The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes (20 page)

T
he only job Eve could find with her bachelor’s degree was at the Cartwright House, the same residential halfway house where she’d worked while in school. Her new job had a different title and more hours, but she was discouraged that she barely made enough to pay their rent. If it were not for Jack’s family, they wouldn’t be able to get by. Still, she liked working with the teenagers. She saw her younger self in so many of them. They operated on emotion and impulse as they pushed toward adulthood with bodies ready for the challenge but brains lagging far behind. Watching and listening to them, she knew how far she’d come in six years. Thank God for second chances.

Cory, though, was her everyday reminder of her own impulsive decisions. She tried hard to be a good mother. People said she was; they complimented her all the time on how she put her own needs second to those of her daughter. Still, Cory was so clingy and insecure. Somehow, Eve was failing her. When Mrs. Rice called to ask her and Jack to come in for a meeting, she knew she was going to come face-to-face with that failure.

“She’s the prettiest little string bean, isn’t she?” Mrs. Rice said, once Eve and Jack were seated across the desk from her in the kindergarten classroom.

Eve nodded. “Thank you.” She clutched Jack’s hand on her knee.

“And she’s smart. She’s doing very well in all our lessons. She’s well behaved and never makes an ounce of trouble. She’s the kind of student it would be easy to ignore since she doesn’t make waves, but I don’t want to ignore her, because she deserves better.”

“What are you getting at?” Jack asked.

“She’s not doing well socially,” Mrs. Rice said. “The little boys all treat her like a princess. They’re gaga over her. About five of them consider her their girlfriend.” She chuckled. “Even at five, they’re into good looks. But she’s made no real friends among the girls because she’s so shy. She’s afraid to do things the other children do, like climbing on the jungle gym, for instance. One of the other girls will try to persuade her to climb with them, but Cory stands on the ground and shakes her head. Eventually, the girls give up on her.”

Eve licked her lips. “She’s afraid of a lot of things right now, but I think she’ll outgrow it.”

“You might be right,” Mrs. Rice said. “I just wanted to let you know what I’m observing, because often a child will be just fine at home and you’d never know this is going on.”

“What can we do?” Jack asked.

“Build her self-confidence,” Mrs. Rice said. “Give her things to do that she can excel at. She is going to be a phenomenal reader. I can tell you’ve done a great deal of reading with her.”

“Yes,” Eve said, relieved that she’d done something right. “I’ve read to her since she was tiny.”

“And it shows. So that’s something I make sure to reward her for. I’ve put her in charge of handing out the little books we use.”

Eve smiled at the thought of Cory being in charge of anything at all. “I don’t think I’ve done that with her enough,” she said to Jack. “You know. Had her take responsibility for things.”

He nodded. “We can let her decide what we do on Saturdays. Give her some choices and let her pick.”

“That’s the idea,” Mrs. Rice said.

“Yikes,” Jack said when they’d left the school and started walking home in the crisp darkness. “That’s the tallest woman I’ve ever seen. I felt like a shrimp next to her. She must tower over her students.”

“She does. I told you how scared Cory was of her at first, but she seems to like her now.”

“You know, though, she has a point,” Jack said. “You don’t like her to ride her bike because you’re nervous about the traffic—even though she’s riding on the sidewalk. You’re afraid she’ll fall. The other day when she was afraid of the dinosaur skeleton at the museum, you took her out of the room, like you were verifying for her that she was right to be afraid of it.”

Cory had been screaming and cowering and creating a scene. “I didn’t think it was fair to everyone else in the museum to be subjected to her screams.” Eve felt defensive.

Jack hesitated before speaking again. “I worry, though, that she picks up on your fears about her.”

Eve felt a flash of anger. She’d been parenting Cory for six years. Jack had known her for only two. She bit her tongue, though, because she knew he was right.

“You know what I think would help Cory a lot?” Jack asked.

“What?”

“Having a brother or sister to boss around.”

Eve laughed, and she wondered if he heard the anxiety in the sound. She longed to have a baby with him. She longed to see how his features would blend with hers. She loved the way he lit up around Cory and wanted to see that joy doubled in him. But having a baby could only force her to tell more lies. Any doctor would know she’d never been pregnant before. How would she keep that fact from Jack?

“We’re poor people, Jack,” she said. “We’re way below the poverty line. It would be irresponsible for us to have a baby right now.”

“Cory’s nearly six years old,” he said. “If we wait ’til we’re rich, she’ll be old enough to raise the kid on her own.” He stopped walking and turned her toward him. “You know my parents aren’t going to let us starve,” he said. “They’ll help us out as long as I’m in school.” He kissed her. “So, let’s go home and throw away your pills.”

T
he day after her twenty-fourth birthday, Eve felt woozy as she drove to work. Two blocks from the halfway house, she pulled her car to the side of the road, opened the door and threw up into the street.

She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.
Oh, God, Jack,
she thought.
I’m sorry.
There would always be dishonesty in their marriage no matter how much she wished otherwise. Jack was so forthright, so sincere, and she wanted to open her heart to him in return, but she couldn’t. So, although she had news that would thrill him, she wouldn’t tell him right away. She needed to keep her pregnancy to herself for a while first, as she figured out how to deal with all that lay ahead.

By that weekend, though, he’d guessed. Although she got out of bed quietly on Saturday morning and turned on the bathroom fan to mask any sound she might make, he knew.

“Are you all right?” he asked when she came back to bed.

“Just feel a little off this morning,” she said.

He stroked her cheek. “You haven’t been yourself in the morning lately,” he said. “Any chance you’re…?”

She bit her lip, then smiled weakly at him. “I think I might be,” she said. “I didn’t want to say anything to you until I knew for sure.”

“Yippee!” Jack jumped to his feet on the mattress and did a little dance. She couldn’t help but laugh at him. He was perfect daddy material. “I’m with child!” he shouted.

“Shh! You’ll wake Cory.”

He flopped down again next to her. “Oh, Evie.” He kissed her shoulder and rested his hand on her flat stomach. “This is wonderful. I’m sorry you feel bad, but I’m…I’m exquisitely overjoyed.”

She kissed the tip of his nose. “Me, too,” she said, and she meant it.

“Let’s call my parents,” he said.

She shook her head. “I want to wait until we know everything’s okay,” she said. “Can you suppress your enthusiasm for a couple of months?”

“I guess. What should we name him?” He caught himself. “Or her?”

“I was thinking we might name him after your father if he’s a boy.”

“Alexander,” Jack said. “I love that name and Dad would be proud as punch. And if it’s a girl, how about after your mother?”

She’d actually been thinking of that, and it touched her that Jack had the same idea. “Would that upset your mother, though?” she asked. She got along well with Jack’s parents, but was careful never to ruffle their feathers. She and Jack owed them too much.

“She’d understand,” he said. “And I really like the name Dru. Was it short for something? Drucilla?”

“Nope. Just Dru.” Her eyes welled up at the thought of bringing another Dru into the world. If only her mother could be with her. If only she could hold her hand through the next eight months.

“Did you have a lot of morning sickness when you were pregnant with Cory?” Jack asked.

Here we go,
she thought. “It was just like this,” she said. “That’s how I knew I was pregnant this time. It feels the same.”

“This time you won’t be alone, though,” Jack said. “I want to go to every doctor’s appointment with you and be there when you have him. Or her. When do we tell Cory? Do we have to wait to tell her, too?”

She nodded. “Yes, definitely,” she said. “For now, it’s going to be our little secret. Okay?”

Eve was cleaning up after lunch that afternoon when Jack walked into the kitchen with the mail.

“Anything important?” she asked, drying her hands on the dish towel.

Jack shuffled through the mail. “A couple of bills and a fat envelope for you with no return address.” He handed the envelope to her. She knew without looking at it that her name and address would be typewritten, and she knew what she would find inside. Since leaving Marian’s house, she’d received two of the envelopes filled with money. Both had been forwarded to her from Marian’s address; this one had her new address on it.

“Oh, thanks,” she said. “You can just put it on the counter.”

“Don’t you want to see what’s in it?” Jack patted the envelope between his thumb and fingers. “Feels like an invitation or something. Do you know anyone who’s getting married?”

Eve drew in a breath and leaned back against the counter. She didn’t need to lie about this to him.

“I think I know what it is,” she said. “Open it up.”

“It’s addressed to you, though.”

“Go ahead. Open it.”

He slid a finger beneath the flap and slit the envelope open, then peered inside.

“Holy crap,” he said, drawing out the bills. “They’re fifties!”

“How many?” she asked.

He counted them onto the counter. “Twenty of them! A thousand dollars in cash.” He frowned at her. “Who would send you a thousand dollars in cash?”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t really know. I’ve gotten several of those envelopes since Cory was born. The first one came to me at Marian’s house and there was a note inside. Just a scrap of paper. It said ‘for your baby.’ It was a few hundred dollars then. Now I get one a couple of times a year, and though there’s no note with them anymore, I assume it’s money meant for Cory.”

Jack hadn’t lost his frown. “What have you been doing with it?” he asked. He sounded not suspicious exactly, but more than curious. She didn’t blame him. They were hard up for money, and here she was getting cash she hadn’t told him about.

“I’ve put it in a bank account for her,” she said. “In the beginning, I bought things she needed. Baby supplies. That sort of thing. But for the past couple of years, I just socked it away.” She looked at the money on the counter. “This will make it close to four thousand dollars,” she said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this was happening?” Jack asked.

She couldn’t look him in the eye. “I felt kind of weird about it,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hide money from you, Jack. I hope you don’t think that.”

“Of course not,” he said, “but I do wish you’d told me. Why do you feel weird about it?”

“Because I can’t explain where it’s come from. There’s always a different postmark on the envelope. Oklahoma. Ohio. Where’s this one from?”

He turned the envelope over and looked at it. “El Paso, Texas,” he said.

“See what I mean?”

“Could it be someone in Cory’s father’s family?” he asked.

“That’s what I figure,” she said. “But who knows? Are you upset? Do you think we should use the money to pay our bills or get a better place to live or—?”

“No,” he said. “Whoever sent it wants it to go to Cory, so that’s who it should go to.” He pouted, jutting out his lower lip like a little kid. “Our new baby’s not going to have a crazy benefactor, though,” he said. “He’s going to be a poor little Gus.”

She smiled. “We’ll make it up to him—or her—somehow,” she said.

She managed to go alone to her first appointment with the obstetrician. She scheduled it for a day when she knew Jack would be at a Dramatic Arts Conference in Washington, and she drove to the appointment with a heavy heart. She was hurting herself as well as him; she longed to have him at her side throughout her entire pregnancy. They should be sharing the experience together, just as he wanted, but she could think of no way to make that possible.

The doctor’s name was Cheryl Russo. She had a thick New York accent that was out of place in Charlottesville, but her manner was soft and slow and Southern. She was so lovely, in fact, so easy to talk with, that for one brief insane moment, Eve considered telling her the semi-truth about Cory.
My husband thinks she’s mine, but she’s really adopted, so please don’t let on that this is my first pregnancy.
But then Dr. Russo would think she was a terrible woman and terrible wife. She would ask questions Eve would be unable to answer. She’d wonder how a twenty-four-year-old woman happened to have an adopted six-year-old. Once Eve started down the path of telling half-truths to the doctor, she’d be dodging land mines right and left. So she opted for the simplest deception she could come up with: she would have to keep Jack away from her appointments, one way or another. That was all there was to it.

The deception, though, tore her apart. It was so unlike her to be manipulative with Jack. When he returned from the conference and was unpacking his suitcase in their bedroom, she told him that she’d seen the doctor, and he stared at her in disbelief.

“Please don’t be upset,” she said quickly. “When I made the appointment, I didn’t realize it was when you’d be out of town, and I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d feel terrible.”

“I
do
feel terrible.” He stood with a pair of jeans in one hand, a shoe in the other, and he looked crushed. “Why didn’t you change it?”

“It took me so long to get,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, what did the doctor say?” he asked.

“It was all very unexciting,” she said.

“That’s because you’ve been through this before.” Jack dropped the jeans back into the suitcase, not only hurt but angry. “It’s new for
me.
I think you forgot that.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” She had the feeling she would be saying “I’m sorry” throughout the course of her pregnancy.

In June, they decided it was time to tell Cory.

Cory had, as that other mother had predicted on the first day of school, come to love Mrs. Rice, who had capitalized on the little girl’s reading skills to help her feel important and self-confident in the classroom. She was still shy with the other children, still afraid to join in their rough-and-tumble activities on the playground. Looking at her, it was almost understandable. Even at six, she possessed a fragile beauty. She was tall and long-limbed, with pale blue eyes, delicate fair skin and small, feminine features, and she looked as though she might shatter into a thousand pieces if she fell from the jungle gym.

“We have some exciting news for you,” Jack said, as he and Eve tucked Cory into bed.

Outside the window next to Cory’s bed, fireflies twinkled in the trees, and Cory had to tear her attention from them to her father.

“What?” she asked.

“You’re going to have a little brother or sister,” Eve said.

The night-light on the wall illuminated Cory’s look of surprise. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open. Then she grinned.

“When?”
she asked.

“Sometime in November,” Eve said.

“It’ll be like a special birthday present for you,” Jack said. Cory would turn seven November twenty-second.

Cory’s gaze dropped to Eve’s belly. “Is the baby in your tummy now?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like it.”

Eve laughed, resting her hand on her stomach. “Uh-huh,” she said. “She or he is very tiny now, but in a few months, you’ll see a big difference.”

“I can’t wait!” Cory clapped her hands together. “This is the best news since I was four,” she said.

Eve laughed again. “What happened when you were four, honey?” she asked.

Cory looked up at Jack, admiration in her face. “That’s when I got my daddy,” she said.

Somehow, Eve was able to go alone to her prenatal appointments. Although she and Jack never talked about it, he seemed to guess that she was uncomfortable about having him at the appointments with her, and he stopped badgering her about them. She did bring him to her sonogram appointment, hoping there would be no reason for the technician to mention the fact that this was her first pregnancy. She told Jack that she’d had no sonogram when she was pregnant with Cory, so he had no reason to be surprised by her tears of amazement when the technician pointed to the baby’s beating heart on the monitor.

He took her to a romantic restaurant for dinner afterward. They held hands across the table, then went home and made love, and Eve wept as she told him how much she loved him. She told him that regularly, worried that he might interpret her need for privacy as something more than not wanting him around when her feet were up in stirrups.

After the first few months of her pregnancy, she felt very well. But then, suddenly, the nightmares started. In them, she gave birth to a baby girl and then started to hemorrhage, blood flowing out of her while she lay in a hospital bed trying to scream for help but unable to make a sound. Several times a week, she’d awaken in the middle of the night gasping for breath, scrambling out of bed and throwing back the covers as she turned on the light to check the sheets for blood. Jack would hold her, sing to her, and whisper words of comfort in her ear. Still, nothing could erase the image in her mind of Genevieve Russell lying pale and cold on the bed in the cabin, the life ebbing out of her body.

She knew she’d never be able to keep Jack away from her labor and delivery, nor did she want to. She needed him by her side. He went through the childbirth classes with her, and when people asked if this was her first pregnancy she would always answer that it felt like it, because she’d been so young and naive the first time around.

“It must have been so hard for you when Cory was born,” he said as they drove home after one of the classes. “You had no support at all.”

“I barely remember it,” she said. “I mean, I remember pain, of course, but they must have knocked me out, because all I really remember is holding Cory in my arms.”

“Well, I hope it’s that easy for you this time.” Jack reached over to squeeze her hand.

She hoped he wouldn’t say anything about her “first pregnancy” during her labor and delivery, when the medical staff would be there to hear him. As jittery as she was growing about delivering a baby, she was even more afraid that her lies might come crashing down around her.