Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (26 page)

One line another chance to get out of this, to change my mind.

Two lines … Two lines …

My breathing was shallow and fast as I looked down.

Two lines.

Pregnant.

I dropped the test, looked down at my stomach, looked but could not touch. Could not quite believe
.

I’ve made a baby. I’m going to have a baby.

I couldn’t help but smile. We had done it. First time. One go.

I’m going to have a baby.

My eyes welled with tears. I was so overwhelmed suddenly with happiness. With joy. With an avalanche of such feelings gushing through me, I almost forgot. He or she wasn’t mine.

This baby belonged to someone else.

Stephanie was wearing her work mask.

She had her hair piled up on top of her head, her blond locks held in place with four brightly colored and patterned chopsticks. She wore a yellow Chinese tunic dress made from real silk—she wouldn’t wear it otherwise—and with a slit at the side that ended at the top of her thigh. She wore shimmery tights and yellow high heels that added more height to her frame. Her forearms, from wrists to elbows, were ringed with yellow and white bangles. For someone who worked in a fashion shop, I wondered why she didn’t realize that yellow did not suit her. At all. It didn’t suit most people with her pale coloring, and from all the pieces in the shop, it was the least successful one on her. But maybe that was the point. Show people that they could still look good even in clothes that didn’t suit them. For me, clothes often reflected your inner state. And if I didn’t know her, didn’t know that this was one of the many ways she disguised herself, I would say she was trying too hard.

The first time I met her, she had been trying too hard. All of Mal’s girlfriends had been worried about Mal’s and my relationship, but because of how enamored he was with her, I knew she’d be particularly hard to get on with. So I had not made any particular effort to dress up, not that I did anyway. I could tell instantly from the way her eyes swept over me when I met her that she took my lack of effort as a personal insult, because she had tried so hard to look effortlessly beautiful and I, it seemed to her, didn’t even think her worthy of slapping on a bit of mascara for. Having said that, if I had made an effort, the only way to make her happy would have been to get it spectacularly wrong so she could feel superior to me.

I navigated my way around the tightly packed rails, noting how truly “individual” the pieces were. And expensive. I also noted that in a few months, I would find it hard to move between these rails.

“Hi,” I said to the back of her head.

She turned around and grinned when she saw me. It was a genuine grin, one of many I had been treated to since I’d agreed to do this thing for them. “Hi!” she said, moving away from the copy of
Vogue
she had been poring over and coming to the counter. “I was going to call you later. See if you fancied some noodles.” She opened her arms and did a little spin. “Do you wonder why?”

“That’d be lovely. I’m not working today. Maybe we could ask Mal as well.”

“No need, he’ll come because I’ve told him to,” she joked.

“I like your thinking,” I said, reaching into my bag, my hands closing around the sandwich bag I had gently tucked in there before leaving my flat. It had been like carrying the crown jewels in a carrier bag. I had kept wanting to take it out and look at it. Make sure it was real. That it hadn’t evaporated.

“Now, how can I be of assistance?” she asked, back in work mode.

“I’ve got something for you,” I said. I pulled out the bag and handed it over. “I thought you might find it interesting.”

She frowned quizzically at me and took it, her bangles clattering. Her eyes widened as she saw what was in the bag. Her manicured fingers pulled back the creases and folds of the clear plastic tightly over the test.

“OH MY GOD!” she screamed suddenly and loudly. “OH MY GOD!” She threw herself across the cash desk, knocking aside the pink wrapping paper and the spool of ribbon and roll
of tape, as she threw her slender, tanned arms around me, the bangles clattering loudly in my ears as they met around my shoulders. “OH MY GOD!” She squeezed what she could of me. “OH MY GOD!”

She let go and ran around the desk. “OH MY GOD!” she screamed again and hugged me properly.

“Can I feel, can I feel?” she asked, almost bouncing up and down in excitement. I hadn’t expected this reaction. I knew she’d be happy. I knew she’d be ecstatic, but not that she’d lose all semblance of Stephanie. I liked this person. I
loved
this person. It was a shame I had never seen her before.

“Yeah, sure, but there’s nothing to feel at the moment.”

She dropped to her knees, pressed her hand inside my coat. “Oh my God,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. She pressed her cheek to the square of fabric over my stomach. “Hello, little one,” she whispered. “Hello, baby.”

At that moment, the owner of the shop appeared. She’d heard the screaming and had come to see what was going on. She was dressed far more soberly, in jeans and a cream twinset, obviously a woman who liked fashion but wasn’t a slave to it. She stopped behind the counter when she saw her assistant manager on her knees, pressing her face against the stomach of a customer.

“What is going on here?” she asked. Her voice came from money. Probably how she could afford a boutique that never seemed to have any customers.

Stephanie got to her feet and grinned at her boss as she hooked her arm through mine. “This is my best friend, Nova. And she’s just found out that she’s having a baby,” Stephanie said.

“I see,” the owner said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I replied, feeling like a fraud. I was also overwhelmed by what Stephanie had said. Me, her best friend. Me. She had stopped being suspicious of me and was starting to accept me.

“We’re having a baby,” Stephanie said, a huge grin lighting up her face.

The owner shook her head. “I can see I’m going to get no more sense out of you today,” she said. “Why don’t you take your friend out for a celebratory cup of tea and some cake?”

“Oh, thanks,” she gushed. “I’ll just get my coat and bag.” Stephanie dashed out the back.

“Is this your first?” the owner asked me.

I nodded, feeling like a fraud again. I’d have to get used to this. When everyone could see I was pregnant, they’d quite rightly assume the baby was going to be mine. They’d ask about due dates, baby names, the sex of the baby, and all the other questions you asked a pregnant woman because of course she was going to keep the child. I hadn’t worked out, yet, what I was going to say. To strangers and to the people I worked with. How I was going to explain what I was doing and why it was the right thing to do.

“Oh, wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Steph so happy. That happens a lot, though. Friends become so happy and caught up in your pregnancy that it’s almost as though they’re having the baby, too.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “I can understand that.”

When Stephanie returned, she hooked her arm through mine again. “Thanks so much, Arabella,” she said. “Come on, let’s go tell Mal.” She stopped, looked at me, desperation and anxiety in her eyes. “Or have you told him already?”

I shook my head. My first instinct had been, of course, to pick
up the phone and call him, because he and Cordy were the first people I always called. But as I’d dialed his number I realized that I had to tell Stephanie first. Out of the three of us, she was the one who hadn’t had anything to do with the baby so far. She had hovered like a moth around a flame, but she wasn’t part of the flame. Telling her first would be a way to bring her in, reassure her that this was about her, too. “You’re the first person to know after me.”

“Really?” she said, then bit her lower lip as more tears blossomed in her eyes. She hugged me again. “Thank you,” she whispered against my ear. “Thank you so much for doing this for me. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you.”

P
ink, blue or white?

I held each of the rompers in my hand in turn, trying to decide which one to buy. Yellow was out. No one should ever wear yellow, although I had to sometimes for work. Pink, blue or white?

White was the safe option, obviously, but it was sort of noncommittal. Buying one of the other colors would show I fully believed in this.

Although we were only ten weeks pregnant and buying clothes could jinx it, I couldn’t help myself. Every lunchtime, sometimes on the way home, I’d go for more baby clothes. My heart fluttering, my stomach dancing, with every soft piece of material I caressed.

I liked the attention, too. The way other women would assume that I was like them, that soon my belly would protrude and show under the pressure of my growing baby, my ankles would become swollen, I’d maybe have to wear my wedding rings on a chain around my neck instead of jammed onto my bloated fingers. No one asked when my baby was due, I simply noticed the surreptitious way they would glance at my stomach and back at my face, then would look away, their minds made up that I was pregnant. I belonged to their club. I decided to buy all three rompers. I could always team the blue one with a pink bow or sew a football motif onto the pink one.

“I was thinking Malvolio for a boy, and Carmelita for a girl,” Mal said that night. Our legs were intertwined, the broad muscles of his limbs surprisingly light on mine. The bedside lamps created a pool of light around us, and piles of baby books shared the bed with us. We were as bad as each other, buying baby books, thinking about the nursery colors. (Mal didn’t know about the clothes, I hid them in what would become the nursery.) He had a week-by-week planner splayed open on his stomach, and was nuzzling my shoulder, stroking my stomach as he spoke.

“
Why?
” I replied, genuinely mystified. I knew how he truly felt about his name, and Carmelita?! What the—?!

“Malvolio because it’s tradition, and I like the sound of Carmelita. Carmie … Come on, Carmie, eat your sprouts.”

“Tradition? Since when have you been a traditionalist? Men are so arrogant, naming children after themselves. You don’t get women doing it. You won’t get a Stephanie Wacken, Jr., for example.”

“We do it to carry on the name.”

“And it’s not enough that your surname is usually carried on? If that was the case, then it should be women doing that. Because our surnames are obliterated by marriage and bearing children, we should make sure
our
names are honored by naming our first-born girls after ourselves.”

He pressed his finger on the tip of my nose before he followed it with a kiss. “You’re being silly. It’ll never catch on.”

“Sadly, I think you may be right.”

“Besides, Carmelita is a wonderful name.”

“Yes, yes it is, but not for our daughter.… Can you believe it? We may be having a daughter.”

“No, it’s a boy.”

He spoke with such certainty, I raised my eyes to look at him.
He was staring into space, a blissful half-smile smoothing out his features and unfocusing his eyes. “Oh? Do you know something I don’t know?”

“No, not really. Nova told me. She has a feeling she’s carrying a boy.”

My heart dipped a fraction. Only a touch. Nothing horrendous. It was a momentary flutter that dissolved an instant after it touched my heart. Why hadn’t she told me that? “When did she tell you that?”

“The other day. I was asking if she was going to find out the sex, and she said she didn’t need to as she knew it was a boy.”

“But we agreed not to find out the sex during the scan,” I reminded him.

“I know, but just because we don’t want to know doesn’t mean Nova won’t want to know.”

I pushed myself away from him, looked at him. His handsome features, all strong and angular lines, still soft from his blissed-out mood, stared back at me. I frowned at him. “It doesn’t matter what she wants to know. It’s got nothing to do with her, Mal.”

It was his turn to frown as he blinked at me a few times. “She’s having the baby,” he reminded.

“For us. It’s
our
baby. We make the decisions about the scan and finding out the sex. She’s only carrying the baby. Growing it. We’re going to be its parents, which means we need to make the big and little decisions.”

His forehead creased a little more. “That sounds … I don’t know, cold-blooded,” he said.

The heart flutter returned, lasted a little longer this time. Only a fraction longer, nothing to worry about. “She has to be cold-blooded about this, Mal. Don’t you see? If she starts making decisions like finding out the sex of the baby, or even if she’s
involved in those sorts of decisions, how is she going to be able to give him or her to us at the end of the pregnancy? The more involved she gets, the harder it’s going to be.”

Mal shifted in bed, gently but precisely moved me off him, so he could sit up. I noted the movement, though, the slight pushing away. It wasn’t me he was pushing away, it was the thought he hadn’t completely explored before. The one thing he hadn’t wanted to consider: how this would affect Nova. He’d just assumed it would be easy for her because she was doing this thing for us. That, her being her, she was doing it for someone she loved and there’d be no complications.