Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (24 page)

He really and honestly didn’t understand. “I know, Mal, in your wonderful, politically correct, rainbow-colored world,
such things don’t matter, but here on planet earth, they do. People will look at the baby and know it’s not mine.”

He paused, thought about it, then said, “So?”

“So? Mal, the baby would stand out at all our family gatherings, walking down the street, when I take him or her to the park.… The baby would always stand out, people would notice and they’d talk.”

“Why do you care what other people think?” he asked. He could ask that because he had the confidence not to care. He had the strength to fight anyone who said anything about him and those he loved. I didn’t.

“I don’t know, I just do,” I said. After I left home, I had rebuilt my reputation, I had become the type of person other people didn’t talk about, I blended in. This would be the opposite of blending in.

“Steph, things only matter if you allow them to. We all stand out in lots of different ways. That only matters if you let it.”

“Says the good-looking, white, middle-class man with the white, middle-class life. It’s very easy to talk about things only mattering if you let them when you’re in a position of privilege.”

“I’m working class,” he said with a bright smile. “And I know things only matter if you let them because all those years that people gossiped about my mother, and the fact my father had been in prison, I only cared when Victoria would say things. Whenever she had a go at Mum for ruining her life, or when she accused me and the Kumalisis of sending her away because we didn’t love her, that hurt. That mattered, because I care what she thinks. Yeah, I got in fights at school over the things people said about my family, but as I got older I realized it didn’t matter. They can say what they like. And if they don’t like something, fuck ’em, that’s their problem. Not mine. If someone
doesn’t like the fact my child is half black, they can fuck off out of my life.”

“I can’t think like that. I’m not like you.”

“OK,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “Say I had been married before to an Indian woman, had a child with her but got divorced. She gets custody, me and you get together. Then, one day, she decides to go off on a round-the-world trip and leaves our child with me. Us. So, what, you’d say no we can’t look after her because she’d stand out?”

“Course not, but that’d be completely different.”

“Yeah, it would. Because you wouldn’t have been holding her since the day she was born, you wouldn’t have felt her moving around in the womb, you wouldn’t have fallen in love with her from the moment she was conceived.”

When he put it like that, it sounded so possible. A baby of our own.

“Nova,” I said.

“She’s the right choice.”

“If she’s so perfect, how come it’s taken you this long to mention her?”

“Because you didn’t,” he said.

“I didn’t because you didn’t.”

“You didn’t because sometimes you think she and I are too close.”

“Only sometimes.”

“Fair enough.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

For three weeks, I thought about it, we talked about it, and it all came back to one thing. One person.

Nova.

W
e both know I didn’t really like you when I met you,” Stephanie said.

Stephanie was about to ask me for something, I could tell. She was carrying out a classic move in trying to get someone to do something for you: lay all your cards on the table. Or, at the very least, appear to do so. She was trying to manipulate me in case I still hung on to any slivers of resentment for what she thought of me before she got to know me. Admitting to not liking me suggested that she was ashamed of it, therefore any hurt I still held wasn’t going to be nearly as deep as hers. She was ashamed, I shouldn’t hold that against her and hopefully we could “move on” and find a new beginning, which would involve me doing whatever it was that she wanted from me.

“It wasn’t you, of course, I didn’t even know you,” she continued. “It was me, my insecurities.” Her sea-blue eyes flicked upwards as though remembering that time, in a galaxy far, far away. She shook her head slightly, bouncing the waves of her cornsilk-colored hair. Not natural. I knew that now. I knew all these things about Stephanie, the woman who had apparently become my friend over the past four years. I knew she assisted her hair color, I knew she’d had a serious accident just over a year ago. I knew she stopped being office manager in a law firm just over a year ago and now was assistant manager of a clothes boutique.
I knew Mal dyed her eyelashes and eyebrows every six weeks because otherwise she would look like she had neither. I knew she ran every day—rain or shine. If the weather was particularly bad, she would go to the gym and run on a treadmill. She practiced yoga, she smoked even though she thought neither Mal nor I knew it was more than a sneaky one every now and again. She drank very little. She had kissed another woman in college. Her left breast was a half-cup size smaller than her right. She plucked the gray out of her pubic hair. She always wore bangles on both wrists, but had recently started wearing more of them.

I knew a lot of extraneous information about Stephanie, but if God was in the details of knowing a person, then we had a Godless relationship. She was a mistress of disguise; a regular Mata Hari. She put on whichever persona was appropriate for the person she was talking to, blending herself in to fit the background of their personality. With me, she feigned openness. Because I talked far too much for my own good, and tried to think the best of people always, she tried to be like that with me, too. She didn’t realize that I saw through her disguise because I didn’t simply listen to her, I could feel her. She was closed; her aura a tightly woven mass of energy with very defined, sharp edges that would never allow you beyond a certain point. You could spend hours with Stephanie and know very little. You could spend years with Stephanie and know even less.

“I can’t have children,” she said. Her fingers revealed her anxiety. They laced together, they unwound from each other, they drummed on the table, they tapped on each other, they spun the base of her wineglass in a circle on the wooden table.

“God, I’m sorry,” I said. Mal hadn’t told me that. Not that he would ever reveal their secrets to me.

Her hands went to the bag that was sitting beside her on the
red leatherette sofa. She rummaged inside, pulled out her pack of Marlboro Lights and lighter. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.

“No, course not,” I said.

Her body relaxed as she inhaled on her cigarette. As she exhaled, more tension was released.

“Where was I?” she said after two more draws. “Oh yes. I’d just revealed my big secret.” Her flippancy wasn’t at all convincing. “I told Mal before we got married, when things became serious. I couldn’t
ever
allow him to tie himself to me without knowing … Without knowing that.” She pressed her hand over her collarbone to show her sincerity and how much it had cost her to reveal her secret to another person. “It’s a medical thing,” she continued. “A mishap …” Tears welled up in her eyes. The last—and first—time I saw Stephanie cry was on her wedding day. She’d been so overcome with happiness that tears cracked her façade. These, I could tell, were not as genuine as her wedding day tears. “I’m sorry … Sometimes I feel like I’ve been cheated out of being a real woman.”

I nodded in understanding, wondering what she wanted from me. Under normal circumstances, she would not be revealing this to anyone, let alone me. And her aura hadn’t changed at all. The defined, razor edge was still there: get too close and she would cut me off. But she still wanted something that she could only get from me.

“We’ve been looking into adoption,” she said, “but it’s unlikely we’ll get a baby.”

“What, a professional couple like you two? Good-looking, successful, all your own teeth? I find that hard to believe,” I said. I knew nothing of adoption, but if I were ever to be responsible for advertising the concept, I would make Mal and Stephanie
the poster couple. They couldn’t look any more perfect if they wore matching T-shirts that proclaimed, “We’ve cured cancer, ended world poverty and we’re making great progress on reversing global warming.”

“OK, I admit, we might. But it’ll take time. A lot of time. And form-filling and people prying into the very details of our lives.”

“As they should. They can’t just hand over a baby to anyone.”

“No, quite … We also want a baby that is genetically connected to us.”

Her aura changed then, the edges softened, reached out to me. I felt a cold chill thrill down the side of my head, into my neck and along my spine. Without meaning to, I leaned back a little. They wouldn’t … They certainly wouldn’t—

“We’ve been through all the people we know and … We love you so much … There was no one else who would be suitable and who would even think about it. And we’re only asking you to think about it. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.”

They would. They had.

She drew hard on her cigarette, the action hardening her: sharpening up the edges of her face and mannerisms. She was closed off again. As she expelled cigarette smoke, she ran her tongue over her upper teeth.

“We think you’re amazing,” she said with a wide grin. “And if there is anyone on earth we’d want to carry our child for us that isn’t me, well, it’d be you. Every choice we looked at was no way nearly as … well, you as you.”

She’s hiding something
, crossed my mind. Followed swiftly by,
She’s lying.
I pushed my thoughts aside. What was there to lie about? What was there to hide?

“I—erm—I …” I began, not quite sure what to say. I was surprised that it had come from her and not Mal.

“I asked because I didn’t want you to say yes simply because it was Mal who asked,” she said, reading my mind. “I know what the pair of you are like, you’ll do anything for each other without a second thought. This is a huge thing, though, and I—
we
—want you to think about it carefully.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll do that,” I reassured her, and grabbed my wineglass and took a gulp. Of course I wouldn’t do it. This wasn’t lending them money toward the deposit on their house (which she still didn’t know about), this wasn’t making an effort with a person who clearly hated me, this was growing a baby inside me and then giving it to someone else. Who could do that? I know people did do that, but who were they? How
could
they? I wasn’t one of those people, that was for certain. And I was surprised that they thought I was.

“It’d be traditional surrogacy,” Stephanie said. Her eyes were poring over me, watching for my reaction. She should have tuned in with her other senses, because then she would know: the answer was no. “That’s when you use the intended father’s sperm and the surrogate’s eggs.”

I wouldn’t be giving them their baby, which I had grown, I’d be—I took another huge gulp of wine. No way! Absolutely no way.

She rested her hand on my forearm. “Please just think about it,” she said, a quiet, stilling plea. Our eyes met and for the first time she was open. I could see the emotion in her: sincerity. Her armor, her disguises, her deflections were laid aside and she was sincere.

When she had done that, had stopped playing the role of Stephanie for a moment and had
been
Stephanie, the least I could do was think about it.

Only think about it.

S
he didn’t say no.

She had looked shocked, but she didn’t say no straightaway. She didn’t say no at all.

She was the logical choice, the perfect choice. I could see that now.

And she was going to help us.

She was going to help me.

I was going to be a mother.

I was going to have the family I’d always wanted. And the life I’d always wanted.

Everything was going to be perfect. I just
knew
it.

M
usic rose up from the street below my window.

Not from a car stereo, not from someone’s Walkman being played too loud. I recognized the tune almost immediately. The opening guitar strains of “Over the Rainbow.” The Hawaiian version, soft but faster than Judy Garland’s rendition. I went to the window, twitched aside a sliver of net curtain. In the street, below my window, Mal stood playing his guitar. His eyes were fixed on my window and he grinned as he spotted me. It was the mischievous smile he used to give me when we were children and had stolen cookies from the cupboard, or sneaked out of bed and sat on the steps listening to Mum and Dad talking in the front room. It was the smile that made what we shared special and unbreakable. Few people who hadn’t been there from the beginning of our time together could understand it.

He began to sing and even through the glass and walls, the timbre of his voice touched the very core of me. When he and Cordy used to sing together when we were younger, it made everyone smile. I hadn’t heard him sing in years. Now he was serenading me with his smooth voice at 11 p.m. from the street outside my flat.

This would be so romantic if he wasn’t married and if they hadn’t asked me to have their baby. I knew why he was doing
it—because we hadn’t spoken in over a week. He’d been round and he’d called, but I was always “unavailable.” I couldn’t speak to him after what Stephanie had asked, so had started to avoid them. He was forcing my hand, doing something that would get my attention.

I hauled open the window. “OK, I get the message,” I said. “Stop.”

The lights went on in the living room of the flat downstairs, suddenly drenching him in a yellow glow. He carried on singing, seemingly oblivious to the fact he was about to get seven types of hell kicked out of him by the body-building ex-bouncer-turned-Elvis-impersonator who lived below me. “Quick, get inside!” I hissed.

Mal continued to sing, that grin on his face. He wasn’t moving until I came downstairs to speak to him.

Jerking myself inside my flat again, I grabbed my keys from the side table and ran into the corridor. On the way out, I threw on my poncho to hide my pajama top and bralessness. Taking the carpeted communal stairs two at a time, I flung open the front door and ran into the night, to where he stood. All the lights in the four flats in our building were now on. Like a coordinated Mexican wave, the lights of flats and houses on our street blinked on one after the other; then people pulled aside curtains to see outside. It wouldn’t be too long before someone would be calling the police or coming out to shove Mal’s guitar down his throat.