Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (41 page)

But not this time, because when she looked at Chloe she knew that one thing had changed at least. She was not prepared to go back to London stuck in the same limbo her stepfather had put her in all those years ago. This time she would be free of him, she would not let him ruin the rest of her life. And to do that she needed to make her mother face the truth, no matter how much it hurt her. And this time Willow thought she knew how.

“I’m not sure I can eat this,” Chloe said at last, her voice small as she pushed the plate away. “It looks nice and that but I . . . isn’t seafood a bit dodgy for unborn babies?”

“I don’t know. Do you know, Holly?”

“I think crab’s okay, actually, but now I come to think of it, the last thing you need is chilies, you poor thing. You’ll be up all night with acid reflux! I’ll make you something else, it won’t take a moment to whiz you up some tomato and basil, is that okay? I can pop some arugula on the side.”

“I don’t really like arugula,” Chloe muttered, avoiding looking at Willow. “I mean, have you got any chips? Or toast?”

“Don’t be silly, you need fresh food in your condition. Won’t take a moment.” Holly bustled around, busying herself with tearing up fresh basil, adding chopped tomatoes and olive oil to a pan.

“Being pregnant sucks,” Chloe said finally, taking a sip of her water. “I really fancy a glass of wine.”

“Really, don’t you just think it’s amazing?” Holly beamed as she set a fresh plate of pasta in front of Chloe. “That little
life, growing away inside of you. One day soon they’ll become a person, a noisy, opinionated, sleep-refusing, wonderful, loving, clever little person. And you’ll be watching to see if she or he has your smile, your laugh, your frown.”

“The girls have got your frown,” Willow and Holly said simultaneously, chuckling at some private joke.

“It’s wonderful!” Holly beamed at Chloe.

Chloe swallowed, her jaw tightening as she dropped her gaze to the pasta, but she still didn’t eat.

“Oh God, I’m being tactless, aren’t I?” Holly said. “I just don’t think through what I’m about to say, that’s my trouble. Oh God, Chloe, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Chloe said. “It’s just, well . . . I won’t know what he’s like, if he’s noisy or annoying. Or has my frown. I won’t know it at all, will I?”

Chloe pushed her plate away from her, which Holly automatically pushed back. Willow watched, fascinated to see how her sister dealt with this moment, desperate to learn from her.

“Well, you don’t have to decide right away,” Holly said, shuffling her chair closer to Chloe and taking a knife and fork to the younger woman’s linguine. After a few diagonal slices she loaded up a fork and all but made engine noises as she piloted it toward Chloe’s mouth. “Either way you still need to eat. Open.”

Chloe obliged, chewing dutifully until, after Holly plied her with one or two mouthfuls more, her mind caught up with her body in understanding she was hungry and she took the fork and began to feed herself.

“I can’t have a baby, I’m fifteen,” Chloe said, between mouthfuls. “I mean, obviously biologically I can. But it’s not . . . how would I cope? I wouldn’t, would I? I’d want to be fifteen, I’d want to be young and I’d have this baby. Neither of us would be happy.”

“It would be hard, that’s for sure, but with support from your family, from Sam . . .” Willow and Holly exchanged glances. “I’m not saying that adoption isn’t the right choice, I’m just saying it’s important that you know it isn’t the only choice.”

Chloe shook her head. “Can you imagine Dad looking after me and a baby on his own? He can’t even look after himself. His only kid is a problem child. He’s down two wives already, and the next one in line is a total bitch. In fact, even if he did want me to keep the baby, she wouldn’t let him. She’d send it off to a children’s home or something.”

“Really?” Holly said mildly. “You make her sound like a fairy-tale wicked stepmother. Is she
really
that bad?”

It had never occurred to Willow to ask Chloe that question, she simply thought that Sam’s latest girlfriend must be as awful as Chloe described her. Perhaps it suited her just as much as it suited Chloe to think so. No one ever wanted to feel that they’d been replaced by a better model, even when in her case it was pretty inevitable.

“Well, whatever she’s like right now it’s your job to think about the rest of your life and which path you can most easily live with. The path where you trust your child to someone else to bring him up, or the path where you make the decision to be a parent. What’s most important is finding the way that is going to cause the least amount of damage, for both you and the baby.”

“Blimey, when did you take a degree in psychoanalysis?” Willow asked Holly.

“I read,” Holly said, unable to look at Willow directly. “I’m interested in finding ways of letting go, of being free of the past. You know, finding a way to heal.”

“The thing is,” Chloe said, “the thing is I do sometimes think about it. I think about him, the baby. About me and him
together, and I get this really weird feeling of wanting to hold him so badly. And I think how amazing it must be to love a person that much and for them to love you too and I have this idea in my head that we’d be like a little team, him and me against the world. But . . . but what if I don’t love him? What if I look at him and all I see is his dad and then . . .” She looked up at Willow, her dark eyes full of fear. “What if I hate him?”

“Oh, Chloe.” Holly covered Chloe’s hand with her own and Willow got up, coming around the table to embrace the girl.

“Do you think you’d hate him because you hate the father?” Willow asked her.

Chloe nodded.

“Why do you hate him, for taking advantage of you, for not asking you out, for not sticking by you? Oh, Chloe, I understand, but one thing never changes, and that’s teenage boys. He’s used you, and he’s not the one left dealing with the consequences, and that’s not fair. But you shouldn’t waste your hate on him, don’t let that color what you decide to do about the baby.”

“It’s just I thought . . . he said things would be different and I believed him, and then this happened, and he just—he ran away and left me in the shit.”

“It wasn’t just some random boy at a party, was it?” Willow asked.

Chloe shook her head.

“Who was it, Chloe?” Willow asked her, ever so gently. Chloe turned her face away from Willow, as if she couldn’t bear for her to look her in the face.

“It wasn’t like I didn’t want it, or that I’m not almost old enough,” she said. “It wasn’t like I didn’t go after him, because I did. He kept saying no, that it was a terrible idea, that it mustn’t happen and that I had to leave him alone. But everyone could see the way we felt about each other, all my friends said that
the chemistry we had between us was amazing, and that I had to go for it! So it wasn’t just in my head. Everyone thought it, all my friends, well—at least I thought they were my friends. Haven’t seen any of them for weeks now. . . .” Chloe paused, taking in a deep breath, ragged around the edges with the threat of tears. “And then one day it just happened, I stayed late, made up a reason to be alone with him. I knew it was going to happen, I could feel it, you know? And he knew it too, it was obvious. I’ve never felt anything like it, it was so romantic and exciting. One minute we were talking and the next we were kissing and it was so amazing, it was brilliant.”

“Who was it?” Willow asked uneasily.

“Later, when we were alone, after the first time—my first time—he said that he’d tried and tried to ignore his feelings for me but that he couldn’t anymore. He said he’d loved me for a long time, but if I wanted to be with him I had to understand that nobody could ever know. And I was fine with that, I liked it.” Chloe was adamant. “It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Chloe, who was it?” Willow asked again, more insistent this time.

Chloe hesitated, lowering her lashes.

“Mr. Jacobs,” she whispered, her voice barely audibly. “Ed, Ed Jacobs—my drama teacher at school.”

“Your teacher?” Holly gasped, catching a stunned Willow’s eye.

“Yes, but it wasn’t like he was a perv,” Chloe said hurriedly. “He’s only twenty-four, not much older than me at all really. He said that as soon as I was old enough I could leave school and then we could be together and no one could stop us. We had it all planned out: I was going to do my A levels at college, and then he was going to support me through university. I mean he loved me, he really, really did, and then . . .”

“And then?” Willow just about managed to form the words.

“I got pregnant. I don’t know how, we were so careful, but it happened and he”—Chloe swallowed—“he changed overnight, no, in a second. The second that I told him. Suddenly it was like he hated me, like I’d deliberately set out to ruin his life, wreck his career. He went from being so lovely and sweet to . . . it felt like he was controlling me. He wanted me to get an abortion, he made the appointment and everything, forged a letter from Dad to get me off of school, said I had to make out I was sick. He had it all planned, and suddenly I felt like I was being smothered and controlled and I didn’t want that. So I told him I wasn’t going to do that and he went crazy, screaming and shouting at me. He said if I told anyone about us he’d . . . well, he threatened me.”

“He did what?” Willow said, very quietly, very softly. “How?”

“He said he’d make sure the whole school knew what a slut I was, how easy I was. That the baby could be anybody’s. That I’d lied about us, made it all up because I was a psycho little bitch trying to ruin his career. That I could say what I wanted, but no one would believe me, and anyway even if they did my dad would hate me and I’d lose all my friends. It’s funny because I haven’t told anyone and that still happened. It’s not fair.”

Willow bit her lip, the brief period of inner calm she had been experiencing swept away in an instant by a tsunami of maternal fury and the overwhelming urge to find this Mr. Jacobs and rip his head off with her bare hands. But it would not do to show that to Chloe, not at this exact and very finely balanced moment. The very last thing Chloe needed now, as she was teetering on the brink of coming to terms with her pregnancy, was someone to go wading in, all guns blazing. Not yet.

“Well, he was wrong about no one believing you,” Willow said, careful to keep her tone even. “I believe you and Holly here does too, and if you wanted to you could prove that the baby was his as soon as he was born. It’s a simple test to show paternity.”

“Really?” Chloe asked. “Like on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
?”

“Exactly,” Willow said. “But look, is it because of this man that you decided to give the baby up for adoption? Is it only because of him that you don’t want to keep it?”

Chloe thought for a moment, pushing her half-eaten plate of food away from her.

“At first I just didn’t want to do what he wanted, and then after I left school I tried not to think about it for a while. I thought maybe it might just . . . go away? But it kept growing and growing until I knew that I had to tell Dad, but I didn’t know how. So I decided to find you. Dad keeps everything in files in his office, so I went in there while he was at work and picked the lock on his filing cabinet with a paper clip, I really did!” Chloe was momentarily distracted by her fledgling skills as a criminal. “Everything is in there, everything, there’s even a file on me. I found a little bag in it with my first ever haircut and my hospital tag . . . a picture of Mum nursing me, holding me so tightly, and looking at me like I was . . . totally amazing. I wish I’d seen it before, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen how much Mum loved me. I stole it, anyway . . .” A faraway, lopsided smile tugged at the corners of her mouth briefly. “Anyway, there was a file marked ‘Willow’ too. It’s where he keeps your wedding photos, things you sent him, cards and stuff, romantic crap and the stuff about the divorce. There was a solicitor’s letter that had your address on it. I copied it out and googled it. That’s how I found you. I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t expecting to run into your outside your house. I was trying to find out if you were still there, and then there you
were. In the street. It was like you were looking for me and there I was. Like a wish come true.”

Touched, Willow reached out and cupped Chloe’s face in the palm of her hand. “I was wishing for you,” she said. “Every day. I didn’t know it until my wish came true.”

“Lucky you wished for a troubled, knocked-up teen then,” Chloe said, smiling faintly as she leaned for a second into Willow’s hand.

“You said that you came to me because you are like me. What did you mean?” Willow asked her.

“I don’t know, really.” Chloe looked embarrassed. “I think I meant that you knew what it was like to make a mistake. You slept with Daniel, after all.”

“You knew about that?” Willow was shocked. “And we didn’t actually have sex.”

She neglected to mention that it was probably only because Sam had walked in on them.

“It was hard not to know. After you left Dad was in pieces, crying all the time. I was frightened—I mean, Dad crying? I couldn’t imagine it, it’s like . . . well, when your dad cries that’s like the end of the world, isn’t it?”