The Most Fun We Ever Had (53 page)

“I have to take care of it,” Violet said. “Jesus Christ, Wendy, I’m starting law school in a couple of months.”

Of course she knew about this; of course there had been ample discussion of Violet’s recent U of C acceptance at her parents’ house when last she’d seen them. But Violet hadn’t led with that sentiment; she’d begun with
I have to take care of it,
and Wendy wasn’t sure if she was imagining the indecisive wobble in her sister’s voice as she delivered that particular line.

“I mean, why?” she asked, and she marinated in Violet’s resultant quiet, letting the midsummer breeze flutter the hem of her skirt.

“I just— I wasn’t expecting for this to…”

“You could be siring the next Stephen Hawking,” she said. And, at Violet’s silence: “Or, I mean, not a great example, I guess. But—hey, there’s a chance you and Mr. Express-for-Men Poindexter might enhance Dad’s scientific genes in a way that none of the rest of us could.”

Her sister remained quiet, and her heartbeat trilled.

Then: “Rob doesn’t shop at Ex
press,
Wendy; I don’t understand why you have to be so—”

“I’m just
saying,
” Wendy said, “that you could be harboring a kid who comes out with the periodic table memorized.”

Violet’s silence, then, she recognized as the tearful kind, and she remembered the context, the content, the stakes.

“I’m just asking why this is so black-and-white for you. Because you don’t seem particularly happy with the option you’ve chosen.”

“Nobody’s happy about having an abortion, Wendy.”

“Maybe it’s not your only option.”

“I just— I’ve never felt so— But of course it’s the most logical…”

“It’s not always the most logical decision that’s the right decision,” Wendy said, feeling wacky and sage and somehow powerful, like their mother. But it was what she would have told herself. You didn’t always
have
to do what other people expected you to do. She’d built an entire life around this. “I’m just saying that you can find a little leeway if you want to. Defer school for a year. Come here, if you want. God. I’m not saying that you have to
do
anything; I just mean that the thing that everyone else does isn’t always necessarily the best thing.”

“You have no idea how fucking
scary
this is for me,” Violet said.

And so Wendy was triply surprised when her sister called her from the airport three days later.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Violet said, climbing beside her into the passenger seat of Miles’s Audi.

“First time for everything,” she said, but she took a second—in the O’Hare arrivals lane, with neon-vested sticks-in-the-mud ushering her car out of its idling place—to look her sister up and down. “You look
fulsome,
” she said. “You actually look really good, Viol.”

“You’re sure Miles is okay with this?”

Her husband had been unbelievably accepting when she’d floated the idea by him, still fascinated, as an only child, by Wendy’s mystical ties to her myriad siblings.

“Absolutely okay,” she said. She glided the car into traffic, and she and Violet spent the stop-and-go ride home on the Kennedy talking about what was to come.

She’d pulled the lie about Paris out of her ass, and Violet, conversationally fluent from a French minor, had gone with it, and when they got to Hyde Park they sat drinking lemonade on the roof, Wendy in the hammock and Violet primly cross-legged in a wicker chair, both of them getting kind of silly from the sun and the circumstances.

“I bet they sell shitty black-market Chanel bags at Navy Pier,” Wendy said. “You could send one to Mom.”

“We could get Dad a beret,” Violet said, and they both cracked up in the hysterical punch-drunk way you could do only with your sister.

It was in moments like this that Wendy remembered how much she loved her sister—her prissy, perfectionist, annoying-as-all-get-out sister—because Violet was the only person on the earth who had experienced the world in almost the exact same way, in real time, step for step, save for those first few months of life, but even then she’d been accompanied by Violet for most of the time, Violet growing inside of their mother. And she felt a surge of pride for Violet—laughing, lovely Violet, head dipped back and throat exposed and a hand unthinkingly on her still-flat stomach, but even still the gesture reminded Wendy that all of this was not
quite
funny, was actually quite fucking terrifying, if you really gave it a lot of thought, but not giving it thought had been her idea in the first place, hadn’t it? Violet doing something brave. Violet doing something because some part of her wanted to. She pushed her toes against the ground, setting the hammock aswing. Their laughter had died off.

“What’ll we
do
about Mom and Dad, though?” Violet asked, and Wendy bristled at the strains of whininess in her voice.

But it was a fair question. Because their parents were, of course, only fifteen miles northwest, benevolently worried about Violet traveling abroad (even in
Europe
), expecting weekly long-distance phone calls and newsy handwritten letters and, probably, an excess of visits from Wendy to make up for the absence of their preferred child. She and Violet were both fairly certain that their parents wouldn’t try to visit Paris; they still had Liza and Gracie at home, and their mother had thrown herself full-throttle into running the hardware store and was so deeply entrenched that it was unlikely she’d pull herself away for a vacation.

“God, I
should
be going to Paris,” Violet said. “I should be doing something
exciting
before I…”

“Spend the rest of your waking hours negotiating contracts and staving off the advances of overstuffed Midnight-at-the-Viagra-Triangle predators in Canali suits?”

“I’m not sure,” Violet said softly.

“I’ll deal with Mom and Dad.”

“Wendy, I…”

“Jesus Christ, how many fucking times do you want me to tell you that you’re a legal adult who’s allowed to make whatever decisions you want to make? I don’t have some shrewd insider knowledge, Violet. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything’s going to be—”

“I was going to say thank you,” Violet said. “For—this. Whatever it is.”

And people did not often thank Wendy, so her voice contained the hint of a question when she replied, “You’re welcome.”

Then for a while it was actually sort of fun, a pedestrian espionage. They figured out a way—a friend of Miles’s who lived in Bretagne and accepted envelopes of prewritten postcards—to get correspondence from Violet to their parents with European postmarks. Violet moved into one of their guest rooms and at night they’d walk together along the lakeshore, out to Promontory Point, talking about everything and nothing. Wendy expounded on her sex life, and Violet pretended to be disgusted but asked sly follow-up questions that betrayed her curiosity; they assuaged each other’s weak guilt over lying to their parents—parents
wanted
their children to be best friends, didn’t they? And everything had unfolded from there, in the way that most of their interactions unfolded, with long stretches of defiance punctuated by bursts of tenderness, arcs of jealousy that tapered off with flurries of compassion. In the way that most of their interactions unfolded, except wholly different, huger and more extraordinary than either of them could begin to understand.

Wendy, on the occasions when she had to have dinner in the suburbs with their parents, played her part flawlessly, peppering David and Marilyn with fraudulent secondhand anecdotes about the personable sheep in Mont-Saint-Michel, betraying nothing of the fact that their little Francophile was in fact just a few miles away, watching
The West Wing
and reading about breathing exercises.

Unsurprisingly, Violet excelled—as she did with everything in her life—at pregnancy. Wendy would come home and find her sister sitting Indian-style at the kitchen table, one hand cupping her belly and the other holding a book—
What to Expect,
or
Let’s Go: France,
or, during windows of peak dorkiness,
The University of Chicago Law Review—
a beautiful glow coming off of her face, glints of red in her messy brown hair. Violet seemed, despite the elemental desolation of her situation,
accompanied.
She was supplemented in a way that Wendy herself had never felt.

“I don’t know,” Violet said one night, beached on the loveseat. “I feel sort of—like, anointed.” She wore her pregnancy well, seemed only to be getting prettier as she gained weight, rounded out, became slower in her movements.

“Calling yourself a saint is generally frowned upon, I think, in terms of being—you know, humble,” Wendy said.

“I suppose what I mean to say is that I feel—well, blessed, kind of. Despite everything,” Violet said. “I feel almost—whole.”

“Call Mom and tell her,” Wendy replied. “She’ll be happy to know that all the money she spent sending us to CCD wasn’t entirely for naught.” She liked the sound of what Violet was saying, though, the idea of wholeness—and the implied whole
some
ness—that came along with childbearing. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt whole. She had a house and a husband and a kitchen with a built-in wine fridge, but when she donned the black backless Calvin Klein tomorrow night and went with Miles as Platinum Donors to the Shedd Gala, she would feel not like a woman but like a little girl playing at something. She would drink too much and, she hoped, not say anything embarrassing and later she would tumble into a cab and come home to Violet—who would likely be wearing sweatpants and doing the weird, private exercises she did with her pelvic muscles to prepare for the coming months, but who was
blessed
and
whole.

It might be kind of nice, she thought, not for the first time, to be Violet.

—

T
here was something about being around Wendy that made her feel almost drunk. Or maybe the feeling was amplified by the fact that she hadn’t had a drink in eight months. But she’d started to feel inexplicably weepy one night sitting cross-legged in Wendy’s living room, feet falling asleep beneath her slightly swollen ankles. The baby, whoever it was, had been making her feel, alongside a sickly and unending indigestion, a strange euphoria lately, imbuing her with an unfamiliar sense of communion with the world around her, despite the fact that she was hiding from said world. But in the last few weeks she had begun to allow herself—
really
allow herself—to consider what might happen next. What came after her parting from this tiny bonfire of human collegiality and wonderment, this little person who wouldn’t exist were it not for her. Were it not for her sister.

She missed her mother during these times—when she was kept awake with racing thoughts, when her belly hardened with Braxton-Hicks, when she actually dared to picture what it would feel like to hand her baby over to someone she’d never met and would never see again. What in the holy hell had she gotten herself into? She had huge-hearted and endlessly generous parents; they would have understood; they would have arranged their lives around her transgression in the way they did Wendy’s; they would’ve taken her to Planned Parenthood or supported her if she’d decided to keep the baby.

She
could
call her mom, she knew. Even this late in the game. Even when she was so close to the finish line, filled to the gills with a baby whose face she couldn’t picture. She tried to imagine what the phone call would sound like—Marilyn shocked and fretful, her words inflected, but a taskmaster, too, asking the questions neither Violet nor Wendy had asked, the crucial what-ifs, keeping Violet’s best interest at the forefront all the time.

“Wendy,” she said. Sometimes when she was a kid she’d awaken from a nightmare with the feeling she had now—a rushing sound in her ears, her heartbeat in overdrive, and the loss-of-control sensation that would make her grip her bedsheet as if it were some kind of lifesaving buoy. Tonight she gripped the arm of the couch with one hand while the other covered the baby, a kid who might have her eyes or hands or penchant for order, a kid who’d instinctively assume that she would be there when it breathed air for the first time, a kid who’d never been given a reason to think otherwise, who’d never been given a say in any of this.

“Wendy, are we…”
We didn’t think this through.
“Who do you think’s going to adopt him? Or her?”

Wendy stared at her for a long minute. She felt some of her panic receding, but she could tell it wasn’t far away. She was due in two weeks—or thereabouts; she’d fudged the possible date of conception at her first prenatal visit, which Wendy had insisted on chaperoning. Who would she be a month from now, without the thrumming presence inside of her? She pictured herself then, empty-bellied, childless, training her body back into something she recognized, training herself to be the daughter her parents would recognize: law-school-bound, going through the motions, fresh from an enlivening year in Europe.

“I think you need to cede one to the powers that be,” Wendy said.

Of course telling her parents had appealed to her less than Wendy’s offer. Wendy’s offer, one that promised excitement and eventual escape, appealed more to her simply by virtue of the fact that Wendy had made it. Because her parents were her parents, but Wendy was her sister, the bravest person she knew and the person who had always known her best in the world. It seemed ludicrous that anyone was supposed to make a decision about going forward with a pregnancy so early on, before she understood the immensity of the implications, before she knew what it felt like to have an animate being inside of her.

But would it not also be brave to
keep
the baby? To test her own limits, the limits of her body and her heart and her understanding of the world?

As though reading her thoughts, Wendy spoke again: “Don’t fucking dare start thinking about that, Violet, because it’ll drive you out of your mind.”

There were footfalls on the stairs, and then Miles appeared, down from his study. “Ah,” he said. “I’m interrupting.”