Life Happens

“Now you’re an expert?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Here. You take her.”

Before Mya could protest, her mother dumped the baby into her arms. Mya had no choice but to hold her.

“Relax,” her mother said. “You’re stiff as a board. Babies are like dogs. They sense when you’re nervous.”

Mya glanced at Elle. “You don’t mind that comparison?”

Shrugging, Elle said, “It looks like Kaylie thinks you’re doing okay.”

Miraculously, it was true. Pink cheeked, her eyelashes matted from her tears, the baby stared solemnly up at Mya as if trying to figure out something important. But she didn’t look particularly worried. Mya was nervous enough for both of them. “You know, kid,” she said, “you’re heavier than you look.”

“How much did she weigh at birth?” Millicent asked.

“Six-and-a-half pounds. It seemed like a lot at the time. How much did I weigh?”

Millicent looked to Mya to answer.

In a quiet voice, Mya said, “You weighed six pounds, fourteen ounces.” There was absolutely no reason for her throat to close up, and yet it did.

The room was silent. While everyone was trying to decide where to look, Kaylie figured out what it was she’d been pondering, and tried to stick her finger up Mya’s nose.

She was quick. But Mya was quicker.

“Good dodge,” Elle said. “She’s had a thing for noses lately.”

“When Mya was two, I had to take her to the emergency room because she put a button up her nose,” Millicent said, very matter-of-fact. “I guess it’s not surprising she’s marrying a doctor. Isn’t he as close to perfect as a man can get?”

Mya’s diamond ring glinted beneath the lamplight. Another brittle silence ensued while she told herself there was nothing wrong with her diamond ring or with Jeffrey. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe the flaw lay within her. Struggling with her uncertainty, she began to walk slowly around the room, the way she’d seen her mother do earlier. With a sigh, the baby rested her head on Mya’s shoulder.

“Kaylie resembles you, Elle,” Millicent said.

“Except for her eyes,” Elle said. “They’re blue like her father’s.”

Mya found her mother watching her. Something powerful passed between their gazes. Elle’s father had blue eyes, too.

A flash of grief ripped through Mya. Part of it was guilt for depriving her mom of her only grandchild, but that was far from all of it, for her mother wasn’t the only one Mya’s decision had deprived. At the time, she’d been so certain she was doing the right thing.

“Well looky there,” Millicent said when Kaylie’s eyes fluttered. “I’ve heard it often skips a generation.” There was reverence in her mother’s voice.

“What does?” Mya asked cautiously.

“That connection. It’s instinctive. She knows you all right. You two fit.”

Mya was peering down at the baby, therefore she didn’t see Elle’s expression still and grow serious. Millicent saw it, and it brought a dull sense of foreboding. The girl was keeping secrets. And Millicent knew from experience that when girls Elle’s age kept secrets, there was usually hell to pay.

Mya knocked softly on Elle’s closed door.

A quiet “Yeah?” came from within.

Poking her head in, Mya whispered, “Is Kaylie asleep?”

Elle nodded. A dim lamp illuminated one corner of the small room. Elle had pushed the double bed against the wall. The baby slept on her tummy on the far side, a small bump beneath the blanket.

“Be prepared for my mother to arrive with a crib tomorrow. I told her to talk to you about it first. Did she?”

Elle shook her head, but didn’t seem to know where to look. And Mya found that the earlier belligerence had been easier to deal with than this reticence. She would have preferred to have this conversation later, when Elle felt more comfortable here, but Millicent was convinced that the girl was hiding something, and insisted this couldn’t wait until morning.

“Are you coming in or what?” So much for Elle’s reticence.

“Won’t Kaylie wake up?”

“Once she’s out, she stays out.” Elle sat near the head-board in baggy flannel bottoms and a stretchy tank top that bared a small tattoo of a musical note that seemed at odds with the barbed wire tattoo encircling her other arm. “I had a good mom,” she blurted. “The best.”

Perching carefully at the foot of the bed, Mya said, “Did she and your—do you have any brothers or sisters?”

Elle sat cross-legged, her elbows propped on the pillows she piled in her lap. “She said I was all she needed. Well, me and Dad.”

Kaylie hummed in her sleep.

“My mom was an attorney,” Elle said. “My dad still is, but she quit when they got me. Sometimes she helped him with wills and paperwork, but most of the time she cooked and planned trips and dinner parties and carpooled and took me to soccer practice and music lessons and friends’ houses.”

Mya could picture that. “What was she like?”

“She was very intelligent and tall and kind of ordinary. She played the piano, and she laughed a lot.”

Mya didn’t know what to respond to first, the sense that it was exactly the kind of life she’d wanted for her baby, or the puncture wound that giving her up had left in Mya’s insides. “It sounds as if she took very good care of you.”

“Too good.” The sound Elle made had a lot in common with a snort. “She spoiled my dad and me rotten. After she died, laundry piled up and the cupboards went empty. Dad and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it. He remarried a year later. I guess desperate situations call for desperate measures, huh?”

Mya studied Elle’s features, one by one. She was extremely thin, her face pale in the dim light. Her short blond hair was tousled, her brown eyes expressive. “So you have a stepmother.”

“You’d recognize her relatives from the movies. They wore pointy hats, kept flying monkeys for pets, and one of her sisters perished when a house fell on her somewhere above Kansas.”

Mya bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Not a lot of love lost there, I take it.”

“I despise my stepmother.”

“Despising people comes naturally to the Donahue women.”

They shared their first genuine smile. A moment later Elle looked away.

“She and my dad have two kids of their own now. He spends a lot of time at the office. I would, too, if I were him.”

Why, Mya thought, couldn’t life ever be easy, or at least fair? Since she knew firsthand that wishing was a worthless pastime, she prepared for the inevitable questions.