Chapter 18
Ilena
Saturday Morning
Two Days After the Outing
This is where Ilena’s gray lives. The walls of the nursery, which they apparently just finished the build-out and decorating
of, are Coventry Gray. She knows it, because she knows every hint of brown, every subtle trace of green, every undertone of
blue and black and yellow in every version of gray paint there is. She studied them, tested them on the walls of the living
room, dining room, hallway, and mudroom of her and Jonah’s house in Newton. This was the perfect one. Pure, no deception.
No traitorous eggplant or fraudulent charcoal infiltrating with the second coat.
She presses her feet into the fluffy white area rug that softens the ebony wood.
The room is beautiful, everything she could have imagined and things she couldn’t have.
A gray crib a shade lighter than the walls, cream changing table with black matte pulls, a simple pewter standing lamp above this upholstered chair she’s gliding back and forth in.
She’d never have chosen the gold sunburst dial mirror or the menagerie of safari animals, proudly stuffed and commanding the bench under the window.
The blackout shade she’d wanted in her bedroom hangs above this window, ready to help the singleton sleep by blocking the reflection off the harbor.
Her baby will have a waterfront view. What would her mom say to that?
The “her” in “her baby” still gives her a mild case of imposter syndrome, yet she can’t deny what she saw at the hospital.
A baby, this baby, a “Felix and Ilena” baby curled inside her uterus. She has the picture to prove it.
She rises from the glider and peers over the edge of the crib. Last night, Felix surprised her, first with the meal he cooked
of lobster risotto and then by leading her here to see all the gifts from the office baby shower put away and arranged. He’d
nestled the photo from the ultrasound inside the crib atop a sheet with little sailboats like polka dots. He’d done all of
this while her best friends hid a man’s body. Not just any man, a man who had helped AIM to become AIM. A man she considered
a friend. One who had been more than a friend to Mallory. Ilena knew, of course she knew. She knew her best friend better
than anyone. And as much as Mallory was hiding it, including to herself, she was hurting.
Ilena had cried. And not a little.
She’d cried because of the wood floors she’d have never picked out and the view she never dreamed she’d have and the hydrangeas
at home that probably needed watering and the glass-topped dresser in the bedroom she despised and the lingering lemon of
the luxurious risotto in her mouth and the house that was hers but not hers and the man that was hers but shouldn’t be and
the baby that should have been hers and Jonah’s.
But it wasn’t. It was hers and Felix’s. Which is why she couldn’t bring herself to search for Jonah’s name here. When the
technician ran the wand over her skin, Felix had clutched her hand, tears in his eyes even before the ghostlike picture came
into focus on the monitor.
“This is everything,” he’d said, leaning in to kiss her forehead.
It all disappeared: Mallory and Grayson and the police and James and the pregnancy stick note and Jonah, everything that had been swirling in Ilena’s mind.
She was simply present with her baby and the father of her baby.
When the technician asked if they’d changed their mind about not knowing the sex, her instinct was to say yes, they had. She had. That’s when she knew.
She wasn’t going to the police. She wasn’t going to tell Felix that she wasn’t the Ilena he thought she was, that in her world,
he’d married someone else, had a child with someone else. She couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk an arrest or jail or an evaluation
by social services or a psychiatric ward. Goddammit, Mallory was right.
The lessons Ilena’s mother had instilled in her should have made it a harder choice, one she had to think through, struggle
with, in order to conquer her dependency on doing the right thing. But nature is stronger than nurture, and she knew instinctually
without doubt or hesitation that nothing mattered except this baby. The singleton came first.
Mallory knew it, because Mallory knew Ilena the same way Ilena knew Mallory.
A gentle knock on the nursery door, and there’s Felix, holding a box of tissues. “Just in case.”
She smiles weakly. “Apparently hormones are a thing.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” He enters the room wearing an untucked polo and blue-and-white-checkered shorts. “It’s clearly my
fault though. I wasn’t thinking last night. How can one eat lobster risotto without a glass of muscadet? I should have made
mac and cheese.”
“Please don’t. Ever.”
“Not even for the singleton?”
She wraps her hands around the top rail of the crib. “Homemade, with Vermont cheddar only, not that imitation crap.”
“You got it, Lennie.” He winks, and she tries not to startle at the unexpected nickname.
She knows Jonah’s mood from the way he slides his phone off the nightstand each morning, can guess what he’ll choose off a menu at any restaurant faster than he can, and can time his ejaculation to the second hand of her rose compass clock.
After twenty years with Jonah, there’s so little that’s new or surprising.
As Felix crosses the room, he pauses at the small pegs on the wall beside the door, each home to a little hanger dangling
a onesie. Above is a small shelf that she only now realizes holds a framed photograph of her family. Ilena, her sister, and
her mom on what appears to be her sister’s college graduation day, which threatens more tears. Her sister didn’t graduate
in her world. She couldn’t take the pressure to be the best. There’s no sign of her dad, and disappointment fills Ilena to
think he was no different here.
At twelve, Ilena had been old enough to understand what it meant that her father was moving in with a woman who wasn’t her
mom, but too young to realize that the hug Ilena had given him, begging him to stay, was tantamount to her choosing a side
and his was the wrong one. The betrayal never left, seeming to linger in her mother’s criticism of everything from the way
Ilena packed the dishwasher to the shape in which she plucked her eyebrows. Her mother had always been demanding, expecting
Ilena and her sister to be perfect daughters, to live up to the reputation of their attorney father and president-of-their-synagogue
mother. The picture-perfect family. Her father leaving shattered the image her mother needed, the one that tamped down her
insecurities. The one that allowed her to let go of her practical side and be the fourth in their games of Uno or shout out
crossword answers as Ilena and her dad bent over the kitchen table on Saturday mornings.
But that mother disappeared just as her father had done. And as much as Ilena knew it was her father’s choice to break up
their family, she couldn’t stop blaming her mother. Sometimes she wished that when her father had left, he’d taken her too.
Yet her father being who he was had set off a chain reaction.
If he hadn’t left, Ilena wouldn’t have begged him to stay, wouldn’t have betrayed her mother by choosing him, wouldn’t have had to work so hard to be the best at everything.
Would she have gotten into Harvard, met Mallory, founded AIM?
Her dad’s infidelity may be the key to Ilena’s success.
But it had been the opposite for her sister.
When their mother demanded perfection, her younger sister stopped trying because it felt impossible.
Yet here, she hadn’t. She’d finished college.
Ilena couldn’t be more proud. Her sister had found a way to succeed in spite of their mother. The same way Ilena had.
“It strikes me that we’re overdue. Do you want to invite them?” Felix asks, turning and coming to rest on the opposite side
of the crib. “Your mom and sister?”
She nearly laughs out loud. The Cohens operate independently, as Felix’s “overdue” and her father’s absence from this photo
implies is the same here. She’s not sure what Felix knows of her family, and now’s not the time to find out. She’s juggling
enough as it is. “Invite for what, exactly?”
“James offered to do a gender-reveal party.”
“He did?”
“Well, after I asked him to. But really he owes us for missing the wedding.”
“James missed the wedding?”
A fake laugh. “Funny. Sure, sure, we barely noticed bad sushi stopped our best man from attending.” He reaches into the crib
and lifts the white envelope from the ultrasound technician. “Well, party too tacky?”
She stares at the envelope, then the photograph atop the sailboat sheet. “Definitely, but let’s do it anyway. Except, I’ll
host.”