Chapter 7 #2
Making up her mind, Bessie nodded. “I actually know about that.” Wayward looked over at her questioningly. She continued, “Your mom was here yesterday. I overheard her talking about it to Roses.”
Wayward chuckled bitterly. “Yes, those two have teamed up against me, as though Roses plotting alone wasn’t already enough.
My mom has emerged out of nowhere to play eunuch to her big sister.”
“Actually,” Bessie revealed, “your aunt and your mom were at each other’s throats.”
Wayward’s eyes widened. “What!?”
Bessie nodded. “Oh yes. There was hot tea and veiled threats. It was very telenovela. Apparently, your aunt’s plan for you
was your mom’s idea in the first place.”
“You are blowing my mind,” Wayward intoned. He considered what else he could have mistaken about his mother. But this revelation
about Iris instantly mended something that had been wounded deep inside him. After so often feeling abandoned by his mother,
Wayward finally felt wanted.
Bessie smiled. “You see?” She pushed at him good-naturedly. “You do have people in your corner, Wayward Sun-Kwok.”
He looked to the north along the California coast toward Malibu. “Roses told me to come see her at her home this afternoon,”
he said. “What should I do?”
“You once gave me very good business advice,” Bessie said as she stood up, dusting herself off. “You said, ‘Always take the
meeting.’” She offered him a hand.
He grinned at her. “That is pretty good advice, if I say so myself.” He grasped her hand and she stood him up.
“So, take the meeting with Roses,” Bessie said, “but I will modify to add, ‘Do what’s best for you, and no one else.’”
“Ah,” Wayward said, “the grasshopper has become the sensei.”
The new friends laughed.
“Let’s go back down,” Bessie said gently. She walked toward the stairs.
“One sec,” Wayward replied.
As Bessie watched, Wayward walked back to the edge of the Sunfang Global Building. He threw the cigarette package off the side, baggie and all.
Every Friday around lunchtime, April packed a picnic for one and biked down to El Matador, a small beach near her neighborhood
along the Malibu coast. She had been doing this since Meadow started going to school, and she always went alone.
April locked her bike in the dirt parking lot, grateful to see that it was deserted for now, which was not often. She made
her way down the hill to the water below.
El Matador is a hidden gem of a beach down a steep staircase off an unremarkable section of the Pacific Coast Highway. But
locals knew it to be a magical place, with its arched sea caves, its trifecta of craggy cliffs, and its gentle waves lapping
microfine sand. To April, however, this tiny beach had one more defining detail: It was where she used to bring Lewis to play.
Kicking off her sandals, April walked past roosting seagulls until she reached a giant rock formation sitting right on the
shoreline that looked like either a turtle or a tree trunk—she could never decide which. She sat down against it, so that
she was facing the Pacific, and set down her picnic basket upon the warm sand.
It was here, right on this patch of sand, where Lewis took his first steps.
The funny thing was, April Sun had never wanted to be a mother. The way young April saw it, she was going to be far too fabulous
with far too many obligations. Forged from birth into the impossible image of Roses Sun, the Sunfang princess had the world
to conquer first.
By twenty-five, April had graduated summa cum laude from Pepperdine University with an MBA and was living the West Coast socialite
dream: cohosting award-season parties with Sunbern, rubbing shoulders with the Hiltons and the Kardashians, authoring columns
for Vogue and Teen Vogue, chairing various philanthropic causes as the new media-friendly face of Sunfang Global.
There was a revolving door of various eligible bachelors that swirled around her, including a Saudi sheikh, an older A-list film director, and a Chinese American real estate scion who owned all the malls in Texas.
So when the humbly born Cristiano Baccay entered her picture, everyone was surprised. First of all, their elders had long
assumed that Cristiano was Wayward’s not-so-secret boyfriend, since the two boys were so inseparable. Because April and Wayward
had been raised as sister and brother, Cristiano had always been in the background of April’s life, peripheral to the point
that he too was practically family.
But to April, twenty-one-year-old Cristiano was no longer just one of Wayward’s little friends. Over the years, he had grown
into a strapping specimen of a man, a champion athlete who broke barriers in college basketball at USC and unintentionally
sprang thirst traps on social media with his movie-star looks.
April Sun was no fool; she had felt every one of his moony looks in her direction since they were kids, and as they grew older,
she always thought of him fondly as her hometown boy. Now young adults, their innocent friendship was beginning to toe the
line of provocative flirtation.
It was New Year’s Eve nine years ago at the Sun cousins’ annual legendary house rave in the San Bernardino Mountains, back
when it still happened. April, Wayward, Sunbern, Felicia, and a teenage Lola were hosting at the Sun Clan’s legendary cabin
perched on Big Bear Lake, with jet-setting guests from all over the world, as well as a surprise set by Daft Punk just before
midnight.
Peaking on molly, April was fending off the ubiquitous pack of male admirers following her around. She was not interested
in these suitors. The Sunfang princess was recently single, and she needed to slip away to the family-only section of the
house to find a balcony for some fresh air.
By fate, he was already standing alone on that same balcony. Steam rose off his broad shoulders as he wrapped his coat around her.
“Any New Year’s resolutions?” Cristiano asked.
April shook her head. “I don’t believe in them. How about you?”
Below them, they heard the loud chants of the entire party counting down the end of old times.
“I’ve had a lifelong resolution,” Cristiano said softly, his eyes glowing at her in the moonlight.
“I know.” April smiled.
She pulled him to her and they kissed. Cheers, songs, and fireworks erupted all around.
That night, despite him wearing a condom and her being on the pill, they became pregnant with Lewis.
Listening to the gently lapping waves of El Matador, April laid out her picnic: a simple peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich
cut in half and a couple of clementines. She held a sandwich half and looked at the patch of sand across from her, where her
little boy had once walked.
Lewis would have been eight that day, about to turn nine. Their son had had Cristiano’s eyes and her nose, his ears and her
chin. April could easily envision what he would have looked like as a nine-year-old, had he lived.
When she first found out she was pregnant, she and Cristiano had been secretly shacking up for a month without a care in the
world. April had been stunned by the parallel red lines on her pregnancy test—how did this baby manage to emerge with so many
obstacles in its way?
Cristiano was conflicted too. A believer in his own destiny, he always knew that someday he would start a family with April Sun.
But this felt too soon. Here he was, not even graduated from college yet, no secure financial future.
Not to mention that not even Wayward knew about their new coupling, and now there was a baby on the way.
April and Cristiano decided to tell Wayward first, hoping that Roses’s favorite nephew could help soften the blow for her.
They came to his dorm room at Occidental College, where they found him in a stupor, in a puddle of cigarette butts and popper
bottles. He had not stopped partying since New Year’s, and when they told him about their dilemma, he did not react well,
telling them that they had to deal with it on their own. The then-twenty-year-old Wayward had his own issues with perceived
abandonment, combined with a constant self-inflicted hangover, and he had felt betrayed by his two closest people.
April and Cristiano drove to Malibu full of apprehension. When Roses opened her front door, she saw the two of them together
and the looks on their faces, and the Sun matriarch already knew what had happened. April was sure that her mother was going
to facilitate all the appropriate steps to “take care of it,” and a part of her was tremendously relieved as she’d been too
scared to decide for herself.
But upon hearing their explanations, Roses astonished them.
“Against all odds, this child was created,” the Sun matriarch had said, “and we will see this through.”
As April took a small bite of her sandwich, out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. Looking over at the stairs, she
watched as a young couple walked their toddler down the steps, pointing out at the ocean. They waved over at her, but she
looked away. She wished they would leave.
Lewis was not an easy pregnancy. During the first two trimesters, April had severe morning sickness, a perpetual nausea that would make her bedridden for entire days.
Her blood pressure skyrocketed, her legs swelled painfully, and she even developed gestational diabetes.
Roses had April move out of her beloved cottage right above the Chateau Marmont back into the Malibu compound where she had grown up.
Cristiano soon followed suit, putting his college studies on pause and abandoning his basketball career so he could help take care of April.
They were twenty weeks in when April, Cristiano, and Roses sat together in her gynecologist’s clinic as the ultrasound specialist
ran the cold, sticky transducer over April’s bulging belly.
“Nice healthy heartbeat,” the specialist was saying. “And . . . yes, there it is!” She pointed at the monitor at a bump on
the outline of a kicking fetus. “Congratulations, folks, you’re having a little boy!”