Chapter 14
Three months passed.
Pinewood Hollow turned, slowly, into fall. The live oaks did not lose their leaves. They went a little duller. The Spanish moss got a little grayer. The bay stopped being warm enough to swim in and became, in the mornings, a sheet of cold pewter under early light. The cicadas quieted.
The pecan trees on the back drive began to drop their nuts onto the gravel. Imari, who at nine had taken to filling her pockets with pecans on the way home from school. Aurora remembered doing the same with smooth gray stones at her age.
The adoption petition had cleared family court without contest.
Imari had started, sometime in the last month, calling him Uncle Halston without making a thing of it. Halston had not made a thing of it either. He had just answered to it the first time as if he had been Uncle Halston his whole life.
*****
Aurora had been ill in the mornings for two and a half weeks before she finally said anything to anybody about it.
She had thought it was stress due to the back end of the adoption proceeding and the lingering grief over Maeve that came up like a wave once a week without warning and laid her on the couch in the sunroom for forty-five minutes at a time.
Never did she think it was a baby.
It was Yvette who said it. She had set down a bowl of clear broth in front of Aurora at the breakfast table one Wednesday morning, looked at her for one long second, and said, “Chère. When was your last period.”
Aurora looked up at her.
She set down her spoon and was very still.
“Yvette.”
“Tell me.”
“I do not know. I have not been keeping track. I have not been keeping track for two months, Yvette. With everything that has been happening, I just have not been keeping track.”
“Chère.”
“Yvette.”
“Drink the broth. Then go upstairs to my hall cupboard, I got you a test yesterday, it is in the second drawer. Do not say anything to your husband yet.”
Aurora drank the broth.
She did not, on the stairs up to the second floor her mind was racing. She could not be. Could she?
The test was positive.
She set it on the marble counter of her bathroom and she sat down on the edge of the tub in her linen dress, put her hand on her own stomach, flat under the linen, and she did not move for ten minutes.
A baby.
She had not planned for it. She had not, exactly, planned against it. The marriage had begun under conditions that did not lend themselves to planning.
They had never talked about it. Not once, in all their nights together, had either of them mentioned contraception, and the silence had not been an oversight — it had been a kind of agreement, the sort two people reach without speaking.
The small body in her now was simply the answer to it: the question they had both been careful never to ask out loud.
A baby.
Halston's baby.
Warm tears filled her eyes and fell down her cheeks.
*****
She did not tell him that night. She wanted to be sure. She wanted the bloodwork, the heartbeat and the word from an actual doctor.
She got the bloodwork the next afternoon and the heartbeat at the obstetrician's office in River Oaks Yvette had called for an emergency appointment, the obstetrician who had delivered Yvette's first granddaughter, a woman named Dr. Marcine Adler, fifty-five, who took one look at Aurora's face on the table and said gently, “Honey, your husband is going to be one happy man.”
Eight weeks along.
*****
Aurora drove home from River Oaks at dusk.
She walked into the master bedroom. Halston was at the desk by the window, his laptop open, his glasses on, his jacket off. He looked up when she came in and noticed the look on her face.
He closed the laptop.
“Aurora.”
“Halston.”
“Sit down, baby. Whatever it is. Sit down.”
“It's nothing bad.”
She walked across the bedroom and sat down on his lap on the desk chair. She set both her hands on either side of his face and looked at him.
She said, very quietly, “Halston. We are having a baby.”
He did not move.
He looked at her, then down at her stomach. He looked back up at her face, then back down at her stomach. He set his palm, very slowly, across the front of her dress where it lay across her belly.
“Aurora. We are.”
“We are, Halston, I am eight weeks pregnant.”
His whole face came apart.
He pressed his forehead very gently against hers and held it there.
“I have done nothing to deserve you, Imari and now this baby. I am going to be a dad again! I love you, Aurora. I love you so much I do not know how to hold this.”
“You hold it the same way you have been holding the rest of it.” You are going to be the best father this child could possibly have. Do you hear me.”
He held her tight against him on the desk chair for a long time without saying anything. The room got darker.
Eventually he picked her up out of the chair and carried her across the bedroom to the bed and laid her down, stretched himself along her side and pressed his open palm flat against her stomach.
He stayed there for a long, long time then whispered something against her skin, low under her t-shirt, that she could not entirely hear.
She did not need to hear it.
She knew what it was.
*****
They told Imari the next morning.
Imari was at the breakfast table with the Squishmallow on the chair beside her and a piece of cinnamon toast in her hand and one braid almost untied because she had been rolling around with the goldens in the back yard before breakfast.
Aurora and Halston sat down across from her with their coffee. Halston did not say anything. He let Aurora do the talking.
“Imari, sweet pea. We have something to tell you.”
Imari looked up. Her face went, briefly, the small tight watchful look it had used to wear in the first weeks at the estate. She had not had that look in months.
“Something bad?”
“No, sweet pea. Something good. Something very good. I am going to have a baby, sweet pea. You are going to have a little brother or sister in the spring.”
Imari's mouth opened.
Then her face changed in a way Aurora would remember for the rest of her life.
She came up out of the chair, knocked Archie off the seat next to her, ran around the table at full nine-year-old speed, and threw herself bodily into the space between Aurora and Halston where Halston's arm was around the back of Aurora's chair.
“I'm going to be a big sister.”
“You are sweet pea. You are.”
“I'm going to be a big sister.”
“You are. You are.”
She turned and grabbed Halston by the collar of his shirt and shook him a little.
“Uncle Halston. I'm going to be a big sister.”
Halston pulled Imari into his chest. He kissed the top of her head and held her there.
“You are, Squirt. You are.”
Yvette, in the doorway with a tray of cut fruit, set the tray down and walked back into the staff hallway without anybody seeing her, and stood in the linen closet for two minutes with her hand pressed over her mouth.
*****
Errol and Ayanna were told that weekend.
Ayanna was out in the workshop with Errol, perched on the stool by the bench with a cold glass of sweet tea, talking to him while he worked, when Aurora came in with Halston.
Errol set down the chisel he was holding the moment he saw their faces.
He turned to look at his daughter. Aurora told them.
He was stunned into silence. Then he crossed the workshop and pulled her into a hug so tight she had to drop her face into the cedar-smelling cotton of his work shirt and just stay there.
“Baby. I am so glad. I am so happy, baby.”
Ayanna had not moved off the stool. Her glass was still in her hand. Her eyes had filled.
“A baby,” she said softly. “Oh, Aurora. A baby.”
Aurora lifted her face from her father's chest. Ayanna set down her tea, crossed the workshop, took her daughter's face in both her hands, kissed her forehead, and then pressed her own forehead there and held it, the way she had when Aurora was a little girl.
She did not say anything else. After everything she had carried by herself for fifteen years, she got to stand with her daughter's face in her hands and know that a baby was coming.
Halston, in the doorway behind them, watched his wife held between her mother and her father.
*****
That weekend, however, was the weekend the hurricane came.
It was supposed to make landfall as a tropical storm.
The Houston news kept calling it a tropical storm.
The Pinewood Hollow harbormaster had downgraded the small craft warning twice on Friday afternoon.
The Iverson estate had been built to withstand a Category 3, and Yvette, who had lived through nine hurricanes on the Texas coast in her career, was not particularly worried.
The storm strengthened overnight, off the coast of Galveston, into a low Category 1. The wind picked up sometime around two in the morning the bay began to rise.
Halston was, of all places, in Washington, DC, for a Defense Department briefing he had not been able to move.
He had told Aurora he would be home Saturday afternoon.
His commercial flight was grounded at Dulles by Saturday at noon.
He chartered a small plane and was told it would be six hours before the airspace south of Houston Hobby cleared.
Aurora was on the phone with him at one in the afternoon when she heard, the wheezing.
“Halston. I have to go. Something is wrong with Imari.”
She dropped the phone and ran.
Imari was on the floor of her bedroom on her knees with her small hand pressed flat against her own chest. Her face was the gray-white look of a child who was trying to find air through a straw she did not have.
Aurora was on the floor beside her in three seconds, her own hands around her Imari’s small shoulders.
“Sweet pea. Imari. Imari, baby. Look at me. Breathe with me.”
“Aunt Rory.”
“Breathe with me, baby. In. Out. In. Out. Yvette. Yvette.”
Yvette appeared in the doorway already on her own phone to the estate physician and the urgent care in the next town.