Chapter 15
NORA WAS THE FIRST sister to spot the announcement in her mail.
She’d been sending out headshots, trying to get a new agent, and frequently checking her mailbox for responses that had yet to trickle in.
When she saw the envelope in her mailbox, with Nate’s return address in the top-left corner, it felt weirdly reminiscent of the Save the Date that had arrived a few years earlier.
Oh God, she thought. Please don’t let him be engaged again.
She tore open the envelope on her walk back up the stairs to her apartment and pulled out the thick white card from inside:
NATE AND HEIDI ANNOUNCE THE BIRTH OF THEIR DAUGHTER:
MALLORY GRACE
6 LBS 6 OUNCES, 19 INCHES
5/2/2007 AT 11:53 P.M.
Nora ran the rest of the stairs, and she was out of breath, her hands shaking as she picked up the cordless phone and punched in Julia’s number.
“Who the hell is Heidi?” she said as soon as Julia picked up.
“What?” Julia asked. “Nora? Is everything all right?”
“Nate had a baby, with a woman named Heidi?”
“What are you talking about?” Clearly, she hadn’t gotten her mail yet.
“I got a birth announcement in the mail. Nate and someone named Heidi had a freaking baby. You didn’t already know? Don’t you talk to Nate about the rental and stuff?”
Julia cleared her throat. “Not in a… few months. I haven’t spoken to him lately… Nothing has come up that we’ve needed to talk about.”
Somehow more surprising than Nate having a baby with a woman she’d never heard of was the fact that Julia didn’t know a single thing about it. Nora wondered if Julia was telling her the truth. “So Nate really didn’t tell you, about any of this?”
Julia sighed so deeply in response that Nora sensed she was being honest.
“You really didn’t know?” Nora repeated.
Julia was silent on the other end of the line for another moment and then she said softly, “Nate has… a baby? This isn’t some kind of a joke?”
“Go check your mail,” Nora said. “And then call me back.”
Emily sat at her desk, in her tiny office in a small upstairs room above the aquarium portion of the Museum of the Ocean.
She was trying to figure out how to use the museum’s new online system to request PTO for the whole last week in May for her sisters’ trip, when her boss, Dr. Daniels, walked in without knocking.
It wasn’t unusual, as they had formed an easy sort of comradery in the last few months, and Emily often forgot that her boss was actually her superior.
She plopped down in the folding chair on the opposite side of Emily’s desk and sighed deeply. “Do you have any Tums?”
“Tums?” Emily opened up her bottom desk drawer, rifled around in the mess, but came up with only a half-empty bottle of Motrin. She held it up as an offering, and her boss shook her head.
“No, it’s not cramps. It’s full-on nausea, Em.”
“Maybe you’re pregnant?” Emily joked. She knew, even as the words popped out of her mouth, that it wasn’t a wholly appropriate joke.
With her boss. But not much had been appropriate between the two of them these last few months.
It’s not that they were sleeping together, or, God, even anything close.
Her boss was married, and any attraction (which Emily would deny altogether, if pressed) was one way.
Still, there had been many moments like this: walking in without knocking.
Or the accidental brush of a hand as they walked by each other, or the very intentional hug.
And Emily knew that her boss’s marriage was rocky at best, she had confided that much to her.
They’d gotten married young straight out of college, high school sweethearts, and twelve years of marriage later things didn’t quite have the same shine.
Emily never had many close female friends in her life, aside from her sisters.
Her acquaintances from high school and college had come and gone, and years later, there was no one she cared enough about to keep in regular touch with.
So, she had told herself, again and again, that that’s what this was.
That’s what she was feeling every time her boss walked into a room and suddenly made her feel warm: friendship.
Here, at thirty-one years old, Emily had made her first bona fide friend.
“God, maybe I am pregnant,” her boss said now, standing up and clutching her stomach. “I’ve been telling myself it was food poisoning, but… I’ve been off all week.”
Emily raised her eyebrows, suddenly finding the whole idea of what she would’ve done to have gotten pregnant vaguely annoying.
“You could take a test,” she said, opening and then closing her bottom drawer again quickly.
She definitely did not have a pregnancy test stashed away among this mess.
It was more that she suddenly felt the need to do something with her hands.
Her boss nodded. “Would you go out and buy me one? I know it’s not your job… but you don’t mind, do you?”
Emily shook her head, though she actually did mind.
Not doing the favor, but somehow the act of being complicit in whatever this eventually turned out to be.
A baby, a stomach flu. She didn’t want any part of either one.
But she didn’t say that out loud. Instead, she stood up and said, “Sure… is there like any specific kind I should buy or…?”
Her boss shrugged and then slunk back down in the chair and sighed. “Just get the cheapest one. Or, I don’t know, maybe get the most expensive. Is that more accurate?”
Emily let out a dry laugh and shook her head. “I’ll get the priciest one and expense it.”
“Ha, you’re hysterical. My purse is downstairs on my desk. Grab a twenty out of there and use that.”
Emily put her hands on her hips and just stared for a moment before moving toward the door.
“What?” her boss asked, and raised her eyebrows. “Am I breaking labor laws by asking you to do this for me?”
Emily shook her head. “I mean…” she started, and then hesitated. “I thought you and Rick weren’t even getting along?”
“We’re not.”
“So how could you be…?”
“Oh, Em, you really were born yesterday, weren’t you?”
Emily reddened at the teasing insult. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Everyone is having babies!” Emily bemoaned a few weeks later, stretched out on the large white leather sectional in the Ocean Boulevard house.
Nora was peering through the window in the dining room, trying to get a glimpse of Heidi, who was walking back and forth on Nate’s porch with what allegedly was a few-weeks-old baby but sounded, from here through the open window, more like a squawking goose.
“Not everyone,” Julia said quietly from her place at the other end of the sofa. Neither of her sisters picked up on the weight of her words, or noticed as Julia turned away. She pulled her laptop from her bag and powered it on, pretending she had to urgently check her emails.
“Damn!” Nora squealed from across the room. “She’s cute!”
“All babies are cute,” Julia said flatly.
“Not the baby, dumbass. Heidi.”
Emily got off the couch and walked to the window to take a look; Julia stared at her laptop screen and scrolled through her inbox.
“Julia, get over here,” Emily commanded her.
But Julia didn’t move. She had no desire to see this cute woman whom Nate had somehow met, gotten together with, and had a baby with all since she’d left him in the middle of the night in Santa Monica last June.
They’d been avoiding each other ever since, having communicated only through a few emails about the rental over the course of the entire year.
Still, Julia felt hurt. She knew she deserved this, after the way she’d left him.
But the fact that Nate’s entire life had changed in a whirlwind of nine months, and he hadn’t even called her to tell her about any of it, made her stomach ache.
She felt it viscerally, deep in her core, in the empty space inside of her that would never grow another baby.
She’d had no idea a Heidi even existed, much less that Nate had made a baby with her, before Nora had called about the birth announcement a few weeks earlier.
“Let’s go over there,” Emily said. “I’m dying to meet her. She looks nicer than Becca, thank God.”
Nora nodded in agreement and grabbed her flip-flops from by the door. “Jul?” she said, casting a look at Julia, who had not budged one inch from the couch. “Aren’t you coming?”
Julia shook her head. “I’m tired from the early flight. I’m gonna rest.” Emily and Nora exchanged a look, and Julia forced a smile. “I’ll meet her later this week, I’m sure.”
Nora frowned for a quick second, but Emily slipped her feet into her bright orange Crocs and opened the front door.
The two of them ran down the porch and across the yard, and through the open window Julia could hear the sound of an unfamiliar woman’s laughter.
Pure and high and sweet-sounding. Cute? From her laugh, Heidi sounded glamorous and beautiful.
Julia wondered how they’d met, and then she quickly shook the thought away. It doesn’t matter.
With her sisters out of the house for a few moments, Julia got off the couch and picked up their schedules from the dining room table.
She took a pen from her purse and then added activities to all the free time that could’ve potentially gone to Nate the rest of this week.
She could not withstand a dinner at his house, smiling at Heidi and their baby.
A trip out on the sailboat, seeing the glow on his face now that he was in love again.
Outwardly, a year after her final miscarriage, Julia looked whole again, healed. Normal. But inside, she often still felt ripped in two, like maybe she’d left her real self with Nate back in a hotel in Santa Monica, and only her bloodless shadow had been walking around her real life ever since.
She had done it before, put something that had happened between her and Nate in the vault.
Then she saw him again the next year and pretended like nothing had ever happened.
But she couldn’t bear to do that right now.
Every emotion still felt too raw, and she didn’t have it in her to pretend this week.
Julia added in extra walks. A dinner at Peohe’s on the bay side of the island, which they had never tried.
A day trip to SeaWorld, which they also had never been to but it seemed somehow relevant to Emily’s new job.
An afternoon stroll through Balboa Park to see the beautiful jacaranda trees in full purple bloom this time of year.
Followed by an evening jaunt up to the La Jolla Playhouse to watch the world premiere of Carmen, which she knew Nora would be thrilled about.
She had this strange feeling that if she kept her sisters entertained, neither of them would think to ask her about why she was avoiding Nate.
And avoid him was exactly what she did that week. Julia went out of her way not to go next door. Nate didn’t come over to say hi either, or ask her to take a walk, like he usually did.
Nora and Emily would report back that Nate seemed tired and that Heidi seemed very nice. But Julia would not witness any of this for herself.
And by the time she saw Nate again the following summer, she would have convinced herself that she had almost forgotten what had happened just before she’d left him in Santa Monica. Almost.