Chapter 12
Present Day
It was the evening of the family party. Wren was still in her bedroom after her escape, bundled up in blankets despite the heat outside, the Frenchie Pierre at her feet.
She was pretty sure that Landon and Celia had gone out for the night to celebrate their engagement, but she could still hear Ivy downstairs, alternating between angrily stomping and frantically scrubbing the plates and bowls from their barbecue.
Earlier, when her sisters had followed her upstairs, Wren had been terribly conscious of the open window and the people listening on the veranda downstairs. She hadn’t found the will to explain herself to them. But she knew it was only a matter of time before her pregnancy began to show.
If her calculations were correct, she was a little more than three months along.
No longer as nauseous as she’d been hours before, Wren tiptoed out of her room.
Pierre followed close, acting the part of her shadow.
They went downstairs to find Ivy on the sofa, scowling at the dark screen of the television, as though she’d forgotten to turn it on.
When she spotted Wren, she gave her a curious look.
“How are you feeling?” Ivy asked. She was still so sure that Wren’s Graves’ disease was acting up and that Wren wasn’t handling her health responsibly. She still saw Wren as her helpless little sister. Maybe that was what Wren was.
“I need to talk to you,” Wren said. “Is anyone else here?”
Ivy shook her head. “Elliott, Lily, and Tyler are all out with friends.”
“And Juliet?”
“Back home with Theo,” Ivy said darkly. There was a sense of abandonment in her eyes.
Wren knew that loneliness was something that Ivy had previously thought was her lot in life.
She probably still thought it was her destiny, despite having so many people she loved around her all the time these days.
Wren knew it was hard to disconnect yourself from the story you’d been telling yourself about yourself. She knew that firsthand now.
Wren sat on the opposite side of the sofa. She realized she was terrified of Ivy, if only because Ivy’s moods were so difficult to gauge. They were all damaged, the Harper sisters who’d “been through so much.” Things had gotten better, maybe. But that didn’t mean they were great.
“I haven’t been honest with you,” Wren said, raising her chin and telling herself to be brave.
Ivy’s face looked pinched. “It is your Graves’ disease,” she stated.
“No. It’s not. It’s really not. I’ve handled that okay, or as okay as can be expected,” Wren said, her voice delicate. “But there is something wrong with me. Or something right with me. I don’t know what to make of it.”
Ivy gaped at her. Everything in the room seemed to crystallize. Wren knew it was now or never.
“I’m pregnant,” Wren offered.
Immediately, Ivy shot to her feet. Wren expected a torrent of questions and angry accusations, but all Ivy seemed able to do was stand there and gape at her. Wren’s cheeks were inflamed.
Just then, the front door opened. Celia breezed in, her eyes alight after her celebratory evening with her brand-new fiancé. Ivy and Wren turned to look at her, wiping Celia’s smile off her face.
“What’s going on?” Celia demanded.
“Wren’s pregnant,” Ivy stammered.
Celia was quiet for a beat before hurrying over to the sofa and wrapping her arms around Wren. “Oh, my sweet little sister!” she said. “No wonder you haven’t felt like yourself!”
Above them, clearly irritated by Celia’s easy ability to love and love and love, Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and waited.
“Tell us,” Celia breathed, “when did it happen? How far along are you?”
Wren fought the tears that threatened to pour out of her. “I’m maybe three months,” she said. “I went to the doctor in Greece, and they confirmed that everything looks good. Great, even. Healthy.” This, above everything, had been a surprise.
Now, she stalled, biting her lower lip. How could she explain everything that had happened without losing her cool? She didn’t want to prove to Ivy just how much of a mess she was.
“I wanted to tell you right away,” Wren said.
“It’s a delicate issue!” Celia threw up her hands. “It’s the first time you’ve been pregnant, right?”
Wren nodded.
“And you were all alone out there!” Celia added. “You must have been scared.”
“I was,” Wren whispered. She’d been petrified.
At this, Ivy let out a soft, ominous sigh. Wren and Celia looked up at her. She remained unsmiling, her forehead wrinkled up in thought.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Ivy said, as though she’d just put the pieces together. “You want to leave your baby here. With us.”
Wren’s jaw dropped with surprise. Never could she have imagined Ivy accusing her of doing that.
But even as she considered the idea, even as she steamed with anger, she wondered if a part of her actually wanted that: to leave her baby here in Bluebell Cove.
After all, with the pregnancy, Wren’s happy-go-lucky travel lifestyle was at risk.
Her career was at risk. Ivy had a new relationship, a fresh perspective, and a foundation here in Bluebell.
It really was a wonderful solution.
But it was one Wren couldn’t use. She couldn’t. Oh, her thoughts were racing now, and her palms poured sweat. She got to her feet and wiped the dew from her brow with the back of her hand.
“I would never do that,” she whispered.
“Of course not,” Celia said, standing beside her. “We know that.”
Celia gave Ivy a very dark look that meant, lay off.
But Ivy continued to glare at them in her classic Ivy manner. Yes, she often thought the worst of people. But that didn’t mean she was always wrong.
“You know that’s what Mom wanted,” Ivy said under her breath. “She didn’t want to be a mother. She wanted to be free of us. She…”
“That’s enough,” Celia shot.
Ivy squeezed both of her hands into fists, then turned and walked up the stairs and disappeared into her bedroom. Wren collapsed back on the sofa and looked down at her feet. Celia went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of water, one for herself and one for Wren.
“I’m sorry about that,” Celia murmured.
Wren shook her head and squeezed the glass of water with her thighs. “I haven’t told anyone yet. Not anyone except the doctor.”
Celia’s eyes were wounded and filled with curiosity. “Oh,” she said. “I mean, not even…” It was clear she wanted to ask who the father was but was too frightened to.
Wren knew almost exactly what both of her sisters would say about her “baby daddy.” She decided not to give them any information. She didn’t want to hear any of it.
Eventually, Wren’s nausea returned, and she went upstairs and got back under the covers. Pierre fell asleep soon after, the tip of his nose tucked under a pillow at the far end of the bed.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she told the dog. But even as she said it, she felt a deep, unending sadness, because she knew that soon, the dog’s owners would discover his whereabouts and take him away from her.
It was for the best, she knew. She wasn’t stable. Ivy knew that, too.
Why had Wren thought she could have a child?
Years before, when their father had died, and they’d all come back to Bluebell Cove, and Celia had discovered their mother’s old journals, they’d learned more about Margaret Harper’s complicated inner life.
They’d learned about her dissatisfaction with her marriage and her chaotic feelings about motherhood and about how desperately she’d wanted to be free.
From the pages of her journal, it seemed clear that Margaret was always about a meltdown away from leaving their family behind.
Wren closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself a year or two from now.
By then, she was sure, her travel photography career would be back on track.
Maybe she’d be in Lima, Peru, or the Maldives or somewhere in India.
Maybe she’d be invited to a grand party filled with some of the most powerful people in the world.
What would she do with her baby? She supposed she could get a babysitter.
Babysitters were all over the world, and you could get good ones if you paid well enough.
But it wasn’t like she could get a babysitter every night.
For the next eighteen years, give or take, her needs would dictate her entire life, and the wants of the baby growing in her stomach would be her only concern.
What about school? Could she homeschool?
But that added another complication, especially as Wren didn’t want to spend much of her day inside, relearning algebra so that she could teach it to her child.
Wren kept herself awake for hours, panicking about everything she hadn’t thought of thus far during her pregnancy.
Ivy’s fears became her own. Around two in the morning, she snuck out of her room and went to the office downstairs, where she knew Ivy kept their mother’s journals.
Wren hadn’t looked at them in years, but she now craved reading her mother’s thoughts.
She hoped there was a kernel of wisdom, a truth that she could cling to.
Unlike the others, she’d never really been able to know her mother. She didn’t have a single memory.
Ivy kept the diaries on the top shelf, next to the old Russian novels Wren would never get around to reading.
She opted for the last two—the year during which Margaret was pregnant with Ivy and the years leading up to her death.
With them tucked under her arm, she went upstairs, then burrowed between her sheets and pored through her mother’s words.
It is something that I can’t hide from this time: the fact of my pregnancy.
It’s the worst nausea I’ve had so far in any of them.
It’s like I can’t keep anything down. At night, I have nonstop nightmares about bringing another baby into this world, into my marriage.
I can’t believe that we weren’t careful, that we didn’t think about what we were doing, that we threw caution to the wind.
James is certainly no more pleased about the pregnancy than I am.
We’ve fought about it nearly every day this week.
He accuses me of not taking care of myself.
He accuses me of being unable to care for another child.
I accuse him of hating me and locking me into a world that I no longer care for. And around and around we go.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of human the baby will turn into, later on.
I hope he or she won’t feel the anxiety and self-directed anger I feel upon waking and going to sleep.
I hope in twenty or thirty years that James, this fourth baby, and I can go out to dinner and laugh about how he or she “wasn’t planned,” as they say, but that he or she is secretly our favorite child.
“Don’t tell Celia, Ivy, or Juliet!” I’ll beg this child, laughing.
I’ll tell him or her, “You brought our family together. You made everything perfect! We couldn’t have done it without you. ”
I have to believe in that kind of future, somewhere in the roots of me.
I have to believe that we can escape all this darkness we’ve created.
I have to believe that I can be a better mother than I ever was before, and that Celia, Ivy, and Juliet will remember more of the good days than the bad.
I don’t know why I must always fixate on the bad.