Chapter 34
Lila Logan Cameron
Call sign: Cassiopeia
Lila reclined on one of the chart house sunbathing mattresses, her belly skyward and her sunglasses making the clouds and
sails look heart-shaped. She rubbed sunscreen lotion over the fronts of her legs, her stomach, the crown of her breasts, and
her collarbones. Her bikini of choice today was a push-up top with a knotted center and high-cut bottoms, both in the color
the catalog had called Persian Pastel.
As the boat dipped and rose, Lila wondered if the motion would affect getting an even tan. She was already going to have tan
lines, which was bad enough. If the twins weren’t on this trip, she would have vastly preferred sunbathing in the nude, but
alas.
Lila needed time like this to decompress after MJ’s accident and Francis’s little surprise. Her children had been quiet these
past few days and her husband distracted, which allowed her the exquisite opportunity to ruminate.
After a lifetime of streaming through her days, Lila had had an inordinate amount of stillness this past year. Her momentum
was dead. Her life was stagnant. Tia’s absence did that to the family: made everything feel calm. Copacetic.
She hadn’t missed Tia’s mood swings, though.
Lila had only ever intended to have one child. With one, you were just a person with a child.
Two was what made you a mother.
That was the belief Lila’s own parents had subscribed to. Patrick and Lori Logan had similarly set about to have an only child.
A boy would be nice. He’d be a banker like Patrick. They weren’t so arrogant to assume they wouldn’t possibly have a girl,
but Lila had found prayer cards in her mother’s vanity that politely (and repeatedly) petitioned Saint John Bosco for a son.
Lori Logan, to her quiet dismay, had delivered not one, but two female babies in the final hour of March. The first, Elaina
Maria Logan, was dead.
The second was Lila.
Lori Logan recovered admirably from her shock and her thirty-hour labor. She ordered a twenty-two-inch coffin for her firstborn,
scheduled Elaina’s funeral for the same weekend as Lila’s baptism, and swapped her Saint John Bosco prayer cards for those
of Saint Agnes of Rome.
Lori’s professions included housewife and perfectionist. She collected Madame Alexander dolls and sometimes photographed her
infant daughter surrounded by them, like she was a lovely little doll herself. Lila had always supposed that’s where the idea
for the beauty pageants came from. Lila’s first memories were her mother changing her out of Mass clothes and into pageant
ones: from paisley print and pressed collars to butterfly sleeves and chiffon. She remembered coughing in clouds of hair spray
and squashing her little-kid feet into heels. And she remembered winning. A lot.
On the rare occasions Lila didn’t bring home prize money, she’d found that, to her parents, she was worse than a disappointment.
She was an obsolete.
It became rather a talent of Lila’s, understanding when and why she lost attention. Attention couldn’t be maintained every
single minute. It had to be prepared for and guided. When Lila’s parents ran out of their ability to pay attention, Lila rotated
to another source. This skill of hers did wonders on-screen. How does one become the person people look at in a room of a
thousand girls who look just like her? One needed that ineffable yet scrupulously acquired quality. The kind that won pageants.
The kind that made headlines.
Lila understood that marriage and pregnancy would relinquish attention. People loved weddings, but they didn’t love married
people. They loved babies, but they weren’t so fond of their sleep-deprived parents.
Yet she wanted to marry Francis in a chateau in the South of France and wake up with her head on his shoulder and hold their
baby in her arms. So though it wasn’t strictly career-related, Lila Logan got married. She got pregnant.
With Lila’s own pregnancy, of course, she had known by her third prenatal appointment she was having twins. But—and maybe
this was terrible (she’d never told anyone, not even Francis)—she had subconsciously assumed one of them would be stillborn
like her sister had been. So she’d prepared herself for one baby and one death rather than for a family of four.
Rylan came first, smaller than average with a dark head of hair. This is it, Lila had thought when she held him. My child.
But then the doctor asked her to resume pushing. With the epidural, Lila couldn’t feel a thing except her baby boy, who was
swiftly removed from her breast.
So Lila pushed, delirious. This was the afterbirth. The placenta.
But it wasn’t.
It was her daughter, Tia, who was born anything but still.
Tia screamed rather than cried, tiny tears that shone like diamonds rolling down engine-red cheeks. She was small and dark-haired
too. Lila’s children matched each other far more than they did the woman who delivered them.
When the blood and the shit and the war of it all had been wiped away, Lila held her two babies, one in each arm. And as Rylan
slept, a tiny hand pressed to Lila’s heart, Tia squirmed.
She was like that for seventeen years. Writhing to be freed from Lila’s arms, twisting when she was strapped into a seat,
ducking when Lila went to kiss her head, and always vocalizing her displeasure with wails and shrieks and screams.
Did you put your mother through his hell? Lila once asked her husband after four-year-old Tia had drawn blood biting a classmate’s hand. Lila knew for a fact that
at Tia’s age she had been an orderly, convivial child who was never violent and never in trouble.
Must be why she left me, Francis joked back. Lila had wanted to ask him more. Had an elementary-aged Francis been as aggressive as his daughter?
Did he bare his incisors when he raged? Was his mother’s absence the reason for his poor behavior in high school?
Mostly, though, Lila wanted Francis to slide an arm around her and tell her his juvenile upheavals could never happen to their
daughter. Tia had a mother, after all.
But Francis didn’t say that, and Tia had resumed her fit, so the conversation never happened.
After a while, Lila disengaged with her daughter. Better to be breezy and unaffected, a sail rather than an anchor when the
storm rolled in.
Meanwhile, there was not a soul on earth more endearing than her son.
He was a beautiful boy, thick-lashed and slender.
He flushed easily, his skin baby pink and petal-soft.
He said his first word a full two months after Tia, but he was crawling and exploring weeks before her.
Whenever Lila passed by, he would lift his arms above his head, exposing the full-moon of his tummy until she bent to scoop him up.
His sister seemed to hoard the ability to make sound, so when Rylan cried it was silent.
When he had a tantrum (which was rare), it was with his mouth sealed and wounded eyes so large he looked like one of Lori Logan’s dolls.
They spent every moment together. Lila arranged for daily afternoon teas, dressing Rylan in green suspenders and pressed dress
shirts, while Lila matched him in mint florals. She designed the sunroom (which she liked to think of as her son-room) to be a space for the two of them to set up their ceramic tea set and be waited on by Alejandro. Francis and Tia didn’t
understand. On the rare occasions they joined teatime, Tia would spill on the cream tablecloth. Francis would glance at his
watch and ask Alejandro to mix sake in his tea. The two of them dominated conversation, arguing and raising voices.
Things were better with Lila and Rylan alone.
Lila marveled at her son. Even when everything that made him enchanting revealed him to be guarded.
Overly cautious, a child psychiatrist told Lila.
He seems to be responding to his sister’s forcefulness with wariness.
He’s her opposite. Try getting them in different preschool classrooms. He might find himself more without her.
It was true. Lila had learned from the beginning that Rylan did better away from Tia.
Last summer had been the breaking point. Tia’s rash behavior destabilized Rylan. How was he supposed to know who he was when
he had his sister tugging him one way and his father the other?
Simple.
He needed someone safe and soothing in between.
It had been Lila, murmuring into her husband’s ear, who decided it was time for Tia to be sent away.
There was little more they could personally do for her.
Tia didn’t permit any sort of parenting anyway, and that was just fine with Lila.
Rylan needed all the parenting. He was receptive to it too. With Rylan, Lila got results.
And so did Francis.
He had told her about the tests long before he proposed them to their son. Francis had always been obsessed with rites of
passage, the process of coming of age. His own family had obliterated their life savings to give him the chance to get his
life together on an all-boys sailing trip across the Atlantic. He once told Lila that passage had changed him forever. Francis’s
shipmates, however, had been the wayward sons of anesthesiologists and architects. They were boys who took chances for granted.
Francis would let his entire yachting empire sink into the sea before he let Rylan do the same.
Just don’t give up on him, Lila had petitioned Francis. Promise me that no matter how many times he fails, you won’t give up on our son.
Francis promised.
And Lila turned a blind eye.
Meanwhile, as Tia’s wrath zeroed in on Francis, Rylan clung ever tighter to Lila. Lila was the soft one, the safe one. From
a vantage point of gentleness and motherliness, there wasn’t a single string she couldn’t find and pull.
Lila’s phone trilled to inform her it was time to flip onto her stomach. She oiled herself down with more sunscreen and switched
from supine to prone. The sunlight was an anesthetic. She hadn’t been this loose, this liquid, in ages.
Francis had so many ideas for how to handle their lives.
Their son. But in the end, it was always Lila who coaxed out her desired outcome, who planted seeds with whispers.
This trip would end no differently. It wasn’t just the sunshine that eased her in the midst of this boat with her brazen daughter and her secretive husband.
She had a new idea, one she had murmured not to Francis but to Alejandro. Once spoken, it was no longer an idea but a plan.
All she had to do now was luxuriate for a few more days until her lover put it into action.
So Lila set another timer to bake the back half of her body and closed her eyes to bask.