18. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
Two weeks after the hospital, my mother throws me a baby shower, and it is everything I didn’t know I needed.
Soft pink streamers. A cake shaped like a swan that my mother swears was “no trouble at all,” which is how I know she fought with the bakery for two weeks.
Women who actually support me, crowded into my mother’s living room, laughing and passing around tiny onesies and making me cry with every heartfelt card.
No Hazel. No Clybornes. Just people who love me.
“Sit,” my mother commands, steering me toward an armchair she’s draped in ribbon like a throne. “You are not lifting a finger today. Not one.”
“Mom, I’m pregnant, not broken.”
“You’re nine months pregnant and you’ve spent the last three months fighting a war. Today, you sit.”
My cousin Renee drops onto the arm of the chair, already two mimosas deep. “Listen to your mother. Also, I require details about the hot carpenter.”
“He’s not a carpenter.”
“He builds things and he has forearms. Close enough.”
He assembled a crib with instructions written by a sadist. He drives twenty minutes at 3 AM because my locks are shit. He talks to my belly when he thinks I’m asleep.
“He’s…” I search for a word big enough and come up short. “He shows up.”
Renee snorts into her mimosa. “Girl, the bar is on the floor.”
“The bar is on the floor because Cedrick buried it there,” my mother says sweetly, setting a plate of petit fours in my lap. “Isaac dug it up and put it somewhere respectable. We like Isaac.”
From the sofa, Patricia Wren raises her teacup. “As Isaac’s mother, I’d like it on the record that-”
“That you taught him everything he knows,” I finish. “He warned me you’d do the bit.”
“He warned you.” Patricia sets down the teacup, delighted and betrayed in equal measure. “That boy has no material of his own, dear. He gets that from his father.”
“You taught him to hover,” I say.
“I taught him to show up,” Patricia corrects, eyes twinkling. “The hovering is all him. His father does it too. It’s genetic. You’ll be tripping over Wren men for the rest of your life, dear. My condolences.”
The rest of your life. The words settle somewhere warm under my ribs, and I have to look very hard at my petit four for a second.
The games are ridiculous. Someone melts candy bars into diapers and makes us guess the brand, which is exactly as horrifying as it sounds. There’s a guess-the-belly-circumference game where Renee guesses a number so insulting that my mother confiscates her mimosa on principle.
“It was a compliment!”
“It was a zip code.”
Somewhere between the onesies and the hooded bath towels, someone hands me a box with tiny knitted booties inside, and my chest seizes without warning.
White leather shoes with little bows on the toes. “I saw them in a window and I couldn’t resist.”
“Hey.” Renee’s voice drops, just for me. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.” I make myself smile. “Hormones.”
She doesn’t push. She just refills my sparkling cider and announces, loudly, that the next person who makes me cry owes her twenty dollars, and the party rolls on around me.
This is the part nobody warns you about. That you can hate someone with your whole chest and still miss the person you thought they were. That grief doesn’t check first whether the dead ever actually existed.
Halfway through the presents, my mother hands me a package that arrived by courier.
“It’s from Isaac,” she says, eyebrows raised meaningfully.
“He’s not even here and he’s stealing the show,” Renee mutters.
Inside is a letter, sealed in an envelope with my name written on the front in his careful handwriting.
For you, when you’re ready. - Isaac
“What is it?” my mother asks.
“I’ll be right back.”
I read it in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, tears streaming down my face.
He writes about the first time he saw me - at a work party, three months before I started dating Cedrick. He writes about watching me fall in love with his best friend, about standing at our wedding feeling like someone had reached into his chest and torn something vital out.
He writes about the night of the dinner party, watching me burn my marriage to the ground and feeling, for the first time in five years, something like hope.
Tell her that her mother is the bravest person I’ve ever met, the second-to-last line says. Tell her I loved you both before I had any right to.
I would be honored to be part of her life. Whatever role you’ll let me have. Whatever you need me to be. I’m not going anywhere. - Isaac
Someone knocks on the door. “Chantal? Honey? The swan is melting.”
“One minute!”
You’re crying in your mother’s bathroom over a letter, and three months ago you were standing in your daughter’s nursery holding a screenshot. Same tears. Different universe.
I emerge red-eyed and glowing.
Renee hands me a glass of sparkling cider. “You okay?”
“Better than okay.”
“Twenty dollars,” my mother calls from the kitchen. “Whoever made her cry owes Renee twenty dollars.”
“It was Isaac!”
“Then Isaac owes me twenty dollars!”
The front door opens.
Hazel stands in the doorway.
She’s wearing white - a pointed choice, given the occasion - and her expression is a complicated mix of defiance and desperation. Her eyes sweep the room. The streamers. The swan. A roomful of women going silent one by one, like lights switching off down a street.
“I wasn’t invited,” she says.
“No,” I say. “You weren’t.”
“But I was supposed to be part of this.” Her chin lifts. “I decorated the nursery. I picked out that crib. I was going to be her godmother. I planned half of this shower before-”
“Before I found out you were sleeping with my husband. You keep leaving off the end of the sentence, Hazel. It’s the most important part.”
Someone inhales sharply behind me. My mother sets down the cake knife with a click that sounds like a hammer cocking.
“I came to say-” Hazel falters, recalibrates. “You should get used to me being around.” Her hand comes to rest on her flat stomach. “I’m carrying Cedrick’s baby. Our children are going to grow up together whether you like it or not. Siblings, Chantal.”
The room holds its breath.
I set down my cider.
“How far along are you, Hazel?”
She blinks. “…Fourteen weeks.”
“Fourteen weeks.” I let the words hang in the silent room. “Four weeks ago you stood in a parking lot and told me fourteen weeks. You’re the first woman in medical history to be pregnant in a coma, Hazel. Babies keep growing. Even imaginary ones.”
Somewhere behind me, Renee whispers, “Oh my god.”
Hazel’s face goes white. “I - the dates - you don’t know what you’re-”
“Show the room one ultrasound. One appointment card. One prescription for prenatals.” I step closer, watching the lie collapse in real time.
“You’re claiming fourteen weeks. You’d have pictures.
You’d have a due date memorized down to the hour, and you’d have shoved all of it in my face the second you walked through that door.
Instead you’re standing at my baby shower in a white dress with nothing but a hand on your stomach and a story. ”
“Cedrick believes me.”
“Cedrick needs to believe you. That’s not the same thing.” My voice drops, and somehow that’s worse. “You made up a baby to keep a man who never loved either of us. Look around, Hazel. Look at what you traded twenty years of friendship for. He’s not even here. He’s never anywhere.”
Her mouth opens. Closes.
“I loved you like a sister,” she whispers. The tears are falling now - real ones, probably. She could always produce them.
“I know.” And here’s the terrible part, the part I will never say out loud to anyone but myself: some piece of me loves her still - the her that painted elephants, the her that maybe never existed at all. “That’s what makes it unforgivable.”
Renee appears at my shoulder with a glass of champagne.
And throws it directly in Hazel’s face.
“She said get out,” Renee says sweetly. “Before I aim lower.”
Hazel flees, champagne dripping down her designer dress, and someone at the far table wolf-whistles.
My mother raises her glass. “To my daughter. Who doesn’t take shit from anyone.”
The room erupts in cheers.
Later, when the guests have gone and it’s just us and a ruined swan, my mother washes dishes and I dry, the way we have since I was tall enough to reach the counter.
“You went easy on her,” she says, handing me a plate.
“That was easy?”
“You let her leave with her spine. The Chantal from that dinner party would have taken it home as a souvenir.” She studies me sideways. “You okay?”
“I keep waiting to feel like I won.”
“And?”
“Mostly I feel like I lost her twice. Once to him, and once to whoever she actually is.” I twist the towel in my hands. “Is that stupid?”
“It’s the opposite of stupid.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the way she did when I was six. “You can mourn the friend and still bar the door against the stranger. Those are two different women. One of them just happens to be wearing the other one’s face.”
And champagne, I think, and startle myself by laughing.
That night, I call Isaac.
He picks up on the first ring.
“Before you say anything,” he says, “my mother has sent me eleven texts. One of them is just fire emojis. Another says ‘your girl is a legend’ with three exclamation points. Do I want to know?”
“Hazel crashed the shower. She claimed fourteen weeks again.”
A pause. “Again? It’s been-”
“A month. Yes. Everyone did the math at the same time. It was very quiet, and then it was very loud.”
“God.” He exhales - half a laugh, half something darker. “Are you okay? And don’t do the thing where you say ‘fine’ in that voice.”
“What voice?”
“The dinner-party voice. The one you use when you’re bleeding somewhere no one can see.”
He knows the voice. Five years of watching, and he learned every one of my hiding places.
“I got your letter,” I say instead.
The silence on the line is the loud kind.
“Yeah?” Careful. So careful.
“Did you mean it? Everything you wrote?”
“Every word.” Rough. Immediate. “Chantal - every word. The wedding. The work party. All of it. I’ve never been able to say it out loud without it sounding insane. Five years. Who does that? Who stands next to a man at his own wedding thinking-” He stops. Steadies. “Every word.”
You are about to ask a man to drive across town at ten o’clock at night, with a decree that isn’t signed and a custody fight still ahead of you, because a letter made you cry. Bernice would put her head in her hands. Caroline would frame it.
Ask him anyway.
“You said you’d be whatever I need.”
“I did. I will.”
“Then come to bed. I want to show you what that means to me.”
A beat. Then, strangled: “I’m getting in the truck.”
“Drive safe.”
“I’m going to break several minor laws.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m in his arms, and the only thing that exists is this.