Baby of the Family Read online

  At the end of “The First Noel,” Brooke’s mother hit her soprano’s high note, and Roger picked little Brooke up underneath the arms and swung her in a circle while she shrieked in delight. This dance was the kindest thing her father had ever done for her. She felt more than special; she felt chosen. Just as she was spinning, LJ gave a thumbs-up to Theo Jr. and the boys reached down into their plastic bags. It was perfect timing: the father-daughter scene would be disrupted by a flitter, a flutter. “Snow?” the ladies in their heels and pearls would ask their bald, tuxedoed husbands, squinting upward. “How charming.” Then splat—a condom would land directly on a glistening forehead. Then all around—splat splat splat—it would be raining condoms, disrupting their perfectly choreographed event. And although Roger would feign anger at that moment, although he’d probably yell a bit at LJ in front of Corney for show, he’d be downright tickled. Roger loved a successful prank.

  But just as LJ dug his hand into the plastic bag, he was seized on either shoulder. He turned to see a mustachioed man in a black-and-white suit, growling. The hotel employee said, “Not this year, asswipe.”

  Across the ballroom, LJ could see that there was a fat man grabbing Theo Jr. in just the same fashion. A coordinated ambush! In the box beside him he heard a cracking voice admonishing Eliot, “You kids think this is a damn joke? Do you know how much more work you create for all of us?”

  They were caught. The plan had failed. All the Whitby kids were being dragged away from the balconies.

  Below, on the ballroom floor, Roger kissed the top of Brooke’s head. As he returned to his place at the piano, her mother announced that they would perform their fourth and final number. Her father’s shoulders bounced up and down as he pounded out a keyboard flourish, before the couple launched into a bopping version of “Joy to the World!” As Brooke walked to the back of the ballroom, one of her aunts squeezed her shoulder, to share in the excitement. Brooke could not stop herself from smiling. This is what happened in New York. She was a part of something bigger than just her parents and her brothers and sisters. That day was, perhaps, the happiest she had ever been.

  Yes, even in Brooke’s adult mind, New York was still a dreamland, where her family was charming, loving, and all together. A place of happiness. But if there was anything that adult Brooke had learned, it was that that kind of happiness didn’t last. She tied Phoebe’s leash to a stop sign pole and entered the electric glass doors of the CVS pharmacy imagining what was realistic, and what would really happen to her after her house was gone.

  She and Phoebe would have to move to a depressing one-bedroom rental apartment that her RN salary could support, far from the hospital. It shouldn’t be that bad, she told herself, moving into a smaller place and taking the T to work. It was a normal thing to do. But as she reassured herself, she began to panic: she’d constructed each part of her existence so carefully, laid the routine of her days down meticulously so that she’d never fall back into the hole of sadness she’d spent years crawling out of, after her brother’s death and the subsequent dissolution of her family. In moving out of her home, she’d certainly lose the circle of friends she was still loosely a part of: all those born-and-bred Beacon Hill people, all the other St. Paulies who lived in their Back Bay town houses with their husbands and wives and golden retrievers. Brooke had managed to maintain contact with these people by having just enough extra cash to occasionally go to charity events on weekend evenings. This was the life that those people lived: black tie and white tie and cocktail attire; the Children’s Fund or Friends of the Earth or the Mayor’s Council. Brooke paid the property taxes on her house, but with not having to pay rent or a mortgage, and with the added income from her upstairs tenants, she could sometimes manage to buy a ticket to an event and show her face among the only group of friends she had ever known. While she never had much fun at these evenings, seeing all those familiar faces gave her comfort. If she stopped going altogether, the whole gang of them would surely forget about her.

  She sighed loudly, walking down the drugstore aisle. Why did she need those so-called friends? The problem was that they knew her. Even if they knew nothing about her current daily life, as none of them ever asked a word about her nursing job, they knew her family and exactly where she was coming from. They didn’t ask about her job because they simply didn’t understand it. Most of the women didn’t work now that they had children, and the men were by and large investment types or lawyers at the bigger white-glove firms. It was a full nine years ago when, during cocktail hour at a Kennedy Greenway Conservancy charity dinner, she had told a group of friends she’d gone to Beacon Hill Nursery School with—the Pickney sisters and Brad Waloff and a handful of others—that she’d gotten into Northeastern’s nursing school and was planning to go. They’d all tilted their heads and narrowed their eyes in confusion. Caroline Pickney had asked earnestly, “Why would you want to do that?” They had no conception of the need for money. It didn’t occur to them that people they grew up with would ever have that need.

  Brooke was aware that if she wanted to, she could most likely be married to Marc Costa within the year, and then all that financial worry would disappear. The rational option was to appease him, marry him, suck it up and move to a giant house in the suburbs. They’d been on and off for two years now, and at forty-two, he was frothing at the mouth to lock down a wife and have multiple children before his parents felt he was inappropriately old. What she liked about Marc was his ease and his ability to make her act in ways she never had, enjoying his cars and clothes and other material possessions. She liked these things, and Marc himself, as guilty pleasures. During their first few months of dating he’d wooed her by taking her on weekend sails out of the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island, in one of the many motor sailers he co-owned with his friends. It was their hobby to buy and sell these boats, but they only ever went out on the water with a captain. They had no interest in the hard work of sailing. Instead, they’d steer the boat for a few minutes before Marc would blend a drink in the cabin and hand it to Brooke, already sprawled out in her bikini in the bow cockpit. It was gluttonous, really, and fun. But could one marry a guilty pleasure? She couldn’t shake the deep-seated fear that she was failing. When she was a little girl, her father would say to her, “You are my constant, Birdie. You are a rock. I know just the kind of life you’re going to lead.” And although living her life as a middle-class nurse wasn’t what her father had envisioned for her, marrying into Marc’s tacky family and living in the suburbs certainly wasn’t either. It wasn’t what she was meant to do.

  Yet, if she broke up with Marc and she dropped off her social circuit because she couldn’t afford it, she would be alone again during all nights and weekends, with no one to eat her meals with. Her only identity then would be her day job: Brooke Whitby, RN; Brooke Whitby, middle-class, lonely, average woman. In the middle of the brightly lit family health aisle, Brooke leaned down to examine the small white packages on a bottom shelf.

  “Can I help you?” asked a chirpy teenage girl in a smock and cornrows. Brooke shook her head. She’d found the brand of pregnancy tests that they used at the hospital: four minutes, 99 percent accuracy. She wasn’t worried. Biologically, the timing didn’t make great sense.

  Back outside, with the test tucked safely into her handbag, she and Phoebe made their way up Charles Street. Her friends would be ferrying their children to private grade schools in Brookline and Cambridge about now, waving from their Volvos and city-sized Subarus. She tried to compose herself, smile as though it was just any other morning and she was out to pick up a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t any other morning. Her father was gone, and soon her home would be gone too.

  As she and Phoebe huffed up the slant of Mount Vernon Street, she imagined becoming Mrs. Costa and still being invited to all the benefit dinners and charity balls. She would be able to, for once, buy a table. (She had, in fact, met Marc at the Humane Society dinner, where his good look
s forced her to forgive him for his embarrassingly typical question of “So . . . are you related?”) But with the image of being his wife, a shadow of misery encroached on her peripheral vision. What would she do all day in a pop-up mansion in Newton? When she had first met Marc, she had thought of their relationship as a kind of joke—a temporary vacation from real life, with an uncomplicated, pleasure-seeking, fun acquaintance. He was nothing like her, and therefore it was amusing to speed over to Newport in his Audi and care little about the problems of the world. But what had started as a slightly embarrassing dalliance had now been dragged out for so long. And the truth of the matter was that he did not know her. It made sense why he wanted her: a petite blonde, a Whitby, old enough to not make him a vulture yet strangely still single. But Marc with his gaudy taste; Marc and his perpetually surprised, childlike demeanor—he had a completely different angle on the world. He would never be able to see hers.

  When her own house on Joy Street came into view, she saw a small figure in a bright green coat on her front step. Brooke nearly laughed out loud. It was as if by magic that she was there, someone who really, truly did know her. Allie sat patiently waiting.

  Brooke’s house was brick and three stories high, not one of the grander mansions in the neighborhood but stately with its gas lamp in the front yard and a whaling-era knocker on the door. Even now, when she approached it, she remembered the first twelve years of her life, those happy ones, filled with noise and family and Peter. There were multiple years between each of her siblings: Kiki was the oldest, then three years later came mischievous LJ, four years later was Brooke, and finally, five years after her, Peter had been born. Although she was significantly younger than Kiki and LJ, it was only Peter who seemed to be considered younger than the rest; her mother liked to call him her “most handsome surprise.” Although they lived in the middle of the city, the family was a sports-loving one, and there were always ice hockey sticks and field hockey sticks, and footballs and cleats and crew uniforms strewn about the house. They’d had two nannies, Carla and Rosemary, both of whom walked over from the North End before breakfast and must have walked home again long after Brooke was asleep and her parents had returned from parties, disheveled and happy, holding high heels and cummerbunds in their hands.

  One of the most awful parts about the divorce was the fact that before it, her parents had been so joyful. They were boisterous together: singing and kissing in the kitchen in the morning, dancing in the great room at night, causing their children constant embarrassment. Corney’s upbringing in her severe, Lutheran family on the North Shore of Massachusetts clashed with her natural exuberance. She’d joked that she had left the North Shore for Broadway, but Roger had caught her in a net in Boston and she’d never made it to New York. Roger was jolly and energetic back then; whistling down to wherever his office of the moment was, the insurance business in Downtown Crossing or the brokerage firm at Government Center, challenging LJ to shoot pucks at him in their tiny backyard. He would take them on trips without any warning, loading her and Peter and their mother into the car, driving up to New Hampshire to pick up Kiki and LJ at boarding school, then going a million miles an hour on I-90 to Niagara Falls, or zipping back to Boston and taking a helicopter to Hilton Head Island or the Bahamas. “It’s too damn cold!” He’d grin. “I can’t let my family ice over in the New England winter!” This was what it was like, her family, when it still existed. One day she was a happy twelve-year-old girl, going to her progressive private day school in the morning and returning in the afternoon to a gleaming old kitchen filled with Carla’s still-warm focaccia, milk and oranges, and sometimes a small piece of chocolate. By dinnertime her mother would swoop in, squeezing Peter and Brooke close to her. Then everything changed forever.

  Now, thirty-seven-year-old Brooke—maybe not happy, but totally fine—let herself into her own front gate. Allie held up an offering of two cups of coffee in her white-and-blue mittens.

  “I know I wasn’t invited. But . . . cinnamon lattes?” Allie said, standing. She gave Brooke an impish smile. Her curly black hair was now whispered with gray, but her eyes were still childishly large and warm.

  “I didn’t know you were in town,” Brooke said.

  Allie made her way toward her as Phoebe whined, wanting to go inside. Allie ran a nonprofit that sent underprivileged girls on wilderness retreats throughout New England, mountaineering and sailing and sea kayaking, as well as school-year-based mentoring and enrichment classes. She’d founded the organization nearly a decade ago, and the main offices were in Woods Hole on the Cape, just a ferry ride away from where Allie had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Her arms were solid around Brooke now; she smelled of coconut, of comfort. “I’m so sorry about your father,” she said into Brooke’s neck. “I wish I’d known sooner.”

  Brooke felt the smoothness of Allie’s chin knock into her own, then move toward her face. Was it possible that Allie was trying to kiss her, right there on the street, right in front of her own house at morning rush hour?

  Brooke lurched back. “Come inside.” It wasn’t that their romantic relationship had been a secret. All those Beacon Hill people had known Allie since high school, and everyone was aware that she was gay. And for two years Allie had lived in the house on Joy Street with Brooke, which Brooke also assumed everyone knew. But Brooke didn’t like the gay label. She simply wasn’t a lesbian. It was undeniable that she was, or had been, in love with Allie. But whatever they’d had was a one-off, a special relationship. And she didn’t need to broadcast it on the street. Plus, Allie had made it clear she was done with Brooke: Brooke wasn’t interested in marriage, and therefore whatever had been between them would never be happening again.

  In the high-ceilinged great room at the front of the house, Allie crouched on the piano bench while Brooke sat on the robin’s-egg-blue rug, sipping her coffee and letting Phoebe off her leash.

  “Want to tell me about the funeral?” Allie asked. And Brooke did. She gave her all the pertinent details: LJ’s obnoxious behavior; the cousins who were there (Allie knew them all by name); the fact that Brooke’s mother hadn’t shown up; how everyone in the family came to the whispering consensus that it would have been cruel to tell her father’s third wife—Shelley’s sick mother, Elizabeth—about the death and the funeral. All the Whitbys knew about Elizabeth losing her mind and her increased stints in hospitals over the past few months.

  Allie listened to the report with interest, nodding along in her solemn-yet-thoughtful Allie way. Then she moved onto the rug too and sat with her legs straight in front of her so that the sides of their feet touched. “Well, you knew this was coming. And at least this chapter is over now. Can you feel good about that?”

  Brooke took a deep breath and leaned into the side of Allie’s body. She had shed a few tears at Forest Lawn cemetery while her father was being lowered into the ground, in the plot next to Grandfather Whitby. But sobbing was not in Brooke’s precise nature. Since her father had died, she had not, in fact, lost it.

  “It’s not over,” she told Allie, her voice wavering with emotion. “It’s not over, because my father—he did something cruel, although I don’t know how cruel he meant it to be. He gave my house away.”

  “What?” Allie placed two hands on the tops of Brooke’s knees. “This house? How would he be able to give it away?”

  “You know it’s his,” Brooke whispered, then explained the whole thing. She couldn’t control her tears. Allie turned and held Brooke, her firm breasts pressing beneath Brooke’s smaller and softer ones. Involuntarily, Brooke felt her sobs getting louder. In the past few months, she’d seen Allie less than she ever had since the day they really met each other, during Parents’ Weekend when they were in their first year, third form, at St. Paul’s. Now she could count on her fingers the times they’d been together that winter: a planned dinner at Sonsie, Jules’s birthday drinks, and one accidental run-in by the Frog Pon
d skating rink. But here Allie was, showing up at the moment when Brooke needed her most, making the whole tilting world seem so much more stable.

  Allie wove her warm fingers into Brooke’s. Then she stroked the top of Brooke’s hand, just as she’d been doing for years. Did they hold hands like this in high school, or had they waited until they were in their twenties, when their love affair had finally, totally begun? Now Allie’s mouth was by Brooke’s ear, kissing her lightly.

  Brooke leaned back and caught her breath. “I can’t, Als. Marc said he’s coming over for lunch today.”

  Allie flinched.

  “I need to pee,” Brooke mumbled, and lugged her now leaden body up off the ground, remembering to pick up her leather purse.

  “I’ll be here,” Allie said, grimacing.

  Inside the white-tiled bathroom, Brooke perched for a moment on the side of the claw-foot tub. Everything was fine: she was still in her house; she still had her job. And Allie was there. Just like Armond said, “All is not lost.” She took the pregnancy test box out of her bag and as she unwrapped the plastic, she noticed that her hands were shaking. This was ridiculous: she was a medical professional, good in a crisis. This was just a logical, rational precaution. She peed on the foam wick and four minutes later, after breathing deeply with her eyes closed from the side of the tub, she stood up and peered at the tiny window.

  She took in the information clinically at first. Then a thought occurred to her: how funny that most modern women find out life-changing news while locked inside a tiny room, all alone. Perhaps at that very moment, millions of other women were looking down at these little sticks, shocked. There they were: two faint pink plus signs.