Not My Daughter

2

The doctor confirmed it. Lily was definitely pregnant. Learning that her daughter didn’t have a fatal disease, Susan was actually relieved – but only briefly. The reality of being pregnant at seventeen was something she knew all too well.

Susan had become pregnant in high school herself. Richard McKay was the son of her parents’ best friends. That summer, when he was fresh out of college with a journalism degree and a job offer for fall that he couldn’t refuse, something sparked between them. Pure lust, her father decided. And the chemistry was certainly right. But Susan and Rick had spent too many hours that summer only talking for it to be just sex. They saw eye to eye on so many things, not the least being their desire to leave Oklahoma, that when Rick dutifully offered to marry Susan, she flat-out refused.

She never regretted her decision. To this day, she recalled the look of palpable relief on his face when she had firmly shaken her head. He had dreams; she admired them. Had there been times when she missed having him there? Sure. But she couldn’t compete with the excitement of his career, and refused to tie him down.

His success reinforced her conviction. Starting out, he had been the assistant to the assistant producer of a national news show. Currently, he was the star, following stories to the ends of the earth as one of the show’s leading commentators. He had never married, had never had other children. Only after he became the face in front of the camera rather than the one behind was he able to send money for Lily’s support, but his check arrived every month now without fail. He never missed a birthday, and had been known to surprise Lily by showing up for a field hockey tournament. He kept in close touch with her by phone – a good, if physically absent, father.

Rick had always trusted Susan. Rather than micromanage from afar, he left the day-to-day parenting to her. Now, under her watchful gaze, Lily was pregnant.

Stunned, Susan listened quietly while Lily answered the doctor’s questions. Yes, she wanted the baby, and yes, she understood what that meant. No, she hadn’t discussed it with her mother, because she would do this on her own if she had to. No, she did not want the father involved. No, she did not drink. Yes, she knew not to eat swordfish.

She had questions of her own – like whether she would be able to finish out the field hockey season (yes), whether winter volleyball was possible (maybe), and whether she could take Tylenol for a headache (only as directed) – and she sounded so like the mature, responsible, intelligent child Susan had raised that, if Susan hadn’t been numb, she might have laughed.

Silent still when they left the doctor’s office, she handed Lily the keys to the car. ‘I need to walk home.’ Lily protested, but she insisted, ‘You go on. I need the air.’

It was true, though she did little productive thinking as she walked through the November chill. No longer numb, she was boiling mad. She knew it was wrong – definitely not the way a mother should feel; everything she had resented in her own mother – but how to get a grip?

The cold air helped. She was a little calmer as she neared the house. Then she saw Lily. The girl was sitting on the front steps, a knitted scarf wound around her neck, her quilted jacket – very Perry & Cass – pulled tight round her. When Susan approached, she sat straighter and said in a timid voice, ‘Don’t be angry.’

But Susan was. Furious, she stuck her hands in her pockets.

‘Please, Mom?’

Susan took a deep breath. She looked off, past neighborhood houses, all the way on down the street until the cordon of old maples seemed to merge. ‘This isn’t what I wanted for you,’ she finally managed to say.

‘But I love children. I was born to have children.’

Looking back, Susan pressed her aching heart. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. My problem’s with the timing. You’re seventeen. You’re a senior in high school – and expecting a baby at the end of May, right before exams? Do you have any idea what being nine months pregnant is like? How are you going to study?’

‘I’ll already have been accepted into college.’

‘Well, that’s another thing. How can you go to college? Dorm rooms don’t have room for cribs.’

‘I’m going to Percy State.’

‘Oh, honey, you can do better.’

‘You went there, and look where you are.’

‘I had to go there. But times have changed. Getting a job is hard enough now, even with a degree from a top school.’

‘Exactly. So it won’t matter. Anything is do-able, Mom. Haven’t you taught me that?’

‘Sure. I just never thought it would apply to a baby.’

Lily’s eyes lit up. ‘But there is a baby,’ she cried, sounding so like a buoyant child that Susan could have wept. Lily didn’t have a clue what being a mother entailed. Spending the summer as a mother’s helper was a picnic compared to the day-in day-out demands of motherhood.

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said and, suddenly exhausted, sank down on the steps. ‘Forget do-able. What about sensible? What about responsible? We’ve talked about birth control. You could have used it.’

‘You’re missing the point, Mom,’ Lily said, moving close to hug Susan’s arm. ‘I want this baby. I know I can be a good mother – even better than the moms we worked for this summer, and I have the best role model in you. You always said being a mother was wonderful. You said you loved me from the start. You said I was the best thing that ever happened to you.’

Susan wasn’t mollified. ‘I also said that being a single mom was hard and that I never wanted you to have to struggle the way I did. So – so think beyond college. You say you want to be a biologist, but that means grad school. If you want a good research position—’

‘I want a baby.’

‘A baby isn’t only for the summer, and it doesn’t stay a baby for long. He or she walks and talks and becomes a real person. And what about the father then?’

‘I told you. He doesn’t know.’

‘He has a right to.’

‘Why? He had no say in this.’

‘And that’s fair, Lily?’ Susan asked. ‘What if the baby looks exactly like him? Don’t you think people will talk?’

A hint of stubbornness crossed Lily’s face. ‘I don’t care if people talk.’

‘Maybe the father will. What if he comes up to you and asks why this child who was born nine months after the time you had sex has his hair and eyes? And what happens when your child wants to know about his father? You were asking by the time you were two. Some kids do still have daddies, y’know. So now it’s your turn to be the mommy. What’ll you say?’

Lily frowned. ‘I’ll go there when I have to. Mom, you’re making this harder than it needs to be. Right now, the baby’s father does not have to know.’

‘But it’s his baby, too,’ Susan argued. Desperate for someone to blame, she sorted through the possibilities. ‘Is it Evan?’

‘I’m not telling who it is.’

‘Do I know him?’ Susan wondered if Lily was stonewalling for a reason. ‘Was he the one who wanted the baby?’

Lily pulled her arm free. ‘Mom,’ she cried, hazel eyes flashing, ‘listen to me! He doesn’t know. We never talked about a baby. He thought I was on the pill. I did this. Me.’

Which, of course, was one of the things Susan found so hard to swallow. It was like a slap in the face, a repudiation of everything she had tried to teach her daughter.

Desperate to understand, she said, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t an accident? I mean, it’s okay if it was. Accidents happen.’ Lily shook her head. ‘You just decided you wanted a baby.’

‘I’ve always wanted a baby.’

‘A sibling,’ Susan said, because, when she was little, Lily had begged for one.

‘Now I’m old enough to have my own, and I know you might not have chosen to be pregnant seventeen years ago, but I did. It’s my body, my life.’

Susan had raised Lily to be independent and strong, but cavalier? No. Especially not when there were realities to face. ‘Who’ll pay the medical bills?’

‘We have insurance.’

‘With premiums to which I contribute every month,’ Susan pointed out, ‘so the answer is me. I’ll pay the medical bills. What about diapers? And formula?’

‘I’ll breast-feed.’

‘Which is wonderful if it works, but sometimes it doesn’t, in which case you’ll need formula. And what about solid food and clothes? And equipment. They won’t let you leave the hospital without an approved car seat, and do you know what a good stroller costs? No, I don’t still have your old one, because I sold it years ago to buy you a bike. And what about day-care while you’re finishing school? I’d love to stay home with the baby myself, but one of us has to work.’

‘Dad will help,’ Lily said in a small voice.

Yes. Rick would. But was Susan looking forward to asking? Absolutely not.

Lily’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I really want this baby.’

‘You can have a baby, but there’s a better time!’ Susan cried.

‘I am not having an abortion.’

‘No one’s suggesting one.’

‘I already heard my baby’s heartbeat. You should have listened to it, Mom. It was amazing.’

Susan was having trouble accepting that her daughter was pregnant, much less that there was an actual baby alive inside.

‘It has legs and elbows. It has ears, and this week it’s developing vocal cords. I know all this, Mom. I’m doing my homework.’

‘Then I take it,’ Susan said in a voice she couldn’t control, ‘that you read how pregnant teens are at greater risk for complications.’ It was partly her mother’s voice. The rest was that of the failed educator whose crusade had been keeping young girls from doing what she had done. That educator had failed on her own doorstep.

‘I stopped on the way home for the vitamins,’ Lily said meekly. ‘Do you think the baby’s okay?’

As annoyed as she was – as disappointed as she was – a frightened Lily could always reach her. ‘Yes, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘I was just making a point.’

That easily reassured, Lily smiled. ‘Think I’ll have a girl like you did?’ She didn’t seem to need an answer, which was good, since Susan didn’t have one. ‘If it’s a girl, she’s already forming ovaries. And she’s this big.’ She spread her thumb and forefinger several inches apart. ‘My baby can think. Its brain can give signals to its limbs to move. If I could put my finger exactly where it is, it would react to my touch. It’s a real human being. There is no way I could have an abortion.’

‘Please, Lily. Have I asked you to get one?’

‘No, but maybe when you start thinking about it, you will.’

‘Did I abort you?’

‘No, but you’re angry.’

Susan shot a pleading glance at the near-naked tops of the trees. ‘Oh, Lily, I’m so many things beside angry that I can’t begin to explain. We’re at a good place now, but it hasn’t come easy. I’ve had to work twice as hard as most mothers. You, of all people, should know that.’

‘Because I’m a good daughter? Does my being pregnant make me a bad one?’

‘No, sweetheart. No.’ It had nothing to do with good and bad. Susan had argued this with her own mother.

‘But you’re disappointed.’

Try heartbroken. ‘Lily, you’re seventeen.’

‘But this is a baby,’ Lily pleaded.

‘You are a baby,’ Susan cried.

Lily drew herself up and said quietly, ‘No, Mom. I’m not.’

Susan was actually thinking the same thing. No, Lily wasn’t a baby. She would never be a baby again.

The thought brought a sense of loss – loss of childhood? Of innocence? Had her own mother felt that? Susan had no way of knowing. Even in the best of times, they hadn’t talked, certainly not the way Susan and Lily did.

‘Don’t be like Grandma,’ Lily begged, sensing her thoughts.

‘I have never been like Grandma.’

‘I would die if you disowned me.’

‘I would never do that.’

Turning to face her, Lily grabbed her hand and held it to her throat. ‘I need you with me, Mom,’ she said fiercely, then softened. ‘This is our family, and we’re making it bigger. You wanted that, too, I know you did. If things had been different, you’d have had five kids like Kate.’

‘Not five. Three.’

‘Three, then. But see?’ she coaxed. ‘A baby isn’t a bad thing.’

No. Not a bad thing, Susan knew. A baby was never bad. Just life-changing.

‘This is your grandchild,’ Lily tried.

‘Um-hm,’ Susan hummed. ‘I’ll be a grandmother at thirty-six. That is embarrassing.’

‘I think it’s great.’

‘That’s because you’re seventeen and starry-eyed – which is good, sweetheart, because if you aren’t smiling now, you’ll be in trouble down the road. You’ll be alone, Lily. In the past, we’ve had two other pregnant seniors and one pregnant junior. None of them wanted to go to college. Your friends will go to college. They want careers. They won’t be able to relate to being pregnant.’

Lily’s eyes widened with excitement. ‘But see, Mom, that’s not true. That’s the beauty of this.’

Susan made a face. ‘What does that mean?’

3

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Cute,’ Kate Mello told her youngest and proceeded to pour dry macaroni into a pot of boiling water. ‘Lissie?’ she yelled upstairs to her second youngest. ‘When are you going? I need that milk.’ She stirred the macaroni and said more to herself than to Mary Kate, who stood beside her at the stove, ‘Why is it that I’m always out of milk lately?’

‘I’m serious, Mom. I’m pregnant.’

Holding the lid in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, Kate simply touched her forehead to Mary Kate’s and smiled. ‘We agreed that you had the flu.’

‘It’s not going away.’

‘Then it’s lactose intolerance,’ Kate said, setting the lid on the pot. ‘You’re the one who’s drinking me out of milk. Lissie? Soon, please?’

‘I’m drinking milk,’ said Mary Kate, ‘because that’s what pregnant women do.’

‘You are not a pregnant woman,’ Kate informed her daughter and reached for her wallet when Lissie appeared. There wasn’t much in it; money disappeared even faster than milk. She found a twenty among the singles, and handed it over. ‘A gallon of milk, a dozen eggs and two loaves of multi-grain bread, please.’

‘Alex hates multi-grain,’ Lissie reminded her as she pulled on her jacket.

Kate put the car keys in her hand. ‘Alex is twenty-one. If he hates what I buy, he can get his own apartment and buy what he likes. Oh, and if there’s money left over, will you get some apples?’ As Lissie left, she handed Mary Kate a stack of plates. ‘Eight tonight. Mike is bringing a friend.’

‘I conceived eight weeks ago,’ Mary Kate said, taking the plates.

Kate studied her daughter. She was pale, but she was always pale. Same with looking frail. The poor thing had the delicate features of an unnamed forebear, but her hair was all Kate – sandy and thick, wild in a way that the child never was. Kate tacked hers up with bamboo knitting needles. Mary Kate tied hers in a ponytail that exploded behind her, making her face look even smaller.

‘You’re not pregnant, honey,’ Kate assured her. ‘You’re only seventeen, you’re on the pill, and Jacob wants to be a doctor. That’s a lot of years before you two can even get married.’

‘I know,’ Mary Kate said with a spurt of enthusiasm, ‘but by then I’ll be older and getting pregnant will be harder. Now’s the time for me to have a baby.’

Kate felt the girl’s forehead. ‘No fever. You can’t be delirious.’

‘Mom—’

‘Mom, did Lissie leave?’ This from Kate’s third daughter who, not seeing her twin, snatched a cell phone from the clutter on the kitchen table.

‘That’s mine, Sara,’ Kate protested. ‘I’m low on minutes.’

‘This isn’t a social call, Mom. I need tampons.’

‘I don’t,’ Mary Kate said in a small voice, but with Sara calling Lissie and Mike choosing that minute to duck in and ask if he could have two friends for dinner, Kate barely heard her.

‘It’s only mac ’n cheese,’ she cautioned him.

‘Only?’ her twenty-year-old son echoed. ‘You said it was lobster mac ’n cheese.’

‘Is that why they’re coming?’

‘Definitely. Your lobster mac is famous. The guys hit me up every Wednesday morning for an invitation.’

‘And if your uncle decides to pull his traps on Friday?’

‘They’ll switch to Friday. So two is okay?’

‘Two’s okay,’ Kate said, and remarked to Mary Kate when Mike and Sara were both gone, ‘Lucky the catch is up and the price is down.’

‘I’m trying to tell you something, Mom. This is import ant. I stopped taking the pill.’

Hearing that, Kate turned. Her daughter looked serious. ‘Are you and Jacob cooling it?’

‘No. I just decided I wanted a baby. Did you know that a woman is more fertile right after she goes off the pill? I haven’t even told Jacob yet. I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Something about her serious look gave Kate pause. ‘Mary Kate? You’re not joking?’

‘No.’

‘Pregnant?’

‘I keep doing tests, and they’re all positive.’

‘For how long?’

‘A while. I mean, I would have told you sooner, only I wanted to make sure. But I’m really on top of this, Mom. I bought books, and I’m getting more info online. They have a support group for teens, but I don’t really need that. I already have a support group.’

Kate frowned. ‘Who?’

‘Well…well, for starters, my family. I mean, we normally have seven for dinner. Tonight it was eight, and now nine. What’s one more?’

Kate would have sent Mary Kate to the back porch for another folding chair, because that was what one more meant in their cramped dining room, if she hadn’t been struggling to process what the girl had said. ‘Is this true?’

‘Yes. Anyway, you love kids. Didn’t you have five in five years?’

‘Not by design,’ Kate said weakly. ‘They just started to come and didn’t stop.’ Not until Will had had a vasectomy, though that wasn’t something they often discussed with the kids. They would have discussed abstinence, if they believed there was a chance the kids would listen. More realistically, they talked up responsibility. ‘But wait, back up, I was twenty-one when I had my first child, and I was married.’

Mary Kate didn’t seem to hear. ‘So now this is the next generation. I like being the first one of us to have kids. I’m always last in everything else.’

‘The decision to have a child should involve both parents,’ Kate said. ‘You need to ask Jacob before you do anything rash.’

‘Oh, Jacob is just so serious sometimes. He would have said no, and he’d have given lots of reasons that made sense, but sometimes you have to just go with your gut. Remember Disney World five years ago? You piled Dad and us in the car and drove us to Florida in the middle of winter, and we didn’t have hotel reservations or anything, but your gut told you the trip would be good.’

‘That was a trip, Mary Kate. This is a baby. A baby is for life.’

‘But I’ll be a good mother,’ Mary Kate insisted. ‘Last summer was such an eye-opener – seeing what those moms did? Like, no patience with their kids, wanting to palm them off on us while they sat way off at the other end of the beach. I’ll never do that with my baby. If it’s a boy, it’ll be a little Jacob. That would be awesome.’

Kate was speechless. The quietest of her five, the most passive and deferential, Mary Kate was rarely this effusive. And what had she just said? ‘A little Jacob?’

Mary Kate nodded. ‘I won’t know the sex for a little while, and I know it could be a girl…’ Her voice trailed off.

Bewildered, Kate looked around. The kitchen was small. The whole house was small. ‘Where would we keep a baby?’

‘In my room. Co-sleeping is big right now. By the time my baby outgrows that, Alex will probably be out of the house and maybe Mike, too, so there’ll be more room. And then once Jacob graduates from medical school—’

‘Jacob hasn’t graduated from high school,’ Kate yelped, struck again by the absurdity of the discussion. ‘Mary Kate, are you telling me the truth?’

‘About being pregnant?’ The girl quieted. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

No, she wouldn’t. She was an honest girl, a bright girl, perhaps the most gifted of Kate’s five kids, and she had a future. She was planning to marry a doctor and be a college professor herself.

‘I mean,’ Mary Kate went on, speaking faster now, clearly sensing her mother’s horror, ‘you always said “the more the merrier”, that a noisy home makes you happy, that you’d have had more children if we’d been richer.’

‘Right, but we’re not,’ Kate stated bluntly. ‘Your father and I barely finished paying off our own college loans in time for your brothers to start college, and now with the twins there and you next year – but you won’t be going to college if you have a baby, will you? How can you be an English professor without a college degree – without a graduate degree?’

‘I’ll get one. It just may take a little longer.’

Kate couldn’t believe what her smart daughter was saying. ‘May just take a little longer?’

‘And in the meantime I’ll have Jacob’s baby.’

‘Where? How? Jacob’s dad drives a PC truck, and his mom teaches first grade. They’re as strapped as we are. If Jacob loves you like he says, he’s going to want to be with you and the baby, but his parents can’t support the three of you.’

‘I’d never ask them to,’ Mary Kate said. ‘Besides, I don’t want to marry Jacob yet. I want to stay here.’

‘So we can support you and the baby?’

‘Fine,’ the girl said. ‘Then I’ll move out.’

Kate grabbed her daughter’s shoulders. ‘You will not move out, Mary Kate. That isn’t an option.’

‘Neither is abortion.’

‘I agree, but there are other choices.’

‘Like adoption? I’m not giving my baby to someone else.’ She plucked at her sweater. ‘See this? It was Sara’s, and these jeans were Lissie’s, but this baby is mine.’ The hand on her middle was pale but protective.

Yes, Kate acknowledged. Mary Kate often got clothes from the twins – okay, usually got clothes from the twins – but didn’t large families do that? She was a hand-me-down child in everything but love. Kate had always thought that would make it okay. ‘Your sisters outgrew those things,’ she argued. ‘They were good clothes.’

‘That’s not the point, Mom. This baby’s mine.’

‘Just like you and your brothers and sisters are mine,’ said Kate. ‘When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a vet. I love animals. But I loved your father more, and then you kids came along really fast, and I loved you all so much that I wanted to be a full-time mom, which was lucky, because there was so much to do for the five of you that our house was chaotic even without my having an outside job. And by the time you all were in school, we didn’t have the money for me to train to be a vet. Do you think I work just for kicks?’

Mary Kate was subdued. ‘You love your work.’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t do it if it didn’t pay. We need every extra cent.’

‘My baby won’t cost much,’ the girl said meekly.

Kate took her shoulders again, holding onto a dream that was fading fast. ‘It isn’t the money,’ she pleaded softly. ‘I want things to be easier for you when you have kids. I want your children to have rooms of their own. I don’t want you to have to choose between music lessons or ballet because you can’t pay for both.’

The door opened, and Kate looked up, fully expecting it to be Lissie. But it was Will. Who had worked his way from the PC shipping dock to foreman of the department, losing hair and gaining girth, but remaining Kate’s rock.

She always felt a weight lift from her shoulders when Will came home, but her relief had never been greater than it was now. ‘Here’s your dad. Will, we have something to discuss.’