All the Little Liars (3 page)

 

Chapter Two

As Robin and I filled out a million forms in Dr. Garrison's waiting room, I whispered, “This is definitely blowing my cover. We have to go directly to my mom's house from here.”

Robin nodded. “You'd think they'd told people we were going to be here,” he muttered back.

I'd already seen three women I'd gone to high school with, though they'd all been a few classes behind me. In fact, there weren't any women my age in the waiting room. They were all either five to ten years younger or twenty-plus years older. It was almost embarrassing. Luckily, I got to look down a lot to the clipboard in my hands. I'd already completed some paperwork online; I hadn't realized those had been only the warm-up forms.

At last the nurse, whose name tag read “Jennings, R.N.,” called me back. Robin went with me as a matter of fact. Blood pressure, height, weight, more questions. It was a lot of work, going to a doctor. I felt like I'd passed some kind of test when Nurse Jennings showed me into an examining room.

There was a little curtained cubicle with a tiny bench in one corner, and I climbed out of my clothes and into the rose-colored paper robe. All of a sudden, I was absolutely terrified. What if all the pregnancy tests (I'd ended up taking three) had been mistaken? What if I had some disease that made my boobs swell and hurt, instead of having a baby inside? What if something was wrong? I came out to perch on the end of the examining table. I tried to smile at Robin. I was actually relieved that Robin looked just as anxious. I couldn't have endured his trying to tease me out of my apprehension.

After about a year, Kathryn Garrison came in and shook my hand. She was a solid woman in her forties with short blond hair and some truly hideous black-rimmed glasses. She wore very little makeup. And she was wearing Nikes. Well, okay.

“Ms. Teagarden,” she said, taking the rolling stool at the little counter. “And Mr. Crusoe, I take it? Hey, you wouldn't be related to the writer?”

Robin said, “I'm the writer.” He assumed his public smile.

“Well, a celebrity! I love your books!”

I usually took this in my stride, because I loved Robin's books, too. But today was not the day to admire his talent.

“I'm glad you do. But today we're a little anxious, and we'd like to be sure everything is fine and normal,” Robin said.

“Sure, I get that!” Dr. Garrison said, and turned to me. “Let's go on and have a quick examination. Now, you've taken some home pregnancy tests?”

“Three,” I said. “All positive.”

“And this is your first pregnancy.”

“Yes.” I'd put that on every form that had passed through my hands.

“We'll just check you out,” Dr. Garrison said. “Mr. Crusoe, can you step out a minute?” Reluctantly, he did. “Aurora, you slide down to the end of the table and put one foot in each … okay. Relax, please.”

I wasn't sure I could, but I tried. Dr. Garrison looked off into the distance while she examined me, as if she could see a ghost in the corner. She gave me a hand to sit up, and called Robin back in. “Oh, my goodness, yes,” she said, smiling. “Pregnant for sure. Congratulations, primigravida!” That meant I was a woman having her first pregnancy, I remembered from one of the many booklets in the waiting room.

I'd let out the breath I'd been holding. I was grinning like an idiot, and so was Robin. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Our baby was official.

When I felt more in command of myself, Dr. Garrison resumed her seat on the rolling stool and asked me some very personal questions. “Let's do an ultrasound,” the doctor said. “That way we'll have more information before I give you a due date, since you're not sure about your last menses.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling things were moving very fast.

“So just lie back again, and I'll ask Nurse Jennings to wheel in the ultrasound.” She put the stirrups away and extended the footrest. Apparently, Robin did not have to go outside for this phase.

“Will we see the baby?” Robin asked, as if he hardly dared to know the answer.

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Garrison said, smiling. “You sure will. But you won't think it looks much like a baby.”

Getting ready for the ultrasound took a little longer, but then I had cold gel on my stomach and Dr. Garrison was gliding a sort of disk thing over it. Robin and I watched the screen, terrified and riveted. He gave me a wild look like a horse that's going to bolt. I probably looked equally nervous.

“There's your baby,” Dr. Garrison said, smiling.

Our baby seemed to be two faintly connected blobs. Friends had told me how disconcerting that was, and now I got to experience it for myself. Then the baby wiggled. It was alive!

“It can
wiggle,
” I said, and began crying again.

Dr. Garrison said, “Let's see,” and moved the device around some more. Suddenly, there was a rhythmic swishing sound in the room. “Yes, I'm getting the heartbeat.”

“Our baby has a heart,” Robin said proudly, and I didn't even think this was strange.

“It sounds so swooshy,” I said. I'd always imagined heartbeats as sounding like drums or hooves, but this sounded more like water sloshing in a bucket.

Dr. Garrison nodded. “Perfectly normal,” she said. She let us continue to listen and look while she sat with her laptop.

“So,” she said. “The baby is approximately ten weeks old.”

“Our baby,” Robin said reverently.

“Yes, Mr. Crusoe. You and Ms. Teagarden will be having a baby right around July twenty-first.”

As we went to my car, I realized I didn't remember anything else about the visit, though Robin clutched a big envelope containing a prescription for prenatal vitamins, an appointment slip for four weeks later, and about a ton of material about baby development, labor and delivery choices, and how to take care of myself during my pregnancy. A quick peek had told me that not only was I a primigravida, but I was an elderly primigravida. Horrors. (I was over thirty-five.) But Dr. Garrison had assured me several times that my age didn't necessarily mean I'd have any trouble at all carrying and delivering our baby.

Our house was on the way to my mother's, so we dropped off Robin's car there.

We didn't go inside. We didn't check on Phillip.

I didn't even think about it.

When Robin climbed into my car, again carrying the big envelope, we sat looking at each other: stunned, excited, terrified. Then we leaned sideways to hug each other, awkward in our coats. This baby had suddenly become very real. We were too flustered and excited to have a coherent conversation. We threw out remarks at random, though.

“My next book is due July fourteenth,” Robin said. “I've got to make a schedule so I can turn it in early.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I have to find out if the library has maternity leave. And I guess we have to decorate the room by Phillip's?”

“Has to be that one,” Robin said. “Thank goodness we've got the study.”

“Yeah, I'd hate to move again,” I said.

“Ohhhhh…” Robin thought about that. “Maybe wait till he's older, ready to start school. There might be a school district we ought to be in.”

“School,” I said, overwhelmed. “Let's just think about getting her here safe, okay? We can worry about school in a few years.”

“You're right, of course,” Robin said, with the abstracted air of a man who was wondering if his child should go to Harvard. “Do you think he might have red hair like mine?”

I laughed, and then Robin was laughing with me. “I don't think I've ever been this happy in my life,” I said, and started crying again. This seemed to be a pattern.

“Let's go see your mom,” Robin said, and looked as if he might get teary, too.

My mother and her husband, John, were surprised when we rang the doorbell at four thirty in the afternoon. My mother was her usual well-groomed self, correct down to the last hair on her head—still dressed as though she were going into the office, though she was now semiretired. I automatically scanned John, and he was looking good, too. He'd had a heart attack a few years before, and I still worried about him.

Mother said, “Have you come to eat supper with us?” She glanced down at her watch. “I can stand you some grilled cheese sandwiches and minestrone.”

“No, no, we just dropped by to tell you some news.” I fidgeted around for a minute. I glanced up at Robin. I braced myself and I also smiled hugely. “Mom, I'm pregnant.”

I had
finally
impressed my mother.

Her mouth open, she sank onto a handy couch. John practically leaped forward to shake Robin's hand.

“Really? You've been to the doctor and everything?” My mother had never trusted home pregnancy kits.

I nodded. “We just left Dr. Garrison's. My due date is July twenty-first.”

“Oh,” Mother said breathlessly, and I swear she had tears in her eyes. “This is wonderful news.” Then after a moment of silent absorption, she said, “Thank God you got married already.” Then she sat up. “Wait. Is this why you got married?”

I'd been waiting for that. But I didn't know quite how to answer. Luckily, Robin was prepared. First he pulled me over to the couch opposite Mother's, while John buzzed around aimlessly, beaming.

“No,” Robin said, smiling. “We would have gotten married anyway. But we got married a little sooner and a little more quietly because we were pretty sure we had a baby on the way.”

I'd figured Robin and I were in a serious relationship and were headed for an even more serious one. But I hadn't been sure how he'd react to finding he was going to be a father. To my profound relief, he'd had the ring in his pocket before he'd even discovered I was pregnant. I hadn't even imagined he was going to propose.

My mother's delighted smile morphed into something more like gloating. I knew she was thinking about Arthur Smith, a police detective I'd dated for a few months … until I'd gotten an invitation to his wedding and noticed the bride was pregnant. The next words out of Mother's mouth were, “I wish that Arthur Smith was still in Lawrenceton. You'd show
him.
”

“Beating a dead horse, Mother,” I said. “I didn't even know he'd gone. Where to?”

“He got a job as sheriff in a town in northern Arkansas,” she said.

“Well, I don't have enough brain to spare to think about him,” I said. And it was lucky Mother didn't know that Arthur's marriage was the least of his offenses. I'd never tell her or John that Arthur had had an affair with my now-deceased half sister-in-law, John's son's wife.

“Are you going to find out if it's a boy or a girl?” John asked. His smile just wouldn't go away. He had three grandchildren, and I could tell he'd been hoping my mother would have one of her very own blood to spoil—though she'd been doing a fine job on her step-grandkids.

We looked at each other. “Are we?” Robin asked me.

I shrugged. “I don't know. What do you think?”

“We might need more time to talk about that,” Robin said, which sounded good to me.

After thirty more minutes of hosannahs and a lot of questions we couldn't answer, we were in the car and driving back to our house. My mother's excitement, and John's, had made our own the keener. We were moving out of the stunned phase (which we'd pretty much been in since I'd taken the home pregnancy test right after Thanksgiving) and into the joyous phase. We'd given my mom the green light to tell John's family—John David, a widower and the father of a toddler, and Avery, married to Melinda. Avery and Melinda had two kids, a little girl and a toddler boy.

While I heated up the chili Phillip had put out on the counter and made corn bread to go with it, Robin called his mother, Corinne. Corinne had other grandchildren, but she'd given up on Robin producing any since he'd turned forty. She was very happy, too, and asked to talk to me directly. She had all the same questions my mother had had, and I still didn't know the answers to all of them.

When dinner (such as it was) was ready, I called my brother Phillip, who emerged from his room. My half brother is blond, a look he enhances, and he has blue eyes. I'm brown and brown. He's much taller, at least five foot nine to my five foot nothing. Phillip's a good-looking guy, no doubt about it. But I like to think that we have a certain similarity; maybe in the shape of our faces, the set of our eyes. “Corn bread?” he said, surprised. Evidently corn bread and chili did not go together in Southern California.

“You'll like it,” I promised. “We have something else to tell you.”

“Yeah, I need to talk to you, too,” he said. “But you go first. You look pretty excited.”

“Phillip, we're going to turn the bedroom next to yours into a nursery.”

“Yeah? Why?” he said, his eyes on the pan of corn bread. I deduced that he wasn't really listening to me.

“Phillip. Why would we need a nursery?” Robin said.

My brother's jaw dropped and he flushed red as a multitude of ideas and images seemed to be hitting him broadside. “For real?” he said in a choked voice. “For real?”

Robin nodded.

For one moment Phillip looked very happy. He pumped Robin's hand enthusiastically, and came around the table to give me a hug. But then the joy collapsed. “So I guess you'll need me to move back to California?” he said in a very subdued way.

That hadn't been my intention at all. “No, you kidding? We need a babysitter,” I said. “Don't you dare go off and leave us.” (I hoped that was how Robin felt, too, because we hadn't talked about it; our list of things to talk about grew longer and longer.)

After supper, while he was loading the dishwasher, Phillip asked if he could tell his friends. After a glance at Robin, I nodded. I was impressed that my brother had enough friends here in Lawrenceton to tell. He'd lived with us a very short time. Maybe he meant his friends in California, too. He'd probably just put it on Facebook. Oh, God.