“Yes.” The news of Antoinette’s pregnancy coated Kayla’s mouth. The test was in her purse.
“What do you think she was hiding? Do you really think she was having an affair with your husband? Is that something she would do?”
“She was having a relationship with someone,”Kayla said. “That much I know.”
“Because she told you?”
“No,” Kayla said. “She was about to tell me. Before she went in the water. But she never got the chance.”
“So you’re assuming she was having a relationship, then,” Lindsey said. “I mean, if Antoinette didn’t tell you.”
“I have evidence,” Kayla said.
“Oh, please,” Lindsey said. “Please. You’re being very melodramatic, Kayla, you know that? I appreciate that you’re my mother’s friend and everything, but really. You come off as a bit of a drama queen.”
Kayla hit the brakes and reached for her purse, dug through it like a smoker hunting down her last cigarette. Then she found it-the sandwich bag containing the pregnancy test. She held it up before Lindsey’s face.
“This,” Kayla said, “is a positive pregnancy test. I found it at your mother’s house last night. Believe me, there is no way it belongs to someone else. This is Antoinette’s. There is no way someone else’s positive pregnancy test was going to be lying around your mother’s house.”
Lindsey stared at the bag like it was a severed head. Okay, fine. Melodrama. Kayla hit the gas, and panic washed over her. They were getting closer to the spot where they’d been swimming. Two orange pylons marked off a section of beach, and a man in a black fireman’s uniform held the end of a rope that led into the water. He walked with the rope between the two pylons. About twenty yards out, a diver surfaced, lifted his mask, shook his head. They were dragging the bottom. Kayla was so spooked by this that it took her a moment to notice a Jeep sitting alongside the fire department’s Suburban. Kayla blinked, confused. The Jeep. And then she saw him, sitting on the front bumper, his face hidden in his hands, his shoulders heaving.
Her baby crying.
It was Theo.
Theo
“Baby. Oh, baby, oh, baby, baby.”
Like his worst nightmare, or maybe as an answer to his prayers, he felt arms around him and over the arms he saw Antoinette’s face, or almost. The arms and the voice belonged to his mother, that much he knew instinctively. He wanted to throw the arms off, lash out: What the fuck are you doing? Leave me alone! But instead he let himself get pulled in. His mother’s arms. She loved him. She must know about everything by now, and yet she loved him. His whole life she’d told him that she was a safe place to go, that no matter what he did she would forgive him, and that he never had any reason to be afraid. And yet the last eight, nine hours he’d been very afraid as he watched the diver sweep the bottom of the ocean floor looking for Antoinette’s body. He’d cried and watched and prayed to the God he wasn’t even sure existed. Thinking that if they did find her dead he would drown himself, too. Because how could he live without her? Now he was in his mother’s arms looking through tears at a face that was almost Antoinette’s, but not. He let himself cry.
“I love her,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby.”
“Ssshhh. Ssshhh.” His mother’s hand ran through his hair. She knew, and she wasn’t angry. He had been sure his mother would be angry; he was sure the news would devastate and scandalize everyone- his mother, the rest of his family, the island of Nantucket. Antoinette had thought so, too, and that was why she had wanted to get an abortion-because of what his mother would say. And so, he despised his mother and he loved her. His emotions were tangled, knotted like a fishing net. It was too much for a kid of eighteen. Too fucking much.
Theo had known Antoinette his entire life. In the green vinyl photo album there was a snapshot of Antoinette holding him as a baby. She was twenty-seven years old and a complete fox in a black leotard and a black leather miniskirt. In the photo she looked strangely sad, a little like the Mona Lisa, he thought. Theo removed the snapshot from the family album- it was the only photograph of her in existence, she said. Theo placed it on Antoinette’s nightstand. He sometimes looked at it when they made love.
“That picture makes me feel old,” she said. “Elderly.”
But he liked it. It proved they had a shared past.
Theo had known Antoinette his entire life. And so there was nothing to hide. She baby-sat once when he was thirteen and certainly old enough to baby-sit his sisters and brother himself. Except that his parents were going off-island, to Boston for a long weekend. Antoinette slept on the sofa under an afghan that Theo’s grandmother crocheted, and she slept in the nude. Theo got up in the middle of the night to pee, and he sneaked down to the living room, and there was Antoinette asleep on the couch, covered with the afghan, her clothes in a pile on the floor. It was dark, but his parents kept a light on over the kitchen sink at night and so Theo saw part of her shoulder, a slice of her ass, and what he thought was a nipple poking through one of the holes in the afghan. His penis grew so hard it actually hurt, and he hurried back to his bedroom and stroked himself until he came. Antoinette was his fantasy for a long time after that.
But it wasn’t an obsession or anything. Because before this past April, Theo had been a normal kid. He did well in school, he played third base on the varsity baseball team, he had friends and girlfriends. The summer between his sophomore and junior years, he’d had sex with two girls-Gillian Bergey from his class, and a summer girl named Ashland. He’d told his dad about both girls. His dad asked if Theo had used a Trojan, and Theo said, Of course. (Though a couple of times with the summer girl he’d forgotten, but she’d sent him three perfumed letters the following fall, and there was no mention of any problem.) His dad had said, “Sex is healthy and highly enjoyable, but I always want you to be smart. And considerate. Do you hear me?”
Theo had known Antoinette his entire life, but she didn’t enter his life until the April evening when he bumped into her at the Islander Liquor Store.
Nearly every night after baseball practice, Theo shuttled his teammates Brett and Aaron (catcher and left field) to the Islander to get Cokes and chips and Slim Jims, and Theo-the only one of them who was eighteen-bought scratch tickets and a tin of Skoal for Brett, who was addicted to the stuff. They sat on the curb outside the store and opened the Cokes and the bags of Doritos and pork rinds, they scratched the silver film off their scratch tickets with quarters, and when nobody won anything, they flipped the tickets into the trash bin near the front door. Theo was well-deserving of this hour and its pleasures: the hot shower in the locker room, the blaring radio in his Jeep, the soda, the chips, the cold curb under his rump as he turned his baseball hat backwards and shot the breeze with his friends.
The night Theo saw Antoinette, he gnawed a Slim Jim, and Brett spat nasty brown loogies into the parking lot. Aaron talked about his job that upcoming summer as a beach boy at the Cliffside Beach Club and how he would date all the hot nannies.
“Nanny,” Theo said. “There’s something twisted about that word, man. It’s like something you would call your grandmother.”
“I call my grandmother Gramma,” Aaron said.
“I call my grandmother Mimi,” Brett said.
“What about Granny?” Theo said. “Rhymes with nanny.”
“You know, the foreign chicks aren’t technically nannies,” Aaron said. “They’re au pairs.”