A Little Help from Above (22 page)

Shelby vowed never again to speak ill of the flu. At least the flu eventually went away, unlike morning sickness, which continued day and night. And although Lauren was at her side feeding her saltines and stroking her hair, it was to no avail. Suffering would be Shelby’s exclusive domain, as long as life was growing inside her.

Lauren was secretly relieved Shelby was having such a rough time. All her experienced friends said the worse the morning sickness, the healthier the baby. She had no idea if there was any medical merit to their findings, she was just happy to hear it was a good sign. But the other reason she wasn’t bothered was that Shelby was too nauseous to attend Dr. Weiner’s funeral.

In fact for the first several weeks after the home pregnancy test confirmed the news, Shelby didn’t go much of anywhere. She’d lie by the pool while Pucci and Maria doted on her. Occasionally she’d venture upstairs to the office to do some work, but her attention span was limited owing to the fact she was frequently interrupted by waves of nausea.

When Dr. Kessler insisted on examining Shelby to confirm either a pregnancy, or a virus, she didn’t argue until she learned he couldn’t make a definitive diagnosis without first drawing a small amount of blood. Fortunately she passed out after he got his sample.

Eventually the nausea subsided, and Shelby returned to her writing assignments. Or at least the DES piece, as the wedding article was now a huge bore, what with so many brides and grooms confessing they’d married for many reasons, with love being at the bottom of the list.

Conversely, the DES story continued to fascinate her, mainly because three generations of victims had inundated her with case histories, medical records, legal briefs, insurance claims, government reports and a wealth of other source material unlike anything she’d ever seen.

After poring over the documents night after night, it truly puzzled Shelby that none of the network news magazines had jumped on the story. Lord knows if the world’s largest drug companies had marketed a pill to five million people that resulted in deformed limbs, the condemnation and demands for retribution would be relentless. But as a silent and invisible tragedy, one that was perceived as old news, it was growing increasingly difficult for DES to cause a stir.

And, too, Shelby sensed that without benefit of a three-hankie, made-for-TV weeper, or a celebrity victim/spokesperson, this cause was nowhere on the sympathy radar screen. So it came as no surprise when even Ian indicated he was growing out of love with the story.

“Must we dwell so much on the negatives?” he asked upon beckoning her into his office one afternoon. “Surely there must be a happy ending now and again?”

“Get real!” Shelby threw down the reporter’s gauntlet. “I can’t even find one lousy happy ending for the stupid wedding story, and that was supposed to have nothing but happy endings.

“Besides, what sort of happy ending did you have in mind for young women whose patience, courage, and faith are put to the test every day? Whose reproductive systems are permanently deformed? Who live in fear of getting breast cancer, knowing that after forty, their risk is 2.5 times higher than non-exposed women? Who worry about other forms of cancer, early menopause, hormone replacement therapy, the ill effects of DES on their sons and grandsons…”

“Yes, yes.” Ian juggled rubber balls. “I read through all your research, exhaustive as it was, but I must share with you this little teensy weensy problem I’m having.”

“What?” Shelby stood with hands on hips. “Not enough deaths to satisfy the Gladiators who double as our readers?”

“No, it’s just, how shall I put this? Where’s the scandalous aspect? Who are we indicting exactly? Can’t we at least out a celebrity or two who have been keeping this terrible secret under their gynecologists’ rug?”

Shelby’s jaw dropped. “Are you suggesting the story isn’t newsworthy enough for you unless I uncover a star’s DES exposure?”

“Ah. There you go.” Ian clapped. “Smart as a whip, as usual.”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying,” she cried. “You’re not going to run this unless I dumb it down to the category of a Hollywood sob story, are you?”

“Let’s just say in its current form, the piece is such a downer it reads like a Brontë sisters reunion. Perhaps you’re just too close to the facts.”

“Damn right I’m too close. If it wasn’t for DES, I wouldn’t be pregnant right now.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ian dropped the balls. “Did you say pregnant, as in, with child?”

“Ah. There you go,” Shelby clapped. “Smart as a whip, as usual.”

“Really,” Ian stroked his chin. “And who’s the lucky papa?”

“Remember Avi?”

“Your brother-in-law?”

“Bingo!”

“Why, Shelby.” Ian found the news titillating. “You naughty girl. And you accuse me of being depraved? Does your sister know?”

“Of course she knows.” Shelby winked. “She was there!”

The ashen look on Ian’s face kept Shelby afloat the rest of the day. Then again, although she was loath to admit it, there might be some validity to his criticism. The tone in her draft copy was both ominous and heavy-handed, unlike the brash writing that was the paper’s signature style. Maybe tonight she would review her notes to see how the copy could be spiced up, Informer style.

In the meantime, she would force herself to go back to work on Ian’s pet project, just in case she needed a bargaining chip. No way was he getting his little wedding piece if he killed her DES story, as it was turning into the finest investigative report of her career. If she did say so herself.

Later that day, Shelby peeked over her cubicle. “What do you make of this, Warner?” She handed him a stack of old New York Times wedding announcements. “I’m working on a piece about couples who got married on the same weekend ten years ago, and of the eight couples I’ve tracked down so far, only one is still together. Any
chance there was some sort of full moon thing going on that made all this wedded bliss blow up like a shaken can of Coke?”

Warner pushed his glasses up his nose to study the clippings. “The naysayers always make the best students,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m saying it’s always people like you who jump up and down that there’s no validity to astrology, then become my prize pupils. So in answer to your question, yes, you could be correct in assuming there was some sort of planetary configuration that caused those marriages to be doomed from the start. But I’d have to look it up in my ephemeris to be sure.”

“Your what?”

“An ephemeris. It’s a special book showing precisely where each planet was at noon and midnight, relative to the others, for every day of the year, according to Greenwich Mean Time.”

“Ha! I’ll tell you about Greenwich Mean Time.” Shelby laughed. “That’s when the snooty town fathers of Greenwich, Connecticut, close their borders to the riffraff from the Bronx so they can’t drive over to buy their Powerball lottery tickets.”

“You Capricorns are such a riot.” Warner hee-hawed, then regained his dignity. “But tell me. What do you know about these couples? Do they seem to have any common bonds?”

“You mean aside from the fact that as kids, even their piggy banks had vice presidents?”

“No, silly. What busted their marriages? Was it cheating, alcohol, cross-dressing, all of the above perhaps?”

“Let me think.” Shelby took the clippings back. “Well, in the case of Leigh Seton McDonnell, who wed Henry Preston Jennings, I interviewed Mrs. Jennings, and she talked a lot about the difficulty her husband faced as a third-generation lawyer at the prestigious firm his grandfather founded. Oh, and something about his fetish for baby-sitters.

“Then in the case of Elizabeth Drake Brown and Douglas Colin Wigglesworth…”

“Wigglesworth?” Warner snorted. “Where do they get these ridiculous-sounding names?”

“On the Mayflower, of course. Who wants Higginbottom?” she yelled. “Who wants Drinkwater? Anyway, in their case, according to the husband, things got off to a rocky start because his wife never got
over her first fiancé, a Mr. James Woodrow Easterbrook. Apparently while good old Doug was slaving away at his trading desk down on Wall Street, Mrs. Wigglesworth was getting her wiggles’ worth at the Plaza Hotel. He said the marriage broke up before their third anniversary, when his wife announced she was carrying Mr. Easterbrook’s child.”

“I’d have to check, but it could have been a void-of-course moon.” Warner sighed.

“Never heard of it.” Shelby stretched. “Is it like a full moon? Crime jumps, pregnant women go into labor? That sort of thing?”

“No, but you get an ‘A’ for being so abso-fucking-lutely close. A void-of-course is a much rarer planetary occurrence. It’s when the moon is in conjunction with Venus retrograde.”

“In English, please?”

“Let’s just say it would be a fairly crappy time to get married.”

“Why?”

“Because Venus is the planet ruling love, trust, and relationships, and during a void-of-course, it loses most of its positive energy. It would be like trying to launch a hot-air balloon without the gas. Much as you want to fly, you can forget about the liftoff.”

“And you think it’s possible that on May 25, 1988, the moon was void-of-whatever?”

“Warner is not a betting man. But if what you say is true, that every couple you’ve interviewed so far has a rocky marriage, then yes, I’d be willing to put my money on it.”

“Would you be a sweetheart and check for me?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure. When do you need to know?”

“By the end of the week. I’m driving up to Chappaqua on Saturday to interview the M.J. McCreighs, the only anniversary couple I’ve found so far who hasn’t split up.”

“Aye, aye, Captain Shelby,” he saluted. “Oh, how I love converts.”

Shelby studied the directions Mrs. McCreigh gave her, checked her cell phone to make sure it was fully charged and took a deep breath. It was a splendid day for a drive to beautiful Westchester County, and she was actually feeling strong. Although she was somewhat bewildered to be experiencing hot flashes at the same time she
was experiencing nausea. What if she turned out to be the first pregnant woman to experience signs of menopause?

At least she was getting away from her near-claustrophobic life at home, where well meaning people were constantly hovering, as if one wrong move on her part might end the whole damn fairy tale. But when Lauren insisted she drive Shelby to her appointment, Shelby put her foot down. “Lay off, okay? I’m pregnant, not a cripple.”

“Fine. I was just trying to be helpful.” Lauren shrugged. “Anyway, Avi and I are going house hunting today. There’s a three-bedroom colonial in Roslyn that sounds perfect for us.”

“Good,” Shelby said. “Spend some time with your husband for a change. I need the break.”

So when her cell phone rang, just as she was heading onto the Whitestone Bridge, she jumped. She hadn’t intended to receive calls, only to make them if she got lost. As she fumbled to reach for the phone, she hoped it wasn’t the McCreighs calling to cancel on her.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” the shaky voice cried.

It was déjà vu all over again. “Lauren?” Of course it was Lauren.

“He did it. He really did it. I can’t believe he did it.”

“Who, what, where…” Shelby repeated her old mantra.

“Avi. He left us. He left for Israel, the son of a bitch.”

“What?” Shelby swerved into the right lane, lucky to apply the brakes before crashing into the fence that separated the bridge from Flushing Bay.

“He just called me from the airport,” Lauren sobbed. “He told me he had one run to do this morning, and then he’d pick me up so we could go meet that realtor. But it was a lie…”

Shelby’s head spun. She couldn’t drive while under the influence of hysteria, as confirmed by the driver behind her who furiously waved his middle finger at her. But there was no place to pull over, and no way to get Lauren to stop talking.

“Things haven’t been great. You were right. But I never thought he’d pick up and leave. What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean we?” Shelby tried to steer while holding the phone in the cradle of her neck. “He’d didn’t leave me, he left you.”

“No, he left both of us, Shel. You’re carrying his child.”

“So what?” Shelby shouted over traffic. “We had a deal, remember? This Bud’s for you.”

“I know. I know,” Lauren whimpered. “Where are you?”

“The Whitestone Bridge.”

“Are you serious? Be careful. You could have an accident!”

“The odds are good,” Shelby looked in her rearview mirror to see if the hostile man behind her was still on her tail. Fortunately, he was busy picking his nose. “Hold on. Traffic is slowing down. We’re getting close to the bridge.”

Shelby scrambled for change in the ashtray, then tried focusing on Lauren, all the while trying to avoid ramming into the limo in front of her. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

Lauren tried to control her sobbing. “He…We found out yesterday…Oh, my God. You’re going to kill me.”

“What?” Shelby screamed. “I can’t hear you that great.”

“He said he couldn’t go through with it,” she shouted. “That the whole thing was too crazy.”

“But he was the one who came up with the idea in the first place.”

“Yes, but that was before…that was before we knew…Dr. Kessler’s office called yesterday. They got your test results back.”

“Oh my God. Is there a problem?” Shelby started to feel light headed. “Are we talking Down’s syndrome? Missing fingers and toes?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, okay then. What could be so terrible?”

“Um…you see…they think it’s more than one,” Lauren blurted.

“Come again,” Shelby screamed. “Did you say more than one?”

“Yes.” Lauren started to bawl.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Shelby slammed on the brakes, screeching so loud the sound probably reverberated for miles. Miraculously, the alert driver behind her avoided a collision.

Shelby put on her flashers, causing drivers to have to merge into one lane. As they honked and cursed, she heard Lauren say something about two fetal sacs showing up in the sonogram.