Mother Load (26 page)

When they reached the Big House, George and Martine ran out as if they had been watching at the window for their arrival. Her father made an elaborate fuss over Andy’s birthday, but he didn’t seem to mind when Andy ran past him so he could tell Jonah all about riding shotgun. He was already focused on snatching his namesake from his car seat.

Martine came around the van to retrieve Eleanor, leaving Anna and Lily with the task of hauling in both of the infant carriers, the diaper bag with the baby supplies, and a large shopping bag filled with Andy’s birthday presents.

Anna made a circuit of the van closing all the doors. “Have you noticed that no one even says hello to us anymore? It’s like we’re invisible.”

“It’s payback for how we treated Kim and Hal when Jonah was born. I think it comes with the territory.”

“Wonder if anyone would miss us if we just got back in the car and drove off. We could go back home and get in the hot tub…have our own little party.” She arched her eyebrows suggestively.

“Best offer I’ve had all day. Georgie would starve before we got back, though.”

“Need a hand?” Hal asked, arriving at the front door as they juggled their load.

Anna thrust the gift bag into his hands and told him to put it with the others. Then they wound through the house to the sunny patio and settled into side-by-side chaise lounges beneath an umbrella.

Andy had already stripped down to his swim trunks and jumped into the pool with Jonah. Kim stood in waist-deep water swirling a delighted Alice back and forth in a small inflatable raft. Hal burst from the kitchen to do a cannonball into the deep end where the boys played.

“I almost feel disembodied from my own life,” Anna said, nodding toward her father, who was sitting beneath the covered patio with a sleeping George.

“And look at that,” Lily said, gesturing to Martine, who was parading Eleanor through her garden to inspect the colorful flowers. “I’m not even sure they know we’re here.”

“Dad was telling me last week that they had talked about selling the house once he retired for good. They were thinking of downsizing into one of those luxury condos on Wilshire and buying something up in Tahoe too. I said that would be nice, that we could come up a couple of times a year and hang out. Next day he said never mind. I think he and Mom would go nuts if we didn’t come over here at least twice a month.”

“If you ask me, that’s only going to get more intense as the children get older. I guess we could always gather at our house, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

“Remember the first time you came here?”

Lily chortled. “When your homophobic father insulted me? How could I forget?”

“You won him over though. He loves you like a daughter now.”

“I know.” And Anna knew she loved him like a father, whether she admitted it or not. “You know what I also remember? That weekend we brought Mom over here to meet the family.”

Anna nodded. “She walked through the garden with my mother just like her granddaughter is doing right now.”

They looked at each other with sudden tears at the poignant reflection.

“That was just four days before she died,” Lily said sadly. “You really honored her by giving our daughter that name…and you honored me too.”

“I never seriously considered anything else. But George? That one blew me away.”

“What can I say? I was still under general anesthesia.”

Birthday cake and presents followed the pool party, and by the time they called it a day, even Jonah was exhausted. Before they left, Anna took one last look around the patio. Every summer at the Big House seemed to bring momentous change…Lily, Jonah, then Alice and Andy. And now George and Eleanor. As a family they had known phenomenal joy and devastating loss. She couldn’t bring herself to think about loss again, not after the scary episodes they had gone through with George. She preferred to dream about the happier times, looking ahead to the day she would sit with her father in the shade while Lily paraded her grandchildren through the garden.

*

The table lamp cast a soft glow in the alcove by the front window of the master suite creating the perfect ambience for winding down at the end of the day…and winding down Eleanor and George. Anna had rearranged the master bedroom to accommodate not only the two cribs but also the reclining rockers from the other bedroom. She had argued it was easier to cram everything in one room, especially since Eleanor had a tendency to wake up as they were walking back across the hall to her crib.

Lily liked how this new arrangement gave them a couple of hours to relax together every night. In the old days they would lounge on the couch in the family room and watch TV after putting Andy to bed. Now they sat and talked about their day, trading off one baby for another as Lily nursed them both. George in particular enjoyed being rocked, while Eleanor seemed to prefer being jostled gently as she was carried around the room. TV with sound was a thing of the past, but that didn’t cut into Anna watching Dodgers games.

As Anna rocked George, Lily tried to persuade Eleanor to take her breast. “It’s funny how she prefers the bottle sometimes. I think she has trouble seeing everything when she’s pressed against me. She doesn’t mind it so much when she’s ready to go to sleep though.”

“I’ll feed her if you want, and you can nurse this one.”

Eleanor suddenly seized the nipple and began to nurse. “There she goes. Let’s see how long this lasts.”

“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Anna said as she set George into his crib.

“I felt the same way whenever Kim would nurse her babies. Except hers always loved it. Eleanor’s fussy about it sometimes.”

“Not this little guy, though.” She tickled his tummy and he waved his arms. “He doesn’t care where his food comes from.”

Lily snickered. “As long as you keep it coming.”

“Didn’t you love that look on Kim’s face when you told her both of them slept from midnight till five?”

“I don’t think she believed us. I’m just glad you’re getting enough sleep again. You were dragging around here like you’d run a marathon.”

“It’s easier now that school’s out because I can sleep in till seven. That extra hour in the morning was a godsend.”

Eleanor fussed and turned her face away from Lily’s breast.

“I think she’s done already.”

Anna scooped her daughter onto her shoulder and began to pat her back.

“She has the sweetest disposition,” Lily said.

“I know. She doesn’t mind who’s holding her as long as their feet are moving.”

Eleanor’s wide brown eyes took in every detail, and she seemed especially fixated on things that were red. Anna had come up with the bright idea of strategically placing interesting objects—stuffed toys, pictures and trinkets—at shoulder level throughout the room. Eleanor never tired of the circuit.

Lily picked up George from his crib and with hardly any coaxing at all brought him to her breast. “Sylvie couldn’t believe Georgie was six and a half pounds already. I told her he ate nonstop. At this rate he’ll pass Eleanor in another week or two.”

Eleanor let out a burp then dribbled onto the towel on Anna’s shoulder. “It’s amazing how he’s taken off all of a sudden. You can’t look at him now and tell he had any problems whatsoever.”

“Sylvie always said once his lungs developed he would be out of the danger zone. I guess I expected him to be kind of…not really puny, just sort of picky or take it or leave it about eating. Instead he eats like a teenager.”

“Seven weeks…I don’t know how we kept from going crazy, especially that night his heart rate shot up and Sylvie put him on the ventilator. That scared the crap out of me.”

“You?” Lily could still picture Anna’s stalwart expression as Sylvie walked them through the risks. “If that was scared, I must have been petrified. And I would have been a whole lot worse if you hadn’t been so calm and confident about everything. You’re the only thing that kept me sane.”

Holding Eleanor firmly against her shoulder, Anna bent down to kiss the top of Lily’s head. “Trust me, all was not as it seemed. I was scared out of my mind, just like you were.”

“No way. You don’t get rattled. You just buck up.”

“Not always. Sometimes I melt down, like the day we came to pick you up in the new minivan. That was the night after Georgie had to go on the ventilator. I nearly took Andy’s head off in my office because he dared to touch one of my ledgers. That’s why you got a new car, by the way—not because I agreed with you, but because I had to make up with Andy.”

“Anna Kaklis, you are full of it.”

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

“Are you telling me you were just as worried as I was this whole time?”

“Maybe more. But seeing you upset made it even worse for me, so once I saw how much calmer you were if I acted less worried, I figured it was better for both of us.”

Lily didn’t know how she felt about that. On the one hand, she actually had endured the ordeal better because of Anna’s confidence. She had been able to convince herself she was overreacting. On the other hand, she felt foolish now to realize she had been duped. “It was dishonest for you not to share how you really felt. We should have gone through it together.”

Anna gently laid a sleeping Eleanor in her crib, sat in her recliner and kicked off her shoes. “We went through it together, but neither of us needed to feel worse than we already did. I tried to stay positive because you needed that. And what I needed most was for you to be okay.”

“But that means you worried all by yourself. You were scared too but you didn’t come to me for support. How is that supposed to make me feel?” George seemed to pick up on her dismal tone and started to fuss. She shifted him to the other breast and drew a deep breath to still her unpleasant mood.

“You should feel like we’re partners. To me, that means we work together in a way that’s good for both of us. In this case I put what I thought you needed first. Don’t you do that for me sometimes?”

“Of course, but…” It still meant Anna had bottled up her feelings inside. “Who was there for you?”

“Andy, mostly. It was good that I spent more time with him because he ended up giving me extra attention too, whether he realized it or not. The more I reinforced how great it would be for him once his brother and sister got here, the more I was able to stay focused on that. I didn’t let myself think too much about everything in between.”

“And what else did you keep from me? Were you upset that I didn’t quit work sooner?”

Anna made a sheepish face. “Upset isn’t the right word. I was disappointed, but I got over it in Palm Springs that day you called me on it for not supporting you. You were right and I was wrong.”

“Yeah, except you were the one who was right. If I’d been home, that accident wouldn’t have happened.”

“It might not have happened on the Santa Monica Freeway, but it could have happened anywhere else, even if I had been behind the wheel. What really matters is we’re home now and we’re all safe. No need to second-guess anything.”

From the very beginning, it had been as easy as that, Lily realized. Anna wasn’t one to dwell on problems between them or punish her for their differences with something as immature as the silent treatment. That was Lily’s habit, and she vowed at that moment to put it behind her. “How did I ever get so lucky?”

“I ask myself the same thing. A part of me wants to rush ahead and dream what we’ll be like a year from now, or five years from now. I like to imagine that first day Andy comes to work at the dealership. I’ll be fifty years old by then, and all I can think is how happy we’ll be. But then I try to put it out of my head because I don’t want to miss a second of right now.”

George began to squirm and Lily handed him off to Anna and climbed into bed. “It’s funny…this time last year I was dreaming about a night like tonight, going to bed with our baby in the crib beside us. All of those fantasies pale next to reality.”

“My whole life is like that,” Anna said sweetly.

Lily closed her eyes and tried to quiet her thoughts, not an easy task with Anna tossing about such profound pronouncements. Her fantasies of Anna Kaklis had begun the day they reconnected after the earthquake, when her divorce had become final. There was Lily, dreaming the love of her life would be someone so beautiful, so kind and so charming. Anna was everything a fantasy was made of.

Then she discovered a reality that was far beyond those meager dreams. Never had she dared imagine Anna would come to cherish her in the same way, and that she—and now these three precious children—would be Anna’s fantasy fulfilled.

Anna’s recliner creaked and moments later the lamp clicked off. Her long nude body then slipped between the sheets and nestled next to her, a physical display of her happiness with their life.

Lily wriggled closer and opened her eyes, seeing Anna’s tranquil face in the glow of the tiny nightlight in the alcove. “Hey, Amazon…wake up and make love with me.”

“You’re late,” Lily said, looking up from the stove. She was barefoot, with baggy shorts that barely showed underneath one of Anna’s button-down shirts. Her blond hair hung into her eyes, evidence it had been too long since she had made time to get to the salon. She had her hands full at home with Eleanor and George, who at three years old, were too young for the preschool in Westwood.

“That’s because I stopped to pick up ice cream.”

Lily shook her head and sighed with resignation. One of her ongoing complaints was that she had never quite recovered her figure from when the twins were born. “Why do you torture me like this?”

“I’ve learned that torture—properly applied—makes you quite happy.” She dropped to a squat to catch Eleanor in a hug as she raced into the kitchen from the dining room, which was wall-to-wall toys. With gangly arms and legs and prominent cheekbones, her daughter looked more like her every day.

“Eleanor swam across the shallow end all by herself today.”

“That’s my girl!” Anna ignored Lily’s faux cranky mood and embraced her from behind, groaning as she saw what was in the pot. “Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”