store, a rush of elation. ‘Too easy,’ she said aloud to the empty street, her skirt whispering against the sidewalk, already gone hot and sullen in the rise of spring, her sandals so worn that she could feel the insistent warmth against her heels. The pleasure of the forbidden lasted until she had made it back to the house, ramshackle and dark, where she was staying, a few people crashed on the broken furniture in the living room, sleeping off last night’s excess. She yanked open the box, tossing the instructions in the direction of the trash can, and did the deed. Huddled on the toilet in the bathroom, tile cracked and shredding beneath her feet, staring at the pink line, pale as fading newsprint, her conscience caught up with her.
‘It doesn’t get much lower than this, old Cordy, old sock,’ she could hear Bean telling her cheerfully.
‘How are you going to take care of a baby if you can’t even afford a pregnancy test?’ Rose harped.
Cordy brushed our imaginary voices aside and buried the evidence in the trash can. It didn’t make a difference, really, she told herself. She’d been headed home anyway, wandering a circuitous loop, going where the wind or the next ride took her. This just confirmed what she’d already known – that after seven years of floating like a dandelion seed, it was time to settle down.
Settle down. She shuddered.
Those words were a bell ringing inside her. That was, after all, why she’d left. Just before exams in the spring of her junior year at Barnwell College, she’d been in the study lounge in the psychology department, lying on the industrial carpet, her arms locked as she held a textbook above her face. Two women, seniors, were talking nearby – one of them was getting married, the other going to graduate school. Cordy lowered the book to her chest, its weight pressing harder and harder against her heart as she listened to the litany of What Was to Come. Wedding favours and student loans. Mortgages and health insurance. Careers and taxes. Unable to breathe, she shoved the book onto the floor and walked out of the lounge. If that was the future, she wanted no part of it.
It was our fault, probably, the way we’d always babied her. Or maybe it was our father’s fault – Cordelia had always been his favourite. He’d never said no to her, not to her breathless baby cries, not to her childhood entreaties for ballet lessons (dropped before they got to fourth position, though she did wear the tutu for an awful long time after that, so it wasn’t a total waste), and not to the desperate late-night calls for cash infusions in the years she’d spent drifting around the country, accomplishing nothing in particular. She was the Cordelia to his Lear, legendary in her devotion. He always lov’d our sister most. But whoever’s fault it was, Cordy had thus far refused to grow up, and we’d indulged that in the same way we’d indulged every other whim she’d had for nearly her entire life. After all, we could hardly blame her. We were fairly certain that if anyone made public the various and variegated ways in which being an adult sucked eggs, more people might opt out entirely.
But now? Growing up didn’t seem so much like a choice any more. Cordy fumbled around through one of the bedrooms until she found a calendar, counting backwards. It was almost June now, she was fairly certain. And she’d left Oregon, the last stop on that long, strange trip, in, what, February? She rubbed her knuckles on her forehead, thinking. It had been so long since things like dates mattered.
But she could trace the journey back, before she’d started feeling so empty and nauseated in the mornings, before her breasts had grown tender enough that even the material of a T-shirt seemed like it was scraping against her skin, before the endless fatigue that swept over her at the strangest times, before she’d known. Washington, California, Arizona. Her period had come in Arizona; she dimly remembered a tussle with a recalcitrant tampon dispenser in a rest stop bathroom. And then she’d gone to New Mexico, where there’d been a painter, much older, his hair painted with shocking strands of white, his skin wrinkled from the sun, his hands broad and callused. She’d paused there for a few weeks, waitressing a handful of shifts to make money for the rest of the trip home, not that it had lasted. He’d come into the restaurant to eat, all by himself, and it had been so late, and his eyes were so lonely. For a week she’d stayed with him, spending the days curled on a couch in his studio, reading and staring out over the arroyos while he painted in silence: strange, contorted swirls of colour that dripped off the canvases onto the floor. But he’d been gentle, and blessedly quiet, and after so much Sturm und Drang, she’d nearly been sad to leave. The last night, there’d been a broken condom, a hushed argument, dark dreams, and the next morning she had been gone.
Slumping on the bed, Cordy let the calendar fall from her hands. What was she supposed to do now? Go back to New Mexico and tell the painter? She doubted he’d be excited to hear the news. She wasn’t exactly thrilled herself. Maybe she’d have a miscarriage. Heroines in novels were always having serendipitously timed miscarriages that saved them from having to make sticky decisions. And Cordy had always been awfully lucky.
Until now.
Cordy stepped over the piles of dirty clothes on the floor and back into the hallway. The crashers in the living room were still snoring as she tiptoed through to the kitchen, where she’d left her backpack. She’d lived here one winter – it seemed like years ago, but it couldn’t have been that long, since this was the address the letters had come to. Had it been years ago? Had it really been years since she had been in one place long enough to have an address?
Gritting her teeth, Cordy began shoving things into the bag. She didn’t know what to do. But that was okay. Someone would figure this out for her. Someone would take care of her. Someone always took care of her.
No problem.
Bean absolutely and positively did not believe in anything even vaguely paranormal. But for the past week or so, she’d had the strangest feeling that something bad was coming. She woke up in the morning with a hard pit in her stomach, as though she’d swallowed something malignant, growing, and the weight stayed with her all day, making her heels clack more sharply on the subway steps, her body ache after only a few minutes of running on the treadmill, jewel-toned cocktails simmer in her stomach until she left them in their glasses to sweat into water on the mahogany bars of the city’s trendiest watering holes.
Nothing in her bag of tricks made the feeling go away – not seducing a hapless investment banker over the din of a club, not a punishing spin class that left her so rubbery and tired that she vomited into the toilet at the gym, not a new pair of shoes that cost as much as the rent she paid for her tiny closet of a bedroom in a shared apartment in Manhattan. As a matter of fact, that last one made the rock inside her turn into steel.
When the moment she had been dreading finally came, the managing partner of the law firm she worked at arriving at her desk and asking to see her in his office, it was almost a relief. ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’ she quoted to herself, following his wizened steps into his office.
‘Have a seat, Bianca,’ he said.
In New York, everyone called her Bianca. Men, upon asking for her number in a terminally hip watering hole, would have to ask her to repeat it, and then, upon comprehension, would smile. Something about the name – and, honestly, few of them had the synapses to rub together at that point in the evening to make any sort of literary connections, so it must have been something else – made her even more attractive to them.
To us, however, she would always be Bean. And it was still the way she spoke to herself. ‘Nice going, Bean,’ she would say when she dropped something, and her roommates in the city would look at her curiously. But being Bianca was a part she played well, and she wondered if part of the sickness she felt inside was knowing that performance was coming to an end. Forever.
She perched on the edge of one of the leather wing chairs in his sitting area. He sat in the other. ‘We’ve been doing a bit of an accounting audit, you see,’ he said without preamble.
Bean stared at him. The pit inside her stomach was turning into fire. She stared at him, his beetled, bushy eyebrows, his soft, wrinkled hands, and wanted to cry.
‘We’ve found a number of . . . shall we say, anomalies in the payroll records. In your favour.