She felt a hand on the back of her neck, and it was Vanny, gently rubbing the tense muscles. “You good?”
Bailey quickly swiped at her eyes. She had Vanny. He would help her. He would install the car seat and do all the light switches. She gave him a small smile. “I’m just feeling really sad about leaving this doll here.”
“See? I told you I picked a good one.” Vanny took Bailey’s bag and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, walking her out to the parking lot.
Budweiser Manor
Bailey had dreaded telling her parents she was pregnant, but they were bizarrely sanguine about the whole thing. They had watched Bailey’s sister Kylie marry a complete dirtbag, they had watched her other sister Madison spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments, so, Bailey supposed, there were worse things than watching Bailey have a free pregnancy in her thirties with a decent guy.
The truth was that Bailey came from a deeply cheesy family. Her father, Jay, was a beer distributor for Anheuser-Busch who drove up and down the state selling spirits to package stores and restaurants. In 1975 he met her mother at a party on Prides Beach and fell crazily in love. Clara was magnetic and beautiful, and Jay was a man on the rise, promoted to sales manager and leasing a shiny new Saab convertible. They married in a blowout ceremony at the Myopia Hunt Club, a cake the size of a Great Dane, hockey-puck steaks, and scalloped potatoes for two hundred.
He bought an old church on Heartbreak Road and converted it into a house. Until elementary school Bailey and her two sisters shared a room, but as Jay became more and more successful, promoted to a management position on the Budweiser account, then even higher up at Michelob, traveling three days a week to St. Louis, he poured his money into renovations. He built out a new kitchen with glossy marble countertops. He had a reflecting pool put in the center of the house beneath a skylight with a spiral staircase at the end. He and his architect designed an entire new wing, doubling the size of the place, princess bedrooms for each girl, a primary suite, and a playroom full of Barbies and dress-ups. Clara loved the house and obsessed over shelter magazines, training herself in the art of home decorating, hiring a glassblower to make them a custom chandelier for the foyer, scouring the shops in Boston for art and artifacts. Clara planted a garden and filled it with roses, all pink and white. They dug a pond back behind the house and made an island in the middle and bought two large mute swans that glided around their domain with an air of snooty serenity. Jay put in a hot tub on the deck, and a trampoline in the yard, and fenced it in with netting so Bailey and her sisters could jump and flip with abandon and never worry about concussing themselves off the side.
Their house was the one all the little girls flocked to, eager for playdates and sleepovers, and long afternoons in the massive playroom where the Barbies enacted grand soap operas with lots of fighting and sex. For Bailey’s tenth birthday her mother, now pronouncing her name “C-LAR-uh” like a Spaniard, invited every girl in her class to ride in a pair of rented limos to the movie theater, where she gave them each a crisp twenty to buy whatever candy they wished, then whisked them back to the house for ice-cream sundaes under fairy lights in the garden. In high school, through her newly sophisticated teenage lens, Bailey saw how her family was over the top and tacky. She named her house“Budweiser Manor” and rolled her eyes at the fifteen-foot Christmas tree decorated entirely with glass angels, the massive sexed-out bathroom with two showerheads, the fussy gauze canopies over each four-poster bed. She cringed at her sisters’ matching BMW SUVs, her mother’s weekly manicure appointment, her father’s “CEO glow” maintained year-round with trips to the tanning salon. Her family was nouveau riche, tacky as hell, the human equivalent of Diet Coke served in Waterford crystal.
Two years ago, Bailey’s parents had moved out of Budweiser Manor and into a retirement community. Her father wasn’t even retired, but when the golf club at Turner Hill built up their McMansions the developer struck a deal with the town to make it a community for residents over fifty, and Jay jumped at the chance to walk out his front door and onto the back nine. Bailey’s parents wanted to bring their swans to Turner Hill, but the bylaws of the community prohibited it. Their new house even had a little water feature, but the community board had said no. Canada geese and ducks splashed in the pond all day, but still swans remained banned.
“They let in all sorts of other waterfowl but not swans? That’s bird racist, that’s what it is,” Clara complained.
“You probably shouldn’t go around saying that to people,” Bailey had cautioned. But until Jay and Clara figured out how to get the swans into Turner Hill, Bailey had agreed to live in her childhood home with the swans. She gave up the lease on her little house on the river and returned to Heartbreak Road, the reluctant grand dame of Budweiser Manor.
Supportive as theywereabout the pregnancy, whenever Bailey talked to her parents about the baby’s name her mom became completely unhinged.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just give the baby Vanny’s last name,” her mother protested.
“Because it’s my baby, Mom,” Bailey explained for the millionth time.
“Honey, we just think that if you don’t give the baby Vanny’s last name he’s going to start to think you don’t want to get married,” her father tried.
“That is correct. I don’t want to get married.” Bailey really wasn’t sure how else to say it.
“You don’t know that, honey,” her mother pushed. “A lot can change when the baby arrives.”
They had this conversation about three times a week, everyone ignoring the fact that Van had a girlfriend, and they always reached an impasse. Of course, a lot would change when the baby arrived, and Bailey couldn’t pretend otherwise.
As best as she could guess, Bailey had gotten pregnant sometime after the holidays when instead of doing dry January, they all leaned in extra hard on chasing away the winter doldrums. They played Quarters and Flip Cup, Beirut and President. They woke up hungover and drank Bloody Marys, the vodka joining the alcohol already coursing through their systems. One night they made Mexican Manhattans and Fran fell asleep with her clothes on. The kids were off with their grandparents, so Bailey and Vanny had sex in London’s bed, a twin with Buzz Lightyear sheets, and Bailey felt appropriately guilty about it after. (She didn’t tell Fran, but she threw the sheets in the washing machine before she left.)
Then, in February, Bailey was half asleep when she felt a sharppinch. She assumed it was cramps, that she was getting her period early. The next day she had a spot in her underwear, but that was it, just a spot. A few weeks later, no real period in sight, Bailey called up Van with a problem. The swans who lived in her pond wouldn’t eat and Bailey was worried. She would normally call her parents, but Jay and Clara were in Florida playing golf, so Van came over on his way to work.
The swans were named Hissy and Prissy, and they were total assholes. They flapped their wings aggressively whenever you went near them, they chased away smaller ducks and birds who encroached on their spot, and they would try and bite you if you so much as went to refill their water bowl. Despite all that, Bailey had a real soft spot for them. They were both female swans, pens, bought specially from a breeder for five hundred bucks a pop, and although the breeder had guaranteed the gender, Bailey’s mother had wanted to make sure they didn’t end up with tiny cygnets, so she hired a vet to come out and authenticate it with DNA testing, since cobs and pens were hard to tell apart and instances of sexing mistakes were rampant. (Bailey always felt a pang when she heard the phrase “sexing mistakes” since she felt she had made some of her own.) Hissy and Prissy had pinioned wings, so they couldn’t fly away, and the whole thing made Bailey sort of sad. In an age where everyone knew you were supposed to adopt a dog from the shelter rather than buy a purebred, the idea that her mother had sourced these cantankerous mute swans just to live sexless, decorative lives felt wildly out of touch.
For years Bailey had watched her father take care of them. In the winter, when the pond froze over and there were no weeds or clumps of algae to eat, he moved the swans to the barn, where he covered the floor with hay, put on the small heaters, and brought them bowls ofdry food. When Bailey was around, she would tag along, sneaking them bits of her pancakes to share. The pens spent four long months under the heaters until, finally, on the first warm day in spring, Bailey’s father would open the barn door and let them back out to their thawing pond.
This year Bailey had done it all the same. When spring came and the ice on the pond turned to mud, Bailey opened the barn doors and Hissy and Prissy pushed past her as though they were breaking out of jail. They waddled across the grass squawking happily, splashing down past the reeds and spinning in dizzy circles on the water. They dipped their heads and yanked up weeds and declared their winter barn days over. But then, one Sunday, they moved up onto the little island to lay their eggs and just stayed there. Every morning while she drank her coffee Bailey had stomped down in her rubber boots to check on them. Every afternoon before she left the house she’d step out on the back deck and look again. It was weird, but they wouldn’t get back in the water. They just sat there on the little island, and Bailey had realized, with a jolt of horror, what that meant.
The pens lay eggs, clutches of six or ten. The eggs weren’t fertilized—the vet had proved they were both lady birds so there was no mating involved—and usually after a few days they felt something in the eggs that made them understand they weren’t going to hatch, and they moved on. Once in a while, though, they seemed convinced there were chicks inside. They would sit on the eggs waiting for them to hatch week after week. When this happened, the only way to save them was to take away their eggs. It was, hands down, the worst part of swan husbandry. You could wait a couple of weeks to see if they figured it out on their own, but if you waited too long the pens would die, starving to death as they protected their hopeless eggs.
It made Bailey miserable to think about. Even though Hissy and Prissy were assholes by nature, she felt she had developed a good relationship with them. They knew she brought them food and they no longer raised their wings angrily or snorted as long as she kept her distance. In the past her father had taken the eggs, wearing heavy gloves to protect himself from bites and scratches, but he wouldn’t be back in time.
When Vanny rattled up in his Subaru Outback and pulled a lacrosse helmet and gloves out of the trunk, Bailey felt like she was watching Indiana Jones arrive with his whip.
Together Bailey and Vanny performed the terrible task, wading out to the island, Bailey menacing the pens with a long broom, pushing them off the nest with the sharp bristles, Vanny darting in to snatch up the eggs as the swans flapped and screeched their furious cries. It was awful and frightening, and when it was over Vanny came into the kitchen and collapsed on a chair, examining the long scratch on his arm, which was either from Hissy’s claw or a swipe of Bailey’s broom.
“Well, I’m traumatized,” Vanny said, pushing his long hair out of his eyes and balancing one socked foot across his knee. Bailey always thought he looked like he was stretching himself out for a nap. She made him a coffee in a go-cup, and when he left, she waved to him from the door feeling something she couldn’t quite name. As he drove away, Bailey realized what it was. She googled “implantation bleeding,” and everything went sideways. The spot in her underwear. The pinch in the night. It was an egg, fertilized, nestling into the lining of her uterus.
Three
Augusta