Antonia averted her eyes. She was ridiculously emotional and hormonal. “But what if I am a terrible mother?”
Scott came around the table to sit beside her. “You won’t be. All you have to do is be you.”
“Are you sure about that?” Antonia asked her dear friend, the father of her child, who had always been honest to a fault.
“I’m sure,” Scott told her before he called the waiter over.
Antonia waited for the stinger, a funny one liner that added the punch line Not really, definitely don’t be you, but there was none. Scott was sure of her, and sometimes that sort of faith was all a person needed. Looking back on it, she blamed Scott for her night with Ariel. Or perhaps it was the wretched day she’d had. She’d visited Gideon, then had joined her neurology class to observe a girl who had been struck by a car while riding her bicycle. Antonia had nearly been provoked to tears, totally inappropriate for a medical student and utterly out of character for someone as stoic as she. Afterward she’d phoned Ariel without thinking it out. She must have sounded desperate, for when she arrived home Ariel was sitting on the floor beside her door reading The Borrowers. “What can I say?” Ariel was sheepish, her glossy hair falling into her eyes. “I like kids’ books.”
“That’s convenient because I happen to be pregnant.” Embarrassingly huge, actually, and not feeling the least bit attractive.
“I noticed. Maybe that’s why you’re so beautiful.”
The rest had just happened, and the truth was, Antonia had wanted it to. They were entwined before she had unlocked the front door. With every kiss she forgot the despair of her afternoon, the sound of the ventilator, the whiteness of the girl’s eyes, the chart the doctor on call had passed around to the students. Antonia was logical above all else, but now her insistence on rational thoughts and action seemed absurd. The girl in the hospital had been struck out of the blue, if she had left her house ten minutes later or ten minutes earlier the accident wouldn’t have happened. Walking through the corridors of the hospital, Antonia had been overwhelmed with what she thought was anger, but what she was actually experiencing was an intense desire to be alive. She had been alive with Ariel Hardy. There was no way to deny it.
In her dream, she had been walking through tall grass with Aunt Jet, who was young, no older than Antonia herself. Antonia looked down and realized she was wearing a white dress trimmed with lace. Jet was in a white slip, wearing red boots.
How do we find Kylie? Antonia asked her aunt.
The same way we lost her. With the book, Jet said.
Jet signaled for her to approach, intending to tell her niece a secret that most young people weren’t privy to until it was too late. What you wind up regretting aren’t the things you do, it’s what you don’t do that you will never forgive yourself for.
“Bad dream?” Ariel asked when Antonia awoke with a start, having slept till nearly nine. As it turned out, Ariel had a habit of waking at five thirty a.m., a practice begun in her law school days when there was never enough time to study, but she’d stayed in bed so as not to wake Antonia. She still wasn’t wearing a stitch.
“Not exactly,” Antonia said. “I was talking to my aunt Jet.” And then she blurted, “I was wearing a wedding dress.”
Ariel tossed her head back and laughed. “Well, I guess last night was good.”
Ariel reminded Antonia of a lily as she stepped out of bed. There were dozens of water lilies in Leech Lake and Antonia had always wanted to leap in and swim among them, but she was forbidden. Evidently, there had been a near drowning sometime in the past in that very lake, and strange stories about a sea serpent. Antonia had gone so far as to concoct an experiment of her own, leaving out bread crumbs on the shore and setting up her camera so that it would take a photo if anything pecked at the bread and set off the string attached to the camera’s shutter button. All she’d come up with were a few blurry images of sparrows.