“You wouldn’t be.”
“This isn’t a crush for me, Van. This isn’t infatuation. What you and I have is real to me.”
“This week has been terrible. I thought I had ruined everything.” Van looked anguished.
“So you want to try to make this work?” she asked.
“Yes.” Van took her hand in his. “Please don’t break up with me.”
“Okay.” Caroline pulled Van’s arms around her. And so it was decided. Caroline and Van would muddle through this awkward and messy thing, they would fall fully and completely in love, they would meet this new baby, and they would make a new kind of family. It wouldn’t end in tears, Caroline repeated to herself, because Van said it didn’t have to.
Two
Bailey
Honorable Discharge
Bailey Newmarch was pregnant, and it was all anyone could talk about. They asked her how many weeks along she was, they asked her if it was a boy or a girl, they even asked if they could touch her belly, which was especially invasive since she was barely showing, and it would mostly just feel like touching another adult’s stomach. But somehow they couldn’t quite make themselves ask her the thing they most wanted to know, which was how Bailey, at the age of thirty-four, could find herself pregnant by another woman’s boyfriend.
It was a disaster, honestly, but more like global warming and rising tides—a disaster that had been years in the making and shouldn’t have been quite so surprising to everyone. Bailey had been sleeping with Vanny Whittaker since they were in high school. They had sex in the back of cars; in vacant hotel rooms in Rockport, where Bailey’s sister worked in reception; once even in the janitor’s closet at school. They’d dated other people in college, but both moved back home in their twenties and picked up right where they left off, friends who foundthemselves at the same parties, friends who occasionally ended up in the same bed, then friends who, apparently, mixed their DNA to create a human.
“When I waspregnantpeople said the weirdest stuff to me,” Augusta told Bailey, cracking open a pistachio and dropping the shells onto her towel. They were sitting on Pavilion Beach watching Fran’s and Augusta’s children torture hermit crabs by collecting them in buckets and making them fight, screaming with joy and then abandoning the tiny creatures to die in the hot sun. “My mother-in-law kept asking me if I was constipated. This is a woman who closes the bathroom door to blow her nose and suddenly she wants to talk about my gastrointestinal issues.”
“RJ’s father told me that if I had a C-section I should make sure to collect some vaginal discharge and put it on the baby’s head to give him some microbes,” said Fran, making a horrified face.
Bailey pretended to throw up. “That should be illegal. Men should never use the word ‘discharge.’ ”
“Unless they are talking about getting fired from the military.”
“Or shooting a gun.”
“Or a battery that is out of power.”
“Hunh,” Bailey reflected. “I guess there are exceptions. But still, RJ’s dad was way out of line, Fran.”
“Word.” Fran shook her head with disgust.
Awkward as theentire situation was, Bailey was pretty sure Vanny was in love with her, and that if she told him she wanted to get married he’d drop everything and buy her a ring. But as much as Bailey likedhim, as much as she believed he was handsome and fun and always reciprocated oral, he was also…Vanny. He was just so entirely transparent and knowable. While Bailey had dated guys who were dark and mysterious, exciting and strange, Vanny was anything but. She’d known him since she was eleven years old, and in that entire time, he had never smoked a cigarette because his dad had promised him a thousand dollars on his eighteenth birthday if he never did. All their friends thought that was the best deal ever, but also, they wondered, couldn’t he just smoke and lie about it? He had four sweaters from J.Crew back then: a red, a gray, a green, and a striped, and he wore them in such a predictable rotation that Bailey knew even before seeing him on the path between the parking lot and the school each morning which one he’d be wearing. How could you ever really fall in love with a guy like that? You just couldn’t.
Bailey had met Vanny’s girlfriend a few times. She seemed fine—in a probably-never-shaved-above-her-knees kind of way. She was a little younger than them, not even thirty, and she was always trying to recommend podcasts nobody had heard of. She had light-brown hair, parted down the middle, the porcelain skin and rosebud lips of a Victorian doll, and when she parked her car at Vanny’s mom’s she ran over a rhododendron and didn’t even notice, but it wasn’t really any of Bailey’s business.
Fran’s son hadpulled downhis swimsuit and was peeing into the ocean, his sweet little bum white as pizza dough. “London, pull up your pants!” Fran yelled, and he turned around and grinned proudly before yanking up his shorts and sprinting off down the beach to the rocks. “I swear to God, when school starts in the fall he’s going to go outside and pee in the soccer field. I’ve never met a human who lovedgoing alfresco as much as this child.” She shook her head and popped open a can of wine, pouring half into a cup and offering it to Bailey, who waved it off.
“Just for one day I’d like to know what it was like to pee outside as a guy,” mused Bailey.
“I’d trade bodies with Colin for a day.” Augusta nodded, accepting the wine. “Just to see what it was like. And then I’d make him have my body and he could feel how he ruined it with our children.”
“Right? I’d have to warn RJ about crossing his legs before he sneezes, about never running without a sports bra,” said Fran.
“But don’t you worry they’d get it all wrong?” asked Bailey. “Like, they wouldn’t use any moisturizer, they’d probably leave on a wet bathing suit all day or forget to pee after sex, and then when you switched your bodies back, you’d have dry, scaly legs and a raging urinary tract infection.”
“Ugh, they’d totally fuck it up,” agreed Fran sadly.
Bailey liked tothinkthat she, Augusta, and Fran were like three different flavors in a variety pack. While Bailey was blond and tousled in the manner of a ’90s bombshell, Augusta was redheaded and slim with the kind of skin that needed nuclear-powered SPF, And Fran—Francesca—was dark-haired and boyish and utterly without vanity, her hair always in a ponytail, her feet in running shoes, her cutoff shorts made from jeans a decade out of style. The three were friends because they’d been thrown together for so long, friends who had celebrated their eighth birthdays together, who had slept over at one another’s childhood homes so many times they could find the bathroom in the dark, who knew where in their bedside tables one another’s moms kept their diaphragms and what their dads wore to sleep. They didn’t text eachother “Let’s get together this week,” instead they texted “Where are you right now” or “I’m about to pull into your driveway” or “Come over and bring Gatorade and saltines, I’m hungover.”
All down thebeachthere were small groups just like them, women and children camped out for the afternoon on the pebbly sand, every so often spraying on a new coat of sunscreen, tying down a bright floppy hat, doling out peanut butter sandwiches, grapes, Goldfish, and peaches from the cooler. Bailey had spent the last four summers watching Augusta’s and Fran’s kids play on this beach, reading paperback novels and gossiping while her friends’ children dug in the sand, eating it by the handful. In some ways it felt like a relic of the past—women tending the children while the men were at work—but Augusta didn’t have a job (instead she had a rich family), Fran logged in weird hours for a geeky engineering company based in Hawaii, and Bailey made her own schedule doing freelance marketing, so there they were, old friends with time on their hands and long sunny days.
“Hey, is Van coming to any of the doctor’s appointments?” asked Augusta. “Did he want to come hear the heartbeat?”
