Emmy

C H A P T E R 1Lily was on a highly important mission: she needed to steal her mother’s eyelash curler and she needed to do it now. She’d gotten up early with the intention of running a couple of miles, but slipped on her shoes and realized they were probably a few sizes too small. Wearable, yes, but just a bit too small to run in. I’ll get some new running shoes tomorrow, she’d promised herself. Tomorrow. Right. She’d eaten breakfast with her mom, and even spent a few minutes feeling guilty about not having a job as she watched Sarah trudge off to work. She’d instant messaged her best friends Peyton and Alyssa for a while, then flopped down in front of the television just in time to watch Regis and Kelly. Lily watched as a woman was revealed on the talk show, supposedly with a completely new face. This made Lily reach for her newest issue of Seventeen, looking for similar make-up tips as those on the televison, and viola, she was swept away by the imperative need to copy the innovative use of an eyelash curler on page 26. Sometimes it paid to be shallow. It was so different for Lily these days, walking into her mother’s room. The reason was obvious: it wasn’t her mother’s room anymore. It was her mother and Nick’s room now. A woman’s room was so different than a woman’s room with a man. It was utterly different when the man was your mother’s spanking new husband, whom you’d met less than a year before. Lily wasn’t grateful for her parents’ divorce. There were so many things she’d lost. But it took Nick’s presence now to show her the role-defying alliance and remarkable closeness she’d shared with her mother for all those years when it had been just the two of them. When her father had first left, a lot of the usual boundaries had come down. She’d slept in her mother’s bed nearly every night for six months. Had it been for Lily’s sake? Or for Sarah’s? Once there was no dad coming home after a hard day of work, “the ladies”, as her mother called them, had eaten popcorn and string cheese for dinner many nights. Lily had considered it a treat, not having to stomach the usual obligatory vegetables. Lily used to feel an easy ownership of this room. Now she treaded into the waters carefully. She used to flop at will on the bed, watching television as her mother got ready for work. But it was an entirely different bed now. Not literally a different bed, but in every other way different. She steered wide around the bed now. It wasn’t just that the room contained a lot of male stuff. It wasn’t like Nick was a slob. He was always conscious that the apartment had been just Sarah and Lily’s long before he’d joined up. He controlled one side of the closet, three bookshelves, and a new dresser from Pottery Barn. He didn’t even have pictures up yet. The room now testified not so much to him but to them–their privacy, the things they shared together. Even when they weren’t present, Lily felt like she was invading it. The bathroom used to bloom with female stuff–creams, lotions, make-up, waxes, and perfume. Now, in deference to them, Sarah kept it all mostly stowed away in the cabinet.. Even seeing Nick’s electric razor next to Sarah’s bottle of nail polish made Lily feel like she had staged an intrusion. The eyelash curler wasn’t in the top drawer, Lily quickly discovered. When you lived with your daughter, you kept things like this in plain view. When you lived with your brand-new husband, you hid the evidence. Lily already knew that most of the stuff Sarah didn’t want Nick to see, she hid in the cabinet above the toilet. Yes, this was the right department, Lily realized as soon as she jiggled open the sticky door. There was mustache cream, blackhead scrub, fake eyelashes and a box of Crest Whitestrips. Lily squeezed her hand toward the back, knocking over a bottle of Beano and a container of Tums. A plastic bottle was sent rolling by the falling Tums. Lily watched with displeasure as it landed with a splash in the open toilet. Damn. She watched it bobbing in the toilet water. She could see that it contained some type of vitamins. She really hoped that the cap was watertight. While she delayed sticking her hand in the toilet–who would be in a hurry to do a thing like that?–Lily wondered why her mom had hidden the bottle from Nick. Nick was a health fanatic. He talked about herbal supplements in the morning like they were his best friends. Why had her mother hidden vitamins from nutrition-man Nick? Lily’s curiosity was her best motivator. She plunged her hand into the toilet and plucked out the bottle, tossing it immediately into the sink and running hot water over it. She reached for a bar of soap, rubbing it over the container and paying careful attention as to hiding the label. Once the bottle and her hand were sufficiently clean, she turned it over to satisfy her questioning mind. A sharp pain suddenly shot through her forehead. The pain descended down into her stomach and into the tips of her toes. The front of the bottle communicated precisely why it lived between the laxatives and the Tums. But it wasn’t Nick that her mother had been hiding them from. At least, that was what Lily strongly suspected. They were prenatal vitamins. The kind you took when you were going to have a baby. And Sarah was almost certainly hiding them from Lily.Lily was sitting at the table in the small kitchen of the apartment later that day, clutching the prenatal vitamins. In this time of thinking, certain facts aligned themselves in Lily’s mind. Her mother had gained weight in the last couple of months. Lily had connected it with happiness, but not she felt inane for not being more observant. Sarah’s wardrobe had drifted slowly but surely to the more roomier stuff in her closet. Had she stopped drinking wine? Lily tried to think. Had she been going to a lot of doctor’s appointments? Lily remembered a time when her mother had been joking with her aunt about how teenagers were so self-absorbed. Sarah had said she could’ve repainted the entire apartment and Lily wouldn’t have noticed. Lily had laughed it off then, but she felt the sting of the remark now. She heard a key turning in the front door–her mother arriving home from work at her usual time. Lily stayed where she was, knowing her mother would come into the kitchen after setting her bags down. She hadn’t planned at ambush, but that’s exactly how it came off. “Hey sweetie,” Sarah said, kissing Lily on the cheek. “Do you want to order Chinese for dinner? I’ve got a coupon for half-off an order of vegetable lo mein.” Wordlessly, Lily shook the bottle of vitamins for her mother to see, a questioning look on her face.. Sarah stared at it, and slowly it’s significance registered. Her eyes widened, and her expression changed from confusion to surprise to dread to exhaustion and back again. “How far along are you?” Lily demanded, skipping right to the point. She wanted her mother to deny it, to say it wasn’t true, but Lily knew that wouldn’t happen. “Five months,” Sarah said, sighing and slipping down into a kitchen chair across from Lily. Her whole body looked tired. “You’re kidding.” Lily’s voice was flatly accusatory. “When were you planning on telling me?” “Lily. Please.” Sarah wanted to reach for Lily’s hand, but she was sitting on one and the other was wrapped around the neck of the vitamins. She quickly abandoned her attempt. “Just let me explain, alright?” Lily offered something between a shrug and a nod. “Nick and I have talked a lot about having a baby. He hasn’t had that joy in his life like I had. We thought it would take a year or two for me to conceive. We never dreamed it would happen this fast.” Lily cocked her head skeptically. With half her mind, she was trying to calculate whether this baby was conceived before or after the wedding. It was a close call. “I didn’t even guess I was pregnant until I was almost three months along. And then there was the issue of telling you. I was just waiting for the right time. Everything seemed so...complicated.” Complicated. Lily hated that word. It didn’t even begin to sum up the situation. “There were your exams, and homecoming. Then graduation crept up on us. I didn’t want the news of the baby to take away from all those special days.” “Were you going to tell me before it was born?” A hurt frown spread across Sarah’s face. “Of course,” she said quietly. “We were going to tell you this weekend.” How convenient, Lily thought. I find the vitamins today, and they just happened to choose this weekend to tell me. Right. “Do you know what kind it is?” Lily asked. “You mean a boy or a girl?” Lily nodded. “Yes, actually, we do.” Sarah exchanged her frown for a grin. “You’re going to have a baby sister.” Lily nodded again. A girl. Of course it was a girl. “So I guess it’s due around...” Lily had already made the calculations, knowing the baby was due around her birthday. But she left the space for her mother to fill in. “Around the beginning of October,” Sarah supplied, her look of dread intensifying. Lily knew this was happy news on a lot of levels. Ever since the sixth grade, she feared going to college. She felt guilty that she would be leaving her single mother alone to defrost food and eat by herself night after night. But come this September, she’d be leaving a happy couple with a spanking new baby on the way. And besides, Lily was getting the baby sister she always wanted. If she were a bigger and better person, she’d be able to feel the happiness about this situation. She’d even be able to hug and congratulate her mother. But she wasn’t a big and good person. She’d gone through too many experiences to know that about herself by now. “It’s kind of perfect timing, in a way,” Lily stated robotically. “I’ll be leaving for college, and there’ll be a spare room for the baby. You could even start redecorating it now. No need to waste any precious time.” The corners of Sarah’s mouth quivered. “It wasn’t good planning. We didn’t plan this at all.” “You could even combine birthday parties. What a funny coincidence.” “Lil, I don’t think it’s funny.” Sarah’s gaze was intent and steady. “I think it’s serious. I’m sure you have a lot of complicated feelings about this.” Lily did have a lot of complicated feelings. In fact, she was sure that if she had any more feelings, her head would explode. She could just picture her mother, sitting at the table covered with complicated feelings goo. Silently she handed her mother her vitamins and got up to leave. Earlier, she had debated whether to tell her mother they had fallen into the toilet, but now as she strode away, she figured she’d just let her mother go ahead and eat them. Lily hated herself right now. But she hated her mother just a little bit more. C H A P T E R 2