Lies We Bury(34)
“How are you?” I stare down at her belly, then back up to Lily’s beaming face. Full cheeks suggest the time we’ve spent apart has been good to her, and she seems happy about the baby. “Are you a surrogate?”
She giggles, a husky sound, just the way I remember it. Warmth spreads along my limbs, and I can’t deny how good it is to see her.
Here. In this city. During this week. Did Lily return home for the anniversary, too? Is she here, knowing about Chet’s parole and intending to . . . do something next week? Doubt and concern mingle together as I search her face for that glint that sparkled upon my arrival.
“No, I’m not a surrogate. Jesus, Em.” She rolls her eyes, then crosses her arms beneath a swollen bosom.
I lift both palms up. “Hey, I’ve thought about it. It’s a handsome check at the end of it, and you’re helping someone, right? No judgment.”
Lily’s smile fades. “Actually, Bea and I got a sperm donor over in Geneva. We wanted to start a family. Realizing I was going to have my own family made me want to come home to Oregon. For good,” she adds. “You’re here now, so we figured Portland was a good spot to settle down.”
“And Jenessa.”
“What about her?”
“Jenessa is here, too.”
Lily pauses. “Oh. Well, all the more reason.” She resumes a broad grin. Since Lily and I grew up separately from Jenessa, I sometimes forget that the pair of them never really bonded. Of the seven years I lived in Chet’s compound, only three of them were shared with Lily; she remembers less of it with Jenessa than I do.
We enter the lobby and pass a potted lily of the valley, lush with its green leaves and white bell-shaped buds, which my sister points out with pride—her first addition to the space. As we take the elevator to her fourth-floor apartment, I wonder whether I should have waited for Jenessa to visit with me. To share in this welcome home to our little sister. When the elevator stops, Lily takes my hand, swinging it back and forth as we walk down the hall, limping with the uneven gait she’s had almost her whole life.
Calling Jenessa on the drive here didn’t earn me a return call—I tried, at least. When we were kids, she and I couldn’t help fighting over Lily like she was a toy, at times pulling her between us until Rosemary made us stop. We would often try to lure Lily to play with one of us individually, by dangling either her favorite toy or the prospect of a game; the winner would get five minutes of uninterrupted play time with Lily before her attention fluttered elsewhere, or indeed, the older sister got bored. We even called her Sweet Lily, because Rosemary and Nora were always commenting what a sweet baby she was, despite losing her birth mother.
In hindsight, we had such limited sources of entertainment—and even affection—that I don’t blame us for treating Lily’s love as a trophy.
The fourth-floor hallway is peaceful, empty it seems, on a Wednesday at noon, and I wonder whether anyone else—the media or Rosemary—is aware Lily’s returned.
Pauline wired payment for the hour I spent at The Stakehouse yesterday and the two hours last night that it took to touch up the Post employees’ photos. As I was selecting images from The Stakehouse that I thought might be of interest to her, I made sure to exclude photos of the body—trash bag over its head, behind the kegs and undisturbed. Revealing that I was there in advance of the police would start an avalanche of questions—even as Pauline would, no doubt, pay top dollar for something that unique and which only the Portland Post could offer readers.
The gray-painted apartment door already bears my sister’s signature decoration: several pots of her favorite flower, the Stargazer lily, flank each side. Vibrant pink, black-freckled, narrow petals lean forward as if they sense my anxiety.
“Ready?” Lily turns to me with a smile, limping from the tight rotation. She reaches for my hand, and I help to steady her. “Sorry. Pregnancy has really thrown off my balance. The old hitch has flared up again.”
“No problem. And yes. I can smell the muffins from here.”
Once we were out in the world, medical professionals ran all the tests and suggested all the expensive procedures to make us whole—As if you weren’t born underground, they said with self-assured nods. They would fix us, mostly using Chet’s insurance, which a lawyer argued should be extended to us as his biological children. Rosemary didn’t want anything to do with him once we were free, and she initially went hysterical at the lawyer’s proposal. Then the doctors sat her down and laid out our medical needs as they saw them; she relented. The vitamin D deficiency I had was treated with therapeutic drugs for six months until my biochemistry normalized, Jenessa was given braces to correct a painful overbite (although Rosemary saw to it with our daily flossing that none of us had any cavities), and Lily was granted a pro bono surgery on the congenital defect that had left her with an extra toe.
As an infant, it wasn’t an issue; she crawled everywhere on her knees. When she started walking, she complained of increasing pain that led her to favoring the other foot. One surgery turned into two, then a third when she was a teenager and past her final growth spurt. The last I heard, her foot ached when it rained very hard, like a meteorological barometer, but the pain was minimal. The medical bills beyond that first pro bono surgery, however, were not, and both Rosemary’s and Lily’s settlement money went quickly.