The Girl in the Mirror(60)



“I don’t get it,” I say. “Wasn’t he basically raping you?”

“No,” she says quietly. “That’s the thing. I love Richard. He loves me. And the sex was nothing like I expected. I realized something that people had told me all my life but I had never understood. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. You and Adam, I understand now why you didn’t want to conceive to get money.”

For a moment, I forget that I’m Summer and that I’m supposed to know what she’s talking about. Because the truth is that I don’t know. This is the thing that I have never understood.

“What did you realize?”

“That it’s like the nuns at school say, isn’t it? It turns out they were right after all. God knows how they know.” Virginia’s voice grows husky. “Sex is a sacrament. Sex, the best sex, is the moment when you connect with another soul, and maybe you create a new life. That’s why they call it making love. If it’s right, if it’s special, then you’re making the holiest thing. You’re creating love.”

“Is that how you felt with Richie?” I ask. I don’t know if I want to know the answer.

“No!” cries Virginia. A light passes across her face, as if she’s some kind of priestess or angel, but now she frowns again and rips open another bag of M&Ms. “We both knew that sex should feel that way, but it didn’t! It was all wrong! And how could my mother understand? She’s been doing it with Uncle Colton since God knows when! I don’t think our father was even cold in the ground. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did it with Uncle Edgar, too! They’re barbarians, the pair of them. Richie loathes his father.”

Virginia fixes me with her forget-me-not-blue eyes. “You were right, Summer,” she says. “No baby should ever be conceived for cash. This money is a curse! And that’s what I’ve done to my baby! I’ve cursed him!” She is racked by such heaving sobs that I fetch a bucket just in case. I don’t want regurgitated M&Ms on my peach carpet.

There’s more. Virginia and Richie, after their day of epic lovemaking, locked the witch out of their hotel room and agreed that their love could never be. Richie gallantly spent the night on the floor. Or perhaps he was out of juice. The next morning, Virginia tried to run away, but Francine caught her and demanded she do her duty to her family and hop back into bed with incest boy.

Virginia was unwavering. She and Richie had agreed never to have sex again, never to see each other again, as some kind of purifying sacrifice, a bargain with the gods. After two days, Francine relented, and she and Virginia flew home to Wakefield, leaving the bridegroom to his father’s wrath.

It was too late. Virginia’s uterus turned out to be on Francine’s side. She was pregnant.

She didn’t want an abortion, but she was miserable, especially after she spotted me at the beach, bulging out of my bikini, and Francine admitted that I hadn’t miscarried. Ashamed to see her school friends or even her sisters, she hid in the attic of the beach house watching TV and eating herself sick.

“That’s why I’m so much fatter than you,” she says, staring enviously at my neat baby bump. “By the way, I know you’re at least thirty-six weeks. Mum’s counted.”

I start. Francine must have assumed that Summer didn’t know she was pregnant when she set out to sail to the Seychelles, so she has miscounted by two weeks. Summer would be thirty-eight weeks pregnant, only a fortnight shy of her due date of the twenty-eighth of November. I’ve had to tell my family Summer’s real due date and give up on my early attempts to nudge it into December, because, as I feared, my mother asked me too many pointed questions about when the baby was conceived. So she and Adam and my midwife believe I’m thirty-eight weeks pregnant, but I’m not. I’m only thirty-three weeks.

“How many weeks are you?” I ask. For the first time, I share the world’s obsession with exactly how pregnant everybody is.

“I’m thirty weeks tomorrow,” Virginia says. “I’ve Googled it. If the baby’s born now, he’ll go on a ventilator or at the very least CPAP. He’ll probably have a hole in his heart and hemorrhages in his brain. He could have lifelong problems. He could die.”

I can’t risk getting into a discussion about this. I don’t know what CPAP is. Virginia is staring at the space on the wall where the photo of me holding Tarquin used to hang. I have no idea whether what she said is accurate, but the photo was always a scary reminder of how birth can go wrong.

“But why would the baby be born now?” I ask. “You might be a bit on the large side, but you’re young and healthy.”

“That’s why I’m here, Summer. Don’t you see? Mum doesn’t care about me or the baby. She just can’t stand to lose that money.”

“But it’s out of her control, isn’t it? I’m way further along than you.” I feel a chill as I say it. I have to be nonchalant, like my baby is ready to be born.

“It’s not who conceived first,” says Virginia, “it’s who’s born first. They can still win if they force me into labor. I don’t know what they might do. Mum kept talking about taking us to Thailand, although she had sworn she’d never return after Dad died, and then I found a page open on her laptop, a private maternity hospital in Phuket. Schedule your C-section, choose your baby’s birthday. Isn’t it true you can get anything up there for the right price?”

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