Page 1

PROLOGUE

Fall 1978

“W hat are we going to do?” the girl asked. She was nearly seventeen, pretty, with long black hair and dark eyes. She wore a fuzzy lavender jacket, a pair of high-waisted jeans, and platform saddle shoes.

The man with her was twenty-three, twenty-four at the most, with washed-out blue eyes and floppy brown hair. He wore a plaid cloth jacket and bell-bottom jeans. “I wish you’d told me how old you were. It wasn’t nice to lie to me.”

“I wanted you to like me.”

They were wandering around Belle Isle Conservatory. A seventy-odd year old, sprawling greenhouse set in the middle of an island park. Neither of them was interested in plants.

“Can you get rid of it?”

“I can’t. I already love him.”

“How do you know it’s a boy?”

“I just do. A mother knows those things.”

He thought about how young she looked, how impossible it seemed that she was talking about the things mothers knew. And he remembered that when they’d met he thought she looked like Cher, only prettier. He still thought that.

“You could give him away.”

Quietly, they passed a collection of palm trees so tall they almost touched the glass dome above them. On the ground below was a collection of tropical plants. The whole place was green and warm and impossibly humid. Through the window they could see that it was already cold outside and the natural plants were dying out for the season.

Uncomfortable with the silence, the young man said, “Don’t you think it’s weird, looking at palm trees when Canada’s just across the river?”

“Canada’s always been there. And the whole point of this place is that the plants don’t belong here.”

“If I knew you better, I’d have known you’d say that.”

“I have to tell my family you’re going to do the right thing. You know what they’ll be like if you don’t.”

“You’re threatening me?”

“I’m telling you the truth. You know I am.”

“You can’t think of another way out of this?”

“You mean one where you don’t have to do anything?”

“I mean one that doesn’t wreck both our lives.”

She frowned at him, like he’d said something stupid. “Nobody’s life is getting wrecked. We’re just having a baby.”

“Why do you even want a baby?”

“Because when you have a baby there’s always someone in the world who loves you. Who doesn’t want that?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “I think I could always love you.”

“Then everything’s perfect.”