Page 8 of The New Year's Party
“You were a bridesmaid for Hellie!” spouted Bennett. He was angry now. “You held Bunny’s hair back when she puked that one year! Remember? Jenn gave you birth plan advice when we had Norah!”
“I know,” she said, a surge of emotion moving up her throat. “I’m sorry, you’re right. Sorry.” Tears were slipping out. She closed her eyes and let them mingle with the shower water.
“I just don’t—” Bennett’s voice, which started out pissed off, took a sudden turn toward tender. “Are you crying?”
“I don’t know. Sorry. Just hormones, probably.”
Just memories of the years before that fateful, final New Year’s party. Just memories of simpler times when, drama notwithstanding, she’d counted herself lucky to be included in sucha tight group as the one her husband had formed in his turbulent Marquette High School days. Bennett, Doug, Will, and Phelps truly had something special. Olivia didn’t know of any other group of friends who had seen each other through so much over so many years, through broken leases and totaled cars, drugs and breakups and cross-country moves. Olivia had never had friends like that, and even though in the early years she always felt like an add-on to the core that was the OG Four, she was happy to bask in the glory of a bond that strong. But then...
“Hey. C’mere,” murmured Bennett as he drew Olivia into an embrace. The water beat down on her back. She held still and let herself be hugged. “We’re okay, right? We’re okay.”
These days, more often than not, Olivia’s body felt saturated with touch from the kids and their very physical needs. But right now, her husband’s wet, firm body felt good. She sank her face into his shoulder and felt the tears come faster.
What would she give to go back? What price would she pay? What limb would she sacrifice?
“Rosie and Alex—the testing—” said Olivia in a small voice. “I have all the paperwork somewhere in my email. I’ll schedule something for January.”
Bennett sighed. “Thank you. I know you do a lot. For all of us. It’s not like I don’t notice it.”
She gave a single nod.
It was massively stressful for Olivia to imagine these results coming in. What if her kids had that genetic abnormality too? How would she ever tell her sweet children that there was something built into their bodies that could kill them like it had killed their aunt Emily when she was only nine?
But there was another fear laced into that, wasn’t there?
Olivia and Bennett had three precious children. One of them had been born in October 2015, nine months after that final New Year’s party. One of her children had dark hair instead of blond. Brown eyes instead of blue.
“Looks exactly like my ancestor John Rutherford Rhodes,” Bennett had observed, always the history buff, squinting at a black-and-white photograph from the ancestry tome he had helped his uncle compile, glancing between baby Rosie and the bearded serious man in the hat. “Doesn’t she?”
“Oh, my God, you’re right!” Olivia had said, flush with relief,giddywith it, even though there was nofuckingresemblance at all. “A dead ringer.”
She loved her children. But every time she looked at them, she had a stomach-twisting fear that, one day, Bennett would wake up from the golden stupor of happiness she’d tricked him into.
Because one of Olivia’s children was not like the others.
Chapter 3
Doug
December 31, 10:00 a.m.
New Year’s Eve, Doug skipped his usual morning shave. He had a few errands to run before work, and he wanted to be at the office early since he was hoping to leave early too. That way, he’d have time to run home and change before he and Hellie were due at the New Year’s party.
He left the house whistling, jangling the car keys in his hand to the rhythm of “Jingle Bells” and turning on the front porch to wave goodbye to the day nurse, who was watching his exit from behind the front window with her arms crossed. She had resting bitch face, and Doug knew she actively disliked him. He’d seen the nurse with Granny’s various liquid-form drugs, angling the bottles back and forth, eyeing their contents, as if Doug was going to steal his grandmother’s fuckinghospicedrugs. Well, surprise, Nurse Nancy, he was eighty-nine days clean, and he wasstayingclean.
Doug climbed into the old Ford Taurus and turned the heater on to full blast. The last day of the year seemed to hang heavy. Pregnant gray clouds above and a thin layer of snow below, ragged patches of grass poking up. Scrappy, like Michigan City itself.
It was strange to be back in The Region. Strange and also not strange. It’s where he had grown up. It’s where he hadimagined himself launching from. And he’d launched, alright. Then it was malfunctions all the way. But they’d stayed strong, he and Hellie... until the second miscarriage, earlier this year. Something in Hellie had broken, and now everything was touch and go. Doug had never felt so fragile as he did now. His surroundings, his life, like spun glass, and himself, oversized like the proverbial bull, trying like hell to make it through without knocking anything over.
“I can’t keep doing this, Dougie,” Hellie had said when they were packing up their stuff to move here.
“You mean moving? Or trying for a baby?” he asked.
She looked at him with a new expression. A kind of blank expression, like all the patience and passion he loved her for had bled away and she was merely a doll, unblinking and unfeeling. “No. I mean, if you can’t find a job and keep it this time, I’m out.”
Doug had the good sense to remain quiet, even though he’d wanted to throw their wedding vows back in her face. What about for better or for worse? He wasn’t a shit husband, he’d just faced shit circumstances, and sure, perhaps made a couple shit decisions along the way, to be completely fair, but—
That wasbehindthem. Eyes on the prize, right?