She’d waxed her mustache for years. Without Les to kiss good night—or without Eliza—she’d stopped.
“I moved back home,” Eliza said. “We were trying to reach you.”
“I know, my darling. I know everything.”
Eliza scooted up in the bed. “Jude told you? You didn’t give him a hard time, did you?”
“I certainly did.”
Di was pleased to fill in the details. She knew, after weeks of false leads, that they had been in Vermont. She knew, after a weeks-long wild-goose chase to Chicago, where Jude had called her at her hotel, that they had not been in Chicago. She knew a bad private investigator. She didn’t know who was a bigger piece of work: Les or his ex-wife. She knew that, apart from her first trip to the ER and her present one, Eliza had not seen a doctor. She knew about the six weeks of cocaine and the marijuana and now the doctor and nurse did, too. She knew about Johnny’s indiscretion. She knew what had happened in the park, and if Eliza thought she wasn’t going to bring the fattest lawsuit the City of New York had ever seen, she’d better think again.
She took a long sip of tea.
She knew that Eliza had decided to give up the baby. Was that right?
Eliza, petting the tape on the back of her hand, nodded.
Her mother petted the back of Eliza’s hand, too. She thought that was a wise and brave choice. She knew that Eliza had missed her and that Eliza knew she’d missed her, too. She knew that Eliza was sorry and that Eliza knew she was sorry, too.
The nurse came in then. “Someone’s awake!” She padded around in her sneakers, checking monitors, the IV. They wanted to keep her here one more night, she said, to make sure her brain didn’t swell. While the nurse adjusted the strap on her belly, Eliza looked at the ceiling, staring at the white lights until tears burned in her eyes. The nurse held up the banner of paper spilling out of one of the machines. “You see these dips and peaks?” she asked, tracing them with her finger. Eliza squinted at the graph. “This is your baby’s heartbeat. It’s following a nice pattern now.”
Eliza cleared her throat. “The drugs I did—did they hurt the baby?”
The nurse hung her clipboard at the end of Eliza’s bed. Di gazed into her tea. “There’s no way to know yet, honey. You quit the hard stuff in the first trimester—that’s what counts.”
After the nurse left the room, Di took up Eliza’s hand and began gently, absently pushing back each of her cuticles. Always file your nails in one direction, so they don’t tear. If you tap your nails on a table, they’ll grow faster. Eliza closed her eyes. Maybe it was the sleeping pill. She felt light, as though she were floating in her hospital bed on a slow-moving river.
“Mom? I don’t think you quite know everything.”
Her mother stopped massaging.
Eliza said, “Johnny’s not the father.”
Her mother sat up straight in her chair, spilling her tea in her lap.
I knew it. I knew that kid was acting.” Les punched the button with the side of his fist, and a can of Coke clunked down through the vending machine. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, champ. Why cover it up?” He extracted the can, opened it, and took a long sip.
“It’s not me,” Jude said. “Why do you always think it’s me?”
“No? Come on. I’ve heard the way you talk about her. You’re telling me you two haven’t . . . ?”
“We haven’t, we haven’t.” Did everyone think they had? Why was Jude the last one to assume the two of them were a possibility?
Les leaned against the vending machine. They were in an alcove of the waiting room. No one could hear them. “Who’s the daddy, then?”
Jude told him.
Les chewed over the name, sliding it around on his tongue, trying to recall who Teddy was exactly, how he might fit in. “Teddy. Yes. That makes sense, now that you mention it. When she went to visit you, right?” He shook his head: what a shame.
“We thought if we said Johnny was the father, Di would let her keep the baby. They could raise it together.” The opposite now seemed just as likely. Would Di have insisted Eliza give up a dead boy’s baby?
“You know, Lady Di was pregnant more than once. She had some . . . procedures.” Les slurped his Coke, his eyes distant. “One of them was