We're losing control
Will you turn me away or touch me deep inside?
It's just that I'm late, I'm never late.
What does it mean?
It can't mean that, it just can't!
September is fierce that year with humidity, as if the summer is trying to extend itself. In whispered phone calls, late at night, she confirms their worst fears.
I'm sorry.
Don't say that. It's not your - it's my fault too.
Our fault.
Our baby.
His tone is reassuring, but the words make her cry.
She memorizes his home number, writes it down sometimes in her notes at school, in between quadratic equations and interpretations of To the Lighthouse. She sits hunched forward, a cardigan draped artfully across her shoulders, hoping it will hide her swollen breasts.
She calls him late at night when no one can walk in or overhear, on the white princess phone in her room, feet tucked under her. She's always cold lately and pulls a pink angora blanket across her legs. "We need to talk," she whispers, and he says he'll pick her up.
He parks way back on the private drive and she tiptoes out in fur-lined slippers, slides into his car.
"You need to tell your parents," he says as they roll slowly down the drive; he clicks on the left hand blinker, looking sympathetic but determined.
"You don't understand!"
"Addison, you're going to start - I mean, unless you want to - but we -" he breaks off.
"I don't want that," she mumbles, and fiddles with the controls in the station wagon, trying to turn up the heat. It's going to be Halloween soon. Maybe she'll dress as an ordinary student, one whose life isn't falling apart.
"I want to keep the baby."
He's gripping the steering wheel with both hands, watching the road - there are hardly any lights on this back road, and she's not sure where they're heading - so she can't see his expression. Then he nods, and she watches his curly hair bounce slightly, up and down. "Okay," he says, like that time she stopped him on the hill. The girl who flirted with him then seems forever ago. "Okay," he says again.
Susan notices before her parents do. Of course. She's bringing up a dress she's had tailored and walks into Addison's room without knocking. Addison's in a tank top and underwear and wraps her arms around herself immediately, protectively. Susan turns away, hangs the dress in her closet.
"I had it taken in a half inch," she says as Addison shrugs quickly into a robe.
"Um, thanks."
"But maybe I shouldn't have."
Addison gulps. "Susan-"
"You haven't told your parents?"
She says nothing.
"Addison."
"I haven't told anyone," she admits.
"Oh my god. Addie, they're going to find out."
"Don't tell them," she says sharply, every fiber of her voice saying you're just the staff, and Susan, even though she's only about five years older than Addison, calls her Addie and treats her like a friend, knows her place and nods dutifully.
Susan's there when she finally tells them, because she can't button her uniform skirt around her waist anymore and a safety pin looks so terribly gauche, and she thinks maybe they'll just handle this with silence like they do everything else until the Captain flexes one fist and says "Who is he?"
Addison looks down at her feet. "His name is Derek."
The Captain is still looking at her, expectantly, waiting for a surname, a place or a fortune to figure out who they are. He's a Lowell, but not the Greenwich Lowells. Or Derek Margate, remember the Margates, from the ball in Hartford.
"He, um, I met him at the club."
Everyone's quiet for another moment, then the Captain frowns. "Not this - waiter - Archer said was sniffing around you this summer-"
"Captain," Bizzy says sharply and he falls silent. Then she turns to Addison. "Is this true?"
Addison swallows.
Bizzy's hand flutters to her heart. "I need a drink," she manages, even though she's already holding a cocktail, and Susan leaps to her feet.
She comes back in with a tray of lowball glasses. The Captain takes one and drinks deeply. Addison waves her away. She doesn't say I'm sixteen or I'm pregnant because she knows those aren't the kinds of things you say to a drink in this house.
The Captain takes a deep breath. "I'll make an appointment for her."
Addison flinches at her; he's not even talking to her. "Wait, what?"
"To get this taken care of."
"No, I-" She shakes her head. Maybe she waited this long on purpose. "I'm - done with the first trimester already." She sees both her parents wince, almost imperceptibly, at the term trimester.
"That won't be a problem."
"But-"
"Kitten," the Captain's tone is soothing. "We're thinking of what's best for you here. I know people-"
"I don't want to."
"It will be private."
"I want to keep it." She laces her fingers across her midsection and a shadow crosses her mother's face.
"You can't be serious."
"I want to keep it," she repeats. She's never asked for anything before. Why not now?
"It's been legal for ten years, Addison," her father attempts. "You have the right."
Addison shakes her head. "I don't think it counts as a right if you're forcing me into it," she retorts and then jerks back as sudden heat floods her cheek. She clutches her burning skin as Bizzy draws her hand back.
Addison just stands still, finding it hard to believe she's been slapped in the the movies it looks - neater. Carefully she draws her fingers away. Her cheek still stings.
"If you insist on this foolishness, you will no longer be a member of this family."
With as much dignity as she can muster, she looks right at Bizzy.
"You're a terrible mother," she says, more wonder than malice in her tone.
Bizzy's expression is cool as ice. "Well, dear, the apple usually doesn't fall far from the tree."
It's different for Derek. He doesn't get it. He wakes up and goes to school as usual - she knows this, because he calls her when no one's home and he goes to the doctor with her, driving what she knows is his mother's station wagon. He looks the same: hair a little longer and scruffier, that slight squint because he knows he needs glasses but thinks it'll interfere with his pitching. He's still on the team and everything.
Not Addison. She folded up her Sacred Heart uniforms and her navy blue team swimsuits and let her mother's secretary figure out what to do with them. Bizzy had already stopped speaking to her altogether. Addison still had a charge card back then and used it for some forgiving elastic-waisted skirts and then regretted it when she got to her first class at the alternative school in Stamford. There were girls there with teased hair, hard looking girls in leggings and acid wash with giant hoop earrings. Addison felt prissy and stupid in her pressed collared shirt, her pleated skirt. They whispered about her. Called her preppy and richie rich before settling on Princess Di.
"Shouldn't you be somewhere a little nicer?" one of them asked her that first week, sarcastically. She had the flat vowels of the mill towns and Addison just bit the inside of her cheek, hard, and used her pink uniball pen to fill in all the circles in the open page of her textbook. She never would have done that at Sacred Heart. Maybe she's changing too. But even as she gets used to the other girls - several of whom have swollen bellies too - she can't but notice that the algebra is stuff she did two years ago. She was supposed to be in Calc B this year.
Instead she's here, trying to get a GED in an alternative school while her life slides farther away from her grasp the bigger her belly swells. She can stay until she shows, that's what they told her, so Bizzy's secretary drives her to an apartment her parents have paid six months rent in advance on - or, knowing them, some untraceable foundation has paid it.
"You should call Bizzy," Susan murmurs. "I think if you apologized-"
"For what?" Addison shrieks, because she's almost six months pregnant and she's done being quiet. She's done with everything except this baby and Derek. They're all she needs.
Susan presses her lips together. "Good luck," she says; Addison slams the door hard and enjoys her flinch.
Oddly enough, the first month is almost fun. Derek visits and helps her set up. They investigate and the rent is more than they'll be able to swing, so they enjoy it while they can, before they have to move. It's furnished simply but it's hers; they stretch out on the queen-sized bed and Derek rubs her aching calves, her feet. He tells her she looks beautiful even when she feels repulsive, bovine. Her breasts seems enormous to her now; Derek looks at them with appreciation and lust but they're too sensitive for his questing fingers. I'm happy just to look, he tells her. Everything's going to be okay, he tells her, and she believes him. His words are warm, like the blanket he used to wrap around her, afterwards, when she shivered lightly in his arms.
This, it turns out, is what happens after the summer.
Archer visits, once. He looks around, then presses a hundred-dollar bill into her hand and tells Derek not to be an asshole.
Your family is -
Don't say it. And she cries because she can't believe she's never going back to her pink princess bed or her pink princess life and because Archer's at Princeton, his Forbes inheritance locked up in trust, with no real access to anything that could help them.
Derek's going to get a job. So will Addison, sometime. And then she'll go back to school. And they'll have a baby who looks like both of them and it will love her the way her family doesn't. Derek's her family now anyway.
He says I love you in the dark, he holds her gently, spooning her and the baby all at once, strokes her belly as it grows. It's drum-tight now; they feel the baby kick.
Are you scared? Derek asks her.
She's scared every second but something tells her he can't know that. So she denies it, huddles in his arms and hopes it's permanent.
When it happens Derek holds her hand while pain rips through her in waves. She thinks of the boathouse, the seaweed smell and the ache between her legs and his breath in her ear. And then she thinks of nothing but survival, getting through the bone-crushing sensations that threaten to rip her apart. Whatever is inside of her, whatever they've created, feels bigger than both of them.
Is this normal? Derek keeps asking. Is she okay? She wonders if he still wants to be a doctor someday.
A nurse sponges off her brow and calls her sweetheart and she knows they feel sorry for her because her mother's not here, because she's seventeen and in pain and Derek's perspiring almost as much as she is. They refer to him as Daddy while they move around him, taking measurements and nodding at each other over her supine body. Daddy can come stand here and support your legs, they say and she winces, not ready yet for these names.
She bears down and feels herself breaking and when the baby is finally dragged out of her, screaming, Addison holds the fretful damp bundle to her aching breast and thinks I know how you feel.
The baby spends her first New Year's Eve wailing and Addison is close to joining her.
"Let's go out," Derek suggests and Addison fights the urge to slap him.
"I can't drink," she snaps, "I'm nursing."
"You can be DD."
"Seriously?" She throws down the battered copy of Spock his mother gave her and he winces.
"Addie, come on-"
"No." She grits her teeth, already tired of this, of feeling like a harried fishwife at seventeen, of the baby's screams and her own nagging tone. Jodie. She wanted to call her Emerson - that's about where she stopped in Lit class - and Derek liked Caroline, after his mother. They named her Jodie because they saw it in a magazine and Addison liked that it wasn't not too girly. A few weeks after the birth she already had second thoughts about it but worried they commit teen mothers for changing their babies' names.
Jodie gurgles in her bassinet now, crying spree over, and Addison stands firm even though she could fall asleep on her feet right now. As usual. They're in their own place now, the only one they could afford. There's peeling paper on the walls in the living room and the linoleum in the kitchen is cracked and the Goodwill furniture has seen better days.
"We're not going out."
So Mark comes over there, six feet two inches of swagger, and she rolls her eyes. He says "looking good, Addie," and she pretends she can't hear him. He peers into the bassinet at Jodie and Addison's embarrassed because she's clean, sure, but she's wearing just an undershirt - the heating pipes are all screwy in this apartment, no need for anything more, and she still has dried tear marks on her face from before. Mark just looks at her for a moment, then touches the top of her head, so carefully Addison doesn't even have to say careful. "She's an okay kid," he says, but from him it comes out almost like a benediction.
Mark and Derek drink beers on the couch for a while. Addison pulls the afghan around her and sits in the recliner, which only works if you pull the switch twice. Jodie wakes up, three times. She nurses her in the bedroom, watches the numbers on the clock change. She says goodbye to 1983.
Next year will be better.
"Happy new year." Derek kisses her and she kisses back even though Mark's watching and making a face that makes both of them laugh. She feels benevolent, kisses Mark on the cheek. "I'm going," he shrugs, because there's a party up in Madison and Derek doesn't even ask if he can tag along.
They curl up together in bed, Jodie peaceful in the bassinet Derek's sister handed down.
"It's 1984," Addison whispers.
"Big year."
"Huge."
They kiss softly, then more urgently, and it's the first time since Jodie that she can remember wanting it, feeling anything.
Then Jodie's awake, making soft peaceful sounds, and she feels horribly guilty.
"Is she going to remember this?"
"God, I hope not."
Addison slinks into the bathroom to shower. The hot water's out again. She rests her head against the blue tile, avoiding the mildew running the length of the crack by the soap ledge, and waits to feel clean.
When the colic lets up, and it sometimes does, and Jodie sleeps in a neat warm ball between them, it feels okay. She holds on to these moments of okay, except when she's too tired and falls asleep with her shirt pulled halfway up, trying to nurse. Jodie's half on formula anyway because she's not that great at latching, but the breast seems to soothe her so Addison nurses her when she can. Anything to stop her crying. Derek tells her you're doing such a great job and you're a wonderful mother. She pretends it matters and lets him hold her. She falls asleep with her head tucked under his chin.
They're a family, he tells her, and one day they'll be one, officially.
Addison Montgomery-Shepherd. She says it in her head. He kisses her deeply and she closes her eyes, pretending they're still in the boathouse. Pretending it's still the summer and she's starting school in the fall. Real school. Pretends her life didn't end looking out at the ocean, under a blanket.
"Do you want me to propose to you?" His eyes are twinkling and she remembers how lucky she is. That he comes home every night - she knows from the girls in her A-school GED class that that's not the norm. That he's so good to them. So sweet.
"Propose to me in Paris," she says, and he grins that half-smile and then Jodie wakes up, howling.