Page 71 of No One Aboard
Lila reclined on one of the chart house sunbathing mattresses, her belly skyward and her sunglasses making the clouds and sails look heart-shaped. She rubbed sunscreen lotion over the fronts of her legs, her stomach, the crown of her breasts, and her collarbones. Her bikini of choice today was a push-up top with a knotted center and high-cut bottoms, both in the color the catalog had calledPersian Pastel.
As the boat dipped and rose, Lila wondered if the motion would affect getting an even tan. She was already going to have tan lines, which was bad enough. If the twins weren’t on this trip, she would have vastly preferred sunbathing in the nude, but alas.
Lila needed time like this to decompress after MJ’s accident and Francis’s little surprise. Her children had been quiet these past few days and her husband distracted, which allowed her the exquisite opportunity to ruminate.
After a lifetime of streaming through her days, Lila had had an inordinate amount of stillness this past year. Her momentum was dead. Her life was stagnant. Tia’s absence did that to the family: made everything feel calm. Copacetic.
She hadn’t missed Tia’s mood swings, though.
Lila had only ever intended to have one child. With one, you were just a person with a child.
Two was what made you a mother.
That was the belief Lila’s own parents had subscribed to. Patrick and Lori Logan had similarly set about to have an only child. A boy would be nice. He’d be a banker like Patrick. They weren’t so arrogant to assume they wouldn’t possibly have a girl, but Lila had found prayer cards in her mother’s vanity that politely (and repeatedly) petitioned Saint John Bosco for a son.
Lori Logan, to her quiet dismay, had delivered not one, but two female babies in the final hour of March. The first, Elaina Maria Logan, was dead.
The second was Lila.
Lori Logan recovered admirably from her shock and her thirty-hour labor. She ordered a twenty-two-inch coffin for her firstborn, scheduled Elaina’s funeral for the same weekend as Lila’s baptism, and swapped her Saint John Bosco prayer cards for those of Saint Agnes of Rome.
Lori’s professions included housewife and perfectionist. She collected Madame Alexander dolls and sometimes photographed her infant daughter surrounded by them, like she was a lovely little doll herself. Lila had always supposed that’s where the idea for the beauty pageants came from. Lila’s first memories were her mother changing her out of Mass clothes and into pageant ones: from paisley print and pressed collars to butterfly sleeves and chiffon. She remembered coughing in clouds of hair spray and squashing her little-kid feet into heels. And she remembered winning. A lot.
On the rare occasions Lila didn’t bring home prize money, she’d found that, to her parents, she was worse than a disappointment.
She was an obsolete.
It became rather a talent of Lila’s, understanding when and why she lost attention. Attention couldn’t be maintained every single minute. It had to be prepared for and guided. When Lila’s parents ran out of their ability to pay attention, Lila rotated to another source. This skill of hers did wonders on-screen. How does one become the person people look at in a room of a thousand girls who look just like her? One needed that ineffable yet scrupulously acquired quality. The kind that won pageants.
The kind that made headlines.
Lila understood that marriage and pregnancy would relinquish attention. People loved weddings, but they didn’t love married people. They loved babies, but they weren’t so fond of their sleep-deprived parents.
Yet she wanted to marry Francis in a château in the South of France and wake up with her head on his shoulder and hold their baby in her arms. So though it wasn’t strictly career-related, Lila Logan got married. She got pregnant.
With Lila’s own pregnancy, of course, she had known by her third prenatal appointment she was having twins. But—and maybe this was terrible (she’d never told anyone, not even Francis)—she had subconsciously assumed one of them would be stillborn like her sister had been. So she’d prepared herself for one baby and one death rather than for a family of four.
Rylan came first, smaller than average with a dark head of hair.This is it, Lila had thought when she held him.My child.
But then the doctor asked her to resume pushing. With the epidural, Lila couldn’t feel a thing except her baby boy, who was swiftly removed from her breast.
So Lila pushed, delirious. This was the afterbirth. The placenta.
But it wasn’t.
It was her daughter, Tia, who was born anything but still.
Tia screamed rather than cried, tiny tears that shone like diamonds rolling down engine-red cheeks. She was small and dark-haired too. Lila’s children matched each other far more than they did the woman who delivered them.
When the blood and the shit and the war of it all had been wiped away, Lila held her two babies, one in each arm. And as Rylan slept, a tiny hand pressed to Lila’s heart, Tia squirmed.
She was like that for seventeen years. Writhing to be freed from Lila’s arms, twisting when she was strapped into a seat, ducking when Lila went to kiss her head, and always vocalizing her displeasure with wails and shrieks and screams.
Did you put your mother through his hell?Lila once asked her husband after four-year-old Tia had drawn blood biting a classmate’s hand. Lila knew for a fact that at Tia’s age she had been an orderly, convivial child who was never violent and never in trouble.
Must be why she left me, Francis joked back. Lila had wanted to ask him more. Had an elementary-aged Francis been as aggressive as his daughter? Did he bare his incisors when he raged? Was his mother’s absence the reason for his poor behavior in high school?
Mostly, though, Lila wanted Francis to slide an arm around her and tell her his juvenile upheavals could never happen to their daughter. Tia had a mother, after all.
