CHAPTER SIX
Leah quit her job. She spent her free hours writing Cameron letters and never sending them. She stared out the window, knowing that it was only a matter of time before money ran out and she would be forced to return to work.
She gained forty more pounds. She was numb from head to toe, gobbling up every bit of comfort she could afford, but not really feeling it. She threw away her bathroom scale, and bought a whole new wardrobe, full of elastic waistbands and oversized t-shirts.
She went back to smoking. It didn’t give her much pleasure, but it gave her something to do—something to pass the tedious hours when she would have been at work. She smoked a pack a day, out on her balcony which faced a small patch of woods.
Her mother grew worried. She wasn’t answering her calls, and whenever she did catch her, she sounded flat and depressed. She paid her a surprise visit one April, and found her apartment in shambles.
“Good Lord!” she cried. Leah was wearing a sweatshirt stained with strawberry jelly and elastic-waistband pants. She looked up tiredly at her mother.
“I didn’t have time to clean,” she said. Connie marched into the bedroom, and found that the bed was unmade. The sheets were dirty.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” she said.
Leah didn’t have the energy to protest. She just rolled her eyes and said, “Whatever.”
She told everyone there that she was “Mary, Mother of Christ, Bride of God.” The doctors changed their diagnosis to “schizo-affective disorder.”
The patients all stared at her with google-eyes but she didn’t care. From then on, she didn’t care at all what happened to her.
The government started giving her money; said she had a disability and couldn’t work. Leah was apathetic. They said she should start going to a rehabilitation program full-time, and she said sure, why not.
She was the fattest that she was ever going to get, and her mind was on automatic pilot. She forgot all the passions of yesterday, forgot all the heartaches, forgot all the obsessions. She wanted nothing and strove for nothing. She was the ultimate non-person, and yet, she didn’t even care.
She started sending the letters to Cameron; she didn’t know why, she just did. Perhaps she’d read somewhere that it’s good to make a leap of faith. She sent them one by one, drawing on them with colored pencils, attaching stickers to them, then sealing them with gold seals. She never expected any replies. She remembered what had happened with Brendan, and she expected the same thing to happen with Cameron.
One night, after seventeen no-replies, she wrote a whole book. She filled an entire blank journal with page after page of personal information, crazy thoughts, and delusions. Basically, she poured her heart out to him. The next day, she slipped it into an envelope and mailed it.
She got no reply. There was only one thing left to do. Say good-bye. So on a beautiful card embossed with silver butterflies, she bid him farewell.
A week later, in the darkness, he appeared in her bedroom. She didn’t know how he had gotten in, but then remembered that she had probably left the front door open.
He left as quickly as he had come. And he never returned.
She lost weight. The pounds slipped off easily once she stopped eating to pass the time. Her skin was hanging a bit, but once she joined a gym, she tightened up quickly.
She was twenty-eight. She moved to Minneapolis and found a part-time job at the Times. She worked diligently, and soon, her boss was pleading with her to take on a full-time position.
One day, she looked around and realized that no one remembered the incident with Brendan Caldwell. Either that; or they simply never heard.
He was a big-time star now. He was taking lead roles in prominent films, gaining favorable publicity all around the world. Girls fawned over him, screamed when he appeared in public, threw their panties at him, that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, Leah was working her hardest. She soon made it to the top, earning her place as one of the paper’s staff writers.
She made a circle of friends. She shopped at the fashionable boutiques and bought a handful of party dresses, which she used at night during dinner parties and the occasional club outing.
She met men, and it was her rule to let them come up on the third date. She did not love her men, but enjoyed their male company with casualness and abandon. She enjoyed her sexuality at this point, and did not hesitate to express it to the best of her abilities.
By this point, she knew that Brendan and Cameron were never going to be a part of her life again. Oftentimes with her men, she would pretend that she was making love to one of the two, either one it didn’t matter.
One night, her lover pulled away to say breathlessly, “You’re amazing. It’s like I’m in bed with a different woman every night.”
Leah closed her eyes and continued the fantasy, falling into it as though she were sinking into a warm, comforting pool. That night, it was Brendan. She realized, with irony, that probably millions of girls were having the same exact fantasy.
And she realized that, out of the two, she had never slept willingly with Brendan.
In the morning, her lover was gone. She gingerly picked up one of her shoes, which had landed in the wastebasket, and sat down on the edge of her bed. Sheets draped around her naked body, she sighed.
The at-home pregnancy test was pink. Leah blinked her eyes, reaching for her glasses.
She was not shocked. A little surprised, maybe, but she had been practicing unprotected sex for months now, and her period was two weeks late. She never got a late period, not even when she was overweight.
She dropped the plastic test into the tub and prepared to call her mother. She was not going to happy, even though Leah was approaching thirty and had ample financial resources to take care of a baby. Her mother held onto her traditional Christian values tightly, and knew nothing of her daughter’s recent promiscuity.
It wouldn’t ruin her, Leah thought. She would have no reason to hang her head in shame, considering the history of their extended family.
And Leah wanted the baby. She didn’t care how greatly she would have to alter her fast-paced life, how much stress she would have to endure. This child was a part of her, and she could not deny the pull it already had on her heart.
Her mother, of course, sounded disappointed. “I am concerned about your mental illness, Leah,” she said. “Do you really think you’d be a stable enough mother for the child? Some years you’re thriving, others you’re deteriorating.”
Leah was hurt. It had been a long time since she’d been in the hospital, and since then, she’d shown rapid improvement. She hoped her mother wasn’t implying that she would be some sort of “Mommy Dearest” or something.
And she wasn’t entirely sure that she was mentally ill. After all, what did she have in common with the people whose stares were blank and absent, that time when she walked into the room when she was a teenager? She had her problems, that was well established and certain, but Leah was positive that there was a difference between her and the rest of the people she’d met with illnesses of the brain.
She was an up-and-coming journalist, becoming more and more famous. She put words and thoughts together effortlessly. How could they say that she truly had a disease which one of the main symptoms of was confusion?
Leah realized her snobbishness before she went too far. Even still, it did not match the self-righteousness and self-centeredness of her youth. She realized that she was trying to justify her motherhood, and she was becoming defensive in the process.
She sat back against her chair, submitting to her condition.
They wouldn’t likely take her child away; she had a thriving career and a fairly long track record of stability. She relaxed, rubbing her abdomen.
She was happy. And that was all that mattered to her then.
She continued to work while she was pregnant. They all knew that she was going to take maternity leave, and a couple of weeks before the due date, they threw her a baby shower.
Leah’s cheeks were plump from the extra fat as she held up a pair of knitted pajamas and smiled big. “Thank you,” she said. “But my baby is going to be a boy. Pink hearts and butterflies are kind of girlish, don’t you think?”
Her co-worker blushed. “Oh my gosh, you’re right. I totally forgot.”
“That’s okay,” Leah said. “My boy will grow up to be a gender-sensitive man.”
The baby came. Leah wailed as her friend drove her to the hospital. “Get me the epiderral!” she screamed.
Hunter Logan was born on August ninth, and weighed six and a half pounds.
She took him home bundled in a soft, cotton blanket. She couldn’t stop watching his face; the way his skin was so scrunched up and his eyes were almost closed, and how he looked out with wonder at this strange, new world.
Leah touched his tiny hands and fingers, which clasped hers. He made soft gurgling noises as liquid came from his mouth. She gently wiped it away and caressed the rest of his face, feeling a love and a bond so powerful that even she could not have imagined it.
At home, she placed him in the crib that she had bought with some friends a few weeks before the due date. He immediately fell asleep, but Leah didn’t want to leave his side. She watched him with hushed awe, not totally sure if he was real, half expecting him to disappear into thin air.
That night, she retrieved her comforter and pillow from her bedroom, and slept on the floor of the nursery beside the crib.
Seven months later, stressed from taking care of Hunter, but happy nonetheless, Leah reluctantly returned to work. She’d hired a nanny to watch her son during the day, and at night, she gave him her full attention.
She loved him with fullness and abandon. He was her waking thought, her worry, and her hope. She made eager plans for his future, and dreamed about what surprises lay ahead for them.
Her friends were supportive, but they saw less of her now. Their lifestyles were different. Whereas they liked to go to clubs and parties, Leah stayed home and watched her son. Her social life slowed to a halt, until the only people in her life were Hunter, her parents, and her nanny.
She went on for three years like this. She worked, came home, played with Hunter, and went to sleep. It continued on for such a long time that her mother became worried again.
“You need to find a man,” her mother told her on the phone once. “Hunter’s got to have a daddy at some point.”
Leah was shocked. She had not even thought about men in such a long time that the idea seemed ludicrous to her. It had been over three years since she’d had sex, and to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t looking.
Connie set her up on a blind date with an Italian man from her church. His name was Robert, and the date was a disaster. They barely spoke two words to each other the whole time, and Leah was fidgeting in her seat, worrying about Hunter.
She was relieved when the date was over. When she got upstairs, she called her mother and said, “Please. Don’t ever do that to me again.”
She started to date again, but slowly. She met nice men through work or through the day-care center, but almost always they were all wrong for her.
That’s when she met Duncan Edwards. He was picking up his four-year-old from preschool when Leah noticed him. She was wearing a burlap sundress that accentuated her curvaceous figure, and simple make-up consisting of wine-colored lipstick and some light powder. She had long ago dispensed with her routine of heavy make-up, and now opted for simplicity.
He, on the other hand, could never have been described as “simple.” He was older than the rest of the parents, his dark brown hair peppered with gray and his brown eyes sultry and penetrating. He was wearing a business suit and a navy blue tie, but his attire could not mask his athletic physique. “Which one is yours?” Leah asked casually.
He looked up at her. “Actually, I’m here to pick up my granddaughter. She’s the one in the corner, playing with the boys.”
Leah looked up coquettishly at him. “You don’t look old enough to be a grandfather,” she commented.
He smiled. “I married young. My daughter got pregnant when she was a teenager.”
“Oh.” Leah looked around. “How long have you been married?”
“Actually, I’m divorced,” he said regretfully. He looked down pointedly at her finger. “I don’t suppose you’re married, either?”
She blushed, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “Single parent,” she said apologetically. “Hunter never had a father.”
He was more attractive than he had been from across the room. She realized, then, that she had not had such school-girlish feelings for a man in quite some time, and the feeling left her bewildered and scared. “You don’t need to apologize,” he said softly. “It happens all the time. Believe me, I know.”
He seemed to genuinely understand. Leah smiled up at him and paused. “Would you like to have lunch with me some time?” she asked forwardly.
He looked taken aback. Then he answered, “Well, of course. I’d love to.”
They ate at a trendy restaurant downtown during office hours. They engaged in lively conversation, stumbling over each other’s words, laughing at their own mistakes.
He invited her over to his house afterwards and she accepted. When she got through the door, she gasped at the beauty and the vastness of it.
The ceilings were high and hung with chandeliers and oak beams. The hardwood floors shined with a high gloss, and the open spaces were so large that every sound echoed within them. The furniture was luxurious and expensive, and the bay window at the back gave a large, sweeping view of the Minneapolis skyline.
She dispensed with her purse and made herself comfortable in a soft chair in front of the fireplace. Duncan, who had gone into the kitchen, reappeared with two wine glasses and a bottle of perinon blanc.
“You’ll have to watch out for me,” Leah said. “In high school I used to be a bit of a boozer.”
“Were you, now? I’ll just have to get you drunk and see for myself.” Leah smiled. He proceeded to pour the chilled wine, then handed one to his companion.
“Cheers,” he said.
She raised her glass. She drank quickly. But the alcohol went straight to her head. She asked Duncan if she could lie down somewhere. He led her to a guest bedroom and said that she could take all the time that she needed.
She woke up to hot, insistent kisses. They were moist, and inviting. She was still dizzy but the fire in her body propelled her to kiss whoever it was back.
It was dark in the room. The shade was almost completely drawn, but a little bit of sunlight peeked out from underneath it. She raised her lashes slightly to see who it was, and saw that it was Duncan.
“Wha-what are you doing?” she breathed.
He said nothing. He captured her in an even more powerful embrace, kissing the nape of her neck, the space between her breasts, her abdomen, her thigh. Leah sighed with contentment. She breathed him in deeply, smelling the scent of his masculine cologne. He wanted her, and she wanted him.
By the time she got home, her nanny was screaming at her. She had missed a full day of work and had arrived home late without calling.
Leah marched in nonchalantly, and hung her purse on its peg.
When she went in to go and kiss Hunter, the nanny tried to stop her. “No, Leah, he’s sleeping. I’ve been trying for hours to get him to sleep.”
She pushed past her. “Let him wake up.”
“Fine, then, you put him back to bed. I’m not going to deal with the consequences.”
Leah spun around. “Do you want to still work here?”
The nanny stood there in shocked silence, then bowed her head and went into the next room.
Leah crept into Hunter’s room, feeling the tears beginning to fall. “You’re my son, after all,” she said, but even as she said it, she felt him slipping away. It was beginning again. The same wild, impulsive person was coming out in full force, awakened anew by the possibility of control.
She kissed him, and left.