Pink balloons rock gently in the breeze beside the window Mum’s just cracked open. The weather forecast had been cloudy with partial rain this afternoon so we decided last night to move the baby shower indoors. But now the sun shines bright outside. Mum was up most of last night stringing paper lantern lights from the corner of the dining room to the edge of the living room, wrapping baby pink tissue paper around the legs of the table, and tying ribbon onto mason jars filled with creamy white votives. Their flames flickered now in the soft wind.
The downstairs has been completely transformed from its usual state of strewn pillows, empty Diet Coke cans, dirty dinner plates and celebrity magazines boasting the newest diet trend of the season – the Bee Pollen Smoothie diet, the DASH diet, Keto Cure. The old me would’ve bought into all of those at one point; now I have different priorities. Now I see things in a new light, perhaps in a clearer light. To me, anyway.
I was angry at Cara, Lily and Mollie for a long time after the pregnancy came out. I thought they’d judged me, that they’d turned away from me when I needed them the most. But in truth, they were shocked and confused, just like me. I’d shut them out as I had a lot of people. And now as they sit here in my living room, drinking pink lemonade from pink striped paper straws and gossiping about celebrities who’ve just had babies with their co-stars, I realise that I’m not alone in this after all. I’ve never been. I just didn’t know that, or trust that. And maybe once they go off to university and start their own lives away from Birchwood we’ll lose touch gradually, slowly drift apart like branches in a river. But maybe we won’t.
‘You OK?’ Mum asks, nudging me away from the dining table.
‘Yeah, great.’ I refill my lemonade tumbler, slightly overdosing on the amount of pink in this room, and rejoin my friends on the sofa.
Mollie pops up and wanders back over to the food, while Lily smooths down the edges of her mint green tea dress.
‘Pretty dress,’ I say, actually meaning it.
‘Thanks. H&M.’
‘I haven’t been in there in ages.’
‘You should. They have a nice children’s section.’ She sips her lemonade, then dabs her coral lipstick with her napkin. Pink, of course. Everything here is pink.
Cara turns her head back to the table and I wonder whether she’s eyeing Mollie at the sugar end of the display. She never could turn down a caramel eclair. But she whips back to me, and then again towards the table. ‘Luce, your mum?’
I feel a big smile stretch across my face. ‘Yeah, she looks amazing, right? She’s been doing really well the last couple of months, ever since I told her about this one here.’ I gesture to my growing belly, my fingers caked in icing sugar from the eclair I had just polished off. Best thing about pregnancy: indulging in every food craving. I mean, second-best thing about pregnancy, of course. The first is seeing Annabel’s little face as she enters this world. Annabel Sophia McNeil. I haven’t told anyone yet. I want her name to be a surprise. It was a surprise to me too. I finally succumbed and picked up one of the many baby name books my mum had bought me and before I’d hit the B names, I saw ‘Annabel’. One of the passages in the books associated it with ‘Love’, ‘Grace’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Favour’. It’s also a variant of Anna, my grandmother’s name. She died when I was seven, but my mum talks about her often. A black and white photo of her with my grandfather at a disco in Perth sits in a copper frame in my mum’s bedroom, which she now sleeps in. Gone are the nights passed out on the sofa with the remote control in her hand and an empty wine glass on the floor by a fallen pillow. This pregnancy – Annabel – has changed everything, for all of us.
I don’t know when it was that I decided to keep her. I can’t exactly pinpoint the moment I made the biggest decision of my life. It was as if one day I’d woken up knowing that I’d give birth to her and raise her, like it was never a decision at all but more of a sudden realisation. And then I started telling people. My mum first, then my dad, Auntie K, teachers and friends at school, neighbours. I even found myself making a joke that I couldn’t drink coffee for another few months at Jo’s BusStop Cafe by the school while proudly pointing to my swollen belly. It suddenly became not just acceptable to be pregnant, but just a part of who I am. I’m not just Lucy McNeil, high school student. I’m Lucy McNeil, Annabel’s mum. And I’ll be just that in every sense of the word, because I owe that to her. I owe that to myself. I’m going to be a good mum. And I don’t just tell myself that at night to calm the nerves. I think – I know – I actually mean it.
I’m going to be a good mum.
‘What are you smiling about?’ asks Cara, playfully nudging me.
I shake my head and merely rub my belly.
‘Love your mum’s new haircut. She should totally set up a profile on one of those dating apps!’ laughs Mollie, as she plops down in the sofa beside me, eclair in her hand.
‘One day, definitely. We’ll make sure she does. She’s cute for her age, right?’
‘I’d date her,’ shrugs Lily, peeling off the armchair to skip the song on my iPod.
‘You’d date anyone,’ mutters Cara, leaning into me.
‘Oi, I heard that!’
Taylor Swift’s new song blasts from the speaker that perches on the bookcase next to a gold-rimmed frame that up until last month used to hold a photo of my dad. Now a photo of my first scan rests inside, not quite big enough to fill the 5x7 frame.
‘Is Trina coming today?’ asks Cara, looking around.
‘She’ll be here soon,’ I nod. ‘She’s picking up the shower cake from Frederick’s.’
Mollie pulls half an eclair from her glossy sugar covered lips. ‘There’s cake? Oh no, why didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘You can have both,’ I laugh, gripping my stomach. ‘Ow.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘She’s just kicking.’
‘She wants cake,’ says my mum, walking past.
‘She’s not the only one,’ sighs Mollie.
‘Trina’s coming up the drive now,’ calls my mum, peeling back the lace curtain.
I slowly stand, still uncomfortable from Annabel’s kicking, and reach the door before Trina has had a chance to ring the bell.
She stands on the step, hands empty.
‘No hug?’ she laughs.
Wrapping my arms around her, I see a familiar figure shuffling up the driveway towards us. My throat suddenly feels dry and I no longer feel Annabel kicking.
Trina pulls away from me and bites her lip. ‘Guess who I ran into?’
Steve continues the slow walk up to me, then stops slightly behind Trina. His hands are full with a rectangular white box wrapped in a pink satin ribbon. More pink. He smiles, a forced smile, and holds out the cake to me, but I don’t take it.
He looks different today. He’s wearing a smart collared shirt in pale blue plaid, and ironed trousers. His shoes look like they’ve been polished to a shine by his mother. He clears his throat. Then he clears it again.
Trina looks away, feigning interest in my mum’s garden gnome that looks like Mick Jagger. I think that’s why she bought it. ‘Actually I think I might just go inside and see if your mum needs any help.’ She scoots in, leaving us alone on the doorstep.
He leans in. ‘Um…you have every right to just shut the door in my face, but I just wanted to say how sorry I am for how I’ve acted this year to you—’
‘To Sophia too?’
His jaw clenches and the cake box tilts slightly. ‘Especially to – to—’
‘Sophia. Is it hard to say her name?’
He nods and that’s when I see them; the tears in his eyes. My shoulders soften and a fluttering in my belly draws my eyes down. This is about her now, not us, and not the past. I have to stop pointing fingers at everyone else and accept my part in it too.
I inch the door away from us, opening it wider.
He takes a slow deep breath. ‘I can come in?’
‘It’s a full house in there,’ I mumble, shrugging my shoulders. ‘Just women “ooh-ing” over an unborn baby.’
‘I know. I’d still like to come in, if that’s OK.’ He smiles at me and this time it looks genuine. I suddenly remember the Steve I once knew, the Steve I became close friends with, the Steve Sophia once knew. He can’t erase the last year of our lives, the last year of Sophia’s life. But he’s trying. It’s a start.
‘Yeah, sure.’ I hold the door out and he walks through, cake still gripped in his hands. Probably squished by the way he’s holding it. I slowly close the door and hear Steve’s voice booming over the end of the Taylor Swift song. ‘Whoah. There’s a lot of pink in here.’