Page 26 of Lost Dreams

It makes me wonder whether I should talk to Dad about giving Carter a job at the Lodge? There are certainly jobs to be had here. There are things that could keep us busy and stable until our baby graduates from high school. Ha! I can’t believe I’m already thinking about the baby’s graduation, only about a month before my own.

I know I need to tell Carter. But it’ll be tricky. He wants to call on the apartment we looked at in Manhattan and tell them we’ll take it. But now, I’m not so sure.

I need to think.

May 3, 1996

Today, I tried to explain to Carter what’s going on. When I told him I was pregnant, he told me, “That’s impossible, you can’t be pregnant, we’ve been so careful.” I told him, “Apparently, we haven’t been careful enough.” He didn’t know what to say. He told me he needed to think about it.

I don’t know what there is to think about, really. The baby is a factual thing. We need to think about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to bring a baby into the world and how we’re going to afford said baby—but that comes later. Why can’t we celebrate what we know to be true?

May 4, 1996

Carter didn’t come to school today. I didn’t know what to do, so I found Allegra in the hallway, and we went to the pay phone and called Carter’s home number. Nobody answered.

May 5, 1996

Still no Carter today. Everyone keeps asking me where he is, and I don’t know what to tell him. As his longtime girlfriend, I’m supposed to know whether he’s sick. I’ve lied three times to say that Carter isn’t feeling well, or that he has a doctor’s appointment. I feel like a fraud.

But where is he? All morning, I had morning sickness. All morning, I was throwing up and thinking about Carter, wondering if he’s abandoned me.

I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to raise this baby alone.

The entries went on, with Lorelei panicking about Carter’s whereabouts, and Carter not showing up to school. Eventually, Lorelei’s classmates seemed to understand that Lorelei didn’t know where Carter had run off to, and they began to pity her. This made things all the more difficult for Lorelei, who felt she had to hide so much.

As Aurora read, she grew increasingly angry with Carter Johnson—that handsome singer with the guitar outside. How had her mother let Carter back into her life? Did she not remember how he’d abandoned her?

And then, the worst possible thing happened in her mother’s life.

May 15, 1996

I woke up this morning to blood. There was blood soaking in my pajamas, all over my sheets. I got up and screamed, and Allegra woke up immediately and rushed me into the bathroom. We both knew in a moment that I was having a miscarriage. Allegra wanted to go get our mother, but I told her not to. I told her, “Nothing matters now. It’s over.” Finally, the blood stopped, and I cleaned myself up, put on a pad, and went to school.

All day, I wondered if people could see what had happened written on my face. I wondered if someone was going to pull me aside and tell me how sorry they were for my loss. But nobody knew a thing!

I’m emotionally devastated. I feel at the end of my rope. Carter is gone. Our baby is dead, and I feel that the future I’ve been planning for years is now dead as well. I don’t know how to approach the next years of my life. I suppose I’ll walk across the stage and graduate from high school. And then what? Will I spend the rest of my life on Nantucket Island? Will I ever leave the White Oak Lodge?

13

It wasn’t till the following afternoon that Aurora saw Lorelei again. By chance, she ran into her in the kitchen of the family apartment, where Lorelei was making herself a sandwich and reading something on her phone. Aurora remembered, now, that Lorelei had moved from the upstairs suite to one of the family bedrooms. Aurora chanced a glance to see that the text on her mother’s phone was from her father, something about reaching Rome and heading straight into work.

“Ciao, Mama,” Aurora said.

Lorelei nearly leaped from her skin. Fixing her smile, she said, “Hi, sweetheart. I haven’t seen you all day.”

Aurora had spent the morning in her bedroom, going over her notes for the next interview that she, Kenny, and Oren planned to conduct for their documentary. This time, they were going to interview Benjamin Whitmore—the son of Charles and the nephew of Edmund Whitmore. They wanted to get to the heart of that family tragedy of Edmund’s death through Benjamin’s stories. Of course, Grandpa Benjamin still didn’t know what they planned to interview him about. They’d suggested it was something vague about the White Oak Lodge and its history. They wanted to see genuine emotion. They wanted him to get reflective.

At least, that was what Oren had said. Aurora wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about surprising her grandfather with those particular questions. Then again, she hardly knew Benjamin Whitmore.

Now, Aurora opened the fridge and considered what to say to her mother, this woman she’d thought she’d known previously, whom, as it turned out, she knew very little about. Last night, via her mother’s journals, she’d discovered that, at age eighteen, her mother had had a pregnancy, her boyfriend had abandoned her, and she’d had a miscarriage immediately after that. That was quite a lineup. It was enough to change the geometry of someone’s heart.

Aurora searched her mother’s face for any sign of that pain. She wondered why Lorelei hadn’t mentioned it before. She wondered why, when Lorelei had come to Berlin to fetch Aurora after Sebastian’s accident, Lorelei hadn’t said, “I’ve gone through my own share of heartbreaks, too.” Aurora would have loved to know.

Aurora would have loved to know it more recently, as well—this past semester, in fact, when her life had very seriously fallen off the rails again.

Not that she was willing to think about that yet.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Lorelei asked now.