PART 1 — ELEVEN FORTY-SEVEN
The message came through on a Tuesday evening in the December while I was still at my desk.
Trent Mercer.
I sat and looked at that name on a screen for about four seconds without any feeling in my hands.
Eight years since the man who told me he would love me forever took eleven days to file, from the evening I told him I was expecting.
He said I was lying. He said it in a kitchen and he said it again on a telephone. He filed before there was anything on a scan to look at. Then he changed his number and went, and I did not hear his voice again for eight years.
Now:
Christmas dinner at Mom’s, Hensley Ridge, the 25th. Family wants to see you one last time.
I read it three times.
Then I laughed, and not because it was funny, but because I knew precisely what that sentence was for.
Trent Mercer still had a twenty-five-year-old woman in his head. Devastated. On her own. Probably grateful to be asked.
My assistant Wynn was in my doorway with a folder.
“Kendra. You’re not going.”
I looked out at the city and said, “Oh, I’m going.”
Christmas morning was clear and hard and blue.
We lifted off at ten past nine with four children strapped into the back in matching red, because they had voted on it and I had lost.
I should say what those four knew before we got on that aircraft, because a great many people have since assumed I used them.
They knew all of it, at the level an eight-year-old can hold, and they had known since they were six and Beau asked directly at a kitchen table.
What I told them then, and have not changed since, is that their father did not believe I was expecting them, and that he chose to go before they were born, and that this was about him and had nothing to do with anything they had done, because they did not exist yet.
Zadie asked at six whether he knew there were four. I said no. She thought about that for a while and said, “That’s quite funny.”
The invitation I read out to them at the kitchen table in the December. All of it, exactly as it was written, including the words one last time.
Then I said they did not have to come, that I would go on my own, and that nobody would be in any trouble whatsoever for saying no.
They asked to talk about it on their own, which they do, which is a thing about four children the same age that nobody warns you about.
They came back after eleven minutes and Ike said, “We want to see what he looks like.”
That is why we went. Not my line. His.
“Mum, are we actually meeting our grandpa?” Ike asked.
“And Grandma?” said Zadie.
I said, “Maybe.”
Across from me sat two boys and two girls, eight years old, and every one of them has that man’s eyes and that man’s jaw and the specific way he used to set his mouth when he had decided something.
The man who ran from becoming a father became, without ever knowing it, the father of quadruplets.
We came over the ridge at about twenty to twelve and I could see the house before we were down.
At eleven forty-seven that helicopter settled on the front lawn of Roberta Mercer’s house and the snow came up off the grass in a wall.
I got out first.
Then Ike. Then Beau. Then Marlow. Then Zadie.
The front door opened before the rotors had stopped.
Bobbie Mercer came out onto the step with a glass in her hand and she got about three feet and then she stopped dead, and that glass went out of her hand onto the stone and broke.
I put my hand on Zadie’s shoulder and said, quietly, “All right?”
Four heads nodded at once, which is a thing they do and which I have never got used to.
We walked up to that door and the whole house went quiet.
Then I saw him.
Heavier. Greyer at the front. And the smile he had arranged for my arrival came off his face in about half a second.
Beside him was a blonde woman of about twenty-nine in a red dress with a ring on.
Trent looked at Ike. Then Beau. Then Marlow. Then Zadie.
And the colour went out of him from the top down.
The woman in red said, “Trent? Who are these children?”
He could not answer her.
I stepped into that hallway and every conversation in that house stopped.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
Nobody moved.
I said, “I’ve brought the grandchildren you didn’t know you had.”
Something dropped out of Trent’s hand and I did not see what.
Bobbie Mercer put her hand on the wall.
And then Marlow — who is the quiet one, who had not said a word since the helicopter — let go of my coat and stepped forward, and looked straight up at that man with a completely open face.
And she said, “Are you the man who didn’t want us?”
PART 2 — THANKSGIVING
I need to go back eight years, to a Thursday in the November, because everybody assumes the cruelty in this story was Trent’s and it was not.
I was twenty-five. I told him on the Sunday, at home, and he said I was lying and went out and did not come back until two.
On the Thursday it was Thanksgiving at Bobbie Mercer’s house on Hensley Ridge. About thirty-five people.
I had a scan photograph in my handbag. Seven weeks. It is a grey shape and a black shape and to anybody who is not the person carrying it, it is nothing.
Trent had not told his mother. He had told his mother nothing. He had spent four days telling me to get rid of it and I had spent four days saying no in a flat voice, and I went to that house because I was twenty-five and I thought his family would make him behave.
Somebody asked me a perfectly ordinary question about the following summer and I said, in a room with thirty-five people in it, that we would have to see because I was expecting.
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