“It was the Empress. I found it in the dumbwaiter.”
“The dumbwaiters aren’t for guest use. I use those for housekeeping. To deliver the flowers and horoscope cards to each of the rooms without anyone seeing me move through the hallways upstairs. I feel my cover is blown,” Rini says with a tentative half smile.
“Your secret’s safe with me. Besides, I’m used to old homes. And the tarot card? Does it mean what I think?”
“The Empress is the number-one card to predict pregnancy. Was it right side up or upside down when you found it?”
“I can’t remember.”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s look at your chart.” Rini pulls out her phone and shows me her screen, but all I see is a bunch of dots and lines and symbols. “Jupiter will be transiting through Pisces in conjunction with the Moon in your fifth house in nine months. It could be a metaphorical birth, but given that Saturn is transiting through Ted’s ninth house at the same time, the context tells me it’s literal. I see it plain as day.”
I share with Rini that we’ve been trying to conceive for five years, unsuccessfully. “I’m so relieved to hear I didn’t mess up by waiting to make partner at my law firm before trying to get pregnant.”
“The law is an important part of your journey. You had to choose to be an advocate for others. Your chart is deficient in air signs, which means you have difficulties expressing yourself verbally. Your experiences in speaking up in conflict have often ended in devastating miscommunication.”
Logically, what Rini’s saying doesn’t land, but emotionally, it hits hard. Like a lump in my throat.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m choking on what I can’t figure out how to say. So I just swallow it all down.”
“These issues began way before you were born,” Rini says. “They have been passed down in your family lineage. With every generation, more lessons are learned, more healing occurs. You’re going in the right direction.”
My parents fought when I was a kid, and of course it upset me. But it was scarier when I knew they were mad and they ignored each other. The tension was so thick I couldn’t breathe. Any terse words passed back and forth were communication, clues for me, and I could track the progress of their resolution until I felt safe again.
I pick my head up to check on my brother and the rest of the crew, chewing the tiny piece of skin I’ve ripped off from my thumb.
“If you stop ignoring what you don’t want to see, you could find more confidence to speak your truth,” Rini says. “Margot, your family is figuring out a lot karmically. And even though your baby is coming, there’s much work to do.”
My stomach drops. She must be able to see Adam’s troubled marriage. I’ll have a child, but the rest of us will fall apart. Adam and Aimee will get a divorce, I’ll have to coordinate visits, Christmas will be broken up, school events will be tense. It will be a juggling act that I can’t manage. I’ll drop every ball.
“I feel like everything falls on my shoulders,” I admit.
Rini scrolls through her phone again before turning the screen to me. “This is Saturn. Saturn takes about twenty-seven years to orbit the Earth. Does that time frame mean anything to you?”
“My parents died in a car accident twenty-seven years ago tomorrow.”
Rini nods as if it all makes sense, but I’m not seeing the big picture.
“There’s something big coming to you around their death. Some new information, or a new perspective. It’s going to be a life-altering realization. Maybe a story that’s different from the one you’ve been telling yourself.”
“For that, I’ll have to ask Adam. He’s the storyteller,” I say.
“You are too, Margot. You tell yourself stories all the time. It’s what makes you a survivor. Maybe you’ve neglected the creativity of your Pisces stellium in favor of your hardworking, practical Capricorn Moon, but it’s there.”
The story I hear loud and clear is how I need to keep my brother’s marriage intact so I can bring my baby into a solid extended family.
Rini puts her hand on my forearm, her grasp damp and heavy. With her touch, I’m grounded in this very moment.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Rini says, her brown eyes shining black as night. “Getting what you want isn’t the same as getting what you need.”
Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of a shooting star, and all the dots connect. I would have missed it if Rini hadn’t laid her hand on me.
In third grade, we read a poem in which the author reimagines stars as openings in the sky where loved ones shine down to let us know they’re happy. After I heard that, I would make Nana bring us out to her country house in Southold a few times a year so I could see Mom and Dad. There were no stars at all in the city, and I hated to think that meant they weren’t happy. Or worse, that they were happy and they forgot to shine down to tell me.
Nana, Adam, and I would lie on Nana’s lawn bundled up in our winter coats and hats. Nana would point to different constellations and name all the people she’d lost. Back then I would talk to my parents in my head all the time, but I’ve stopped. I thought it was a child’s game, but I can do that anytime I need. Tears spring to my eyes.
“I should get back to the kitchen. S’mores in a few,” Rini says.
I nod. Rini taps the arm of my chair as she walks by me.
“Serena is a beautiful name,” I say, remembering the moment we met and she introduced herself. “Why don’t you use it?”
“It’s not me. Serena is a girl for whom the world is her oyster. That’s what my parents wanted for me when I was born. But that wasn’t my life in the end.”
Rini disappears across the lawn and inside the house. I turn my face up to the night sky and take in everything she said.
It occurs to me that if my parents are souls dancing among the stars, my future child might be up there waiting. I search the sky and point to the one that might be Serena Dylan Flynn. In the distance, not at all where I was looking, a light zooms across the sky. Another shooting star. It’s her.
“Serena,” I whisper, touching my belly.
My arrival-day fears were both right and wrong. Everything is changing, but nothing bad is going to happen. My family is coming.
FARAH
After dinner, Eden refills her wine and moves to the seat next to me. Eden and I have an unspoken pact to not discuss kids, motherhood, or anything tangential to either. It started the first time I met her. She asked me what I did for a living, and after I answered, she declared she was not having children. Clearly, she was set off by my work, as if I was going to force her into becoming a mother because I deliver babies for a living. She was still wrestling with the consequences of being open about her child-free status and expected me to preach and persuade her to change her mind. Quite the opposite, I revealed why I chose to become an obstetrician and how it had nothing to do with mothers as a whole, but instead, my mother.
My mother is a breast cancer survivor and when I went to med school I started with a mind toward oncology. Though she beat the cancer when I was too young to remember, I thought of her as a warrior. I could help other women be warriors too. But when I did my rotation in med school, I knew the field was not for me. Giving people bad news, counseling women through their lowest points, having patients look at me like I was the problem and not their source of wisdom—it was a far cry from my mother’s hindsight warrior story. I broadened my search to any practice that focused on women’s health, as it was consistently underfunded, under-researched, and largely ignored by old-school medicine. That’s when I found my calling. Being an OB-GYN meant caring for women through their reproductive life from the ages of fifteen to fifty-five. Dozens of stages of life. Long periods of slow changes. There was nothing better suited to me.
After I shared that, Eden relaxed, and when we saw each other, we often chatted about our favorite dark psychological TV dramas. But tonight, she has something else on her mind.
