When my father died, I’d said goodbye to his body, empty of his essence—Earl Porter in flesh but not in full. I was never a religious person, although I hoped the afterlife existed; all those artists and warriors and thinkers and lovers seemed awfully wasted if their only point was to kiss the earth once and leave. Seeing Dad in front of me without his fundamental Earlness had made me a believer in the soul, if nothing else. So I was heartened to walk into Eleanor’s darkened chambers and, after all this time, still not be struck by any absence of self. Her cheeks were pale, her skin was slack. The eyebrows she so frequently lofted in my direction lay chillingly still, as did she. But she wasn’t gone. There was a presence here. I realized then that as long as this was true, I’d be here, too.
The nurse gave me a stern just one minute expression.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, compelled to treat Eleanor’s bed with reverence, like a church. I sat down next to her, and unbidden, tears came, a flood that made a mascara-sodden mess of the hanky Donna had tucked in my bra.
“I fucked up, Eleanor,” I wept. “They’re broken. We’re all broken. We need you. You’ve got to get well and scare us all straight again, because I have no clue what to do or how to do it.”
I took her hand, papery and cool, and caught myself for a second before deciding to follow my instinct and lean over to kiss her forehead. A tear fell on her skin, and as I wiped it off, I leaned closer.
“Stand tall in the storm,” I whispered right into her ear. “I will if you will.”
CHAPTER TWO
Right, you’ve picked the photo of the screaming baby,” said the game show host. “Listen up. What percentage of our studio audience said it wants the Duchess of Clarence to sprog up in the new year?”
I groaned and tipped my head back in my chair.
“Sweetie, Eleanor doesn’t want to hear such rude noises,” admonished my mother from the screen of my iPad, propped up against a vase on the end table next to my wing chair in Eleanor’s sickroom.
“Maybe I’m doing it on purpose, to annoy her back to consciousness,” I said, glancing over at my New Year’s Eve date. Eleanor’s heart rate monitor beeped peacefully in response.
True to my vow at the state dinner, I had spent a lot of time at the Queen’s bedside. I’d argued with Richard that Eleanor’s prior invitations to her chambers meant she would consider me immediate family (and got surprise backup from Marta, who gave him a signature crack on the leg with her cane and gruffly said, “Get with the times, boy”). Sometimes I would sit there and say nothing while Marta, stationed across from me, pecked at various phone apps. Sometimes I ranted about the Cubs—we’d bombed out of the playoffs to the Mets, and I had a lot of feelings that only a comatose body wanted to hear—and sometimes I sketched. Dr. Google told me that reading to a patient in Eleanor’s state could be beneficial; two or three times I brought over Georgina’s notebooks and read her entries from the months when Henry Vane had taken over as their tutor. He’d provided a welcome and wise shoulder for the teenage Eleanor, on whom Queen Victoria II had started coming down hard in terms of etiquette and comportment, in anticipation of the line of succession swerving in her direction. Most often, though, I read the newspapers to her aloud, in case on some unconscious plane she missed her daily habit of plowing through them and would decide to wake up and do it herself.
“Can a succubus even get pregnant?” one of the comics on the show said, then laughed uproariously at himself.
“What are you watching?” Mom asked.
I squinted at the TV. “Some comedy game show about news polls, or something?” I said. “I’m betting hardly any of them want me to reproduce.”
“Wrong! A full 84 percent of our studio audience wants a bouncing baby Bex around Buckingham this coming year,” the host crowed.
“Fantastic,” I said, draining the last of my drink. “At least my uterus is popular.”
Richard’s big mouth had the effect he surely desired: It took the low-level bump-watch I was already under, simply by virtue of being a famous married person, and shoved it into hyperdrive. Us reported my mother had been spied browsing the baby aisle at Target (she had been, for a friend’s granddaughter). Clive opined that Nick should make sure any child of my body was actually his, and Xandra Deane wrote that I was forcing Nick into fatherhood so he didn’t desert my faithless carcass (a paraphrase, but barely). Everyone else started analyzing my weight: whether I’d lost too much, or looked puffy, was too thin to get pregnant or less toned than what they considered my normal. Somehow, all those opinions existed at once. The womb-watch was officially on, and since I couldn’t wander out into the street and invite people to Instagram me demolishing a pile of soft cheeses, I had to shut up and deal.
“But whose baby will it be?” one contestant asked. She pointed at Nick’s photo. “Won’t be his. Not after she bonked his brother.”
“You can’t spell Lyons without lie,” said the comic, to great
