Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

  I’ll pay you back, she says, as I hand her my parents’ credit card so she can give the number to the airline.

  It’s not my money, I say.

  I’ll pay them back, she says.

  * * *

  The day after she leaves I spend walking through an old school close to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh, now turned into a makeshift memorial: classroom after classroom, I stare at rows of murdered faces. Different rooms contain different sexes: board after board of men and boys; row after row of women and girls. Days later, I’m in Siem Reap and wake up before the sunrise. I’ve hired a young guy to drive me around Angkor Wat and we watch the sunrise through the main temple and I forget to take a picture, shocked still, each time I turn, that she’s not there.

  I imagine all those hours of her flying, nauseous still, I’m certain. I want to go to her, follow her home, if only briefly. I track the hours I know have had to pass to get her off the plane and somewhere safe and settled. Her sister’s there to meet her. They email from a hotel in Miami and I’m relieved that she’s in someone else’s care.

  I stay five more weeks and we write long emails back and forth the whole time. It is, in some ways, the best our relationship has been in months or years. From hostel hallways and internet cafes, in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, so alone that I go days or weeks hardly talking to other people, I can pour myself out loving her, knowing she will take in all of it, knowing she’s so many thousands of miles away and cannot come to ask for more. My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away.

  * * *

  A month later, in Florida, both of us are back with our parents while I wait for school to start. She calls, she texts almost every day. Her body’s changing but not enough that anyone but I and her family can see the difference. She’s tired and she’s sick but it’s not clear what of her nausea is hormones and what’s being afraid. We go for the same long walks on the beach we used to take in high school. We talk and talk except the tenor’s different. Everything feels heavy, everything is shaped and weighted differently by what lies ahead.

  * * *

  She goes out to California. She does not want to be the knocked-up girl in our small Florida town and though it smells a little like it was not wholly her choice, I understand why she wants not to know anyone in the place where she’ll become a mom. I am not privy to her conversations with her mother. She’s known me almost half my life but I’m not comfortable at their house anymore, afraid somehow that her mother finds me culpable. I imagine her mother wants her to have the baby somewhere where people won’t assume this is an aberrance, like her beauty and her brilliance, that her mom passed along.

  Her mother’s brother takes her in. She has a room overlooking their pool up in the hills outside LA where she reads and studies for her MCATs and waits for the baby. She says she wants peace and time to think, none of the people we grew up with asking how she’s doing, wondering out loud about the father; she doesn’t want her mother every day pretending this is all just exactly as she’d planned it all along. Sometimes, when she calls to tell me about what it feels like, the sound of her on the machine at the doctor’s office, where she goes by herself, the pictures that she texts of blacks and grays and whites that look like shadowy mush, I try to picture her as Mother, and it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s so concrete. She’ll have someone to love always, something sure to be.

  She says she’ll come back east and we can raise the girl together. I don’t ever quite acknowledge this because I think it’s just a thing she says to include me. I assume, when she’s there in front of her, she’ll go home to her mom. I’m back in grad school and she says she’ll find a job close by, apply to med school. The mystery of it, and the magic, has awoken something in her and, once again, I have flashes of feeling, somehow, that she’s found her way to a world I can’t quite touch.

  * * *

  They won’t know what happened when it happens. She’ll go in for one of the thousand checkups one has to go to in the final trimester, thirty-eight and one half weeks. They’ll attach her to the machine that checks the baby’s heart and there won’t be a sound and the doctor’s face will get stiff and her nose will wrinkle and she’ll fiddle briefly, almost calmly, with the machine. There will be quiet where there should not be quiet and she will sit and she will wait.

  We have to … the doctor will say.

  She’ll bring a nurse in.

  Is there someone you could call?

  * * *

  Her uncle shows up, silent, after she calls her mother, who cannot get on a plane until the next day with her sister.

  * * *

  Three days later they’ll induce her. I won’t be there. The labor will stall and they’ll have to cut her from her. More silence then, the shivering from the anesthesia, epidural; her teeth will chatter and they’ll pull the curtain just below her chest as they remove her. I’ll have the same thing happen, six years later, except when my baby comes we’ll hear her and we’ll hold her; I’ll make my husband open up his shirt so she can settle in against his chest as they stitch me back up—when hers comes out, the whole room will stay still.

  * * *

  I go to her three weeks after, once her sister’s gone back east to school, her mom’s flown home. She’s a blank, soft space, stiller somehow than I’ve ever seen her. I crawl into her bed with her the night I get there; every night I’m there I lie close to her and I’m not sure either of us sleeps but we lie quiet, bodies warm. It’s our first glimpse of death up close, but also, it’s our first glimpse of birth. We swim every morning in the pool below the room where she still stays in the house that seems always to be empty. We float and I try hard not to look for signs of her beneath her one piece. We walk to the farmer’s market close to the house and I try to make her dinner. I’m an awful cook but we get vegetables and fresh eggs and cheese and I make us large salads with store-bought dressing in paper bowls and we set them on our laps, the TV on most of the time, movies and shows we watched when we were teenagers. We walk and walk, we swim and eat, but hardly talk. The third night I’m there, I sit in her bed reading and she’s a long time in the shower and, every time she’s in the shower, I think I hear her cry. When she comes out, she has one towel around her hair and one held up at her chest and she stands in front of the full-length mirror in the room we sleep in. She wears underwear but nothing else and points to the still-smarting scar beneath her belly; it’s so low she has to hold her underwear down with her thumb to show me, and she pulls my hand over the length of it, rough and bright red, jagged. It’s proof, she tells me, eyes splotched red and swollen. That she was there.

  Nine days after I get there—because I don’t know what to say and I can’t help her, because she’s signed up for more classes and I tell myself that she’ll survive it; because all there is is empty space that I can’t fill—I hug her and I hold her and I make her promise that she’ll text me every day and tell me if and when she needs me; I’ll come back whenever. I fly back to restart school.

  * * *

  I don’t know why she doesn’t go home to Florida. Her uncle’s gone for work most of the time and she’s in that big, quiet house all by herself. It will be two days after I leave her alone in California before she calls a dealer, a guy we both know from high school who lives an hour away. He’ll sell her weed and pills and she’ll come back the next week. She’ll have just signed up for an MCAT course and claim the drugs steady her. She will have gotten Vicodin and Oxycodone to take as needed, whenever the pain gets to be too much, after the C- section. She’ll be told, just as I am later, to take it on a schedule, to get ahead of the pain.

  * * *

  I will text her, daily at first and then weekly. I will ask her how she is, but there will only be so many ways to say that she is fine, that she has no job or friends but she’s still there. It will be almost a month after I leave before we talk on the phon
e again. It’s the fact of trying to fill up all that silence, mostly, that keeps me from picking up the phone. She’s cooking most of her meals and swimming in the pool we swam in; she’s still waiting for her life to start.

  * * *

  She’ll ace her MCATs. When she gets into nearly every med school she applies to, I’ll see her mother post about it on the internet and I’ll send her a text saying Congrats and she will text back Thanks.

  * * *

  A long stretch of time will pass then in her absence. It will pass for her, and for me, but not ever together. I’ll talk about her sometimes, my oldest, dearest friend, I’ll say, and then I’ll turn red and have to go splash water on my face.

  * * *

  I’ll get married and she’ll come—she’ll be in the wedding—and it will feel strange how little she knows or even seems to want to know the man that I am marrying. She will sit next to me as I get my hair done—paid for by my mother—talking to me, just like always, thinner than I’ve ever seen her, her feet up on the hairdresser’s supply kit, her own hair loose and wild down her back. She’ll tell the woman, who twists my hair at the base of my neck, what best suits me. She’ll stand next to her at one point, loosening dark strands around my face. She’ll bring a man whom I remember only as pale and tall and, once, as I am walking among the different tables greeting people, as I’ve been told it is my job to be greeting people, I’ll see his hand slipped high up underneath her dress and watch her face stay flat and passive as he grins and the thin fabric of her skirt rises slowly up and falls again.

  * * *

  Years will pass then. She’ll become more frantic as I start to feel more steady. We won’t know how to be with each other without her there to guide us both. We’ll talk sometimes once a week and sometimes once a month. There will be gaping holes of space of missed calls and unreturned text messages, both from her to me and me to her; there will be hours—when I do pick up and she’s sad or angry; when she has met someone and it hasn’t gone well; when no one, nothing, is the thing she wants; when she needs to cry and rage—that I walk around our apartment with the phone pressed against my ear and try to think how else to say the same useless phrases that I’m saying, as my husband motions to me to just get off the phone because dinner’s ready, we have people that we’re meeting, I have more to read or write or grade and he hates the way I look emptied out right after, because he’s heard me say the same thing in different forms for hours now, then years.

  We’re dressed to go to dinner with a client of my husband’s who’s suggested maybe he’d be interested in opening a furniture store. It’s two years after he quit his job and one of the first of all the many times we wonder if our choices were all wrong. We’re walking to the subway and she calls me and I answer. I won’t go down the stairs until she isn’t crying anymore.

  What’s wrong with me, though? she says.

  Nothing, I say, and I mean it. You’re my favorite person in the world.

  She’s been broken up with. She’s aced every year of med school and has her pick of residencies across the country, but she still wants most of all, maybe just like everybody else, to feel safe and loved. Her mother and her sister are exhausted by her. They have patience for her for the first little while, but they, like me, get worn out.

  It’s cold out and my husband makes a show of pulling up the collar of his coat.

  I’m just tired, she says.

  I know, S.

  I don’t want to have to try at this again.

  We hear two trains come and go and she’s still talking. My husband says my name so she can hear.

  What’s his deal? she says, angry.

  Sash, I say. We have to …

  She cries harder and I put my hand over the phone.

  Just go, I say. I’ll meet you.

  My husband mutters something I’m glad I don’t hear, looks at me pleadingly one more time, and heads down the subway stairs alone.

  * * *

  A phone call I don’t answer and then don’t return because I am, I tell myself, exhausted, qualifying exams and building a dissertation. I send pithy text messages telling her I’m thinking of her, which, sometimes, I am. I miss her, desperately; I know no one like her. The people I know in New York all know me only as a grown-up; we’re polite and functional, make plans weeks in advance. Sometimes I think of her and want only to be with her. But then either I get her on the phone or just linger long enough on the thought of her to remember the her I miss is not the one I’d get if I called. Messages I listen to at first and sometimes, at first, respond to, then her name, on my voicemail, after a preliminary dissertation conference: her name with the blue dot next to it that means the voicemail has not yet been played, a deep breath in, closing the phone, the blue dot haunting me for days, then months. Whole years pass. And then just swiping right and tapping, watching as I disappear them, exhausted by the prospect of her needs that day; not talking to my husband that week, back in therapy because he cannot fix me and I am angry at him for not helping to fix me. Back in therapy because grad school health insurance might be the last good health insurance of my life. Boundaries are an okay thing, says the therapist when I talk about Sasha. But she needs me, I say. I’m pregnant, and he motions toward my stomach. I am partially in therapy because everyone’s afraid for me. Postpartum depression is a real concern, they tell me. Get rest, and focus on the baby, they say. I am not yet done with graduate school and also tending bar for extra money. She is not a child, says the therapist, about Sasha, as I hold my hand under my belly. You have plenty on your plate.

  * * *

  One year later, as I nurse our five-month-old around the clock while trying to write my dissertation, Sasha will eat a bottle of Oxycontin alone in her apartment close to the hospital where she’s chief resident, and she will have to take a leave of absence and her mother and her sister will fly out to be with her and she’ll send me a letter, asking me to come get her from the rehab where they sent her that she hates. She will not call me, not during and not after. I’ll write her back something dumb about how much I love her, but that I think that she should listen to her sister and her mother. I don’t love her. I don’t know what love is, she’ll say, in the letter filled with fury she sends back to me. What in the fuck, she’ll ask me, have you ever done for anyone but read and speak and think?

  THE CHILEAN WRITER eats a spoonful of the crème brûlée we’ve somehow ordered. I’ve talked and talked and now want mostly to be quiet. I hold my coffee with both hands.

  You were so young, she says.

  She was also, I say.

  What could you have done? she says.

  It’s a question that I’ve heard before and hate and want no part of.

  Shown up.

  And now? she says.

  We’re grown-ups, I say; we text. I stalk her on the internet once my children are in bed.

  And she’s pregnant? she says. She’s better?

  I don’t know what that means, I say.

  5

  MY HUSBAND’S TAKEN a job out of town for three weeks and I have to go in late to work while he’s gone. I keep asking for concessions. I keep sloughing off responsibilities on my co–homeroom teachers—kids I ask them to check in with, readings I want to make sure my students get for which I do not trust the twenty-four-year-old—and only think enough to feel guilty about it afterward.

  I’m pretty sure by now I won’t get fired no matter what I ask for. I’m a thirty-four-year-old J. Crew–cardigan-clad white woman with an Ivy-League PhD, and, though both of my co–homeroom teachers work harder than I do and are better at their jobs than I am, when the CEO walks from classroom to classroom to watch all of us teaching, she always reports back to the principal that she likes the feel of me.

  * * *

  I take both girls to school and it feels magic to get to do this daily. They fight with me sometimes and sometimes with each other and they cry and do not want those socks or that dress or that underwear and sometimes
they lie on the floor by the front door and scream because the seams on their shirt are rubbing wrongly on their collarbone again. But still, I get to hold their hands and walk them to the bus and ride it with them. I walk them each into their classrooms, and I linger, knowing that I’ll be late, as they sprint up to their friends. Sometimes, they sprint back, to kiss me on the leg, ask for one more hug. I put them in the running stroller early and I run them a loop around the park before school starts, packing my clothes and bag into the bottom of the stroller, changing in the school bathroom, locking the stroller up close to the school and going into work still smelling of sweat.

  * * *

  I’m scrolling through Sasha’s Instagram a week before my husband gets back: more vacations, coastal pictures. She went to see her sister. Her mother visits. I can only see above her chest in all the pictures; I wonder, though, if she was pregnant after all. I count the weeks between each photo, try to match them with the texts she’s sent. I imagine her close to due now, showing, surely. I reconsider making up a profile to befriend her spouse on Facebook.