At least she hadn’t knowingly wedged herself in between yet another couple, I thought as I walked away. I still couldn’t believe the irony of her telling me to punish my partner for leaving me, while all along she’d been sleeping with him. Sure, she hadn’t known I was Tyler’s significant other, but she’d known he had one. That they were trying for a baby, for Chrissake.
On the way home, I wondered if I could trust Damian. I had no clue who he really was. I had no contact information for him. No last name. How did I know he wasn’t steering attention away from himself? What if he was the scorned lover who, in the heat of rage and jealousy, had killed Katya and now wanted to get rid of Nick, the guy who’d fucked it all up for him?
I was in way over my head. This was the kind of information I should be going to the cops with but after being interrogated, I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. What if they didn’t believe me? Worse, what if I somehow implicated myself even more?
I had to talk to Nick. I couldn’t imagine he’d admit to it—if Katya had indeed given him the money—but I had to at least get a sense of what was going on before I even considered calling Robertson. I just had to make sure not to scare Nick. Ask him only about the green card marriage without mentioning the money.
I called Coogan’s as I headed toward the subway. A woman’s voice answered. “Yeah?”
“Can I speak to Nick, please?”
“There is no Nick here.”
I halted. “The bartender,” I said, confused. “Nick, the bartender with the tattoos.”
“Sorry,” she said, and hung up.
I stared at my phone and pressed redial. “Yeah?” The same woman again. She was clearly not in the habit of mentioning the bar’s name or asking how she could help.
“Hi, I’m sorry but this is Coogan’s, right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I was there last week and spoke to the bartender. Nick. Tall, skinny, shaved head, tattoos all over his arms.”
“He no longer works here.”
I felt a jolt. “Do you know where—”
“Nope.” Click.
I’ll be damned.
That bastard. It had all been one big performance, hadn’t it? Oh, I didn’t even know she’d gone missing. Oh, she stood me up. I’m so heartbroken. He must have waited for the cops to look elsewhere, and then he’d quit his job and split. Even if he hadn’t done anything to Katya, the little weasel wanted to pocket her money. Assuming he hadn’t put it in the bank—which seemed to have been the plan—the cops had no way of tracing it to him. Unless, of course, they had a reason to request a search warrant and found it stashed in his apartment. I dialed Robertson’s number before I chickened out. He picked up on the second ring, no greeting, just a cold, snappy “I’m listening.”
I hesitated. “You might still think that I had something to do with Katya’s death,” I began, “and maybe I’m stupid to be calling you, but this is really important.” I told him what I’d learned about Nick and the fact that he had conveniently disappeared.
“And how did you come to know this?” Robertson asked.
I recounted my meeting with Damian, painfully aware of how suspicious the whole story sounded. “I don’t expect you to believe me,” I said at the end. “I don’t even know if his real name is Damian. But I thought I should tell you about the money.”
“Thanks. We’ll look into it,” Robertson said, and I was about to exhale when he added: “We might need you to come to the station again. If any follow-up questions come up.”
My hand clenched around the phone. “Sure. Let me know,” I said and hung up.
Hungry and depleted, I hurried toward the subway on 96th Street. At the corner, just before the entrance, I spotted a Mexican food truck and slowed down, my mouth watering at the pictures of handmade corn tortillas piled with beef, onions, sour cream, and tomatoes. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was to cook. I might as well get a burrito and a couple of tacos and call it a night.
* * *
Back home, I prepared to binge on Netflix, resolved to put Katya, Tyler’s betrayal, and the loss of my job out of my mind. They were all linked to Katya in one way or another but I refused to think about it. The Mexican food wasn’t sitting well in my stomach and I curled up on the couch, going through the new releases. I’d just settled on a Showtime comedy series when the doorbell rang. “Are you kidding me?” I said out loud as I got up.
I opened the door to find Sam standing there, smiling awkwardly, hesitantly. She had leggings and running shoes on. Her thick brown hair was pulled into a loose ponytail.
“Is everything okay?” I asked. “Come on in.”
“Sorry for not calling first,” she said, and followed me inside. “Our phone conversation was a bit awkward the other day . . .” She let her voice trail off as she eased herself into the armchair. “Anyway, Mark’s home with the girls. I was going to go to the gym but thought I better stop by and see how you’re doing.”
I was touched. Sam was a good friend. I shouldn’t have been so short with her over the phone. Her brother’s mistakes weren’t her responsibility. “I’m sorry about the other day,” I began, “but I’d just learned about—”
She waved me off. “Don’t mention it,” she said, her eyes on the empty ice cream tub I’d polished off last night that was still sitting on the table, the smears left by the spoon on the carton crusted hard. My shoes were at the foot of the couch, where I’d kicked them off as I’d come in half an hour earlier.
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “I’ve been feeling pretty lousy today.” I picked up the Ben & Jerry’s container to take it to the kitchen. “It’s late for coffee but maybe a glass of wine? I’m afraid I don’t have anything else.”
She said she was fine, didn’t need anything, so I got us both water bottles from the fridge and a couple of glasses. If she thought our last conversation was awkward, this was proving to be worse.
“I heard about your job,” she said, and put her hand on my arm. “You must be devastated.”
“Who told you?”
Sam pursed her lips into an apologetic frown before she said, “Tyler.”
I sat up straight. “How the hell does he know?”
“I think your mother told him,” Sam said, her voice rising at the end as if she were asking a question.
My mother, of course. I should have never told her, but she’d called me yesterday afternoon when I was at my lowest, too crushed to bother coming up with an excuse for why I was at home so early. I wanted to scream. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse. I filled my cheeks with air and let it out through puckered lips.
“I just . . .” Sam began, paused. “I know things are really strained between you and Tyler—”
“Strained?” I blurted. “You know he left me, right? In the middle of our donor egg cycle? For the donor, who turned out to be his student. Or was it for the grad student the papers reported on?” I was breathless. The nausea had become really bad and I felt the blood draining from my face and hands. I closed my eyes, hoping for relief.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. But Tyler swears—”
“I’m sorry.” I got up and rushed to the bathroom. I barely had time to shut the door before I hugged the toilet. I wished I’d turned on the sink to drown the noise, but there wasn’t time.
“You okay?” Sam asked when I returned.
“Sorry, I had some tacos earlier.” I sank into the couch. “I guess the spices didn’t agree with my stomach.”
“Can I get you something?”
“I’ll be okay. Just give me a few minutes.”
Sam looked at me. Her eyes lingered on my swollen breasts. I could see the recognition light up her face. “Are you . . . ?” she began. “Could you be . . . pregnant?”
I couldn’t imagine lying to Sam. Not when she asked
outright. She’d been there for me, every step of the way, and now she’d come to check in on me. Penka had taken the news so well, I thought, surely Sam would, too.
I slowly nodded.
“Oh, my God,” Sam shrieked, and came to hug me. “But wait. When?” she asked as she pulled back and settled on the couch next to me.
That was the hard part. Admitting to what I’d done. It wouldn’t have been an issue had I just gotten pregnant naturally. “You know Tyler left just three days before the transfer, right? The embryos were ready, everything was set to go.” I looked down at my hands. “I didn’t have it in me to cancel.”
She stared at me, her mouth agape. “It was my last chance, Sam. I had to take it.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said, and looking at me tenderly, she smiled.
I sighed, relieved. “But please, you can’t tell Tyler.”
“What?” She pulled back. Her smile faded. “You mean he doesn’t know?”
“He left me, Sam. He did some horrible—”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “My brother is finally going to be a father and you expect me to—”
“But he didn’t want the baby. And the whole business with our donor . . .”
“Look, I can’t speak for Tyler. In all honesty, I’ve no clue what’s going on with him. But this . . . I’m sorry, Lana. He might be a jerk—and I understand how pissed you are—but you can’t keep something like this from him.”
I stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. “Sam, it was his choice. He walked out. This baby is all I have—”
“I don’t care what he did.” She stood up. “He ought to know he’s going to be a father.”
“Sam, please! I’m not even past the danger zone—”
She grabbed her purse and headed out. I followed, my stomach in a knot, a metallic taste in my mouth.
At the door, she turned. Her expression was pained, disappointed. She held my gaze before she said, “Lana, this is not okay.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “Please give me a chance to tell him myself.”
“Tomorrow. You have until tomorrow evening.” She turned and walked away.
I let the door slam behind her, feeling let down, angry, terrified. But deep down I knew she was right.
44.
LANA
NOW
At ten the next morning, Tyler was waiting for me at the entrance to Riverside Park’s Cherry Walk at 125th Street. I’d considered having him come over to the apartment, but I wanted the freedom to leave if and when I needed to. A coffee shop or a café was out of the question. He wasn’t the type to raise his voice in public and make a scene. But what did I know? I could no longer trust who he was and what he was capable of. Sitting on a bench would have been awkward; I would be fidgeting, uncertain what to do with my arms, crossing and uncrossing my legs, worrying that I was too close to him or too far. Better to talk while walking down a set path. It would be good low-impact exercise for me, too, I reasoned, as I laced my running shoes. The cherry blossoms would be long over by now so there shouldn’t be many people.
Only once I reached the underpass of the Henry Hudson Parkway and glimpsed the water, glittering in the sun, did it occur to me that we would be walking along the river. My stomach twitched at the thought of Katya washing ashore on the other bank. Then again, it might not be such a bad idea to have our conversation tinged with the memory of her at each step.
“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” Tyler said after we’d exchanged self-conscious greetings and headed down the path, the river on our right, hidden by a thicket of bushes, lush with spring.
I looked at him. “I called you.” My eyes lingered on his face. I’d forgotten how much I liked his cheekbones, the line of his jaw. His hair had grown long, beyond his usual short-crop cut, but I’d always preferred it that way. It gave him a boyish air.
“I know. But I’ve been asking you for so long and . . . what I mean is, thanks for talking to me one way or another.” He sounded confused, broken. “I need you to know that I didn’t—”
“I don’t give a damn, Tyler. Whatever you did, it’s your problem.”
“But I want to—”
“I listened to you last time. I let you tell me at length what a horrible partner I’d been—”
“I didn’t say horrible. I just pointed out some issues.”
“And you were right. I had lost track of reality, of the point of it all. I was working too hard. Not to excuse my behavior—but as a way of explanation, it helped having something to pour my energy into during the grueling infertility treatments.” I paused to take in the view. The river stretching ahead of us, lower Manhattan’s skyline in the distance. “The thing is,” I continued, as we resumed our walk, “after each failure, I put all my energy into the next cycle, hoping that it would be the one to finally solve the problem. Once we had a baby, I thought, then we could start building our life. But that time kept getting pushed further into the future.”
I stopped to zip up my sweatshirt. The wind had picked up after we’d left the buffer of bushes behind. We were now walking along the bank, just a small pile of boulders away from the water. Apart from the occasional bicyclist and a couple of joggers, we were the only ones around. It was late morning on a weekday.
“Along the way I lost the spark, the curiosity, the sense of adventure,” I continued. “I lost myself. And I guess I lost ‘us.’ In retrospect, it was largely because I knew the infertility was my fault—well, my body’s anyway—and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I just wanted to solve it.”
I felt him turn to me but I was looking at the ground, the large cracks in the cement snaking across the path.
“I tried to—” he began, but I raised my hand to stop him.
“You tried to reassure me. I know.” I looked at him. “I actually called you to discuss something else. But before I launch into it I just wanted to acknowledge that I heard you the other day and I see what you meant. We’re past it now.” I took a deep breath. “There is something else I need to tell you.”
We’d reached a section with linden trees, their sweet fragrance thick in the air. At a different time, I would have stopped and pulled on a branch, smelled the blossoms, maybe plucked a few.
“What?” Tyler said, and looked at me with such alarm that I thought of bailing out.
Years ago, when we’d first started trying for a baby, I’d pictured the moment I would tell him that I was pregnant. In my fantasy, he wraps his arms around me and lifts me off the ground and swirls me like a kid, before setting me back down and kissing me. Even later, after the initial and less invasive fertility treatments, when I’d still been using pee sticks, I’d held on to the hope of experiencing that moment. With the IVF cycles, the news came via a phone call. It had been nerve-racking, waiting for the damn phone to ring, for hours on end. I’d taken the first call at work. A negative. After that, I’d started taking sick days for the occasion. Tyler would stand next to me and hold my hand as I picked up the receiver.
The three times we’d gotten positive results, our joy was tinged with fear. Was it going to stick?
I looked at Tyler and clenched my fists. “Okay, here goes,” I said, but couldn’t continue. What if he got really upset and pursued some legal action against me?
We’d stopped in the middle of the pathway. A barge powered upriver silently. I could smell the water, splashing brown against the boulders. A hint of ocean salt in the air. Tyler was staring at me. The expression of dread on his face had given way to fear. “You aren’t sick, are you?” he asked.
“God, no. Why would you think that?”
He exhaled, visibly relieved. “I don’t know. You’ve been looking pale the last few times I’ve seen you. Your mother said you’d lost your job but, for all I know, you’d quit. And you have something to tell me but you have trouble say
ing it. . . .”
“I’m pregnant,” I blurted out. “There, I said it. You’re going to be a father, Tyler Jones.” I let out a long breath, relieved to finally have it out there.
He tilted his head, furrowed his brow as if he had trouble hearing. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
I told him how I’d gone through with the transfer as scheduled.
“You did what?” he said with a sharp intake of breath.
“I went against your wishes, I know, but I promise not to ask you for any support. You don’t even have to acknowledge paternity—”
“Is it for sure? How far along?”
“Almost nine weeks.”
“My God, Lana.” He stared at me, his forehead crunched, his eyes cloudy before, finally, a smile began to make its way onto his face. He hugged me and held me tight. His familiar scent, his arms wrapped around me just so, it all felt right, comforting, like returning home from a long hard trip. We stood like that, the river flowing beside us, birds twittering in the trees. It was a quiet moment—two broken souls finding a reprieve in the middle of a storm. In the end, I had to wiggle out of his embrace for some air.
“I hope that means you’re okay with it?” I said with a tentative smile. “You aren’t mad at me?”
“Are you kidding?” He hugged me again, then let go and just stood there staring at me as if trying to glean the baby growing inside me.
“Let’s keep walking,” I said. “It’s a bit chilly.” My T-shirt was soaked under the thin sweatshirt that was no barrier for the wind.
“What does Dr. Williams say?” Tyler asked. “Are we out of the woods at this point?”
I sighed. “There are some complications.”
He halted. “What complications?”
I told him about the hematoma.
“Fucking hell. That’s one issue we haven’t had yet,” he said. “There’s always something, isn’t there? But he says not to worry, right?”
“So far, so good.” We resumed walking. The path in this section was squeezed between the river and the parkway. Cars whizzed by at high speed. Just as life had passed us by during those eight years of trying. “I’ll keep you posted.”
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