Now with a single look he managed to convey something along the lines of “You are—no joke—the world’s coolest sister. I mean, seriously, your generosity and kindness are beyond colossal, and even though in a classic Toby dumb-shit move, I totally neglected to run this by you beforehand, and even though you and Teo just moved into this awesome house and were probably into the idea of some alone time, I sincerely hope that you’ll let me hang out for a while in this my hour of need. Because you rock.”
“Oh, Toby,” I groaned.
“You’ll hardly know I’m here.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Mostly I’ll be, you know, elsewhere, waging my campaign to get Miranda to let me move in. Like a siege. This’ll just be my base camp.”
“What a lovely metaphor.”
“Love is war, right? Oh, and I have a lead on a job in Philly, so consider me a renter.” Toby smiled a smile calculated to melt my heart. I glared, first at his cheeky expression, then at his sweaty Gatorade. No, I thought, no way, not this time, buddy boy.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “no, no, no, no, no.”
He kept smiling.
“I said no.”
“And this is a no-means-no situation?”
“Yes,” I said vehemently, but of course it wasn’t. When I began to whack the heel of my hand repeatedly against my forehead, Toby tackled me in a bone-crushing hug, crowing, “I knew you’d let me stay, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…”
“Get off me, you Saint Bernard.”
I pushed him away, and said, “And I’m not letting you stay. I’m only saying I’ll discuss it with Teo.”
“No need,” he said, cheekier than ever, “I caught him on his way out to drive Clare back this morning. He gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.”
Just as I was commencing to stew and mutter about this, the doorbell rang.
Toby scrambled to his feet, and said quickly, “Uh, and I have, like, one other piece of news? But it can wait.”
At the expression on my face, Toby said, “No, no, it’s good. It’s amazing, actually. You’ll love it. I love it. Right now, though, gotta get the door.”
I stood up and stamped my foot. “Toby, just tell me. Now. This minute,” I commanded.
Toby did not do as he was told. Instead, he bounded over to the door and flung it open. Lake stood there in a purple felt cloche hat, holding a chocolate cake.
“Cool,” exclaimed Toby, wide eyed. “How’d you know it was my birthday?”
“Ah. You must be Toby,” she said dryly, but the way her mouth was twitching at the corners told me that Lake would pass the Toby litmus test with flying colors. “I’m Lake. I think you met my son, Dev.”
“Yeah, right. Dev’s a nice kid. A dim bulb and all, not a lot going on upstairs, but nice.” Toby grinned and held out his arms. “So, Lake, may I take the cake?”
“Oh, please,” I growled at Toby, with a look that said I am not finished with you by a long shot, “when in your life have you ever done anything else?”
I was happy to see her. It was a complicated, wary happiness, since the last time I’d set eyes on Lake, her face had swiveled shut and told me lies, but it was happiness all the same. And there was something else, too, some feeling I hadn’t felt toward her before. Not pity, exactly. Call it tenderness. Despite not having known her for long, I’d seen a surprising number of Lakes, and the Lake who stood newly cakeless in my foyer, purple hat in hand, was not one I’d ever seen before.
She seemed to have bigger eyes and to take up less space. Even her hair seemed tamer. And she stood differently. She didn’t stand on the earth as though she owned it, absolutely sturdy, as though a different, better gravity worked on her than on the rest of us. Mostly, though, it was the look in her eyes that had changed. The arch blue burning was gone. Lake looked at me and around my house with this odd combination of worry and eagerness, as though she’d lost something and needed it back, as though she were hoping she might find it there, but was so afraid she wouldn’t that she wasn’t sure she even wanted to look.
It hit me then: Lake needed a friend, probably more than I ever did. She wasn’t desperate (I thought that in her own way, Lake must be as immune to quiet desperation as Toby), but she needed a friend, and her need made her fragile as I’d never imagined she could be. So, with the sudden tenderness tugging on me like a gentle current and because I’ve required enough second chances myself to be a true believer in them, I took three big steps toward Lake, hugged her, sat her down, and made her talk.
It didn’t take much. The story was right there, ready to be given away. Sad and full of loss, but also a love story if I’ve ever heard one.
The story started before Dev was born, with the pre-Dev Lake, a smart, utterly lonely Midwestern girl who’d found herself in the center of a Cinderella tale. “I wasn’t that exceptional. But I grew up in a town where nothing was exceptional. I was it, the point-to girl. As corny as it sounds, I was hope.”
When she was named a National Merit finalist, the local paper did a long, glowing article, with photos of her with her beaming parents—“My SAT scores made the front page, literally”—and followed up with a series of articles tracking Lake through her senior year of high school.
“My father had always been a silent, angry guy. Still waters run deep and shark infested. They’d pop up now and then and bite. But whenever the reporters showed up at our house, the guy became a charmer, the proudest papa you ever saw.”
“What about your mom?”
“She wanted so badly for me to get out, to go somewhere and shine. I think she’d wanted that for me since the day I was born.”
The Sunday before Lake left for Brown, her family’s church had thrown a party for her. “It was supposed to be for all the graduates who were going on to college. There were four of us. Two were going to the community college down the road. The other one, a girl named Beth Wolter, had deferred her acceptance to the state university because she was pregnant. So the party was really for me. Pretty much the whole town came. I hated it and loved it, and I hated that I loved it.”
She’d gotten pregnant with Dev at the end of her sophomore year, except, of course, back then she didn’t know that it was with Dev.
“My boyfriend from home drove all the way out to pick me up. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I remember sneaking around the house to the back door like a burglar and seeing my mother’s face through the kitchen window. She was peeling potatoes at the sink, and I just stood there thinking, ‘She doesn’t know. This is the last time I’ll see her when she doesn’t know what I’ve done.’”
When Lake told me the next part, her voice hardened. “It was like a fucking tidal wave had hit our house. I knew it would be bad, but it was so much worse than I’d thought it would be. My dad was a lunatic, of course. I’d expected that. But my mother was a thousand times worse. And what’s so strange is that even while she was saying awful things to me, I understood that she wasn’t disappointed in me, like my dad was. She wasn’t thinking about what the neighbors would say. She was disappointed for me. God, it was insane: these two conservative, churchgoing people screaming at their upstart liberal daughter to have an abortion.”
After a tiny hesitation, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
Lake gave a wry smile and said, “The million-dollar question.” She sighed. “I’ve been pro-choice since the day I learned there was such a thing as pro-choice. Way before I went to Brown. And two years before I got pregnant, I was calling Beth Wolter a fool for not having an abortion.”
She took a sip of coffee. “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. Why I did what I did. And what I think is that growing up, I was always alone. I never felt like I fit in with anyone. My mother told me it was because I was special.” Lake laughed a short, bitter laugh. “The way she described it, it was almost biblical, like I’d slid down a beam of light straight from heaven into this dark, depressed town. I know I was smart. Not as smart as Dev. I never
had the fun with it that Dev has, puzzling things out all the time.
“Anyway, I kept waiting for the day I could leave and find my place, my people. But when I got to college, it was all rich, beautiful kids. I know it’s not possible, but at the time I could’ve sworn they all knew each other. From summer camp or boarding school or some island where their families all hung out together laughing, with tinkling drinks and white shirts and blond dogs running around.”
“Wasn’t there anyone who you felt at home with?”
Lake looked at me for several long seconds. “There were one or two people who were important to me. Or who I could’ve let become important to me. But it just didn’t happen.”
“Maybe you wanted a reason to leave.”
Lake nodded. “Maybe. It was more than that, though. When I found out I was pregnant, my first thought was ‘Now there will be another person like me.’ That probably isn’t a very ‘healthy’ reason to have a baby.” She shrugged.
Lake had left and never gone back, left with Dev’s father, Teddy, a restless twenty-one-year-old, a nice boy.
“He thought it was an adventure. Get the hell out of Dodge, you know? But after Dev was born, I could tell Teddy was in over his head, and he was the kind of person who would’ve done the right thing until it killed him. But his heart wasn’t in it. So I took Dev and left.”
“Has Dev ever met him?”
Lake shook her head. “I call my mother now and then. Not often. But Dev and I haven’t seen anyone from back home. It just seems easier.”
I tried to imagine not seeing my parents for fourteen years, how not seeing them could possibly be easier than seeing them. I failed. But Lake’s parents aren’t my parents. I am not Lake.
Lake looked down at her coffee. When she looked up, the fierceness was back in her eyes. “I just wanted him. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”
I understood this kind of wanting, and because my eyes were suddenly full of stinging tears, I got up from the table and went into the kitchen. When I got back, Lake was in the living room, holding the double-photo frame that sat on our mantel. In both photos, Teo and I are side by side, grinning like demons. One was taken on our wedding day, the other some twenty-five years before.
“The dynamic duo,” I said, smiling.
Lake set the picture down quickly, looking confused. “You two, you’ve been together since you were kids?”
I laughed, “Well, not together-together. We grew up a few houses down from each other. Our parents are best friends, and all of us—Ollie, Toby, Cam, Teo’s sister, Estrella, Teo, and I—we were like one, big, loopy family. But Teo and I took our time falling in love.”
“How much time?”
“It’s just been a few years.” I felt embarrassed by how cozy and sweet this must sound to Lake, how easy. But Lake smiled at me and plopped herself down on my couch.
“It must be—comfortable, being married to someone you’ve known for so long. I bet it feels homey,” she said, “familiar.”
I considered telling her the whole truth, that, yes, it was comfortable; it did feel like the best kind of home. But also how loving Teo could feel anything but familiar, how it could mean walking a fine silver edge between exhilaration and ache, and how there were long moments—entire mornings even—when focusing on just one aspect of him—the back of his hand, the colors in his face, his voice—was all I could manage because the whole of him might overwhelm me. Or how I’d lie in his arms in bed after making love, luminous with gratitude and thinking the words: I am poured out like water, I am poured, I am poured out, I am poured out like water.
Even our shared childhood, the parts of Teo’s story I’d carried around with me as casually as I’d carried anything and for as long, could become almost unbearably present and precious to me: that the man on the edge of the bed, putting on his blue shirt in the dark, was once the boy who slept in a tent in his backyard for the week following the death of his grandfather would hit me with all the force of past and present both and make me want to weep.
Or this: As Teo knelt before me with his head in my lap, grieving for our lost pregnancy, time became a telescope closing, and the eleven-year-old kid he’d once been was suddenly right there in the room with us, the boy who’d dragged me out of my warm house and up to the roof to watch the Leonid, his face exultant, counting streaks of light under the miraculous sky.
Could I tell Lake any of this? Would she want to hear it?
I said, “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.”
“And your parents,” she said, “all four of them. I bet they’re clamoring for grandchildren.”
“Oh, well, you know,” I said, shrugging.
“So what about it?” she asked. “What’s your timeline?”
I should have told her then. Everything pointed to it. Lake had just told me the story of her life, and I felt closer to her than I ever had. Surely she deserved to hear what I was desperate to tell: the miscarriage at fourteen weeks, fourteen, just as we’d gotten the first, risky trimester behind us; blood on the white floor; me doubled over with my arms around myself, trying to hold it in, keep it safe, saying, “It’s okay. I promise. I promise.” I was still bleeding when the towers fell, and I spent weeks afterward torn between consolation and despair: between finding my own loss so small, so feather light and bearable compared to the huge, shattering, manifold losses of that day and feeling—selfishly, I know—that the devastation on television mirrored my own.
Entirely by accident, for reasons I still don’t understand, but that perhaps had something to do with the pure, feral grieving I’d heard on the other side of Piper’s door that afternoon and with her eyes when she looked at Elizabeth, I had turned this story over to Piper. Piper, who didn’t even like me. I’d trusted Piper, and even though she’d shaken off the moment of my trusting her with one toss of her blond head, I found—and I understand this even less—that I didn’t quite regret it.
If I could tell Piper, I could tell Lake.
But I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know that we have a timeline. Whenever it happens, we’ll be glad.”
We were.
Two days later: pink lines in a plastic window.
All those Annunciation paintings had it right: the descending angel, white lily, cascading light, the woman’s face bespeaking humility, fear, elation, or all three at once. It should be momentous, an announcement accompanied by singing choirs, auroras of gold.
Even a blood test, a doctor striding forth in a lab coat bearing tidings of great joy would feel more fitting.
But however I got the news, I got it.
When Teo got home, I was sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. He sat down next to me, and he must have seen something in my face because he didn’t say anything, just picked up my hand and pressed it against his mouth.
“I’m five feet tall,” I told him. “Will you love me when I’m spherical?”
And there it was, around his face for maybe half a second, an aurora of gold. “Cor,” he said. Latin for heart. A nickname he almost never uses, one so private, it’s almost a secret from us, too. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to love you when you’re spherical.”
He kissed me. I kissed him back.
“So,” I ventured finally, “are we opting for cautious optimism?”
Teo smiled his beautiful smile. “No way. Full speed ahead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not even optimism. Are you kidding? Jubilation. Incautious jubilation.”
This is why I love my husband.
“Okay, then.” I pressed Teo’s hand to my belly and looked down at it. “You hear that in there? Your father says incautious jubilation, so incautious jubilation it is!”
And it was.
ELEVEN
In the last weeks of Elizabeth’s illness, when she had the presence of mind to want on her own behalf, Piper wanted to remember everything, wanted to store every image, word, and hour, even the bad ones. But time
moved so erratically—screeching by; slamming to a whiplashing halt; limping with excruciating slowness, like an injured animal—and there was so little left for sorting or reflection that a lot got lost. Even so, Piper could pinpoint the precise moment at which she and Tom had become allies, a single force: exactly two weeks before Christmas, a pocket of stillness, no words exchanged, two sets of blue eyes locked together over the heads of children.
It had been lullaby time at Elizabeth’s house. Wednesday evening. Kyle had finished work at a reasonable hour, for a change, and was at home putting Carter and Meredith to bed, and Tom was on his way back from taking Elizabeth’s mother, Astrid, to the airport. Over the months, Astrid had come and gone, come and gone, politely, obdurately refusing Tom’s offers to move into the guest room for an “extended stay” (there were no right phrases; “for as long as it takes,” “for the duration,” “until the end,” all wrong). Each visit, Astrid would walk into the house, lightfooted and smiling, be with Elizabeth for hours every day, helping to bathe her on days when she didn’t want to get up, coaxing her to eat, talking and talking, and then after a week or so, would leave looking flat, slack faced, and confused, as though sadness were a drug.
Astrid would be back in a few days, having detoxified among her cats, her friends, her houseplants. Tom would be back any minute. But for the moment, Piper was alone, outside the entryway to what used to be Elizabeth’s dining room, listening to Elizabeth sing to Emma and Peter. Lullaby time was the last ritual, the one Elizabeth clung to with what Piper knew had to be every ounce of stubbornness she had left after the others (afternoon Popsicles, reading aloud, tickle time) had become occasional, then sporadic, then had fallen off altogether. Her voice, as diminished as the rest of her, came out papery, almost tuneless, but Piper didn’t need to hear her to know the song because the song was always the same—“Bridge over Troubled Water”—and so familiar that Piper couldn’t believe all the years she’d spent not realizing that it was about motherhood.
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