Then Came You

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Your dad’s eyes got so bad.” Rita was wringing her hands. She was a short, chunky woman with a chipmunky face and two inches of gray showing at the roots of her hair, with thick thighs and breasts that slumped against her belly. My father’s ladylove, in high-waisted jeans and bright-green plastic Crocs.

  “What happened?”

  More hand-wringing. “Can I bring you gals some coffee?”

  “We’re fine,” I said, the same instant that Kimmie said, “Yes, please.” Five minutes later, we each had a cup of microwaved brew, and Rita was perched at the edge of a plastic-slipcovered armchair while Kimmie and I sat on the sofa facing her.

  She plucked the teabag out of her mug, realized there was nowhere to put it, and dunked it back in. “You know your dad had been really sick.” Rilly sick.

  “I know my father was a drug addict.” I was done with euphemisms, done with pretending. Maybe it comforted her to think that my father had a disease instead of a weakness, but it wouldn’t comfort me anymore.

  She pressed her fingers to her lips. “He fought so hard against it. So hard.”

  “Just tell me,” I said. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Please,” said Kimmie.

  The woman sighed and pressed her hands together. “He came back here when he finished with that place,” she began. That place was probably the sober-living house. I nodded, wondering what it was like to leave a group-living home where there were schedules and counselors and mandatory AA meetings, and then come back here, with Rita, where he’d done so much drinking and drugging. Maybe I should have made other arrangements, found another place for him to go, rented an apartment…

  Kimmie touched my forearm. I forced myself to stop thinking about it. Hindsight wouldn’t fix things. He was dead now, and what I had to do was get through the funeral and clean up the mess he’d undoubtedly left behind.

  “For a while he was doing okay,” Rita continued. “He’d go for walks, or to the library. He’d go to the gym, pedal that sit-down bike they have. He’d have dinner waiting when I came home from work. Simple things,” said Rita. “Chicken patties, or hamburgs. Spaghetti. Like that.” I nodded, remembering his sad attempts at omelets when I’d come for breakfast.

  “The night it happened. .” She pulled in a long breath. “I went to bed at about ten, that’s what I do, because I work, you know, I need to be up real early.” I nodded. “At two or so I heard him up, rustling around. .” She gulped. “And then when I got up, I found him there, on the bathroom floor. His head. . his head was. .” More gulping followed, and a single spastic gesture with her hand. I’d find out later what she hadn’t been able to tell me, from the police photographs and the autopsy report, that my dad had died with his head in the toilet and a crack pipe in his hand. It was a detail, in all honesty, that I could have gone to my own death without knowing.

  I kept my eyes on my lap, the throbbing pressure of tears filling my head. It was what I’d expected, but still, hearing it like this, out loud, in this tacky little apartment, made it real. Rill. Kimmie took my hand. I wondered what she made of all this, how far away it was from her own life, her own diligent, hard-working parents. All I wanted was to get out of this place, to breathe the fresh air, to get back on the plane that would take me home and have all of this be someone else’s problem, someone else’s mess.

  “I’m so sorry, Julia.” My name sounded strange in her mouth. I hadn’t been Julia since high school. But my father had called me Julia, and Julia was what I’d been when he’d discussed me with this woman. “He tried so hard. He fought it. He really did.”

  I got up before she could continue. “Thank you,” I said. What did I mean by that? Thank you for taking him in? Thank you for letting him stay? Thank you for giving him a place to die, so he didn’t have to do it on the street? “The funeral’s Monday morning, in the veterans’ cemetery,” I said. “You’re welcome to come.”

  When she hugged me, I could feel her soft body against mine, and I smelled her scent of stale coffee and cigarettes almost overcoming that strange chemical odor that I thought was probably eau de crack. When she pulled away she was crying, and talking fast, words tumbling over one another, her accent growing ever thicker. “I would have done anything for him. You don’t know what it’s been like. What I went through. All those years. I had a house when all this started.” She gestured at the sad little room, the cheap furniture, the piles of crap that my fingers itched to scoop into a trash bag. “A house that was paid for, a car, a 401(k), my savings, my retirement account…”

  He’d smoked it all, I thought to myself. Smoked it all up. Now she was practically yelling, her hands balled into fists on the hips of her jeans, an indignant fireplug in green clown shoes. “I did the best I could. The very best I could.”

  “I believe you.” I was so tired. I’d never been so exhausted in my life. All I wanted to do was be in a bed somewhere, shoes kicked off, covers pulled up to my chin. “I know you tried to help him, and it must have been very hard.” She closed her mouth, her face sagging. “Thank you,” I said, and managed to sound like I meant it.

  • • •

  Kimmie walked me away from the apartment building, through the fence, past the banner flapping in the wind, across the street to a park, where we sat under a tree whose leaves were tipped with gold. Fall was here. Winter was coming. I shut my eyes, imagining my life in New York City — the job I despised, the apartment that was still almost more than I could afford, the shower stall so small that the plastic shower curtain stuck to my skin if I didn’t position myself perfectly, the dirt and grit and noise. I considered the men on the subways who’d use a crowded car as an excuse to cop a quick handful of ass, and Rajit, who’d once thrown a cup of coffee at me when it was too cold. (“Keep a change of clothes,” one of his former junior analysts had told me, opening the bottom drawer of her desk to show me a skirt and top, still in dry cleaner’s plastic, that she’d learned to stow there after he’d thrown a salad, with blue cheese dressing, at her.)

  I drove us back to my mother’s salon. “How was it?” my mom asked, hugging me, and I told her it went fine, knowing that she didn’t want to hear the details. Kimmie and I caught a bus home, to the neighborhood of neat little ranch houses where I’d grown up. I flipped on the television set, heated soup, buttered toast, found juice glasses, plates, and napkins, moving around like my body was made of cotton. Once, my first year at Princeton, someone had posted a picture of me, taken when I wasn’t looking, online, on a website that rated the looks of all the women in our class. I’d been furious and ashamed. My roommates hadn’t sympathized. “Jesus,” one of them had said when she thought I was sleeping, “it’s not like he said she was ugly. Or fat. It’s a compliment.” Indeed, my inbox had pinged steadily for a week, with guys emailing to introduce themselves and ask if I wanted to get together for a cup of coffee or a movie or lunch. I hadn’t been able to explain how it made me feel invaded and diminished, like there was this thing out in the world, this thing with my name and my face and a great stupid hank of blond hair, this thing that looked like me but wasn’t.

  Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, surrounded by everything I remembered — the square in front of the sink where the linoleum had worn thin, the placemats my father had bought for me and Greg at the children’s museum, the postcard of Barcelona that had been taped on the refrigerator for years — I felt that same sensation, of being there and not there, of not really being myself. I watched Kimmie. She had pulled her hair into a high ponytail, spooned her soup, and chattered to me about New York — a restaurant that made what was supposed to be the best fried chicken in the world; a musical, all in Spanish, where they gave student discounts on Wednesday nights. We washed the dishes, then I took a shower, letting the water flow over me, telling myself what to do next. Pick up the soap. Wash your legs. Under your arms. Now the shampoo.

  Kimmie was waiting in the bedroom, in her men’s boxer shorts and ribbed sleeveless undershirt, curl
ed up on the bed. “Do you need anything?” she asked me.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and lay beside her in the darkness, perfectly still, thinking about who I was: a college graduate, a junior analyst, an egg donor, a woman without a father. “He used to braid my hair,” I whispered, unsure of whether I was talking to myself or to Kimmie; unsure whether she was even awake. But oh, I remembered it, every detail: sitting on the floor in front of his recliner in my favorite loose flannel pajamas, his brown lace-up shoes on either side of me, his hand moving the comb against my scalp, his calm voice asking, What color ponytail holders? One braid or two?

  A noise came out of me, something between a moan and a sob, a sound I’d never made before, could not imagine making. It wasn’t loud, and I quickly buried my face in the pillow, but Kimmie must have heard me. She pressed her body tightly against mine. I pulled her head close to me and buried my face between her neck and her shoulder, pressing against the softness of her skin.

  ANNIE

  Before I left Target for the last time, Gabe gave me a reading list. Most of the books I found at the library and started but didn’t finish, but there was one that held my attention. It was called Never Let Me Go. It was set in England, at a boarding school, and it started off slowly, the way so many of Gabe’s books seemed to begin. At first I thought that it would be about rich kids in the countryside, their fads and cliques and crushes, and two girls falling for the same boy. But gradually, the book shed its disguise and showed its true self to me, and it wasn’t a kids-in-school book at all. It was a horror story. The students at the boarding school weren’t real people; they were clones who had been bred so they could donate their organs. When they “completed”—when they made all the donations they could — they would die.

  Once I realized this, I thought the book would turn into a thriller, where the girl, Kathy H., and the boy, Tommy, would try to run away and be together. The clones looked exactly like regular people; there was nothing that distinguished them from anyone else. But that didn’t happen. The two of them simply accepted what they were, what they’d been made for, their destiny. They never tried to fight it, never tried to run. I finished the book feeling sorrow mixed with recognition, thinking, That’s Frank. That’s me.

  Frank and I met at George Washington High School in Somerton in Northeast Philadelphia, the winter of our junior year. We’d been in the same schools since seventh grade, but we weren’t in the same crowd. I played flute in the school band and took the academic-track classes — not the honors courses, for the college-bound smarties like Nancy, but the classes for the kids for whom community college or an associate’s degree was at least a possibility.

  Frank was on the vocational track, for the kids who were going to work as auto mechanics or licensed practical nurses, delivering the mail or reading the meters or mopping the floors. I knew his name, in the way that all of us in our class of just over two hundred knew one another’s names, but I didn’t know much about him. I’d noticed him because there weren’t that many black kids in our high school, and because he was so cute, with green eyes and close-cropped hair and his skin, medium brown and perfectly smooth, and his lips.

  One winter day I’d been sitting in the cafeteria at my usual table with my friends, picking at the shredded cheese on my salad (I was dieting, the way I had through most of high school), when Frank walked over to our table. My girlfriends stared. Most of the shop boys, black and white, wore jeans that hung off their butts, exposing as much of their boxers as they could get away with, and heavy workboots and Tshirts advertising some band or another. Frank had the boots but was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, neatly pressed, the sleeves rolled up to show his corded forearms. As he came close, I could smell soap and motor oil (he’d been working in the school’s garages that morning), and the good, clean scent of his skin.

  “Hi there, Annie,” he said. His eyelashes were long and curly, the kind a girl would spend forever torturing herself with an eyelash curler clamped against her lids to achieve. I remember exactly what I was wearing: a red jersey Henley T-shirt with three buttons at the collar and my favorite pair of jeans, the size-ten Calvin Kleins, a silver locket on a heart that my father had given me for my sweet sixteen. My hair was long, in ringlets that I crafted each morning with a curling iron, and I wore big hoop earrings, studded with fake diamonds, that swung almost to my shoulders and made me look like J.Lo, my fashion icon at the time. “Want to go to the Sweethearts Dance with me?” Frank asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah, I’d like that.”

  My girlfriends started giggling. I blushed, admiring him for the way he’d asked, for approaching me in public instead of with a phone call, for risking embarrassment. I also couldn’t quite believe that he knew who I was, that I wasn’t just one of the faceless girls who moved through the same hallways and classrooms but might as well have inhabited a different world. But I also had the strangest sense that I knew him. . that, somehow, my entire time in high school, maybe even my entire life, had been leading up to this conversation.

  “I’ll pick you up at six,” he told me. He was very calm, looking at me steadily, ignoring my friends. “We can go to dinner first, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” I said again. “I live on Crestview.”

  “I know.” He walked off, and my girlfriends fell on me, scooping me up like a quarterback in a huddle.

  “Oh my God! Frank Barrow!” I smiled, feeling flushed, almost feverish. I still couldn’t quite figure out how he knew me. The next week revealed nothing. Frank smiled when he saw me in the hallways. At lunch, he’d make a point of coming over and saying “hello.” But that was all. I should have been frantic with nerves, part of me wondering if he’d asked me out as some kind of joke or dare. (In the movies I loved, the ones I’d watch every time they came on cable, 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed, things like that happened, there were pranks and jokes and misunderstandings, but the boy and the girl always wound up together, the way they were meant to be.)

  My friends were useless when it came to figuring out what was behind Frank Barrow’s interest, but full of suggestions about what I should wear. I had the dress I’d bought for homecoming, but I wanted something new for Frank. So I used eighty dollars of my babysitting money to buy a simple sleeveless dress in periwinkle blue, with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swished around my ankles and had braided gold metal buckles at the shoulders, an inexpensive knockoff of the Badgley Mischka gown Kate Winslet had worn to the Oscars that year. I borrowed a pair of gold strappy sandals from Nancy and paid another twenty dollars to go to the beauty school and have my hair curled, then arranged in an updo, with a little rhinestone butterfly clipped over my right ear.

  Frank wore a dark-blue suit with a light-blue tie almost the exact same shade as my dress. He held my arm as he walked me to his car, which was his father’s Buick, very old but very clean (I learned later he’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it for the occasion). It wasn’t until he was backing out of my driveway, one arm over my seat, that I realized I didn’t know where we were going. Before homecoming that fall, my date and I and three other couples had gone to the Chart House in Center City, which was, as the name implied, right on the water (the Delaware, which wasn’t one of the world’s prettiest rivers, but when you lived in Philadelphia, you took what you could get). The tables there were set with an array of silverware that most of us found bewildering, and the cheapest entrée, pasta with roasted seasonal vegetables, cost fourteen dollars.

  “Burgers okay?” asked Frank.

  “Sure!” My voice was too loud. I worried that it sounded like I was disappointed and trying to hide it, but the truth was, I’d left the Chart House with a stomachache, brought on, I figured, by sitting up perfectly straight terrified that I was going to spill salad dressing or step on the hem of my dress or do something that would reveal to the grown-ups eating their meals at the tables around us that none of us had any business being there.

 
Frank drove to McDonald’s on Broad Street. “Wait here,” he said, hopping out of the car. Five minutes later, he came back with a steaming, fragrant bag, already spotted with grease from the fries. My stomach growled, and, instead of being mortified, I laughed — I hadn’t eaten in days so I could look good in my gown.

  Frank didn’t say much, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, as he drove to Fairmount Park, then up the steep, twisting road called South George’s Hill. He parked right behind the Mann Center, an outdoor concert hall that was dark and quiet that night. This was a noted makeout spot where more than a few of my dates had ended. At that hour it was too cold and dark for the runners and cyclists to be out, and too soon for the couples. The sun was just setting, the sky fading from pale blue to indigo, and the city was spread out like a gorgeous quilt of light beneath us. We sat in the car with the windows cracked open and the heater on and a wool blanket Frank had pulled out of the trunk over our laps, eating Big Macs and fries and sipping vanilla shakes.

  Sitting with him, I felt none of the nerves I’d felt with other boys, none of the awkwardness of wondering whether I looked right or sounded right or was saying the right things. Frank hadn’t offered me any liquor, nor had he made a dive toward my mouth or my bra hooks. He asked me questions and listened, respectfully, while I answered. We were talking about Dana Hightower, who’d allegedly transferred to a magnet school in Center City but who had really, my girlfriends and I suspected, been sent away to have a baby, when I blurted, “Why’d you ask me to the dance?”

  He lowered his lashes. I remember how perfect he looked, his white shirt crisp, his cheeks freshly shaven, how he smelled like soap and a citrusy aftershave. I remember the song on the radio was called “Angel of Mine,” and feeling once more that sense, undeniable, overwhelming, that this had all been arranged beforehand, that he and I were meant to be, that we were going to be, and that I didn’t even have much say in the matter. “Why?” he asked. “You don’t want to go?”