Then Came You

by Jennifer Weiner

  This week, we’d grabbed street food and were dining on the benches outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hazy and warm, the sky a washed-out white, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a Friday afternoon, which meant that Rajit was probably halfway to the Hamptons already, and I wouldn’t be missed as long as I stayed late enough to finish my research (today’s enthralling topic — a sneaker factory in Paraguay). People had kicked off their shoes and rolled up their sleeves and pants legs (and, in the cases of some of the girls, their shirts) in an effort to make the most of the sunshine.

  I bought a plate of halal chicken and rice. Kimmie had a container of fruit salad, a big bottle of water, and a black-and-white cookie. We spread napkins over our laps, traded plastic silverware, and split the cookie so that we each got black and white.

  “We should go to the beach,” I said. “I’ll bet Florida’s cheap right now.”

  “I bet Florida’s hot.”

  “No hotter than this,” I said.

  Kimmie speared a bite of kiwi and held it out to me. I looked around to make sure no one was looking, then ate the kiwi off her fork. “JetBlue’s got good deals.” She held out a chunk of pineapple. I looked around again and, when I noticed a trio of guys in ties staring at us, pulled away. Her sigh was so soft I almost didn’t hear it.

  Since that first night — the night we played show and tell, as I called it — we’d spent almost every night together. I still paid rent on my apartment, and my roommates thought I had a serious boyfriend. I wasn’t in a hurry to disabuse them. It was none of their business. Kimmie and I woke up together, snuggled on her futon, and made tea in her tiny kitchen. We showered together, hip to hip in her narrow tub, washing each other’s hair under the spray. She’d sleep in my Tshirts, which fell to her thighs, and we wore beaded bracelets we’d picked up at the Brooklyn Flea, but we didn’t hold hands in public, let alone kiss. When we’d visited her parents for Christmas, they put us in Kimmie’s room, which had a single bed, and spread blankets and a sleeping bag on the floor for me. We’d spooned in the bed, whispering and giggling as Kimmie’s mother rattled around in the kitchen, preparing lasagna, the most American dish she knew.

  When we were together, at dinner, at the movies, or strolling through a store or a street fair, we looked like best friends. I wasn’t sure what I was — if I was gay, if I’d always been attracted to women and had never managed to figure it out. All I knew for sure was that I was in love with Kimmie. With her, I felt safe in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe not ever, and certainly not since my father’s accident. She was so small, so fragile, with her little bird bones. I could span both of her wrists with one of my hands, could buy clothing for her at Gap Kids, but she was stronger than she looked; smart, and fierce. When she got a cold, I bought her Theraflu and Gatorade and chicken soup from the deli. When I lost my wallet, she called my credit-card company and figured out how to get the DMV to FedEx me a replacement license overnight.

  On the bench Kimmie ate the pineapple herself, then pressed her lips together. I wanted to pull the elastic out of her hair, to bury my hands in its cool silk. If she were a boy I wouldn’t have thought twice. I used to rub my palm against the smooth skin on the back of Dan’s neck after he got his hair cut. I’d sit on his lap in his eating club’s common room and carry on conversations as if he were an anthropomorphized chair. I wasn’t wild about public displays of affection, but I wasn’t averse to a little hand-holding, an arm around a waist or over my shoulders, a kiss hello or goodbye. Kimmie and I didn’t do any of that. We couldn’t, without people labeling and judging. . and even in a city as big as Manhattan, where there were plenty of gay men and women, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of publicly declaring that I was one of them. Given my long hair, my high heels, the skirts and blouses and makeup I wore to work, people gave me the benefit of the doubt. They gave it to Kimmie, too, I figured, if they stopped to think of her as sexual at all. With her clothes on, she still looked more like a little boy than a woman. With her clothes off. . I gave a little shiver, thinking of it.

  “You know I love you,” I said. My voice was low.

  She touched my cheek. I felt myself tense. Women touch each other this way, I told myself. They do it all the time. But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw, or thought I saw, that the guys in ties were staring. They’d been joined by a construction worker in workboots and khaki pants white with drywall dust. He was holding a falafel folded in his hand, and he was definitely looking at us, staring like we were a porno movie that had just started playing, one that he could hardly wait to rewatch alone, in private.

  I pulled away, faster than I’d meant to. Kimmie got to her feet. I stood up, reaching for her, wanting to touch her hair or her hand, barely managing to make contact with one bare shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She nodded, sighing. “Sure you are. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Is this what it’s going to be like, our whole life? Always hiding, always afraid someone’s going to see?”

  I lowered my voice. “We’re not hiding. We’re just not, you know, taking out a billboard.”

  “So are we just going to lie to everyone, about what we are? Tell everyone that we’re friends?”

  Her cheeks were flushed. I wanted so badly to hold her. . and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. It was as if I were paralyzed, frozen with shame. Back at work, after the funeral, when people had asked what had happened with my father, I’d said, heart attack, and told myself that it was the truth. His heart had stopped. True, it had stopped after he’d done an unknown quantity of street drugs. But that was nobody’s business but mine.

  I tried that line with Kimmie, hoping it would soothe her. “Look. You know I love you. But what we do, what we are to each other…”

  “So we hide.” Her voice was flat. She bent and, with staccato jerks of her arms, began picking up our trash.

  “So… I’ll see you tonight? At home?” Had I ever called her place “home” before? I didn’t know. But it felt like home. I could picture every part of it: the glass Coke bottle with a single gerbera daisy on the windowsill next to her futon; the two-burner stove that Kimmie wiped down every time after we’d cooked something, the yellow teapot and the cups from Chinatown that she kept on a shelf we’d hammered into the wall.

  Kimmie picked up her backpack and slung it over her shoulders. She paused, and it felt like my heart stopped beating before she gave a curt nod and walked away.

  I watched her go. The three guys with ties walked down the sidewalk, laughing. A cloud blew across the sun. The construction worker balled up his trash, tossed it in the bin, then came and sat beside me.

  “Fight with your girlfriend?”

  I turned, bracing myself for the leer, the salacious smile, but saw, instead, mild blue eyes that held nothing but sympathy. For a second, I wondered whether all the people I’d been afraid of, the ones I’d thought would judge me — my coworkers, my former classmates, my horrible boss — had someone in their lives, a cousin or a sister or a daughter, who was gay. Or maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe he’d just meant “girlfriend” in the most innocent way, a friend who was a girl.

  “I’m not as brave as she is,” I said, in a low voice.

  He nodded. Then he hitched up his sagging pants and walked off, another New Yorker, just minding his own business. I went back to the office and sat behind my computer, ignoring the deadline on the latest pitch book, ignoring Rajit, who called on speakerphone from the Jitney to the Hamptons and berated me for mistakes actual and imagined. At night, I plodded home, bought a take-out salad, then sat at the half-size table in the kitchen, poking at it, afraid to call Kimmie or go to her apartment, the place where I belonged.

  “What’s up with you?” Amanda asked.

  “Bad day at work.” There was vodka in the freezer, grapefruit juice in the fridge. I mixed myself a drink, glugged it down like medicine, then lay on my bed for the first time in weeks, wondering what I was supposed to do now.

&nb
sp; I’d just closed my eyes when Amanda knocked on my door. “You’re blowing up,” she said, holding out the BlackBerry I’d left in the kitchen. Hoping it might be Kimmie, I lifted the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”

  The voice was crisp, and it took me a minute to recognize it. “Julie? It’s Leslie Stalling from the Princeton Fertility Clinic.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” Leslie began. She gave a nervous chuckle. “I can’t say I’ve ever had a conversation quite like this before. Let me start at the beginning. Your egg was used by a couple in New York City.”

  My heart sped up. Hadn’t part of me always known it would happen this way, that I’d end up in the same city as the baby?

  “The biological father died.”

  “What?” I sat frozen as Leslie explained the rest of it — father dead, intended mother missing, twentysomething half sister left in charge. “She asked for your information,” Leslie concluded. “We can’t give that out, of course, but. .”

  “What’s her name?”

  Leslie told me — name, address, email, phone numbers. Which left me with only one more question. “The baby?”

  Her voice warmed. “She’s gorgeous. A beautiful little girl.”

  Bettina Croft was waiting for me in the lobby of her apartment building on Central Park West. She shook my hand, led me to the elevator, and pressed the button for “Penthouse.” “We’ll talk upstairs,” she said. The elevator whizzed upward, giving me time to study her. She was about my age, in a scoop-necked black linen dress and black patent-leather slides: all of it simple and, I guessed, all expensive, too. Her only jewelry was a diamond circle pin at her collar. Her thick auburn hair was pushed back from her face by a black velvet headband, the way I bet she’d been wearing it since sixth grade. She was prettier than she’d looked in the picture I’d Googled on the way over. Her lips were thin, her chin a shade pointy, her teeth too big for her mouth. But her eyebrows were elegantly arched, her eyes wide and expressive beneath them, and she had beautiful skin, cream tinged with pink at her cheeks.

  The elevator chimed. The doors slid open, and we stepped into a foyer, then into a living room as airy and high-ceilinged as a basketball court. Multicolored rugs glowed on the hardwood floors and important art hung on the walls. Vases and bowls full of fresh-cut, beautifully arranged flowers ornamented every corner and there was something astonishing to see everywhere I turned. I walked to the windows, past a glass vase filled with flowering cherry blossoms and a framed Picasso hanging on the wall like it didn’t know it wasn’t in a museum. Looking out over the twinkling lights and the treetops of Central Park, I wished that Kimmie was with me. She’d appreciate this apartment, she’d notice things I didn’t, she’d hold my hand while we talked about it on her futon — how many bedrooms did we think it had, and how many people worked to clean it, and how much did it cost to live in a place like this.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked.

  Bettina sat on a long, curving couch upholstered in a shimmery fabric somewhere between silver and beige, and studied me, as frankly as Jared Baker had long ago in the mall. “Figures. You’re exactly the type India would go for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bettina flipped one hand in my direction. “Tall. Blond. Gorgeous. Smart.” Somehow, she managed to make all of those words sound like insults. “What’d you play, field hockey? And you were in Cap, I bet.”

  “I played field hockey and lacrosse, but only in high school. And I wasn’t in Cap.”

  She lifted her plucked eyebrows. “You got hosed at bicker?”

  This was insider lingo. “Cap” was Cap and Gown, one of the most selective eating clubs. Bicker was like rush, and getting hosed was Princeton parlance for getting rejected. “I wasn’t in a club. Did you go to Princeton?”

  She shook her head, adjusting her headband. “My dad did. And my uncles, and my oldest brother. But I spent enough time around the campus to know what it’s like. Why weren’t you in an eating club?”

  “Because I couldn’t afford it.” Her thin eyebrows arched even higher. I wondered why she was surprised. Did she imagine that girls like her, in apartments like this, were the ones selling their eggs?

  “I was hoping you could tell me about yourself.” She reached into the purse she’d kept slung over her shoulder and pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Any health issues in your family? Do you happen to know your blood type?”

  I knew it from the tests the clinic had done. . which meant that Bettina probably knew it, too. “O negative,” I said, wondering when she’d get around to asking me what she really wanted to know. I was still struggling to make sense of what I’d learned — that her father, the baby’s father, was dead, and that his wife, the baby’s mother, was gone.

  “And your family history? Cancer? Diabetes? Heart disease?”

  My unease was solidifying into anger. “The clinic can tell you about that,” I said, sitting back in my chair and crossing my arms against my chest.

  “Mental illness? Substance abuse?” She sat back, skinny legs crossed, staring at me.

  “Google?” I answered back.

  “If anyone in your family had an issue with substance abuse,” she said sweetly, “I think that’s something you might have mentioned before donating an egg.”

  She was right, of course. She was right, and I’d been wrong. “I needed the money,” I said, dropping my eyes and wishing, once more, for Kimmie.

  “For what?”

  “For my dad.” My eyes were stinging. “To get him into rehab. Which didn’t work, as I’m sure you already know.”

  “You shouldn’t have lied.”

  “I didn’t lie. Nobody at the clinic ever asked.”

  “Well, don’t you think it was something you should have mentioned?” Her voice was getting louder. I got to my feet.

  “Did you bring me up here just to insult me? Because I could have just stayed at work and had my boss do that.”

  She surprised me by changing the subject. “Where do you work?”

  “Steinman Cox. I’m a junior analyst.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “Yeah,” I said sourly. “It’s spectacular.”

  She sighed, finally looking her age. “I’m sorry I was provoking you,” she said. “This whole thing’s just very new.”

  “So why did you want to meet me? Because it sounds like you know all the important stuff already.”

  “I just wanted to see you in person. To meet you, before I asked.”

  “Asked what?”

  She shifted on the couch, recrossing her legs. “This is probably going to sound crazy,” she said, “but I want to know if you want to be. . involved, somehow.”

  I blinked at her. “Involved?”

  “Like… oh, I don’t know. An aunt, or a friend of the family.” She looked at me, her eyes wide, an expression that was almost pleading on her face. “My dad’s gone. .” She paused, then cleared her throat. “My dad’s gone, and my stepmother took off, and good riddance, as far as I’m concerned, but this baby’s got me as a parent, and I don’t know what I’m doing. So I thought…”

  “You want people,” I said, remembering my conversation with Kimmie; my dream of being a mysterious benefactor.

  “A village,” Bettina agreed. “You know, ‘it takes a village’? So I thought. . I mean, it’s probably crazy. You agreed to sell an egg, it’s not like you wanted to be a mother.”

  I interrupted. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s sleeping,” said Bettina. I thought this was a refusal until she added, “Take your shoes off and come with me.”

  I did, then followed her as she led me down a hall and eased open a paneled door with a tiny embroidered pillow on a pink silk ribbon that read dream time hanging from the cut-glass doorknob. “Her name is Rory,” said Bettina, and eased the door open.

  The nursery was lovely, all cream and pale pink and celery green. A white-noise machine broadcast the sound of waves
and seagulls from one corner; a humidifier purred in another. Bettina tiptoed over the carpet to a crib in the center of the room. . and there, in the center, with a pink blanket pulled up to her chin, lay the baby. She was sleeping on her back, her head turned to the side, arms stretched above her head like she was signaling a touchdown.

  “Oh,” I sighed. She had a few wisps of blond hair, eyebrows like gold, and a dimple in the cheek that I could see. The same dimple I had; the one I’d inherited from my father.

  INDIA

  The thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.

  After I left the apartment, I took a cab to Newark Airport, went to the United kiosk, and printed out my ticket for Paris. I endured the pat-down at security, walked to the gate, and spent an hour browsing in the duty-free shop, long enough for the security cameras to get some good shots of me. Then, bending over my purse, exclaiming as though I’d left something — my wallet! my passport! — at home, I walked briskly back down the hallway, out of the airport, into the gray afternoon. It wasn’t like it was my baby, I told myself as I walked. Not really. True, it was Marcus’s sperm, but Marcus’s sperm had also made Tommy and Trey and Bettina, and it wasn’t like I was close with any of them. Not mine, not mine, not mine, I thought, climbing on board a bus.

  The bus took me into Manhattan to the Port Authority, which was noisy and crowded, smelling of fast food and urine and bus exhaust. Buses were pulling in from Dallas and Kansas City, from Topeka and Toledo, from Pittsburgh and Tallahassee and all points in between. Fresh-faced girls with bags over their shoulders and their best boots on their feet were stepping into the terminal, getting their first look at New York City, planning how they’d conquer it without thinking for an instant that they’d fail; that, someday, they might find themselves forty-three years old, with a stranger’s face and all of their bright plans in ruin.