Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  My mom seemed surprised. "Really?"

  "You and Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh, and his other kids, too, I guess. And reviews of your book. And stories about you."

  She didn't seem happy to hear it. "I wonder why."

  "I found a tape of him at Grandma Ann's."

  "A videotape?" She looked even more puzzled.

  "No, a tape recording. You guys were kids. He was reading to you."

  She nodded slowly. "He did that. When Aunt Elle and I were little girls." Her face softened at the memory.

  "I don't know. He sounded so nice on that tape..." A lump was growing in my throat. "He sounded like my dad. But you were right. I should have listened. He wasn't very nice."

  "He used to be," my mother said. She pressed her lips together, maybe remembering something tender: her father taking her ice skating, or teaching her to swim. "He used to be fantastic. That was the worst part of it," she said slowly. Her voice was shy, soft, even girlish. "He wasn't always awful, you know? He was a wonderful father for the first little while. He'd read to us and take us places. He'd teach us things."

  "How to skate," I said. "How to swim."

  "Yep. And he loved us..." She blinked and turned her face away. "He loved us so much before...Well, I don't know. Maybe what happened was chemical, or just a really bad midlife crisis. But I remember when he'd tell me that he was proud of me, it was the best feeling in the world. Because it was so rare, you know?" I could tell she was having a hard time finding words for this--my mother, who had something to say about everything, who'd tell me that words were her tools. "Grandma Ann was always proud of us, and we always knew she loved us, but with him, you didn't always know. So when he said it..." She crumpled an airplane napkin in her fist. I looked at her, then looked away. Peter told me how proud of me they were all the time. He read me books, he took me places. I never doubted for a minute that he loved me, or that my mother did, even if her love sometimes felt like a straitjacket. Even Bruce loved me, I thought. Even though he'd run away to Amsterdam. He'd come back, and done the best he could.

  "I shouldn't have lied about him," she said heavily. "I'm sorry for that. It wasn't a good decision, but I thought it would be better for you to think he didn't care than to think that he cared for the wrong reasons. I thought that maybe later, when you were older, I could tell you the whole story. If you were interested."

  I thought for a minute. Then I figured, In for a penny, in for a pound, which is something else my mother always says. I bent over and pulled my copy of Big Girls Don't Cry out of Mrs. Marmer's purse.

  "Oh God," my mom said miserably. "That. Okay," she began, taking a deep breath. "Before you say anything, in my own defense, I wrote it when I was twenty-eight, and I'd been through a very bad breakup. Things in there were exaggerated for comic effect."

  "Like how many guys Allie slept with?"

  She winced. "Especially that. And, um, the angry and insecure thing. And thin-skinned and petty. All of that. All made up." Her lips curled upward, almost in spite of herself. "Except the fat part. That, sadly, is true." She thought about it. "Also thin-skinned. But as far as you're concerned, I was a virgin until the day I got married." She thought it over. "Well, until the day I met Bruce. Which, by the way, was when I was much, much older than you are." She sighed and bent down, reaching for her book. "What else?" she asked.

  "You're a good mom," I said.

  Her hands froze on her tote bag. "You think so?"

  "The best," I assured her. From the way her shoulders were shaking, I thought she might be crying, but she pulled herself together and opened her book. "Can I just ask about one thing?"

  "Sure." Her voice was a little wobbly.

  "When you went to Los Angeles, in the book."

  "When Allie went to Los Angeles," she corrected with a little smile.

  "'To escape,'" I quoted. "'To escape and be reborn.'"

  My mother rolled her eyes. "Boy, didn't I think I was the writer."

  I ignored her. "The thing she was running away from..." And here it was, the root of it, the heart of my journey. "It was me, wasn't it?" I whispered. "You didn't want to have a baby."

  Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Joy." She pulled me close to her, rubbing her hand against my curls. I rested my head against her chest, close enough so her breath rustled my hair when she whispered, "You were the thing I was running to. I just didn't know it yet."

  Somewhere over Virginia, I told her about Tamsin, how she'd been the one to spill the beans on my mother's career writing Lyla Dare. She was just as shocked as I'd been. "Tamsin?" she said. "Tamsin Marmer? Your BFF?"

  "She was mad at me," I admitted. "That's why she did it."

  "Great," my mother muttered, and heaved a long, bosom-shifting sigh. "Oh well. Nothing to do about it now, I guess. Cat's out of the bag. Water under the bridge. When God closes a window, he opens a marriage."

  "Huh?"

  "Door," she said, shaking her head. "It's actually 'When God closes a window, He opens a door.'"

  "Why would God open a marriage?"

  Her cheeks were pink. "It's a joke," she said. "Old joke. There was this rabbi in Cherry Hill who had his wife murdered, and then he told his mistress that when God closes a window, He opens a door, only Peter and I would always say that when God closes a window, He opens a marriage. Anyhow. If it wasn't Tamsin, it probably would have been someone else eventually. It'll work out."

  "So..." It seemed impossible, but I asked it anyway: "Are you grateful to Tamsin?"

  She gave me a crooked smile and a shrug--not a yes, but not a no, either.

  "Are you grateful to your dad?" I asked.

  The captain came on the loudspeaker to announce that we were beginning our descent into Philadelphia. My mother was quiet for so long I wasn't sure that she was going to answer. Finally, she said, "The thing is, I got everything I wanted, you know? Eventually, I did. A husband and a wonderful daughter, and a beautiful home, and friends I love, and work..." Her voice trailed off. "When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there...whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time."

  I must have winced, because she squeezed my shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "Oh, and before we land, there's something else we need to discuss." She pulled open her tote bag. Underneath her book and her wallet and her bottle of water was a folder with a stack of printed pages and a photograph of Betsy, the woman from the website. "So listen," said my mom. "How would you feel about being a big sister?"

  THIRTY-FIVE

  "I don't know." I stared down at my lap, draped in a white hospital gown with a blue pattern of snowflakes, and stretched my legs toward the bottom of the bed. "I feel weird that I don't feel any weirder. Does that make sense?"

  Peter shrugged. He was sitting in a chair beside my bed, where he'd been since I came out of the procedure room. There was a pitcher of ice water on the bedside table, and an arrangement of flowers that he'd brought, tulips and daffodils. "I don't think there's any one way to feel," he said.

  I yawned. The harvest had been scheduled for the revolting hour of six A.M., which meant we'd been up since four. Outside, the sky was hazy and gray, with dark thunderclouds massed in the distance. I was glad my doctor had ordered me to spend the rest of the day in bed. Back at home, the central air would be keeping things delightfully chilly. "Nine eggs. That's pretty good, right?" I said. In fact, nine eggs struck me as a kind of middling total. I'd read online about women my age who'd gone through the regimen of hormones shot and swallowed and wound up with only two eggs. I'd also read about egg donors in their twenties who'd produced a whopping twenty-four eggs in a single cycle.

  "Nine should be plenty," Peter said.

  "Then my work here is done," I said, and shifted my weight, wincing at a cramp. My nine eggs would be whisked off to a laboratory, where they'd be combined with the best contenders from my husband's early-morning sample of washed and spun sperm. The b
est-looking sperm plus the best-looking eggs would, with any luck, equal a few nice-looking eight-celled embryos, which would be threaded through a catheter and injected into Betsy's chemically primed uterus. Then we'd wait.

  Peter lifted my hand and kissed it. "Are you feeling all right? You're not uncomfortable at all?"

  "I feel fine. It's just a little unnerving. Brave new world, right?"

  He squeezed my hand. "So what now?"

  I shrugged. "We wait, I guess."

  "And what about you?"

  I looked at him curiously. "What about me? I'm going back to bed."

  "Have you thought about your writing? That other novel Valor's been after you for?"

  I turned my face away and sighed. The Monday after I'd gotten back from L.A., I'd gotten the call from Larissa I'd been dreading. After careful review of the salient facts, Valor had decided that I could no longer function effectively in Lyla Dare's universe. "But that's not such a bad thing," Larissa had told me. "Now you can clear your plate for your next novel!" "Sure," I'd said softly, and hung up the phone.

  "Honestly, I haven't been thinking about books. I've been thinking about how fast my eggs are deteriorating, and how to keep my daughter from leaving the country without my knowledge."

  "I'm serious," Peter said. He looked at me steadily. "You wrote StarGirl for how long?"

  "A while," I allowed. It had been nine years, and I would have written those books forever, I thought, if things had worked out differently. Lyla's world had been such a comfortable hiding place. By the end, her skin had been so easy for me to slip into, her body and her emotions so easy for me to inhabit, even if both were worlds away from my own.

  "Maybe what happened was a good thing," he said. I bit my lip and said nothing. He put his hand on the back of my neck and rubbed. "I just wish you weren't so afraid."

  "What am I afraid of?" I demanded. "I'm not afraid. I'm fine."

  He wasn't giving up. "You should write another book. A real one."

  "I liked my fake ones," I said.

  Peter was undeterred. "I think," he continued, "that you have a purpose, and you need to live up to it."

  I rolled my eyes. "Did you hit your head, then watch Oprah? Can I have some pain pills now?"

  "Are you in pain?"

  I looked at his face in the too-bright hospital light, the planes of his cheeks, his straight dark brows and warm brown eyes, and remembered how, the first time I'd met him, I hadn't thought that he was handsome--all I'd been able to see was that he wasn't Bruce, and I'd overlooked the kindness in his expression; the way, more than anyone else, he saw me, really saw me, and was not fooled by all my sass and poses or the names the world had called me.

  "I do have a purpose," I said. "I take care of Joy."

  "Joy's thirteen," he pointed out. "She'll be in high school soon. You've done your job, as well as any parent can."

  "Some job," I said, looking down at my lap. "Except for her running three thousand miles away, I've done just great."

  He ignored me. "I think there's something else you're supposed to be doing."

  "My purpose," I repeated. "Like a divine purpose? From God?"

  Peter didn't smile. "Maybe," he said. "And if it is, you shouldn't ignore it. Remember what happened to Moses when he ignored God?"

  I struggled to recall my Hebrew-school lessons. "Are you saying that my editor's going to appear to me as a burning bush? Because that would be cool." I thought it over. "Different, anyhow."

  "You should write another novel."

  "You," I said, "should lay off. Anyhow, if we have a baby, don't you think I'll have my hands full? What with the diapers and the middle-of-the-night feedings and the sleep deprivation and the cracked nipples and all?"

  "You won't be breast-feeding."

  "I'll have sympathy cracked nipples," I explained.

  "You wrote the first one when you had Joy," he pointed out.

  "I was young!" I said. "I was young and I needed the money and nobody wanted to take naked pictures of me! I didn't know what was going to happen." I looked back into my lap and said, half to myself, "I can't go through that again. I can't put you guys through it again."

  "We all came out fine," he said patiently. "People survive worse things than having a writer in the family."

  "I won't," I began. He looked at me calmly. "I can't," I said. He continued to watch me with a smile on his face. I flopped back onto the pillow. "Agh. Go harass one of the doctors about her divine purpose. Or go see how our embryos are doing. Do you think it's too early to give them names?"

  He got to his feet, then bent down and kissed me. "I love you."

  "Yeah yeah yeah."

  He kissed me again, and I kissed him back, one hand on his cheek, the other on the soft down at the back of his neck, pressing him toward me. "Love you, too," I said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  "You missed last Sunday," Cara said. I'd been at the Ronald McDonald House for forty-five minutes, and she hadn't said a word to me. She'd just followed me into the kitchen and sat at the table with her arms folded across her chest, staring at me with her eyes narrowed while I did the dishes and put away the cereal boxes and sponged the counters clean of what looked like the aftermath of oatmeal cookies.

  "I had to go somewhere," I said, and tossed her a sponge. "Hey, do you want to help me out with this?"

  "Not really," she said, tilting her chair back on two legs.

  "Don't do that. You're going to fall."

  "So what?" she asked. "I hear there's a good hospital right nearby."

  "Ha ha ha." I squirted more cleanser on the countertop and went back to attacking the dried-on brown sugar with my sponge. When the counter was as clean as it was going to get, I folded the dish towel next to the sink. "I'm sorry I wasn't here last weekend."

  "Whatever," said Cara.

  "How's your brother?" I asked. She shrugged. "How are your parents?"

  She shrugged again. "They're at the hospital. They sleep there most nights."

  I dried my hands. She tilted back in her chair, farther than she had before, staring at me, before she thumped back to the floor.

  "Do you want to go outside?" I asked.

  She looked out the window at the thick green leaves of a chestnut tree waving gently in the wind, and didn't answer. "You'd be doing me a favor. I'm grounded. I'm not allowed out of the house except to go to school, and my bat mitzvah lessons, and to come here. So if we went out..." I looked out the window, making calculations about time and money and how much of each I had. "We could go to the coffee shop, or we could go to Cereality, or we could look at clothes at Urban Outfitters."

  "Why are you grounded?"

  I pulled up a chair beside her. "I stole my mother's credit card and went to Los Angeles."

  Her chair thumped down on the floor. "No way! What did you do? Did you see any movie stars? Did you go to Disney World?"

  "Disneyland," I corrected her. "Disney World's in Florida."

  "So did you go? Did you go to Universal Studios? You went on an airplane all by yourself? I've never been on an airplane." She stared up at the ceiling. "I guess I'll get to go on one soon, though."

  "Really?" It seemed like an odd time for Cara and her family to be planning a trip.

  "Well, maybe. You know, those Make-A-Wish people. Stupid Harry'll probably ask to go to Sesame Place. You can drive there," she said. She lifted her legs off the floor. Her chair tilted sharply backward. I jumped up and grabbed her before she hit the floor, surprised by how small she was, how light her body felt.

  I set her chair onto the floor. "See?" I said. "I told you that was going to happen!"

  She inched back toward the table. "So what'd you do in Los Angeles?"

  I sat down again. "I went to meet my grandfather."

  Cara's eyes were shining with interest. "What happened?"

  "Not much," I said. "He's kind of a jerk."

  She pulled a ponytail holder out of her pocket and wrapped it around and around her ind
ex finger. "Oh." She bent her head and mumbled something.

  "Huh?"

  "My brother," she said. "I'm supposed to go see him."

  "Oh." I got to my feet and started wiping a counter that I'd just wiped. "Are your parents coming to get you?"

  "I guess I could wait for them." She tilted her chair back on its legs again, and this time I didn't stop her. "Maybe you could..."

  "Could what?"

  "Take me to the hospital. It's visiting hours now."

  I felt my palms go cold. I hated hospitals. I had ever since I was a kid. Hospitals were where bad, painful things happened. "Don't you need an adult to take you?"

  She pursed her lips and pouted. "You went all the way to California all by yourself, and you won't even walk me across the street to go to the hospital?"

  When she put it like that, there was no excuse. Plus, I couldn't be a baby forever--not with my bat mitzvah coming up. I told Deborah at the front desk where we were going. I got my backpack out of the closet, stuck my cell phone in my front pocket, and walked Cara across the street.

  The hospital stood on a corner, a big building that stretched the length of an entire block, with ambulances lined up in front of the entrance and people clustered by the doors, smoking (some of them were in wheelchairs, with lit cigarettes in their hands and IV bags dangling from poles over their shoulders). Cara walked ahead of me with her head down and her arms swinging at her sides. "It's the sixth floor," she said.

  "Wait," I said. "Hang on."

  She stared up at me. "You don't have to be scared," she said. "It's not catching or anything."

  "No, I...I just...Wait." There was a fruit cart across the street. I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and bought three oranges, better versions of the fruit that had dropped onto my grandfather's lawn. For years I'd watched my mom go to the hospital to visit people, sick friends or ladies who'd just had babies. It's always nice to bring something, she'd said.