Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  The day after she decided to stop taking her fertility drugs, she didn’t wake until seven, when she heard Gil’s cries. There were five missed calls from the clinic on her phone, and a text message from Andrew asking how the morning had gone. Her head felt like it had been slammed repeatedly between metal cymbals. She went to Gil’s room, picked him up.

  “Hello, my love,” she said softly.

  Elisabeth carried him downstairs and placed him in his high chair. She washed a handful of blueberries and cut each one in half before putting them on his tray. She had forgotten a bib, but she couldn’t imagine going back upstairs, so she let him dirty his shirt. What was the difference? She’d have to soak one thing or the other.

  Elisabeth swallowed three Advil and made coffee. She drank two cups, then fixed herself a piece of toast with peanut butter, and a scrambled egg for Gil. She could not remember the last time she’d been this hungover.

  The previous night, before Sam came, Elisabeth had made the mistake of looking at Charlotte’s Instagram for the first time since Christmas. It was like she was anxious over IVF and decided the best way to cope was to turn her attention to the only thing that made her even more anxious. She scrolled all the way back, through February and into January. The posts were the same as ever—sexy bathing-suit pics, asinine self-help sayings.

  In one photo, Charlotte leaned backward off a moving train as it traversed the side of a lush, green mountain. She wore the shortest dress Elisabeth had ever seen. Charlotte’s arms were outstretched, hands holding on to the sides of the open train door. A gorgeous man hovered over her. They were kissing. They looked like they were one sneeze away from falling off a cliff.

  The caption read: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” I live by those words. Sri Lanka has reminded me that possessions don’t matter, money doesn’t matter. Only love matters. Only adventure. There are people who will never understand this. They believe money is everything. They hold on too tight to their small and boring lives. And for them, I sometimes weep. But not today, dear readers. Today, I SOAR.

  “Fuck you,” Elisabeth said out loud.

  She looked at the needle on the kitchen table and thought of how Charlotte was to blame for landing her here, in this position. Yet nothing had changed for Charlotte. There had been no consequences.

  Almost two hundred commenters praised the train shot for its beauty, and Charlotte for being so brave. Elisabeth was fairly certain the quote was from Helen Keller, but Charlotte had probably seen it on a coaster and claimed it as her own.

  Elisabeth pictured herself walking down the aisle of that train, feeling the warm air on her cheeks, and, whoopsie, shoving her sister right off.

  After that, she started drinking.

  The end of the night was a blank space. Elisabeth didn’t recall saying goodbye to Sam. There was a pot of cloudy water on the stove, a colander in the sink, which suggested pasta, but she couldn’t say what she’d eaten.

  Sam texted to check in around nine. Elisabeth was tempted to ask her what happened. But she just responded that she was fine.

  How much had she told her?

  Eventually, she called the clinic back. Gil was speed-crawling up and down the front hall with a pen in his mouth, and she was letting him because she needed him happy and entertained above all else if she was going to survive this day.

  “We got no results for you this morning,” scolded the nurse on the line. “It’s impossible to monitor the state of your uterus if you don’t show up. Make sure you’re there tomorrow.”

  “Will do,” Elisabeth said.

  That was all? She had never missed a single monitoring session when they were going through this the first time. They had once set out from Brooklyn in a blizzard at four-thirty in the morning, before the streets were plowed, to make it to the Upper East Side for seven o’clock.

  She called Andrew during Gil’s nap. She was on her fourth cup of coffee by then.

  “How did it go this morning?” he said. “I feel awful that you had to get Gil up that early and schlep all the way to the blood-draw place.”

  “It was fine,” she replied.

  Elisabeth couldn’t get into it yet. Maybe after she’d taken a shower, or a nap, or both.

  “How’s Denver?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Andrew said. “Hard to tell. There are definitely the cool kids in the room, who everyone’s dying to meet. I’m not one of them.”

  “I think you’re a cool kid,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  Elisabeth tried to sound optimistic. “Keep it up,” she said. “There are three days to go. It only takes one person.”

  “Did the clinic call with your levels?”

  “Yup.”

  “And?”

  “All good.”

  She willed him to stop asking questions so she could stop lying.

  “You think we’ll still be able to do the transfer on Saturday?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I’m excited,” he said.

  She decided then that she would tell him in person what she had done, as soon as he got home.

  On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings, Elisabeth went to the clinic and let them draw her blood. It made no sense, but she felt as though if she kept doing this, it meant she hadn’t backed out entirely. Each day, the clinic called an hour later and said things weren’t moving as fast as they should be. Her levels were too low. Each day, they told her to double her dose of everything that night, and she said she would, before proceeding to do nothing. The drugs had gone out with the garbage on Tuesday.

  Andrew got home after eleven on Friday night.

  She was reading in bed, waiting up for him.

  When he came into the room, she said, “I’m so happy you’re back.”

  He looked deflated.

  “What?” she said.

  “The grill. It’s not going to work, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People were laughing during my presentation.”

  “No.”

  “I’m pretty sure one guy in the front row was playing Tetris on his phone. They were bored by the whole thing.”

  “That’s because you didn’t have enough time to perfect it,” she said. “Maybe the prototype needs work. But that doesn’t reflect on the idea.”

  “They hated the prototype and the idea,” he said. “Most people there met with ten or twenty potential investors. Only two wanted to meet me. They both said the same things: people do barbecue on cloudy days, and people like the taste of meat seared in charcoal. Now more than ever, apparently.”

  They were the exact things she had worried about. But Elisabeth wasn’t happy or smug. She felt sorry for him.

  “There’s another product like it that’s selling gangbusters, already in stores,” he said. “The inventor was on TV.”

  “If that one’s selling gangbusters, maybe there’s room for two in the market,” she said.

  “No. They said not.”

  “Adversity is part of it, right? You can’t let two bozos in Denver decide your fate.”

  “Elisabeth. Seriously. What am I doing?” he said. “When do I ever even grill?”

  She laughed. Something in her unclenched. Elisabeth realized only now that she’d been waiting months for him to come to this conclusion.

  “I think I knew from early on that it wouldn’t work,” Andrew said. “But I had this opportunity. I got to do the thing everyone wants to do. I got to follow my dream. I didn’t want to give up on that. Especially after what happened to my dad. It was like I was going to succeed for both of us, to make up for what he went through. No one ever says what you’re supposed to do when you realize your dream was kind of stupid in the first place.”

  “You said yourself, you can come up with more ideas,” sh
e said.

  Andrew shook his head. “As it turns out, I’ve got nothing.”

  Elisabeth stretched her arms out to him. “Come here.”

  Andrew got into bed, fully clothed, and spooned her, pressing his chest to her back, holding on tight.

  “I don’t know if it was even about the grill,” he said. “I hated my job. I wish I could have just said that and saved us this wasted year.”

  “It wasn’t wasted,” she said.

  She was thinking that maybe now they could return to Brooklyn, the grand experiment complete.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It wasn’t. I like living here. I like being near my parents, having a backyard for Gil.”

  Andrew got out of bed, went to the dresser, and picked up the check from her father.

  Elisabeth’s body grew stiff at the thought of him asking her to accept it one more time, but Andrew held it out to her and said, “Rip it up.”

  “What?”

  “Go ahead. Rip it up. I wasn’t listening. I was being selfish. I get it now.”

  Elisabeth felt like her husband had returned to her in some way she hadn’t known he was gone.

  She tore up the check and let the pieces fall to the bed like confetti.

  “Now what?” she said.

  Andrew shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  We start over from scratch, she thought. With nothing. Holy shit.

  But she said, “Thank you.”

  They had sex then. The first really good sex since Gil.

  Afterward, lying in the dark, he said, “All week at that conference, I kept thinking about me, you, and Gil in the car tomorrow, and of the amazing thing that’s about to happen to our family. That kept me going.”

  Elisabeth needed to tell him. No more lies. But how?

  “The odds are, it won’t work,” she said. “I don’t want you getting your hopes up.”

  “I know,” he said. “But at least we’re trying. And, hon? I have a feeling it’s going to work.”

  Elisabeth felt angry; it was his own fault. She had tried to warn him.

  She cried on the way to have her blood drawn the next morning, and she cried all the way home, wondering what the hell she was doing. The window of time to tell him was nearly closed. She dreaded the moment.

  He was in the living room when she got back, sitting on the floor with Gil.

  The phone rang—the clinic calling already—and she rushed to answer.

  It was the doctor himself on the line. As rare as a unicorn sighting.

  “I know we have the transfer of one embryo scheduled for this afternoon,” he said. “But I’m looking at your chart and I’m concerned about your body’s response this week. It’s almost like you weren’t taking any hormones at all. I hate to tell you this, I know you’re coming a long way, but the odds of a transfer working are basically zero. I’m afraid we should call it off and try a new regimen next month.”

  Elisabeth took the phone up to the bedroom and closed the door.

  “I want to go ahead with it,” she said.

  “I can’t advise that.”

  “It’s my call, right? As long as I’m paying.”

  “Yes. But you pay me for my expertise.”

  “It will be fine,” she said. “I know it.”

  “All right,” he said. “As you said, it’s your call.”

  Elisabeth was somehow separate from her body as she watched herself get in the car with her husband and child and head to the city. She was in awe of her own dishonesty.

  Halfway there, Andrew said, “I’ll only say this once, but I feel strongly that we should put in both embryos to improve our chances.”

  “Okay,” she said, digging the hole ever deeper. “Let’s do it.”

  She reached over, took his hand.

  Elisabeth showed up at the hospital right on time, along with twelve other women. It felt like something from the fifties, how they were made to sit together in the waiting room wearing hairnets and paper gowns. When it was her turn, she followed a nurse down the familiar hallway, into a room that looked like the inside of a spaceship. The nurses strapped her to the table and tipped it back.

  The doctor came in, the one who was scheduled to do procedures today. She didn’t remember ever seeing him before. She was relieved that her doctor wasn’t the one. He might try to talk her out of it again.

  Elisabeth hung upside down while the doctor talked about the Mets and inserted a tube through the wall of her uterus, planting there her last two chances of becoming a mother again.

  He said, “Good luck, I’ll be rooting for you.”

  She thanked him, knowing that all the luck in the world could not possibly make it work.

  Elisabeth was wheeled out on a stretcher, and made to lie still for an hour. The nurse gave her a black-and-white photo of two perfect circles. Their insides looked like the surface of the moon.

  They spent the rest of the weekend at the Carlyle. Even the smallest room was absurdly expensive, but Andrew insisted.

  “You’ve always wanted to stay there,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  On Saturday night, after Andrew and Gil were asleep, Elisabeth went down to the lobby, to Bemelmans, and ordered a gin and tonic. She sat at the bar, watched as the dark room filled with people, impeccably dressed. In the town where she now lived, there was nowhere a person could go dressed like that. A jazz trio roared. The young man at the piano was gorgeous, not a line on his face. Nobody said a word to her. Elisabeth felt like a ghost.

  At Andrew’s insistence, he and Gil went out in the morning while she slept in. Then the three of them ate room service and walked through Central Park, and then they were heading home, to wait.

  The following week was spring break. No Sam to talk to. She was in London, with Clive. Andrew took the week off so Elisabeth could spend it on the couch, watching movies, free of any stress or responsibility. She had too much time to think. She wondered if the embryos had left her body yet, unprimed as it was to receive them. Or if they were still floating around inside her, searching in vain for a place to attach themselves.

  She went to her Friday session with Violet, nervous that somehow Violet would intuit that she was holding back. But Elisabeth spent the hour talking nonsense—about her neighbors and her book deadline and a dream she’d had about an old boyfriend from high school—and Violet couldn’t tell the difference.

  She was supposed to take progesterone suppositories to increase her chances for success. Each morning, she removed one from the bottle and flushed it down the toilet.

  Nomi texted her most days, as usual, about something trivial—an old classmate of theirs had lost eighty-five pounds; Nomi’s kids were getting scooters and she and Brian were fighting over the necessity of helmets for toddlers. Elisabeth wanted to tell her, but she would have to start from the beginning. She wasn’t sure she could say it out loud. Then one more person would know her secret. She wished she hadn’t told Sam, that she could die without anyone finding out what she was capable of.

  Elisabeth had always prided herself on knowing that she would never cheat on Andrew, as if that was the only way to deceive someone you loved.

  She was disgusting. She was her father’s daughter after all.

  * * *

  —

  The following Monday was Sam’s first day back.

  She hadn’t yet taken off her sneakers when Elisabeth confessed everything.

  “I was going to tell him,” she said. “But then he came home from Denver and he was upset about what happened there, and I couldn’t get the words out. The rest—I can’t even explain. It turned into this runaway train.”

  “So Andrew still thinks there’s a chance you’re pregnant?” Sam said.

  “Yes. I’ll do one last blood test, the pregnancy test, on Friday, and tha
t will be that. A few more days of this deception. Or the rest of my life, depending on how you look at it. I’m a liar, Sam. I’m terrible. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Sam didn’t respond.

  “I wish I’d never dragged you into it. You must think I’m the most awful person.”

  No reply. Elisabeth realized then that she wanted Sam to absolve her.

  Elisabeth looked at her. Sam was crying.

  “I think I know how you feel,” she said, finally. “I did something recently that I really regret. I thought I was doing the right thing, but—I’ll tell you, if you want. Then we’ll be even.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Elisabeth said.

  “But I understand what you’re going through. This thing I did. Now it’s too late to fix it. I can’t stop replaying it in my head. I think maybe I’m a bad person. I never thought I was, but I am.”

  Elisabeth reached over and touched her arm.

  “Stop beating yourself up. There’s no such thing as a good person. Or a bad one. There are just situations we get ourselves into that we never would have imagined, and we have to find our way out.”

  She wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince Sam or herself of this.

  They stared at each other.

  Sam raised her left hand to wipe tears from her cheek.

  That’s when Elisabeth noticed the tiny diamond.

  “Is that what I think it is? I thought you told Clive you didn’t want a ring.”

  “I did! He said he couldn’t resist.” Sam shrugged. “He’s a romantic.”

  That was one word for it.

  The whole thing was controlling, a sign that he refused to take her as she was.

  “And you’re happy about this?” Elisabeth said.

  “I don’t think anything has changed, really.”

  “Sam, he proposed.”

  “Yes, but he already thought of us as engaged.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I love him. We’re together. I guess I don’t think defining it matters as much as all that.”

  Elisabeth wondered if she meant it. They were from different generations, maybe they viewed marriage differently. But no. She knew Sam. Sam was traditional; Sam painted her grandmother on a porch while her peers were pinning pubic hair to a corkboard and calling it art.