Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  “She was my best friend. Why would she hook up with Gabe when she knew I liked him?”

  When I’d first met Paige, working in Long Island City, I assumed we had certain things in common. Her teeth were slightly crooked, and she was always asking to borrow two dollars for a Coke from the vending machine in the warehouse. She turned out to be from Scarsdale, a kid who hadn’t liked wearing her retainer. She found my background fascinating, and while I was prone to exaggerating Jaclyn’s shortcomings and my occasional run-ins with the Deerling police force, the premise at which Paige most often marveled was a hard fact: from the time I turned twelve, no certified adult thought to keep track of where I was. Now Paige was savoring the moment, reacting as if I’d kept Gabe’s daughter a secret for the sole purpose of spilling it tonight—a salacious gift on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday. Throwing up her elegant, semimasculine hands, Paige said, “Why does anyone do anything when they’re seventeen?”

  We were sweating in an un-air-conditioned bar in Bushwick, as far from Deerling as I’d ever been. At twenty-two, I owed my overall happiness to the state of Pennsylvania, which I imagined as a barricade between my childhood and me. Only when I saw the state on a map, crowded between Ohio and New York at the base of the country’s thumb, did I doubt it was up to the task.

  There’s something to the idea that Carrie, Gabe, and I acted impulsively—we were kids, and kids burn things down; they drive cars into rivers and behave like animals toward the people who love them—but I don’t have the luxury of believing it’s so simple. If I don’t take seriously the things we did and felt at seventeen, then my entire adult life becomes a joke.

  “What makes you so sure she knew how you felt?” Paige asked. “Gabe’s a hard guy to resist. The dignified, brooding type. Maybe she genuinely wanted him for herself.”

  Carrie did want him for herself—casually, experimentally. I have never doubted the pleasure Gabe and Carrie took in each other’s company (or, to my grief, in each other’s bodies). But this was a girl who could correctly predict the onset of my period by the way my stomach protruded, barely, over the waistband of my jeans. Watching a movie together, she would say, “Don’t cry,” in the second before my shuddery inhale. When I told her about Gabe and me turning a homework assignment into a joyride, making it last as long as possible, she knew how I felt. She always did.

  “Before Gabe showed up, I’d been talking about going to college together, moving in together. Maybe she was telling me no. Maybe she was trying to say she’d had enough of me.”

  Paige was skeptical. “But you still had a year of high school left. Maybe your friend was just trying to get through it. Maybe you’re overestimating the extent to which her life revolved around yours. She needed a pick-me-up. And it doesn’t sound like your hometown was crawling with interesting men.”

  Gabe wasn’t merely interesting. Gabe was a time traveler, an ambassador from the future.

  He was proof of life outside of Deerling County.

  * * *

  A few days after Halloween, Carrie threw up. We were leaning against the counter in my kitchen, sipping Diet Cokes, watching my brother search the fridge for his after-school snack. Lifting the lid from a Tupperware container, my brother sniffed and theorized, “Old turkey burgers?” The moment the smell reached us, Carrie blanched. She turned and vomited into the sink.

  “Sorry,” Carrie croaked, running the water over the bile-

  splattered dishes. “Hangover.”

  My brother, bewildered, said, “It’s Tuesday.”

  “She’s been hungover since Sunday,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Carrie agreed. “Interminable hangovers run in my family.”

  Still clutching his Tupperware of spoiled poultry, my brother said, “That’s quite a curse.”

  Miserably, Carrie nodded.

  * * *

  The next two months were a blur, during which Gabe, in his ignorance, slipped farther down Carrie’s list of concerns. When I think back to our mornings on the bathroom floor or our numbing afternoons in class—the room’s aroma of boiled hot dogs and pencil shavings—my stomach churns, as if mine were the body in revolt that fall. The number of humans I’ve gestated is one. I know that. Still, a dozen years after Carrie’s pregnancy, when an ultrasound tech squirted a cold curl of gel onto my belly and asked, “First baby?” I struggled to produce the correct answer.

  There was a night in November when I drove Carrie to the hospital to receive intravenous fluids. Squished together on the narrow bed—Carrie’s hand resting on her still-flat abdomen, mine on the remote control—we watched the episode of Dawson’s Creek in which Joey Potter loses her virginity. The premise: during an improbably lavish school trip to a ski lodge in Vermont, Joey and Pacey share a room. She wears a pink camisole with no bra and he brushes her hair, slowly, without encountering a single knot.

  From there, the camera is mostly concerned with the undoing of buttons.

  “Was it like that?” I asked.

  Fluid dripped into Carrie’s veins. “Sure.”

  But could it have been so romantic, or reverent, even in their imaginations? Gabe and Carrie were not in love—he would assure me of that later, whenever I questioned what we’d done. In essential, unyielding ways, Gabe and Carrie were too similar. Each was judgmental and quick to become self-righteous when his or her judgements were questioned. Whimsical observations escalated into fights. Often their fights concerned Ohio. Gabe, echoing his parents, maintained that our town had no culture. Carrie challenged him to define culture: Overpriced restaurants? Rush hour traffic? She relented when Gabe described visiting MoMA on vacation in New York City with his parents or listed the indie bands he had seen live. Carrie and I hadn’t been to a concert since we were fourteen, when my mother dragged us to hear a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band perform at the golf course.

  Though Gabe, like Carrie, was proud to a fault, he had a domestic silly streak that was all his own. In the privacy of a bedroom or a car, he spoofed on radio hits. He broke awkward silences by smiling to reveal an orange peel wedged between his lips. His comedic timing left me doubled over, gasping for air, while Carrie looked from him to me like she was considering dropping us both off at the pound.

  I kept prodding. “Was there a fireplace, casting flattering shadows across your faces?”

  “No,” she said. “No fireplace.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once.”

  I put some space between our shoulders. “Just once? Are you kidding me?”

  She sighed. “No, not kidding you.”

  And there was no joy in her response, this time.

  There were things I didn’t need her to say. I understood that, whatever her motivation for sleeping with Gabe, she hadn’t meant to permanently tie her life to his. If Carrie’s goal had ever been to bruise me, it hadn’t been to bludgeon me. She’d broken up with him a couple of weeks before learning she was pregnant, in no small part because my infatuation with her boyfriend had become intolerable to us both. The unspoken plan was to give Gabe a second to catch his breath before I claimed my pass to make out with him. Due to the cells accumulating personhood in Carrie’s uterus, the pass was now null and void. I got it. I didn’t expect her to accommodate my feelings for the father of her child.

  But I did, however unfairly, wish she would say she was sorry.

  She never did. Either she believed the blue paper gown and tubes taped to her wrist absolved her or else she already suspected what was coming.

  * * *

  Gabe was the third person we told, after Carrie’s mother and after mine. Driving to the highway exit Denny’s where we’d asked him to meet us, I was more nervous than Carrie seemed, my hands slipping against the steering wheel.

  “Why breakfast?” I asked. “Why not dinner? Isn’t that when you’re supposed to have serious conversations?”

  Carrie stared
out the window. “I’ve never heard that rule.”

  “Sure you have. Dinner is official. People, like, join hands and pray before dinner.”

  “You want to pray before we eat our pancakes?”

  “Maybe we should.” I was concerned she did not feel the weight of our mission. Carrie talked to me less and less as the pregnancy progressed. I felt jealous of the fetus, who was presumably keeping her company.

  “Look,” she said, “you can’t go around dropping bombshells at dinner. It’s too close to bedtime. How would Gabe ever get to sleep after that?”

  I turned into the Denny’s parking lot. Mounds of shoveled snow buried the medians. “No, you’re right. Better to tell him at 9:00 a.m. In another twelve hours, he’ll be over it.”

  In the months since their breakup, Gabe Feldman had become a subject of fascination among our peers. No one in Deerling had ever heard the term emo and so couldn’t apply it to Gabe’s swooped bangs, slim-fit corduroys, Elliott Smith T-shirt, or scratched leather messenger bag. If pressed for a description of the new kid, most locals would have sooner produced the word homo—but that wouldn’t have fazed Gabe, and so no one bothered. Gabe slammed his locker and moved through the halls like a businessman impatient to cross an airport terminal. None of us was used to thinking about our town as a pit stop; to us, Deerling was home, and home was a concept as unyielding as the broken-down cars in our backyards and the generations of junk cluttering our grandmas’ attics. Gabe had moved here from Philadelphia. Before that, he had lived in Boston and New York. He didn’t care whether he was liked by the teenagers of a small midwestern town—therefore, he was beloved.

  Later he told me he had started his senior year pretending to be a spy, dispatched to observe the habits and rituals of Middle Americans. He said yes to everything: yes to parties, yes to football games, yes to driving an ATV through the center of town, yes to the county fair, yes to using empty Budweiser cans as target practice in Bruce Stout’s backyard. It wasn’t until Carrie and I walked into Denny’s hand in hand—both Carrie’s nerves and nausea had surged in the parking lot—that Gabe realized his life in Deerling was more than a game.

  My job was to answer the practical questions—thirteen weeks along, due at the beginning of July, feeling sick but excited—while Carrie engaged Gabe on the delicate subject of his paternity.

  “I don’t want us to get back together, and I’m not asking you for anything,” she said. “I know this is primarily my fault.”

  I flinched. My assumption, until now, was that their chosen method of birth control had failed them. My understanding of fertility was vague, rooted in our health teacher’s assertion that you could be struck pregnant at absolutely any time—no matter the day of the month, no matter the brand of pill or condom. Even if you didn’t fully have sex, but just kind of gestured toward intercourse. Sperm were sneaky.

  If, in fact, Carrie and Gabe had declined to take precautions in the heat of the moment? It wasn’t a moment I wanted to imagine.

  “Not your fault,” Gabe said quickly.

  His hair fell in his eyes as he dipped his chin toward his coffee. A moat of empty sugar packets surrounded the mug. His fingers shook as he tore open another.

  “Still, you don’t have to, like, be a dad. I can leave that line blank on the birth certificate.”

  Gabe frowned. “Don’t do that.”

  “You want to be a dad?”

  “I mean, no. Not really. But if I am a dad, I don’t want to pretend I’m not one.”

  “Okay,” Carrie said. “That’s honest. Thank you.”

  Gabe laughed. “This is surreal. Don’t you guys think this is surreal?”

  Carrie and I exchanged a look. This morning was no more surreal than our past one hundred mornings. Still, I ached for him. I wanted to cradle Gabe’s head in my lap while he cried.

  “We don’t have to figure everything out right now,” Carrie said. “You can think about how involved you want to be and then get back to me.”

  Outside the restaurant, Gabe used his remote key to unlock his Volkswagen Beetle, a car that looked like a rotund space invader among the pickups and Wranglers of Deerling. He watched Carrie and me climb into her truck and called out, “Hey, Care?”

  The nickname revived all the affection of their brief romance. She looked up.

  “Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

  “Not yet. It’s too soon.”

  “Are you going to find out?”

  The wind whipped his hair away from his face. His forehead, unblemished, was creased with concern.

  “Do you think I should?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It would be cool to know.”

  The two of them shared such tentative smiles, I had to turn away.

  It’s funny, now, to remember the assumptions we made—

  primarily, that the adults in our orbit would leave it to three teenagers to dole out custody and care for an unborn child. Carrie and I were still waiting for Gabe to call and define the parameters of his fatherhood when Mr. and Mrs. Feldman drove up to the Hart house one Friday night, mid-January. I was at home, chatting with Carrie on the bulky Dell desktop my mom had begrudgingly set up in one corner of our kitchen. Back then, Jaclyn was bewildered by the hours my brother and I spent on the internet, bewildered by the internet itself—the atonal beeps and screeches of the dial-up connection—and unable to imagine a future in which all of us stroked our handheld screens for comfort. Carrie typed, Um. The Feldmans are here.

  Me: all of them??

  Carrie: just Gabe + parentals + some random dude??

  Me: what do they want??!

  Carrie: brb

  I stared at the computer, my heart pounding. At the top of my buddy list, Carrie’s screen name turned gray to indicate inactivity. After fifteen minutes I typed, everyone still there?? and received an automated message in response: a couplet of Nick Drake lyrics, one of the morose musicians to whom Gabe had introduced us.

  More than an hour later, the away message came down and Carrie typed, finally they’re gone. She gave me the verdict: Gabe had been accepted early decision to NYU and would be attending college in the fall. As long as things remained amicable between him and Carrie, he would not file for custody. Mr. and Mrs. Feldman would make child payments until Gabe graduated and began earning a minimum salary of $40,000 per year, at which point he would assume responsibility for the payments himself. Gabe would see the baby whenever he was in town—Christmas, spring break—and at least once per summer.

  The random dude turned out to be a family mediator.

  My fingers were still hammering away at my keyboard when Carrie told me she was logging off, going to bed. By the time I saw her the next day, the meeting was already in the past. To rehash the details, she told me, would stress her out, and stress was among the things—caffeine, hot baths, deli meats—that Carrie avoided on the fear-mongering advice of that prenatal bible, What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

  My first vicarious glimpse into that night wouldn’t come until Gabe and I were twenty-five, on vacation in Rome. Again, a conversation made possible by foreign surroundings and two bottles of Chianti at lunch. We began by talking about how neither of us had ever been to Europe until now.

  “When I was a kid, I always thought I would go the summer before college. I thought I’d schlep a backpack around and sleep on trains,” Gabe said.

  “Oh, yeah? And then what happened?” Talking to Gabe about Carrie always made my cheeks hot. The topic was equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, like taking a sledgehammer to your own house.

  Gabe played along. “Got a girl pregnant. Spent the summer waiting for her to go into labor.”

  “What a drag.”

  We sank into silence. The wrought iron table wobbled against the sidewalk. On Gabe’s plate, a few remaining bites of gnocchi drowned in red sauce.
<
br />   I took a breath. “When Carrie and I asked to meet you at Denny’s, what did you think was going on?”

  “Honestly? I thought you two were going to inform me of some arrangement you’d cooked up, wherein you and I got to date. Maybe with some conditions, as predetermined by Carrie.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been a little dramatic?”

  “You two were a little dramatic.”

  That fall, following the positive pregnancy test, Carrie and I had mostly avoided Gabe. I’d talked to him a couple of times only because we still shared an English class. Once I told him I liked his T-shirt. Against a black background, a reddish circle was labeled mars. “Is Mars your favorite planet?” I asked. Gabe had looked down at his skinny chest and replied, “It’s my favorite planet shirt.”

  “We were dramatic because she was pregnant,” I said.

  “So I learned.”

  “Would you have dated me?”

  Gabe smiled. “I’m not sure. At the time, I thought of you as Carrie’s sarcastic friend who maybe had a crush on me. I didn’t fall for you until a few months later. You guys invited me over to bake cookies, which sounded so unbelievably wholesome, I figured it was code for, like, do meth, until I remembered Carrie was going to be a mom. And moms do things like bake cookies. Do you remember this?”

  At twenty-five, I still remembered everything, but I lied and said no.

  “The cookies Carrie wanted to make were crazy complicated. The dough wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. She had a bowl full of liquid mess, and she started crying. Hysterically.”

  “Hormones.”

  “Your solution was to take the whole failed experiment and toss it into the river behind Carrie’s house. You must remember this.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “So, we walk down to the river, and it’s March, and it’s freezing. And we determine Carrie’s too pregnant to walk across the rocks, and so you volunteer. You were wearing a pair of flip-flops, if memory serves.”