“That girl is you.”
“She’s teenage me.”
“You want me to tattoo teenage you on your grownup body?”
“She’s not really me,” I say. “She’s the way you saw me.”
Now Nina is pushing through the screen door, letting it slam behind her. “Mom!” she shouts with so much urgency that for a second I worry she’s injured.
“Yes?” Carrie answers, tranquil.
“Where’s the peanut butter?”
Carrie closes her eyes. “There’s a new jar next to the microwave.”
Before going back inside, Nina frowns at me. “Your baby’s crying.”
“Take it up with your dad,” I counter.
For whatever reason, Nina slinks back inside as if I’ve reprimanded her.
“She’ll be your stepdaughter now,” Carrie says.
“What does that make you and me?”
Leaning over her knees like a person experiencing vertigo, Carrie smiles at the grass and says, “There’s no word.”
* * *
Carrie does not tattoo teenage me on my grown-up body. I never wanted her to, really; I only wanted her to admit that the most popular piece from her portfolio is me, the direct result of all the hours we spent arched over matching sketchpads. “Put your head back the way it was,” I would say, “you’re ruining my drawing.”
“Stop talking,” she would say, “you’re ruining mine.”
If I had known Carrie would monetize my scowl, maybe I would have written that admissions essay, The Night My Best Friend Gave Birth. I was afraid writing it would feel like stripping our friendship for parts, and I was hurt when it appeared that Carrie had, with her tattoos, done exactly that. But maybe she never saw it that way. Maybe to her those sketches were always a means to an end—practice for some better life.
Maybe our whole friendship was practice.
The night before Gabe and I leave Ohio, I tell Carrie to sketch me an idea. The only instruction I’m willing to give her is “something for Jack.” Undaunted by the task of paying homage to someone too small to have a personality, Carrie finishes the drawing in five minutes flat.
“For your shoulder,” she says, presenting me with her sketchpad. “So you can still hide it from your mom.”
For the rest of my life, I will blush while explaining to strangers that I have a tattoo of a jackrabbit in honor of my son named Jack. Carrie’s idea is sappy and embarrassing and I love it. One day, Jack will love it too. (And then hate it. And then love it again.)
We leave the kids with Gabe, and Carrie drives me to Mansfield. Her studio is on Main Street, wedged between a Greek diner and a children’s bookstore. In the front window is a framed New York Times profile, published the same year I heard Carrie interviewed on NPR. Inside, her studio has brick walls and a clean glass reception desk.
In a back room, Carrie tells me to lie down on what appears to be a massage table wrapped in plastic. The sight of the table immobilizes me. Fear makes a desert of my throat. Maybe I can’t do this.
Carrie touches me. “You okay?”
“Are you sure this is safe? Like, for breastfeeding?”
“The ink won’t get into your milk, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“And I won’t get an infection?”
“No. I’ll show you how to take care of it.”
Maybe I don’t want another body-based chore. Maybe I don’t want my body to be the subject of anyone’s dispassionate scrutiny ever again.
“Will it hurt?” I ask, stalling.
“Compared to pushing a baby out of your vagina? The pain won’t even register.”
Carrie shows me the stencil she has made of the jackrabbit drawing. Suddenly I want the rabbit on my shoulder more than anything. I want a tattoo for the same reason I wanted to have sex with Gabe when I was seven weeks postpartum. So rarely in the past year has my body been under my authority.
I climb onto the table and lie with my face in a pillow that smells vaguely medicinal. My nursing tank top gives Carrie full access to the canvas of my shoulder blade. With gentle confidence she transfers the stencil to my skin.
“Tell me if you feel yourself freaking out, okay?” she says, and the needle begins to vibrate.
Carrie’s wrong. The pain registers, but it’s the kind of pain I can breathe through. It’s the sting of a hot shower on a fresh sunburn or a cube of ice clutched tightly in my palm. It’s a pain I can forget and then remember and then choose to live with. It never swallows me whole.
After finishing the rabbit’s outline, Carrie switches to a bigger needle for the shading, which hurts a little more.
“How much do I owe you for this?” I ask.
She laughs at me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Angela Beatty, recently promoted to staff writer for The Atlantic, sends me an email after Gabe and I get back to New York. Her name in my inbox rings only a distant bell. I click, and the photo of Jared Jenkins’s funeral procession loads within the body of the message. Having only ever glanced at it over Nina’s shoulder, I’m impressed by the image enlarged on my laptop’s screen. For the first time, I appreciate how much the picture reveals: not only the casket draped in the confederate flag or the pro-Trump banner or the blue backdrop of Deerling’s cloudless sky, but the self-righteous sneer on the driver’s face. His confidence that he is honoring his friend, that there’s a version of America—long gone or still to come—that could have prevented the death of a teenage kid who didn’t want to wear a seatbelt.
“Did you take this photo,” Angela Beatty wants to know, “on Sunday, June 26, 2016, in the town of Deerling, Ohio?”
That she doesn’t ask me to supply the family’s name is a relief. I write back, “Yes. Why?” and receive an immediate response.
“Do I have your permission to publish it alongside a piece I’m writing about Trump supporters in the rural Midwest? It’s a striking photo of an ugly thing. I think it needs to be seen. Where I live, people don’t realize how passionate his fans have become.”
Jack is asleep in his vibrating chair on the coffee table. I’m deep within the embrace of our broken yellow couch, basking in the comfort of my own apartment, which Gabe scrubbed spotless before he met us in Cleveland.
Jack will never claim to be from New York. He won’t remember the M train barreling past the kitchen window, the bedroom door that never fully shut, the pipe in the bathroom that stays so hot we have to warn our guests not to touch it. (Of course, they touch it.) He will belong to Ohio. To his dad and to me and to Nina and to Carrie. Remembering that this was not part of the plan when I was round with him, pulsing and aching and sick with him, makes my blood run cold. I feel as if I’ve seized the wheel and swerved at the last moment, narrowly missing the sharp slope of the ravine to my right.
Was Deerling everything you wanted it to be? Gabe asked over the phone, exasperated, pretending what I wanted was lost on him.
Yes. Unequivocally.
“Publish the photo,” I tell Angela, because Nina should get what she wants too. Nina should get everything. “Put Deerling on the map. But for the record, we don’t live there anymore.”
* * *
What Gabe says, when I’ve drunkenly demanded answers, is that he didn’t immediately know I was interested. When we found him reading poetry alone in the woods, it was Carrie who greeted him, who struck up the aggressive back-and-forth that passes for conversation when you’re seventeen. She was the one who asked for his screen name, and who, during those last weeks of summer, sought opportunities to touch obscure parts of his body: she pressed his anklebone and said, “Skinny.” She pulled on his earlobe and asked, “Did you sterilize the needle, at least?”
Meanwhile, what was I doing? I was laughing at Gabe’s jokes—disconcertingly hard, he claims, as if maybe he was the joke—and speaking to Carrie in an
alienating shorthand, forever reeling her back to the shore of our friendship. Gabe had no way of knowing that in one year he would ask me to give her up for him. Or that I would do it.
I don’t believe he was ever oblivious to my longing, which wasn’t subtle. But I don’t blame him for choosing Carrie, for assuming it made no difference which girl he kissed that year. Deerling was supposed to be like Vegas. (High school was supposed to be like Vegas.) Our lives were allegedly spread out before us, as immaculate as the layer of snow that blanketed the dump each January, concealing its creeks and trails.
The three of us were babies.
“My mom will be at work until at least seven,” Carrie promised. “We can rustle up some adult beverages and chill until then.”
At her house, Carrie promptly left Gabe and me alone in the yard while she pillaged the garage for the promised hard lemonade—which Mr. and Mrs. Hart, both of them abstinent and devout, stocked for their less disciplined guests. Gabe collapsed cartoonishly into an old hammock that Carrie and I hadn’t gone near in years. The hammock sagged almost to the ground and Gabe wore an expression of good-natured regret.
The silence between us was so strained it was intolerable. I stared at the weeds of Mrs. Hart’s long-abandoned garden, hoping to appear lost in a thought that had nothing to do with Gabe, one so deep and complicated he would have trouble comprehending it, even if I were to let him try.
“So, who are you?” he said at last. “The wordless sidekick?”
I suspected Gabe had misinterpreted the way I’d climbed voluntarily into the back of the truck, where a shallow bench seat gave me an unobstructed view of his left shoulder as he rode shotgun.
“Not a sidekick. The best friend.”
“Ah. So, I guess I should expect to see a lot of you?”
“Carrie hasn’t managed to shake me yet.”
“Has she tried?”
“Of course. But I’m all she’s got.”
Carrie reappeared, ducking beneath the partially closed garage door. She had two bottles of lemonade wedged between the fingers of her left hand, a third bottle clutched in her right. “Let’s drink these fast,” she said, “and then find something to do.”
“What do you mean something?” Gabe was lying in the hammock with one arm bent above his head. I could see down the sleeve of his T-shirt, where clumps of deodorant clung to a nest of dark hair. “Isn’t this enough?”
Carrie and I looked askance at each other. This, so far, was nothing.
“We’ll need a change of scenery,” I said.
“Some food,” Carrie added.
“Drugs,” I proposed.
“At least one dear diary moment.”
“Oh, at least.”
Gabe twisted the cap from his drink and said, “I think I’ve made a mistake, following you people home.”
Correctly, Carrie predicted, “Too late now.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Love and gratitude to my agent, Susan Ginsburg, whose guidance over the past decade has meant everything. I’m also grateful to Stacy Testa for her comments on an early draft and to Catherine Bradshaw for her help at every stage.
Thank you to Peggy Hageman, whose sharp editorial eye and sense of humor made revising a dream.
Thank you to the entire team at Blackstone Publishing, including Ember Hood, Josie Woodbridge, Rick Bleiweiss, Jeff Yamaguchi, Greg Boguslawski, Lauren Maturo, Megan Wahrenbrock, and Mandy Earles.
Thank you to my writer friends and first readers, including Kerry Winfrey, Liz Zaretsky, Lauren Rochford, and Carolyn Eyre.
Thanks, finally, to the three loves of my life: Dan, Wes, and Hank. Let’s get back in the car.
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