“So what happened?”
He gave a smile so broad his whole face seemed to wear it. “Medication. Can’t you tell? It’s made me fat and happy.”
Being with Kevin made her feel everything at once: lonely, abandoned, terrified of some decision she’d already made. Later, when it was her turn to talk, she tried to explain without specifying anything: “I don’t think I want some big career. I know I’m supposed to, but I just don’t. I want to have a different life.” She thought of her parents, the quiet happiness of their lives, marred only by the miscarriages her mother had suffered before Cara—the miracle—arrived and stayed. “I think everyone wants to pretend we’re adults now. I go to these parties and everyone’s smoking and drinking, like at last we can, this is what we’ve all been waiting for, and it’s not.” This was the first time she’d thought about all this, how unhappy she’d been. For so long, she’d narrowed her thoughts into a tunnel of cheerful optimism for Suzette’s sake: This party might be great, she’d say. They have friends who are in a band. What was she thinking? Suddenly she saw, in the perfect clarity of Suzette’s absence, that all of it had been awful. Until now she hadn’t let herself see the life Suzette was going crazy to reject.
“Ah, parties,” Kevin said, grinning now, his whole face alive. “I went to one once. You want to hear what happened?” She smiled and nodded. “It was a football-player party. Or, more pathetically, an ex-football-player party. It was in Scott’s basement. Dark, okay? With these huge overstuffed sofas, the only light in the place trained on the keg, and big drunk Scott—I think honestly intending to have a conversation with me—comes staggering over and sits down on top of me. For like thirty seconds, he sits there, saying, ‘Wait? Kevin?’”
She laughed, knowing already something had shifted, a decision had been made. This made no sense, but it was true: he seemed like the first genuinely happy person she’d seen in years. She would bring Kevin back to the apartment she couldn’t face spending the night alone in.
The next morning when she woke up, Kevin was gone. On the glass coffee table he had left a wax paper bag with a chocolate chip cookie inside, and a note underneath: “I bought this last night, and then I forgot to give it to you. K.” The cookie was enormous and Cara ate the whole thing, thinking, for the first time, with unbridled glee, Maybe I’m eating for two. The night produced a tectonic shift in her worldview: Oliver mattered little, college even less. Suzette’s breakdown wasn’t a tragedy, but a road sign pointing Cara onto a path she must have seen when she stood in the bookstore thumbing through What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Kevin wasn’t the end of that path, he was a catalyst onto it, a way of seeing different versions of possibility: life could have no taste for a while, and then it could return.
Truthfully, what she saw in Kevin was hope for Suzette’s return. Three weeks later, she went over to Suzette’s old house, found her sitting in the kitchen wearing sweatpants and an old Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She was better already, Cara could tell. She smiled when Cara walked in, then rolled her eyes at Teddy’s insistence on making tea for everyone. He was a tenth-grader now, taller than both of them, but he still had his quiet, boyish sweetness. “Look, Teddy, I’m fine,” Suzette said as he set mugs down on the table. “Maybe Cara and I will just talk by ourselves if that’s okay.”
He hesitated, then walked out. Alone, they sat for a minute in silence.
“So I’m sorry for getting so crazy on you.”
“You weren’t crazy, Suzette.”
Suzette held up a hand. “It’s better to be honest,” she said. “I’m trying to sort out what happened in my mind. I wanted to be ready to grow up and be independent. I kept thinking, ‘Look at Cara, she’s not afraid of things. She just does them.’ You don’t look at something and see a thousand ways it could go wrong. You just do it.”
Cara thought about the secret she had come here to tell her. “Not always.”
“No, it’s a good thing. It’s great. I’m trying to learn how to be more that way. Braver. Not so worried all the time about how things might not turn out right.”
“You already seem better.”
“I am. I’m getting there.” She reached a hand across the table and took Cara’s.
Cara hadn’t planned any of this specifically, hadn’t picked her words yet or how she would say this: “There’s something I want to do, Suzette.” She leaned across the table, whispered in case Teddy was somewhere, listening. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m sure it’s the right thing. I know it. I feel it.”
Suzette stared at her. “What?”
And she told her, said it out loud for the first time in her life. “I’m pregnant and I want to have a baby. I want you to help me. You’ll be the one who knows what to do. You practically raised Teddy. And all those years babysitting. You’ll be great.”
Suzette looked at her. “Even after all this?”
Cara said the truest thing she could think of. “Of course. You’re my best friend.”
Suzette didn’t return right away. For four months she lived at home, working part-time and attending an outpatient program she only described vaguely to Cara: “There’s some group therapy and individual therapy. It’s good. It helps.” Cara understood Suzette’s troubles were related, in some way, to her mother’s breakdown after the divorce, which they bore witness to for years, but never talked about. But her mother was better now, working again, which Cara saw as an optimistic sign. Suzette was getting this out of her system; she’d be back again soon, stronger than before.
In all that time, Kevin floated like a secret, in and out of the picture. The first time they saw each other after sleeping together, Kevin surprised Cara by delivering the very speech she herself had prepared. “I’d like us to be friends,” he said, fiddling with a ceramic dish of sugar packets on the table where they were having lunch.
“Okay,” Cara said, stunned.
“It’s not you, believe me. I know myself a little bit better now. I know what I need to be careful of. Too much drama isn’t good for me.” He spoke quietly, but was sure of himself.
“Am I a lot of drama?”
“To me, I guess, yes. I don’t know what your life is like. Does it feel like drama?”
He didn’t even know the ways that it did, that he was right. “I suppose,” she said.
He meant it about being friends, he told her. He didn’t have very many, just a few from his old war-games days, some football players. “Most of them went away to school. With the ones who are around, I’m sort of the token geek, I guess. I’ve never been friends with a girl before.”
Suddenly she saw what he was saying—real friendship, like she’d had so little of. “Okay,” she said, meaning it.
And for a time, they tried it—they went out to the movies once and sat with a king’s meal of concession food in their laps, as if reiterating the point with every handful of food: See, we’re just friends. Friends don’t worry about greasy hands or Dots breath later. Another time he brought her to a meeting of his Dungeons and Dragons club, a collection of oddballs she recognized from high school. She couldn’t play, of course; the rules were ridiculously complicated, full of heated battles between two people shaking fistfuls of dice. These were the kinds of boys she didn’t let herself contemplate much when she was in high school, her eyes trained so fiercely on popular girls, on boyfriend prospects.
By the time Suzette was ready to move back to the apartment, Cara’s friendship with Kevin had lost all its momentum. She was too unpracticed, didn’t know how to end an evening without awkwardness. Too many times, she sat in his car, engine idling, door handle half-pulled, and said, “So…what? Give me a call sometime?” Every evening felt like a buildup to the same sad wall. “I had fun tonight,” she’d say, and mean it—they did have fun, laughing about elementary school teachers or the names some restaurants gave to hamburgers. She never told him she was pregnant or about her intention to keep the baby. Anytime she contemplated doing so, she thought of th
e first thing he’d said in launching their friendship: Too much drama isn’t good for me. She also discovered the surprising ease of keeping the secret. For months, nothing changed but her breast size and the inner workings of her body’s chemistry. It wasn’t until she was five months along that she began leaving the button of her jeans undone beneath her sweater. If he noticed, he certainly made no remark about that or the beers she no longer drank.
They also spoke surprisingly little of Suzette. Cara hesitated to mention her, given the embarrassing way it factored into their reconnection. She never wanted him to ask, “Why did she lie?” She didn’t want to contemplate such a question herself. Instead, when it came up, she tried to be frank in a way that mirrored his own honesty and allowed no speculative questions. “I think she’s struggling with her own depression, but she’s getting a lot better. She’s much stronger, much clearer these days. She knew what was going on, got help right away.”
He nodded through all this. “Good,” he said, and looked away, apparently uncomfortable with a tale of problems so similar to his own.
He worked now, four days a week, at a record store in town. Once, on the eve of Suzette’s planned return, she walked in and surprised him. The instant he saw her, she could see this wasn’t a good idea. He was seated on a wooden stool, behind a cash register, wearing round wire-frame glasses she’d never seen before. When he saw her, he took the glasses off. “What are you doing here?” he said, not smiling.
“I just thought I’d stop by. Maybe pick something out for Suzette. She’s moving back in next week.” She flipped through the contents of a rack as if this really had been her intention. Her back hurt these days and she’d begun to feel something like movement, a rippling flicker, like a fish swimming freely inside her. “I’m allowed, right? To come into your store?”
She meant this as a joke, a way to let him know how unfriendly the expression on his face was. “It’s just”—he looked around though they were alone—“kind of a girlfriend thing to do.”
She stared at him and a minute later walked out, her abdomen sloshing.
For weeks, she kept expecting him to call, kept planning explanations she’d offer to Suzette, who had never, in the four months since she moved out, mentioned his name. When the time came, she decided she would be honest: He told me he never ran into you. They would have the conversation, leave all this behind.
But he didn’t call; he never called, and her calling him would only necessitate an explanation, at last, of the baby that was now making himself known, visible every night when she lay in bed and watched tiny bumps roll across the drum of her stomach. She and Suzette established a cautious balance with each other. Suzette talked about needing to have some boundaries from the start, and Cara understood from her tone that this meant more than rules about housekeeping duties. “We need to decide what we’re going to expect. We’re not going to just make plans and not tell each other.”
Cara understood the mistakes she had made in the past, leaving Suzette alone too often. With her due date looming, her stomach growing, she felt a desperate certainty. “I’ll be home, I promise. I won’t do that old stuff.”
Suzette nodded. “We need to share in apartment work.”
“I know. I will.”
“I can’t be the only one who buys milk and coffee.”
“That’s right. You’re right.”
“And on weekends, I may need to go home. I can’t promise I’ll always be here, either.”
“Okay. That’s fine.”
In between conversations like this one, there were also good times—going to birthing classes, buying baby supplies. Cara kept busy with preparations and gave herself no time to consider what had happened to Kevin or why their friendship had dissolved so swiftly in the wake of a single, inexplicable misstep on her part. She assumed that it was her fault, that visiting him at work violated some rule to the measured friendship they’d erected. She missed him but, truthfully, felt a certain sense of relief that not seeing him at all, by some choice on his part, left her with one less person to explain herself to. It had been hard enough with her parents, who greeted her announcement with perfect silence and then, from her mother, an uncharacteristic burst of tears. The tears came during what she’d anticipated as the hardest part of the conversation: the question of paternity. During the course of her prenatal visits, a sonogram had determined the fetus to be smaller, less developed than he should be, given the dates she’d provided. Cara heard this, unable to pull her eyes away from the frozen black-and-white picture on the monitor screen—he looked like a Martian, painted gray, with a broken string of pearls loosed from his neck. “That’s the spine,” the technician had said, slightly bored, as if it were obvious, and Cara felt a trembling sense of pride at the miracle of this accomplishment, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years. She’d done it! Something her mother had struggled with so, and only succeeded at once. “He’s normal,” the doctor said, “Just smaller than we’d expect, which means you might have been slightly off on your dates.”
Only later did she contemplate this long enough to consider the possibility that when she slept with Kevin claiming protection she didn’t have, she wasn’t already pregnant. “I don’t know who the father is,” she told her parents. This was easier, she’d decided, than any other explanation she could offer: He’s married; he was a friend, now he’s not. She tried to make it clear, even through their tears, It doesn’t matter.
Explaining any of this to Kevin, including the slim possibility he was involved, would only be a trial, one she was happy to avoid, mostly because she was happy about everything. As the pregnancy progressed, her happiness grew until she felt guilty by the size of it. Her parents came around, agreed to help her financially; Suzette was back, doing well. The world was lining up to allow this wonder to be truly hers. Soon, she’d have a baby.
The last night of their birthing class, she and Suzette went out to dinner to celebrate an end to meeting with people they had nothing but due dates in common with. They sat, giddy with excitement, toasting with their water glasses, and Cara looked up to see, across the restaurant, Kevin and his mother standing in the doorway.
He made slow progress toward them, his expression shifting as he took in her changes. She didn’t warn Suzette who was approaching slowly behind her. Instead she let a silence fall, and when he got to their table, she understood—in Suzette’s gasp of surprise, in the awkward way Kevin stepped back and looked away—that all those months ago, Suzette hadn’t lied. Kevin had.
After that, came a terrible night of confession.
“I only slept with him once,” Cara said. “After you moved out and he told me he’d never run into you at all. I didn’t know what to think. You were gone and I needed a friend.” She hesitated, wanting Suzette to understand—it hadn’t been Oliver who broke her heart. “It felt like you were my family, and you left.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Suzette snapped. “You have a family.”
“There’s a difference. You’re my chosen family. And Kevin and I were just friends. Right away, we decided just to be friends. He was the one who insisted on that. He was the one who didn’t want anything more to happen.”
Suzette stood in their living room, shaking her head, looking around the room slowly as if she were trying to memorize its contents before she stepped out of it. “I can’t do this, Cara,” she said. “I don’t want to do this.”
Cara leaned over her enormous belly. Sometimes in Suzette’s presence she tried to draw less attention to her pregnancy, to sit straighter, keep her hands off her abdomen. Now, with three weeks to go, it was impossible. “Do what?” She was growing defensive, already self-protective. She had a baby to think about, something more important than these dramas.
“I can’t keep doing this. Living your life.”
“Is that what it is?”
“My God, don’t you see it? This baby will come and I won’t be his mother. I’ll be what I’ve always been—your friend
. That’s ridiculous. It’s idiotic. Nobody should do that.”
Cara sat back. They had talked about this, of course. Not enough, perhaps, but they had said it would be a new kind of family. “Someday, there’ll be a sit-com of this and we’ll have lived it,” Cara had said, straining slightly, as she always did, to see things optimistically.
Suzette stared at her, long and hard, her eyes trembling with the weight of words she wasn’t saying. “I’m not going to be your labor coach. It’s too much for me. I can’t do it.”
“Fine,” Cara said, thinking of Kevin’s words: Too much drama isn’t good for me. To me, you’re drama.
“This isn’t really friendship, Cara. Don’t you see that?”
The next day, Cara came home to find cardboard boxes stacked up in the hallway. Seeing them, she actually felt a little relieved. She was nine months pregnant, on the brink of becoming a mother and a new person with a past she could divorce herself from. She didn’t have the time to wonder why she had this effect on people, why her friendship was more than Suzette or Kevin could bear. She couldn’t examine it, could only decide: Never again. Never again would she risk this mistake, believing that real love, sustained love, lived safest and longest, went deepest in friendship. Suzette had already moved out once and broken her heart. Kevin had abandoned her for the crime of stopping by work. Never again would she reach out to people who might recoil from an outstretched hand. And she hadn’t.
After Suzette moved out, there was some attempt at rapprochement. Cara’s mother stood in as her labor coach, but Suzette came to the hospital bearing a guilty bouquet of Mylar balloons. “He’s beautiful,” she said, pushing the balloons in the door. “I can’t believe how beautiful he is.”
To Cara’s exhausted post-delivery eyes, Suzette seemed too cheerful, too obviously relieved to have spared herself from assisting in Adam’s arrival to the world. She hugged Cara, who sat stiffly in bed and whispered, “Thanks.”