“Hey.” He stopped in midstride and surveyed me. “How come you’re not all covered in dirt like the rest of us?”
“Yeah,” Noah said. “How’d you stay all clean, Mom?”
I said airily, “When you’re as good at this game as I am, you can play for hours without getting filthy like you two losers.”
Andrew caught Noah’s arm and whispered in his ear. Noah nodded and carefully laid the football down on the grass.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” Andrew said. He and Noah started walking on both sides of me again, both of them affecting casual attitudes by ostentatiously sticking their hands in their pockets and whistling. Then Andrew said, “Now!” and he grabbed one of my arms and Noah grabbed the other and with a sharp tug, they (well, Andrew mostly) managed to pull me off my feet and down onto my butt.
“There,” Andrew said, standing over me and dusting off his hands in a “job well done” sort of way. “Now you look like you’ve played ball.”
“I hate you both,” I said. “Help me up.” I held out my hands and they each took one and hauled me to my feet.
“You’re heavy,” Noah complained.
“Yeah,” Andrew said. “You must weigh—what? Ninety whole pounds?”
“Whoa,” said Noah, who weighed less than fifty.
“What’s going on out here?” Melanie asked, appearing once again at the back door. “I could have sworn I just saw them tackle you, Rickie.”
“You did,” I said, swiping at the seat of my pants. “And now my butt is dirty and it hurts.”
“She deserved it,” Andrew said to Melanie. “I swear I only do that to people who deserve it. Although”—he turned to Noah—“your aunt looks a little too clean, don’t you think?”
Melanie shrieked and ran for the house. “Come in now or Laurel will freak!” she called over her shoulder. “Everything’s ready.”
I limped exaggeratedly toward the house.
“You okay?” Andrew said. “We didn’t mean to actually injure you.”
“Just know this,” I said solemnly. “I may forgive but I never forget. You better start watching your back, Fulton.”
“You couldn’t take me down if you tried. I’m bigger than two of you put together.”
“That’s what you think. One day, when you least expect it…”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m shaking in my boots.” He opened the door and held it for me and Noah. As I went past him he said, “That was fun. Thanks for playing.”
“Yeah,” I said. Noah ran off toward the kitchen. I nodded after him. “Somehow you get him doing things that no one else—What’s that sound?”
“My cell,” Andrew said, sheepishly snaking a phone out of his pants pocket. “It’s my ring tone. I liked Star Trek when I was a kid.”
“God, you’re a nerd.”
He nodded amiably and squinted at the screen.
“Gracie?” I asked.
“Yeah. She must be at a port.”
“You can answer it if you want.”
“No, that’s okay.” He pressed the button to ignore. “We’ll talk later.”
“You sorry you didn’t go with her?” I asked as we moved toward the dining room. “I mean, I’ve seen that photo of her in a bikini…”
“You did? Oh, the one in my office.” He laughed. “Yeah, I guess I didn’t take that into account when I said I’d skip the cruise. But, no, I’m not sorry—I’ve met her parents. Anyway, I’m very happy to be here. I’m having fun.”
“Let’s go eat,” I said abruptly.
Noah seemed to be enjoying being the only kid. It wasn’t a bad gig. Most of dinner was taken up by his recounting, blow by blow and play by play, the entire football game. It made me realize how seldom he and I played outside like that. Most of our free time was spent hunched over computers or watching TV or reading or doing something else that was quiet and indoors and solitary. His cheeks were glowing, and his hair was sticking up in clumps from all the sweat and dirt, and he kept chattering away about how I had thrown the ball to him and then Andrew had grabbed it and then it was his turn to throw to me and it almost made it all the way to me but then Andrew got it again, and so on. My father plied him with questions, showing an interest that was either sincere or the world’s most incredible deadpan. I could never tell with him.
Andrew supplied some additional color commentary, most of it about how well Noah had played. He was pleasant and convivial around my parents and Melanie, but I kept thinking about how, when we had been alone, he had started teasing me in that mildly cruel and edgy way you tease someone you’ve become comfortable with.
Or are flirting with.
That was the other possibility. There was something flirtatious in his air with me that day. I could have sworn it.
The thing was, I was liking it. I was liking him. That badly timed phone call from Gracie was probably the best thing for me because I had stupidly been forgetting about her, forgetting that the cute guy eating Thanksgiving dinner with us already had a girlfriend—a very beautiful, tall, and successful girlfriend—and if things had worked out the way he wanted them to, he would have been spending the holiday with her.
So I tried to stop thinking about how much fun I’d had outside and focus on eating Thanksgiving dinner with my beloved family, although the food wasn’t exactly helping to keep my attention focused. It was decent, not great. My mother was a decent, not great, cook, and both Melanie and I followed in her footsteps. The gluten-free stuffing wasn’t as good as real stuffing and we didn’t have biscuits, but otherwise it was your basic Thanksgiving meal. The turkey was dried out and barely warm, but once you piled on the gravy, extremely sweet sweet potatoes (my mother loaded on the marshmallows, to Noah’s delight), and cranberry sauce, you couldn’t really taste it much anyway.
The wine, though… the wine was good. Dad was an oenophile (a word he had taught me to say and spell when I was seven years old) and spent a fair amount of his free time researching and tasting wines from all over the world. He liked to discover good obscure wines from different countries, and he often prowled around some of the dustier little wine stores in LA, buying bottles that the owners and managers recommended and keeping careful track of which ones he did or didn’t like. He had a whole computer spreadsheet for the cataloguing of wines we’d tried.
For Thanksgiving he had pulled out several different bottles, announcing early in the meal that we were going to decide once and for all whether a light red or a complex white went better with turkey. He encouraged the adults to try them all, and he didn’t need to urge any of us twice: Melanie was drowning her sorrows, I was slightly on edge because of Andrew’s presence, Mom was harried from all the cooking and ready to relax, and Andrew—well, I don’t know if anything was bugging him or not, but he managed to keep up with the rest of us.
So everyone except for Noah was a little tipsy by the time we’d finished up the meal. And those of us who’d started drinking before dinner were probably tipsier than the rest.
“Should we have dessert right away or take a break?” my mother asked as she surveyed the wreckage of the meal.
Melanie’s cell phone rang before anyone could answer. She always left it right next to her plate during dinner when she was apart from her kids. “It’s Nicole,” she said after checking. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead,” Mom said. “We’ll wait on dessert.”
Melanie jumped up and, putting the phone to her ear, left the room.
“Can I watch a little TV?” Noah asked. “Just until dessert?” He looked at my mother, not me, aware that she was in charge of the day’s activities.
“I guess so,” she said with a little sigh, and he quickly slid to his feet and darted out of the dining room before she could change her mind.
The rest of us started to help clear, but Mom said, “Rickie, do me a favor and take Eleanor Roosevelt for a quick walk, would you? I’m exhausted but she hasn’t had any e
xercise today.”
“A walk sounds good,” Andrew said. “I’ll go with you.”
I got Eleanor Roosevelt all leashed up and we headed out into the now decidedly cool night air. It felt good, though, after all that wine.
Eleanor Roosevelt strained at her leash, trotting wildly, ecstatic just to be outside.
“Want me to take her?” Andrew asked as she practically hauled me down the street.
“She’ll calm down soon,” I said. “She’s not as young as she used to be.” I felt a bit floaty from all the wine, so the dog’s tugging didn’t even bother me. I just kind of gave in to it, let her pull me along.
“This is a nice neighborhood,” he said, looking around. “Nice and quiet.”
“I guess. I’m kind of sick of it, though. I thought I’d be far away from here by this point in my life.”
“So what happened?”
“Noah happened.”
“No, I know, but how did—” He stopped. Then he said, “Is it rude of me to ask about this?”
“It’s just such a stupid story,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Everyone takes risks, you know. Especially when you’re a teenager. No matter how many films they show you in human development…” His voice trailed off.
It took me a second to realize what he meant. Probably because of the wine. Then I laughed. “Oh, it wasn’t that. You’ve met my mother, right? I mean, she’s on the board of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. When I was twelve, she told me there would always be a box of condoms in the bathroom cabinet and I could just help myself whenever I felt I needed to, no questions asked.”
“Wow. That’s pretty cool.”
“No, it isn’t. It was awful. I was so embarrassed by the whole idea, by the way she always talked about that stuff.” I shrugged. “But I guess it achieved its purpose. I mean, I knew everything I needed to know about not having an unplanned pregnancy.” It occurred to me I could never have had this conversation if it hadn’t been so dark and I hadn’t been fairly drunk and the dog hadn’t been dancing around on the edge of the leash. This was not a daylight conversation. But somehow it was okay at night. Or at least this particular night. “The crazy thing about Noah is that he was planned.”
“Oh.” A pause while he digested that. “How old were you when you had him?”
“Eighteen,” I said. “Almost nineteen. It was the summer after my freshman year of college. Oh, Eleanor Roosevelt, do you have to do that now?” The dog was squatting right there, in the middle of the sidewalk. She gave me an affronted look, with some justification: she was only doing her job. I sighed and pulled a plastic bag out of the holder on her leash. “Excuse us,” I said to Andrew. “Feel free to look away.”
“I’m not that delicate. Want me to hold the leash while you get that?”
“Please.” I handed him the leash and, using the bag as a glove, picked up the still warm poop then pulled the bag so it was inverted and the poop was inside. I tied a knot at the top and looked around. “Oh, good, the Casters have already put their garbage out.” I ran over, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and quickly lifted the can lid and dropped the bag inside.
“You look like you’re getting rid of criminal evidence,” Andrew said when I came back.
“You never know when people are going to come screaming out of their house at you. It’s happened to me.”
“Jerks. You’re being a good citizen just by picking it up. They should be applauding you.”
“No one applauds a girl carrying a bag full of shit.”
“That’s very philosophical,” he said. “Can I quote you?”
“I’m saving it for the title of my memoirs.” I reached for the leash. Our fingers touched.
“I can hold it,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll take her.”
He let go of the leash, the side of his hand sliding along mine. We stood there for a moment then I said, “Should we keep going?”
“I’m in no hurry to get back,” he said. “Anyway, I want to hear the rest of the story.” We started walking again. “So you did this unusual thing. You had a baby at eighteen. On purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you want to have a baby so young?”
“There was this guy,” I said. “That’s the short answer, anyway.”
“Lots of people fall in love, but they don’t necessarily start having babies right away—or at least not if they have access to a medicine cabinet full of condoms.”
“Yeah but most people aren’t obsessed with human biology the way we were.”
A short pause. “Okay, you’re going to have to explain that one.”
“We were both biology majors. I mean, I wasn’t yet but I was planning to be one, and Duncan was in his senior year but he was going to go on to graduate school to get his Ph.D. in human evolution. He had this theory—” God, it was hard to talk about this without feeling the self-loathing and bitterness and embarrassment rising out of this knot of poison in my gut. “I mean, it wasn’t just a theory, it’s true, I guess. That humans were meant to have babies much younger than people do these days. That an eighteen-year-old girl was likelier to have an easy pregnancy and a healthy baby than a thirty-five-year-old. I mean, biologically it’s all true, right?” Eleanor Roosevelt had settled down to a steady walk. Her nails made a quiet clopping sound on the pavement.
“So he said you should have his baby right then and there?”
“It was all much more complicated than that.” I flicked the leash lightly on Eleanor Roosevelt’s back, the way you’d giddy-up a horse. She turned and looked at me questioningly but then continued placidly on her way. “We had a plan. We were going to live together in the school housing for families and have a couple of babies while we were young and take turns going to classes and caring for them—we figured we could stagger our classes so we wouldn’t even need babysitting—and then by the time I was done with college and he had his doctorate, the kids would be in school and we’d both be able to have full-time careers and then of course they’d grow up and leave the house and we’d still be young enough to travel and have tons of adventures, unlike people who have their kids later in life and then are too old once the kids are grown to do anything fun.” I flicked the leash again, more irritably this time. “You can see how it all made sense, right?”
“Sure,” Andrew said, his voice as quiet and dark as the night around us. “If you overlook the part where an eighteen-year-old college freshman has a baby.”
“Technically I was a sophomore.” I stepped over a tree root that was breaking through the cement of the sidewalk. “Or, more accurately, a dropout, given the way things turned out. I thought I was a very mature eighteen-year-old, by the way. Perfectly ready to settle down.” I remembered how Ryan had told me not to be in such a rush to grow up when I was fifteen. Where was he when I needed him?
Andrew’s thoughts had gone in a different direction. “What did your parents think of all this?”
“Mom briefly freaked but then she got all ‘We can make this work’ about it. That’s how she operates.”
“And your dad?”
“He was pretty nice about it. I mean, compared to how most fathers probably would have reacted, he was incredibly calm. Just said it sounded like I knew what I was doing, and he’d support me. He liked Duncan. He’d only met him once or twice, but they talked biology and kind of bonded.”
“So what happened to Duncan? And the plan?”
I kept my voice flat and emotionless. It was the only way I could actually talk about this stuff. “A couple of months before I was due, Duncan scored a three-year fellowship to go study with some world-famous biologist in South America. I didn’t even know he had applied. He said he didn’t think he’d get it so didn’t see the harm in applying.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
“He said he’d come back soon and join us.”
“Did he?”
“He’s never
even met Noah.”
You could hear the disgust in Andrew’s voice. “How could he do that?”
“I don’t know. He was so far away, living this crazily different life. Maybe the whole idea of Noah seemed unreal to him. I know he started to seem unreal to me pretty quickly—Duncan, I mean. Not Noah.” I gave a short laugh. “Definitely not Noah.”
“But he knew you were going to have a baby, right?”
“Are you kidding? It was completely his idea. For months he was beyond excited about the whole thing. He had this ability to believe in something so totally that he kind of swept you along with it.” I found it hard to explain Duncan to someone who had never met him. He had been so compelling in person but now that I hadn’t seen him in years, it all felt vaguely hallucinatory. “I thought he was so intense because of how he felt about me, you know? That it was all personal—that he was just so into the idea of me and our having a baby and then this future together… that his whole life had become about that.” I didn’t tell Andrew—couldn’t tell him, couldn’t really tell anyone—how it made me feel when Duncan’s light blue eyes had burned with desire and passion and certainty and all that burning was for me. When he said he wanted to impregnate me, I had felt so special, like I was the Chosen One, like I was some goddamn fertile female Harry Potter.
That was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for… that I had bought into the whole thing and believed him when he said that I was his future.
Not that Duncan had been lying when he said the things he said. He had meant every word—for that moment. I just hadn’t known him long enough yet to realize his nature was as mercurial as it was passionate.
His intensity was like the sun: warm and satisfying and bright. As long as he had directed it at me, I was sure I was doing the right thing because nothing in my life had made me feel as special or wonderful or privileged.
And then it all went away. The warmth, the certainty, the attention. Our future together.
Sometimes I wondered if there had been other women since then who had discovered what it was like to feel that unbelievable glow on them, to feel chosen and special because Duncan had singled them out from all others. Not that Duncan was likely to have asked anyone else to bear his baby. He had to have learned he didn’t want that, right? Plus the odds were slim he’d have found anyone as willing to follow him into Crazyland as I’d been, anyone else who was young and innocent enough to think she was old and mature enough to do that before she really was.