Between Friends (2 page)

Hope is selfish and hungry, even when you believe you have given it exactly what it wants. And what it wants, always, is a miracle. Most people only get one, if they’re lucky.

I was lucky; I got Letty.

Thirty-two matted and framed stories on us—newspaper clippings, magazine articles, even a
People
magazine cover—spanned the wall just inside our bedroom door, tracing the path Benny and I, and Cora, took to create our family.

The Miracle Wall started its life in the living room. When Letty was a little girl, we sat in front of it on her birthday, and I would tell her the story of her conception. By the time she was in second grade she could explain in vitro fertilization as well as I.

When we had visitors, she would pull them by the hand, pointing to the
People
cover, herself as a baby tucked in between Cora and me, our heads tilted together, grinning as if we’d both just won the lottery, with the bright pink caption, “Two Women, One Miracle,” and under that, “How Modern Medicine Is Making Mothers.”

Letty lost interest in the Miracle Wall almost three years ago, just before she turned twelve. In fact, she became so dramatically embarrassed by it that I moved it into our bedroom. I’d been staring at it steadily ever since, slowly feeding the ravenous hope, letting it grow.

And now I was ready for a second miracle.

The day I finally came to my decision was the same day Todd Jasper’s house blew up. Benny was a detective with the financial crimes unit, but the Jasper house had been in his old neighborhood, and he didn’t come home for almost forty-eight hours. And when he did, he carried such rage within him over the loss of a teenager he didn’t even know, that I couldn’t possibly bring up what I had been thinking about.

But now, two months later, two months of Benny’s unpredictable anger alternating with silence, I could wait no longer. I’d passed forty, and time was not on our side. I even thought it might snap him out of his funk, would help him find his way back to the sweet, if occasionally moody, man I married.

I’d chosen my day, gazed at the wall for strength, prepared my speech, and then Benny walked in . . . in uniform.

For a minute all I could do was stare at him.

“Benny?”

“Yeah.”

He looked down the length of his body as if he were as surprised as I to see it encased in uniform rather than a suit.

“What have you done?”

“I didn’t—I didn’t think it would come through this fast. I—”

“You what?” I interrupted, all the anger he’d vibrated with for the past two months suddenly flashing through me, as though it had just been looking for a solid place to land. “You didn’t think? You didn’t
think
?”

And he shut down. I could see it happen. He pressed his lips together and strode across the bedroom and into the closet, slamming his hand against the doorjamb as he passed it. I jumped as the impact made the wall shudder.

“Are you planning on talking to me?” My voice carried, higher and more desperate than I expected.

He ignored me and unlocked his gun safe, stored his equipment, and changed his clothes, hanging the uniform carefully.

“Benny?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, you’re going to have to,” I insisted. “What happened?”

Benny was a good cop, a great cop. The idea that he’d been demoted wouldn’t settle in me. Demotions didn’t come from out of the blue. There were lengthy procedures, accusations of impropriety or ineptitude.

He walked past me, and I reached out, but he stepped just out of range and my arm was left hanging in midair, connecting with nothing but the empty space between us.

“Benny, what happened?” I demanded of his retreating back.

He stopped for a moment but didn’t turn around. “It was my choice, all right? I
asked
to go back. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast. I’ve gotta go feed the birds.”

And just like that, with hardly a word, Benny was back to being a patrol cop.

Who
did
the man talk to? That was what I really wanted to know. In the beginning there were a lot of cop friends, a lot of cop families. Death, divorce, firings, promotions, demotions—they all took their toll.

Benny had slowly reduced his circle of confidantes over the years until, as far as I knew, there were none left. Apparently, not even me. The frustrating part was that he’d never wanted to be a detective to begin with. He’d wanted to be a street cop from eighth grade on. And I was fine with that. I married him being fine with that. I’d never been a cop groupie until Benny became a cop.

I was a Benny groupie.

He got promotions, and he got awards, and when he decided he’d like to become a detective, we
talked
about it. And I supported him, though I admit I missed the uniform.

And now it was back.

But where the hell was Benny?

Because I didn’t recognize the man who had just been in our bedroom, refusing to speak to me. And his timing couldn’t have been worse.

For years I’d been working this out, watching our daughter grow into an independent, occasionally sullen young woman, and becoming increasingly aware of time moving forward. And always thinking of them.

The embryos.

My totsicles, waiting for me.

I was ready. I was ready to talk about it, and he’d blown my timing out of the water.

Though I supposed if he could spring something on me out of the blue, I shouldn’t have felt such a need to broach things delicately. One good surprise deserved another. And it was too late to stop it. I was full up with it, too rehearsed to halt it.

As he made his way through the living room, heading to the backyard to tend to his birds, I took a deep breath and let it rest in my lungs a moment, allowing my voice one last chance to change its mind. It didn’t.

“I want another baby.”

The gritty rumble of the sliding glass door stopped for a moment, and then resumed, slowly, firmly easing closed.

I saw a flash of red swoop down from one of the magnolia trees. The cardinals knew Benny was home. He would be out there for at least an hour, filling the feeders, spraying out the baths, studiously ignoring the birds so they’d trust him.

It didn’t matter; I’d said it. I grimly poured a glass of wine. I’d need to quit drinking, of course, and needed to start eating better, too. Oh, oh now that I’d said it, the lists I’d been making subconsciously came and flung themselves at me, one task loading itself on top of the last like pages chattering out of my printer.

There was a lot to do. And it was all up to me. I couldn’t just grab an ovulation kit at the store and jump my husband the way other women could. I’d spent a long time being jealous about that. Seething with it. Those women who spurt viable eggs each month, with no thought, no contribution necessary from them. Children, little girls, twelve and thirteen years old, floating fat, life-filled eggs out of their fallopian tubes, slutty little eggs wafting around, existing only to be slipped into.

“I want another baby,” I whispered in singsong to myself, slipping a finger around the rim of my wineglass. It didn’t sing. It was glass, not crystal, but the tiny vibration of it traveled into me, a quickening, imitating the thrill of new life that I remembered from being pregnant with Letty.

And then, in addition to the lists of healthy new habits, here came the practicalities of it, the solid facts of in vitro that I’d not allowed myself to think about until I got past the purity of
I want another baby
.

I needed to talk to Cora. And Dr. Collins at the fertility clinic. I didn’t even know if the embryos were still good after ten years, but my recent reading seemed to indicate that there was definitely hope.

I knew the doctor would suggest that we harvest new eggs. There was no way Cora would be willing to go through it all again; the shots, the hormones and the crazy mood swings, the harvesting itself. She did it for us twice, but we were both on the slick side of forty now, in wholly different stages of our lives.

The giving end of IVF was a young woman’s game, the younger the better. But I wanted a biological sibling for Letty. The same genetic pool. Cora and Benny weren’t the best of friends, but there was no question that they’d made a beautiful, healthy daughter.

And the embryos were all sitting there, waiting patiently for me to rescue them from their chilly tubes. I’d paid the fees, three years in advance, a regular reminder—like Letty’s birthday—that I could sustain life, bring it into the world and shape it. When paperwork came in about the embryos and my choices, I’d never even given it a second thought. I’d chosen “Continue to Preserve” and written the check, and for the first couple of times Benny had been right beside me, excited about doing it again.

Cora and I hadn’t talked about it for years, but it was only considerate to talk to her first. Of course I had no idea where she was. I didn’t follow the winds; I had no idea if she was in California for the Santa Anas, in Russia for the boras, or in South Africa for whatever those were called. I could wait. A month rarely went by that we didn’t talk on the phone, though it seemed as though even that was slipping lately.

It was possible that I’d see her that summer. Meteorologists had predicted a busy hurricane season, and if we were threatened, she’d show, hauling along other researchers. They’d turn Cora’s mother’s house into a dorm, with people sleeping on sofas and up all hours of the night, rushing to the storm-beaten beach with their equipment like kids running toward the circus.

I glanced at the clock. Letty was late, due home twenty minutes ago. No more cheerleading this year, but she’d started babysitting for a toddler two blocks away. I’d give her ten more minutes, and then call her cell.

Benny had finished his ministrations for the birds and was now sitting staring out at the yard, patiently watching for the arrival of his favorite brown thrasher family looking for their overripe pears. I would usually take my glass of wine and join him, let him point out the ones I never noticed when they arrived, the female cardinals and painted buntings, both drab in comparison to their mates. But not yet, it wasn’t time yet. I could tell from the set of his shoulders, high and tense. No words were going to get past.

All I could do was wait and fantasize about my baby.

“My mom is probably already home,” she said to Seth. “Just let me off here.”

She pointed to a house that had been empty for almost two years. It was only a block away from her house, but it was like a whole different neighborhood. Her mom said it was foreclosed and would go to auction soon, but nobody had bothered to clean it up or anything. Her dad always said he was going to take the lawn mower down and do it himself because he was sick of looking at it, but he never did.

Seth didn’t argue. He knew her dad was a cop. Everyone in town knew everything about her. Her mother, with her big mouth and dead eggs and stupid Miracle Wall, made sure of that.

He pulled into the driveway and under the carport, the shade sliding over them, and peered at the house.

“Nobody lives here?” he asked.

She shook her head, nervous about the time. Her mom was going to call her cell—and there it was. She jumped to answer, suddenly embarrassed about the ringtone. God, the Jonas Brothers? Ugh. She should have found some rap, something harder, older.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetie. Are you on your way?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Hailey was a few minutes late. I’m walking home now.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

“Okay, bye.” She slid the phone closed.

“She trippin’?”

Letty shrugged. “No, I’m just later than I said I’d be.”

Okay, she knew. But she loved it when he talked like that. She knew it was stupid, to love how someone talked, especially because she knew her parents would hate it. And she knew that was supposedly why she loved it, but it wasn’t.

She didn’t want them to disapprove of him; she already knew they would.

He wasn’t trying to sound tough, he just was. He was so tough, and he was so hot, and she swore to God if he wanted to do it, she thought she would. There were times, late at night, that if he showed up in her room she wouldn’t even wait for him to make a move.

She’d always thought she’d wait until she was at least fifteen, but she hadn’t counted on Seth, that was for sure. He hadn’t really done anything, gone too far or pushed her. She thought that, if anything, maybe she was pushing too far. Besides, she’d be fifteen in just a couple of weeks.

He pulled her toward him and she let him, sliding her rear over the center console. It wasn’t at all comfortable—the emergency brake bit hard into her hip—but she never noticed after a few minutes. She had a bruise from it last week, like a brand, and she pressed it at night, liking the dull pain of it.