Between Friends Page 4

  “No,” he said, raising his voice, determined to fix me. “No, it’s not your only chance. Dammit, Cora—” He stopped and I could hear him quickly typing on his keyboard. “There’s a flight tomorrow from Ft. Myers, connects in Atlanta, that would put you here midafternoon. I’m going to book it, and I want you on it,” he said, his fingers tapping.

  “No.”

  “This isn’t negotiable, Cora. I will be there tomorrow at three. I want to see you get off that plane.”

  “I won’t be there, Drew. Please don’t make this harder for me than it already is,” I pleaded. I’ve never pleaded with a man before in my life. With any other man I would have been disgusted. My first mother pleaded with men. It had disgusted me throughout my childhood, and she stopped pleading when I was eight, when she pleaded with the latest boyfriend who was beating her to stop.

  Her pleas were the last thing I heard from her. After that I was in and out of foster care, until Barbara took me in at eleven and gave me a life. Barbara was a successful real-estate agent who made her own money, never married, but who wanted a child. I never saw her plead with a man—I never saw her plead with anyone—and I modeled myself on her.

  But I didn’t have the strength, not with Drew. And oddly, I did not feel disgusted with myself. My pleas felt like relief, a breeze cooling my face, and it succeeded in stilling his tapping fingers.

  “Cora,” he said, and now here was another surprise—his tone had turned pleading, too. “Please come home. You have to be exhausted. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

  I had to laugh at that.

  “I already am sick,” I said. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, everything I can. And I have to do this, too. Drew, don’t you understand? Not doing this will make me sick; not doing this is what would make me weaker than anything else.”

  I could hear him take a deep breath and knew I had won a temporary reprieve. “I don’t agree with this decision,” he said.

  “Acknowledged.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a date that you’ll be home?”

  I caught myself just before I said I am home.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But soon.”

  “I’ll call Dr. Cho right now and have her set you up with someone. You have to go in right away, okay?”

  “The second she finds someone, I’ll be there,” I promised. “I want to be well, Drew. I won’t sacrifice my health.”

  “I’m afraid you already have,” he said.

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  “I miss you,” he said, breaking the silence.

  “I miss you, too. I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  I hit the off button on the phone and sat with it in my hand for several minutes, considering calling Ali. I was so tired. I would wait for a day. Give myself a chance to rest, to let my body recover, however slightly it might, from the punishing travel schedule I’d put it through over the last four months, getting to all of the winds I could.

  It would be the first time I’d ever arrived home without making Ali my first call. I often didn’t even wait until I’d made it out of the airport. I put the phone down and gave in to my exhaustion. I didn’t bother getting up. I just kicked my shoes off, put my swollen legs up on the couch, and nestled my head on a pile of throw pillows. It wasn’t long before I fell into a deep sleep.

  I woke four hours later with a raging headache and a cop car in my driveway.

  3

  ALI

  “Cora’s back,” Benny announced, his hands already on the buckle of his belt, already falling into the routine of a street cop he’d given up years ago. The careful storing of the equipment, his gun. I hadn’t seen it in so long that for a moment I just admired him.

  And then his words sank in.

  “What? But I just drove by this morning,” I protested. When Cora was coming into town, she called ahead to the company that took care of the house and they opened it up for her. I was never surprised to drive by and see the shutters up, because the next call she made was always to me.

  “Talked to her,” he said as I followed him into the bedroom. “She said she didn’t have time to call, it was a last-minute thing.”

  “Last-minute? Since when has Cora been anywhere that was last-minute from Naples?”

  “Al, I’m just telling you what she said to me.”

  I wrestled irritation that she’d not called me and joy at her being back for only another moment before joy won out, and I hurried to the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  “Hang on,” he called. “She said she’d call you tomorrow.”

  I hesitated, on the verge of irritated again. Benny and Cora’s childish tug-of-war with me was so old that I rarely noticed it anymore, but with everything I needed to talk to her about, I wanted to see her as soon as I could.

  But then I realized the directive had come from her, not Benny, and slowly put the phone down.

  Benny appeared in the doorway. “She said she was tired, and man, Al, she looked it. Looked rode hard and put away wet, to tell the truth. She said she came from Chile.” He shook his head and resumed unbuttoning his collar, turning back into the bedroom. “Don’t know how she does it.”

  I stared at the phone. Sometimes she called from the airport so I could meet her at the house, help her get her bags in, collapse on the patio, and open a bottle of wine to hear about her travels, while the sun went down and the humid air slowly relaxed us both.

  Chile was, where? I searched my geographically challenged mind for a moment, and finally grasped the info I was looking for. South America. Not like she was all the way around the world. She’d come in from Australia and seen me the same day.

  Okay, okay, if she didn’t want me to call right away, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wanted her in a good mood, rested, happy. So we could talk about the baby.

  She’d never asked about the remaining embryos. I think she felt like Benny: There was a problem, we took some shots, along came Letty, problem solved. Tried again a few years later, didn’t work out, okay, done. Despite their simmering animosity, Benny and Cora were actually very alike.

  But for me, having a baby wasn’t a problem to be solved; it was an organic need. And the embryos were just sitting there, waiting for something to be done with them.

  It just took me a while to know that I still wanted another one.

  Getting Letty had taken so long, been such a heartrending process, the miscarriages, the failures. All of them precious. All of them grieved more than anyone else could possibly understand.

  At first I just wanted to revel in Letty, and Benny did, too. Then two years went by, and Benny started asking about doing the next round. But I wasn’t ready. Not yet. Not while Letty was still such work. I thought, maybe, when she was three, maybe then I would feel as though I had this mothering thing nailed down more firmly and could handle the next one.

  And, to be honest, I was scared to death of doing it all again. I was afraid of the mood swings when I had a young child to take care of, afraid of the crushing grief when a transfer, inevitably, didn’t take, or when one did, one that I would inevitably miscarry. I thought about a success, I did, but the odds seemed so stacked against me.

  So we waited four years, and then I, reluctantly, agreed to try again. Cora agreed to more harvesting of her eggs . . . and then I did only one fresh cycle, transferring three, and we froze the rest of the embryos. None of the transferred embryos implanted. I simply couldn’t take it again, and I promised Benny that we’d try again in a year.

  Six months later my father had a heart attack and my parents decided to retire in Arizona, to play golf in the arid air of what was a foreign country to me. They would sell the store, or simply give it to me. If I’d had a couple more years, the decision would have been easy, but I didn’t. And it was a good excuse to put it off for a while.

  Eventually Benny s
topped asking.

  There were nine embryos left. Who knew how many of those were still viable? I could have gone and done it without speaking to either of them about it. In fact, that would have been the easiest thing, even if the preparations for it would have been difficult to hide. I wouldn’t have to contend with objections from either of them, and if nothing came of it they’d never even have to know.

  But what if something did come from it? Just the thought of holding an infant in my arms again made me shiver. Once it was done, there wasn’t anything they could say. What was the alternative? Destroy them? Let it go, stop paying the bill, and try to forget about them?

  If the ones I’d lost had been so precious, why weren’t these?

  It was up to me. Once upon a time, the embryos had been ours, collectively. I’d felt we all had a stake in them, all had a say. And that went for the imagined baby, too. And then the child, the young adult, the adult. I think I had an idea that we would raise him, or her as it turned out, communally, always discussing issues, problems, joys, achievements, milestones.

  But once we’d done it, once we’d gone through the procedures and I was pregnant, the embryo firmly implanted in my womb (I’d stopped thinking about it as a uterus the second I got the positive pregnancy test), I had become, privately at least, incredibly protective of the fact that this was my baby. Thoughts I’d never considered having before crowded my mind. What if, when the baby was born, Cora wanted to play a larger role? When the baby was two? Four? Nine? Twelve?

  Truth was, Cora’s lifestyle suited me just fine. She blew in on the wind, and then blew out again. Our agreement, that it was my baby, always, stood as long as she wasn’t around very often.

  I loved having her back in town.

  But there was no question that when she left I felt a momentous relief. I never kept Letty away from her in any conscious way, but I had noticed that in the last few years I’d made more excuses about why I didn’t bring Letty on our excursions around town. She had school commitments, after-school commitments, babysitting.

  So now, Cora had arrived back in town without letting me know she was coming—a first. And when she was discovered, she’d begged off for another day. I couldn’t help it; I was worried. And I wasn’t even sure about what.

  I handed Benny a beer when he got out of the shower and then sat on the counter, my rear sliding into the sink, while he dried off. He took a drink and eyed me carefully before placing the beer down and toweling his hair dry.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  “How did you know she was home?” I asked.

  “I drove by, saw the storm shutter on the front door was open, and stopped to check.”

  I frowned. “None of the other shutters were up?”

  “Nope. I asked if she wanted me to open them for her, but she said she wanted to get some rest. So I left.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes?”

  “Well, what else did she say?”

  “God, Ali, I don’t know. I obviously surprised her. She asked me in, I sat down on the sofa, asked her if she wanted me to open the shutters, she said no, and said she’d call you tomorrow. That’s it. What is the problem?”

  I shrugged and followed him into the bedroom, watching as he pulled on shorts and a T-shirt. “I don’t know. It’s just odd that she’s not calling me until tomorrow. She’s never done that.”

  “No? Well, like I said, she looked like hell. I guess she’s just really tired. Did I say she came in from Chile?” he asked, making his way out to the backyard. I followed.

  “Yeah, you said.”

  I watched as he cleaned out the birdbaths and refilled the feeders. A cardinal was already in one of the magnolias, peeping at him. When Benny came back into the cage, he started skimming the surface of the pool while the birds flitted down to feed. Taking care of the pool was supposed to be one of Letty’s chores, but Benny had gotten tired of keeping after her about it and had quietly taken it over again.

  “So,” I started, “did you want to tell me about your new job?” He squinted at me across the pool, the sun still bright enough to flash off the ripples he caused with the skimmer.

  “I know,” he said, resignation heavy in his voice. I’d take resignation over the quick anger any day, and any irritation I might have been harboring fled. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Just . . . what happened? Why didn’t you even talk to me about it?”

  “It was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Maybe, I guess, since the kid, the Jasper kid. You remember?”

  “Of course, I remember,” I said. It didn’t seem to need more. Chances were, had Benny still been a street cop when the call came in about Todd Jasper, he’d have been in the vicinity. Not for sure, no, but chances were good; it had been his favorite area to cruise, the area he’d grown up in, where he could do the most good.

  Todd Jasper had been a bright kid, by all accounts a good kid, rarely in trouble. But he’d been living a double life, or at least hiding a frightening one. His parents had operated the largest meth lab in the county from their house.

  Todd was fourteen when his kitchen exploded. He’d tried to save his mother from the chemical fire and was killed when a second explosion obliterated the back half of the house.

  The Jasper house had been one block away from the house Benny had grown up in.

  He sank the skimmer to the bottom of the pool and rested his forearms on it as he looked at me.

  “I didn’t want to be a cop to fill out paperwork,” he said. “I wanted to help people. I could have helped that kid, Ali. He didn’t have to die.”

  “Benny, it wasn’t your fault.”

  He sighed and turned to look at the birds jostling each other for a spot on the feeders before he shook his head and turned back to the pool. He plunged the skimmer to the bottom violently, avoiding my eyes, his lips pressed together tightly, slamming the skimmer back down into the water with every few words.

  “I know that it’s not my fault. But if I hadn’t lost sight of why I became a cop to begin with, I’d still be on the street. I’d be on that street, Ali. That was my street.”

  His vehemence took me aback. He’d been moody ever since it happened, quick to anger, followed by long periods of silence. I had noticed that, of course. But for the first time in months I really looked at my husband. His shorts hung loosely on his frame, and his face was haggard with worry.

  After twenty-seven years of knowing Benny, I’d seen him moody plenty, and he’d put up with my moods over the same amount of time. But over the past several months the silences had become longer, and he’d been spending much more time in the backyard, and on the patio, dealing with the birds, the chores. We had the fattest cardinals and blue jays I’d ever seen, and entire squirrel families now chattered in the trees when Benny came out with his bucket of cracked corn and seed.

  I hadn’t been paying enough attention; that much was clear. I’d been busy with my own obsession over the Miracle Wall. And though he hadn’t exactly noticed that, either, I hadn’t given him the wake-up call he’d just given me.

  I was paying attention now, desperate to make up for lost time.

  I nodded. “Okay, I understand. I really do. I just wish you’d been able to talk to me about it. So, what’s your plan now?”

  He seemed to relax a little, swirling the skimmer through the water gently.

  “I was thinking that maybe I’d get involved with the Explorers program again. Talk to the kids at schools, make an effort with them right at the age that I could really make a difference.”

  “Benny, I think that sounds great. Kids love you, they’ve always responded to you. You should definitely do that,” I encouraged. As frustrated as I’d been with him, now I was delighted to hear that he was interested in becoming more involved with kids.

  He shook his head and went back to cleaning the pool, pulling the skimmer back up and fin
ding minuscule contaminants only he could see. “I’m going to look into it soon. Not just yet. I want to get back to some kind of schedule with what I’m doing now, you know? Be a presence out there. Get to know people again. Even things out. But it’s what I’m thinking about for the future.”

  I smiled at him. This was more the Benny I’d known, more the way our marriage had always been. The past two months were in no way representative of the bulk of our relationship. We were sweet to each other, and we’d talked about the future. I took a deep breath, relief working its way through me.

  “But you know, Al, what you said last night?” he continued.

  My hand halted midway to my wineglass. I hadn’t expected him to bring it up. I’d assumed I would. I’d assumed that I would be very understanding about this whole job thing, would move forward, embrace this change and be supportive. And then I would bring up the baby thing and he would be very understanding, embracing, and supportive back.

  “Yeah?”

  “I am not up for that. Not now.”

  “Hmm,” I said, swallowing a sip of wine, turning this over, figuring the best way to deal with it. I wasn’t ready to breach the tentative truce we’d seemed to be working on.

  “Ali,” he said sharply, and with that the stranger was back in the house.

  I looked up at him across the pool, this man I didn’t recognize.

  “I’m serious. I mean, that was a total shock. I had no idea you were even considering going through it all again. I don’t want another kid now. I don’t want another kid, period. Hell, Letty’s already fifteen in a couple weeks. What possesses you to want a baby now? Ten years ago there wasn’t anything I wanted more. I practically begged you, and you wouldn’t do it.”

  “So that means the subject is just closed?” I asked. “You get to make decisions, big, life-changing decisions, without my input at all, but I’m not allowed to even talk about this?”

  “I don’t need to talk about it to know that I don’t want to do it. How long have you been thinking about this, anyway?”