Between Friends Read online

  I stood up. I wouldn’t get any further with him in this mood.

  “A hell of a lot longer than you thought about Todd Jasper,” I said. As I expected, he didn’t answer, and as I slammed the sliding glass door closed I could see him staring after me, the skimmer pole held before him like a shield.

  LETTY

  The Thai was killer. The pad see eu was hot enough to make her sweat under her eyes, but it was hard to enjoy it. Something was obviously going on. Her parents weren’t really talking to each other, and her mom wasn’t talking to her at all. Her dad was, though. He was asking all kinds of questions.

  At least he wasn’t acting all angry like he had been lately. It didn’t really feel like he was interrogating her, like he knew they’d been in their room, but he was definitely getting at something.

  “So, big birthday coming up,” he said.

  “Um-hmm,” she said, taking a big gulp of cold milk.

  “Fifteen,” he said. “Wow. Time to get your permit, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” she said cautiously.

  “You sure are growing up,” he said, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it, and looking pointedly at her mom, who totally ignored him.

  You have no idea, she thought, stifling a laugh.

  When the phone rang at eight like she and Seth planned, she jumped to get it.

  “Oh, hey, Em,” she said, then acted like she was listening to Emily, her best friend since kindergarten, while she leaned against the counter. Seth kept his voice low so her parents wouldn’t hear anything in case the phone was turned up loud.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Hang on, I’ll ask.” She pulled the phone away from her ear and held her hand over the mouthpiece. “Hey, Mom, can I stay over at Em’s tomorrow? It’s Friday, it’s not a school night.”

  Her mom didn’t even look at her as she pulled pineapple chunks out of her masaman curry.

  “Okay,” she said, “but I don’t want to see you trying to catch up on homework on Sunday night. I want it done before you go over.”

  “Can I just do it there so I can go on the bus with her?”

  She acted like she was thinking, but then her dad said, “Oh, let her go, Ali. She’ll do it there.”

  Go, Dad, she thought. Maybe going back to being a patrolman had made him lose his detective skills or something. She hadn’t stayed over at Emily’s in months. Em was still hanging out with all the kids they’d gone to elementary and middle school with.

  Her mom waved her fork at her. “All right, but I’m serious, I want it done.”

  She put the phone against her ear again. “Hey, Emily?”

  “Yes?” Seth answered, his voice all high like he was talking like Emily. It didn’t sound like her at all, but she laughed anyway.

  “It’s cool,” she said, already wondering what she was going to pack.

  CORA

  “So how are you feeling?” Dr. MacKinnon asked, pressing into my ribs, feeling his way across my kidneys. You’d think a man would be less gentle than a woman, but Dr. Cho had dug her fingers into me so far that I expected to see holes in my back when she was finished.

  By comparison Dr. MacKinnon was practically a masseur.

  “Tired,” I replied. “But travel will do that to you.”

  “So will kidney disease. How’s the pain?”

  There hadn’t actually been much pain. And I wondered if there should be. And I wondered, as I often had before: If I’m not in pain, how bad can it really be? But I only had to remember the ultrasound images to know how bad it was. And to know how close to pain I was getting.

  “One to ten,” MacKinnon prompted me.

  “Two,” I said with a shrug. What I should have said was, Two on a good day, five on a bad day, today I am a three, it is a good day and what do you make of that, how will it change anything? Eventually it might be a ten. Some people have it better, some have it worse.

  “Headaches?”

  “Yes, last night especially. But nothing excruciating, just travel pains.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said, pulling my shirt back down over the back of my jeans and coming around to the front of the table to sit on a little rolling stool. “Dr. Cho is an excellent nephrologist.”

  “And she said the same of you,” I replied.

  “That’s very flattering, but at this point what we’re both wondering is why you’re here. It’s time to get your access installed and prepare to begin dialysis. Dr. Cho—”

  “I’ve told her the same thing. I have my reasons, they’re important, and I’ll go back to Seattle when I’m ready.”

  “Your kidneys are saying they’re ready now,” he said softly.

  “My kidneys never have and never will dictate what I decide to do with my life,” I said. “Until, of course, they do.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Dr. Cho said I’d like you.”

  I shook my head. “Dr. MacKinnon, I’m not plucky, or feisty, or whatever it is we’re calling brave heroines these days. I’m not being strong for my loved ones. I’m here because I’m too much of a coward to not be.”

  He took that in, and I could tell he was revisiting his decision to like me. That was okay. I would be here only for as long as it took for me to become an adult and tell Ali that I might have given her a child who might die before she did.

  “Well, whatever it is you’re here for, I suggest you get to it and go home. Unless you plan on starting your dialysis here. We have a center across the street that I’m affiliated with and it’s a superb facility, but I’d rather see you at home, with your support system already in place.”

  Home. I didn’t know what that was. Where was home? I was all right without defining home, but apparently nobody else was.

  Was it where my daughter was? The daughter I had no claim on. She was always an abstract as mine. Yes, there was genetic material there, but she was certainly not mine. She was theirs, Ali and Benny’s.

  I’d never understood Ali’s attraction, beyond the physical, to Benny. He was so . . . solid. He was so solid as to seem immobile. And immobile was barely breathing, wasn’t it? I wanted movement for Ali. I wanted her to dance on currents, trembling leaves and undulating rivers and swirling waters.

  But she had been so firmly hooked by the whole thing. Marriage, babies. The cruel betrayal of her reproductive organs was devastating. She had been ready, truly ready, at twenty. Who’s ready for a baby at twenty? But Ali really was.

  The rest of us had wanted to wait until we’d graduated college, until we’d had careers firmly established, until we were ready, as if some inner switch would flip and we’d just wake up and know one day. Her struggle had been frightening for everyone. If Ali could be infertile—and at such a young age—then what might we eventually be facing?

  We got degrees, we had careers, those who wanted to married, and then as our friends from high school got pregnant, they slowly dropped away. I imagined they’d say they were dropped, that Ali had become too jealous and heartbroken to maintain the friendship, but I knew better.

  The fact was, Ali’s beautiful, naked longing was too much for them to witness. She cradled their infants, cuddled their babies, played with their toddlers in a loving way they seemed unable to sustain. They dealt with the dirty diapers, the teething, the tantrums, the loss of time, of romance, of sleep.

  I think they couldn’t stand to watch her delighted around their children in a way they couldn’t muster anymore. I think she made them feel inadequate, as though they didn’t appreciate what they had. Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps I was uncharitable. But as far as I was concerned, the only one I needed to be charitable toward was Ali.

  When I visited, while Barbara was still alive, Ali would come to our house and stay the night the way she had when we were girls. Only this time we were allowed to stay out on the beach for as late into the night as we wanted.

  We’d duck through the sea grape hedge, finding our old paths, bursting through to the wide white sand. We’d walk for hours, the
moon a ghost high in the sky, the sun throwing its last desperate rose-gold fingers over the horizon, as reluctant to surrender the beach as we were.

  And she would tell me about how all she’d ever wanted was for someone to call her Mommy. How she needed to hear that word from the mouth of a child, how it thrummed in the core of her body. And how she was certain that she had heard it called to her, across the house, from the nursery she’d optimistically painted yellow and green, in the hazy moments before sleep took her.

  The idea of someone calling me Mommy filled me with dread. It didn’t just feel wrong in my head, it felt wrong in my heart, and it made me shudder at the comedic horror show I was certain I would create if I tried to raise a child. We were close enough that I confided this to her, and if anyone ever wanted to know why I loved her so much it was this: She laughed.

  She did not recoil in horror, look at me in pity, question my womanhood, or grow hurt that I didn’t want, or understand, something that she so desperately did. She simply stared at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. She accepted my truth in as open a way as she ever had. The same way she had when we’d first met on that beach, when I told her that I might be adopted by the rich woman up the road, that my mother had been an alcoholic killed by her own boyfriend.

  She had always had the most perfect, appropriate responses to my secrets.

  I came home for a visit on my twenty-seventh birthday, and as we leisurely walked down the same beach that had seen us race down it as children, she told me that she wouldn’t be having her own children. That she’d gotten bad eggs in the big supermarket of life, and they wouldn’t ever create a child, not with Benny, not with anyone.

  But there was hope, she’d said. IVF, in vitro fertilization, a procedure still new enough that it wasn’t on every news anchor’s teleprompter yet. She’d done her homework on the specifics, and it sounded viable to me.

  “So do it,” I’d encouraged, and she laughed.

  “I don’t know,” she’d said. “It’s so expensive, and it’s so uncertain, you know? I don’t produce viable eggs, so you have to use donor eggs, of course, and who knows what you get there, right?”

  “God, here,” I said, turning toward her and thrusting my hands at her from my hips. “Take mine! I’ll never use them.”

  And we both laughed, the soft, salt-heavy wind twining strands of hair across our faces. And then I stopped laughing.

  “Hey,” I said. “Why not?”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. Why not? Why couldn’t you use my eggs? I’d be willing to bet they’re the most ripe, fertilizable things in the world just because I don’t want them. Why couldn’t I be the donor?”

  She looked almost confused. I think that, until then, the idea had been a fantasy, and here I was, offering it to her on a platter as if it were just that simple. It must have seemed incredibly frivolous to her, for me to be so free with the one thing she felt so abjectly inadequate in producing herself. As if I were offering her hard candies from a never-ending bowl.

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that,” she said slowly, obviously thinking about how she might, indeed, do just that.

  I never had a second’s hesitation. If there’d been a speculum and petri dish on the beach, I’d have done it right then. Of course, I learned that it wasn’t quite so simple.

  I moved back home for a year, injecting myself with hormones, enduring procedures only slightly less personal than giving birth myself in order to make my ovaries overproduce and sync my and Ali’s cycles. There were failures to implant, and two miscarriages, and I grieved with her, and with Benny, as if they had been my own. I helped plant the magnolia trees in their backyard in honor of those tiny babies.

  And I felt horribly guilty, too. When the embryo didn’t implant or she miscarried, I couldn’t help but wonder if the flaw lay within my eggs. Though of course, I wasn’t the only genetic material in there. Technically, they were mine and Benny’s. That little irony, considering the fact that neither of us could be less attracted to each other, never escaped me, and perhaps that was part of why they never made it; perhaps even at our cellular level we didn’t play well together.

  I would often catch her looking at Benny and me in turn, with a Madonna smile on her face, and I knew she was putting an ideal child together in her mind out of our individual parts.

  “God, I hope the kid gets your teeth,” she said fervently once, and remembering Benny in middle school with his mouth full of metal, we’d laughed. That had been early on. The humor turned black after the second miscarriage. After the fifth try we called a halt to it.

  But it was the magic cycle, because then there was Letty, Letitia, named for Benny’s grandmother. I’d been graced with the honor of choosing her middle name, and while I’d considered Barbara, I finally settled on Makani, Hawaiian for “the wind.” Of course she grew up to hate both of them.

  But what joy she brought my friend. What gratitude and satisfaction and fulfillment. The craziness of the press coverage—generated by the PR firm her doctor had hired to jump-start his infertility clinic—only added to her excitement.

  “Every woman who gives birth should have her picture on the cover of People,” she said to me with a grin. It was if she had truly accomplished the impossible, and Letty, tiny, perfect Letty was the proof of it.

  Four years later we did it again. Only after the first unsuccessful cycle, Ali froze the rest of the embryos, and I don’t think she ever tried again.

  The doctor who’d done the procedures opened IVF clinics around the nation, and I’m sure he is partly responsible for the egg donation ads I see on the backs of bathroom doors in ladies’ rooms everywhere now. It was all very impressive, and now thousands of women sell their eggs to infertile couples.

  But it’s illegal to sell an organ to someone who will otherwise die.

  Legal to create life and store it indefinitely in a freezer, illegal to save one that’s already here, warm, contributing to society, taking care of jobs and families.

  I tried to not think of the ethics of it all, but it grew more difficult every day.

  “So how long am I looking at before dialysis?” I asked Dr. MacKinnon.

  He shrugged. “Based on Dr. Cho’s information, a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months at the outside. We’re going to want to go ahead and get your vascular access.”

  I nodded. I knew all about it.

  “A fistula isn’t really an option for you with these narrow veins—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “We’ll have to do an arteriovenous graft.”

  He smiled slightly. “Yeah. We’ll get you set up for it this week, and if we have to go to dialysis sooner, we can use a catheter. You’re going to do fine.”

  “I know,” I said, sliding off the table.

  Dr. MacKinnon stood and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ll meet you out there,” he said, “and we’ll make an appointment for the graft and to set up a dialysis center orientation. You should at least start to get familiar with the process, even if you’ll be doing it in Seattle.”

  I nodded, his hand still heavy on my shoulder. Did he think I would run?

  As I pulled away from him and stepped into the hall, it took all I had to not do exactly that.

  4

  ALI

  By the time I left for work in the morning, my anger had mellowed to a calm, determined patience. I reconciled myself to the fact that the baby discussion was going to go more slowly than I had anticipated. With Cora in town, I changed tactics. I would talk to her first.

  Benny and I kissed good-bye after breakfast as if everything were fine. I managed to keep from driving by Cora’s and pounding on her door, and I spent the morning practicing deep breathing exercises whenever I thought of either of them.

  I ate lunch at the counter, pricing boxes of guitar strings in between bites of salad and mulling over Cora’s undercover arrival. I clipped the phone to the pocket of my jeans and hooked the ea
rpiece over my ear so I was ready for her call and wouldn’t have to dash across the store.

  By midafternoon she still hadn’t called. I started going back over the last times we’d talked or e-mailed, looking for a reason, any reason, she might be angry with me. Had she e-mailed last? Or had I?

  By four I was in the full throes of paranoia, and at ten minutes to closing I had made my plan to go straight to her house and ask her what her problem was and feeling quite righteous about the whole thing, when something slammed into the door hard enough to make my entire front window shake and my heart leap.

  It was Cora, plastered against the glass like a bird, her face comically screwed up in surprise, her eyes crossed, a bottle of wine in one hand. I burst into laughter, completely forgetting everything but the joy I felt at seeing my friend. She stepped back and laughed, and then I saw what Benny had neglected to mention in his “looks like hell” assessment, as if she had merely looked a little tired.

  She didn’t just look tired. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she’d . . . expanded. She hadn’t exactly gotten fat; it looked too soft, somehow. She looked bloated. Not period bloated, not I-drank-way-too-much-wine-and-ate-too-many-pretzels-last-night bloated, but wrong bloated. That was it, she just looked wrong.

  But she was still there, in the mouth, that crazy grin, those eyes, and now that she was here I didn’t care if she’d eaten a salt lick and drunk a bottle of gin rather than calling me. I pulled the door open and held it for her, and she didn’t bother setting down the wine before she wrapped her arms around me.

  “Hey,” I said into her long hair, hugging her back, rocking with her, and laughing. I started to pull away, but she held on, and after a moment I realized her shoulders were hitching slightly.

  “Whoa, hey,” I said, pushing her back more forcefully. She dipped her head down, avoiding my gaze. “Cora, honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  She laughed and held the wine out to me. I set it on the counter while she wiped her face and pulled her hair back. She gave me a tremulous smile and said, “Oh, Ali, I’m so sorry. I’m just jet-lagged and—”