32. Anna
ANNA
The sign comes up faster than I remember.
Welcome to Montana. Big Sky Country.
I've driven this road a hundred times but I always forget how it opens up — the way the land just decides to go on forever in every direction, the sky dropping all the way down to meet it. The mountains are right there. Sharp and clear, every ridge visible, nothing between me and them but air.
I have the top down. There's a McDonald's bag on the passenger seat, half an order of fries going cold in the cup holder. A wrapper on the floor catches the wind and lifts — I lunge for it one-handed, the car drifting slightly, and catch it just before it goes.
I eat another fry.
I drive through town. Past the gas station, past the turn to my mother's office, down the familiar streets. Little has changed.
The one lane road to the house is still unpaved.
My mother is waiting on the porch when I pull up.
The house is low and wide, ranch style, wood siding weathered to a grey-brown, a porch that runs the length of the front. Nothing for miles in any direction except fence line and sky. The kind of house that looks like it grew out of the ground.
She's in her navy suit. Hair pulled back. She left work early.
She comes down the steps before I've turned off the engine.
I get out of the car and she looks at me — really looks, the way mothers do when they're checking for damage — and then she pulls me in.
She's taller than me by an inch. I put my face against her shoulder and she holds on with both arms and neither of us says anything for a moment.
When she pulls back, she looks at my stomach. Just once. Then back at my face.
"You look tired," she says.
"I'm okay."
"You look beautiful." She cups my face in both hands for a second. "Come inside."
She carries one of my bags without asking. Inside the house smells like something she's had in the oven and something else underneath it that I've never been able to describe to anyone who hasn't been in it.
She pours me water and then juice. She sits across from me and watches me with the expression she's had my whole life — equal parts love and assessment.
"How are you feeling?" she says. "Really."
"Better," I say. "Now that I'm here."
She shakes her head. "My baby's having a baby."
I smile.
"Are you happy about it?"
"You know, in a weird way, I am."
"I'm scared, Mom."
"Under the best of circumstances you'd be terrified." She looks at me over her coffee. "You have a law degree, a good head, and you come from tough stock. You'll figure it out." A pause. "And I'll be here."
After a while she squeezes my hand at the door to my room.
"Relax," she says. "I'll start dinner."
My old bedroom is exactly the same.
Same quilt. Same desk by the window. Stacks of plays I've read.
Same photograph on the wall from my first play — I'm fourteen, in a costume that doesn't fit, grinning like I invented theater.
On the shelf above the desk, a debate trophy from junior year.
Second place. I was furious about it at the time.
Looking at it now I think — that girl had no idea what was coming.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I press my hand against my stomach.
Hi. We made it.
My mother brings me tea without being asked and sits in the chair by the window and we talk for two hours.
I tell her everything from the beginning. Luke. Delia. The fake dating. Auditions. Then I fell in love. He didn’t. Or maybe he did, but not enough to want the same life.
At some point she reaches over and puts her hand on mine.
"I'm glad you're here," she says.
"Me too," I say.
And I mean it.
It starts the next day.
I don't mean to. I pick up my phone to check the weather and somehow I'm on Instagram and somehow I'm on a fan account and somehow there are photos I haven't seen yet.
Luke and Rebecca on set. A candid someone got through a fence. His hand on her face. Her looking up at him.
Then another one. A different angle. His mouth close to her ear.
The comments are immediate and comprehensive.
They've been together since week two.
The girlfriend is still in LA crying her eyes out.
No, I'm in Montana crying my eyes out, assholes.
I know what this is. I know exactly what this is. I have been on the other side of a camera. I know how a staged moment looks and I know how the internet turns proximity into a love story.
I keep scrolling.
They look perfect together.
I stay up until two in the morning looking at photos of a man I love with a woman the world has decided he loves more.
I read every comment. I look at every angle.
I find accounts that have compiled timelines, side by side, comparisons of how he looked at Rebecca versus how he looked at me in our early photos.
My back aches. My eyes burn. I'm seventeen weeks pregnant and alone in my childhood bedroom at two in the morning and I cannot put the phone down.
I put my phone face down on the nightstand.
I lie there in my childhood bedroom with the quilt pulled up to my chin and the photograph of fourteen-year-old me grinning on the wall and I think: of course. Of course this is how it ends.
My mother finds me at the kitchen table the next morning. Still in my pajamas. Phone in my hand. I wipe tears from my eyes.
She says something I don't hear.
"What?"
She makes coffee and puts it in front of me and sits down across from me.
"Give me the phone," she says.
"What?"
"Anna."
I give her the phone.
She puts it in her pocket.
"Get dressed," she says. "We have an appointment."
The clinic is twenty minutes outside town. My mother's OB for thirty years.
I sit on the paper-covered table in a room that smells like antiseptic and calm and Dr. Patricia Reeves comes in and shakes my hand and asks how I'm doing.
"Fine," I say.
She looks at my chart. Looks at me.
"Your blood pressure is high," she says.
"I haven't been sleeping well."
"Stress?"
I almost laugh.
"A little."
She looks at me the way doctors look at you when they know you're not telling them everything.
"Stress affects the baby," she says. Simply. Like a fact. "Whatever you're carrying right now — your body is carrying it too. And so is he."
I look at her.
"He?" I say.
She smiles.
"Would you like to see?"
The ultrasound screen is small and grey and grainy and there he is.
Moving. Actually moving. His hands — I can see his hands — opening and closing like he's practicing.
"That's him," Dr. Reeves says.
I can't say anything.
My mother makes a sound beside me.
I watch him move on the screen. This person. This actual person who has been living inside me while I've been spiraling in a childhood bedroom over Instagram photos. While I've been reading comments at two in the morning. While I've been convinced the world knew something I didn't.
He doesn't know about any of that.
He's just in there. Practicing his hands. Waiting.
"He looks good," Dr. Reeves says. "Strong heartbeat. Good size for the gestational age."
"Good," I say. My voice comes out strange. "That's good."
On the way out my mother takes my hand and holds it all the way to the car.
We sit in the parking lot for a while without saying anything.
"He needs you to be okay," she says finally.
"I know."
"Not for Luke. Not for Hollywood. For him."
I look at my hands in my lap.
"I keep thinking about what I'm going to tell him someday," I say. "About why I made the choices I made."
My mother is quiet for a moment.
"Tell him the truth," she says. "That you were trying to protect him before you even knew him. That's not a bad story."
I look at her.
She looks back.
"Give me the phone," she says again.
I give it to her. This time I don't ask for it back.
That night I sit on the back porch with my mother's old quilt around my shoulders and a cup of tea going cold in my hands and I look at the mountains.
No phone. No photos. No comments.
Just the mountains and my mother moving around inside the house behind me. Through the window I can see her at the kitchen table with a brief open in front of her, reading glasses on, red pen in hand. Working late the way she always does. This is her life. It always has been. And it's a good life.
There's a boy. He has hands. He's practicing.
I'm his mother.
That's enough.
I'm staying here. Having my baby. Going back to work — real work, the kind I know how to do. My mother could use help at the firm. I have a law degree. I have a son coming.
I go inside.
My mother looks up from her brief.
"Tea?" she says.
"I'm going to bed," I say.
She nods. Goes back to her reading.
I get into bed.
Outside, somewhere out in the dark, a coyote calls and goes quiet.
I try to sleep.