22. Greer
Greer
I have not slept since Thursday night and have not eaten anything heavier than toast since Friday morning.
The last seventy-two hours I have spent in my apartment with Kieran on the phone, with Lena on the phone, with the baby kicking under my hand at two in the morning, with the lights off and the curtains drawn and the door deadbolted, going over the four sentences I am about to say in Indie's front hall in seven minutes.
None of the versions I have rehearsed make this easier on her.
I sit in the Subaru with both my hands on the wheel for three minutes before I get out. Getting out is slow now, at twenty-two weeks my hip is not the hip it was in October, and I lock the car and walk up Indie's street the way an older woman would.
Indie lives on the second floor of a walk-up two blocks off Memorial Drive in Cambridge. I press the buzzer, she buzzes me in, and I climb the stairs to her door.
She is waiting in the open doorway in jeans and a soft cream sweater, hair down, face washed clean of whatever she has been doing in the last hour. She does not hug me. She does not smile. She steps back inside and holds the door open.
"Come in."
Her apartment is the same apartment I have been in a hundred times in three years, though my visits these last six months have been the rare Saturday-night-pasta ones, not the weekly ones we used to have when we both lived in this neighborhood.
The kitchen is at the front. The couch is in the small living room down the half-step she has always joked is charm.
The window over the couch faces the maple tree on the corner, still bare in March.
She walks to the kitchen counter and turns to face me, and what I have known for seventy-two hours she would do is what she does — she looks at the front of me.
I am in the long charcoal cardigan, but underneath it, today, I am wearing a fitted black knit dress I bought from a maternity boutique in Newton three weeks ago.
The first piece of clothing I have, in the entire pregnancy, put on my body without trying to hide it.
The dress goes from the collarbone to the knee.
It does not, anywhere on the front of me, do the work the wrap dress used to do.
Indie looks for six seconds. Her face goes through a small, slow thing she does not, in any of the six seconds, let out loud.
She says, very quietly: "Sit."
I sit on the couch. She comes down the half-step and sits on the armchair across from me, hands folded in her lap.
"How far along are you now?"
"Twenty-two weeks."
"You knew on Thanksgiving."
"I knew on Thanksgiving."
"And the Herald is — "
"The Herald is correct that I have declined to name the father. Everything else is missing."
She nods. She's got this way of letting me get through the predictable stuff first, just like my bestie does when she's being sweet, before she drops the part she's not sure how I'll react to.
"Okay then," she says.
"Who is the father?"
I look at her.
She is on the armchair across from me with her hands folded in her lap, holding the steady, careful face she has been holding since the door opened.
For seventy-two hours she has, probably considered every man in my life; Brennan, the residents at my last clinic, the surgeon I dated for two months last spring, the bartender at the Cambridge place she has been trying to set me up with since November.
She has not, in those seventy-two hours, let herself consider her father.
He has not, in any version of the world Indie has been living in, been a man my age would sleep with.
I say it the way Lena and Kieran and I agreed on Saturday night I would say it. Four sentences. No qualifiers.
"It's your dad. We did not, the night it happened, know who each other were. By the time we did, I was already pregnant. We have been together since November."
The room goes very still.
Indie does not, for what is probably four seconds, move. Then she stands up, walks two steps to the small kitchen counter, puts both her hands flat on it, bends her head between her shoulders, and breathes once slowly through her nose.
I sit on the couch and do not move.
The clock on the small bookshelf reads 2:07. The radiator under the window hisses, low and steady. Everything in the apartment is exactly what it was when I walked in.
Indie stays at the counter with her back to me for what is probably ninety seconds before she straightens up. She does not, for another second, turn around. She speaks to the window over the sink.
"How did the night happen?"
I tell her. I tell her about the gala in October, the bad fight with Brennan in the hotel hallway during cocktails, going up to the suite to put myself back together, getting off the elevator on seventeen instead of eighteen, looking for the stairwell to go up a floor and not finding it, leaning on a door that was not latched, stumbling into the suite of a stranger.
The water he gave me. The space he gave me.
The bourbon, two hours of talking, sleeping with him, leaving at five in the morning.
He did not, in any of it, tell me his last name.
"When did you find out?"
"At his first physical of the season. October twenty-ninth. I was thirteen days pregnant. I did not, until you came into the office and said Daddy, know who he was either."
Then she turns around.
"And you have been with him since."
"Yes."
"At Thanksgiving."
"Yes."
"At the team Christmas event."
"Yes."
"At the All-Star Break, when I came over here and made you pasta and put my hand on your stomach in my front hall and asked if you were okay."
"Yes."
"And the only person who has not been told any of this," she says, "is me."
"Yes."
She closes her eyes for half a second.
"There is one more thing I want to know before you leave."
"Okay."
"Did you, at any point, think about how this would make me feel?"
I look at her.
"Every minute. Every minute of it. The reason I haven't told you, in five months, is because the only version of this conversation I could find that didn't end with you hating us both was the version where you heard it from me, in your apartment, in a moment of my choosing.
The version where I came over for Sunday pasta in October, the week after the gala, and told you I had slept with a stranger and was probably pregnant and would deal with it on my own.
I missed that window because I did not know who he was.
By the time I knew, it was too late to tell you the basics.
I would have had to tell you the bigger one.
And I knew, every Saturday after that, that the longer I waited, the worse the bigger story would be.
I was wrong to keep waiting. I have been wrong about it since November and I know that. "
She nods.
She does not, for several seconds, say anything else. Then, "Get out of my apartment, Greer."
"Indie."
"Get out of my apartment. Don't call me. Don't text me. Don't email me. Don't show up at my work. Don't have Lena call me. Don't have Mikko call me. Don't have my father call me. I will tell you when I can be in a room with you again."
"Indie, please…"
"Get out."
I stand, pick my purse up off the couch, walk past her to the door without looking at her.
She does not, on the way past, look at me either.
I open the door, step into the hallway, close the door behind me.
I stand on the landing with my hand on the knob for ten seconds before I let go and walk down the stairs.
I get to my car without crying. I unlock the driver's side, get in, close the door, put the key in the ignition and sit in the driver's seat with both hands flat in my lap. The kick comes three times. The dashboard clock reads 2:26. I have been in her apartment for twenty-three minutes.
When I can finally breathe calmly enough to start the car, I do not cry.
I do not turn the radio on. I drive home through Cambridge and across the bridge and through the South End to my apartment watching the traffic lights turn.
I pull up to my building at 2:49, park, sit with the engine off for two more minutes before I get out.
I cross the sidewalk in the soft black knit dress and the long charcoal cardigan, let myself in the front door, climb the two flights to my apartment with my hand on the railing every step.
I unlock my door, go in, close it behind me, and sit down in the front hall with my back against the inside of the door.
The phone comes out of my purse. I text Kieran.
it is done. she told me to leave.
He writes back inside ten seconds.
coming.
I put the phone on the floor beside me and I do not move until he buzzes.
* * *
I let him and he puts his arms around me, and holds me. Neither of us speaks for what is probably a minute.
Then he walks me, slowly, to the couch in the front room and sits me down. He sits next to me, puts his head in his hands, and says into his hands: "Tell me what she said."
I tell him she said get out. I tell him she did not, at any moment, cry. I tell him that the front of me, in the soft black knit dress, was what she looked at for six seconds at the kitchen counter before she said anything. I tell him the last word she said before I left was out.
He listens with his hands still over his face. When I am done, he stays very still for what is probably a minute, then takes his hands down, picks up his phone, and calls Indie's number.
It rings four times. It goes to her voicemail. Hi, this is Indie. Leave a message.
He hangs up, sets the phone face-down on the coffee table, and puts his hand against the front of me.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"I'm here. I am going to be here tonight, and I am going to be here tomorrow, and in twenty days when the season is over, and on the morning the baby is born, and on every morning after that. It’s going to be ok.”
I close my eyes and lean against his shoulder.
We sit on the couch in the front room of my apartment, his hand on the front of me feeling the baby kick under his palm, the late-afternoon spring light from the window slowly turning the gray it goes in March and the voicemail of my best friend somewhere in the city not picking up. The phone does not ring.
We sit there for a long time.