29. Greer
Greer
Indie calls at nine in the morning.
I am at the kitchen table in a soft cotton tunic with my hand wrapped around a mug of decaf, on the tenth day of the paid leave I asked for when the Globe column ran.
Kieran is asleep down the hall in the bed I left at six-thirty when the baby started kicking.
The phone vibrates on the table between my elbows. Indie's name on the screen.
I pick it up on the first ring.
"Indie."
"Greer."
She is, on the other end, the careful steady voice of my best friend.
She says, "Come over. Just you. Not Dad."
I look at the clock on the stove.
"What time?"
"Whenever you can be here. I'll wait."
I sit at the kitchen table with the phone in my hand for a long minute.
Then I get up, go down the hall, and stand in the doorway of the bedroom.
Kieran is asleep on his side with his hand still on the part of the mattress where I was when I got up an hour ago.
His face, asleep, is the face I have been watching for seven months; the one he wears when he has finally let himself stop bracing for what the day is going to ask of him.
He has Game 6 in twelve hours.
I will not wake him up to tell him.
I shower and dress carefully, the soft black knit dress, the navy blazer Indie helped me pick out two springs ago, the gold earrings Lena gave me when I graduated from Northeastern. A small amount of makeup. Hair pulled back.
I leave a note on the kitchen counter under the sugar dish, the same envelope from the pile we have been writing each other notes on for two weeks.
Going to Indie's. She called. Will text later. — G.
The drive to Cambridge takes twenty minutes. I park on Indie's street with five minutes to spare and use them to breathe before I get out of the car and press the buzzer at the front of her building.
She is waiting in the open doorway.
She is in jeans and a cream sweater, the same one she wore the Sunday I told her, her hair pulled back into the bun she wears when she has not slept. Her eyes are red. Her hands are at her sides, the fingers moving against the seam of her jeans.
She does not, in the second I get to the top of the stairs, hug me.
She steps back inside and holds the door open.
"Come in."
She closes the door behind me, walks to the kitchen counter, turns, leans against it with both her hands flat on the counter, and looks at me.
She says, quietly: "Sit."
I sit on the couch.
She does not, this time, come down the half-step. She stays at the kitchen counter, leaning against it with her arms crossed now over her chest, and looks at me across the half-step that has, in eight weeks, become a kind of border between her and me in this room.
She says, very quietly: "I have one question."
"Indie."
"I've been holding it since I closed the door behind you the Sunday you came here. I want to ask it. I want to listen to you answer it. After today we're going to need a long time before either of us knows what the rest of this is."
"Okay."
She breathes in.
She says: "Did you ever, in any of the last seven months, see me as the price of this?"
I look at her.
She is at the counter in the cream sweater with her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes red and her hands shaking; the shaking of a person who has, for eight weeks, been holding herself very still in a single small apartment in a single small neighborhood in a single small city, alone, with the question.
I do not, for several seconds, answer.
I say, "You are not the price, Indie. You are the cost."
She does not move.
"The difference matters to me," I say. "I do not know if it will, in the end, matter to you.
The difference is that a price is the thing you pay for something you decide you want, knowing what it costs.
A cost is the thing the world takes from you for a thing you did not know you were doing.
I have not, in any moment in the last seven months, weighed you against this and chosen this.
I have chosen this and been broken by what it has cost me to lose you.
The losing you part is not the part I was willing to do. It is the part that happened anyway."
She does not, for a long second, move.
"Indie."
"Yes."
"The night at the Bellamy was not a choice between you and your father.
I did not know who he was. He did not know who I was.
By the time we knew, I was already pregnant.
By the time I knew I was pregnant, the thing between us was four weeks old.
By the time the thing between us was four weeks old, I had to either tell you or not tell you.
I picked the wrong thing. I picked not telling you, because every version of telling you ended with what we are doing in this room right now, and I was a coward, and I wanted to keep what we had until I could not keep it.
The cost of the cowardice is that you found out from a column instead of from me.
The cost is what you have been paying for eight weeks.
The cost is the thing I have been losing every day since the Sunday I came here. "
She does not, for several seconds, answer.
"The price would be having looked at you, in the first week of November, and decided you were worth less to me than your father was.
I have not, in any moment of any day since the morning I figured out the baby, looked at you and made that math.
I have looked at you, every day, and known that I was going to have to tell you.
I waited too long. But that is not the same thing. "
She nods, the small careful nod of a person who is taking in what she has been waiting to hear.
She does not, in any of it, sit down.
She does not, in any of it, walk down the half-step.
She does not, in any of it, cry.
The baby kicks under my hand.
I do not say anything about the kick.
She says, very quietly: "Okay."
"Okay."
"I'm going to think about that. I’ll need some time."
"Okay."
"But."
"Yes."
"I want to be at the hospital when the baby comes."
I close my eyes.
"That is the only thing I know about the rest of this right now. I want to be at the hospital. I do not know what I want after that. I want to hold your baby in the first hour the way my mother held me. After that I will figure out the rest of it."
I open my eyes.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
She does not, for another second, move.
Then she walks down the half-step, crosses the small living room, stops in front of me, and puts her hand, briefly, on the back of my head — the small careful gesture she used to do every Saturday night after she poured me a glass of wine.
She takes her hand back without saying anything.
"Go home, Greer. I will text you."
"Indie?"
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me for this. Not yet."
"Okay."
I stand up. I pick my purse up off the couch and walk to the door. She walks me to the door and opens it without hugging me or smiling.
But she does, in the doorway, say: "Drive safe."
I look at her.
She has not said anything to me with care in it in eight weeks.
"I will."
"And Greer."
"Yes."
"Tell my father I am glad he did it yesterday. The press conference. Tell him I am glad."
"I will tell him."
She closes the door.
I stand on the second-floor landing of her building with my hand on the closed door briefly before I walk down the stairs.
* * *
I get to the Subaru without crying. I get in, close the door, put both my hands flat in my lap, and close my eyes. The kick comes once, then again, then a third time. When I open my eyes the dashboard clock reads 2:04 — three and a half hours since I rang her buzzer. I start the car.
I drive home through Cambridge and across the bridge and through the Back Bay to the South End, holding the wheel at ten and two, watching the lights, listening to nothing.
I sit in the Subaru with the engine off for one more minute.
Then I go upstairs.
* * *
Kieran is at the kitchen table in the cotton tee and the suit pants when I come through the door, Game video on a laptop in front of him with the volume off and his notebook open beside it.
He has been working since he woke up. He hears the door, looks up, sees my face, closes the laptop, and crosses the front hall to me.
Both his hands come up to the sides of my face. He looks at me for a long second.
"Greer."
"She wants to be at the hospital when the baby comes."
His face does a small slow thing.
He does not, for several seconds, answer.
"Okay," he says, quietly.
"What did she say?"
I tell him about the price and the cost. I tell him about her standing at the kitchen counter for the whole conversation.
I tell him about her hand on the back of my head.
I tell him about the drive safe in the doorway.
I tell him she will text me when she is ready to be in a room with us again.
I tell him she does not know when that will be.
He listens.
He does not, in any of it, look away from my face.
“And she said to tell you she is glad you did it. The press conference"
He closes his eyes for half a second.
He opens them.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"That is the kindest thing my daughter has said about me to any human being in eight weeks."
"I know."
He pulls me to him and holds me there in the front hall for what is probably two minutes.
When he lifts his face, he says: "I have to leave at four-thirty for the game."
"I know."
"Eat first."
"I know."
"Greer."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For going."
"Indie called me. I went."
"You went without making any of it about you, and you came back with the thing I needed to hear. Thank you."
He kisses me on the forehead. He goes back to the kitchen table and closes the laptop, and puts it in the bag.
I sit at the kitchen table and watch him pack the bag.
After a minute, I say: "Kieran."
"Yes."
"Win tonight."
He looks up at me from across the table, the same look he has been giving me since November.
"I will try."
"That's not what I said."
He smiles, the small private smile that has, in seven months, become the one expression on his face I am sure is only ever for me.
"Okay, Greer."
He stands. He kisses me on the top of the head. He goes.
* * *
He wins Game 6.
I watch it from the couch in the apartment, a heavy blue afghan over my legs and the soft cotton tee of his against the front of me.
The Barons go up 1-0 in the first, give it back in the second, score twice in the third on a Sasha rebound and a Mikko empty-netter.
The horn goes. The series is over. The Conference Final starts on Wednesday.
I text him: win.
He texts back from the bench at 9:47: winning home.
I close the phone.
I sit on the couch in the dark of the front room and I put both my hands on the front of me, and I do not, for a long time, get up.
The baby kicks, twice.
Indie is, somewhere on Beacon Hill in her own apartment in the Saturday-night April dark, doing whatever she does on Saturday nights alone.
She is going to text me when she is ready.
I am going to wait for as long as it takes.