Chapter 75
THEIR FACES COME UP on each other’s phone screens, one by one by one.
They’re all sitting in their cars, in varying stages of light, depending on where they are in the country. It’s brightest for Hope, darkest for Caro.
“So how is everyone?” Hope asks, and they all crack up, because, well. “Caro, have you gone back to work?”
“Not yet,” Caro says. “My hands are still kind of a mess.”
“Oh my word, of course,” Hope says. “But they’re going to heal completely?”
“That’s what we think,” Caro says.
“And I didn’t mean to sound like you have to return to the hospital,” Hope says. “Everyone acts like you must climb back on the horse or whatever. You don’t. You don’t have to keep going back to the place that hurt you.”
“Or where I hurt someone else,” Caro says.
“You didn’t hurt anyone,” Hope says. “It was not your fault that woman died.”
“I know,” Caro says, “but I made it harder for her.” She’s crying, the others realize.
“I didn’t manage her pain well. She was thrashing around.
I’m not sure what I did wrong, and that’s the thing that terrifies me.
I keep going over and over and over it, and I’m not sure what I could have done differently.
” She clears her throat. “Hope, you weren’t the only one keeping a secret from the rest of us.
I didn’t tell either of you mine.” She looks straight ahead at the screen.
“Dan and I have been trying to have kids, and it’s not going to work.
None of my egg retrievals were successful.
” And now she closes her eyes. “It’s made me feel and do the worst things.
I lied to Dan. I told him that the retrieval had worked.
” Tears stream down her face. “How could I tell him that he’s not going to be a dad?
He was born to be a dad. But then how could I lie to him about it? ”
“Oh, Caro,” Ash says. No one speaks for a minute. Caro wipes her eyes furiously with the back of one hand.
“I was going to try,” Caro said fiercely. “I started some drafts of letters on their postcards. To Dan. To our fertility specialist to tell her we were done.”
“Who mailed those, anyway?” Ash asks. “It had to be Ty, right?”
“But why would he want to bring people we loved there?” Caro asks. “It would make what he was trying to do so much harder. To gather people who might be additional suspects, maybe, if things went wrong?”
“Page mailed them,” Hope says. Caro and Ash tilt their heads in shock, mirror images.
“I asked her to go into my trailer and mail one for me after I left. Apparently that gave her ideas, and she decided to mail yours, too. She didn’t love that I was doing all of this—that we were doing all of this—on our own.
She felt like the people in our lives should know where we were. ”
“Oh, Page,” Ash says. “She’s been through too much.”
“She made kind of a mess with them, though,” Hope says. “Do you still want to talk to her?”
“Of course,” Ash says, and Caro adds, “Absolutely.”
“Great,” Hope says. “I’ll text her and see if she can call us now.”
Once she’s finished sending the text, Hope looks up. Her eyes are bright, the line across her throat barely visible anymore. “So, Caro,” she says. “That’s all that’s holding you back? The eggs?”
“Hope,” Ash says.
“Well, they’re kind of an important part,” Caro says, trying to laugh.
Hope’s expression is serious now. “I’m sorry, Caro,” she says.
“I’m bad at this. Really bad. And I know it won’t be the same as if your own retrievals had worked.
But, and this is only if you and Dan want, I can help you.
I froze a ton of eggs in my twenties, and they’re apparently amazing.
You’re welcome to help yourself if you want any of them. ”
“Hope.” Caro looks stunned.
“I’m serious,” Hope says. “Think about it.” She’s trying to keep her tone breezy, but they can hear the emotion behind it. “It would be nice to know I helped you guys, since having kids might not be in the cards for me.”
“Don’t say that,” Ash says fiercely. “You never know.”
Hope shrugs. “I still don’t have anyone to raise a family with.”
“You have us,” Caro says.
Hope smiles at that. Her voice is raw when she asks, “What about you, Ash? How are things?”
“I’m okay,” Ash says. “Wade moved out last week.” They know this—they’ve been texting and sending messages on Marco Polo—but she feels like she should say it again.
Because this is monumental. This is the end of an era that she thought would be her only era, in so many ways.
“And I was keeping a secret from you guys the whole time, too. I never talked about how bad things with Wade were getting.”
“Oh, honey, you didn’t have to,” Hope says.
“We knew,” Caro agrees.
“One of my issues—and of course it’s not the main issue—with Wade is that he’s named Wade,” Hope says. “What is this, 1960? Is he a surfer?”
Ash is laughing through her tears.
“I mean, that’s more on his parents than it is on him,” Caro says.
“You’re right,” Hope says. “It’s a terrible name. And he’s terrible. So they must be terrible.”
“But seriously, Ash.” Caro’s dark eyes are warm with sympathy. “Are you doing okay?”
“I’m doing terrible.” Ash squares her shoulders. Her summer freckles are out in full force from the busy season at Three Sisters. “And I’m also okay.”
“And the girls?” Hope asks.
“The same,” Ash says. They’re quiet again for a moment, and it’s comfortable. Ash feels held.
“How’s Henry?” Hope asks.
“It’s hard,” Caro says. “Really hard.” She moved Henry to a care facility in Salt Lake City to be closer to her and Dan.
“He keeps saying he wants to go home.” When he says it, he sounds frightened, and she feels a bottomless ache and fear for him.
He has no home. She can see it in his eyes.
He has been her home, but she cannot be his, no matter how desperately they both want her to be.
The disease won’t let him rest with her.
For a time, not knowing him now made her doubt that she had known him during all the time that came before—even made her wonder if he had killed someone, and she can’t yet forgive herself for that—but she did know him.
As well as you could ever know a parent.
It’s an incomplete knowledge. A knowledge at once hampered and enhanced by being their child, defined in that relationship in some ways forever, even when you are the one doing the caretaking, even when you are the one acting, largely, as parent. She will always be Henry’s daughter.
Whether he remembers it or not.
“Hold on,” Hope says. “Someone’s joining the call.”
A pause, and then, there she is.
Page.
She holds up an empty blue cardboard box.
“I did it,” Page says, and then she bursts into tears.
“Oh, Page,” Ash says. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“We’re here,” Caro says.
“I might cry at you the whole time,” Page says. She looks at them through the camera, her face young and open.
“Of course,” Hope says. “As long as you want.”