We stare at each other for a brief moment that feels charged—the anger, the recognition. We are strangers to each other. We have no idea about the other’s life.
“This summer,” I say, “I cheated on Leo. He went to New York, and I came to the beach, and I slept with Stone.”
I see Marcella react, but I push on.
“Things have been hard. We needed money for fertility; Leo didn’t want to keep going; I was angry with his absence. Being with Stone made me feel like… like maybe I wasn’t broken.”
My mother says nothing, just keeps looking at me.
“And then I took it back, and it was like we had a second chance.” The tears come fast, now. Fluid and hot. “And we weren’t just grieving anymore, we were happy. Really, truly happy. We gave up and we got our marriage back.”
Marcella opens her mouth to protest, to say, maybe, some inane thing they all say:Don’t give up. Don’t worry, it’ll happen. When you least except it. You just have to believe; miracles happen all the time.
But for some women, they don’t. For some women there is no miracle, no spontaneous pregnancy, no twelfth retrieval where, finally, the One Good Egg, the end. For some women there is only the big, open, wide, gaping middle.
“It felt great. It worked. The do-over worked. It made everything better.”
“I know,” Marcella says. “Sweetheart, I understand.”
I look at her. I see now that she’s crying. Big tears falling down her cheeks. I realize how infrequently I’ve ever seen my mother cry, how infrequently I’ve ever seen hermoved.
“I got a second chance,” I say. “And now—”
Marcella, my mother, looks at me. She takes a deep breath. I see her get quiet, very quiet. And then she puts her hands on my shoulders. She holds them there. She looks into my eyes, and it’s like I see it before she says it, like I know, just from looking.
“It has all been a second chance,” she says, and then she tells me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
She knows exactly where to start because she has practiced this identical conversation hundreds of times in her head. She has run and rerun the dialogue, the tilt of her head, the flow and rhythm of her words.
Of course, there are details that are different—it being here and now. There are the heightened circumstances surrounding this moment—the hospital, the parking structure, the sound of an ambulance. Her husband, above them, somewhere. But even these, in a way, have been accounted for. There was never going to be an ordinary utterance of this narrative. It was always going to be told under duress.
She begins, as she always knew she would, with the call. Dave, on his cell phone. One of those big, wide, flip phones they had in the early 2000s. She, Marcella, didn’t have a cell phone back then. She was a late adopter, refusing new technology. There wasn’t even a beeper in her bag.
“Oh, I could never work that,” she’d tell Dave.
So the home phone rang. It was 6:00 p.m. Dave and Lauren were coming back from a volleyball game. Malibu High had beenplaying Harvard-Westlake in Beverly Hills. She had packed orange slices for the team. Lauren loved oranges.
“Mar,” he said—his voice shaking, broken, breakable—“there’s been an accident.”
She knew, all at once, that it was serious. That her daughter was not OK. She knew in the way mothers always know—even the ones who feel like strangers to their children.
“Where is she?”
“We’re on our way to Cedars,” he said. “Honey, it’s not good.”
She remembers that he sounded like a little boy. That he was not her athletic, strong, strapping husband but someone who needed her care. That he wasterrified. She grabbed her keys, and ran.
She did ninety down the PCH, and to this day she remembers nothing about the drive here, nor leaving her car, abandoned in this same space somewhere.
“My daughter,” she puffed out at the help desk. “She’s here; she’s injured.”
“Name?”
“Lauren Novak.”
The woman looked up at her. Did she have the information? She swore, she could see it there, written on her sad, practiced face.
