“I slept with Stone,” I say.
I tell him about being in Malibu and Bonnie’s illness and the pull that I still have—had—to what came before. Before I was this person who could not have a baby. Before I knew what it felt like to know that everything is not ahead. That some things, even to us—Sylvia, Marcella, me—are irrevocable. I don’t tell him about the ticket—it doesn’t matter. It would be an excuse, now. A way to skirt responsibility. And I need to take it.
Leo is quiet, taking it in. When I’m finally finished, after I’ve been through the staccato beats of the summer, I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. It’s not until getting it all out that I realize what I’ve done, what I’ve put on the chopping block. Everything I’m in danger of losing. My hands vibrate like hummingbirds in my lap. Please please please please.
When I fell in love with Leo I lost a particular kind of ease. Because all of a sudden my life was sutured to someone else. If hewere injured, hurt, hit by a passing vehicle, I knew my life would crumble. For the first time my happiness was so intrinsically linked to someone else that I was terrified of him even being on a plane. Anything that might take him away from me.
And now I’ve done the one thing that might guarantee his leaving.
“I have no idea if you’ll ever forgive me,” I tell him. My voice is shaking. “But God, Leo. I really hope you’ll try.”
He sits there, on the couch, and closes his eyes. I see the flutter of them beneath his lids. I want to put my arms around him, to take away the pain I have just caused. The selfish, stupid decision. He sinks lower. I feel the heaviness of this, of all of it, settle on my chest. The truth of the life around us.
We are not going to get pregnant. My dad is not going to miraculously recover. These are hard, impossible things, but they are also true things. And it’s easier to deal with hard things when they are true. They don’t float on the top of the ocean but sit, sturdy, on the sea floor. They are immovable.
Leo’s eyes open, and he looks at me. I expect to see hurt in them, and I do. But I also expect to see disgust, anger—maybe even hatred. There is none of that. There is just sadness. A well of it. I can feel us both swimming in it.
“Lauren,” he says finally. “I have no idea how I’ll get past this.”
I feel my heart begin to peel away from my chest, straining to get out. To not feel this, this absolute crushing pain.
And then he picks up my hand. Leo touches my fingers, lightly, and the graze feels like the coolest breeze on a hot summer’s day. It feels like a glass of water after hours of thirst. It feels like every obvious thing about love I can think of.
It feels like being saved.
“But I want to,” he says. “I really want to.”
I start crying, and so is he, already, but we don’t embrace. Instead we sit, side by side, our hands gripped like we’re trying not to fall off a very high ledge.
“Why did you have to tell me?” he asks.
I can feel the anger, then. Not just at what I’ve done but that I’ve set it down here.
And he’s right to be angry. I could have swallowed it. I took it back. I could have forgotten and moved on. Spared us this pain of this revelation. But I think about our last fertility fight. How much agency I denied him simply because it wasn’t happening to his body.
“Because,” I say. “You were right. I can’t be the only one who gets to choose.”
Leo nods, but it’s bitter, resentful. It’s half a head shake.
“I just want you to know how much I want this. Our family. How much I want to be here. And I think that we should—”
Leo holds up his hand, cutting me off. “I don’t want to hear it,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do right now but this.”
And he’s right. There is no action to take, forward or backward, no way to take it back, no way to erase the truth that it has happened. No way to enact a future that hasn’t come yet, or take us out of this present moment. All there is to do is be here, to stay in this, and to trust that one day, without knowing, it might become something else.
That’s what time does, if you let it.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Watch him on the stairs!” Marcella says. She runs to him, blocking the place where the door meets the porch. He toddles forward, and she catches him in her arms, swinging him wildly.
He learned to walk two months ago, and he hasn’t stopped since. He’s everywhere—on the deck—lurching toward the beach. In the living room, pulling himself up on the sofa. He only wants to be on the move.
“Got him!” she calls, more for his benefit than ours, and he peels into laugher.
My son, Damien Elliot, absolutely loves my mother.
“He takes after you,” Leo tells me, which is true and funny because he doesn’t actually share my genetics. We ended up using donor eggs. A young woman from Idaho with bright blue eyes and a perfect health history. I’ve never met her, but I know she loves to snowboard and that her favorite book isThe Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. That’s enough for me.
