We were quiet then, just the hiss of the espresso machine behind the counter and the occasional jangle of the bells above the door as people walked into the shop; Sam Smithpiped mournfully through the speakers overhead. This was my chance, I knew. I could be honest with him. I could tell him about Gabe and about Patrick, about getting picked on and then about getting pregnant. But then what? Once he knew the truth about me, there was no way he was going to want to deal with it. All of this hard work—this whole year—would be for nothing.
Instead I reached for his hand across the table, laced my fingers through his. “I hate this,” I told him, squeezing. “I’m sorry. Let’s just be nice to each other again, okay?”
Ian looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s be nice.”
In the end his mom had a conscience crisis and canceled her work trip instead of their family vacation, so Ian and his sister spent the week off the coast of Ecuador, swimming with giant tortoises in immaculately clear, blue-green water. As for me, I managed to avoid Star Lake altogether: my mom scheduled a meeting with her publisher in New York, and I took the train from Boston and met her at Penn Station, the two of us haunting museums and theaters and eating roughly six meals a day. It was a neat and tidy solution. It all worked out very well. Still, it wasn’t lost on me that Ian and I hadn’t actually solved anything, not really—it hung between us all summer, a question that hadn’t been properly answered. Coming to visit Imogen was a compromise, in a way.
Of course, I wasn’t counting on Gabe.
I don’t like thinking about fighting with Ian; it opens upa gulf deep inside me, a chasm I’m afraid of falling through. “Kiss me,” I order now, bumping his ankle with mine as we sit side by side on the wall.
Ian raises his eyebrows, grinning. “Twist my arm,” he says, and ducks his head.
He slides down off the wall to do it properly, standing between my knees and nudging them wider. “I’m really glad you’re here with me,” I tell him quietly, slipping my fingertips into the collar of his button-down; Ian smiles, pleased and maybe a tiny bit baffled, then closes his eyes and kisses me again.
My mom calls as we’re getting back to the cottage. “Hey, world traveler,” she greets me. I hear the grumble of the ice machine in the background, can picture her standing barefoot in front of the fridge back in Star Lake. “You drinking wine and eating cheese?”
“Some of both,” I assure her, stepping out into the plant hospital for privacy. “Just like you made me promise.”
“Good girl,” she says, sounding satisfied. “I give pretty solid advice, I think.”
“Yeah,” I agree, looking out at the gray horizon line; thunder rumbles in the distance, and I shiver. “You really do.”
The night after I took my pregnancy test I shut myself in the stairwell in my dorm building, made myself as small as humanly possible, and dialed Gabe’s number, listening to the echo of the unanswered ring on the other end of the line.I waited a week for him to call me back, steadfast.
On night eight, I called my mom.
I was terrified to tell her what was going on, terrified that she’d be furious at me—or worse, that she’d turn around and write a book about what I’d done. Instead she stayed very, very calm. “It’s all right,” she said, once I’d finally finished crying. “That’s where we are, then. What do you want to do?”
“I know you probably want me to think about giving it up for adoption,” I began, trying to keep my voice steady. After all, my mom would never have been my mom to begin with if some other couple hadn’t taken exactly that route eighteen years before. But for everything I’d ever been taught—everything I’d everbelieved—about a woman’s right to choose, nothing about this felt like a choice to me, not really. It wasn’t something I’d consciously decided. I was a freshman in college, and Gabe hadn’t even returned my phone call. There was no way I was ready to have a kid. It occurred to me, not for the first time and definitely not for the last, how lucky I was that I had the option not to. “But I just—”
“I want you to do whatever’s right for you,” my mom interrupted quietly. “And that’s all.”
She came to Boston the following morning, took me to the clinic the day after that; once the procedure was over she brought me back to her hotel in Copley Square, a tall old-fashioned building with a view of the park and a fireplacein the lobby, cookies frosted with the Red Sox logo in little cellophane bags on the pillows.
“I don’t deserve this,” I said when she brought me a hot toddy from the cozy Irish pub downstairs, setting it on the bedside table and flipping the channels on the hotel TV until she found a bright, soothing rerun. “Mom, really. After everything—I just don’t.”
My mom’s face got very tight then, her lips disappearing and her shoulders going sharp. She grabbed the remote again and clicked the TV off, plunging the room into silence; I thought she was upset with me for being ungrateful until I realized her eyes were full of tears.
“I never want to hear you say that again,” she told me, her voice low and urgent. It was the only time I saw her cry all weekend; it was the first time I’d seen her cry in my entire life. “You deserve everything, do you hear me? You are smart and you are kind and you are hardworking, and this doesn’t change any of that.” She sniffled once and gazed at me for a moment, waiting. “Do you understand?”
I fisted my hands in the clean white sheets, nodded. “Yes,” I said quietly. I didn’t believe her, not really, but I wanted—in this small way, at least—to be obedient and good. “I understand.”
My mom nodded back like the matter was settled—the terms agreed on, the contract signed. “All right,” she said. “Now drink your toddy and get some rest.”
Almost a full year later I look out at the garden behindImogen’s cottage, shivering a bit in the late-morning breeze. “So tell me about it,” my mom says cheerfully. “How’s the trip?”
“Interesting so far,” I begin, tucking the phone between my ear and my shoulder and wrapping my cardigan around me like a blanket. “You have time for the long version?”
The sky opens up as I’m saying good-bye to my mom, sheets of rain sluicing off the sagging roof of Imogen’s cottage and the fields gone soaked and squelching, the goats clustered up behind the convent and puddles half as wide as Star Lake covering the grass outside. The whole house smells like an aquarium. The couch cushions are damp to the touch. We hole up watching game shows while the boys play some weird variation on euchre with a waterlogged deck of cards and Sadie flips through an Irish tabloid, a bowl of salty stovetop popcorn on the coffee table between us. It ought to be cozy and relaxing, but instead it makes me claustrophobic to be trapped inside like this, like the forced proximity invites disaster. My eyes flick from Gabe to Ian and back again.
“Hey, is your mom’s name Diana?” Sadie asks suddenly, tilting her head back onto the couch cushions to look at me; she’s finished with her magazine and is holding her phone aloft, cross-legged on the rag rug with an unraveling afghan piled in her lap. “I went on Amazon to look for that deforestation book Ian was talking about, butDriftwoodby Diana Barlow is, like, right there on the homepage.”
“Oh!” I blink, my heart dropping like the cables have snapped. “Ha. Yeah, that’s her. They must be running some kind of deal or something.”
“Is it good?” Sadie asks, grinning. “Should I buy it?”
“Um.” I panic. “I mean, if you don’t like girly-type stuff, then you probably wouldn’t really be into—”
