I imagine all those hours of her flying, nauseous still, I’m certain. I want to go to her, follow her home, if only briefly. I track the hours I know have had to pass to get her off the plane and somewhere safe and settled. Her sister’s there to meet her. They email from a hotel in Miami and I’m relieved that she’s in someone else’s care.
I stay five more weeks and we write long emails back and forth the whole time. It is, in some ways, the best our relationship has been in months or years. From hostel hallways and internet cafes, in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, so alone that I go days or weeks hardly talking to other people, I can pour myself out loving her, knowing she will take in all of it, knowing she’s so many thousands of miles away and cannot come to ask for more. My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away.
* * *
A month later, in Florida, both of us are back with our parents while I wait for school to start. She calls, she texts almost every day. Her body’s changing but not enough that anyone but I and her family can see the difference. She’s tired and she’s sick but it’s not clear what of her nausea is hormones and what’s being afraid. We go for the same long walks on the beach we used to take in high school. We talk and talk except the tenor’s different. Everything feels heavy, everything is shaped and weighted differently by what lies ahead.
* * *
She goes out to California. She does not want to be the knocked-up girl in our small Florida town and though it smells a little like it was not wholly her choice, I understand why she wants not to know anyone in the place where she’ll become a mom. I am not privy to her conversations with her mother. She’s known me almost half my life but I’m not comfortable at their house anymore, afraid somehow that her mother finds me culpable. I imagine her mother wants her to have the baby somewhere where people won’t assume this is an aberrance, like her beauty and her brilliance, that her mom passed along.
Her mother’s brother takes her in. She has a room overlooking their pool up in the hills outside LA where she reads and studies for her MCATs and waits for the baby. She says she wants peace and time to think, none of the people we grew up with asking how she’s doing, wondering out loud about the father; she doesn’t want her mother every day pretending this is all just exactly as she’d planned it all along. Sometimes, when she calls to tell me about what it feels like, the sound of her on the machine at the doctor’s office, where she goes by herself, the pictures that she texts of blacks and grays and whites that look like shadowy mush, I try to picture her as Mother, and it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s so concrete. She’ll have someone to love always, something sure to be.
She says she’ll come back east and we can raise the girl together. I don’t ever quite acknowledge this because I think it’s just a thing she says to include me. I assume, when she’s there in front of her, she’ll go home to her mom. I’m back in grad school and she says she’ll find a job close by, apply to med school. The mystery of it, and the magic, has awoken something in her and, once again, I have flashes of feeling, somehow, that she’s found her way to a world I can’t quite touch.
* * *
They won’t know what happened when it happens. She’ll go in for one of the thousand checkups one has to go to in the final trimester, thirty-eight and one half weeks. They’ll attach her to the machine that checks the baby’s heart and there won’t be a sound and the doctor’s face will get stiff and her nose will wrinkle and she’ll fiddle briefly, almost calmly, with the machine. There will be quiet where there should not be quiet and she will sit and she will wait.
We have to … the doctor will say.
She’ll bring a nurse in.
Is there someone you could call?
* * *
Her uncle shows up, silent, after she calls her mother, who cannot get on a plane until the next day with her sister.
* * *
Three days later they’ll induce her. I won’t be there. The labor will stall and they’ll have to cut her from her. More silence then, the shivering from the anesthesia, epidural; her teeth will chatter and they’ll pull the curtain just below her chest as they remove her. I’ll have the same thing happen, six years later, except when my baby comes we’ll hear her and we’ll hold her; I’ll make my husband open up his shirt so she can settle in against his chest as they stitch me back up—when hers comes out, the whole room will stay still.
* * *
I go to her three weeks after, once her sister’s gone back east to school, her mom’s flown home. She’s a blank, soft space, stiller somehow than I’ve ever seen her. I crawl into her bed with her the night I get there; every night I’m there I lie close to her and I’m not sure either of us sleeps but we lie quiet, bodies warm. It’s our first glimpse of death up close, but also, it’s our first glimpse of birth. We swim every morning in the pool below the room where she still stays in the house that seems always to be empty. We float and I try hard not to look for signs of her beneath her one piece. We walk to the farmer’s market close to the house and I try to make her dinner. I’m an awful cook but we get vegetables and fresh eggs and cheese and I make us large salads with store-bought dressing in paper bowls and we set them on our laps, the TV on most of the time, movies and shows we watched when we were teenagers. We walk and walk, we swim and eat, but hardly talk. The third night I’m there, I sit in her bed reading and she’s a long time in the shower and, every time she’s in the shower, I think I hear her cry. When she comes out, she has one towel around her hair and one held up at her chest and she stands in front of the full-length mirror in the room we sleep in. She wears underwear but nothing else and points to the still-smarting scar beneath her belly; it’s so low she has to hold her underwear down with her thumb to show me, and she pulls my hand over the length of it, rough and bright red, jagged. It’s proof, she tells me, eyes splotched red and swollen. That she was there.
Nine days after I get there—because I don’t know what to say and I can’t help her, because she’s signed up for more classes and I tell myself that she’ll survive it; because all there is is empty space that I can’t fill—I hug her and I hold her and I make her promise that she’ll text me every day and tell me if and when she needs me; I’ll come back whenever. I fly back to restart school.
* * *
I don’t know why she doesn’t go home to Florida. Her uncle’s gone for work most of the time and she’s in that big, quiet house all by herself. It will be two days after I leave her alone in California before she calls a dealer, a guy we both know from high school who lives an hour away. He’ll sell her weed and pills and she’ll come back the next week. She’ll have just signed up for an MCAT course and claim the drugs steady her. She will have gotten Vicodin and Oxycodone to take as needed, whenever the pain gets to be too much, after the C- section. She’ll be told, just as I am later, to take it on a schedule, to get ahead of the pain.