She didn’t throw up this time. Not once. She didn’t think anything of being so tired because it didn’t feel like exhaustion. It felt like stress. Rehearsal was all-consuming. Shakespeare required muscles she had not yet developed. That didn’t make her not want to do it. It made her only want to do it. But she also had a full load of courses still, and extra library hours to work now that graduation was in sight and student loans loomed. She was helping Davis apply for every tech job in the city. She was helping Dakota with a documentary she was filming about competing pizza-by-the-slice philosophers. So it didn’t seem strange that she was sleeping so hard, that she’d close her eyes for just a moment while Dakota was bitching about her girlfriend and wake up the next morning.
Then she started dreaming about Rebecca. Rebecca as a baby in Robbie’s arms. Rebecca as a toddler—she looked nothing like India or Robbie, but India recognized her anyway, maybe in that way you do in dreams, maybe via some kind of maternal sight, unbound by time or distance. Whereas over the summer, any small child might have been Rebecca, now she had no trouble identifying her, no matter what she looked like. Sometimes Rebecca was older than she was now, but India recognized her anyway. She was learning to ride a bike. She was off to kindergarten. She was getting ready for a school dance. Sometimes she was the demanding three-year-old she no doubt actually was, yelling, “Snack! Snack! Snack! Snack!” in the background while Camille tried to explain something on the phone that India couldn’t hear. Sometimes Rebecca was still inside her, Rebecca in the womb, but in her sticky, snack-demanding form, banging on India’s bladder with a carrot gripped in one fist, pretzel sticks in the other. “India!” she yelled. “Snack!” and when that didn’t work, “India! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
India’s eyes sprang open—though there was nothing to see but the dark ceiling of her middle-of-the-night dorm room—and she knew.
She managed—just managed—to hold on till the sun was up, which was still hours before Davis would be, but she couldn’t wait any longer than that. She called, woke him, made him meet her in the park. It wasn’t cold out, just the slight early-fall chill of the day not yet warmed up, but she was wrapped in her winter coat, shivering on the lip of the fountain. Therefore, when he arrived, the first thing he looked was worried about her. She wanted to dispel his concern. And at the same time she wanted to warn him. But there was no gentle way in, no way to prepare, and she couldn’t wait another moment anyway.
As soon as he got near enough, she blurted, “I’m pregnant and so sorry.” She remembered telling her mother. I got into NYU and pregnant. At least she’d got the lede right this time. She couldn’t meet his eyes quite, but she looked at his face, watched it fall.
“Oh, India.” A whisper.
“I know.”
“No,” he said. Not quite said. It sounded like an echo of her “know” but was not, somewhere between a moan and a wail. But it was like “no,” and “no” was what it meant.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He shook his head. “It’s not…” He trailed off. Not your fault or not the point anymore, sorry or not sorry no longer the pressing issue, it having been supplanted by quite a few others.
“How did this…?” He wasn’t finishing sentences anymore. But he didn’t need to. Not really.
“The usual way, I guess.”
“You’re on the pill.” Bewildered and more to himself than to her, maybe.
“I am. Well, I was. I’ll have to stop now. You have to stop when you…”
“Get pregnant,” he supplied. “Not a lot of point anymore, either.”
She made herself laugh a little, hoping he was making a joke. He ran his hands over his head and left them there, turned in a few tight circles, sat down next to her for a breath, bounced back up again. She watched him. Shivered and watched.
“I guess we should…” He trailed off again, but this time she needed him to finish.
“Tell me.”
“… get some coffee.”
Not what she’d have guessed. She nodded mutely, then shook her head. She wasn’t sure she could stand. “You go. I’ll wait here.”
“Oh. Sorry. Of course.”
“What of course?”
“No coffee if you’re…” He couldn’t say it.
“It’s not that.” Maybe it was that. “I’m not sure I could manage…” She waved in the general direction of her middle.
“I’ll just…” he began. “Skip it,” he was maybe going to say. “Stay here with you.” “Give up coffee since everything in the world’s been turned upside down, and luxury, to say nothing of sustenance and hydration, has collapsed under the weight of the priority list.” But then instead he said, “I’ll be right back.”
She nodded, glad she didn’t have to say anything else while he was gone. She sat on the fountain and tried to stop shaking.
Ten minutes later, Davis was back with a cup of coffee, a sesame bagel, a donut, a croissant, a hot cocoa, and a can of ginger ale. “I don’t know what you want”—she thought he meant so he’d bought one of everything, but then he said—“but I was thinking probably we’ll get married?”
A question mark at the end.
“Are you asking me?”
But he wasn’t. Not really.
“I mean, I will. If that’s what we decide.” He paused, then blundered on. “I was more wondering if that’s what you want. To get married.”
She looked at her shoes and nodded. “Someday.”
He nodded too. “That’s what I thought. That’s what we agreed. So I guess the question is…”
She looked up at him, waited.
“… what’s the difference between someday and now?”
She blinked. “Everything that was supposed to happen first?”
“But that could happen anyway?” He sounded like he was asking her. “I’ll get a job. I’d do that regardless.”
“I guess, but…” She didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
“We’ll just have to…” He didn’t either, apparently.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Get a house in New Jersey instead of an apartment in the city. Take the boring job that pays well instead of the exciting start-up that may or may not.”
This was so logical. How clever she’d been to get knocked up by a computer scientist. “What about me?”
“Same thing.”
“Get a boring job?”
“Stick with the plan. Now instead of someday. Audition a lot and see what happens.”
“I can’t. I won’t be able to.”
“Why not?”
“We’ll have a baby. You’ll be working.”
“Oh, yeah, huh.” He had his homework face on, the one that solved problems which were tricky but not actually taxing. “Well, maybe someday then instead of now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of having a theater career and then a baby, you’ll have a baby and then a theater career.”
She would have her senior year and then graduation and then the baby would come, which made none of this as dramatic as last time. They were adults now, apparently. Educated. One of them was very employable. One of them was old enough and experienced enough to know she was talented and also to know that talent wasn’t enough to guarantee anything and so her career was precarious at best, with or without a baby. If they had gotten married that weekend, maybe they’d have stayed married forever. Maybe they’d have had that baby and two or three more. Maybe they would have grown together and grown up together and never regretted the change in plan because it wouldn’t be a plan, it would be a baby, it would be their family.
But they did not get married that weekend.
Instead, India spent some weeks rehearsing the lead role in the Now-Someday Plan—getting ready to tell her mother and Al-Like-the-Song and everyone, herself especially, that she was tabling auditions, just for a few years, to be a mom instead—but it was acting. She didn’t believe it. She tried to. She knew she should. But she did not. Deep down, she believed that a baby wouldn’t keep her from her dreams, for nothing would keep her from her dreams. Deep down, she believed she would be reading to the baby in the park, and someone would come over and say, “Pardon me. I’m a big-deal talent scout and couldn’t help overhearing, and your impersonations were just extraordinary. You were Frog. And Toad. Here’s my card.” Or she would bring the baby with her to auditions and be so good they’d forget she had an infant strapped across her chest. They would believe she was whatever childless heroine they’d asked her to become. They would so clearly see she was the perfect star for their play that they would gratefully rearrange rehearsal to accommodate her childcare schedule. And so having a baby wouldn’t change her plans at all.
A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, India and Dakota woke to knocking on the door so gentle they were both at first confused.
“Why are we awake?” India said.
“You have to pee?” Dakota wagered.
It was a good guess these days. “Why are you awake?”
“You woke me when you got up to pee?”
“But I didn’t get up.” India shook her head, sleepily. “I was dreaming of tap dancing.” She had taken tap as her PE credit even though she knew she’d never get cast in a chorus line if she couldn’t also sing.
“I was dreaming of woodpeckers,” said Dakota.
“I think that means sex.”
“Only if you have it with men.”
They heard light tapping. Heard it again, apparently. It was coming from the door.
“It’s knocking!” India leaped up, triumphant, and threw it open.
Davis stood there, looking surprised.
“What are you doing up?” he said.
“You’re pounding on the door.”
“Not pounding. Knocking. Not even knocking. Tapping lightly.”
“Why?”
“It’s the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake your whole hall.”
“No, why are you tapping on the door?”
“Morse code.”
“Morse code?”
“I have to ask you something, but I don’t want to ask you something.”
“I don’t know Morse code.”
“That’s why this is effective.”
“Only if you don’t want an answer.”
“I don’t,” Davis said.
“Go have circular conversations somewhere else.” Dakota groaned and put her head under her pillow.
“No circles,” said Davis. “Too dizzy.”
Dakota sat up. “Is he drunk?” She was delighted.
“Apparently!” India was kind of delighted too. Davis was not usually drunk, especially not on a school night.
“You don’t have to go home,” Dakota said, “but you can’t stay here.”
“I live here!” said India.
“You can’t go home and you can’t stay here,” Dakota revised.
“Come on,” India said to Davis. She grabbed her coat off the back of the door and put it on over her pajamas, slipped shoes onto her feet and her arm through his, and led them out into the night.
“I have a question,” he began, formally.
She thought, I’m in pajamas with slept-on hair and middle-of-the-night breath, and he’s going to propose. She thought it would have been nicer in a restaurant or at a show maybe, something she’d dressed up for, something for which she’d had a chance to brush her hair and teeth. But she also thought it was nice to be so loved even when she didn’t look or smell her best. If he wanted to declare himself hers in this moment, he must want to declare himself hers always. “I’m ready,” she said.
“India.” He looked at her, cleared his throat. “Do you…” he began, then corrected himself. “Did you take the pill, India?”
She understood immediately what the question wasn’t, but it took her a minute to understand what it was. “When?”
“When you were on the pill.”
“Of course.”
“I saw you take it,” he said, “whenever I slept over.”
“Yes.”
“Did you take the pill … every day?”
She saw where this was going. Maybe what was strange was how long it had taken to do so. And upon reflection, this made sense. Why would he have to get drunk to propose? “Usually.”
She thought he would yell, but he just nodded. He was not an angry drunk, or maybe he was expecting that.
“You forgot?” he slurred.
“Yes. But not exactly.” She had not yet tried to put this into words, not even to herself, and she could see it would be hard to make it make sense, even if he were sober.
He squeezed the bridge of his nose. She recognized this motion not from Davis but from Torvald. It meant exercising a heroic level of patience with a child. “How tashing—tashking—taxing is it to remember to swallow a pill every morning?”
“It’s not that it’s too taxing.”
“Then what?”
“I think it’s that”—she couldn’t look at him when she admitted this—“Benedick doesn’t take birth control pills.”
He squinted at her. He looked confused. Not about what she said. About who she was.
India was not drunk, and she was also not delusional. Benedick didn’t do all sorts of things she had to. He didn’t have to work at the library. He didn’t have to take a useless and impossible stats class just to satisfy his gen ed requirements. He didn’t even have to eat because he wasn’t a real person. But that didn’t mean she didn’t consider the options in the dining hall through his eyes. India liked yogurt and fruit for breakfast. Benedick was the kind of guy who didn’t consider it a meal unless it had meat.
So it wasn’t that he didn’t take the pill. It was that he didn’t ever think about getting pregnant. Nora Helmer didn’t take the pill, either. Nora Helmer would have given anything, truly anything, to have been able to do so. When India was Nora, she thought about her birth control pill with gratitude several times a day, took it every morning first thing after her alarm went off. But such a miracle would never occur to Benedick, and anyway, he was the kind of guy who probably wanted half a dozen children.
“I had to become, really become, Benedick,” she tried to explain. “I can only be Benedick on stage for two hours a night by becoming him the rest of the day because I’m not like you. It’s easy for you. It’s not easy for me. You can turn it off because it’s so simple for you to turn it on. You want to be in a play to make your grandma happy? You wander cold into the audition and land the star part. You want a summer internship? You phone in the applications but get an offer everywhere you applied anyway. You spend your time at the library flirting with me instead of studying, but you still get straight As. It’s not that you’re good at everything, Davis. It’s that you’re good without even trying.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Because I have to work hard at everything. If I want an A, if I want a part, if I want to succeed, I have to work so hard. I’m not good enough on my own.”
“Oh, India, you’re soooo talented. You’re so good up there.” He stopped and smiled then remembered his point and frowned again. “This isn’t about that.”
“Not for you, maybe. But it is for me. I’d never have gotten that part, any part, if I just waltzed into auditions and gave it a whirl. To win, I have to cheat. I have to get ahead of everyone else. You can be Beatrice for a couple of hours’ worth of rehearsals a day. Me? I have to be Benedick all the time. I have to be him body and soul. Otherwise I don’t get to be him at all.”
“But…”
“What?”
“You want to do this for a living.” He sounded like he was pleading with her.
“Exactly, so—”
“So you can’t go through life like this. No one goes through life like this. It’s acting! This is the whole point of acting. It’s pretend. It’s—”
“I know what acting is.”
“I trusted you,” he said.
Maybe he was too drunk to realize he’d slipped into the past tense.
“When?” she asked.
But he didn’t answer that question. Instead he asked his own. “Did you…” he began, looked at her, looked away.
“Did I what?” She genuinely did not know what he would say. So she was totally unprepared.
“Trick me?” She watched his lips form the words, force them out slowly.
“Into what?”
“It’s okay. You can tell me. It’s not like I’m going to…” He trailed off, so she didn’t know what he wouldn’t do. “I just want to know. I need to know.”
“Trick you into what,” she said. No longer a question. A statement. A dare, almost. Say it.
“Marriage, family.” He ran his hands over his hair, over his face, seemed like he’d run out of terrible things she might have tricked him into. “Forever.”
She felt it all through the middle of her, a rending. “I didn’t think I needed to trick you into forever.”
“You didn’t.” He threw his arms out wide. “That’s what I can’t figure out. That’s my point.”
India wasn’t sure that was his point, but he kept talking anyway.
“India.” A whisper. A prayer almost. “A baby is the one thing you can’t change your mind about. It’s the one decision you make you can never undo. It’s the one thing you can never come back from. Did you … do this on purpose? So we’d have to get married? So there’d be no going back?”
“Why would you—” She wanted to be angry rather than decimated. “How could you think that?”
“Because maybe, maybe this happens to someone once.” His voice broke. “But it doesn’t happen twice.”
“Of course it does. It happens all the time. You think I’m the only woman in the world to have a second unplanned pregnancy?”
“‘Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.’” Benedick. This did not seem fair, somehow.
“Meaning how could I let this happen again?” she said.
“Meaning how can you not have learned from the terrible thing that happened last time?”
“Because it wasn’t terrible last time,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s terrible this time.”
“I didn’t either.” That past tense again.
“I didn’t say, ‘Let’s get married.’ You did. And your life’s not going to change that much. Mine is. You’re going to get the job you were going to get anyway and be with the person you were going to be with anyway and have the child you were going to have anyway. I might have to put the entire point of my entire life on hold. My plan has to change completely. Yours hardly has to change at all.”
“That’s not what’s changed.” But he didn’t say what had.
India would have stayed and fought—always—but Davis’s eyes kept closing, and she walked him back to his room and pushed him into bed. Let him sleep in his shoes, she thought. He’d wake up with swollen, sweaty feet, and it would serve him right. Let him sleep in all his clothes and rise rumpled and stinking and hungover. Then he would see who the responsible one was, who had drunkenly wrested whom from peaceful trustworthy slumber. She waited for him to show up at breakfast, clad in sunglasses and sorries. She waited for her phone to ring for surely he would want her to hear in his voice how bad he felt and not just send a text. She lingered outside stats till the very last second, certain he would find her and convince her to cut so she could come back to his room and be showered in apologies.
In fact, she heard nothing from Davis till rehearsal. When he arrived, he did look awkward and embarrassed, even a little peaky maybe, but he would not meet her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. But he didn’t seem sorry. Or maybe it was that he seemed sorry but not desperate: to take it all back, to make it up to her immediately and entirely, to be absolutely certain she knew he hadn’t meant it. He was just drunk, talking out loud, fretting pointlessly. Pregnancy hormones, basically.
“Okay,” she said. Not that it was okay. More like, okay she understood, though that wasn’t true either.
“Last night was hard.” Like it was the night’s fault. Like its being hard had nothing to do with him. He looked down at his shoes. “I accidentally said some things I didn’t mean to.”
That’s where India’s life—and quite a few other people’s—turned. On that one tiny word. To. Drunk, Davis had said some things he didn’t mean to. But he hadn’t said anything he didn’t mean.
And he turned out to be wrong because this conversation, like having a baby, proved to be a second thing you could never undo or come back from.
When Al-Like-the-Song found out about what he called India’s “condition,” he decided to scrap the cross-gender casting for spring semester. It was much more interesting to have a hugely pregnant Lady Macbeth waddling around the stage.
“That’s why she’s so insistent her husband do whatever he must to become king. Not because she’s a bitter, ambitious harpy. Because she’s nesting. Their family is growing, and she’s putting the life and future of her child before her king’s, before her husband’s, before her own even—she’s a very good mother. When she cries about what it feels like to nurse, we’ll see the pain of a pregnant woman who’s lost previous babies, simultaneously terrified of losing another and already in love with what she knows to be the most fragile thing in the world. Maybe the blood on her hands is real. Maybe it’s from childbirth. Maybe this baby doesn’t make it either, and that’s why she kills herself. This is going to be so much fun!”
Davis did not audition. Because he had no Scottish grandmothers? Because he wanted space from her? Because he was going to be a father and needed to turn away from college diversions toward serious pursuits that would look good on a résumé? Unclear. But India’s Macbeth was a fellow graduating drama major. Good, but not as good as Davis. “Doesn’t matter,” Al-Like-the-Song said. “This Lady M isn’t so much in love with her husband as using him to beget and then enrich and enshrine and eventually enthrone her child. That’s the point here. It’s going to be you and your womb up there, India, and no one will be able to tear their eyes off you.”
She should have been thrilled—she had imagined she was going to have to sit her last semester out—except it wasn’t just onstage with her that Davis didn’t want to be.
She let herself get caught up in rehearsal again. She let herself be a college student for just a little while longer. She let Davis drift away, or maybe “let” was the wrong word, or maybe Davis wasn’t the only one floating slowly out to sea.
They stopped talking about getting married and the Now-Someday Plan.
They did not talk about a different plan instead.
In fact, more and more, they didn’t talk about anything at all.
India didn’t want to think about what that meant. Not didn’t want to. Couldn’t. Every time she tried, her brain went somewhere else: to sleep, to panic, to anger that had to float around with nothing to attach to. She wasn’t mad at him. He wasn’t mad at her. But she couldn’t focus enough to determine what they were instead.
When they did see each other, they were gentle, subdued. They didn’t fight. Maybe they should have, articulated problems so they could be addressed, yelled so the yelling could subside into laughter then quiet talk then intimate whispers. But they didn’t know that. They weren’t married so they didn’t seek a marriage counselor. They were just kids, slow to identify problems, certain they could surmount them anyway, whatever they were.
One day, he was waiting for her after rehearsal, and instead of swelling with love or hope, her heart fell. He should have been with her, not waiting for her afterward. His being there should have been a comfort, not a surprise. She took his hand—out of habit or nervousness she couldn’t say—and they walked toward the library, probably for the same reason, whatever it was.
“I’m sorry I asked if you did this on purpose,” he began. “I know you’d never do that.”
“Thanks,” she said, wary, waiting, because obviously that wasn’t what he’d come to say.
“I love you so much, India.” She could hear the but coming, both of them, all of them, all the buts in the world. “I’m so proud of you. And I’m so impressed by you. I don’t want you to think otherwise.”
“I don’t,” she said. Didn’t?
“Every moment is the moment for you. You’re always present. You’re all in. Full heart. Both feet. It makes you great onstage, but that’s not even it. It’s that it makes you the best person I know, my favorite person to be with.”
His voice broke and he stopped. And she waited.
“You’re fearless and exhilarating and brave.”
Just say it, she thought. “But?”
“Not but. And. And I thought, I always thought, well, that’s the kind of person who gets pregnant at sixteen, right?”
“The kind who’s sexually active and menstruating?”
He ignored that because he was making a point. “The kind who’s full of life and now and fire.”
“So you thought pregnant at sixteen was an unfortunate trade-off.” She didn’t want to be angry right now—she wanted to hear what he had to say—but she was angry anyway. “Unfortunate but worth it because I’m so fun, and anyway the regrettable bits were behind me so not your problem. Or so you thought.”
“I was wrong.”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant. I was incorrect.”
“About what?”
“I think I had cause and effect backward,” he said as gently as it is possible to say something completely ungentle. “It wasn’t that the wonderful way you are got you pregnant in high school. It was being pregnant in high school that made you the way you are.”
“The wonderful way I am.” Even she couldn’t tell whether she sounded sarcastic or hurt or confused or enraged.
“You lost so much. Being a kid. Dances and parties and nights out with friends. Robbie. Rebecca. You grew up before it was time, India. How can that not damage a person?”
“How did we get from ‘wonderful’ to ‘damaged’?”
“Because look.” He met her eyes, but he meant look at her wide, rounding belly. “Look what happened. And I guess I’m starting to realize maybe the fact that this happened before is what made it happen again.”
It wasn’t the point really, but India asked anyway, “Who cares why it happened again?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Because I don’t know if I can do this forever.”
“Raise a baby? Be a family?”
“Be with someone for whom neither the past nor the future really exists. Be with someone so focused on one goal that taking care of anyone, even herself, isn’t possible. I believe too much in consequences and learning my lesson. I don’t want to drag you down with my pragmatics and practicalities. But I don’t know if I can scramble behind you our whole lives trying to hold everything in both arms.”
“Do you think when you grow up”—her voice caught but she held his eyes—“I won’t grow up too?”
“Anyone can make a mistake once,” he whispered, “even a terrible one. But then…”
“What?”
“To let it happen again?”
Again, it wasn’t maybe the issue, but she felt the need to point out, “It wasn’t terrible.”
“I think it was.” He was whispering still, maybe because he didn’t trust his voice, maybe because it was too horrible to say out loud. “I think it was so terrible it made you unable to notice. It wasn’t that you did this”—he waved at her midsection—“on purpose. It’s that after it happened, you therefore couldn’t prevent it from happening again. I’m not blaming you. The opposite, in fact. I just don’t know how to be up for it forever.”
She went with the only bit she knew for certain. “I loved Rebecca. I got to make sure she would have a good life. It wasn’t terrible. It was wonderful.”
“But you didn’t want a baby.”
“I did. I just didn’t want her for me.”
He nodded and stopped walking and there were tears on his cheeks, but his voice did not shake when he said, “I think that’s how it is for me too. I love you. And I want you. But I don’t want you for me.”
She found, for the millionth time, that New York City had everything, in this case an adoption agency with parent profiles posted online. She didn’t look through every one. She didn’t have to this time. As soon as she found the Andrews, she knew they were the ones.
Andy Silverman was stuck on the very first question of the application. This seemed like a bad sign. When they’d met, Andy wasn’t Andy. He was Andrew. And Drew wasn’t Drew. He was also Andrew. At first, this was just meet-cute, and honestly only to the two of them. It was a popular name (top twenty in 1979, the year they were both born), so not that much of a coincidence that they shared it. And it wasn’t really a problem practically. If they were in the common room of the dorm studying, and Drew whispered across the table while also running his foot up his inseam, “Andrew. Hey. Wanna take a break and head up to my room for a bit?” he was hardly going to be talking to himself. Their friends called them Stache (once—once!—he’d left breakfast with chocolate milk on his lip) and Penny (Drew had eventually gotten into Lenox off the waitlist, thank God, but he’d already bought a Penn sweatshirt by then and claimed it was more comfortable).
One night their senior year, though, Drew had said, “Race you for it.”
“Race me for what?”
“Your name.”
“My name?”
“Our name. I’ll race you for who gets Andrew.”
“We’re doing fine sharing,” Andy had observed. He couldn’t picture them calling each other Penny and Stache. He couldn’t picture them calling each other honey and sweetheart. He couldn’t picture calling or even thinking of this boy, this man, this love of his life as anything other than Andrew, and honestly, it felt apt to him that they shared a name, that aloud they were indistinguishable, because that was how it felt to him, that they were part of each other, that they were one.
“In college, sure,” Drew said. “But what about what comes next?”
Andy stopped breathing, practically. “What comes next?”
“When we have to get an apartment together. And a car. And babies. When we get married. When we meet each other’s bosses. When our friends are actual adults.”
This litany spilled out in a strange order. Andy’s ear and heart had snagged on marriage and gone no further.
“Then we’ll need different names. Real ones,” Drew concluded. “So I’ll race you for it. Up to the park and back. Winner takes Andrew.”
They’d pulled on shorts and shoes and nothing else and were outside running through the frigid night before he’d said okay, before he even knew what they were doing, pounding pavement, laughing and yelling after each other, people on the street staring like they were crazy, but not that crazy because it was a Saturday night and they were college students and this was New York City, down three blocks of sidewalk, across four intersections, over two piles of dog shit, four bags of trash, and one tower of carryout noodle boxes, around the fountain, through the park, cutting back down an alley, neck and neck, retracing the final block, Drew just ahead of him at the front door, swiping his card then pulling it shut behind him, Andy just getting his hand in, good thing because he didn’t have his card on him, the sudden heat of being inside again after a hard run drenching them both at once with sweat, stumbling up the stairs together but Drew winning, undeniably, back in the room first by a body length, two, then turning to grin triumphantly at Andy who did not even pause but barreled into him, taking them both down, panting, heaving chests pressed together, Andy’s heart pounding in every part of him. They were wearing nearly nothing so were naked instantly. They fucked with their sneakers on.
Later though, after, the first thing Andy said was, “Congratulations, Andrew.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Is that who I have to be now? Sir?”
“Better than Stache.”
“Agreed,” he’d agreed, “but I guess I was thinking Andy.”
“Andy. How do you like it?”
“Weird. But okay, I guess. I’ll get used to it.”
“I was thinking I’d be Drew,” said Drew.
“If you lost?”
“Starting now,” he said.
“But you won.”
“I was just trying to get your heart rate up,” he said.
“There are other ways,” said Andy.
“Well, I did those too.”
“They worked.”
“You didn’t think I was really going to take Andrew just because I’m a better athlete than you?”
“One of us should be Andrew. No point in both of us suffering.”
“Sure there is.”
“What?”
“Solidarity, sister,” he said. “Share and share alike.”
“Drew and Andy,” Andy mused.
“Drew and Andy Silverman,” Drew corrected.
Andy’s heart rate went back up.
Drew—newly Drew—sat up on one knee.
“I figured when we got married, you’d take my name.”
Andy could not think where to start. “You did?”
“Yeah. Because it’s not a political thing. You’re not a woman.”
“I mean, yeah.”
“And because my parents love you whereas your parents…”
“So I’d be Andrew Silverman too?” Andrew Silverman. The love of his life. And the man in the mirror. It was very strange but also not that strange.
“Officially, you’d be Andrew Silverman. And I’d be Andrew Silverman. But mostly we’d be Drew and Andy.”
Andy could not actually believe it. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“Are you crying?”
“I asked you first.”
“I’m not so much asking you to marry me as telling you to marry me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes you’re crying, or yes you’ll marry me?”
“Yes,” said Andrew Silverman.
“Andrew!”
Except when he was fucking up. Then he got the full name.
He looked up with his eyes but kept his face pointed at his laptop.
“You are overthinking this,” Drew said.
“These forms are hard.”
“You’re stuck on ‘Name.’”
“Maybe it’s a sign.”
“It’s not a sign.”
“If we can’t even fill out the forms to apply to be parents, how will we ever parent?”
“We can fill out the forms,” Drew said. “And ability to fill out forms has nothing to do with fitness to parent. And you don’t believe in signs.”
This was all true, of course, but Andy believed in all sorts of things he didn’t believe in. Should he ever get to page two, there loomed a question about religion, the space for which was a small one, like for name, like for city, like for date of birth, as if an inch were plenty sufficient space in which you might describe your soul’s relationship with the infinite and the divine. That he’d fled the church as soon as he had a choice, that he’d never believed, that he’d never—never never never never—subject any child of his to it, or really to organized religion of any kind, was not the point. Religion, Andy knew, was something you were born into and could not escape. Belief had nothing to do with it.
This did not, however, suggest it made any sense because it didn’t. For one thing, there was too much sin in the world to imagine everyone who engaged in it was going to hell. How could they all fit? Even granting that the laws of physics probably didn’t apply to afterworlds, hell would have to have space for very nearly everyone who had ever lived. Whereas heaven needed room for his sister and Jesus. The pictures they showed—clouds stretching off into infinity, wide expanses of angels and sunshine—seemed entirely the wrong scale. Ditto the cramped caverns of hell looking like someone’s creepy unfinished basement. Hell would have to be the size of a galaxy. Claire and Jesus would fit in the linen closet.
When his father kicked him out, finally, Andy was only fifteen and therefore scared but also relieved. Faced with being disowned and homeless, he was, ironically, as unemotional and unsentimental as his father had been begging him to be for his entire life. He went to the library to figure out what to do, but mostly to have someplace to be. It was late spring, so maybe days at school, evenings in the library, nights on a bench would work until it got cold out again which gave him five months, more or less, to find a better arrangement. Maybe while he was in the library, he could do some research and figure it out. Maybe the library would even give him a job, as long as he was there all the time, and that would help too.
He wasn’t quite ready to be that brave yet, so he headed for his usual spot in the fiction stacks and figured reading about other people who’d overcome parents who didn’t love them—and the fiction stacks were full of them—was a good start.
That was where his sister found him.
“Hi,” she said, like she’d run into him in the living room.
He jumped an inch off the floor, even though he was sitting on the floor.
“How’d you find me?” Andy was staring at his sister like she’d tracked him down in a tent in Antarctica.
“Where else would you go?” She braced herself and slid awkwardly down the wall, her pregnant belly making her a little wobbly, to sit on the floor beside him.
He gave her the list of places he’d considered—the mall, the bus station, somewhere a bus went—but she was unimpressed.
“Not where else would one go. Where else would you go.”
He didn’t need to ask how she knew their dad had kicked him out. Their mom would have called her before he reached the end of the driveway. Technically Claire was living two and a half miles away in her own house with her own husband and her own child, another in her belly, who knew how many more on the way. But she and his mother talked on the phone every few hours it seemed like, and Claire came by every day to check on her. Or, it occurred to him now, maybe it wasn’t their mother she was coming to check on.
So how she knew to look was not Andy’s question. Andy’s question was whether she knew why.
While he was figuring out how to ask, she told him she didn’t know what the Bible said.
“What are you talking about?” he raised his eyes from the floor to ask her. “You know everything the Bible says.”
“I mean I’ve read it,” she allowed. Understatement. “I go to church. I try to live as I think and believe God wants. But…”
She trailed off, and he couldn’t imagine what the end of her sentence was, so he just sat while his head swam and waited for her to finish it.
“The Bible says love your brother. It doesn’t say love your brother unless he’s gay.” So she did know why. He could feel his face burning like the flames of the basement caverns. But she went right on. “It doesn’t say love your brother unless your father doesn’t.”
“But being gay is a sin,” he managed.
“Yeah, but everything is a sin. Eating a hamburger on a Friday is a sin. Thinking it would be cool to have a pool in my backyard even though there’s no way we could afford it is a sin. Enjoying sex with your husband is a sin but so is not wanting to do it. Wishing your dad wouldn’t hit your brother is a sin. Honestly, wishing anything is a sin because you should be praying, not wishing, and praying for your father is allowed but praying against him isn’t.”
“Yeah, but isn’t gay, like, higher on the sin spectrum?”
“Who knows? I don’t think there’s a ranked list. But when you think of all the really horrible things people do to each other, gay has to be further from murder and torture and closer to hamburgers, right?”
“I guess?”
“Anyway, Jesus loves you regardless. That’s the whole point of Jesus. And if Jesus loves you, who am I not to? Who am I to speak for him? He’s Jesus. I’m just Claire. I do what I think he wants. You should too.”
He couldn’t believe it.
“Let me ask you a question, though,” Claire said, and he felt his heart seize because what kind of God would offer this sort of love and then take it away? The kind he’d been taught, that’s who. But she said, “Have you thought about where you’ll sleep?”
He told her about the bench plan.
His sister said, “Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“Home.”
“No way.” He scrambled away from her. That was the one thing he absolutely could not do.
“Not your home,” she clarified. “My home. You can sleep in the nursery.”
“What about Carley?”
“She sleeps with us.”
Andy wondered how Claire could possibly be pregnant again already then, but for obvious reasons, he didn’t want to think about it too hard. On the way through the garage, she grabbed a sleeping bag, and he followed her into the house and up to the nursery. Inside, it looked like a flamingo had exploded. Pink walls, pink curtains, pink sheets in a crib piled with pink pillows and pink teddy bears. Pink carpet and, at its center, a darker pink rug. A rocking chair and rocking ottoman, both lined with pink cushions. A pink dresser. A changing table with pink drawers and a pink pad on top, pink towels hung from knobs alongside, a mobile dangling pink baby animals from the ceiling.
They stood in the doorway looking in.
“What do you think?” she said.
“Well, if I wasn’t gay before…” It was out of his mouth before he could consider the wisdom of these words, but she knocked her hip against his, giggling.
“Shut up!”
“I just … I mean … are you worried she’ll play a sport or something if she sees the color green?”
Claire was cracking up now. They could joke about this. This was something they could joke about. It was a feeling like floating.
Claire tried to stop giggling and failed. “When she was born she was just so…”
“What?”
“Bald! And I thought…”
“That pink leads to hair growth?”
“That we could compensate by being extra … I don’t know … girly.”
“So you decorated her room like a vagina?” Andy said.
“You’re going to make me pee my pants.” Claire was laughing so hard her face matched the nursery. “My pelvic floor muscles have forgotten their job lately.”
“Hang out in here more. Maybe it’ll remind them.”
“I just thought out in her stroller or whatever people were going to keep mistaking her for a boy. Doesn’t matter anyway, though. Carley has not spent a single night in here. Not one.”
“I mean, she spent nine months in the vagina room before she got here. Maybe she’s over it.”
“Maybe that’s what I should try.” Claire cracked up again. “Maybe if I painted in here, the girl would shut up and sleep more than three hours in a row.”
They laid the sleeping bag out on the pink rug in the middle of the pink carpet. “The dresser is full of clothes she doesn’t even fit into yet,” his sister said, “so you can just shove them in the closet and use the drawers for your stuff.”
He opened his empty palms outward.
Claire looked at the floor. “Mom packed for you. Craig’ll go over and get it later.”
Claire’s husband, Craig, was the silent type, less the strong silent type than the fat silent type, and not really fat, but in that way men got when they were more interested in beer than in the gym. Claire seemed not to mind, though. Claire was also fat now because she was pregnant, or maybe Claire was above such shallowness as caring about bodies now that she was a mom, or maybe Claire felt that God wanted her to marry a man with a hairy potbelly. Andy had nothing against Craig, but if Craig was going to his parents’ house to get his stuff, it meant he knew now too. It meant Andy had to add Craig to the list of people who would find out about him and be repulsed and disgusted and appalled.
But after dinner, which Andy couldn’t eat, after Claire went to bed at 8:30 because Carley would be awake again in a few hours, after Craig cleaned up and headed for the stairs without a word, he paused, hand on the banister, and turned back toward Andy.
“So,” he said, “you’re gay?”
“I…” Andy couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Yes.”
It was the first time anyone had asked directly. So it was the first time he had ever answered. He was having trouble breathing.
“Whew,” Craig said. “Hard.”
“I…” Andy began and, horrified, felt his eyes fill up. “Yes,” he said again. It wasn’t what he had expected Craig to say in response to the news. It wasn’t what he expected anyone to say in response to the news. But it was true. And it had not occurred to him before. And it was nice to have this fact acknowledged—not quite as nice as joking about it with Claire, but only because Craig admitting it was hard meant he had to admit it to himself.
“Need anything?” Craig asked, and because he’d been thinking about it, Andy thought he meant help with being gay, or with not being gay, or help on account of the fact that he was gay.
“I…” Why did he keep starting sentences that way? “No. Thank you.”
“Okay,” Craig said. “Cool.” He started up the stairs then turned back, held out his hand in that hooked vertical way guys did when a handshake isn’t appropriate but they don’t want to hug you either. Andy held his arm upright as well and entwined forearms into clasped hands for a moment. “Glad you’re here, man,” Craig said, then turned and went upstairs. It was the most masculine moment of Andy’s young life.
Like the adoption forms, the ones Andy had to fill out to apply to college had also asked questions that were difficult to answer. So he drew a comic book. He drew his father, navy and horned, his dark ink bleeding into the white borders between the panels. He drew his mother hidden in each square, behind a tree, beneath a chair in their kitchen, barely visible around a door or a corner or encased in a curtain. He drew himself walking away from home after his dad kicked him out, the smooth sidewalk outside his house turned rubble-strewn and hole-pocked and smoking. But then his salvation. In the scene where Claire found him on the floor in the stacks, the library looked like a church, soaring ceilings, prismatic light from stained-glass windows, his sister a backlit pregnant angel, a savior sent by God.
He drew her home. The sight of his rebirth, the vagina room, was a little on the nose symbolism-wise but required no reimagining. He sat in there and sketched it just as it was. He drew himself drawing his admission comic alongside Carley drawing him drawing it, which also required nothing but sketching what was.
And then the part that did require imagining. His comic turned speculative. Maybe fantastic. Andy at college—taking notes in class, lying on the quad in the sun, joining a club, touring the city (for he only applied to colleges in New York: big enough to be lost in should that prove necessary again, big enough that he had reason to hope it wouldn’t be). In every panel, at every activity, he was surrounded by friends. In one small square, toward the end, he drew himself holding hands with another student, a boy whose face you could not see but whose grip he could almost feel, whose touch was gentle as the pencil lines that traced it, and who was out there, somewhere, waiting for him.
When he found him, though, it turned out Drew hadn’t actually been waiting. Andy realized this in bed, telling the stories you tell in bed in the early days when there’s still so much you don’t know about each other. He had assumed they’d have the same story. He assumed every gay kid had the same story.
But no. Drew’s parents loved him. Everyone loved him. Drew was popular in high school. He was president of student government without actually running for student government because so many kids wrote in his name. He played varsity soccer in the fall and baseball in the spring; and in the winter, because he was too short for basketball, he joined the bowling club.
“Because heaven forfend you went two months without being on a team of some kind,” said Andy.
“Heaven forfend,” Drew agreed.
He had friends, loads of friends. He even had girlfriends.
“I don’t understand,” said Andy. “How were you straight?”
“I wasn’t straight straight.” He bit Andy’s nipples to demonstrate.
“You were bi.”
“No.”
“You were passing?”
“I was high school straight,” Drew explained.
And when that didn’t work anymore, when he stopped being even high school straight, he talked to his parents.
“Your parents?” Andy was incredulous.
“I was just like, ‘You guys, I think I might be gay.’”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
“How’d they take it?”
“My dad was all, ‘We know!’ and my mom was like, ‘Well, we didn’t know, but we had a hunch,’ and then my dad was like, ‘No, we knew,’ and then my mom said, ‘We pretty much did. We were just waiting for you to know too. Mazel tov!’”
“Mazel tov?”
“It means congratulations.”
“I know what it means.”
“Not congratulations for being gay. Congratulations for figuring it out, for becoming, you know, who I was or whatever.”
“They weren’t upset?”
“Why would they be upset?”
Eternity in fiery hell, Andy thought. But what he said was “Lifetime of getting picked on. Lifetime of disappointment.”
“I wasn’t picked on,” Drew said and leaned his face into Andy’s neck. “I’m not disappointed.”
“But, like, the gap between what they imagined for you—what you imagined for you—and what you actually got, what you’ll actually get.”
“I got into my first-choice college.” Drew spread his arms wide to indicate it. “I met the boy of my dreams,” around whom he encircled them to prove it. “Have you seen my GPA? I’m going to get into my first-choice law school too. I don’t think my life’s disappointing anyone. I think it’s working out exactly like I planned.”
“You thought you’d grow up and fall in love with a woman and have babies together,” Andy pointed out.
“Sure, but that’s just a detail.”
“Kind of a large detail.”
“No, like if you grew up fantasizing about a blond, but when you met the love of your life he had dark hair. Or in your fantasy you had a stucco house in Southern California, but you ended up in a colonial in the Bay Area. I’ll still grow up and fall in love and have babies, but instead I’ll do it with you.”
Andy remembered a conversation he’d had with Claire shortly before he left. Craig was late at work. She was nursing Clyde who was too fussy to eat because he was too hungry. Cash was in his high chair, also screaming, also hungry because he was throwing spaghetti on the floor. Carley was suspiciously quiet, and when Andy went to investigate it was because she’d used his good and permanent markers to draw all over herself and the white tile floor of the bathroom, the tub, the cabinets, the wallpaper that predated their tenure in the house and which Claire told herself might be vintage. It probably wasn’t but that was hardly the point.
It took hours to get everyone cleaned and fed and asleep. Craig came home finally, declared himself exhausted as if he were the only one who was, and went straight to bed. Andy and Claire hadn’t eaten anything yet. While they were waiting for the pizza to come, he said, “Is this what you thought your life was going to be like?”
He meant it rhetorically. He meant it so rhetorically he meant it as a joke.
But from the other end of the couch, without opening her eyes, she said, “Oh yeah.”
“What? Really?”
“Definitely. Adored husband who adores me. House full of kids. Family. Church. This is exactly what I pictured.”
“But weren’t you hoping for more…?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But as far as fantasies go…”
“I mean in my fantasy, Craig looked less like Craig and more like El DeBarge. And my kids never misbehaved. And I had shinier hair. But you know, basically this.”
Whereas Andy, asked to picture his future, had no idea what came between high school and the fiery hell pit. He never pictured marriage because he wasn’t that way. He couldn’t be. He’d tried. So he never pictured children either. He didn’t picture jobs he might hold because all the jobs he knew required a man to be like his father—brutal, hard, mean. He didn’t picture friends—he hadn’t had any so far, and why would people start liking him now? He knew he wouldn’t go to church anymore. He knew he would lose his nieces and nephews who wouldn’t want him around once they learned what he was. He pictured himself crouched against a brick wall being rained on in the cold dark, homeless maybe but it wasn’t that specific a scenario, just the permeating chill and the surety that he was alone in all the world.
So you wouldn’t think it, but maybe Andy was luckier than Claire, luckier than Drew. Claire got what she thought she wanted, what she mostly wanted, and if it was harder than she’d imagined, the Scriptures had prepared her well to deal with it. Drew was getting what he’d imagined too and was finding the substitution of men for women to be essentially cosmetic. But Andy? Andy’d won the lottery because his life was nothing, nothing, like he’d imagined. Their life together was what Drew had fantasized; it was beyond Andy’s wildest wild dreams.
“Wait, what?” On the bed in Drew’s dorm room that day, though, as his mind wandered and snapped back again, Andy remembered what he’d said. “Babies?”
Macbeth performances began the first weekend of May. Commencement was two weeks later. India was due at the end of the month. She thought she might not deserve to graduate, though. Graduation was meant to be a confirmation of her learning and growth, and if she was still making the same stupid mistakes four years of higher education and coursework and reading and essays and exams later, could she really be said to be learned? So she was happy to skip graduation.
But she had to see Macbeth through. It was a dream part. She knew that. And she was great. She knew that, too. But she was so tired. Huge. Heartbroken. And right on the cusp. Which was also the edge.
She thought about inviting the Andrews to opening night but worried it might be weird to have to watch your future be a prop and a theme, upsetting to see it turned to blood, even if it was just stage blood. She knew it would be upsetting because she herself could not stop crying. She cried when she ran lines in the shower. She cried from act three onward. She cried so hard during “Out, damned spot!” she shorted her mic in tech rehearsals. But her voice never wavered. You could hear every word. It was only a college show, but later, when India got famous, people who were there all swore they knew, they knew for sure, that she would be a star.
After the final bow of the final performance, after she let herself watch from a chair across the room rather than participate in all the frenzied hugging, after promising thirty different people that of course she would come to the cast party, after showering off all the fake blood, she found a business card in her backstage cubby, tucked inside her left sneaker. In hot pink script on a yellow background it read:
Ajax Axelrod.
Agent. Maker. Impresario.
On the one hand, it might have been a prank because Ajax Axelrod seemed such an unlikely name.
On the other hand, scrawled on the back was “India, I may have a part for you. Or, if you prefer, may I have you for a part? Do be in touch sooner than later,” which was exactly the sort of eccentric, incomprehensible missive one expected from an agent. So India let herself believe probably it was not a trick after all.
Suddenly she had the energy to keep her promise to those thirty cast-party goers.
Hours later, high from the promise of that card, from her last show, from her last college cast party, from exhaustion that had crossed over into delirium, India stumbled back to her room. It was nearly two a.m. Before she let herself sleep, though, she did some calculations. Powerful agents probably didn’t get to work until at least nine on Monday mornings, and overeager might be off-putting as a first impression. Plus, maybe it was considered rude to call first thing as if Ajax Axelrod didn’t have meetings and emails and colleagues’ weekends to catch up on before he got to the business of new clients. She resolved to get some sleep and call him at 9:48 the next morning, late enough not to seem desperate, early enough not to seem disinterested, off the quarter hour enough not to look like she was trying too hard.
Just before dawn, she went into labor.