You know in movies when someone swears and instead of bleeping it out, they just make the person say it in suuuuuuuuuuper slow motion? Well, that’s kind of what the rest of the afternoon is like for me.
Ethan was right. I was different that night.
It might sound ridiculous to say that apparently I was so happy Shep was finally single that I slept with a stranger but…
If Ethan is telling the truth and I really did have a “new-chapter vibe going on,” you know what the title of that chapter was? See You Tomorrow.
Ethan was so subconsciously happy to be free from Eleni, and I was so subconsciously happy to have Shep around again, that we (un)subconsciously smashed our bits together (literally).
I don’t know why this realization throws me for such a loop but…
I call Willa, invite her for dinner, and she heads right over.
By the time she arrives I have Thai food takeout and black cherry seltzer ready for her.
“It’s weird to see you without Shep hanging around,” she says as she scoops food onto our plates. “If he hadn’t already been out of the house, I was considering putting on my catsuit and rappelling down the side of the building so that he wouldn’t follow me here.”
“He had plans tonight?” I try not to sound too curious.
“Yeah. He took the train up to the Bronx to buy a new bike he found on Craigslist. Seems pretty far to go to get a bike but anyways, enough about him. Spill, please.” She thinks we’re here to talk about Ethan. I told her that he showed up on my stoop, but I haven’t told her the details yet. So I do.
At first she makes a face like he’s a rotten egg, but she softens a bit when I explain how miserable and confused he was. At the end of our conversation about him, we’ve come to the same conclusion I’ve already come to: I need to just get on with things. Either Ethan will get his shit together and figure out how to fit the baby into his life, or he won’t. And I can’t control that.
“Thank Gawd you’re not in love with him,” Willa says, clearing our plates away.
When I don’t respond she freezes and then turns around slowly.
“Hold on…” she says. “You’re not in love with him, right?”
I laugh and shake my head. “No. Definitely not.”
It’s the perfect opening. My stomach flips. Am I really gonna bring this up? Once Willa knows, there’s no going back. But if anyone has seen it, Willa has. She’ll tell me if it’s real.
She heads into the bathroom and pees with the door open. I make myself comfortable on the couch and call through the open door. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s about something Jeff Burrows said to me the other night.”
She groans. “Ugh, that asshole,” she calls.
I can’t quite decide how much to tell her. “He said that me being pregnant…must be hard on Shep.”
Silence. More silence. The toilet flushes, the sink runs.
“Willa?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what he could have meant by that?”
She comes back in fanning her hands to air-dry them. “I wouldn’t give it too much thought.”
“Right. Okay.”
“Unless…” She flops back onto the couch and nudges my leg with her foot. “Unless you’ve already given it a lot of thought and decided that you think you know what it means.”
I turn my face towards the window but it’s too late, she’s already seen the expression I can’t wipe away.
“No! No. No,” she growls, crawling towards me.
“Hey! HEY!” She’s taken one of my wrists and pinned it over my head. “You’re accosting a pregnant right now!”
“Eve Daisy Eileen Marlene Sharona DooLittle Hatch,” she says, and now I know she means business because she’s hit me with the made-up names. “Do you currently have a crush on my brother?”
“No! He’s…the worst! He’s unattractive and rude and he’s never there when you need him. He smells bad and is thoughtless and he never tries to feed me or surprise me or make me happy.”
“Oh, God,” she says, and rolls away from me. “This is worse than I thought!”
I’m torn between my instinct to deny everything and my instinct to spill my guts to my best friend.
“I’m confused,” I finally say. “This is Shep we’re talking about here. And then, on the other hand, it’s Shep. You know what I mean? How could I—What if I—Besides, Nurse Louise once said that everything’s a pregnancy symptom.”
Willa makes a face. “Even feelings for someone? Doubts.”
I give myself a hug around the middle, rub the baby’s back, head to rump, and don’t look at Willa.
“Are you…gonna tell him?” she asks.
I hate to give my fears the whole stage, but they’ve already put their Elvis wigs on and squeezed themselves into white sparkly jumpsuits. “I want to. Honestly, I think he probably already knows. Being around him has just been…But what if…what if as soon as I give birth my feelings just zap away back to friendship?” Willa scoffs, but I soldier on. “And beyond that he’s actually really hard to read, you know! He’s happy when you’re happy. You said it yourself. So if he’s just mirroring me, then how am I supposed to know how he really feels!”
“Eve,” she sighs, looking pained. “You cannot wreck my brother. You do not have permission to wreck my brother.”
“I…I don’t want to wreck anybody.”
She gives me her toughest expression. “Of course you don’t. But you’re going to if you do that thing.”
“What thing?”
“Your I-don’t-know-what-I-want thing.”
“Hey!” Well, that’s irritating. And maybe true. “Is that…that’s really a thing?”
“Of course! You live this bouncy, cloudy existence where everything is both magical and confusing and you never get what you want because you don’t know what you want. You’ve never known what you want.”
“Ouch! Jesus. Slow down a little.”
“I’m sorry, but if it’s Shep’s heart on the line I can’t let him be collateral damage.”
I do a quick and painful inventory. My position at work? All I do is avoid Xaria and resent the program staff. The baby? The words keep being pregnant come to mind. I couldn’t even say I wanted the baby. And now Shep? I think I want him, but I have no idea for how long in either direction that feeling exists. How long have I wanted him? How long will I in the future?
“How sure is anyone about anything?” I demand of Willa.
“I am literally one hundred percent sure of what I want at almost all times. I don’t always get it. But at least I know I wanted it.”
I wilt. “Is it a crime to not know everything immediately?” I ask.
“No.” She’s wilting too. “You’re allowed to move as slowly as you need, Eve. Just…be honest with yourself, please.”
“Okay.” I’m even more confused than when this conversation started, but…also weirdly relieved? “Man, nobody slaps me out of pregnant hysteria like you.”
“You really think this is pregnant hysteria?”
I purse my lips at her. “Didn’t we just go over the fact that I know nothing, ever, and I’m going to work on it?”
She laughs and raises her hands. “All right, all right.”
She got this direct delivery of information from Corinne. Her mother was good at not letting people hide in their shells. Corinne had a few more naturally derived spoonfuls of sugar than Willa has but that’s part of Willa’s charm.
And this is what I need. Someone who loves me who will tell me the truth. Push me. Protect me. Something I’ve been considering slowly rises to the surface. Now is the moment.
“Willa?”
“Hm?”
“You can say no to this. And that would be totally fine. But I thought I’d ask…Would you want to be my partner for birthing classes?”
It’s like she’s one of those rubber pugs that you squeeze around the middle and their eyes pop out. Only, when her eyes pop out, she also bursts into tears. I can’t tell which of us is more shocked by this reaction. She needs both hands and a tissue for these tears. These are the kind of tears that make you thirsty. I deliver a fresh glass of seltzer and she inhales it down to the bottom. And then there are more tears.
“I. Thought. You. Weren’t. Going. To. Ask. Me,” she sobs. “Shep told me you were stressed about going alone. And I thought I’d already ruined everything.”
“Willa…” I’m speechless.
“I’m so sorry, Eve. I know I’ve been so weird about all this. Your pregnancy. God, when I think about how I first reacted when you told me you were pregnant I just want to slap myself. And I’ve been trying to get back to normal, trying to find ways to help you, but that’s only making me even more weird. And—” HONK, she blows her nose. “I really, really want to go to the classes with you. But I didn’t think I had the right to ask. I can’t believe you still want me to.”
Willa, who always asks for what she wants, was afraid to ask for something. That’s how difficult this was for her. “Willa…I can’t even begin to imagine how tricky and painful this has been for you. Me being pregnant, when you’ve been trying for so long. I…really wanted you to be happy for me. And at first, I was hurt that you weren’t. But I know you. You’ve been my best friend since we were preverbal. And I realized something recently.” Very recently. Like literally this second. I take a deep breath. “If you could have been happy for me, you would have been. The fact that you couldn’t…that just shows me how much pain you were in. And that means that you’ve been doing a lot of work to get comfortable for me. And…I love you.”
She collapses forwards, elbows to her knees, and her face in her hands. She looks small again, the way she did the day I told her I was pregnant. “We weren’t ‘just trying.’ ”
My stomach fish-flops. “What?”
She takes a deep breath and drags her hands down from her face. Her eyes are swollen and her skin is blotchy. “I lost a pregnancy last year.”
“Oh, Willa.” I scoot across the couch and slip my hand into hers. She lets me and I’m so grateful for that. “Oh, Willa. Oh, Willa.” What to say? “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“I know. I kept you in the dark about it…Honestly, even when I first got pregnant…I didn’t even tell Isamu for two weeks.”
“When…did it happen?”
“About two months after Mom died. I was eleven weeks along.” More tears spring up, but these are silent ones.
She looks up after a long moment, unlacing our hands to mess around with her tissue. “I got to tell her, you know. Right before she passed, I got to tell her that I was going to be a mom. She was so happy.” Those last words are a strangled whisper that dissolves away into silent pain.
“When I lost the pregnancy…I couldn’t…” There weren’t words then and there aren’t words now. She doesn’t go on for a long time. “Isamu knew, obviously, and he told Shep, one night, because he needed someone to talk to about it. But I just couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t have it in me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I think of Shep during that time. Willa had a harder time of it, I think. But he didn’t think. He knew.
“Willa. You don’t have to apologize.”
“I feel like I do.”
“Okay. Well. Thank you for telling me. Thank you for helping me understand and letting me in.”
Now she turns to me and we’re hugging. “Please don’t hate me for all the weirdness. The secrets,” she whispers.
“I could never,” I say vehemently. I didn’t hate her when I was having trouble understanding her and I certainly don’t hate her now.
“I’m a mess,” she whispers.
What an honest thing to say. My friend who hates being anything less than her best.
“Me too. I’m such a mess. I’m sorry I didn’t see your pain. I just thought…your mom’s passing…I didn’t see the rest. What a horribly difficult thing you went through.”
She nods yes but then crumbles and shakes her head no. “But I’ve always been able to be there for you. It’s one of the things I like the best about myself. And Eve, the way you were after my mom died. You saved my life. I just hate that I haven’t been able to repay you. You’ve needed me and I’ve just been…weak.”
“No, no, NO.” I’m hugging her again. Have you ever wanted to hug all the bad feeling out of someone? Like water from a sponge? I want nothing more than to wring her free of it all. “Willa, you know how we’re best friends?”
She laughs and sniffs. “It rings a bell.”
“Well, maybe we’ve been concentrating too hard on the best part, but really the key word in there is friend. It’s friend, not wife or partner. When we were kids we were each other’s only, you know? No other friend or boyfriend came close. I was your number one and you were mine. But after you met Isamu…I’ll never forget how many times you called and texted while you were on your honeymoon. Wasn’t that, like, so annoying for you?”
She gives me an affronted look. “I didn’t want you to feel left out!”
“Of your honeymoon? Don’t you think it would be weirder for me to feel included?”
We laugh and she gives me a little maybe so shrug.
“I’m just saying,” I continue. “We’ll always be Willa and Eve, Eve and Willa. But it’s okay that Isamu is your number one now. It’s okay to have things that only he knows. It’s okay for us to go through things on our own or to feel some distance because that particular phase of life is making it that way.”
Her eyes are glossy. “I don’t ever want to grow apart from you.”
“God, me either. But if we hold on with an iron grip and not ever let anything change, we’re gonna crack. I mean…” I almost don’t say it. “I’ve been scared to talk about the baby because I thought it would exacerbate the weirdness between us.”
Her face crumbles for a moment and then burns with resolve. “You have to talk to me about it, Eve. Even if it’s hard for me, you have to. For God’s sake, you’re having a baby! You can’t not talk about it.”
“I know. I’m starting to realize that. Luckily I’ve had…”
“Shep,” she whispers, and wipes at her eyes. “Pretty soon the baby will be your number one.”
We’re quiet for a long moment. “Willa? No pressure, but if you ever wanted to talk about it…”
She sniffs, nods, and gives me a gift. She tells me everything.