It was never a good thing when the telephone rang in the middle of the night.
It had happened to her last spring when her mother fell. A doctor’s voice stretched and clinical across the miles, and she’d gotten a cab straight to the airport at 4 a.m., gotten on the first flight to LAX.
Now it was happening again. The ringing jolted her up out of bed. But all she heard when she first picked up the phone, groggy, still half-asleep, was the sound of a man sobbing. And she thought at first, it was a wrong number. Or a middle-of-the-night prank.
Then he said her name: “Bess. Bess. Is that you?”
She still couldn’t place him for a moment. But then it hit her. She was suddenly wide-awake and panic gripped her chest, making it hard to breathe. “What’s wrong, George?” she asked.
“Bess,” he said her name again, in between a sob.
“Is Mare okay?” Her voice shook with alarm, with confusion. George certainly wouldn’t be calling her if Mare was okay.
Then he explained, his words jagged and tear-filled, that there had been an accident, a hit and run. Mare and Max were in the hospital.
“Are they going to be all right?” Bess asked. That was her first question—though, later, it would occur to her to ask why they were together. Why Max was even in Chicago at all when he lived in Seattle? But in that moment, truly, all she could think was that Mare had to be okay. She just had to be.
“I don’t know,” George whispered across the line, his voice so soft, it was like he couldn’t admit all the possibilities to himself.
“I’m leaving right now. I’ll be on the first flight.” She rested her hand against her swollen belly, feeling the reassuring bumps of the baby’s tiny feet kicking. “They’re going to be fine,” she insisted. “They have to be.”
It had been a long, bizarre seven months. Her mother’s fall became a terminal cancer diagnosis, and she had quit her job in Seattle to move back to Pasadena where she had become more of a nurse than a daughter or an artist. She’d started casually dating Gaitlin, a grad student at Caltech, whom she’d met at a bar on Lake Avenue after drinking too much pale ale one night. He was nice enough, a good distraction from her boredom and depression, but it wasn’t anything serious, and she hadn’t even mentioned him to Max when she’d returned to Seattle to pack up the remainder of her things.
Then, she’d discovered, there was this baby, growing, moving inside of her.
It was a strange kind of a secret she had been keeping from Mare, so obvious to everyone around her in Pasadena now. Her dying mother, who swore she would live long enough to meet her grandchild, though that seemed somewhat unlikely. Gaitlin, who said foolish things about getting married when he graduated in May, and she’d nodded along to oblige. But as she had told Mare once—it was the goddamn 1980s; a woman could have a baby on her own for heaven’s sakes. She’d told Gaitlin she’d think about marriage to placate him. (She had not, in fact, thought about it once since he’d brought it up when she’d first told him about the baby.)
But Mare didn’t know that Bess was pregnant. And for some reason, Bess hadn’t been able to bring herself to say it over the phone. It wasn’t that she was ashamed. She wasn’t. It was more that telling Mare would make it all more real somehow. Or would seem to invalidate everything Bess had ever felt for Mare. Maybe Mare would even talk her into marrying Gaitlin, after all. Or maybe Mare would tell her to call Max instead. She was pretty sure she would never be able to talk to Max again after what she’d said to him that last night she was in Seattle. (And she could not share that with Mare, not ever.) So all of that was why the word baby had sat on the tip of her tongue at the end of every phone call she’d had with Mare for months. But she had not yet uttered it aloud.
And so, when she walked into the waiting room of the intensive care unit of Mercy Hospital, and George lifted his head from his hands and looked at her, his eyes wandered straight to her belly, and then his face turned pale. “Shit,” he cursed softly under his breath and averted his eyes. Even after all these years she still didn’t truly know him well enough to know whether he was judging her for being unmarried and pregnant in the first place or judging himself for dragging her out here like this. The latter seemed too kind for George, so she suspected it was the former.
But she was always a people pleaser, so she smiled at him, put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m okay,” she lied, because nothing at all felt okay. “How are you doing? How are they doing?”
George didn’t answer right away, but then he looked back up and slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so, so sorry, Bess.”
His words hit like a punch that instantly took her breath away. It was a feeling she would feel again, a few years later, the sudden gaping hole inside of her, the empty space where the person you loved more than anyone in the world had once resided. “No,” she insisted. “I won’t believe it. Mare has to be okay.”
George frowned, looking confused and he didn’t say anything for a moment. “Not Mare,” he finally said. “Max.”