When I got to the meetinghouse on Pacific, my friend Bree Sydenham was sitting in her silver Bentley Continental. Because this was Venice, hers wasn’t the only Bentley in the lot, but I knew it was hers by her personalized license plate, calbree, which was also her phone number. It was lucky I loved Bree, or her ostentatiousness would be plain annoying.
Through the tinted windows, I could see that she’d placed her forehead on the steering wheel.
She didn’t look up as I tapped gently on the glass. I tried the handle of the passenger door, which was locked. Startling visibly, she hit the button to unlock the door.
I slid in as gracefully as I could.
Bree had an official-looking letter in her lap. “Hey,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I’ll come inside in just a minute.”
I shook my head. “Could you not think of another place to look dead? I swear this is the same parking space.” John H. had died right here the month before. We’d all thought he’d been sleeping in his car, his head back on the headrest, mouth open. He was in his eighties and had diabetes, and he’d slept anywhere he could. He was known for spending long hours in his car sleeping in exactly the same position. But he hadn’t been sleeping. I’d been the one to verify that, as the only doctor at that particular meeting. He’d died naturally and hopefully happily, in the parking lot of the AA fellowship he felt was his home.
“Shit,” she said. “Sorry. Are you all right?”
“Well, since you’re alive, yes.”
Small and silver-blond, Bree was dressed in rust-colored athleisure. She managed to make pregnancy look fashionable. Next to her, I always felt rumpled and tired. I recognized her outer layer as the Nagnata cotton sweater I’d lusted over online and hadn’t been able to spend four hundred dollars on. “I’d hug you,” she said, “but I can’t twist that way.”
“Girl, same.”
She groaned, leaning right as I leaned left so we could exchange cheek kisses.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “You okay?”
“Eh.” She shrugged and folded the letter back into its envelope, but not before I’d seen the logo, a blue circle with three blue stars and a spiraling blue flame. Struggling to keep my expression neutral, I swallowed the jolt that shot through me. I knew that logo.
Bree had a pallor to her skin that I’d never seen before, and her breath was coming quickly. I pressed my hand against her arm. Hopefully she’d think I was being comforting, instead of what I was actually doing, checking to see if her skin was cold and clammy.
“You can tell me,” I said, pretending I didn’t already know.
“No. I can’t.” She sat straighter in her seat and pulled her Louis Vuitton purse from the backseat onto her lap. Tilting the rearview mirror, she applied a quick dusting of powder, a slick of lip gloss. “I’m fine. Anyway. Ripleys at my house this week. It’s finally time for my favorite mommies-to-be to see the new house. And you should see the cupcakes I’m ordering. I’ll put Maggie and her dumb panda cupcakes to shame.”
“First, those pandas were a-freaking-dorable. Second, who’s the father, Bree?”
She crumpled the paperwork into the center console and slammed the lid. “Seriously?”
“Do you know how many patients I’ve seen bring that same envelope into my office over the years? That’s the biggest paternity-testing lab in the country.”
Bree rested her head on the steering wheel again, no small feat given that her belly was almost the same size mine was. “No one can know,” she mumbled. “No one.”
Now maybe wasn’t the time to trot out my lecture on the ethics of considering the father’s rights. “I won’t say anything. But are you okay, Bree?” Stupid question. Of course she wasn’t. “What can I do to help?”
“There’s nothing you can do. I did this to myself. I’m going to lose Hal.” Her voice was hollow.
I’d been surprised by the envelope, but this statement pumped shock through my veins. Bree was not the kind of woman to worry about losing a man. She’d climbed two of the seven tallest mountains in the world. She hosted an annual charity gala for Children’s Hospital that raised more in a night than I’d probably ever make in a lifetime. I once saw her in the Style section in The New York Times after she’d led a push for inclusive sizing at Prada (her initiative failed, and at about a size two, she wasn’t a good spokesperson, but it was still impressive). And she wasn’t just talk—she’d gotten arrested in Tulsa for protesting some fracking thing. She sponsored an annual float at LA Pride for foster kids and families. Hal, her Yale-educated rich-as-fuck husband, was as bland as she was exciting. He was vanilla-flavored nice. I liked him—there wasn’t anything interesting of him to dislike, honestly. I’d read a little of his blog, which was about his journey to being a father. It was so boring it made my eyes water, but tiny Bree herself was normally larger than life and made up for any dullness on his part. I’d never seen her look this small.
I briskly patted her hand. “Stop that. You’ve always said that your relationship is idyllic. People work out bigger things than this.”
Through gritted teeth, she said, “Not idyllic now. Hal thinks it is, of course. He’s so far over the moon he needs a space suit to breathe. Did I tell you he said he’s envious of my stretch marks? This is the biggest thing in his life, and I fucked it up.”
I congratulated myself for not saying Literally. “You want to tell me who the father is?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Is it an ongoing thing?” I said it lightly but knew it was no small question.
She shook her head, but I couldn’t read the side of her face.
“You want me to shut up and give you a hug?”
She nodded hard. “That.”
“We’re going to have to get out of the car, then.”
So we did, and I swear to God, when we were doing the awkward belly-next-to-belly pregnant ladies’ hug, I heard her suck back something that sounded like a sob. Bree Sydenham. Crying. That wasn’t something I’d seen coming my way tonight.
As we pulled apart, she clutched at my arms. “Don’t tell. Not anyone.”
“Of course. I said I wouldn’t.” Surely Bree knew me better than that. We’d been friends for years, and together, we were the founding members of the Ripleys. I pulled away gently. “It’s going to be okay.”
“I’ve got to figure something out—Hal can’t know.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “But he will know. The second the baby’s born, he’ll know. That piece of paper just proved it.”
Ah. Skin color was a dead giveaway to paternity, and patients had come to me with similar concerns in the past. Hal was so white that fluorescent bulbs gave him a sunburn, and Bree was almost as pale. If her baby had skin even one shade darker than they did . . .
“Honey, we’ll help you.”
She shook her head. “You can’t. There’s no way.”
“There has to be.” I pointed to my own belly. “Look at me knocked up with . . . my baby.”
“So? That’s how you planned it.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, my heart pounding as I realized what I might be about to tell her. Normally I hated showing anyone my emotionally tender spots, even people in the program. But Bree and the Ripleys had been so there for me when Rochelle left—maybe telling her a secret of mine would make her feel better about her world falling apart. I took a deep breath and tried to hold back the nerves that fluttered in my chest. My sponsor, Nicole, was always telling me to help others. “You know I didn’t plan on Rochelle leaving me. Want to know something I haven’t told anyone else?”
Bree raised an eyebrow. “Um, yes.”
My heart rate ratcheted higher. “I didn’t even want V when Rochelle left.” Hoo-boy—it sounded even worse than I’d thought it would said out loud. My face went hot. “She’d been inside me for five months at that point. You and I had already formed the Ripleys, and I didn’t love her yet. When Ro left, I even thought I might just hand the baby over to her when she was born, saying, ‘Here’s your kid. See ya.’”
Bree narrowed her eyes. “So?”
The word hurt. Couldn’t she see a little of what it had cost me to say it out loud? My breath was tight in my chest. “Come on. You don’t like my confession?”
“That’s not even close to the situation I’m in, although, yeah, I kind of think you’re a sociopath.” Bree frowned. “You would have given her to Rochelle? Just like that?”
I felt a flap of panic behind my ribs. This was why I didn’t show my underbelly. “No! I mean . . .” Honestly, I couldn’t really remember. That first night, after Rochelle had admitted to me about the affair, and so much worse—that she loved the woman—I’d slept alone in our bed for the first time in years. V was Rochelle’s biological child, but she was inside my body, not hers. I’d just passed the point of looking like I was carrying an extra spare tire and had moved into definite baby-bump territory. People didn’t look nervous anymore when they asked how far along I was. And there I lay, alone in bed, my belly protruding with an alien who wasn’t even mine in residence behind my belly button.
I didn’t want to be a single mother.
For the first time since we’d boarded the express train to Jillian-Getting-Pregnant, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mother at all.
I was an ob-gyn. I knew intimately what women went through to have babies. And I—I didn’t want this. For a person who had a hard time understanding what she was feeling most of the time, I wasn’t confused about what I felt then. I’d thought pregnancy heartburn was bad, but the rage burning behind my broken heart made the heartburn seem like a massage. I tasted betrayal in my mouth every time I rolled over in bed.
Then, eight days after Rochelle left me, I felt V move for the first time inside me.
The quickening wasn’t so much a sharp kick but more of a whispered flutter, as if someone had swum past me in the pool. I knew immediately that it was my blood inside her veins, my body that was busy making hers. At twenty-one weeks, she turned into being all mine.
I fell in love in a way I’d never fallen in love before. The hesitation I’d had before was like a bad mosquito bite—terrible for the time I had it, then forgotten completely. My baby was inside me, and that was all that mattered in the whole world. I was meant to be this girl’s mother. It had always been so.
Mine.
Feeling that quickening had been so monumental that it had washed away what the apathy had been like, erasing how deep it had run.
But I didn’t want to say all that to Bree in the parking lot, so I simply said, “I felt her move a week later, and then I fell in love.”
Bree just shook her blond head. “You can’t compare your shit to mine. You just can’t. You’ll be fine. Your daughter will still have two parents. What if my baby only has me?”
I tried to brush aside the pinch of irritation. I actually could compare my shit to hers, only in my case, I’d been the one cheated on.
Bree was an amazing woman, a force of nature. And sometimes she was a cactus, her incredible blooms hiding the needles you forgot were there. I honestly didn’t mind getting stabbed once in a while, although this needle had gone a little deeper into my skin than normal.
But she was hurting, so I tried my best to shrug it off. “Fair enough.” I tucked my arm through hers and we turned to move together toward the door. We waded through the pocket of people smoking—at least it was mostly vapor now instead of cigarette smoke.
“It’s going to be okay. Even if it’s not okay.” It’s what my sponsor always said.
Bree sighed. “Bullshit.”
She had a point.