Friends from Home

by Lauryn Chamberlain

  I sighed and half laughed at the same time. Fear turned to relief.

  “But this doesn’t mean I don’t want some things to change.”

  Hesitantly, I asked what he meant.

  “I’m taking the GMAT next month. I told you I could stay in New York, but if I got in somewhere else better, well”—he swallowed—“I want to know that you’re serious about us. That you’d go with me.”

  “So you want me to say that I’d go anywhere for you? Right now?”

  He didn’t respond, but his unflinching stare said it for him.

  Was this what we had been building toward, all this time? Through every moment of doubt, every disconnect? The first moment I knew I didn’t want to follow him to business school—or anywhere—should I have told him with greater conviction? If I had recognized that as the breaking point, maybe I could have saved us both all this. Could have never gotten pregnant at all. Tears of frustration welled in the corners of my eyes, but I knew I couldn’t stop now.

  “I thought we were on the same page. When we met, you said you didn’t want anything serious,” I reminded him, trying to strengthen my wavering voice. “I told you I wanted to stay in New York. Forever. I wanted things . . . how they are.” I threw up my hands, apropos of nothing. “I thought you were okay with that.”

  “Well, I am. Or I was. But I said all that when I was twenty-four, for God’s sake. I don’t know, people grow up, Jules.” Then I heard his tone shift. It was subtle, indecipherable to anyone who didn’t know him, but steeliness crept in. In the voice he used when negotiation was no longer an option, he said, “Forget the . . . pregnancy for a minute. Don’t put this all on me. We both know you’ve been completely avoiding what I asked you at Thanksgiving. You shouldn’t be in this if you don’t see it going anywhere. Tell me where exactly you see this going.”

  “Why does it have to go somewhere? It’s a relationship, not a train!”

  “Oh, so you want to be together like this forever? Where we talk about maybe ‘shacking up’ but you always have one foot out the goddamn door? We’ve been together for almost two years!”

  “You never even hinted that you wanted to move in together until you just sprung it on me at Thanksgiving. And, by the way, I do not have one foot out the door just because I don’t want to move to Philadelphia or have a kid with you, and the fact that you even think that—”

  “Look, I know you’re all fucked-up about relationships from your mom, or whatever—”

  “Don’t you even dare—”

  “And I’ve been patient with it, but it’s enough! A relationship has two people in it. And, I don’t know, if you can’t stop being selfish about what you want now—”

  “Oh, and it’s selfish to not want to get more serious with someone who seems like he would rather drink bottle service with his ‘bros’ than talk to me? Who would yell at me like this when I just told him I’m having an abortion?” I jumped up from the couch and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door. All the noise, and our mutual anger, seemed to hang in the air for a moment, echoing until I heard Mark cross the apartment to the bedroom. He opened the door slowly and then came to sit beside me, finally quiet.

  When had I known that I didn’t want to stay with Mark long-term? The charitable explanation, the one I always allowed myself, was that I just preferred to live in the present, and so I hadn’t thought seriously about it. But I had always planned for my future in some sense: I prepped for the SAT for almost a year before we took it. I looked for publishing jobs for more than six months before college graduation. When I knew what I wanted, I seemed more than capable of making things happen. It was evident that I had never acted with this kind of clarity with Mark. I didn’t owe him a relationship, but I had, I realized, taken the path of least resistance instead of telling him how I really felt—about anything.

  “I really didn’t think that this would be . . . like this,” I said at last, gentler now. “I knew we might want different things, and I should have told you when you first started talking about business schools. I didn’t see it clearly.”

  Mark stared at the floor, his arms crossed in front of him. “I guess I just thought you would want to be with me more than you would want . . . what? Dana and Ritchie? Your job? I know you like your job, but aren’t there other publishing jobs? I’m trying to understand, what is it that you even want, Jules?”

  “So it’s you versus the sum total of my life, huh?” He didn’t respond, which told me that’s exactly what he’d meant. Somehow, this made me feel lighter inside. It shored up my growing faith that I might, somehow, be doing the right thing. “Look, maybe we should talk about this more. I care about you. I love you,” I said, even as the past tense—loved—trailed the words in my head, an uninvited ghost. “But I can’t do it now. We can’t work all of this out right now.”

  “When?”

  “The appointment is on the twenty-first. And I can ask Ritchie or Dana to go with me.”

  “I can go with you.”

  “Think about it. You don’t have to. I . . . I wouldn’t make you, especially after . . . all of this.”

  “Well then.” He shifted away from me. “I guess you really don’t think of me as the most important person to you. The person you’d need with you. I’m nothing.”

  I opened my mouth to say, “That’s not fair,” but in a way, it was. He said it unfairly—to hurt me, to elicit pity—but that didn’t change its truth. He wasn’t the most important person to me. That was the part that made me feel low, heavy, laden with guilt. What a way to realize that something is over. I should have known it sooner. This shouldn’t have happened to us. To him. Then I realized that he had continued to make my decision to have an abortion about only his feelings, and I got angry all over again.

  “This can’t really be it, can it?” He sighed audibly. “It’s been almost two years. And you’re pregnant.”

  My heart ached at the sound of that word. My whole body ached, suddenly. “But I think maybe it is.”

  “Well.” He shook his head. “Thanks for making this all so clear for me, I guess. If you don’t want to fight for it, I’m certainly not going to.”

  “If you’re asking me to fight for it right now, to make everything okay for you, then I guess you’re right. I’m not going to.”

  He stood and crossed back to the living room, slamming the bedroom door behind him. I pulled back the skin at the corners of my eyes and I pressed hard until I knew I wouldn’t cry. And then I got up, opened the door, and walked past him out of his apartment, with no destination in mind.

  CHAPTER 18

  I left the building hugging myself, my arms crossed and wrapped tightly around my body as if I might be about to fall apart. I walked down Fifth Street like that for a while until I hit the dead end at Avenue A, and then I finally dropped my hands to my sides, knowing how crazy I must look. I tried Dana and Ritchie on the phone, but neither of them answered. Buzzing with adrenaline, I hadn’t worn a coat, and a cold winter wind was blowing, whipping up off the East River or wherever the ephemeral Manhattan winds come from. I made myself stop at a coffee shop that I had passed before but never been in.

  I wanted to text Dana, but my hands were shaking from the cold, so I just sat down at a table without ordering anything, willing my mind to go blank. As I tried not to think about anything at all, I found myself listening to a group of teenage girls sitting next to me. Their hushed conversation was punctuated with high-pitched giggles.

  “So did you go, like, all the way?” I heard a girl with short black curls say to a girl with a slicked-back blond ponytail.

  Michelle and I used to use that phrase, too, I remembered. All the way. It’s one of those things that makes you feel so grown up as a teen—talking about sex!—but then it just disappears from your vocabulary completely. I imagined myself asking Dana if she had gone “all the way” after a date now. I could he
ar her response in my head: “All the way where?” she’d probably say. “Like, to Brooklyn?”

  I missed the idea of sex as the final destination point. In reality, it was after that that things started to go wrong.

  I checked my phone. One message, and it was from Alan, asking if I wanted to finish watching a documentary we had started a few weeks earlier.

  “Can you come to Elsewhere, the coffee shop? Now?” I managed to type out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, Alan came in wearing his classic weekend outfit: brightly colored puffer coat, jeans, and messenger bag slung haphazardly over one shoulder. Seeing him look so normal made me feel like I could breathe again, like I had just come up from underwater.

  “Jules, what’s going on?” he asked, sitting down across from me and putting his hand over mine. “Your text freaked me out.”

  “How did you get here so fast?” I asked.

  “I was already in the neighborhood. What is going on?”

  “I think I’m going to have to avoid this neighborhood for a while,” I told him, because that was the first thing I could figure out how to say.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Tears welled in the corners of my eyes again, and I tried to force them back. I had never cried in public before. Or in front of any of my friends other than Michelle, come to think of it. “Mark lives here, and I think he and I just broke up, and it’s all because I’m maybe a horrible person. And I don’t know what to do.”

  Alan lowered his glasses, squinting at me with a look both confused and suspicious. “Babe, you are not a horrible person. What happened?”

  Then my male coworker became the second person to find out that I was going to have an abortion.

  Alan stayed silent for a minute. I kept crying, hiding my face in my hands. “Sorry if this is an inappropriate conversation,” I finally choked out, laughing a little between sobs. “Don’t tell HR.”

  He laughed dryly, shaking his head. “Jules. You know we’re more to each other than that.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “But I do know this: This is your decision. It is yours to make, and you are not a bad person for it. And I’m sorry if anybody has ever told you differently.”

  “But I don’t even know if I want to have kids,” I blurted out.

  “So?”

  “So I think that’s why we really broke up. Because I’m supposed to want to have kids, or to ‘move forward’ and go to Philly, and apparently there’s something wrong with me.”

  “What does Philly have to do with this?” He looked at me quizzically, then waved a hand dismissively. “Never mind. Why are you supposed to want to?”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “What, want to live in Philly? God no. Kids? Well, Marcus and I want to someday. Like, way in the future. But that just goes to show you: Not everything is a man and a woman and 1.8 offspring. Clearly.” He snorted.

  “Where is Marcus?”

  “Honestly? Around the corner hiding awkwardly in the ninety-nine-cent pizza place trying to stay out of the way while I talk to you.” He paused. “Good slices, though. Want one?”

  And then I laughed hard enough that I cried for an entirely different reason.

  “Let’s go meet him,” I told Alan. “I could use some pizza.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Alan and Marcus bought me two slices and a soda at the tiny pizza counter. They did their best to make me laugh until they were overdue to go home and walk their new puppy. I wanted to call Dana or Ritchie and explain what had just happened, but then I thought that maybe I wanted to tell them in person. Plus, telling Alan seemed like more than enough for the day. I decided that I would text our group thread and just make plans to see them later, maybe over the next weekend. I would keep moving forward. But for a moment, I found myself stuck in the past. I stared at the background of my lock screen, a black-and-white shot of the Cliffs of Moher. I had taken it on a trip to Ireland years ago that now felt like it belonged to a different person altogether.

  I remembered my first year in New York, which I had spent pinching pennies and saving up for that trip. I hadn’t had the time to study abroad in college or the money to travel right after graduation, but all I wanted to do was go overseas. Why Ireland? Because it was the distant, ancestral home of the O’Briens, I guess. Also the $500 round-trip tickets.

  Anyway, I fell in love. The cliffs stark against the gray sky, the cobblestone streets in Dublin wet from a November rain. I even heard plenty of what Dana called my “hideous folk music.” Mark and I had met right before I left for my trip, but I had stopped thinking about him when I arrived in Ireland. We had been seeing each other for a couple of months, but my feelings weren’t set. I liked “having someone,” and I also didn’t really know what else I wanted from him.

  That changed on the third day. I was checking into a hostel in Dublin, and I looked at my e-mail for the first time on the vacation. I didn’t have cell service, so Mark had sent me a long note—the first and last love letter he would ever write me, as it turned out. He told me he missed me. He told me he was an idiot not to have “made his feelings known” sooner and that he thought we should give a real relationship a try. But the thing that really got me was the last thing he said. “I’m not trying to hold you down or hold you back,” he wrote. “I just want to know you.”

  Now I knew it was so much more complicated than all that—that the best intentions for togetherness don’t always add up to a life together. At the time, though, it made me feel brand-new. Like I wasn’t the same person who had grown up so uncertain, shadowing Michelle, simultaneously desiring and fearing the attention of my mother. It felt like I had become a woman in my own right.

  I told myself not to get distracted, to stay focused on the experience I was having alone. But as soon as I saw his note, I couldn’t help it: A big part of me couldn’t wait to get home. When I flew back the next weekend, Mark drove his parents’ car in from Connecticut, picked me up from the airport, and took us to dinner at a restaurant. Our bartender snapped a photo for us as we were having a last whiskey at the bar—I fancied myself an expert after my trip—capturing us with our flushed cheeks pressed together and our glasses raised at the camera. In a gesture of sentimentality that surprised me, Mark had kept that photo in his bedroom. In it, I look happy in a distinctly twenty-three-year-old way, like I truly believed that, if I were lucky, nothing would ever have to change again. That the hardest part of everything was behind me. “I’m so glad you came back,” I remembered Mark saying over and over.

  I was angry with him, and I didn’t care about him, and I cared about him more than I wanted to believe was possible, and I didn’t want to be with him ever again. I remembered being the woman who loved him enough to want to come home from Dublin, but she felt so far away from me now.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dana and Ritchie came to meet me in Brooklyn the next day. With Demi at a yoga class that overlapped with Terry’s day upstate visiting family, I decided it would be safe to invite them to the apartment. Dana suggested a party brunch; I countered by saying I would pick up bagels from Bagelsmith, her favorite, and get a spread ready at home, mimosas included.

  A second after I buzzed the door open, I heard Dana yell up from the landing, “I’m not climbing four flights of stairs if there isn’t an everything bagel up there. With lox.”

  “There is. And shut up, not all of us can have Oliver to push the button on an elevator for us.” Oliver was the cute doorman in her building she not so discreetly liked to flirt with after a bottle of wine.

  “Oh, I wish Oliver would push more than the button for the fifth floor for me when—”

  “Okay, stop, we get it!” Ritchie shouted as they climbed toward me, and I laughed, one of those dee
p belly laughs, and it anchored me to myself somehow. I felt like I was back inside my body for the first time in a few days.

  Ritchie pulled a gallon of orange juice out of her bag as Dana plunked a bottle of prosecco on the counter. “We have orange juice or prosecco or both—depending on what kind of day you feel like having.”

  “Oh man, guys, you have no idea.”

  Dana narrowed her eyes and cocked her head at me quizzically. I waved a hand to get them to follow me to the couch.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” Dana asked. “You’re acting like my parents when they told me they were getting a divorce.”

  “What?”

  “Remember, they had me over for that weirdly formal Shabbat dinner, and then it was like, ‘Come sit on the couch, honey.’”

  “Right! And then your dad said that there were books to help kids going through this . . .”

  “And I was like, ‘Dad, I’m not a kid, I’m twenty-one.’ They’re freaks; it was fine, I knew it wasn’t, like, a passionate marriage anyway. Loved them both, still do.”

  “Rose and Ethan. The best.”

  We all laughed fondly, thinking about Dana’s eccentric and lovingly loud family. I typically went to a Passover seder at their apartment every year, where the whole blended clan still celebrated together.

  “Sorry, so not the point,” Dana said. “But that’s what you’re being like. If something’s up, just tell me. Are you okay?”

  Yeah, never been better. “Well, remember the pregnancy test? It was positive.”

  Dana collapsed back into the couch. It rattled me to see how I was feeling reflected back in someone’s expression: dumbfounded, defiant, and pitying at once. Then I looked at Ritchie, whose wide eyes watered with concern. She was always the less physically demonstrative of the two, in contrast to Dana’s golden-retriever-like physical exuberance, but she leaned in to hug me first, burying her face in the crook of my neck.