Who Do You Love

by Jennifer Weiner

  Then his mother was shrieking in his ear, and he could hear the crowd chanting his name.

  Mr. Sills, resplendent in a USA sweatshirt that stretched tight over her belly, kept lifting up his glasses to wipe underneath his eyes. Maisie wouldn’t let go of his hand. “You’ll need an agent,” she said that night, and when Andy had looked at her, still dazed from the win, Maisie had kissed him and said, “You just leave everything to me.”

  •••

  Back at home, the medal went into a velvet-lined box, and Andy began his new life. First came the print ads for the sneakers he’d worn in Athens. Then came the Vanity Fair profile (the sneaker ad ran right next to it, which made Andy wonder about the way those things worked). He and Maisie posed in People magazine’s Most Beautiful edition. (“I’m not beautiful,” Andy had said, to which Maisie had answered, “Sure you are . . . and I am, sugar, and this is publicity that all the money in the world can’t buy.”) More ads; more endorsement deals; his first pro-am golf tournament, where he played in a foursome with the world’s top golfer, a network news anchor, and a basketball star he’d grown up watching. Maisie told him he needed a stylist, and he reluctantly agreed—it was easier than spending hours in stores trying to figure out what looked right. His publicist got him into the New York Times, just on the basis of his new look. Maisie had pouted when the photographer told her politely that she just wanted a shot of Andy, but cheered up when the piece on athletes as fashion trendsetters mentioned her by name and called her a supermodel.

  Finally came the one thing he’d been hoping for, the call from Sports Illustrated. Their track reporter was a guy named Bob Rieper, known to the runners as the Grim Rieper. Bob was lean and tall and stooped, with a narrow rectangle of a face, dark hair that hung past his eyebrows, and a low, sonorous voice that seemed made to deliver bad news.

  Bob had been in Athens to watch Andy win his medal. He’d seen him work out in Oregon, where he still stayed and trained at the camp, and in New York, where he’d gotten a place with Maisie. Bob had talked to him about the 2008 games and had accompanied him on a trip back to Philadelphia, where Andy spoke at an elementary school, introducing Bob to Mr. Sills and to Lori. In all that time, Andy had never heard him laugh, never seen him smile.

  It was Bob’s voice on the phone that morning, waking him up from a dream, where he’d been back in Philadelphia, chasing a woman wearing Rachel’s blue cowgirl boots down Frankford Avenue.

  “Hey, man, what’s up?”

  Bob did not believe in small talk. “I need to run something by you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s about your father.”

  Andy felt nothing but mild curiosity as he got out of bed and walked to the window, asking, “What about him?”

  “You told me that he died in Germany when you were a baby.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that you don’t remember him at all, and you never tried to find out any of the details.”

  “Uh-huh.” Across the room, Maisie was looking at him, eyebrows lifted. Andy held up a finger—one minute. Maisie nodded and rolled over as Andy said, “What’s up?”

  “This is hard,” Bob said. “I’ve never had to tell anyone anything like this before.”

  “Tell me what?” When he paused, Andy realized that he was bouncing up and down on his toes and drumming his fingers on his thigh.

  Across the line, Andy heard him sigh. “The fact-checkers found out that there was a guy named Andrew Landis who went to Roman Catholic, who graduated when your father would have graduated and whose enlistment dates line up with what you’ve told me.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “But that guy’s not dead.”

  Andy had been pacing, the way he always did when he talked on the phone. When he heard the words not dead he stopped, frozen.

  “You’re kidding,” he said, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

  “Not dead,” Bob repeated. “He went to prison in 1979. His friend shot someone—a rival drug dealer, it sounds like. That guy gave your dad the gun to get rid of, but the cops caught him with it, which made him an accessory to murder. And because he’d been in trouble before, the judge threw the book at him.”

  Andy thought later that he must have said something or made some noise, because he felt Maisie’s hand on his shoulder, and her face looked frightened. He shook his head, mouthed, It’s okay, held up a finger again, and said, “What kind of trouble?”

  “Drug dealing, larceny, burglary, grand theft auto . . .”

  “Wow,” he said, and tried to laugh. “Maybe tell me what he didn’t do. Maybe that would take less time.”

  “I have to put some of this in my story,” Bob said. “You understand. If I don’t write about this, somebody else is going to, and now that I know about it, I can’t not use it. I just wanted to give you a chance to say something, if you want to.”

  “I get it,” Andy said. He walked down the hall of their spacious and still barely furnished apartment, then into the bathroom, where a face he didn’t recognize stared from the mirror. Alive. In prison. He’d never tried to get in touch. His mom had never said a word. Had she known? How could she not have? “But it wasn’t . . . I mean, he wasn’t—he was an accessory, but he didn’t kill anyone, right?”

  “It looks that way. He just got caught holding the gun. Bad luck.” Andy couldn’t stand the sympathy in the Grim Rieper’s voice, thick as frosting on a birthday cake. “Why don’t you take some time? Talk to your people. I’ll ask you to comment at some point, but don’t worry about that now.”

  A horrifying thought struck him. “Are you going to talk to him?” Andy asked.

  “I’ll probably reach out. He was paroled eighteen months ago. He’s living in Philadelphia now,” said Bob. “It’s a part of your story.”

  My story, thought Andy. Is that what he’d become? And if he had to be a story, why couldn’t he just be the one he’d crafted, the one he’d been working on since high school, the one Vanity Fair and the Philadelphia Examiner and all those other places had been content to repeat? Andy Landis, winner. Andy, who’ll push himself to the front of the pack and hang on. He’ll pay the price, no matter how high. Andy Landis, who came up from the slums of Philadelphia to win gold in Greece. Wasn’t that a story anyone would want to read? It was simple. Inspiring. American.

  He must have said goodbye somehow, because Andy found himself with a phone in his hand buzzing the dial tone, and Maisie looking at him.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he began . . . and then he found himself wishing, with an intensity that felt like a fever, that he wasn’t talking to her; that he was telling Rachel instead.

  But Rachel wouldn’t take his calls, and Maisie was looking at him, a question on her lovely face.

  “It’s my dad,” he said.

  “What do you mean, your dad? Your dad’s dead.”

  “That’s what my mom told me,” Andy managed. “Except SI just found out that he’s not. He spent twenty years in jail, and now he’s living in Philadelphia.”

  “Jesus, what’d he do?

  “He was an accessory to murder.” Andy punched in his mom’s number. When she didn’t answer, he said, “Hey, Ma, it’s Andy. Can you call me as soon as you get this? It’s important.” Even as he was hanging up he was realizing that there was nothing that Lori could possibly say to explain this, no way that she could justify that big of a lie.

  “Oh, baby,” said Maisie. She put her hands on his shoulders and started kneading, a move Andy always found more of an annoyance than a comfort—her hands were so small that she couldn’t exert enough pressure for it to feel good—but he’d never said anything. “Oh my God. I can’t even . . . Tell me what I can do.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t know how he felt or what he wanted or what the next move should be. He dial
ed his mother again. No answer. Maisie started in on his neck, and Andy felt like the apartment walls were crushing him, like his clothes were too tight, like his skin was shrinking, and that if he didn’t move he would explode.

  “Give me a minute.” He scrambled into pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and one of the dozens of pairs of sneakers he had, and was out the door without stretching or planning or even telling her where he was going, across the street and into the park, running without a heart monitor or energy gels or the watch that tracked his distance and speed, as fast as he could, until he stopped somewhere along the East River path, pulled out his phone, and punched in the digits he was surprised he still remembered.

  She won’t answer, Andy thought. It’s not her number anymore. And what can I even say to her? And what will she say to me?

  The phone rang once, then twice, and Andy was about to hang up and put the phone in his pocket, or maybe call a private investigator and try to figure out what had happened and where his dad was now, when a voice said, “Hello,” and then, “Andy?”

  “Hey, Rachel.” Andy stopped and looked around, taking a moment to realize that he’d run far enough to see the Domino Sugar sign across the river.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “How do you know something’s wrong?”

  “You call me after all this time and you sound awful. Something’s wrong.” Oh, Rachel. Her voice was so familiar. It all felt so familiar, like they’d picked up a conversation that they’d ended the night before.

  “It’s my father,” Andy said. “He’s not dead.”

  “What?” He heard her talk to someone, then rustling, the sound of a door slamming shut. “Sorry. I thought . . . Did you just say your father’s alive?”

  “Alive,” he repeated. His voice sounded hoarse. His body felt knotted, fists clenched, quads and hamstrings tight. “He didn’t die. He got arrested. He’s just been in jail for almost my whole life.”

  “Oh my God.” He could picture Rachel thinking, could remember how they would rest together, her head snuggled against his chest; how she’d look at the ceiling and click her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The smell of her hair, the softness of her arms. The way she’d make him laugh. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Go home, I guess. Talk to my mom. Try to find him. Try to ask him . . .” He lurched backward as a pack of cyclists sped by. “Ask why he didn’t want to know me.”

  “Oh, Andy,” she said, her voice so sad, so familiar, so dear, that Andy felt like his body, the finely balanced tool that he’d fueled and coddled and cared for, was crumbling, like it was made of ash or salt. “Oh, Andy.”

  “Rachel,” he croaked . . . and, just as he blurted, “Could you come with me?” he heard her say, “I’m getting married next month.”

  “Married?” It hit him as if one of the shot-putters had aimed wrong and sent sixteen pounds of iron crashing into his gut. He opened his mouth and the word “Congratulations” hopped out like a toad.

  Her voice was tiny. “I was going to call you . . . before it happened, to tell you, but I thought . . .”

  How could you? he thought . . . except he had no right to ask that; no claim on her. He’d never tried to get her back, never even tried to tell her that he still thought of her, that he still imagined that somehow they would end up together.

  “He’s a great guy,” she said, and he heard her trying to sound enthusiastic, like she was selling herself on her soon-to-be-husband’s greatness . . . and then, in a whispered rush, just before she cut the connection, he thought he heard her say, “Sometimes I wish it had been you.”

  Rachel

  2003

  It won’t hurt like this forever. That was what I told myself when I was curled on my bed crying, or lying there motionless, feeling stunned and sick and sad, like I couldn’t get out of bed, like I couldn’t go back and be in the world. The only way through it is through it. At least he hadn’t pretended that he wanted me with him, hadn’t made a big fake effort at getting me to stay. The truth was that I’d been a distraction, poorly suited for a world where the sole focus was on bodies and times, where the party talk was all about lactic acid threshold; where, instead of holding me close and saying that he loved me, Andy’s first move every morning was to lie on the floor with a foam roller under his hips, or work his legs with a tool that looked like a plastic windshield wiper designed for myofascial release.

  I had packed up my stuff while he was still in New York. I’d thought about going back to Florida, but the picture of my parents’ faces, the way that they’d be thinking, if not saying, I told you so, made the idea unbearable. Instead, I’d flown to New York, couch-surfed until I’d found a little efficiency on West Eighty-Sixth Street, reenrolled at NYU, and gotten a paying job at the Family Aid Society, where Amy was still my boss and, no big surprise, Brenda was still a client.

  “Ooh, girl, what happened to you?” asked Brenda. We’d been scheduled for a nine o’clock meeting, and I’d been waiting on her front steps as she hopped out of a stranger’s car, looking perky in knee-high fringed black boots and a cropped black leather jacket. She had cut baby bangs, a quarter-inch fringe. It was a look only girls with perfect features and beautifully shaped skulls could pull off, and Brenda, cute as she was, was not one of them. Andy’s new girl probably was. I’d looked her up on the Internet and she was exactly what I’d expected—­gorgeous, exotic, with slim hips and small, elegant breasts and a face that seemed flawless from every angle. “Your basic nightmare,” I’d told my friends. Amy had asked if I’d wanted to stay with her and Leonard for a while. Pamela had offered to come up from Virginia, and Marissa had volunteered to come down from Vermont. All three of them had told me that I was too good for him, that they’d never trusted him, that world-class runner or not, it was bizarre for any woman to sleep with a guy who had a smaller butt than she did.

  “You’re late,” I told Brenda. It was Monday, mid-March, cold and clear, with trees just starting to show nubs of nascent blossoms. I hated it. I wanted weather like my mood, the skies gray and stormy, ripped by lightning. I had hardly slept for the last month, had barely eaten. The last conversation I’d had with Andy was playing on a loop in my head, illustrated with images of Maisie, leaving me exhausted and with no patience for Brenda’s nonsense.

  “Yeah. My car broke down, so, um, my friend, um, Lynn, was giving me a ride.”

  “Your friend Lynn looks exactly like your ex-boyfriend Stephen. You need to be on time for our appointments. No matter what. You know that our help depends on me signing off on your compliance.”

  “I’ll try,” said Brenda, sounding unapologetic. She unlocked the front door, leading me up three flights of narrow stairs and into the chaos that she’d managed to re-create in the three different apartments she’d had since I’d known her. A bird in a cage shrilled from a bedroom. Her dog lay farting on the floor. I could hear the frantic beating of the bird’s wings, and I could smell cigarette smoke, male sweat, cheap perfume. There were newspapers and magazines layered on the coffee table, shoes and socks on the floor, a coat crumpled in one corner, and the TV remote, backless and emptied of batteries, on the couch. Brenda picked it up, examined it, then held it as she sat. “I had to turn the cable off. Too expensive.”

  When I didn’t answer, she continued. “And then my car broke down, and the guy at the shop won’t give me a loaner. ‘Go get a rental,’ he says.”

  “Is the car under warranty?”

  Brenda looked at me like I’d stopped speaking English, and my sorrow hit me like a sandbag. “You know what?” I said, gathering my bag. I’d stuffed it with a fistful of folders before leaving the office without even making sure they were the right ones. “I’ll come back next week.”

  “Wait, what? You’re leaving? But what about my car?”

  “What about the subway?”

  Her brown eyes widen
ed. “Why are you being so mean?” she whispered. “The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve never been mean to me. Never once.”

  I leaned against the wall. “I owe you an apology,” I said, but Brenda wasn’t done.

  “Everyone else is mean. The people at the OCFS, the people at the school. The supermarket checkers, when I give them my card, everyone else in line, they all look at me like I’m nothing. But you don’t make me feel bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been dealing with some personal issues.”

  Her expression brightened. “What happened?” she asked, leaning forward, ready to dish. “Why’d you come back, anyhow? You split up with your man?”

  “This is not appropriate. I really need to go.” A vague memory surfaced. “Did you ever get Dante tested for ADHD?”

  Brenda’s face fell. “Oh, yeah. That shit. So guess what? No ADHD. He’s gifted,” she said, her tone making it clear this was not a welcome development.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “You don’t get money for gifted.”

  “Actually, you can,” I said, pulling on my coat, zipping up my bag. “It’s a special condition. There’s money for enrichment . . .” The zipper caught. I yanked it hard, and it broke off in my hand. My bag burst open, spilling papers all over Brenda’s floor. I crouched down to start picking up the mess, and found that I couldn’t move. I rocked back on my heels and covered my face with my hands as tears started spilling down my cheeks.

  “Oh, now.” Tentatively, Brenda touched my shoulder, then wrapped her arm around me, helping me stand. “Hey. Come on. No man’s worth all this.”

  I didn’t say a word as she led me to the couch. I just kept crying. Brenda handed me a box of Kleenex (name brand, even though we’d discussed how generic was the exact same thing) and then a cup of instant coffee. “Look at us,” she said, and shook her head. “The two saddest girls in New York.”