Sisterhood Everlasting (15 page)

There was a part of her that cringed at what she had almost done that night and a part of her that wished she had done it. She wanted to cross a boundary, not stay on this side of her life anymore. She wanted to tear it all down and dare herself to feel any worse.

She walked into the office with a long-haired swagger and signed her name on the sheet. As instructed, she went to the bathroom and left a urine sample. She penned a little drawing of the sun on her warm plastic cup. An ancient Earth, Wind & Fire song was playing when she went back to the waiting room, and she found herself dancing to it. She didn’t feel like sitting down.

She was free. She had that, at least. She had nowhere to be, no one to answer to. She slept under the stars. If she was going to be wrecked, at least she’d be free.

The nurse came into the waiting room and called her name. “Bridget Vreeland.”

“Me,” she said. Her name was one thing she was left with, and she had mixed feelings about it. Maybe she could change it. She’d call herself Sunny. Sunny Rollins, like the saxophone player. Or Sunny Tomko. She’d borrowed Tibby’s old name once before when
she’d needed to be someone different; Tibby would let her borrow it again.

She followed the nurse to an examining room. “Should I change into one of those gowns?” she asked. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

“Let’s just talk to begin with,” the nurse said. She was pretty old. In her sixties at least. She had hopeful eyes, Bridget thought, but sort of sad. It was hard to say which they were more. “What can I do for you?”

“I need birth control.”

“Are you using any now?”

“I had one of the rings you put on your cervix. I think it’s expired. I can’t remember exactly the date when I was supposed to change it, but I think it passed.”

“Can you give me the date of your last period?”

Bridget thought back. She had no idea. It wasn’t exactly at the front of her mind these days. “I have no idea,” she said honestly.

“Are you sexually active?”

“Now? Today?”

“Well. Not today necessarily. Over the last two or three months.”

She hadn’t had sex with Eric since the night before Greece. “Not in the last couple of weeks, but before that, yes.”

“Are you married? In a relationship?”

“I have a boyfriend.” She didn’t know why she kept saying that. She had left that alleged boyfriend without a decent explanation. He could probably not reasonably be called her boyfriend anymore.

“Do you think you want the cervical ring again?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“All right. Is there any chance you are pregnant?”

“No.”

“Okay. Go ahead and put the robe on, opening at the front. I’ll do a quick exam and get you on your way.” More hopeful, her eyes, Bridget decided. They were oddly fragile for a person who’d been around so long.

“Great. Thanks.” This was easy.

“Did you leave a urine sample?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The nurse came back in once Bridget had gotten into the robe and her expression was different.

“Do you think the ring is wrong for me?” Bridget asked chattily. “Maybe the pill would be better? But I might forget to take it. You see, that’s why I got the ring instead.”

“Bridget.”

She turned at the sober sound of her name. “Yes?”

“Sit down.”

Bridget hopped on the table. She gathered her papery robe in a bunch in front of her and fitted her heels into the stirrups.

“No, you don’t need to do that yet. Just sit and talk to me for a minute.”

Bridget sat up. She let her feet dangle.

“I can’t give you a new cervix ring or any other kind of birth control because you are pregnant.”

Bridget watched the nurse’s face. She watched her eyes. She looked into them to find some other way of interpreting that word.

“You think I’m pregnant?”

“I know you’re pregnant. I had them run the test twice. False positives are extremely rare after four or five weeks.”

“I don’t think I am. I don’t think I could be. Are you sure you got the right cup of pee?” Bridget’s feet were rattling; her lungs felt shallow. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“If you want to leave another sample, you can. But I feel almost certain that the result will be the same.”

“But I have that ring.”

“The ring emits a hormone that keeps you from conceiving for a certain length of time. You are right that it expired.”

Her lungs were turning inside out again, not catching any air. The air gave her some hope of deniability and she couldn’t seem to get any. Her breasts felt big and achy and had for many days. Her stomach had felt vaguely unsettled, but she accounted for it with the obvious facts that her heart was broken and her life was in ruins, not to mention her long-running hangover.

She thought of her stomach, her uterus, where this thing was supposedly
happening.
Oh, my God
. She put her hands over her face. She felt horribly claustrophobic in here. “I have to go,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound right.

“Bridget.”

Bridget realized at the door that she was still wearing the paper robe and that her clothes were in a pile in the corner. She froze. She didn’t know what to do. It seemed overwhelming to walk to the corner and put them on.

She felt the nurse behind her. The nurse took her hand. Bridget felt herself shaking all over. Her hand was frozen and the nurse’s hand was dry and warm. The hand pulled her back to the table and sat her down. The nurse sat down next to her and put her arm around Bridget’s shoulders. The world was too strange for awkwardness anymore. Bridget caught some air, finally, and it helped her think a little bit.

“Can I just get rid of it?” she asked. She knew those weren’t the kind of words you were supposed to use.

The nurse nodded slowly. “You can end the pregnancy.”

“So let’s do that,” Bridget said quickly. “Can we do it right now?”

“Bridget, it’s a somber choice. I’ve done this a long time and I’ve learned many things in the course of it. You won’t forgive yourself if you do it without thinking it through first.”

Bridget shook her head. She didn’t want to make a somber choice. She didn’t want to think about anything. She wanted this to be over.

“Go home. Tell your boyfriend. Let him help you talk it through. Come back if you decide you’re ready and bring him along to hold your hand.”

Bridget had no choice but to see Eric in her mind. The tears came up from somewhere deep. They weren’t only for Eric but for everything she had lost or ruined or was about to lose or ruin. Because she didn’t deserve anything. She didn’t deserve him or anyone. She deserved to be alone.

The nurse stroked Bridget’s head patiently and let her cry. After a while she moved to stroking her back. She held Bridget’s hand and
passed her Kleenexes. Bridget didn’t deserve this kindness either, but she took it.

“I don’t think I can tell him,” she finally said.

“If you love him, then you have to try,” the nurse said soothingly. “Whether or not you’ll ever want to have a baby together, I can almost promise you the relationship won’t survive if you don’t tell him.”

I don’t think it survived
, Bridget thought, but she respected this nurse too much not to walk out of here promising to make a somber choice. And if she needed to do it thoughtlessly, at least she’d go somewhere else.

The nurse walked her to the front entrance. Bridget realized she was still holding her hand. The nurse took a card out of her pocket. She wrote her cellphone number on the back. “You call me anytime, all right? I mean
any
time.”

“Thanks,” Bridget said. She looked down at the name on the card and up at the little name tag affixed to her breast pocket. For the first time she saw that the nurse’s name was Tabitha.

The couch where Carmen did her crying was midcentury chrome covered in shiny orange material with a fancy name that was basically plastic. Unlike the one in the apartment where she’d lived with her mother, the old chenille chesterfield that kept a permanent record of every spill and every tear, nothing here stuck.

When Carmen finally got up and trudged to the bathroom to blow her nose and pee, she looked in the mirror and she was hideous. A hideous hideosity. For the first week after Greece, she had looked in the mirror and felt sorry for herself. Now she despised herself.

What was she going to do? Was she really going to end this thing with Jones because she was too sad and too crazy and too chicken to get married? Would she say goodbye to him that night? Move out, stay in a hotel for a couple of weeks, find a new place?

What did she have without him? Without this place? Nothing.
She’d be alone. Who did she have to cry to? No one. Not Lena. Not Bee. She didn’t even know how to talk to them now.

She felt the tears starting again. Not Paul. Not her dad. The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people too broken to lean on.

There was her mom. Her mom didn’t know what to offer and Carmen didn’t know what to ask for. Her mom had returned to busy mode, redecorating her house and trying to get Ryan into a new school. She was grateful for quick problems like flowers and hors d’oeuvres. She liked Jones. She was scared of Carmen’s despair.

What about other friends? Her New York friends?

Her New York friends consisted of her stylist and her makeup artist and her manager and her publicist and the PA who got her lattes. They were people who expected something of her. They were audience members. They were not people you fell apart in front of.

And actor friends? They were impossible. They had a drink with you, maybe, but you stayed in bullshit cheek-kissing-acquaintance purgatory forever. Like her, they all had their real friends from “before.” Nobody needed any new ones.

At seven o’clock in the evening, Carmen was wearing her Catherine Malandrino; she put on Billie Holiday and made Jones a martini for when he walked in the door. It was pretty corny, but effective.

Jones waltzed her around the room. “Are we on for September?” he asked happily.

“I was thinking more like April.”

He stopped midwaltz. “This April?”

“This April.”

His smile got big. He put up his hand to give her a high five. “Now we’re
talkin’
, baby.”

After the high five, he carried her into the bedroom and made love to her without even folding down the fancy bedcover or taking off her dress. His phone bleeped and buzzed and spasmed and for once he ignored it.

Afterward, they lay for a long time and talked about the venue and the guest list and where was the most beautiful place to go in April on your honeymoon. Carmen was a pretty darned good actress if she did say so herself.

For a long time after Bridget left the Planned Parenthood office she searched for her bike. She was dazed; her head was pounding and her eyes were stinging. Maybe she’d left it by the bakery.

She walked up and down the streets in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to retrace her steps. Again the world seemed to have stopped and started anew. First there was the world that had Tibby and the Septembers in it, a fundamental center to her life and a source of deepest comfort. In a single moment that world had ended and a new one had started without them. A sadder world had started with just Eric and a mattress on the floor, but she’d left that behind too.

And so had opened the world in which she was itinerant, filthy, and pregnant but had a bike. And apparently now even that world had come to an end.

She stumbled upon her broken lock lying on the sidewalk a dozen yards from Planned Parenthood. So that was what happened to her bike.

She didn’t even stop for it. She kept walking. She pointed her body west and just kept going. She wondered if she could join one of the lower orders, like shrimp or termites, which were not burdened with consciousness.

By the following afternoon, her pack was too heavy and the sun felt too hot. Even the lower orders felt pain. Bridget stuck out her thumb. With her hair blowing around behind her, even messy as it was, she knew it wouldn’t take long to get a ride. She let the first two cars that slowed go by. The third had a man and a woman in it. She got in the backseat.

“Where are you headed?” the driver asked. He was in his late forties, probably, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a Hawaiian shirt.

“Where are
you
headed?” she asked.

“Sonoma.”

“That sounds fine.”

The wife turned around. She had frizzy light brown hair and a look of motherly concern. “Where do you live?”

Even with the mind of a termite, Bridget knew not to set off the
alarms of kind, concerned people who were giving her a lift. “San Francisco,” she said.

“Do you want us to drop you there?” the woman asked.

“No thanks. I’m on vacation,” Bridget said.

“So are we,” the man said. “I’m Tom and this is my wife, Cheryl.”

“Sunny,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for the ride.”

Bridget parted ways with Tom and Cheryl at a gas station off Route 80, a bit south of Sonoma. She walked in the direction of the setting sun. By the time it dunked into the ocean, she’d made it all the way to Petaluma. She sat on a bench outside a bank and wondered about Eric’s cousin Anna and her wedding. It was the day after tomorrow, she thought. Or would have been the day after tomorrow. Anna belonged to the old world, along with Bridget’s bike and her empty uterus and her sanity. She wondered if Anna was even getting married anymore.