Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

The next morning was much the same.

By the end of the day, Sam’s curiosity had taken over.

“I’m guessing you stuck with what you said on Monday? You didn’t do any shots this week?”

Elisabeth shook her head. “No.”

“How did Andrew take it?”

“I haven’t told him yet,” she said, looking down at the floor. “He’s had kind of a hard week out there, so I decided to wait and tell him in person.”

He would be home tonight. They were supposed to go to Manhattan tomorrow for the procedure. Sam wondered if Elisabeth had canceled; she wondered what Andrew would say.

“He’ll understand,” Elisabeth said. “Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “It’s your body.”

“That’s right.”

Elisabeth handed her a white envelope in addition to the usual stack of bills.

“What’s this?” Sam said.

“You’ll see.”

Sam imagined a gift card to one of the restaurants downtown, or a letter thanking her for the other night. She waited until she was alone in her room to open it.

Inside the envelope were copies of the photographs Elisabeth had taken on Monday. Sam and Gil, skin to skin. Their posture far more intimate than any photo Sam had ever seen of her mother with her own children.

In most of them, Sam had a double chin, or flabby nun arms. But one shot was beautiful—sunlight beaming in through the window, Gil on her shoulder, Sam staring down at him, in love. She flipped the picture over. Elisabeth had written something on the back.

Inspiration for the painting! You look radiant here.

18 Elisabeth

EVERY MORNING THAT MONTH, Elisabeth had to be at the diagnostics center by six so they could draw her blood and perform an ultrasound and send the results to the clinic in the city.

She went in the yoga pants she’d worn to bed the night before, didn’t bother to wash her face.

It was pitch black and bitter cold when she started the car each day. The roads were empty. Red lights seemed beside the point. The sleepy-eyed woman at the desk was always drinking a cup of tea, moving slow, when she arrived, as if Elisabeth had walked in on her in her own kitchen.

Afterward, she drove straight home and got back into bed like it had never happened, leaving Andrew to take care of things, which he was all too willing to do. He had forgiven her, it seemed. He never said as much, but she knew his feelings had changed because he had started making her coffee again, because he held her at night, instead of keeping to his side of the bed.

“I feel better than I have in ages,” he told her.

Meanwhile, with each shot, each 5:00 a.m. alarm, Elisabeth felt increasingly unhinged.

She tried to distract herself with work. She was writing again, finally. It made her feel like there was at least one part of her life she wasn’t messing up.

The day after she decided to stop taking her fertility drugs, she didn’t wake until seven, when she heard Gil’s cries. There were five missed calls from the clinic on her phone, and a text message from Andrew asking how the morning had gone. Her head felt like it had been slammed repeatedly between metal cymbals. She went to Gil’s room, picked him up.

“Hello, my love,” she said softly.

Elisabeth carried him downstairs and placed him in his high chair. She washed a handful of blueberries and cut each one in half before putting them on his tray. She had forgotten a bib, but she couldn’t imagine going back upstairs, so she let him dirty his shirt. What was the difference? She’d have to soak one thing or the other.

Elisabeth swallowed three Advil and made coffee. She drank two cups, then fixed herself a piece of toast with peanut butter, and a scrambled egg for Gil. She could not remember the last time she’d been this hungover.

The previous night, before Sam came, Elisabeth had made the mistake of looking at Charlotte’s Instagram for the first time since Christmas. It was like she was anxious over IVF and decided the best way to cope was to turn her attention to the only thing that made her even more anxious. She scrolled all the way back, through February and into January. The posts were the same as ever—sexy bathing-suit pics, asinine self-help sayings.

In one photo, Charlotte leaned backward off a moving train as it traversed the side of a lush, green mountain. She wore the shortest dress Elisabeth had ever seen. Charlotte’s arms were outstretched, hands holding on to the sides of the open train door. A gorgeous man hovered over her. They were kissing. They looked like they were one sneeze away from falling off a cliff.

The caption read: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” I live by those words. Sri Lanka has reminded me that possessions don’t matter, money doesn’t matter. Only love matters. Only adventure. There are people who will never understand this. They believe money is everything. They hold on too tight to their small and boring lives. And for them, I sometimes weep. But not today, dear readers. Today, I SOAR.

“Fuck you,” Elisabeth said out loud.

She looked at the needle on the kitchen table and thought of how Charlotte was to blame for landing her here, in this position. Yet nothing had changed for Charlotte. There had been no consequences.

Almost two hundred commenters praised the train shot for its beauty, and Charlotte for being so brave. Elisabeth was fairly certain the quote was from Helen Keller, but Charlotte had probably seen it on a coaster and claimed it as her own.

Elisabeth pictured herself walking down the aisle of that train, feeling the warm air on her cheeks, and, whoopsie, shoving her sister right off.

After that, she started drinking.

The end of the night was a blank space. Elisabeth didn’t recall saying goodbye to Sam. There was a pot of cloudy water on the stove, a colander in the sink, which suggested pasta, but she couldn’t say what she’d eaten.

Sam texted to check in around nine. Elisabeth was tempted to ask her what happened. But she just responded that she was fine.

How much had she told her?

Eventually, she called the clinic back. Gil was speed-crawling up and down the front hall with a pen in his mouth, and she was letting him because she needed him happy and entertained above all else if she was going to survive this day.

“We got no results for you this morning,” scolded the nurse on the line. “It’s impossible to monitor the state of your uterus if you don’t show up. Make sure you’re there tomorrow.”

“Will do,” Elisabeth said.

That was all? She had never missed a single monitoring session when they were going through this the first time. They had once set out from Brooklyn in a blizzard at four-thirty in the morning, before the streets were plowed, to make it to the Upper East Side for seven o’clock.

She called Andrew during Gil’s nap. She was on her fourth cup of coffee by then.

“How did it go this morning?” he said. “I feel awful that you had to get Gil up that early and schlep all the way to the blood-draw place.”

“It was fine,” she replied.

Elisabeth couldn’t get into it yet. Maybe after she’d taken a shower, or a nap, or both.

“How’s Denver?”

“Okay, I guess,” Andrew said. “Hard to tell. There are definitely the cool kids in the room, who everyone’s dying to meet. I’m not one of them.”

“I think you’re a cool kid,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Elisabeth tried to sound optimistic. “Keep it up,” she said. “There are three days to go. It only takes one person.”

“Did the clinic call with your levels?”

“Yup.”

“And?”

“All good.”

She willed him to stop asking questions so she could stop lying.