Tim Murphy - Christodora

Five minutes later, Drew pinged back: “Uh. . that’s it? No call after six days?:(”

Oh, shit, thought Milly. “I was digesting,” she pinged back. Well, that was honest, right? Should she have to be fake?

Drew didn’t ping back, which Milly thought was pretty rude. She was probably too busy, Milly thought. She’d probably interrupted Drew while she was blogging to all the people who hung on her every word. And basically because Drew blogged or tweeted or CoffeeDated every single moment of her life, it was hard for Milly to avoid following the pregnancy in excruciating detail. It was so obvious she was building up content for a book. What Drew was eating and what special yoga Drew was doing to aid the pregnancy, how the pregnancy was affecting her and Christian’s sex life, and then, of course, every minute aspect of how she felt when they learned they were going to have twins. “Twice Blessed, Twice Yikes” that post was called. Yikes? Milly thought. Yuck.

This went on for months without Drew responding to Milly’s text. Milly thought Drew would break down and ask her to come out to L.A. for the delivery, but Drew didn’t. Suddenly Drew was blogging and tweeting pictures of her, Christian, and two baby girls named Erika and Fiona. The first picture of the four of them she posted, all huddled together like four peas in a pod, Milly just stared at, dumbfounded, for about fifteen minutes. Drew had had children. They were the two who’d never been through pregnancy when everyone else had, and now Drew had gone ahead and done it.

Milly told her dad about it over dinner uptown that night. “Drew had babies this week,” she said. “She had twins. Two girls.”

Sam nodded his head sagely, as though he had something to say about that. “That makes three kids for her now?” he asked.

“She’s never had kids before, Daddy. These are her first.” Milly pushed her father’s water glass away from the edge of the table, where it was sitting perilously near his elbow.

“No, no,” he said. Here we go, Milly thought. Her father was always doing this these days. “She’s got the kid who won the science award in Boston.”

“That’s Liesl,” Milly said. He was thinking about another old friend of hers from college. “Liesl had that kid sixteen years ago. This is Drew. Remember Drew, the writer Drew? She lives in Los Angeles.”

“The one that had the drug problem.”

“Right. The drug problem was twenty-five years ago, though.”

He looked at Milly like she was crazy. “She just went to rehab!” he insisted.

“She went to rehab twenty-five years ago, Daddy.”

Her father looked annoyed. He resumed eating the pasta she’d made him. “I hope she stays off that junk,” he said. “She’s a smart girl.”

Milly just smiled and shook her head. This was her dinner company these days. She loved her dad. Since Ava, her mother, had died of ovarian cancer two years ago, at only seventy-four, it was like a hush had fallen over her and her father. She and Sam could sit at the dinner table together most of the night, watch TV together later, and not say a word, and it was okay. There was a hush in her parents’ busy house after all those years.

And there was a bond. Because Milly and Sam were both empty vessels now. Ava had consumed their lives so completely. Milly had lived most of her life defining herself against someone she didn’t want to become, trying to be the un-her, only to find she had nothing left to work with once Ava was gone. Then came the identity void. The weirdest thing had been sitting with Sam at the memorial service that a bunch of the old downtown AIDS people had organized. Someone would get up to speak and Milly would whisper to her dad, Oh, so that’s the So-and-So she was always complaining about! And then Milly and her dad had heard all the tales. Like when Ava planned a “ceremony” to “honor” the city council speaker, but it was really just to get the speaker to come to Judith House and to trap her in the sitting room with all the clients, all the residents, and say, “Actually the reason we asked you here today was to show you what we’ll lose if you really cut the housing budget 30 percent in fiscal 2015.”

The whole memorial had cracked up when someone, a former Judith House resident who was now a social worker, told this story. “That was Ava!” people were cackling. “That was Ava! You didn’t fuck with her!”

Amid the laughter, Milly and her dad had looked at each other. Her dad shrugged, as though to say, I never knew that, and Milly put her arm around him. There were stories they never knew, or maybe stories they’d only half listened to, and they all belonged to a woman who was larger than the two of them, larger than her own family, who sucked it up and demonstrated heroism every day, and then often came home and had little left for her husband and daughter except perhaps to charm her husband into giving her a foot rub.

“She loved those foot rubs,” Milly’s dad said over dinner. “That’s why she needed me to stick around. I was the foot rub at the end of the day.”

“You were more than a foot rub, Daddy.”

“She was very proud of you,” her dad said.

“I don’t think that’s really true, Daddy.”

“Oh, no, she was. She was just too busy to tell you.”

She and her dad both laughed heartily over this.

Then he’d ask: “How’s the kid?”

This line of questioning never stopped. “Dad, I’ve told you a million times he’s out in Los Angeles and we’re not really in touch.”

“He’s your son. You need to get on the goddamned phone and call him.”

“He doesn’t want to be in touch,” Milly said, too sharply. “I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his. “But I’ve told you that he told me he wanted to live his own life now. Our work is done.”

Her dad shook his head. “I don’t understand that situation one bit.”

“Neither do I.”

But as for Drew? So, the twins came. Milly saw the constant pictures of the twins. She watched the twins grow up in pictures. And one day when Milly was looking at a picture of the two of them in matching striped onesies, in a moment of softness, she typed, “Adorable!” A few hours later, Milly noticed that Drew had put a smiley emoji next to her comment. A week later, when Drew posted a family Halloween picture, Milly wrote, “Boo-dorable!” A few hours later, Drew posted back, “They’re still so small I almost wanted to pose them inside the pumpkins!” To which Milly posted back her own smiley emoji. Six weeks later came the inevitable holiday Santa-hat pictures.

“First visit from Santa coming up!” Milly posted.

“I know,” Drew posted back, “Santa better get crackin’!”

This is how they started communicating again. Pathetic, Milly knew, but that was what the world had come to, just these little pleasantries or silly faces people tapped out underneath one another’s pictures. Then one day Milly was on the tablet and Drew popped up in a chatbox:

“Hi millipede.”

Milly heard the little ping and then just stared at it for about thirty seconds.

“Hi drewpea.”

As soon as she wrote that her gut twisted in an unexpected pang of yearning.

Drew:

Long time no see.

Milly:

I know. Well, you’ve been busy.

Drew:

It’s been crazy. Didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Milly:

Well, you all look pretty happy in the pics.

Drew:

It’s wonderful. It’s a blessing beyond blessings. Grateful doesn’t even describe. [

Here we go with the whole grateful thing,

Milly thought.] But it’s still exhausting!