Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

The playroom is bright; though they’re in the basement, they’re not so far below street level, and the windows are big. One wall is floor-to-ceiling shelves: toys, books, framed photos, even a miniature library ladder that reaches to the uppermost shelf. There’s a sofa, large and low-slung, off white, inviting a stain but surprisingly clean. There’s a small child-size desk and chair, and a child-size easel, and a child-size guitar and a child-size drum set. There are paintings on construction paper, framed in simple white frames, dozens of them, hung on the facing wall. On each, Sarah’s written Henry’s name, and the date the artist completed the work. The room is quiet, cool, beautiful. There are many trucks, but Lauren does not see the truck she has brought. The room is perfect, of course. She feels sheepish about the book she’s brought with her. This room could have been in there.

“Let’s sit.” Sarah eases herself onto the sofa. “I can’t handle the stairs right now. Maybe I should start sleeping down here.”

The sofa is firm, but comfortable. Lauren thinks it must be stuffed with actual horsehair, a rarity in this day and age.

“So, how’s work?”

“It’s good, actually.” This is true but still feels like a surprise. “I’m producing a book with this queeny old designer who’s about a hundred, you should see his rooms. Gold andirons, hand-painted wallpaper, murals on the ceilings, that kind of thing.”

“Do you miss cookbooks?”

“I don’t,” Lauren says. “I think I was ready for this change. Enough of the best turkey burgers ever. The one-hour dinner party. I was done. Now, I’m developing titles, reaching out to new writers and soliciting designers. And we’re doing well. Actually making money, in books, which is nice.”

Sarah yawns. “I’m sorry. I’m not yawning because you’re boring, I’m yawning because my brain is very tired.”

“Not offended,” Lauren says. “You’re pregnant.”

“So any other news?” Sarah gives her a knowing look. “Come on.”

Lauren considers telling her about David, has considered telling her for weeks now — fine, it’s months — but hasn’t. David is still secret. David is still hers. If she does talk about him now, she’s worried the real truth will come spilling out of her. There’s been Gabe, there’s been Rob, there’s been Matt, there’s been Thom; all good, all fine, all happy enough memories, if she overlooks the worse parts, which is easier as time goes by. The worse parts slip away, with her knowledge of algebra and the world capitals.

It’s not that David is different, though he is that, it’s that her feeling about the thing is different. She can see what she could never see before: the future. Marriage can’t be musical chairs; grab a mate when the music stops. The music stops, for most of the women she’s known, somewhere around thirty-three, and the marriages begin. And six years from then, right about now, in fact, as the cycle dictates: the divorces. She tried to see this — with Gabe, with Rob, with Matt: the future. It never came into focus. It never seemed possible, as much as they, and Sarah, and her mother, and her father, might have wanted it to. She still hasn’t introduced her parents to David, but curiously enough, she wants to.

“I’m ready for a vacation,” she says. “I’m over this summer.”

“We’re going away on Monday. We’re renting a house in East Hampton with Fiona and her kids. Family vacation. I even convinced Dan to take three days off, but only three, because he’s worried about the paternity leave coming up. But we’ll all be together those three days, and actually Henry and I are going for ten. You should come out.”

“Fiona. She’s got kids plural, then?”

Sarah nods. “Owen’s just a little younger than Henry, Eliza is almost two now.”

“So cute,” Lauren says. “You guys should have synced up your second borns, too, you could have had family vacations together forever.”

Sarah is quiet. “We did, actually. Not by design, but it happened.” She pauses. “I lost the baby.”

Lauren looks at her. Sarah looks calm, her posture, her demeanor bearing no real relationship to the words she’s just said. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I had no idea. When was this?”

“I never told you.” Sarah exhales deeply. “I don’t know why, to be honest. I just. It was so bad, Lolo.”

Lauren pulls her feet up under herself, pivots in the sofa so she’s almost sitting on Sarah’s lap. She touches her arm, tentatively. Sarah, so fat, so solid, seems fragile. “Were you far along?”

She’d been sixteen weeks. It was old hat, pregnancy. She threw herself into it, and it felt as if it had been longer because she’d gotten so big, so quickly. In utero, Henry had cooperated, blossoming after she walked down the aisle, but the second one had made her presence known early. Sarah had dug out some of the less offensive pregnancy clothes, stored in a plastic box in the basement. She’d bought books for Henry, books about being a big brother, about how love isn’t diminished, but rather amplified, when you add another person into the mix.

She’d told her parents, she’d told Fiona, she’d told the nanny. She’d been on the verge of calling Lauren, actually — it was on her to-do list — when, one otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, she woke up feeling different, somehow. The baby hadn’t really started moving, but Sarah felt a stillness there, inside her taut belly. The doctor asked her to come in, but it was the radiologist, whom she didn’t even know, who gently placed a hand on Sarah’s knee and confirmed that there was no heartbeat.

One of those things. They had to dilate her. They used seaweed, of all insane things. The twenty-first century and that’s how it’s done. She went home, came back, and it was all a terrible mockery of what had happened four years earlier, with Henry: the room hushed, the pain nonexistent, the final moment not an anticlimax even. Dan held her hand, and she cried. She declined to look at the baby, declined the offer of an autopsy. She went home and, two days later, took the big brother books out of the pile by Henry’s bedside.

“Four months. Showing and everything. Then, one morning, spontaneous.”

Lauren’s mind races, trying to latch on to the right thing to say, trying to give voice to all the questions that come up. “But why didn’t you tell me? This is terrible. I could have—. I don’t know what I could have done. But I could have done something. I could have tried.”

“I know.” Sarah squeezes Lauren’s forearm. “It’s not you. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to come home, and just be here, with Henry, and Dan, and be quiet. I thought I was pushing it, with the universe. I thought I was asking too much. I just wanted to. . to never think about it again.”

Lauren thinks, immediately, of Christopher. Ghost brother, the lost boy Lulu never talks about.

“Hey, we got through it,” Sarah says. Another squeeze of the arm. “I should have called, I’m sorry.”

“I should have been there,” Lauren says. “I’m a terrible friend.”

“You’re not. You’re my best friend. It’s fine. Here I am. Look at me.” She spreads her arms open wide to indicate the bulk of her body. “He’s fine in there. It’s all okay.”

“I’m so sorry, though.” Lauren reaches up to take Sarah’s hand, which is cool, and soft. “I don’t know what to say. You’re so. Fine. But I know you. I know that you must not have been fine. I wish you’d told me.”

“Just one of those things, that’s what the doctor kept saying. Sarah, it’s just one of those things. ”

“One of those fucking horrible things.”

Sarah is quiet. “I didn’t know, Lolo. I didn’t know if I could call you. With that. I didn’t know if you’d. . if you’d understand. No. I knew you’d understand. I just didn’t. .”