The Girls From Corona Del Mar (29 page)

Franklin laughed. “She’s so fucking fierce,” he said. Then, in a different tone: “And insane! God, I keep thinking about it. Why did she lie to me?”

“Oh,” Lor said, exhaling, “why does anybody lie? She was scared.”

“I know. I know, she was scared. But that still fucking sucks for me.”

“It’s scary, finding out you’re pregnant,” Lor said.

“Yeah?”

“Fuck yeah. And it’s not—I don’t know, it’s just not a clean choice. It’s not something completely rational.”

“I may be too drunk to talk about this,” Franklin said.

“I’m just saying it’s emotional. You can feel the baby inside of you.”

“Already?”

“Already,” she said. “Not like kicking and moving, but you’re aware of it.”

“But you decided not to have an abortion. Right?” Franklin said. “I mean, isn’t that the whole dichotomy, you both got pregnant, and Mia had an abortion and you didn’t.”

“I’ve had an abortion,” she said.

I froze. I was listening so hard that my spine was tensed, as though I could use my own vertebrae to amplify their voices.

Was she lying? She’d had her fucking uterus removed!

“I didn’t realize,” Franklin said. “I’m sorry.”

“No. You don’t need to be sorry. You’ve only just met me! I don’t expect you to know every footnote of my life story.”

There was a heavy silence then.

“But this doesn’t need to be some debate about abortion,” Franklin said. “I mean, does she even want an abortion?”

“I don’t think so,” Lorrie Ann said. “I don’t think she wants to kill it, but I think she’s terrified of having it too. Which is why she’s so hung up on whether or not you want it. If you wanted it, she could handle having it, she could face the fear of it. But she thinks you don’t want it.”

“God, she’s a retard!” he cried. “I’m in love with her! I wanted to marry her!”

“But isn’t that why you broke up with your last girlfriend?” Lorrie Ann asked.

I heard the lighter flick again, and I knew Franklin was lighting another cigarette. He chain-smoked when he was hammered. He had wanted to marry me. A sudden switch to past tense. Did that mean he didn’t want to anymore?

“Yeah, but that was because I didn’t want to have babies with
Elizabeth
. Not that I didn’t ever want to have babies. And that was five years ago! Did she even tell you the context of that conversation?”

“No.”

What had the context been? I couldn’t remember.

“She had been explaining to me that after raising her brothers she
wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to have kids, that she wasn’t prepared to be that unselfish again, to have that much responsibility, and she wanted to make sure I was okay with that.”

Lorrie Ann laughed like a donkey. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not funny, but that’s kind of funny.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m sure she meant it at the time too. But now, I mean, does she want it? Is that why she’s being so weird? She wants it?”

“Do you want it?” Lorrie Ann asked.

Franklin didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said. I heard the lighter flick again. Maybe his cigarette had gone out, or maybe Lorrie Ann was lighting up too. “It doesn’t feel real. I need to talk to her about it.”

“It won’t feel real until the baby’s born,” Lor said.

“You know, I almost half guessed when Bensu asked her. I thought: Maybe she’s pregnant. Maybe Bensu heard something. I was excited. God, I feel like an idiot.”

“Don’t feel like an idiot. She loves you. She just went about things in a stupid way. But that’s Mia, right? You said it yourself—she can’t act natural. Everything is a little bit forced. She overthinks it. Hard shell, squishy insides.”

“Yeah, but like … can you really start a family and start a life with someone who goes about things like that? Can you trust someone who doesn’t fucking trust you?”

I felt like I was falling an infinite distance, sitting there on our mattress in the dark, as Franklin’s voice said things I never expected to hear, had no idea he thought.

“I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

There was a long silence, and then Franklin said: “How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to be able to blow smoke rings. I even had people try to teach me, but it never worked out.”

“You have to get some backspin on it by tucking in your lips right as you blow out,” she said.

Silence.

“That was good!” she said.

How,
how
could they be blowing smoke rings right now?

“I’ve gotta take a piss,” Franklin said.

“Can I borrow some money?” Lor asked.

My eyes snapped open in the darkness. There was something so predatory about it—asking Franklin instead of asking me. But of course she would need money to go back home, to leave the party circuit.

“How much?”

“I don’t know,” Lor said. “Like a grand?”

“And I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell her,” he said.

“No,” she said reflectively, “you can tell her.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go to the bank in the morning.”

“Just write me a check,” she said.

“In the morning,” he said. “I’m beat.”

Then I heard him shuffle toward the bathroom and the creaking sound as he closed himself in with the plants to pee. Did we have a thousand dollars? Certainly there was money in the grant, but it was tightly controlled.

As I waited for Franklin to finish peeing and come into our room, I tried to calm my heartbeat. All of the pieces of conversation I had overheard were jangling around in my bloodstream: the money, Franklin’s sudden past tense “I wanted to marry her!,” Lor’s weird lie about having had an abortion. He had been excited! When he first guessed, he had been excited! But then, the terrible question: Can you trust someone who doesn’t trust you? A new, cold, and strong feeling entered me. The answer was no. You could not trust someone who was behaving the way I was behaving. I sat in our bed, waiting.

When he finally came in, I heard him set his keys down. I heard the shuffle of his feet, bare, on the vinyl flooring. Then I heard his pants hitting the floor, the clink of his belt left in the loops, and the brief cotton wrestling match with his button-down and undershirt. Then I felt him begin to crawl up the bed.

“Franklin,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

I felt him pause on all fours.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “I get it. I mean—it’s your body. I can understand why you would want a few days to figure out how you feel before you have to figure out how I feel.”

“I need to say this,” I said, and patted the bed next to me. Franklin continued his crawl and scooted under the covers up next to me. He smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes and booze. “I am so deeply sorry,” I said. “I’ve been acting like a teenager trying to fool her mother. You are nothing but open and honest and kind with me, and in return I was trying to manipulate you like I was going to trick you into loving me. I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better. And if you’ll let me, I would like to do better. I will be better.”

The streetlight was coming across his face in slashes. “Thank you,” he said.

I reached down and grabbed his knee, pull-rubbing the tendons that connected to his thigh.

“So what are you thinking?” he asked. “About the—pregnancy?”

I noticed he’d avoided using the word “baby.”

“Well,” I said, feeling the honesty bite in my lungs like winter air, “I feel very scared that having a baby would ruin our lives. I don’t know how we would work out our careers, where we would get jobs in the same place. I don’t know how we would afford it. But even more than that, I am scared that having the baby would force you to marry me because you wanted to do the right thing. I don’t want you to be confined by doing the right thing. I want you to do what is really and truly best for you. And I know that with Elizabeth it wasn’t right, and so I was worried it wouldn’t be right with me.”

Franklin grunted.

“And of course,” I went on, “I’ve had an abortion before. So it’s not that I’m against abortion. I’m not.” I thought of Lorrie Ann saying women had a right to kill their children. “But I do feel like having an abortion at twenty-nine is a very different thing than having one at fifteen. And … if it is what you wanted, I would think about it, but I don’t feel good about it. When I think about it I feel dread.”

He grunted again.

“What do you feel?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how I feel. I have a headache and I’m still a little drunk, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

My heart sank. I clenched my jaw and froze the muscles of my face. I didn’t want to make him feel bad by crying. I wanted him to be perfectly free.

“I mean, I know that rationally everything you’re saying about the jobs and about money—all of that is true. But I still … I don’t know. Don’t you think we could make it work?”

This was not at all what I was expecting him to say.

“And even,” he went on, “worst-case scenario, we wind up teaching Latin at a liberal arts college or something? Still—what a life! I don’t know. I just … I know you’re scared, and I know we should think about it more, but I guess my most basic, gut reaction is that I’m fucking overjoyed.”

“You are?” My eyes were stinging and I couldn’t really breathe, that’s how violent my happiness was.

“Yeah. Is that okay? I mean, is that okay with you?”

“That’s more than okay,” I choked out.

I could hear the smile in his voice. “Good,” he said.

“I just—Franklin, I just feel so strongly that it wants to live.”

“We made a baby,” he said. “We made a person.”

“I know,” I said, but in my mind I was already frantically praying to God, a God I knew I did not truly believe in, to let me keep this, to let me keep all I had been given. I didn’t know why I had been allowed to have so much. It didn’t seem right that I could be allowed to have still more. But I would take it. Even if it was all pure accident, and I hadn’t earned any of it, I would take it. What had Lorrie Ann said? Do we deserve the spring? No one, I thought, could ever deserve or not deserve the kind of happiness that was flooding me, lying there in that bed with Franklin, the bean of life twitchy in my womb, the streets of Istanbul finally quiet, the mists of the Bosporus rolling in.

“I heard Lorrie Ann ask you for money.”

“You did? Yeah, I mean, I don’t care, I’ll give her the money. But I mean, isn’t there a rule or something: don’t give money to junkies?”

“No,” I said. “She’s going home. She’s gonna make things right.”

“That’s wonderful,” Franklin said. “Mia?”

“What?”

“Will you marry me? For real? Will that still be true in the morning?”

“It will be true every morning for the rest of time,” I said, and I really felt, as an almost physical reality, that everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be all right.

But of course, when we woke up in the morning, Lorrie Ann was gone, and, mysteriously, she had taken the tea set with her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Almost three years later, when I was back in California, I arranged to see Arman.

It had been a blessing, really, to have Lorrie Ann gone that morning. To wake up to the empty sublet, the garish colors of its un-matching furniture staring jauntily back at us in the gray light of the misty Istanbul morning. To be allowed to ignore her and everything that had happened in her life and make eggs and toast and coffee in our underwear and giggle over our good fortune: to love each other, to be getting married, to be having a baby. And in the kind of hypocrisy native to everyday living, I pretended that possibly Lorrie Ann might still go home. She had said she was going home. I wanted to believe that she still might, even though she had left without getting the money from Franklin, even though, as far as I knew, she didn’t have a way of getting back to the States. The note she had left said only: “Don’t fuck it up, you two. Franklin, you’re the real deal and I love you. I wish I could stay, but I’ve gotta go. Don’t be mad, Mia. We really were friends, you know. XOXO, Lolola.”

At the time, I thought that it was her life, and that as much as I wanted to live it for her, she was going to have to do it on her own.

But as the weeks and then months passed, I realized I had no way of getting in touch with her. None of my old numbers for her worked. She didn’t have a Facebook account. I had no idea what Portia’s last name was and so could not have tracked her down that way, even if she had returned to Portia, which I found doubtful after the defenestration of
shoes. I tried calling Dana, who was sweet, but who had not heard from Lor in over a year. When Franklin and I got married later that year, I sent the invitation via e-mail to her old Yahoo account. Surely she had an e-mail account she checked regularly, I just didn’t know what it was, and I guessed it wasn’t her deeply odd, teenage handle: [email protected].

When Grant was born, I sent his birth pictures and a letter of apology to the same e-mail account. She was right, I wrote: actually being a mother blew everything else out of the water. She was right: there was nothing more important.