Then Came You (8 page)

He pulled off his glasses and turned them over slowly. “It’s not your job,” he finally said. “Not your job to take care of me.”

“I’m almost done with school,” I said, pulling out the pages that I’d printed and passing them across the table.
Willow Crest: A Community of Care.
I’d done enough research to show that
the place was conveniently located and well-regarded, with a respectable success rate. The intake counselor I’d talked with the day before said that they’d have a bed available within the next three weeks. “I’ve got some money to spare. Would you go?”

He scratched his nose, forehead furrowed, then poked at the pages. After he had his accident, insurance paid for detox in a hospital, then twenty-eight days in rehab in a place up in New Hampshire. He was diagnosed with depression while he was in there, and he did okay for a while once he got out, even though he’d been suspended from his job and was on disability while the school board figured out exactly what to do. Then came the trial. “Area Teacher Sentenced for Drunk Driving Accident,” read the headline on page B-6 of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
My mother, who was normally a stickler about education, had let me and Greg stay home from school the day after the verdict. Greg had disappeared out the back door as soon as she’d left for work. I’d stayed in bed, not my bed but the one my parents used to share, watching game shows and talk shows and court shows, thinking it was quite possible that I would die of shame, that my mother would come home and find nothing but a girl-shaped puddle of embarrassment with, perhaps, some blond hair attached.

The school district hadn’t been able to fire him, but by the time he got out of jail, his job was gone.
Downsized,
they said, claiming that it had nothing to do with what had happened. I couldn’t blame them. Teachers could have a whiff of scandal in their histories—in my high school, there was a math teacher who’d left her husband for a shop instructor—but they couldn’t have hit a mother and child while driving drunk, and gone to jail for the crime.

With no job, he had no benefits. With no benefits, he couldn’t afford the hundreds of dollars of medications he took each month for the depression and anxiety they’d diagnosed in rehab, the conditions that I believed had started him drinking
in the first place. Without medicine, he started drinking again, and ordering painkillers from Mexico and Canada on the Internet, and eventually moving on to the stuff you can buy on the street. One of the first times I’d visited, looking underneath the bathroom sink for more toilet paper, I’d found a crack pipe, an airline-size vodka bottle split in half with a glass pipe duct-taped into the seam. I’d dropped it like it had burned me ... then I’d put it back.

I don’t make excuses. I know what he’s doing is illegal. I know that he’s a drain on taxpayers’ resources, that people who work hard at their jobs are the ones paying for his apartment and his food, for the cops who bust him and the counselors who hand him pamphlets about AA and methadone. I know that the radio talk-show shouters would hold him up as an example of everything wrong with America—how we’re entitled, how we’re weak, how instead of facing our troubles we lean on the crutches of chemicals. But he’s my father . . . and I don’t believe that it’s his fault. It’s not like he’s lazy, some privileged rich kid trying to escape from some imaginary heartache or chasing some feel-good high. He takes drugs so that he can feel something close to normal, and I believe that normal is all he’s after.

“You ready?” I asked. From his apartment complex, it’s a short trip to a strip mall, with a diner and a barbershop. I walked closer to the traffic. My dad walked beside me, his gait a little unsteady, his eyes on the ground.

We went to the barbershop, where I paid for my father to get a haircut, flipping through
Sports Illustrated
while the barber made small talk, then sprinkled talc on the back of his neck. Back in the apartment, I straightened up some more while he made coffee and read the paper. At one-thirty I handed him the plastic bag, my haul for the month.

The shaking in his hands had gotten worse, I saw, as he opened the bag and rummaged inside, pulling out four paperback
novels, a razor and a can of shaving cream, a jar of Kiehl’s moisturizer, and three bars of Dial soap, all of which I’d scavenged from campus. It was easy: my classmates were constantly leaving their buckets of toiletries in the bathrooms, their clothes in the dryer, their bookbags and backpacks everywhere. Sometimes I would slip into the boys’ bathroom and slip out with a razor and a canister of shaving cream in my bathrobe pocket, or I’d hang around the basement laundry room and wait until it was empty and I was alone with a dryer-full of men’s clothing. It wasn’t as if the boys at my school couldn’t spare a little soap or a copy of whatever book it was fashionable to tote around that semester. Because of my job, I knew who had money and who, like me, was on work-study, and I was careful to take stuff only from the ones I knew could just buy more, in the unlikely event that they even noticed what was missing. I was, I told myself, like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and entitled and careless, giving to my father, who needed it more than they did.

“What are you reading?” I asked him. This was a safe question, because he was always reading something.

“Great Expectations,”
he answered. “It’s spring.”

“Oh, I loved that one,” I said, not taking the bait, not mentioning that he’d taught that book every May. “Magwitch was my favorite.” Magwitch, Pip’s mysterious benefactor. Someday, I thought, I would like to be somebody’s mysterious benefactor, too; giving gifts to someone who didn’t know me; watching, from a distance, their delight.

I looked out the window as my father went into the back of the apartment, where I’d never been, to put the soap and shaving cream away. The kids who were playing soccer had taken their ball and gone home. Now there was a woman in a bright orange sari outside, standing behind a baby slumped in the plastic cradle of a swing. She pushed him back and forth as the chains creaked. The baby sat quietly, its brown fingers gripping the edge
of the black plastic, its face stoic, as if swinging was a punishment it was sentenced to endure. When I heard the honk of my mother’s horn, I couldn’t lie, even to myself, about the emotion that flooded through me. It was relief.

Twenty thousand dollars.
I thought about it as I ate pot pie, as I dried my hair in the bathroom, where the shelves were filled with products my mom had bought at cost at her salon.
Twenty thousand dollars,
I thought, lying on the bed. Twenty thousand dollars could pay for rehab. It could buy medicine. Twenty thousand dollars could save him . . . and, with that thought, I finally fell asleep.

M
y husband and I have fights, like any other couple: about money, about whether we’re spending too much time with my family and not enough with his, about whether or not to spank the boys—but we have always gotten along in the bedroom. From the first time I was close to Frank, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him, and feel his hands on me. I loved the muscles of his chest and his legs, the tightly curled hair on his chest and around his penis, the look of our hands entwined, his dark skin against my pale fingers.

That night I got the call from the clinic, saying that I’d been approved as a surrogate, I waited until the boys were sleeping. By nine o’clock they were both dead to the world, full of pizza and worn out from an afternoon of Skee-Ball and table hockey. I lit a candle, zapped the TV into silence, took Frank by the hand, and led him upstairs. In the bedroom he looked around, blinking. The bed was neatly made, the pillows plumped and smooth; the laundry and toys were stacked and folded in their baskets, and I was wearing a tight red Phillies nightshirt that ended about eight inches past my panties. I thought it made me look like a link of chorizo, but it was, I knew, his favorite.

Frank stuffed his hands into the pockets of his work pants and looked me over. “Did you get in another accident?”

“No, silly. I just missed you,” I said, not wanting to bring up that I’d only ever been in one accident, and it had happened because someone had parked too close to me at the supermarket. I knelt on the bed, resting my hands on his shoulders, so close that my shirt brushed against his chest. He untied his heavy black shoes, then took me in his arms, nuzzling my neck with his stubbly cheek as I giggled and squirmed against him.

“Well, hello there,” he said, brushing his palm against my stiff nipples.

“Hello,” I said, and kissed him, first lightly, then more deeply, opening my mouth and feeling his tongue slip inside like it was part of me, like it belonged there. “Hello.”

Frank had been a virgin when we’d started going out. I hadn’t learned that until later, of course. I’d slept with my first boyfriend, Brian Blundell, when I was fourteen, and then, after Brian dumped me for my friend Laurie Zimmer, I’d slept with Brian’s best friend, Fritz, although “slept with” wasn’t exactly right, because we’d had sex just once on the basement stairs and I wasn’t even sure it counted because I didn’t think he’d actually gotten himself inside of me before he finished.

Frank had wanted to wait. He was religious—he and his family were Baptists, and he went to church every Sunday morning and to Youth Fellowship meetings on Wednesday nights, and he’d taken a pledge to stay pure until he got married. His resolve lasted until our fifth date, when we were lying together on the long backseat of his father’s car, after forty-five minutes of kissing and grinding, after my bra and his shirt lay in a tangle on the floor and I was too turned on to feel self-conscious about my jiggly thighs or the stretch marks on my breasts. I’d pushed myself upright and straddled him, unzipping his jeans as he tried (not very hard) to push my hands away, and pulled his penis out of his boxer shorts, stroking it gently. Penises were so strange, in my limited experience, ugly, odd-looking, veiny things, but Frank’s
was smooth and brown, hot-skinned and silky, and it felt just right in my hand, like Goldilocks’s bowl of porridge, or the bed she’d eventually settled on: not too hot and not too cold, not too big and not too small. I rubbed it up and down experimentally, tugging the loose skin over the cap. “Oh, Annie,” he groaned. “We shouldn’t . . .” Then his arms were on my shoulders, and I was on my back, one hand in my purse, groping for the condoms I’d bought that afternoon at the drugstore, just in case.

Seven years later, in our bedroom in the house we’d bought, a room with high ceilings and bare floors and no furniture besides a mattress and the Tupperware bins where we kept our clothes, it was just as thrilling, just as sweet. I knew the place on the small of his back where he liked me to brush my fingertips, and he knew to put his mouth right up against my ear so I could hear his breathing change as his hips sped up, then stuttered to a stop. His sounds, his taste, the feel of his forearms in my hands, his head tucked into the hollow between my neck and shoulders, every inch of him was so familiar and so dear.

When we were done, he fell asleep almost instantly, sprawled facedown, naked on the bed. He had a better body than any of the movie stars in
People,
a muscular back that narrowed to a slender waist, a gorgeously curved bottom. Curled against him, breathing in the scent of his sweat and skin. I let myself doze for a few minutes. Then I settled the comforter over his back and collected my panties and nightshirt from the floor. Frank was so tired these days. He’d work an eight-hour shift at the scanner, examining the X-rays of carry-ons or beckoning travelers through the metal detectors, dealing with people who screamed and cursed and even spat at him, taking out their frustration with the nightmare air travel had become on the most convenient target. After work three days a week, he’d spend three hours more in a classroom, where he was training to do airplane maintenance. Those were union jobs; the pay started at thirty
dollars an hour, plus benefits and three weeks of paid vacation. We’d agreed that the time and money he spent was worth it. By the time he graduated the airlines would be hiring again, but it meant that he left the house before seven most mornings, and on nights he had classes he rarely came home before ten.

I crept into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher and surf the Internet, looking at surrogates’ stories, pricing home renovations and wall-to-wall carpet and new couches, trying to figure out how to continue the process I’d started upstairs, the marital magic of not only getting Frank to agree to let me be a surrogate but also making him believe the whole thing was his idea.

I thought about it while I drove Spencer to nursery school, while I swept the floors or weeded the garden or folded a load of laundry, imagining the feeling of being someone who could give instead of someone who was taking. I would picture the look of gratitude on the new mother’s face as I placed the baby in her arms.
Oh, thank you, Annie, we can never thank you enough.
It would be so different from the look I saw on our pastor’s face when I was rummaging through the church swap bins for winter boots or the one I imagined the credit-card representative wearing when I called to explain that our payment would be late again.

For weeks, I’d been working on Frank, but carefully, the way I’d learned to do it. Instead of bombarding him with requests or giving speeches, I’d casually slip something into a conversation: “Did I tell you Dana Swede from Vacation Bible School had a miscarriage? It’s her third, poor thing.” He’d give me a look and I’d ladle another scoop of tuna casserole onto his plate and tell him I was baking Dana a pie. When the actress from his favorite TV show was on the cover of
People
magazine with her baby twin girls—they’d been carried by a surrogate in Minnesota—I snuck the magazine out of the pediatrician’s office and onto our coffee table, where I could be sure he’d see it. When
Good Morning
America
did a piece on military wives making extra money carrying babies, I inched the volume up. When the toilet broke and we had to call the plumber, I allowed myself one small sigh over the bill, and I permitted myself another sigh when the doorknob on the front door came off—again—in my hands, and I’d had to send Frank Junior in through the kitchen window to open the door.