Lost Along the Way (10 page)

“Basically.”

“God, I could puke all over this,” Jane said. She pulled Cara down on the duvet next to her and handed her the pen. “Are you ready to do this?”

“I don't know what to say,” Cara admitted.

“Just write what I tell you,” Jane ordered. “I'd do it myself, but he'll know it's not your handwriting.”

“I don't think this is a good idea, either.”

“Yes it is. Now write.”

Cara silently shrugged again as Jane dictated her letter.

Dear Reed,

I know that you will think it's cowardly for me to write this letter, but I realize that caring about what you think is all
I've been doing for years, and it's time that it stops. I married you because I loved you and I thought you loved me. Maybe you once did—I don't know—but this is no longer a marriage, as evidenced by the fact that I fear you coming home right now and yelling at me for sitting on your bed. I need to tell you how sorry I am for everything. I'm sorry for making you put up with such an incompetent wife for as long as you have. I'm sorry that I don't work out as much as I should, that sometimes I don't change the sheets on time, and that I buy too many boxes of rice. I've done so many silly things over the years they're impossible to count. But out of all of those stupid things, I've finally realized that the stupidest thing I've ever done is wait this long to leave.

Now THAT was stupid.

Yours truly,

Cara

“Give me your necklace,” Jane said.

Cara stared at the note. “I'd never have the guts to say this stuff to him,” she said.

“Really? The old you never had a hard time sticking up for herself. The old you would have taken a tennis racket to his face and knocked him across the room. Maybe you don't think you'd have the guts to say it, but I promise you, once upon a time you did. That's the Cara I just channeled. Now give me the necklace.”

Jane took the pearls from Cara's hand and placed them next to the letter on the nightstand. “Let's go,” she said. Jane grabbed Cara's bag off the floor, and before Cara could panic and change her mind, she got her the hell out of the house.

M
eg decided to take the scenic route home and drive along the water. She was letting her mind wander as she went down the dark road that circled around the bend and along the ocean's edge when suddenly an old song came on the radio. Out of nowhere she felt the bile rise in her throat and her insides begin to buck and heave. She had no choice but to pull over or risk driving her car into a pylon. It really was amazing how hearing certain songs transported her back in time to a place she really didn't like to revisit. Whenever she heard Counting Crows's album
August and Everything After,
a sound track to her adolescent life, her mind immediately snapped back to the drives she used to take with Cara and Jane, where they'd obsess over the huge issues they had in their lives: whether the frozen yogurt place had failed to put sprinkles in the bottoms of their cones, whether the football team would make the playoffs, whether they should take the SAT
again.
They never would've predicted that things would turn out like this.

She lowered the passenger-side window so she could stare unobstructed at the fishing boat lights as they headed out to sea and listen to the boats still on their moorings, bobbing back and forth and side to side. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw herself the way she used to be—tangled hair, an unlined forehead, and the sparkle in her eye that signaled a spirit that had yet to be broken. She had taken all of it for granted because she was too naïve to realize that her beauty would eventually fade.
Jane and Cara used to tease her for looking like a little girl—but now she felt old and worn. The world had changed so much since then, and so had she. They had been friends in a world where you didn't have to take off your shoes at the airport and had to use pay phones to call home. It was a lifetime ago. She was so tired of treading water and drifting nowhere, alone. Just like the boats in the water in front of her, bobbing back and forth, and side to side.

When Meg left home for Vanderbilt University, her mother had told her to always act like a lady, to send letters home to her parents, to study hard, and to find a nice southern boy to marry. One of the main reasons Meg had wanted to go to school down south was to reconnect with her roots. While Meg had grown up on Long Island, her mother was a born-and-bred Virginia girl who was not at all happy when Meg's father's job relocated the family to New York. Meg's mom fought hard to maintain the traditions that were important to her, like church on Sundays, homemade peach pie in the summertime, and daughters who knew how to write a proper thank-you note. When Meg decided to go to school down south, her mother was beside herself with happiness. The idea of a southern boy intrigued Meg not because she had a problem with the northern guys she'd grown up with, but because the way her mother told it, a southern man was more refined and more gentlemanly than his northern brothers. Who didn't want a guy with good manners who would hold doors open and pull out her chair?

She remembered the first time she laid eyes on Steve, in the lobby of their freshman dorm. Right away she knew he was someone special. He was muscular and fit, with scruffy blond hair and bright blue eyes that were slightly afraid to look at her. He wore a navy-blue T-shirt and flip-flops, and had a notebook
tucked under his arm. Somehow she knew that he'd be loyal and loving and everything she could ever have hoped for in a boyfriend. They stood next to each other as they waited for the elevator, and she remembered so clearly thinking that she had to get to know him. She resisted the urge to nervously bite her cuticles while she said a silent prayer that he would say something,
anything
to her.

“Do you have the time?” he asked, which Meg quickly realized was a stupid question for someone who was wearing a watch to ask someone whose wrist was bare.

“I'm sorry. I don't,” she said with a shrug as they stepped on the elevator. “Hi,” she added, because it was all she could think of to say.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm Steve.”

“Meg,” she said. Then before she could say anything else, the elevator door opened on her floor and she stepped off into the hallway. As the doors began to close on his face, Meg did something that completely surprised her. She jammed her notebook in the quickly shrinking slice of space between them. “I was going to listen to some music for a while. Do you want to join me?” she asked, shocking herself with her courage.

“Oh yeah, sure. Why not?”

They married two years after graduation, but somehow no one worried that they were rushing into it. They very clearly were made for each other. No one ever had any doubts about that.

With some much-needed financial support from Steve's parents, they rented a little condo and Meg went to work testing recipes for a popular cooking magazine while Steve set about teaching poetry and going to school to get his Ph.D. They spent their early years of marriage saving money and dreaming of the
future, trying to decide how many kids to have. How would they know when there were enough little people in enough little chairs at the kitchen table?

Meg found out she was pregnant a few months after they were married and moved back north. Those first few weeks of her pregnancy had been a true honeymoon period, and the love she felt for Steve grew stronger and stronger. She couldn't wait to tell her friends that she was going to have a child. When they were in junior high Meg had been the president of the town babysitters' club. She spent most Saturdays playing with children in the park, or taking them for ice cream in the afternoons while their mothers got manicures. She used to tote Jane's brother, Gavin, around like he was her very own living Cabbage Patch Kid. Now it was her turn to have her own child, and she knew she'd never forget the look on Jane's and Cara's faces when she told them: surprise, love, and in some ways, shock that it was happening so fast. It killed her to keep the news to herself for as long as she did, but she was superstitious. When she looked back, she realized that should've been her first sign that something was wrong. Things shouldn't have been so easy.

Meg, Cara, and Jane were all still so close at that point, and pregnancy was the first real journey she wouldn't be able to travel with them. She'd be going through the next phase of her life alone.

July 2000

“Does this mean you won't hang out with us anymore?” Jane asked, her mouth still hanging open in shock. “Don't get me wrong. I'm pumped for you, I really am! But this kind of sucks for us. Who's going to come with me to happy hour now? Cara never
shows up for early drinks because she refuses to skip the gym.”

“That's what you're worried about? Happy hour?” Cara asked. “Ignore her, Meg! We're thrilled for you. Do you feel okay?”

Their reactions didn't surprise her—Jane worried about how this would affect their social life, and Cara worried about how it would affect Meg's health.

“I feel great! I don't have any morning sickness. I don't have any real cravings for anything, either. I'm tired, but I feel fine other than that!” she said.

“I read somewhere that pregnant women have really bad gas. If that's true, you can stop sitting next to me at the movies,” Jane quipped before reaching over to give Meg a huge congratulatory hug. “I think I'm going to love being an aunt. I will buy it really cute clothes and sneak it into R-rated movies when it's only fourteen.”

“Please stop calling my baby ‘it'!” Meg said.

“This is so great. I only wish we could do it together. Wouldn't it be fun to be pregnant at the same time? Now I feel like you're going forward in time or something and are going to have to report back to the rest of us what it's like on the other side,” Cara said.

It was exactly how Meg felt. The second she peed on the stick and it came up positive, she'd stopped living in the present and thought only of her future. She lived more in her head than she did in the actual world, dreaming about what would happen when Cara and Jane had kids of their own, how all of their offspring would be friends, maybe date each other. How Cara, Jane, and Meg would attend school functions, carpool, bake cupcakes for birthday parties, chaperone class trips, and watch their kids graduate from the chairs set up on the lawn of the high school. It
would be like living through the best years of life all over again, this time without the acne and braces.

“I promise I'll tell you everything,” Meg said. “All the things that no one ever talks about. I swear I will tell you, as long as you guys reassure me that I look skinny even when I've gained thirty pounds. I'll tell you the truth as long as you lie to me.”

“Seems fair,” Jane said as she looked at Cara.

“Totally,” Cara said.

Meg miscarried at the end of her first trimester. Women's intuition is a powerful thing, and one morning she woke up and knew something was wrong. She waited two days before she made an appointment because she couldn't bring herself to face it. Steve thought she was being crazy. They'd had their twelve-week ultrasound the week before and everything had been fine; there was no reason for her to worry that something had changed. But she knew. When her suspicions were confirmed there was stunned silence, then tears, then shock, then sadness, then anger, then acceptance. All the phases of the grieving process dutifully followed as she mourned the loss of the family she thought she had. Meg had dreamed of names and what the baby would look like, clothes she would buy from catalogs, and the rocking chair her mother had used when she was a baby, tucked away in the corner of the basement, patiently waiting until it could be refurbished so she could rock her own baby to sleep. What bothered Meg the most was that Cara and Jane tried to assuage her pain by promising that there would be other babies, that the best way to move on was to get pregnant again, to put the whole thing behind her. Look forward, they said to her one night while they sat on her couch together, as if a new baby would be a substitute for the one
she'd lost, like it was as replaceable as a bracelet, or an earring, or a set of car keys. She knew they didn't understand, and she didn't blame them, at least not then. That was when she believed that things happened for a reason.

When she got pregnant again she was cautious, but once again the girls were there to help quiet her nerves.

June 2001

“I knew it would happen again, see?” Cara said. “Your angel was coming. You just had to wait a little while for it.”

“Don't you guys think it's ironic that you spend your whole adult life worrying that one day you'll find out that you're pregnant, and then when you want to be, you spend all of your time worrying that you won't be? I mean, don't you think that's strange? Is God just fucking with us or what?” Jane asked, smearing blue cheese on an apple wedge. Meg wasn't even comfortable being in the presence of blue cheese, as it's high on the list of foods a pregnant woman is supposed to avoid. She had already lost one pregnancy. She wasn't about to risk losing another due to some bizarre incident involving cross-contamination with unpasteurized dairy products.

“I think I read somewhere that a woman can increase her chances of becoming pregnant if she eats broccoli rabe and shoves a pillow under her ass when she has sex. Is that what you guys did?” Jane joked.

“What the hell are you reading?” Cara asked. “It sounds like something your crazy Sicilian grandmother spewed out years ago that you somehow remembered. That's ridiculous.”

“Entirely possible. Then again, my crazy Sicilian grandmother had seven kids, so maybe she was onto something,” Jane said.

“Just don't stress out,” Cara ordered, trying to add some reasonable advice to the conversation. “You and Steve will get through this. Lord knows you aren't the first couple to endure some bumps in the fertility road.”

“I know. You're right,” Meg said. She believed it.

After the fourth miscarriage, Meg decided that she would embrace the very best the world had to offer in an East-meets-West attempt to conceive a healthy baby that she could carry to term. She endured countless blood tests, genetic tests, shots, and prenatal vitamins; acupuncture; diets that embraced gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, pesticide-free, preservative-free, and taste-free food; green tea, meditation, yoga, and decaf coffees. She had ultrasounds to check her ovaries, and her uterus, and her tubes, and anything else they could possibly check. She visited fertility specialists and tried Clomid, but even after all that, none of the doctors could explain why she couldn't seem to carry a baby to term. Meg put herself through two rounds of IVF, hoping that if the doctors selected only the strongest embryos, her chances would increase. Both rounds failed before her heart was ready to accept what her body had been trying to tell her for the better part of ten years: she wasn't meant to be a mother. The doctors weren't optimistic that the results would be different if they tried the procedure again, or that surrogacy would offer a solution. She and Steve had dipped their toes into the adoption waters but quickly discovered the hard way that there were no guarantees there, either. She was too tired to fight anymore, and it was then that she decided that if she wasn't going to be a mother, then she wasn't meant to be a wife.

Having children was all that she wanted, and her body had failed her. It had failed both of them. Why bother with the lipstick and the blowouts and the heels and the lacy lingerie if she wasn't a woman when it really mattered? She couldn't apologize to Steve for tricking him when she hadn't known. She couldn't apologize for all the years she'd wasted. All Meg could do was let her husband go and pray that he was able to find someone who could give him the family he deserved. She'd allow someone else to resurrect his dreams of coaching Little League and drinking out of
WORLD'S BEST DAD
coffee mugs. She'd allow him to find someone else to love—the second-best gift she could give him. It was horrifying for her to accept, but there was no way to ignore it anymore.