Wish Upon a Star (3 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “Look, I am totally exhausted. I’m going to grab a cab and head home.” I’m sure I said something else, something appropriate to end the conversation, but I wasn’t really paying attention. And I wasn’t looking for a cab, either. Instead, I continued walking uptown. I needed the time to think.

What was Sam going to say? We were both always complaining that we didn’t have time to live our lives. We had too many dinners delivered, grabbed too many quick meals out, blew through his lawyer salary because neither one of us had time to cook. We constantly complained about not having clean clothes, because we couldn’t manage to do laundry in the few spare minutes we scraped together each week. We waded through piles of magazines and snowdrifts of the
Times
because neither of us had time to straighten up the apartment.

I could change all that. I could manage our home life. I could be the perfect corporate wife—cook for us, clean for us—all while raising our child.

Maybe everything
did
happen for a reason. Maybe I’d lost out on the afternoon audition—the Mamet play, and every other show I’d auditioned for in the past year—because I was meant to start down this new path. Maybe I’d pushed my catering boss beyond forbearance for a reason. Maybe it was time to stop being a child, stop being a starry-eyed little girl who thought that she could ever succeed in the impossible world of the theater. Maybe it was time to be a grown-up. Someone practical. A wife.

A mother.

I was a little astonished at how well I was taking this. I mean, it was a shock and all. I never would have asked for such a sudden change, for such a complete transition in my life. But it was real. It was happening. And it made so much
sense
.

Until I tried to figure out how to tell Sam. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t actually pregnant. After all, it had only been six weeks. And I
was
on the pill. I should buy a test at the drugstore before I said anything.

Sam greeted me at the door of our first-floor apartment. (Hmm, the first floor would make it easier to get the baby’s stroller out to the street.) He nuzzled my neck as he closed the door behind me. I could smell beer on his breath. “You’re home early.”

I made some noncommittal noise as I let him lead me over to the living room couch. He’d been watching TV, a Yankees game. Two empty beer bottles sat on the coffee table, glinting next to a nearly full one. Sam nodded toward the collection. “Want a beer?”

I shook my head and shrugged out of my coat. When I collapsed into a corner of the couch, Sam lunged toward the television, howling at the blind ump who wouldn’t know a high strike if it knocked him on his ass. I waited for the batter to hit into a double play before I asked, “Did the Lindstrom case settle?”

He swore. “No. Bastard backed out at the last second. Said he couldn’t recommend settlement to his client without another ten mil to sweeten the pot.” He glanced at me, finally noticing the horror of my chartreuse-and-orange too-small T-shirt. He started to say something, but leered instead. “Well, at least Concerned has one thing going for it.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. I should tell him that I’d been fired. Tell him that this was the last “costume” I’d ever have to suffer through.

“What?” he asked, either because he realized I was upset, or because the baseball game had finally flickered to a commercial.

“I think I’m pregnant,” I said.

Wow. I really thought that I’d decided to wait. To have medical proof, something more than my wigged-out suspicion. Guess not.

He pulled away as if I’d spilled a tray of melted Knickerbocker Glories in his lap. “You’re kidding, right?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m two weeks late.”

“What the—” He jumped off the couch, eyeing me as if I had bubonic plague.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not contagious.”

“What?” His eyes widened. “You think this is funny? Don’t you realize I’m up for partner this year? I don’t have time for this!”

Time
for this? Like I’d just invited him to a party he didn’t want to attend? I forced my voice to stay calm. “Of course I realize you’re up for partner. But it’s okay. I mean, this might all be happening a little sooner than we’d planned, but—”

“A little sooner?” His voice was hoarse, as if I’d punched him in the gut. “How could you have been so irresponsible?”

That
lit a fire under me. I snapped, “Last time I checked, it took two people to make a baby.”

“Are you sure it’s mine?”

“Sam!” I was so shocked I could barely gasp his name. “I can’t believe you said that.”

His gaze settled on my belly, on the tight stretch of chartreuse and orange. He could still make everything all right. He could still apologize. We could still talk this out. But then he said, “I can’t believe it, either. I can’t believe any of this.”

He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. I heard him scramble in the foyer, grabbing for a jacket. I heard him turn the locks, fumbling them open as if his life depended on it. I heard him slam the door, as if he were fleeing a horde of raging demons.

And then I heard nothing but perfect silence inside our perfect brownstone apartment on our perfect block of the perfect Upper East Side.

I collapsed onto the couch and started to cry.

I KNEW I should be grateful. I should be lighting candles in some church, or writing checks to support orphans in a country I’d never heard of, or knitting bandages for lepers, or something. I was lucky. I really was.

I’d seen the real Sam. Now I knew how he truly felt, without any screen, any filter, any contrived social constraints. Sure, I’d startled him with my announcement, and he’d spoken brashly. But that wasn’t really what bothered me.

What bothered me was, he didn’t come back. He didn’t take a walk around the block to cool off, and then come home to discuss the situation, like a man. Instead, he avoided me, ignored me, treated me as if I were some make-believe monster that would just go away if he squinched his eyes shut and counted to one hundred.

He didn’t come home.

The following morning, I called in sick to the Mercer, even though I needed the shift. I needed every penny I could scrounge, now that Concerned Caterers was history.

I left a message with Amy, something mindless and falsely cheery, sneaked into her voice mail when I knew she was at class. No reason to drag her into the spectacular mess I’d made out of my life. She had enough on her mind, with Justin’s misbehavior, with Derek overseas, with spring semester classes drawing to a close.

I stared at the phone all day on Thursday, all Thursday night, willing Sam to call.

I’d handled things badly. Poor Sam had had a lousy day—he thought he’d settled the Lindstrom case only to find out that the damn thing was still going to trial. He’d had a couple of beers; he was angry about the baseball game. I hadn’t thought out my announcement. I should have cushioned the news for him.

Full of remorse, I finally tried to reach him at his office on Friday. His secretary picked up, and clouds of butterflies swarmed in my belly, worse than any audition jitters I’d ever experienced. “One moment please,” she said with a formality that terrified me. “Let me see if he’s in his office.” I caught my breath, ready to apologize to Sam for dropping such momentous news in his lap without warning, ready to ask him to come home, to talk things through. “I’m sorry,” the secretary said a minute later, so smoothly that I knew she was lying. “He’s stepped away from his desk.”

Stepped away. Yeah, right. Just like he’d stepped away on Wednesday night.

I didn’t leave a message.

Friday night, I pictured him hanging out with his friends, drinking beer, playing pool. He was probably crashing on someone’s couch, reliving his carefree college days, pretending he was still in Alpha Beta Whatever. Could he really be seven years
older
than I was? I got angrier and angrier as I stared at mindless TV. I couldn’t bring myself to climb the stairs to our bedroom. Couldn’t imagine sleeping in our rumpled king-size bed.

The thing was, I felt like I’d done all this before. Not the “I’m pregnant” stuff—that was a new one for me. But the “I need to get this guy to pay attention to me” stuff. The “why won’t he call me, when I desperately want to talk to him” stuff. The “I’ll change my life around, do whatever it takes to make this relationship work” stuff.

That’s just who I was. Having a boyfriend was important to me—it made me feel, I don’t know, centered. Complete. Balanced. I
always
had a boyfriend. Even if he wasn’t the sort of guy that Amy approved of, even if he turned out not to be right for me…

The guys in my life had shaped who I was, starting way back in junior high, when I tried out for the school play because I had a crush on the guy who was a shoo-in for the lead. I never would have discovered my love of acting, if it hadn’t been for Corey… Corey… I couldn’t remember his last name. But I would never forget that adrenaline-charged rush of excitement when he gave me a lanyard to wear all of eighth grade spring. At least, until he ended up with his own crush, on Alicia Gold.
Her
last name I remembered. Corey had asked for his lanyard back so that he could give it to Alicia.

And I remembered Amy smoothing my hair while I sobbed out my frustration. Amy, telling me that no guy was worth being that upset. Amy, who just didn’t understand. Who would never understand. Amy, who had probably
never
lost herself in the crazy, dizzy excitement of a new crush. My sister was far too practical for that. She’d married Derek, her high school sweetheart, and I was pretty sure she couldn’t even remember what it was like to be head-over-heels crazy about a new guy.

Saturday morning, I woke up on Sam’s couch, curled into a tight knot, tangled in a crocheted afghan. At first, I thought the ache in my belly was from my awkward position. I soon realized, though, that I had an old-fashioned case of cramps. Two weeks late, but cramps all the same. Aunt Flo had returned, and she was a bad-tempered bitch. I must have been late because I’d been so stressed about the Mamet audition. Mamet, and my entire nonexistent future as an actress.

After I showered, I dry-swallowed a couple of Motrin, staring at Sam’s masculine clutter in the bathroom. Shaving cream, a dirty razor, a toothbrush that should have been replaced months before. I shuffled into the bedroom and saw his dirty clothes piled in a corner—one scruffy mound for the Laundromat and another for the dry cleaner. I tugged on my rattiest sweatshirt, completing my glamorous outfit with bleach-stained sweatpants.

I shuffled into the kitchen and put on water for tea. As I waited for the kettle to shriek, I looked around the room. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. A packet of Pop-Tarts was ripped open, the uneaten pastry left to petrify. A banana was well on its way to turning black.

What was I doing here? What had I possibly been thinking when I spun out my June Cleaver/Donna Reed fantasy of becoming a happy housewife, a loving stay-at-home mom? Why had I been so quick to trade in my future acting career?

Embarrassed by the fantasy I’d spun out the very first second I thought that I was pregnant, I took my time pouring boiling water into a mug. I brewed my Irish Breakfast strong enough to strip the paint from our tiny kitchen’s walls and forced myself to think about the past few months with Sam.

When was the last time that we’d really talked to each other? We’d become like a pair of toddlers, playing next to each other in some elaborate gameroom. And, like a toddler, when Sam had felt threatened by my announcement, he’d thrown a tantrum. And, like a toddler, he hadn’t apologized. Hadn’t even made an effort to apologize. Wasn’t, I was now pretty sure, ever
going
to apologize.

And that was the guy I’d been ready to base my entire future life on? When had I lost so much faith in myself? When had I decided that my own happiness was worth so little?

I sipped my tea and was shocked to realize that it had gone stone cold. How long had I been sitting here at the counter, replaying Sam’s rejection?

Enough.

I headed back to the bedroom and excavated my suitcase and a duffel bag from the back of the closet. I scooped my things out of the tallboy dresser, tossed in my dresses, a couple of skirts, my blouses. Shoes. Socks and underwear. It took me five minutes to collect my stuff from the bathroom, to circle back to the kitchen for my favorite mug.

That was it.

Did I really have so few possessions? I’d been an idiot to give away my college standbys when I moved in with Sam. I thought I’d been so clever to escape from my blocky futon, my chipped dishes and featherweight silverware, my two-seater kitchen table with the permanently splayed legs.

Well, they were long gone now. And I still had to get a roof over my head. I picked up my phone and punched in Amy’s number. “Hey,” I said, when she answered. “Want some company?”

* * *

Amy was wonderful about everything. She literally greeted me with open arms. Justin whined that I was turning him out of his bedroom, but Justin whined about everything, so I didn’t worry too much.

It had taken me over two hours to get to Amy’s place. She lived in New Brunswick, in New Jersey. Unable to face the crosstown hike to the bus terminal, I had splurged on a cab to Port Authority. I just missed a bus, so I had to wait an hour, and then I had a solid twenty-minute walk from the stop to Amy’s little house.

By the time I wrestled my suitcase and duffel bag up her front steps, I already doubted my decision to seek refuge there. It was so far from the city. So far from my life.

Sure, Concerned Catering and I had parted ways, but I still had my job at the Mercer. And I was going to attend more auditions—I’d made that vow on the bus. Landing a real role was more important to me than ever. The first thing I’d do when I was near a computer was check out the leads on ShowTalk, a local Web site devoted to all things theatrical in New York. That would ground me. It would remind me that I belonged on Broadway, that I could be more than Sam’s (ex-)girlfriend, more than a pitiful failure at every single thing I’d tried since graduation.