I'll Be You(81)

Iona had never been to my house before. I watched as she drifted away from me and across the living room, picking up objects—a crystal vase, a decorative tray—to examine them with an assessing eye. White sofas from Restoration Hardware, a pair of vintage armchairs that I had reupholstered in leather, a burl wood coffee table that gleamed with polish. She made a beeline for the marble fireplace, where photos were displayed in silver frames on the mantel: a wedding portrait, Sam and me in elementary school, a black-and-white snapshot of our parents on their honeymoon. She studied these with avid curiosity.

“Your home is lovely,” she said. “I can tell you’ve put a lot of work into it. And so big. How many square feet?”

“Thirty-three hundred.”

She whistled. “You’ll downsize now that Chuck’s gone, I assume?”

I hadn’t considered that. Yes, my home had become a repository of curdled memories, but I still couldn’t imagine leaving. “Maybe,” I said slowly. “It is a lot of house for one person.”

Iona nodded thoughtfully. She pulled a chocolate cupcake out of the bakery bag and held it out to me, then laughed when I hesitated. “Oh, come on. It’s a cupcake. Who are you going to get in trouble with? Me?”

I took a hesitant bite, and then I was cramming the whole thing in my mouth, gulping it so fast that crumbs cascaded down my front and scattered across the Persian rug. When was the last time I’d eaten? A wave of dizziness came over me, a queasy sugar shake.

Iona sat down beside me. She had a cupcake, too, and she took a small nibble of it—a token gesture of solidarity—before setting it gently down on a stack of Elle Decor magazines on the coffee table.

“Don’t you think that today is a good day to get closure on all fronts?” she asked. She was sitting so close to me that her thigh was pressing against mine. I could smell the frosting on her breath.

“What do you mean?”

The look she gave me was a little contemptuous, a little indulgent. “You know what I mean. You never followed up on those addresses. You went to all that trouble to pretend to be your sister, you stepped right out of your comfort zone, and you haven’t done anything about it since.”

I glanced at the console, where the list was hidden in a manila folder inside a locked drawer. It’s easy to pretend that drawers full of ugly things don’t exist if you simply refuse to open them. “I guess…I just think it might be painful to see those children in person. It’s hard enough to know that they exist at all.”

“Pain means you’re growing. Nothing good ever comes from a life that’s easy. Right? Easy makes you soft and vulnerable, it makes you lazy. Painful is confrontation, it’s growth, it’s rebirth.”

I sucked my teeth, tasting the pasty chocolate still caked on my gums. The old Elli would have spent another week in bed in her bathrobe, eating ice cream and watching Real Housewives reruns. The new Elli was supposed to face her painful new reality, gird herself like a warrior going back into battle to face an even more terrifying foe. It felt exhausting.

“How about this?” Iona said. She put an arm around me and pulled me in close, her wiry forearm—muscle over bone, nothing more—like a clamp on my side. “I’ll go with you. We’ll do it together. I won’t make you confront this alone.”

I wavered. Her arm pressed against my back, nudging me forward on the seat. “OK,” I said. My voice sounded very small.

“Great!” She jumped up, radiant with victory, the cupcake forgotten on the coffee table. She looked down at me, at my fuzzy bathrobe covered in crumbs, and then grabbed my hands, pulling me upright. “But first, let’s get you dressed.”



* * *



—

We parked Iona’s car just down the street from a Mediterranean McMansion, a hulking home on a quiet street high in the hills of Burbank. A row of wilting begonias lined the home’s front drive, the front door framed by stands of white calla lilies going brown with drought. I idly imagined picking the lilies, mixing them with white ranunculus and jasmine, a spray of fern for color and texture. Brainstorming floral arrangements was a pleasant distraction from thinking too hard about what I was actually doing here: monitoring a stranger’s front door, waiting for a glimpse of a niece or nephew that I wasn’t totally sure even existed.

Stalker. I tried the word on for size. You’re a stalker. A creep. But mostly I felt alive with a giddy anticipation, one that made my fingers vibrate and my breath come hard. I was going to see a child that came from my genes. I couldn’t deny that it was exciting to simply give in to that longing, without any concern about logic or consequence. Something wild and transgressive was growing within me—an impulsive id that demanded to be fed—and I wondered if this was what Sam felt like when she went on a bender.

As we sat there, just staring at the house, Iona kept up a distracting patter of instructive encouragement. “Think of this as an emotional stakeout,” she said. “We’ll just sit in the car until you get a glimpse of the child, enough to bear witness to the emotions that this brings up in you and dispel them.”

Iona’s car was a heavy Mercedes sedan in pale gold with leather interior, and I wondered just how much GenFem was paying her to be a Mentor. Apparently quite a lot, judging by the buttery scent of the leather. Outside it was so hot that the view of the valley below us shimmered like a mirage, but inside the car the air-conditioning was turned on high, blowing icy Freon straight into my face. I leaned my cheek against the window, feeling the heat of the sun through the cold glass, a disconcerting contrast.