I'll Be You(83)

But his big sister saw us. She was a teenager in a yellow crop top, just out of pubescence but already self-aware enough to notice that two strangers were staring at her just a few feet away. She shaded her face with her hand, trying to figure out who was behind the tinted windows of the idling Mercedes.

Behind us, a car full of teenagers honked in annoyance, making our gawking even more obvious. The sister put a protective hand on her brother and tucked him safely behind her. The dropped hose splattered a torrent of water across her thighs. She held up her other hand and extended her middle finger at us. Fuck you.

“Busted,” Iona whispered, and kept driving.

“Circle back,” I commanded. She shot me a look. “Please? I barely got a glimpse.”

She said nothing but obediently turned around the block one last time. When we arrived back at the house, three minutes later, the teenage girl was in the front yard with an older blond woman, and the little boy had disappeared from sight. When the sister saw us coming around again, she jumped up and pointed out our car to her mother. Their heads swiveled in unison as we pulled up in front of their house.

“Dammit,” Iona swore, and hit the accelerator. The Mercedes’s engine growled and the car leapt forward. In the rearview mirror I could see the mother running out into the street to watch us go, framing our car in her cellphone viewfinder.

“Do you think she saw us? Could she identify us?”

“Not unless she got my license plate number, and then what’s she going to do with that? Call the police? We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Iona turned right and left, seemingly at random, until we ended up on a commercial street lined with boutiques and restaurants. She gave me a sideways look as we slowed to an idle in the traffic. “And?”

I was silent for a moment. “He had dimples,” I said dully. I didn’t realize that I’d started crying but when I touched my cheek my hand came away wet.

“There’s the pain you were looking for,” Iona said. “Embrace it. Confront it. What does it make you want? How can you channel that into something positive for yourself?”

I didn’t know how to answer this. The feelings I had weren’t positive at all. Instead, I looked out the window at the pastel-painted bungalows crowded one on top of another, the surfers thronging the sidewalk with sand-crusted boards under their arms. Convertibles cruised past, packed with teenagers in neon-bright beachwear, blasting pop music by sexy boy bands. The cerulean sky was pierced by an incandescent afternoon sun. Everything in a holiday mood. I blinked and shut my eyes against it all.

I wanted to turn the car around and drive back to those two children, to study their faces and run my hands over their sun-warmed skin and feel the texture of their blond hair. I wanted to hold them in my arms and see if they felt like mine. It was an impossibility, of course. A quixotic quest.

I wondered if Sam ever shared this longing. Was she ever curious about the children she created? Or was egg donation just like so many decisions she made: impulsive, haphazard, quickly forgotten? She’d always been so good at moving past the things she didn’t care to remember. Or blacking out so she wouldn’t have to remember. Another trait that we didn’t share. I supposed she was the lucky one, that way.

This whole endeavor was a terrible idea, I suddenly understood; a masochistic pursuit that was, inevitably, just making everything worse, manifesting my abstract longing for a baby into something frighteningly tangible and visceral. That baby. Our baby. My baby.

“Let’s go home,” I said to Iona. “I’m done.”

“But there’s just one more address on the list,” she protested. Her hands tightly gripped the brown leather padding of the steering wheel. “You should really see this through.”

“I’m not sure what else I hope to gain. And it’s such a drive to Arizona.”

Iona was quiet as we came to a stop at an intersection. A flood of families filled the crosswalk: children with zinc on their noses and sand pails clutched in their fists, parents burdened by the weight of coolers and beach chairs. Then she spoke.

“I was a lot like you three years ago. Just…stuck. I was an associate at a big law firm but the work was giving me ulcers and partnership kept not happening because they said I wasn’t ‘personable enough’ with clients. I was married to this woman, an artist type, who was critical of everything I did, angry at how much I worked. She wanted me to be more loving, more attentive, more present even as she also expected me to cover all our bills with my high-paying job. Then I met Dr. Cindy and she helped me realize how toxic the whole situation was, how everyone around me was just draining me dry, using me up and giving me nothing back in return. And so I left them both. The job. The relationship.” The light changed and she accelerated into the intersection, driving a little too fast considering all the foot traffic. “My wife came from money. She got her father to pay for the best divorce lawyer in Southern California and they took me to the cleaners. She walked away with the beachfront house, the art collection, the condo up in Mammoth.” Her face was oddly blank as she remembered this. “She didn’t even need any of it. She had family money, see? It was just her way of getting revenge for my leaving her. Another way to squeeze me dry.

“The easy thing to do would have been to slink away, nurse my wounds, let my ex win, and be the ‘bigger person,’ right? But Dr. Cindy talked me into reclaiming my control. We did what you and I are doing right now: confronted my failures of strength. We drove to my old home together and sat outside it, tailed my ex as she drove around, just watching her. Dr. Cindy made me address my emotions straight on and ask myself: What do I want most right now? Turns out that my ex was sleeping with her male studio assistant. They’d been fucking for months, apparently. She was bi and didn’t even tell me.”