Lost Along the Way(30)
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.