The Friends We Keep(50)

Evvie wrapped the tests in toilet paper and put them in her bag. She couldn’t quite believe it and knew she’d have to keep looking at them to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

Or was it a nightmare? She washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror, thinking that she wasn’t ready for a baby, that she hadn’t ever thought about this. But even as those thoughts flitted through her mind, she saw that she was smiling, and she wrapped her arms around herself and hugged herself, and it was the first time in five weeks she had felt happy.

“Thank God for that,” said the fashion editor when she walked back in. “You’ve reset?”

Evvie had nodded, and the rest of the photo shoot went swimmingly.



* * *



? ? ?

She wouldn’t be able to tell Ben. Obviously she couldn’t hide a baby from Maggie, even though she was barely in touch with her these days, but she could play with the dates, tell everyone the baby came early, or late, or something to throw Ben off ever knowing. She would figure it out. And she was in New York, far away from Somerset, where Maggie and Ben were living. No one would know. She would keep the father a secret from everyone, say it was just a one-night stand.

As she had anticipated, Ben phoned her, the first time they had spoken since she left his hotel room nine months before.

“Is it mine?” he asked, his voice filled with a mixture of hope and fear.

“It isn’t,” she said. “I’m so sorry. The baby is a month early. I had a boyfriend when we . . . met . . . in New York. I’ve checked the dates. I’m absolutely sure.”

Ben was skeptical. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” she lied, “quite apart from the dates not matching up, I had my period right after you left. It’s a physical impossibility. I’m sorry.”

Ben had sighed with what sounded a little like relief, a little like disappointment. “Thank God,” he said finally. “I couldn’t bear it if . . .”

“It’s definitely not yours,” she said, with all the conviction she could muster. It was fine, she told herself. Because she’d make sure Ben never saw the baby.

Jack was the image of Ben. From the moment he was born, it was like looking at a tiny Ben. When she sent out announcement cards, she made sure it was an artful shot of Jack swaddled in a blanket, fast asleep, his head turned so you could barely make out his features, let alone what he looked like.

She deliberately removed herself from her friends. She had the odd phone call with Topher, but allowed barely anything with Maggie. She let the friendships drift, immersing herself in raising Jack, in a love that was unlike anything she had ever known, unlike even the love she had for Ben.

Her love for Jack was all-consuming, filling a hole she had been unaware of having. Over time, she stopped thinking of him as a miniature Ben, but simply as Jack, remembering only that he would never be able to meet her old friends, and she would never be able to do what everyone she knew was doing, sending Christmas cards with pictures of their children.

The older Jack grew, the more like Ben he became. He had Evvie’s coloring, her hands and feet, but everything else was Ben. Everything else had to be kept a secret. Maggie could never know, and so, over time, their friendship became birthday cards and Christmas cards, then just Christmas cards (generic, no pictures of children anywhere in sight), and then, nothing at all.





twenty-two


- 1999 -



Topher opened the medicine cabinet and avoided looking at the left side. Larry’s razor was still there, his deodorant, his cologne. Occasionally, when Topher was feeling particularly morbid, he would pry off the lid of the cologne and inhale deeply, allowing himself to be swept back in time, but it had been two years since Larry died, and he was trying to do it less. He couldn’t bring himself to clean it out though. Not quite. Larry’s pill bottles were still there, the cocktail of drugs they had prayed would work, Crixovan, Viracept, the protease inhibitors that were seeing incredible results, but not for Larry.

He had been the picture of health, until a small red lesion popped up on his inner thigh. They both pretended it was nothing, until more appeared, and within a few months Larry was a hollow-eyed skeletal shadow of his former self, dying in Topher’s arms in a quarantined section of the hospital.

His funeral was mobbed by everyone who had ever been to his gym, and many who hadn’t. Larry had been beloved by everyone who knew him.

Topher pulled out his own deodorant and examined himself in the mirror. How lucky he was to have escaped; God knows which gods exactly were looking out for him, but someone, some of them, had to have been.

Topher looked good, as he should, for a soap opera star at the top of his game. He had just been offered a part in a movie with another up-and-coming actress, Kate Hudson. His agent was convinced this would be the beginning of his transition from soap opera star to proper superstardom.

But Topher wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to move to Los Angeles and give up the relative anonymity he had in New York. Here, people recognized him, but they left him alone. He liked walking everywhere, couldn’t imagine driving in LA, even though he had great friends there, friends whose wooden house built into a hillside in Laurel Canyon was one of his most favorite places in the world.

He didn’t think he wanted superstardom. He loved being on the soap, but it was grueling, and every day felt much the same. If anything, he thought he might like to try theater, and where better than New York for theater? He turned to look approvingly at the muscles in his back. He hadn’t been back to Muscleman since Larry died. He went to the cheap gym on the next block, and pushed his body to its limits in a bid to assuage his grief.