Jennifer Weiner - Then Came You

“Did you tell him?” Bettina asked. Every drop of culture, of private schooling and summers in the Hamptons, was gone from her voice. She sounded as common as my own mother as she shrieked. “Did he know you’d been arrested? Did he know that you were still married when you married him?”

My body sagged against the couch. Blood thundered in my ears, and when I found my voice it was a raspy whisper.

“What are you talking about? I was. . we got…” Divorced, I wanted to say, but Bettina started talking first.

“I hired a detective. I knew you were a liar the first time I saw you. I just didn’t know how bad it was.”

I managed to straighten the pile of pages into a stack. My hands were steady under Bettina’s glare, and my eyes were dry. “Your father didn’t know about any of that. All he knew was that I loved him.”

“Some love,” said Bettina. “How could he have loved you? He didn’t know what you were.” She smiled at me, a horrible, humorless grin. “You thought you’d waltz in here and fuck him to death and get everything. Well, you were wrong, Samantha. You’re not getting shit. I’m going to tell everyone.” She crossed the room in three swift steps and snatched the folder out of my hand. “Everyone. I’m going to ruin you.”

The door slammed shut. I was alone.

I sat for a minute, shaking, numb, breathless, forcing myself to think. What could she do to me? And what would it matter? I’d lost my love. I hadn’t lost my home yet, but that would be coming soon. And there’d be a baby. A baby and no Marcus. In that moment, I was eighteen again, eighteen and trapped and terrified, with no resources, no family, eighteen and barefoot on the black-and-white tiled floor of my first husband’s apartment, shaking so hard that the plus sign on the pregnancy test between my fingers was a blur, and the only words I could think were I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

In the dressing room, I flipped through the hangers until I found the jeans I wanted, a pair left over from my pre-Marcus life, dark-rinsed, worn through at the knee. I put on one of his Tshirts — freshly washed and folded, of course, but I imagined it still retained the ghost of his scent, his cologne and his skin — and a soft gray wool cardigan on top. He is gone, I told myself. He’ll never come through the door again, never kiss me in bed, never pull out a chair for me at dinner, never pull my head into his lap while we’re watching TV. He’ll never see our baby. I can’t, I thought, with the frantic desperation I’d felt as a teenager, all those years ago. I can’t.

Our luggage was kept in specially built shelves along one of the closet’s shorter walls. I took a duffel bag, a simple thing made of coffee-colored leather. It took me ten minutes to fill it up with jeans and Tshirts, underwear and bras, a set of workout clothes, a pair of sneakers, a toothbrush, and a comb.

In the media room, I sat at Marcus’s desk, flipped open my laptop, and logged onto the travel site I used. There, I bought a direct flight from Philadelphia to Puerto Vallarta, leaving the next morning. A ticket from Newark to Los Angeles, leaving an hour later. From Boston to the Bahamas. From LaGuardia to Vancouver. From Hartford to Paris. My fingers flew. The telephone trilled. Fraud protection. My friends at American Express were concerned about suspicious charges. I assured them that the card was in my possession, that all of the charges were legitimate. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” the pleasant-voiced customer service representative asked, and I told her, nicely, that I was all set.

I bought myself three more tickets — Frankfurt, London, and Lexington, Kentucky. Then I picked up my bag, hailed a cab, and slid into the backseat. “Newark airport,” I said, and started to run.

BETTINA

I don’t understand,” I said, for what felt like the sixteenth time that morning. I was sitting at a table in a conference room in my father’s office with Jeff, my father’s lawyer, at my side and my father’s baby, with her wrinkled rosebud of a face, in a car seat on the floor beside me. I could have left it—her, I reminded myself, her—at home, with the doula, but I wanted her with me as a kind of visual punctuation, a reminder to the assembled attorneys of what had happened, and the situation I was in.

On the other side of the table was Leslie Stalling, director of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, who’d brought a lawyer of her own. There was an urn of coffee, a platter of pastries, and a bowl of fruit on a table against one wall, but no one had touched any of it. Both lawyers had briefcases at their sides and legal pads in their laps, and both had set digital tape recorders out on the table. Instead of a tape recorder or a notebook, Leslie, a fit middle-aged woman with bright blond hair, a strand of pearls, and a well-cut taupe suit, had a box of tissues in her lap. She wasn’t crying, but she looked like she might start at any moment.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to me. “In all the years of operating the clinic, we’ve never had a situation like this.”

“I get that.” How could I not? She’d said that line, or some variation of it, at least a dozen times: In all my years of running the clinic, in all my years of working with infertile women, in all my years on the planet I’ve never seen a situation like this.

I believed her. Who could have even imagined a situation like this one? My father, the biological father of the baby, was dead. My stepmother, the legal mother (technically, she would become the mother as soon as she signed the baby’s birth certificate), had disappeared without bothering even to make an appearance at her beloved’s funeral or to return for her child’s birth. Which meant that, according to a document the two of them had signed that I’d never known about, I was, now that I’d consented, the guardian of my newborn half-sibling. I would be responsible for raising it. Her. Whatever. It was astonishing. One day I’d been a regular twenty-four-year-old, living in my first apartment, working at my first job, waking up, getting dressed, swiping my card through the subway turnstile, standing on a train with the swaying, iPodded worker bees, thinking about whether the guy I’d been spending all my weekends with was my boyfriend if I’d only kissed him once. . then the phone rings and there’s someone I’d never met on the other end of the line, saying that I was a mother.

It had taken me a while to realize that India was actually gone. The first clue came two days after my father’s death, when the funeral home called to tell me that no one had brought them clothes for him to wear in his coffin. “Have you heard from his wife?” I’d asked, and the receptionist said that, regrettably, they had been unable to reach her. I took the subway to their apartment. “Hey, Ricky,” I said to the day doorman, a man I’d known since I’d learned to walk in the lobby. “Have you seen Mrs. Croft around?” It still cut to call her Mrs. Croft — that was, after all, my mother’s name — but it was better than “my stepmother” or “Dad’s new sidepiece.”

“Not since the day your father passed,” he said.

I filed that away and took the elevator upstairs. The apartment was as spotless as always. The chef was wiping down the counters in the kitchen; one maid was dusting in the living room and the other was ironing sheets in the laundry room. But there was no sign of India.

In my father’s dressing room, I picked out a navy-blue suit and a red-and-gold tie, then added a white button-down shirt with his initials monogrammed at the cuff; boxer shorts and an undershirt; socks and a pair of glossy black loafers, and zipped everything into a garment bag. I had already found the picture I wanted, a shot of the five of us when Trey and Tommy and I were little and my mother was still around, posing in front of the Grand Canyon. I would tuck it in the pocket of his suit jacket, so it would be with him, wherever he was going.

I tried to find India. I called and called, leaving voice mails, sending e-mails, pestering her assistant right up until the morning of the service, at which point it was too obvious to ignore: she was gone. The minister didn’t mention it, delivering a pleasant and generic eulogy that mentioned my father’s loved ones without naming them. I sat in the front row of the church, against the hard-backed pew. Where had she gone? What was she planning? And what would happen if she didn’t come back before the baby was born?

After the service — small, just for the family — everyone came back to the apartment. Someone, probably Paul, had arranged for food and a waitstaff, strangers in white shirts and black pants or skirts discretely moving through the room holding platters or picking up empty plates and glasses. I stood by the front door, next to a girl who’d been hired to hang coats on the rolling wire coat racks my mother had bought for occasions like these — well, not like this exactly, but any time we hosted more than a few dozen people — accepting condolences and answering questions. No, we haven’t seen her. No, we’ve been unable to reach her. No, I have no idea where she went.

After enduring an hour of this, I’d gotten Tommy to take my place. Telling myself that I wasn’t snooping but investigating, I slipped into their bedroom and, then, to India’s dressing room. India had kept the dove-gray walls and the ivory carpets and crown moldings, but she’d reupholstered my mother’s zebra-print chair in pink toile and had replaced the antique gold-framed mirror with something high-tech and fancy, circled by pink-tinted bulbs. The better to see your Botox in, I thought, which was a little unfair because before she’d espoused the principles of spirituality and a vegan diet, my mom had shot her share of fillers.

I trailed my finger along the sleeves of India’s blouses, the tweeds and cottons of her skirts, the silk and wool of her sweaters. I considered the sequined and beaded evening gowns, each in its own zippered plastic bag. It would be impossible to figure out whether anything was missing. She could have packed for a long weekend or a week away or a three-week cruise that would take her from Alaska to the tropics, and I’d never be able to tell from the contents of her closet. There was simply too much stuff. Her laptop, which I found in the media room, was what told the story.

At first I’d tried to open her inbox, but it was locked and password protected, and, after it rejected MARCUS as a password, I’d quit trying. But her Internet browser opened with a single click, and she hadn’t erased her history.

“Oh my God.” I hurried back into the living room, dodging a few well-meaning aunts and cousins and my father’s assistants weeping in the corner, and found Darren, who was eating cocktail shrimp and staring out the window, down at the park.

He perked up when he saw me. “Hey, Bettina.”

“I need to show you something,” I told him, and took his hand and led him to the media room, where I’d left her laptop open.

“She bought tickets to Mexico. . and Los Angeles. . and the Bahamas. . and Vancouver. . and Paris. . and Kentucky. All the flights left four days ago.”

He cut and pasted the information and emailed it to himself. “I can call the airlines, ask if she made the flights.”

“So we’ll know where she went.”

“But not where she is. I mean, say she went to Topeka. She could have bought a ticket in the airport from there to Los Angeles. Or Paris. Or Cancun. She could be. .”

“… anywhere by now,” I said. The house phone rang. A minute later, the housekeeper, looking apologetic, was at my side.

“Missy Bettina? Sorry to interrupt, but this lady’s been calling for Mrs. Croft. She says it’s important.”

I lifted the phone to my ear. “Yes?”

That was when I first spoke to Leslie Stalling of the Princeton Fertility Clinic. She apologized for bothering me during such a difficult time. She told me she was sorry to be adding to my worry and stress. Then she said it was imperative that she get in touch with India Croft.

“You and me both, sister,” I said. Leslie Stalling sucked in her breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We haven’t seen or heard from her in days, and now I’m here at my father’s house, and I think. . it’s kind of unbelievable, really, but it’s looking like she left town.”

“Oh, dear,” Leslie Stallings said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She paused, a little three-second break to serve as a transition between life as I’d known it, ending forever, and life with a baby beginning. Then she’d told me about the arrangements my father and India had made.