Between Friends (5 page)

She took the Thai and put it in the refrigerator for later, answering questions about her day, amazed her voice wasn’t shaking. That was a good sign.

Maybe she wasn’t as scared as she thought.

I never thought I missed southwest Florida until I got there. Within twenty minutes of leaving, I’d forgotten it, looking forward to my destination. But there was always a moment on my return in which I felt such relief that I felt a watery weakness in my knees.

The timing of the moment itself varied. If I had a window seat, it was when we were low enough that I caught sight of the coast-line. It made no difference if it was the west coast, skidding along the length of Florida like a slide, or the east coast, cutting across the tip like a knife through a finger. I’d see the canals, the unmistakable, impenetrable thickets of palmettos and live oaks, and would be grateful that I was sitting down.

If I had an aisle seat, it wasn’t until they opened the cabin door and the humidity rushed in, filling my lungs with the salty softness of Florida air, and I would have to hold on to the seat in front of me to stand.

I loved Seattle, and I loved Africa, and India, and Holland, but it was the air of southwest Florida that my body embraced, its cells open fully only for it, as if holding their walls rigid until the right latitude and longitude were crossed and then becoming the loose, semipermeable things they were meant to be.

It caught me by surprise every time, and this time was no different. I was exhausted by the trip. It was always an exhausting trip—the leg from Santiago to Miami alone was nine hours—but this time I was especially tired. The steward asked me if I was feeling all right halfway through the flight, after my seventh trip to the bathroom.

I wasn’t sure what he’d have done if I’d said I wasn’t. That, in fact, I thought my kidneys might be failing
right then
, and did he happen to have one to spare?

But then we touched down in Ft. Myers, and despite my exhaustion, that air hit me and I
breathed
, as if for the first time in years.

I’d left the taxi window down all the way down to Naples. The driver didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was irritated, that he was sweating in the heat and couldn’t wait to drop me off. Which was fine, though I regretted it slightly when he left me in the driveway with all my bags, and I realized I was going to have to wrestle with the storm-shuttered door by myself.

I sat on the stoop and dumped half of my belongings out, looking for the little key. I finally found it in my makeup bag, and once I was in the house, dim as twilight though it was early afternoon, I folded myself into the tweedy sectional sofa and called Drew.

“Cora the Explora,” he answered, my name obviously coming up on his Caller ID. “Where are you?” he asked, his voice full of smile and love and concern.

“I had a little change of plans,” I said, trying to keep my own tone light, trying to keep my exhaustion out of it.

But he was instantly on guard. It wasn’t going to go well.

“What change of plans?”

“I’m in Naples,” I said.

“Florida?” he asked. Not as ridiculous a question as it might first seem. In my past, yes, I might have actually changed plans and flown to Italy.

“Yes,” I said, forgetting about the deep breath of humid air, forgetting about the beach a few blocks away that I was aching to get to, forgetting about Ali and the things I had to tell her, the things I had to worry her with. And Letty, I forgot about Letty, just for a moment. I closed my eyes and heard him breathe on the opposite side of the United States and wondered if I’d made the right decision after all.

“And?” he asked.

That hurt, the brevity of that single word. What Drew and I had always had was words. We spoke more than the same language; we spoke all of the same languages. Upon first meeting each other, neither of us could shut up, and yet we never spoke over each other. We both had profound things to say; we sounded brilliant together. It was not until later, when we’d expressed interest in each other through mutual friends, that we’d discovered that neither of us were particularly talkative people by nature.

But now he was taking that away from me, and I deserved the punishment, but it hurt nonetheless. Drew was rarely cruel. Even when I’d moved out months ago, unable to take the panic that had infiltrated our relationship because of my disease, he had been kind. It hadn’t been the first time we’d broken up, but we both knew it was the last time, and we were gentle with each other over it. Had we lost our conversation, the basis of our friendship, I would have been heartbroken.

But he had, instead, simply moved into the slot I had always reserved for Ali, empty then only because I had not been ready to tell her everything I had to tell her, still trying to understand it myself. Drew had been, for the past six months, my Ali replacement.

“I had to, Drew,” I said softly. “I have to talk to Ali. I can’t let something happen without talking to her, warning her.”

“There’s nothing to warn her about.”

“You don’t know that. I don’t know that. Dr. Cho doesn’t know that. I owe it to her. And I owe it to Letty, too. And I want . . .” I stopped, nervous about the fact that I was about to say it out loud.

“You want what, Cor? Everything’s set up here. Everything is ready to go for you. Your classes are set, your access operation is set. Dr. Cho went to a lot of trouble—”

“I want to know her,” I said, the admission catching in my throat. “This is my only chance.”

“No,” he said, raising his voice, determined to fix me. “No, it’s not your only chance. Dammit, Cora—” He stopped and I could hear him quickly typing on his keyboard. “There’s a flight tomorrow from Ft. Myers, connects in Atlanta, that would put you here midafternoon. I’m going to book it, and I want you on it,” he said, his fingers tapping.

“No.”

“This isn’t negotiable, Cora. I will be there tomorrow at three. I want to see you get off that plane.”

“I won’t be there, Drew. Please don’t make this harder for me than it already is,” I pleaded. I’ve never pleaded with a man before in my life. With any other man I would have been disgusted. My first mother pleaded with men. It had disgusted me throughout my childhood, and she stopped pleading when I was eight, when she pleaded with the latest boyfriend who was beating her to stop.

Her pleas were the last thing I heard from her. After that I was in and out of foster care, until Barbara took me in at eleven and gave me a life. Barbara was a successful real-estate agent who made her own money, never married, but who wanted a child. I never saw her plead with a man—I never saw her plead with anyone—and I modeled myself on her.

But I didn’t have the strength, not with Drew. And oddly, I did not feel disgusted with myself. My pleas felt like relief, a breeze cooling my face, and it succeeded in stilling his tapping fingers.

“Cora,” he said, and now here was another surprise—his tone had turned pleading, too. “Please come home. You have to be exhausted. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

I had to laugh at that.

“I already am sick,” I said. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, everything I can. And I have to do this, too. Drew, don’t you understand? Not doing this will make me sick; not doing this is what would make me weaker than anything else.”

I could hear him take a deep breath and knew I had won a temporary reprieve. “I don’t agree with this decision,” he said.

“Acknowledged.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a date that you’ll be home?”

I caught myself just before I said
I am home
.

“Not yet,” I said. “But soon.”

“I’ll call Dr. Cho right now and have her set you up with someone. You have to go in right away, okay?”

“The second she finds someone, I’ll be there,” I promised. “I want to be well, Drew. I won’t sacrifice my health.”

“I’m afraid you already have,” he said.

There was nothing I could say to that.

“I miss you,” he said, breaking the silence.

“I miss you, too. I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’ll be here.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

I hit the off button on the phone and sat with it in my hand for several minutes, considering calling Ali. I was so tired. I would wait for a day. Give myself a chance to rest, to let my body recover, however slightly it might, from the punishing travel schedule I’d put it through over the last four months, getting to all of the winds I could.

It would be the first time I’d ever arrived home without making Ali my first call. I often didn’t even wait until I’d made it out of the airport. I put the phone down and gave in to my exhaustion. I didn’t bother getting up. I just kicked my shoes off, put my swollen legs up on the couch, and nestled my head on a pile of throw pillows. It wasn’t long before I fell into a deep sleep.

I woke four hours later with a raging headache and a cop car in my driveway.

“Cora’s back,” Benny announced, his hands already on the buckle of his belt, already falling into the routine of a street cop he’d given up years ago. The careful storing of the equipment, his gun. I hadn’t seen it in so long that for a moment I just admired him.

And then his words sank in.

“What? But I just drove by this morning,” I protested. When Cora was coming into town, she called ahead to the company that took care of the house and they opened it up for her. I was never surprised to drive by and see the shutters up, because the next call she made was always to me.

“Talked to her,” he said as I followed him into the bedroom. “She said she didn’t have time to call, it was a last-minute thing.”

“Last-minute? Since when has Cora been anywhere that was last-minute from Naples?”

“Al, I’m just telling you what she said to me.”

I wrestled irritation that she’d not called me and joy at her being back for only another moment before joy won out, and I hurried to the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Hang on,” he called. “She said she’d call you tomorrow.”

I hesitated, on the verge of irritated again. Benny and Cora’s childish tug-of-war with me was so old that I rarely noticed it anymore, but with everything I needed to talk to her about, I wanted to see her as soon as I could.

But then I realized the directive had come from her, not Benny, and slowly put the phone down.

Benny appeared in the doorway. “She said she was tired, and man, Al, she looked it. Looked rode hard and put away wet, to tell the truth. She said she came from Chile.” He shook his head and resumed unbuttoning his collar, turning back into the bedroom. “Don’t know how she does it.”

I stared at the phone. Sometimes she called from the airport so I could meet her at the house, help her get her bags in, collapse on the patio, and open a bottle of wine to hear about her travels, while the sun went down and the humid air slowly relaxed us both.

Chile was, where? I searched my geographically challenged mind for a moment, and finally grasped the info I was looking for. South America. Not like she was all the way around the world. She’d come in from Australia and seen me the same day.

Okay, okay, if she didn’t want me to call right away, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wanted her in a good mood, rested, happy. So we could talk about the baby.

She’d never asked about the remaining embryos. I think she felt like Benny: There was a problem, we took some shots, along came Letty, problem solved. Tried again a few years later, didn’t work out, okay, done. Despite their simmering animosity, Benny and Cora were actually very alike.

But for me, having a baby wasn’t a problem to be solved; it was an organic need. And the embryos were just sitting there, waiting for something to be done with them.

It just took me a while to know that I still wanted another one.