Where We Belong (19 page)

“How so?” I ask with a calculated smile.

“By not joining the family more,” my mom says.

“At swim meets?” I say, glaring at her. “No offense to Charlotte, but I hate them. They’re long and tedious and … And I don’t like sports, period. I like other stuff. Like films and art and music. I’m not like the rest of you.”

“See? The ‘rest of you,’” my dad says. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I like movies and music,” my mom chimes in, looking wounded.

“Okay—first, I said
films,
not lame blockbuster action movies and stupid, cheesy chick flicks,” I say. “And two, Barry Manilow doesn’t count as music.”

“Hey!” my dad bellows, wagging his finger at me. I’ve obviously crossed a line bashing Barry.

“You used to love Barry Manilow,” my mother says mournfully.

“When I was five. And you could still brainwash me,” I say. “Look. I’m sorry I went to New York without telling you. I just needed to meet her. On my own. And I did. And that’s that.”

“Is it?” my dad asks, adjusting the back of his recliner. “Do you feel better now?”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.” I close my mouth and cross my arms, uncertain why I’m not more willing to simply wave the white flag when they are obviously trying to be nice. And at the very least, they haven’t threatened to ground me, a sign of a subtle and surprising shift of power.

“So. Are you going to stay in touch with her?” my mother asks.

I shrug as if it makes little difference to me when I’ve already checked my phone twenty times since I’ve been home, hoping for a reply to my “Made it back safely!” text.

“Well,” my dad says. “On that note, we had an idea.”

“What kind of idea?” I say, worried.

“We’d like to meet her,” my mother says, looking like she’s just eaten something sour.

My dad nods. “What do you think about inviting her out here? Maybe for graduation?”

“Yeah. Um … I don’t think so,” I say.

My mother looks shamelessly elated.

“Why not?” my dad says.

“She’s really busy.”

“Well, then she can decline,” my dad says. “But we’d like to extend the invitation. If it’s okay with you?”

“We’d like to at least talk to her,” my mother says.

“You have nothing in common,” I say.

“We have
you
in common,” my dad says.

“And I bet we
all
think you should go to college,” my mother chimes in, tipping her hand too early.

“Oh. So
that’s
what this is about,” I say, snapping my fingers as if a lightbulb just went off. “Get her on your side. Three against one?”

My mother shakes her head too quickly and vigorously, further blowing their cover.

“Okay. Look. I’ll think about it,” I say, wondering if I’m more agitated because they’re so transparent about their intentions or because I know that Marian wouldn’t want to come.

“Thank you,” my dad says. “We appreciate it.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yes,” my dad says reluctantly.

I stand and head to my room so I can continue my search for Conrad Knight. I have no idea if he went to college, but I’d bet all the tuition in the world that he’s not down with Barry Manilow.

12

marian

A
few days
after Kirby leaves, I’m at Peter’s loft in TriBeCa where he has lived since Robin kicked him out of their Upper East Side brownstone. We are on his couch, watching television, talking about work and Aidan, who will be coming over soon. Everything appears perfectly normal, but I can tell something is slightly off with us, and I have the strong feeling that it has something to do with Kirby. As much as I tried to turn the page when she left, I feel different now. Maybe I miss her. Or maybe I’m worried that Peter feels differently about me now, even less likely to want to marry me. Or maybe it’s that I know I haven’t yet told him the full story.

I wait for him to bring her up, but when he doesn’t, I start to worry more, until I finally blurt it out. “For what it’s worth,” I say, resting my hand on his. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her sooner … I really wish I had.”

“I wish you had, too,” Peter says. “For
your
sake. Not mine.”

“Are you sure this doesn’t change … things?” I ask, looking in his eyes.

“Because you had a baby and put her up for adoption when you were eighteen years old?” Peter asks. “Do you really think I’m that shallow?”

“I don’t think that would make you shallow,” I say, knowing I’m avoiding the real issue. “Necessarily.”

“Marian. What you did took courage. I admire it. I admire
you.
” He shakes his head, as if he’s still digesting the magnitude of the story. “But I guess I just don’t fully understand … why you wouldn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t tell anyone.”

“But I’m not just
anyone.
” He puts his feet up on the coffee table, crossing them at his ankles. “Look. I understand that this is a very personal and private matter. I get why you wouldn’t bring it up at
cocktail
parties … But we’ve been together for
two
years. We’ve discussed marriage.”

I hesitate and then say, “
I’ve
discussed marriage.”

He sighs, as if this is a technicality, and says, “So if she hadn’t come, and we got engaged, would you have told me then?”

I feel myself start to squirm as I tell him I don’t know.

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay. Maybe not,” I say. “Probably not.”

“And you think that’s okay?” he asks. “To keep a secret this big from the person you want to share your life with?”

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling my knees up under my chin. “I thought so … But now that I’ve met Kirby … It feels like a betrayal.”

“You didn’t betray me. You just didn’t trust me,” Peter says, as I realize that the people I really betrayed were Conrad and Kirby.

As if he senses this, he stares into my eyes and says, “So is that everything? Do I know the whole story now?”

“Well … There is a little more to it,” I say, wiping my palms on my jeans.

He gives me a look that says he knew it, then gestures for me to continue.

“Kirby’s birth father doesn’t know about her,” I say, my voice quivering.

He remains stone-faced as I tell him about the pregnancy test—that first lie to Conrad. And how I walked out the door, never to return, never to speak to him again.

Peter’s expression finally changes, his face covered with judgment. “So this guy doesn’t know he has a child?” he says.

I shake my head, my face burning, shame welling in my chest.

“Why?” Before I can answer, he continues, animated. “Why didn’t you just tell him the truth? Why didn’t you just say, ‘Oh, shit. We have ourselves a little problem here.’”

He makes it sound so easy, and yet I have no answer.

“Were you in … denial?” Peter presses. “Is that why you lied? Is that why you kept the secret?”

I cringe, catching the way he has just used the words “secret” and “lie” interchangeably. “Maybe. I really don’t know. I just—I just didn’t think there was a point.”

“You didn’t think there was a
point
?” he says. “In telling a man he’s conceived a child?”

I try another angle. “I felt as if I were sparing him.”

“How so?” Peter fires back. He squares his shoulders to me and holds my gaze.

“What teenager wants to hear that they got a girl pregnant? It’s the ultimate nightmare, Peter. Remember—we were eighteen. Kids.”

“Well, don’t you think he deserved to know? Don’t you think that was
his
choice to make? Not yours?”

“Obviously not. I obviously thought it was
my
choice. You know … pro-
choice,
” I say, even though I know I’m obfuscating his main point.

Peter’s way too smart for this. “Right. I know it’s your body—your choice … But we’re not talking about whether to
have
the baby. We’re talking about
knowing
about the baby.”

“Well, if you think I had the right to
abort
the pregnancy … Why couldn’t I give her away? What’s the difference to Conrad?”

“I’ll tell you the difference,” he says crisply. “One makes him a father. The other does not. Doesn’t this guy have a right to know about his own child? As a father … God … I can’t imagine…”

“But it wasn’t like we were going to get married and start a family and a life together. I was going to college. He wasn’t.”

“Right. I got that,” Peter says. “He was a loser in a band. Going nowhere. I got that part.”

“He wasn’t a
loser,
” I say, feeling oddly defensive of Conrad, although it occurs to me that nobody could have treated him worse than I did. “We were just different. We wanted different things. But neither of us wanted a baby.” I bite my lip. There is nothing I can say to defend myself, but I try anyway. “Giving Kirby two stable, loving parents was better for her than anything he could have given her alone. His father was an alcoholic. He was broke. And yes, he wasn’t going anywhere. What if, for some reason, he wanted to keep her? What would I do then?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says, shaking his head. “I guess you would have had to make a choice.”

“I did make a choice. And it was the right one for everyone involved,” I say. But for the first time ever, I wonder whether this is true.

A few seconds later, in the worst possible timing, par for the course for Robin, I hear the sound of her voice in the hallway. Whether to irritate Peter, spend more time with him, or simply catch me off guard, showing up early—or completely unexpectedly—is one of her signature moves, and I should have prepared for this possibility.

“Shit. They’re forty-five minutes early,” Peter says to himself. And then, because he knows this annoys me, “I’m sorry.”

I nod and consider hiding in Peter’s bedroom, but instead I gather myself as Robin saunters in without knocking, Aidan trailing behind. Peter stands, smiles, gives his son a high five, then musses up his swooping boy-band bangs that don’t seem to go with his somber personality.

He turns to Robin and says, “When is he getting a haircut?”

“This is the look now, Peter,” Robin says. “You’re in television. You should know that.”

“Hi, Aidan,” I say.

“Hi, Marian,” Aidan says back politely, shaking his hair from his left eye. He’s a sweet, well-mannered kid, but we sadly have little rapport, perhaps because I really don’t see that much of him. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if Peter sees that much of him, which you’d certainly think was the case if you listen to Robin complain about her ex’s schedule.

Robin deposits her purse and two shopping bags on the floor, taking a seat across from me, sighing with exhaustion. Her chocolate-brown suede skirt is short, showing off a long expanse of tanned, toned thigh. Robin manages to ooze sex appeal in a barely tasteful way, and I smile remembering what Peter’s sister once said about Robin: that if she had to take one thing to a desert island, it’d be lube. The comment should have bothered me, conjuring Peter’s steamy days gone by, but for some reason, Robin has never made me jealous in that way, not even the few times I’ve seen her in a bikini. The only time she bothers me is when she seems to still be in love with Peter, like the time we came to pick up Aidan at her place and she showed me their wedding album, prominently displayed on her coffee table. What made it worse is that Peter just shook it off with a laugh, saying what he always says, “That’s Robin.”

It’s not that I don’t want Peter to get along with her, and I actually like her pretty well myself—she can be incredibly funny and fun to be around—but I do resent it when they act as if they’re still a couple.

“How are you, Robin?” I ask her now.

She sighs, then launches into a diatribe about how busy and stressed she is. She is the busiest, most stressed nonworking person I’ve ever met in my life. In mid-sentence about a charity ball she’s chairing, she glances at my big toe, the polish chipping as of this morning.

“Oh, honey. What’d you do to that big toe? Stub it?” she says in a Southern accent. She grew up in Connecticut, but went to Auburn and turns the accent on and off when it suits her.

I shrug, glancing at Peter, engrossed in conversation with Aidan, and barb her back. “Who knows? Maybe playing tennis with Peter?”

This is a purposeful statement as Peter told me that it was a bone of contention during their marriage. It wasn’t that he wanted her to run marathons or scale mountains, but she refused to so much as get her head wet on trips to the beach. He said it was a symbol for so much else wrong with them, namely that they had little in common, that she was materialistic and obsessed with her appearance (summed up by her face-lift at age forty-four).

But the biggest problem in their marriage—and ultimately the deal-breaker—was her chronic dishonesty. She never had an affair—at least none that Peter knew of—or told a huge lie, but there were enough little lies and half-truths to build a compelling case against her. The Devi Kroell alligator hobo she bought wasn’t “that expensive” (it was
four thousand
dollars—a problem in and of itself). She only had one drink, not six. Her college boyfriend friended
her
on Facebook, not the other way around. In fact, Robin seemed to fit the definition of a pathological liar, telling lies when there seemed to be no reason to do so—about completely insignificant things—like not telling the truth about what she had for breakfast. Peter said when he could no longer trust her, he no longer liked her. My stomach churns with worry that he will feel the same about me now.

Robin chitchats (mostly to herself) for a few more minutes, then abruptly stands and prances to the door. “I gotta go. Have a hot date!” she says, passing Peter and Aidan on her way to the door.

To her obvious disappointment, Peter looks bored with her routine, showing no interest in her love life. Or her legs, for that matter.

“Don’t you want to know who I’m seeing?” she asks him, raising her voice an octave, cocking her head to the side as Aidan migrates toward the couch, pulling an Ursula Le Guin novel out of his messenger bag. I have never seen a boy read as much as he does, which he obviously doesn’t get from his mother who once, unabashedly, announced to me that she “hates to read.” Who admits to something like that?