Eye Contact (16 page)

Suzette stopped, turned around in slow motion. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Just shopping. What about you?”

“I have to buy soap,” Suzette said too loudly. “Everything's dirty.”

Cara looked around, softened her voice to a whisper. “At home?”

“I need ant traps and soap. There's ants everywhere. In the bed, in the sink, everywhere.”

“I don't remember seeing ants.”

Suzette narrowed her gaze over Cara's shoulder then turned. “Never mind.”

Cara left the store with Suzette and put off buying the pregnancy test when Suzette announced the next day that she was going home for a while. A weekend, maybe, or a week. That night she packed two enormous suitcases with what seemed to be everything she'd owned in the apartment. In the confusion of the days that followed, Cara found the number she'd once looked up for Kevin and dialed it. She apologized for calling him, but said she wanted to ask what was going on with Suzette, if he knew how long she intended to stay at home. He listened without speaking. “This…is…weird,” he finally said. “I don't really remember her. I remember—well, you.”

“Oh,” Cara said, panicking. How was this possible—how had Suzette gone so crazy so quickly? “She told me she had run into you, but I must have gotten confused. Maybe it was a different Kevin. So I'm sorry. I'm kind of embarrassed.”

“Don't be. I'm happy to hear from you.”

The following day, Oliver began class by telling a story that surprised everyone: “So this weekend my wife and I were driving back from the beach, and what did we hear on the radio?” The boy next to Cara said, “What?” just as Cara thought,
Your what?
The tin-tasting nausea in the back of her mouth moved from her throat to her stomach and down to her feet. After class, Oliver walked out with another student and never lifted an eye in her direction. He had obviously arrived at some kind of decision, and this was his way to tell her of it.

She called Kevin again that night, asked if he'd like to have dinner sometime.

She still hadn't taken the test even though she had some signs of pregnancy—tender breasts, morning nausea that abated with a cracker—she drank at dinner because she had read in a book:
Don't worry too much about alcohol consumed before you knew you were pregnant.
If she was pregnant, there was a small window here, one night to decide the rest of her life, and she needed it. With a glass of wine, she felt happy for the first time in months. It had been almost two years since she had seen Kevin, and he looked surprisingly healthy, with a full beard and a flannel shirt that made him look rugged, in spite of the cane he still carried and hung on the back of his chair. Seeing him again, away from the eyes of others she must have been far too conscious of back then, she allowed herself the luxury of all thoughts, including this one: how handsome he was.

“So Cara, Cara, Cara. Tell me all about your life,” he said after she sat down. “Are you a marine biologist yet?”

She smiled, shook her head. “Not yet. Why don't you start? Tell me about your life and then I'll tell you about mine.”

The surprise—and it occurred to her, he always surprised her—was how honest he was. The kidney transplant had been terrible, and set him back for a long time. He couldn't leave the house, couldn't make it back to school. “I was going to go to graduation. That morning I was all dressed, my parents were in the car, and I couldn't move. Couldn't even stand up. My parents panicked and took me back to the hospital.” He paused. “Wearing my suit, I remember that.”

Only then did Cara register the most significant change—his speech was still halting, with strange articulation, but he had words now, at his disposal: “Now I get how depression takes over your body. At the time, I couldn't see it. In the middle of it, you can't see anything.”

She leaned toward him, thinking of Suzette, of the possibility that if she asked, she might understand this hole in her life better: “What happens? What does it feel like?”

“Oh God,” he laughed. “You don't have your senses. You can't taste anything or smell. Once, I put salt in my coffee and didn't notice. My mother tasted it later and told me.”

“So what happened?”

He gave a smile so broad his whole face seemed to wear it. “Medication. Can't you tell? It's made me fat and happy.”

Being with Kevin made her feel everything at once: lonely, abandoned, terrified of some decision she'd already made. Later, when it was her turn to talk, she tried to explain without specifying anything: “I don't think I want some big career. I know I'm supposed to, but I just don't. I want to have a different life.” She thought of her parents, the quiet happiness of their lives, marred only by the miscarriages her mother had suffered before Cara—the miracle—arrived and stayed. “I think everyone wants to pretend we're adults now. I go to these parties and everyone's smoking and drinking, like at last we can, this is what we've all been waiting for, and it's
not.
” This was the first time she'd thought about all this, how unhappy she'd been. For so long, she'd narrowed her thoughts into a tunnel of cheerful optimism for Suzette's sake:
This party might be great,
she'd say.
They have friends who are in a band.
What was she
thinking
? Suddenly she saw, in the perfect clarity of Suzette's absence, that all of it had been awful. Until now she hadn't let herself see the life Suzette was going crazy to reject.

“Ah, parties,” Kevin said, grinning now, his whole face alive. “I went to one once. You want to hear what happened?” She smiled and nodded. “It was a football-player party. Or, more pathetically, an ex-football-player party. It was in Scott's basement. Dark, okay? With these huge overstuffed sofas, the only light in the place trained on the keg, and big drunk Scott—I think honestly intending to have a conversation with me—comes staggering over and sits down on top of me. For like thirty seconds, he sits there, saying, ‘Wait? Kevin?'”

She laughed, knowing already something had shifted, a decision had been made. This made no sense, but it was true: he seemed like the first genuinely happy person she'd seen in years. She would bring Kevin back to the apartment she couldn't face spending the night alone in.

The next morning when she woke up, Kevin was gone. On the glass coffee table he had left a wax paper bag with a chocolate chip cookie inside, and a note underneath: “I bought this last night, and then I forgot to give it to you. K.” The cookie was enormous and Cara ate the whole thing, thinking, for the first time, with unbridled glee,
Maybe I'm eating for two.
The night produced a tectonic shift in her worldview: Oliver mattered little, college even less. Suzette's breakdown wasn't a tragedy, but a road sign pointing Cara onto a path she must have seen when she stood in the bookstore thumbing through
What to Expect When You're Expecting.
Kevin wasn't the end of that path, he was a catalyst onto it, a way of seeing different versions of possibility: life could have no taste for a while, and then it could return.

Truthfully, what she saw in Kevin was hope for Suzette's return. Three weeks later, she went over to Suzette's old house, found her sitting in the kitchen wearing sweatpants and an old Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She was better already, Cara could tell. She smiled when Cara walked in, then rolled her eyes at Teddy's insistence on making tea for everyone. He was a tenth-grader now, taller than both of them, but he still had his quiet, boyish sweetness. “Look, Teddy, I'm fine,” Suzette said as he set mugs down on the table. “Maybe Cara and I will just talk by ourselves if that's okay.”

He hesitated, then walked out. Alone, they sat for a minute in silence.

“So I'm sorry for getting so crazy on you.”

“You weren't crazy, Suzette.”

Suzette held up a hand. “It's better to be honest,” she said. “I'm trying to sort out what happened in my mind. I wanted to be ready to grow up and be independent. I kept thinking, ‘Look at Cara, she's not afraid of things. She just does them.' You don't look at something and see a thousand ways it could go wrong. You just do it.”

Cara thought about the secret she had come here to tell her. “Not always.”

“No, it's a good thing. It's great. I'm trying to learn how to be more that way. Braver. Not so worried all the time about how things might not turn out right.”

“You already seem better.”

“I am. I'm getting there.” She reached a hand across the table and took Cara's.

Cara hadn't planned any of this specifically, hadn't picked her words yet or how she would say this: “There's something I want to do, Suzette.” She leaned across the table, whispered in case Teddy was somewhere, listening. “I've thought about it a lot. I'm sure it's the right thing. I know it. I feel it.”

Suzette stared at her. “What?”

And she told her, said it out loud for the first time in her life. “I'm pregnant and I want to have a baby. I want you to help me. You'll be the one who knows what to do. You practically raised Teddy. And all those years babysitting. You'll be great.”

Suzette looked at her. “Even after all this?”

Cara said the truest thing she could think of. “Of course. You're my best friend.”

 

Suzette didn't return right away. For four months she lived at home, working part-time and attending an outpatient program she only described vaguely to Cara: “There's some group therapy and individual therapy. It's good. It helps.” Cara understood Suzette's troubles were related, in some way, to her mother's breakdown after the divorce, which they bore witness to for years, but never talked about. But her mother was better now, working again, which Cara saw as an optimistic sign. Suzette was getting this out of her system; she'd be back again soon, stronger than before.

In all that time, Kevin floated like a secret, in and out of the picture. The first time they saw each other after sleeping together, Kevin surprised Cara by delivering the very speech she herself had prepared. “I'd like us to be friends,” he said, fiddling with a ceramic dish of sugar packets on the table where they were having lunch.

“Okay,” Cara said, stunned.

“It's not you, believe me. I know myself a little bit better now. I know what I need to be careful of. Too much drama isn't good for me.” He spoke quietly, but was sure of himself.

“Am I a lot of drama?”

“To me, I guess, yes. I don't know what your life is like. Does it feel like drama?”

He didn't even know the ways that it did, that he was right. “I suppose,” she said.

He meant it about being friends, he told her. He didn't have very many, just a few from his old war-games days, some football players. “Most of them went away to school. With the ones who are around, I'm sort of the token geek, I guess. I've never been friends with a girl before.”

Suddenly she saw what he was saying—real friendship, like she'd had so little of. “Okay,” she said, meaning it.

And for a time, they tried it—they went out to the movies once and sat with a king's meal of concession food in their laps, as if reiterating the point with every handful of food:
See, we're just friends
.
Friends don't worry about greasy hands or Dots breath later.
Another time he brought her to a meeting of his Dungeons and Dragons club, a collection of oddballs she recognized from high school. She couldn't play, of course; the rules were ridiculously complicated, full of heated battles between two people shaking fistfuls of dice. These were the kinds of boys she didn't let herself contemplate much when she was in high school, her eyes trained so fiercely on popular girls, on boyfriend prospects.

By the time Suzette was ready to move back to the apartment, Cara's friendship with Kevin had lost all its momentum. She was too unpracticed, didn't know how to end an evening without awkwardness. Too many times, she sat in his car, engine idling, door handle half-pulled, and said, “So…what? Give me a call sometime?” Every evening felt like a buildup to the same sad wall. “I had fun tonight,” she'd say, and mean it—they did have fun, laughing about elementary school teachers or the names some restaurants gave to hamburgers. She never told him she was pregnant or about her intention to keep the baby. Anytime she contemplated doing so, she thought of the first thing he'd said in launching their friendship:
Too much drama isn't good for me.
She also discovered the surprising ease of keeping the secret. For months, nothing changed but her breast size and the inner workings of her body's chemistry. It wasn't until she was five months along that she began leaving the button of her jeans undone beneath her sweater. If he noticed, he certainly made no remark about that or the beers she no longer drank.

They also spoke surprisingly little of Suzette. Cara hesitated to mention her, given the embarrassing way it factored into their reconnection. She never wanted him to ask, “Why did she lie?” She didn't want to contemplate such a question herself. Instead, when it came up, she tried to be frank in a way that mirrored his own honesty and allowed no speculative questions. “I think she's struggling with her own depression, but she's getting a lot better. She's much stronger, much clearer these days. She knew what was going on, got help right away.”