Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [102]
“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