Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [124]
I graduated in June. David didn’t attend the ceremony, but he was there, waiting for me outside the high school in his car, which was an immaculately kept baby-blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible that he’d inherited from his father and kept in a garage, dressed in a custom-made zippered canvas cover. We went home. He made pasta. We made love, which, while not the rapture the movies and novels had taught me to expect, was at least pleasant enough. In September I planned to start taking classes at UConn. I would study theater and art history, like David had. In August, I found out I was pregnant.
To this day, I can remember the feeling of it, the sundress I’d been wearing, the taste of milk and Cheerios still in my mouth. I can feel the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor cool under my feet, and I can see the claw-footed tub with the rust stain around the drain in front of me, the pregnancy test, with its pink plus sign, jiggling up and down in my shaking hand. We’d been using condoms ... except a few times, when David would slip inside me for a few strokes without one. This is the end, I thought. The end of everything. Marriage was one thing, but if I had a baby, I’d be stuck in New London for the rest of my life. Even though I had no particular ambition, no idea of where else I’d want to go, what else I’d want to do, I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. David had been an escape hatch, not a lifetime plan, and a baby wasn’t part of my plan at all.
I waited until he went to work the next day to make the appointment at the Planned Parenthood in New Haven, an hour’s drive away. I took money out of the bank—and, I’m ashamed to say, out of his wallet. I drove the Tercel my mother had given me to the clinic, and, when it was over, I bought a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water and just kept driving west. As the miles slid by, the year that I’d endured—my grandfather’s stroke, my trip from Toledo to New London, my brief time with Raine, then the car, then David, had all started to feel like it had happened to someone else. Someone else had slept in the cramped backseat of the car; someone else had gotten married in front of a justice of the peace with bad breath and a wandering eye; someone else had gotten that abortion and woken up alone, a curly-haired, kind-eyed nurse handing her a sanitary pad and asking whether there was anyone waiting to take her home.
In Los Angeles, I bought a driver’s license with a fake name and a birthday that made me twenty-one. Eventually, I lived so long as that girl, India Bishop, that I almost forgot I’d ever been anyone else; a girl whose mother hadn’t wanted her, a girl who’d stolen food and slept in a car, a girl who’d left a husband behind.
My plane landed in LaGuardia just as night was falling. I bought a new cell phone and spent the night in a hotel. In the morning I cabbed it to Grand Central and bought a ticket for the train that would take me to New London for the first time since I’d left David, all those years ago. The trip was only a few hours, through the soupy, humid August air. Kids had opened a fire hydrant on the corner and it was dribbling water into the gutter. In the park in the center of town, teenage girls in bikinis lay on towels, and mothers with babies pushed strollers back and forth in the shade.
David’s apartment was an easy walk from the station. The front door to the old Victorian, long since divided into one- and two-bedroom flats, was supposed to be locked, but it hadn’t been when I’d known him, and it wasn’t now. The stairs had been stripped of the green carpet I remembered, and now the wood of the walls had a mellow gleam. The banister had been refinished, and the walls were painted a pretty cream color, and the ceramic Virgin was where I remembered her, in the little nook at the top of the stairs.
I knocked at the door, and he swung it open and looked