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2004
Years before Laurel sees her best friend in a hospital for chemo or physiotherapy, she sees her in one for Conrad’s birth. For a very long time after Susannah dies, putting weight on the memory hurts more than any fracture or bruise.
Susannah had names picked out for her then-unborn baby, and because she hadn’t wanted to know the gender until the moment of birth, she’d had lists of contenders. More stressfully for Laurel, Susannah was, at the time, into the sort of hippie shit that made her think giving birth at home in a warm tub would be a fun idea. Adam had shrugged and said that it was up to Susannah—she was the one that would be giving birth—thinking this kind of indecisiveness was being a good husband.
Thankfully, Laurel had managed to convince Susannah to do it in a hospital, but it had been a harrowing few weeks.
But, anyway. Susannah had lists.
“What if it comes out and none of the names fit?”
Susannah’s gaze is fixed on a brown water stain on the ceiling tile when Laurel looks up from her armchair beside the bed. She’s been trying and failing to read the same two pages for the past ten minutes.
“Have you narrowed down your lists?” she asks.
A buttery diamond of afternoon sun slides over Susannah’s cheek as she turns, cheek sinking into her pillows. “Down to Savannah and Sophie if it’s a girl. Max or Conrad if it’s a boy.”
“I’m sensing some patterns here.”
“S for girls is elegant. And I like As in the middle of names.” Susannah sighs and fidgets, still uncomfortable despite the epidural. At least her heart rate has slowed. Machines and monitors continue to chirp like birds around her, measuring the start of two new lives. Laurel doesn’t know it now, but she will be back here years later, listening to them chart the end of one. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ll just know when I meet them.”
“Middle names are easier.”
“That’s because I’ve had them picked out since we met.”
“Sure, but I still think Laurent as a middle name is crazy.”
“It’s so romantic. It’s your name.”
“You are cursing your theoretical unborn son with Frenchness.”
Susannah laughs aloud, then winces, waving Laurel back into her seat when she stands.
“I’m fine,” she hisses through her teeth. “Stop making me laugh.”
“Why not something less snooty? It can still be something me, just not—Laurent.”
“Adam says Laurent is blueblooded.”
Laurel rolls her eyes so passionately that phosphenes spring to the dark backs of her eyelids. “He’s a chairman, not a minor royal.”
Susannah sighs. And, because she looks strained and miserable and small, her body distended by this unborn child, Laurel closes her book properly and sets it on the bedside table to think.
“Why not Beck,” she says after a stretch of silence. “What I call you.”
“But that’s just my maiden name. And what if it’s a boy?”
“So? You’re doing all the work of bringing a baby into this world, why can’t a boy have your maiden name as a middle name?”
“I guess.”
“Plus, Beck can be masculine, too. Kind of. Or unisex, like Alex or Riley.”
“I don’t like it when you’re calmer than I am.” Susannah shuts her eyes and breathes through a contraction that cares not for her epidural. “It flies in the face of all reason.”
“It’s the best friend override.”
“Thank you.” Susannah relaxes as the contraction passes and tilts her face back to Laurel. “For being here. After my mom said their flight was delayed and Adam decided to stay at work until later, I thought I’d have to—to do this all alone, and I—”
“Hey,” says Laurel. “You don’t have to thank me for being here for the literal birth of your child. Okay? No one should be doing something like this alone in a room with a bunch of strangers. As long as I’m here,” she takes and squeezes Susannah’s hand, “you won’t do anything alone.”
Susannah’s smile is tired but true. She squeezes back.
Then, because they are who they are, she says, “I’m just glad you’ve seen my butthole already.”
“Yeah, imagine if you had to do this with someone who’s never seen your butthole.”
“Horrifying.”
Night falls fast, now that it’s November. Weak afternoon sun rolls into the blue gloaming and then a shivering black evening drizzle. Eventually, Adam does arrive, and eventually, Laurel is the one who fields the texts from Susannah’s parents that they’ve landed in Boston. She quietly sits back and watches from afar once the active pushing begins, Susannah disappearing behind a throng of blue scrubs and hair caps, Adam bent over her mattress and cheering her on like he’s at a sports game. He keeps saying, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” and Laurel’s too nervous to even care.
And then at 12:09 AM of November 12, 2004, Laurel’s best friend becomes a mother. For years she will joke that her son was too stubborn to be out by November 11, a perfectly lucky day, because he has to do everything just a little too late.
Adam does not cry, but Laurel does, watching the doctors lower the grey-pink bundle of newborn into Susannah’s arms.
“Hi, baby,” says Susannah through her own weeping. “My beautiful boy, Connie Beck Fisher.”
2008
When Laurel wakes, she has all of two peaceful heartbeats to listen for her children’s crying—a whine from Isabel, a complaint from Steven—before she makes out the small black silhouette standing beside her bed, inches from her face.
For a moment it’s utterly still. Then it whispers, “Laura, I’m scared.”
By sheer force of will, Laurel Park does not wake up the entire township of Cousins screaming, for which she thinks she is owed some kind of award. Instead she freezes, heart nearly exploding out of her eyes, until they adjust. Bit by bit, the soft hallway light illuminates the line of Conrad’s thin shoulders and steamtrain footie pajamas.
“Hey, Connie,” whispers Laurel, sitting up warily. Is this what kids do once they have free will? She wonders if Steven or Isabel are too late to return or unbirth. “What are you doing up? What’s wrong?”
“I’m scared,” he repeats.
Well, great. That makes two of them.
Lamplight floods the room when she switches it on. Laurel hasn’t been asleep long, because new mothers are not afforded real sleep, and so wakefulness returns easily to her. To Conrad’s credit, he looks like he’s been trying to self-soothe for a while—he’s got his blanket balled up against his chest like a shield. Down the hall, the light to his bedroom is on.
“Did Susannah not wake up?”
“I don’t know.” He blinks up at her with his huge green eyes. Seaglass eyes, Susannah calls them. “Mommy is always sleeping.”
Susannah’s second—Jeremiah—is a lot fussier at night than Conrad ever was, and both of them are using their months at the summer house to restore their sleep debts. Laurel feels blessed all over again that, though her children are poor at going down for naps, they both now sleep through the night.
“Mommy’s probably exhausted.” Laurel hoists him up into her bed, where he immediately crawls under her duvet. The door to Isabel and Steven’s room remains silent through all this, which Laurel is insurmountably thankful for. “Want to stay with your Laura tonight?”
Conrad nods, his entire body bobbing. She fluffs a pillow and rests it against the headboard, sitting back on it to tuck him in.
“Want to tell me what’s got you so scared? Bad dream?”
He contemplates this. Laurel hasn’t been around many four-year-olds in her life, but he’s always struck her as oddly—almost eerily—astute, even if his brain and vocabulary can’t keep up with his thoughts. He gets this look in his eyes, and Laurel realizes she might have signed herself up for a question she doesn’t know the answers to.
“What if Mommy leaves me,” he starts, “and then, and then what if she doesn’t come back, or she comes back bad?”
Yeah, there it is. Laurel doesn’t have any plans for the morning, so she supposes a philosophical reckoning with death with a four year old in the middle of the night is fine. “Why do you think she’d leave you?” she asks gently.
“I don’t know.”
“She wouldn’t leave you, Connie. She loves you too much. She’d fight the world if it tried taking you away from her, so she’d never leave you without a good reason. Maybe it’s because she’s going to work, or maybe she’s got errands—”
“What’s ‘errands’?”
“Errands are things people do to make sure their days go by easier,” Laurel explains. “Things like going to the bank or grocery store.”
“Okay.”
“Some of those errands might be for you. Picking up Bandaids because you skinned your knees again, or buying a photo frame for some family pictures. But she’ll always come back. Her world starts and ends with you and your brother.”
“What about Daddy?”
“Him too,” Laurel lies easily, “But you and Jeremiah first.”
“What if it’s bad?”
“Like, she comes back, and things aren’t the same?”
“I don’t know.”
Laurel isn’t sure how old a kid has to be to understand, or at least understand enough to vocalize, the concept of sameness. How is Susannah so good at this mother thing? She feels like she’s flying blind at all times.
“Things are always changing,” says Laurel. “We’re here at Cousins beach. Today, you ran through the sand by the shore and left a line of your footprints. Do you think those footprints will be there tomorrow?”
“No?”
“No,” says Laurel. “And what’s different between the ocean and, say, a puddle?”
“The ocean is big,” Conrad says, which isn’t wrong.
“It’s very big,” Laurel agrees. “And it’s always moving. Always changing. What do you think would happen if you try to keep the ocean still, like a puddle?”
“It would be hard.”
“Awfully hard. But does that make the ocean bad?”
“I don’t know.” Laurel lets him sit with it, because she can see that he’s thinking as hard as his little brain allows. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so, either. So maybe your mom leaves and comes back. It might be different, but not bad, because life is the ocean and its shore—always changing.”
“But why?”
“Why does it have to change?”
“Yeah.”
It’s Laurel's turn to say, “I don’t know.” Then she adds, “I’m actually still trying to figure that out, too.”
“But Mommy says you know everything.”
“And she’s right, but this is a little harder to know.” Laurel yawns fiercely. “How about I try to tell you about it over breakfast tomorrow morning?”
“Okay,” Conrad says. He mirrors her yawn and pulls the duvet up to his chin. “Good night, Laura.”
“Good night, Connie.” Laurel brushes the bangs off his forehead—sweaty—and switches off the lamp.
In the morning, Laurel scoops him into her arms and carries him back to his room before he wakes, and by breakfast, he’s forgotten all about it.
2012
Steven had shoved Belly out of the rec room upstairs with so much force that she landed on her tailbone and burst into tears that could wake the dead, which is why she, Laurel, and Susannah are now gathered at the dining table stringing beads together, making friendship bracelets.
“She’s ruining things, Mom!” Steven had insisted. “Far Cry 3 is too hard for her and she keeps messing with the controls, and we keep telling her she sucks too bad to play—”
“Why is it even called Far Cry,” Laurel says, absently stringing a necklace she’s making for Susannah. Open before them are three separate organizers, each square brimming with artisanally crafted beads—frosted glass, marbled flowers, chips of porcelain dotted with eyes of Nazar. “What is it a far cry from?”
In her lap, Belly is focused on her own bracelet. Bless her heart, none of the beads match—but at the center are plastic alphabet beads spelling out Conrad’s name. She’s strung them out of order, so they read CNORAD.
Laurel doesn’t point it out.
“Honestly, I don’t think they’re old enough to be playing it,” Susannah says. She’s made a gorgeous wrap necklace and has already moved onto finishing it with jump rings. “Connie tricked me into buying it. Said it would be good for improving hand-eye coordination.”
“And has it?”
“I wouldn’t know. My boys surf, Laur, they’ve always been coordinated—hey, Connie!”
Conrad has skulked his way downstairs. Eight, gangly, and scabby, he’s spent the first few weeks of summer telling spooky stories to the rest of the children and scaring them so badly that the first few nights saw Laurel and Susannah setting up pillow and blanket forts in the living room, hosting a massive slumber party together so none of them had to sleep alone. He’s taken to walking like a ghost. Laurel will close the fridge door and Conrad, noiseless, will have appeared.
“You guys hungry?” Susannah twists to look at the time on the stove. “It’s almost dinner, if you can wait.”
“Nah. Jere and Steven are hogging the controllers.” He eyes the beads. “What are you guys doing?”
“We’re doing beads. Want to try?” Susannah pulls out the chair beside her. “Belly’s been hard at work and is almost done with hers.”
For a moment, Laurel is sure that Conrad will scoff and roll his eyes and say beading is girly stuff and inherently has cooties, which is how Steven would react, now that he’s discovering how fun it is to relentlessly tease and fight his sister. But Conrad stands wordlessly for a while, studying his mother’s necklace, before parking himself in the seat beside Laurel and reaching for the wire spool.
“You need help?” she asks, sliding the organizers closer to him.
“No.” He eyes Belly’s bracelet and leans closer. “What’re you making?”
“No looking!” Belly yells, yanking her bracelet away.
Again, Laurel expects—she doesn’t know. A sneer, or “What, is it babyish, like dolphins?” But Conrad just shrugs and says, “Okay.”
And Belly herself seems so surprised by this that she shoots her own question back. “Then what are you making?”
“I dunno.” Conrad reaches for the beads studded with rounded glass spikes that look like miniature, exploding fireworks. “Something cool.”
“All jewelry is cool,” says Susannah. She props a chin in her hand. “Why not make something for your Laura? She could use some bling.”
Laurel rolls her eyes in Susannah’s direction, but Conrad is looking up at her like he’s been tasked with shuttling a queen across a desert. Now that he’s older, he no longer turns that piercing gaze on her as often—as if he’s starting to wake up to the idea that adults are not infallible, omniscient gods—but every so often he still does.
Now he takes in her bare wrists, her undecorated neck, her ringless fingers.
“Do you like bling?” he asks baldly.
She laughs. “It gets in the way of being a mom,” she says. “But I’ll appreciate anything.”
Susannah crimps the edge of her necklace to finish it, then stands. “I’m going to get started on dinner,” she announces. “You keep working.”
“No, I’ll help.” Laurel finagles Belly off her lap and into the dining chair. “Tell me when you’re done, Bean. I’ll help you tie the ends.”
Dinner is mushroom risotto and sungold tomato salad tossed with mangoes and balsamic vinegar; Susannah grills chicken on the barbecue outside and serves it with pico de gallo and extra onion on the side. Laurel makes herself helpful by trotting meat in and out of the sliding glass door, and by the time the food is ready to plate, Belly and Conrad have disappeared from the dining table, leaving open bead organizers behind.
Laurel puts them away—and finds them crouched by the hydrangeas outside, poking at the body of a cicada on the ground with morbid fascination.
Again, for a brief moment, Laurel thinks Conrad might pick up the dead bug in his fingers and chase Belly with it as she screams and runs—but he doesn’t. He simply hands her his twig and allows Belly her share of poking.
The two of them are so fascinated by this hollowed bug corpse that the fireflies begin to gather in the falling dusk above them.
She hates to break the spell. “Kids, come wash your hands! Dinner’s ready!”
Belly needs a stepstool, but Conrad forgoes it, sticking his fingers under the running water and only dutifully scrubbing when Laurel raises her eyebrows. Then he does so vigorously and theatrically, splashing droplets onto the counter.
A bracelet shakes around his bony wrist. There it is—CNORAD, surrounded by a mismatched line of glass beads like so many tiny animal eyes. The clear elastic cord is knotted unwieldily, earnestly, loose ends waving tentacle-like in the air.
“Did you help her finish it?” asks Laurel, handing him a towel.
“Yeah. But she spelled my name wrong.” He doesn’t make a move to take it off.
“She tried pretty hard. Said only you got one because you let her try the Far Cry game.” Laurel holds out her hand. “Want me to look after it so you can eat and play after dinner? Keep it out of your way?”
“It’s okay. I’m not a mom.”
2016
Laurel doesn’t get the text notification, phone set to Do Not Disturb to focus on her manuscript, but Conrad’s call rings through the emergency bypass and fills her headphones with noise.
She answers.
“Hey, Connie. It’s—” She checks the clock on her laptop screen once, twice. “The middle of a school day. Is everything okay?”
The other end of the call is silent. Laurel hits save on her document and sits back in her chair.
“Connie?”
Again, silence filters across the line, and Laurel’s starting to wonder if this is a buttdial when Conrad finally speaks.
“My mom’s sick, Laurel.”
“Oh.” Laurel lets out a breath. “You scared me for a second, there. Is Adam not home? Is that why you’re—”
“Mom has cancer.”
All Laurel can do is stare at the calendar app on her laptop. It is barely after lunch on a cloudless April Wednesday. Years later this, too, will make sense, somehow. The middleness of the week, hanging between the start and the end, which is how Laurel’s life will feel once Susannah is gone. She will remember the exact shade of dust coating the curtain rods of her home office—blue when the light hits it—and she will remember the torn, peeling plastic on the corners of her research binder, because she will pick at it until it tears.
But right now, Conrad is on the other end of the line, begging for a life ring.
“Are you okay?” Laurel asks, strangled, even though she wants to ask a million other questions. Is your mom okay? What kind? Is it treatable? Lots of cancers are, like, benign tumors, do you know if it’s operable? How much time does she have? Please, please let it not be pancreatic or brain or any cancer, please be lying, please—
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice starting to crack. “I’m scared.”
Fuck. So is Laurel.
“Can she call me? Is she not okay right now?”
Conrad is fully breaking down into tears now, words barely intelligible over the phone. Some tiny sliver of Laurel registers that he is going against his mother’s wishes by calling her like this, that he is still too young to understand that he should have let Susannah come to her first, but a much larger, sharper, more painful part of her is glad that her best friend has raised a child who knows to run to Laurel when the world feels like its ending. She’s always said she’ll hold it up her damn self for all four of them—her own kids and Susannah’s—if she has to.
Laurel just didn’t think a time like this would come so soon.
“She didn’t want to tell you yet,” he says through his gasping. “She—she said she didn’t want to worry you, that you’d freak out, and no one outside our family knows, but I’m scared and no one is telling us anything. The doctors keep saying they’ll get back to us with more when they know more, but it’s been a week now, and we keep waiting. They’re scheduling her for chemotherapy and she’s going to lose all her hair, and—and what if it doesn’t even work?”
“If they’re scheduling her for chemo, that’s good.” Laurel propels herself out of her chair to begin pacing her home office. Her body fills with the fizz of dread and panic. She doesn’t know that. She can’t promise shit. “That’s a good sign. That means they think she has good chances.”
“It’s breast cancer,” says Conrad miserably. “Don’t a lot of people die from that?”
“Plenty—plenty of them also survive, Connie.” Laurel doesn’t know that, either. She just has to believe it, because she doesn’t have anything else. “Are you home? Did they pull you out of class for this?”
“Yeah. She went to the doctor last week. Today was her diagnosis…Jere and I were called out of school and she took us for ice cream, and then she told us. Our dad knows. And you know now, I guess. That’s it.” He gives a mighty sniffle. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you called me, Connie.”
For a while longer Laurel coaxes Conrad through the last of his tears until he can speak without a quaver in his voice. He says he will be okay, and Laurel says she thinks everything will be okay, and she knows that this is the first time Conrad truly understands how much adults lie.
Then she hangs up.
Minutes of silence snail by. It is broken by the sound of a car passing in the street below. Laurel watches her laptop screen darken, then phase into its screensaver, before she unlocks her phone once more and scrolls through her contacts.
In the middle of the day, her mother is probably busy with her friends—working on bojagi projects together, gossiping over persimmon-leaf tea—and might not even hear her phone. She tries anyway. Four rings go by, and Laurel is positive that her call will go unanswered when the line clicks.
Her mother answers. “Hello? Aegi?”
“Hey, Umma.”
“Nothing, just my daughter,” says her mother, an aside to someone nearby. Then she turns back to the receiver. “I wasn’t expecting a call from you. How is everything?”
“Oh, you know.” A beat. “Susannah has cancer.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah. Oh, no,” echoes Laurel, and then she, too, bursts into tears.
When Belly had been four, she’d fallen so ill with a fever so high that she’d seized and wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Two harrowing hours and a fire engine later, she’d reawoken, and at nine AM Laurel had called her mother sobbing. And because Laurel’s mother had immigrated to the United States alone, settled and flourished in Palisades Park with nothing but sheer grit and panache, she’d listened to her daughter cry piteously for two minutes before saying, “Now, here is what you will cook.”
A week later, Belly was freshly emancipated from her tonsils.
Laurel’s never really gotten better at cooking. She can follow a recipe fine, but her food has never taken on real magic—not the way her mother’s or Susannah’s can, as if their souls are sprinkled in each dish. But it is the first shape of love she knows, and it is the one she turns to when she learns her best friend is sick.
“Whatcha makin’?”
Steven slouches into the kitchen after dinner, no doubt smelling the aroma of stewing cornish hen floating through the house. He, too, knows how out of character it is for Laurel to cook. And at this hour?
“Chicken soup with ginseng and jujubes,” says Laurel. “Some cucumber kimchi and radish. And—well, this was supposed to be potato salad, but I think I messed up the cooking time on it.”
Steven studies it. “It looks like cheese cubes and snot.”
“Keen observation, Steven, thank you.”
“You didn’t get them soft enough.”
“I boiled them the way the recipe called for,” says Laurel defensively. Which she had! Twenty minutes at a simmer, like her mom had instructed. “And I went in with forks. They just won’t mash.”
“You should try microwaving them.”
“What? No.” Or, she doesn’t know—maybe he’s onto something. “That’ll just dry them out and I’ll have to drown them in mayo.”
“You’re supposed to cover it with a wet paper towel and then microwave, Mom,” says Steven, and he rolls his eyes like he’s explaining this to Belly. “Here, look.”
She watches as he trots across the kitchen and does exactly that—ripping a paper towel from its dispenser, running it under the faucet until it’s damp, not dripping, and fanning it over the sad plate of crumbly potato cubes. After pushing all the bits beneath the paper towel blanket, he pops it all in the microwave for a minute.
They stand together and wait. Laurel expects during the full minute for fire to catch, poised to yank the microwave open and douse the plate in the sink. It never does.
When it’s done, the potatoes slide out steaming and fluffy. Steven takes the tines of a fork to them again, and they mash like warm sand under the metal.
Laurel glances between the potatoes and Steven in wonder.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“YouTube. Duh.”
“You’re watching cooking videos on YouTube?”
“No, it’s just how a streamer makes his dinners so he doesn’t have to stop his game.”
For what it’s worth, John agrees at the drop of a hat for Laurel to make the trip to Boston to bring Susannah food. He speaks to his manager about getting in late because he’ll have to do dropoff and pickup for the kids.
Though they’re not sleeping in the same bed anymore, he crushes Laurel into a hug before she climbs into her car.
“Please tell her I’m thinking of her,” he says, as Laurel starts the car. He reaches through the window to give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “And please, please drive safe. Text me when you get there. And get some coffee.”
“I’ve got all thirty hours of The Eye of the World loaded and ready,” Laurel jokes weakly. “Promise to text me if anything happens with the kids.”
“Nothing’ll happen. Go see Susannah.”
The drive is mind-numbingly long. Laurel doesn’t understand how some of her other college friends who have moved out to California drive up and down the coast like it’s no big deal—she starts to get antsy by the end of the second hour, and she hasn’t processed a word of her audiobook at all.
Her GPS says she’ll make it just after three PM, which is perfect for hotel check-in. She’d booked one because she’d rather die than encroach on Susannah’s house and hospitality at a time like this, even though she’s positive Susannah is going to call her crazy once she finds out.
The worst thing about an unbroken drive is that it allows her mind to wander too much. Now that she isn’t trying to decipher her mother’s recipes—why are immigrant parents averse to a single real measurement?—or caught in her own whirlwind of packing, Conrad’s sobs come back to her. Susannah will be okay, because she has to be okay. She’s the kind of person that anchors generations of people, backward and forward from her existence, and losing her will upset that balance in catastrophic ways, like hurling a stone through a spider’s fine web. Laurel knows that in her life she will lose her parents, perhaps her husband, and there will be stories and songs and movies that tell her how people survive those things.
She does not know how to survive losing a best friend, and it feels like no one else has written a guidebook on it, either.
Boston is raining when she arrives, sky morose and weeping stickily. She checks into her room at the Best Western, where she changes her clothes and brushes her hair. Her skin smells like car upholstery and stale coffee.
Only when Laurel has gotten back in her car, checked the food in the cooler to make sure it’s arrived in one piece, does she begin to doubt herself. Only briefly, but that doubt flashes through her like an unwelcome heart palpitation—that Susannah will be angry that she’s found out, and upset that Laurel has come all this way.
But she is here, so. She might as well go.
It’s late enough for Conrad and Jeremiah to be done with school for the day, but the two of them should still be at football practice. Laurel deflates with a sigh of relief when she sees Susannah’s car parked in their driveway and pulls up to the curb outside their house. The house remains still as she scurries out into the dreary, misting rain, shouldering her cooler and slamming the trunk shut.
When she rings the doorbell, the house breathes back in silence. The windows of its French doors remain frosted and unfeeling, until—
A pale figure moves behind them, and the door swings open.
“Laur,” Susannah says, and she looks terrible. Not any thinner, head still glowing with her blond hair, but her lips are chapped and she looks like she hasn’t slept. “What the hell are you doing here?” She eyes the cooler on her shoulder. “What’s going on?”
Laurel thought she’d have something more eloquent or comforting to say. Something like, I’ll always be here for you, no matter what happens. Or You can tell me anything, even if—especially if—it’s terrible. But none of that happens.
Instead, all she can manage is, “Connie called me.”
For a moment, Susannah’s expression is stricken, as if Laurel has thrown wine in her face. And then, as if it’s some fault of her own, Susannah whispers, “I’m sorry.”
But Laurel surges forth and wraps her arms around her, the two of them swaying on the foyer, hugging so tight and long that the rain transforms from mist to fog to watery sunlight. As Laurel smells the lilac sweetness of her best friend’s hair, she lets herself fantasize that things will be okay.
2018
And for a few years, they really seem like they might be.
Susannah starts chemo treatments. She does lose all her hair. Quietly, Laurel gives Conrad her email address so that he knows he always has someone in his corner, and every few weeks a message from him will slot itself in unobtrusively among her agent emails, her editor notes, and her author site mail. Same old is often the subject line.
Twice a month, Laurel makes the drive to Boston to drop off chicken and ginseng soup. The house is messier each time, and Laurel spends the day cleaning up what she knows—doing the dishes, running loads of laundry, vacuuming and mopping the floors. The first two times, Susannah protested ferociously, thin and pale but no less insistent.
“Can you not just accept that I want to hang out with you?” Laurel says when Susannah glares at her for organizing a trunkful of groceries. Bought with the money Susannah provided, of course, so it wasn’t even a big deal. “I don’t have regular hours, because I’m not chained to corporate America. Let me take care of you while I can.”
Susannah’s head drops back onto the couch armrest, where she’s lying beneath a knitted blanket. With only Laurel here, she’s done away with her headscarf.
“I wish it had just been us,” she murmurs, so quietly that it’s nearly lost behind the rustling of grocery bags. “I’ll always be happy for the two sons I have. I wish they could have sprung out of my skull like Athena from Zeus, and the two of us could weather this bullshit together.”
“We are.”
“I know.”
Whatever Susannah was going to add on is lost. Her eyes flutter, and she drifts off into a nap. Once Laurel gets all the food in the fridge, she locates the car keys again, tosses on a jacket, and heads back out.
Jeremiah is first to finish football practice. Conrad always lags behind as team captain, held back to speak with the coach. Laurel turns in the driver’s seat as Jeremiah clambers through the automatic minivan door, throwing his duffle in the backseat.
“Hi, Laur!” he sings. “Is Mom sleeping again?”
“Sure is. How was practice?”
She puts the car in park and turns off the ignition—half the team is still gathered on the field, Conrad’s gangly figure standing out like a lighthouse in the dark.
“Bad,” he says, as cheerfully as he might say Good. “Coach says we fall apart too easily when we’re faced with an unfamiliar strategy.”
“Is that so?” Laurel glances in the rearview mirror as Jeremiah puts his seatbelt on and balances his helmet in his lap. “So is your coach chewing your brother out?”
“I think so.” Jeremiah shrugs, peering out the open door. “But Connie’s good at everything, so he’s probably chewing everyone else out more.”
“Good thing you escaped, then.”
“Nah, I was benched. He doesn’t have anything to say to me.”
The tone of his voice makes Laurel’s eyes travel back to her rearview mirror. Jeremiah—newly in middle school, experiencing the first twangs of a deepening voice—has his gaze fixed on the field. Perhaps he’s escaped a lecture, but here he is, an outsider on his own team.
“I’m sure you’re as valuable a player as the rest of them, Jere,” says Laurel.
“I guess.” Something flickers through his expression that Laurel will see over and over again, one that will grow darker and meaner as he gets older, feeling like an outsider in his own family. For now it is nothing but young envy and the loneliness of growing up. “Dad doesn’t think so.”
“Your father is wrong for that.”
But Jeremiah never answers.
2019
Laurel, who has been riding the high since their arrival at Cousins Beach, Susannah exploding from the front door to sing, “I’m in remission!,” doesn’t notice how gloomy Belly has been all evening until she catches her in the kitchen alone, eating ice cream out of a gallon tub.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Laurel, descending upon her daughter. “This is first breakup behavior. If you want ice cream, scoop it into a bowl.”
She and Susannah are setting up for a movie night without the kids. Belly had begged all morning to go to the boardwalk at night with the boys—and Laurel had finally relented. The boys have already left; Belly shouldn’t even be here.
Her daughter lets Laurel pluck the spoon out of her hands, and immediately she knows something is wrong.
“What happened?” asks Laurel, tilting to look Belly in the face. “Why didn’t you go with Connie and the boys? Did they change their minds last minute? All you could talk about at breakfast was how different the boardwalk looks at night.”
“I don’t wanna go anymore.”
“Are you not feeling well?”
“I’m fine. I’m just gonna go watch TV upstairs.”
“What—hey, wait! Susannah and I were just about to—”
But Belly’s squirreled out of the kitchen and up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Susannah crosses through the kitchen moments later, arms laden with chips from the pantry.
“Was that a tornado I saw just now, or just Belly? Why isn’t she at the boardwalk with the boys?”
Laurel, who once too had been thirteen years old, understands in that moment that there is only one thing that can get Belly to clam up this way.
“Connie might have said something to her.”
“Connie?” Susannah’s eyebrows lift as she deposits the chips onto the kitchen island. “Not Jere or Steven?”
“Had to be him,” Laurel says. “Steven riles her up to her face, and Jere simply follows whatever Steven says.”
“Well, what was she doing?”
“Eating ice cream out of the tub.”
Susannah gives a low whistle and a grimace. “Yikes. Well, I’m as curious as you are.”
“Has Con ever said anything to you about Belly?”
“He’s a fifteen year old boy, Laur. I think he’d hemorrhage first.”
The two of them bark with laughter. Susannah sighs as her face relaxes into a tired, pensive smile.
“I still remember my childhood crush,” she says. “As boring and storybook as they come—the boy next door who taught me how to ride his Razor scooter and ran barefoot through the woods with me looking for pinecones. I cried for a week when they moved away. Now I can’t even remember his name.”
“I guess it’s different for Belly. She’s never known a world without Conrad in it.”
The two of them sit with this.
“They’re at an age where they need to discover things for themselves,” Susannah says, ripping open bags and shaking thick, fragrant handfuls of chips onto their snack plates, “so I don’t believe in involving myself in their business unless they ask it of me. But, please. If Connie’s ever needlessly cruel to Belly—”
“He wouldn’t be.”
“She’s my special girl, Laur. I can’t bear to know that she’s hurting alone.”
“And Con’s my special guy. The first baby.” Their first baby, if they’re honest about it. When Susannah had first discovered she was pregnant, she’d called Laurel first, and for about three hours on a cold February Wednesday the two of them were the only souls on Earth to know that Conrad existed. “I know he wouldn’t. Not on purpose.”
They finish plating their movie snacks in companionable silence. Laurel still hasn’t gotten used to Susannah’s hair—there’s so much of it, growing wild and free about her head, uneven and almost rough-shorn, but it catches the kitchen lights again. The way it always used to.
“It scares me that they’re becoming their own people,” Susannah says. “Is that a bad thing to say? Like, it’s the best thing ever. I love hearing their thoughts about art and music and the world. And at the same time, I’m realizing they know what real hurt can be now.”
“It’s not a bad thing to say.”
“I spent a lot of time thinking I’d never see them get to this point. And now, seeing it, it scares me.”
“Get used to seeing it, Beck,” Laurel says firmly. “You’ve got a lifetime to keep watching them fuck up.”
2021
No. No, she doesn’t.
Susannah makes her promise not to mention it to anyone at the house during the summer, which Laurel agrees to—but she knows the moment they pull into Cousins that something is wrong. The air has all the familiar salt and brine upon it. Gulls are shrieking as they always do. Jeremiah comes bounding out of the house in front of his mother, and Conrad—
He appears, eventually. Shrugging on a jacket, carrying himself and his expression so differently that Laurel nearly doesn’t recognize him. Seventeen and furious, crackling like a stormcloud. In the past, Susannah and Laurel had joked that Conrad walked like he could be a politician one day—“maybe I really should have gone with Laurent as his middle name, that’s such a politician’s name”—but now he is slouched, rigid, like he carries a weighted forcefield about himself.
There’s no point. Laurel will keep her promise to Susannah, but children know; children will always know.
Laurel unloads the trunk of their suitcases, and by the time she straightens up, he’s tousling Belly’s hair like they’re kids again, and a smile has broken out across his face. Chatter fills the driveway as Jeremiah and Steven crowd around the car to help unload the rest of their things. Laurel shuts the doors, locks them, and slings her bag over her shoulder, keys tucked into her palm.
“You get taller every time I see you, Connie,” says Laurel, holding her arms out, amazed that Conrad still willingly accepts her hug. The pungent stink of weed clings to his jacket. Has he been smoking? It’s not really like him, but neither is the rest of any of this. “I hope you’re not scared of heights.”
“Hey, Laurel,” he says. And he’s still smiling, he is, but there are shutters around his face now. “And you get shorter every time.”
“Don’t get smart with me, young man,” she warns.
He laughs, but it doesn’t explode out of him anymore. Ha ha ha ha! It used to fill the house, him and Steven the loudest of the four, crowing like beasts, Jeremiah cackling after them, Belly the eternal victim of their antics. Now it rumbles out of him, a low, surly chuckle.
And so Laurel knows, long, long before it ever happens, when it begins to end.
2023
The problem is, when it does end, the world crawls on. Everything inside Laurel ends—sleep and digestion juddering to a halting stop—except for time. It takes everything in her to get out of bed the day of Susannah’s wake, and even more for her to find her black dress and pearl earrings. The air inside their house is pall-quiet and no one plays music on the drive to Boston.
Everything moves around her in a thick gel—color warping and transforming shapelessly as people and flowers move through her periphery, like oil slicks on water. Laurel sits in pews. She stands up. She turns her head when Steven speaks to her, her mouth moves when she replies. Belly puts her hand on her wrist, seeking her mother’s touch, and Laurel grips back.
She delivers a eulogy. Hours in front of a blank Word document on her laptop has amounted to one meager page dedicated to her best friend. She remembers taking the podium after Conrad sings a piece paired to his guitar, his voice trembling and unsure beneath the high ceilings.
Laurel can’t remember a word.
Later, the congregation forms a line to bid Susannah goodbye beside her casket. Laurel brings up the rear, last after the children, John, and Adam. She puts one foot in front of the other. Closer and closer to the casket she gets, until she’s looking down at Susannah’s coiffed, painted, posed body.
Searches her face. Sees nothing left.
The undertone of the makeup they used for her is too yellow, and she looks jaundiced. But they did put her in her favorite dress—red gingham, one that she wore every summer, and the one she’ll appear in for all of Laurel’s dreams.
Laurel tries to think of something to say. Anything. You're making me say goodbye? Really? Or You motherfucker, I can’t believe you left me first. Or We said till the end when we graduated together.
“I love you.” That’s what she says. “I love you. I love you always.”
The reception fills the house to the brim with people, because it is no surprise that Susannah goldened every one of the many lives she touched. Laurel puts a serving of hors d'oeuvres on a plate and holds it, just to give her hands something to do.
John stands near her, quietly, and regardless of how weakly their marriage whimpered as it died, she is grateful for it. When other mourners approach her, he fields them, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze when all she can muster is a rictus smile and a tight “Thank you.”
“Are you okay?” he asks, hand to her back, after a third mourner comes and goes without Laurel saying a word. “You don’t have to keep doing this. We can go.”
“No.” To both of those things.
“Or sit down. Fewer people will approach you.”
Laurel’s gaze skates restlessly over the reception. Guests are clumped together in black masses, disembodied shadows. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Some bright scrap of red gingham. Steven is standing with Jeremiah in the kitchen, neither of them speaking. Conrad is taking the stairs two at a time. She can’t find her daughter among them, nor can she scrounge up any worry.
The clouded sky outside is darkening. Already, the world is moving on.
“I’m fine,” she says. She will never quite be fine again—the same way that she smashed her ankle falling down a flight of stairs in college, and it still hurts every time winter comes round—but she doesn’t know what else to say.
“I’ll get you a drink.”
Laurel braces her hip against the foyer table as John pushes his way through the milling bodies. She hasn’t slept right in days. The floor is starting to feel like cotton.
A thud resounds behind her and a soft, concerned hush falls over the foyer. Laurel turns.
Her daughter is sprawled on the floor, and is scrambling back to her feet, straightening her dress. Belly’s face is twisted, anguished, and she looks to Laurel like her mother might cross the short distance to take her into her arms.
Beside her, Conrad’s face is a million shards of glass.
And Laurel—Laurel has always prided herself in not being her own mother. Not yelling at her children for the follies of youth or the ugly mistakes of growing up or the horror and rebellion that comes with learning that the world is cruel. Loving them when they remind her they’re not extensions of her own consciousness.
But right now, seeing her daughter surrounded by her best friends and still pushing them away, rage as black and ugly as a storm rises in Laurel and nearly chokes her.
Which is good. Because it means she says nothing, nothing that could truly hurt Belly, who in years time will be able to look back at this and laugh at her own selfishness. But it also means that Laurel stands rooted where she is, expression a hard plaster mask, and turns away from her tearstained child.
How dare you embarrass me at my best friend’s funeral. How dare you act like your world is ending when my world really has ended. You’ve never lost any real thing in your life and I’ve lost it all. You have years to make new friends. Susannah was it. She was it for me. Imagine if Conrad died tomorrow, and then you’d understand. I was the lighthouse and she was the island and now I’m nothing but scrap metal in the sea. How dare you. How dare you. How—
“I’ll go check on her,” John says, returning with a flute of sparkling wine. Then he, too, is darting out the front door.
Leaving Laurel to hate every single thing that’s crossed her mind, none more than she hates herself.
Her children’s bedroom doors are shut once Laurel finishes her shower. Her mother would be aghast, but she can’t find the energy to fish her hair dryer out from its drawer, and so she sits on her bed in her robe and wet hair, listening to the rain fall.
A week has passed. A million years have passed. An hour has passed. Laurel can’t say; no one told her how strange time would become after death. It’s almost midnight but she swore it was eight just a moment ago. It keeps happening—losing swathes of time, where she’ll look up from the single paragraph she’s typed to see that the sun has gone and her stomach is burning with hunger.
In that time, she hasn’t spoken to Belly. Every night, her daughter still stands in her doorway, mumbling a weak, “’Night, mom.” Often when Laurel has already crawled under the covers, facing away from her door, trying to chase sleep. Staring at the opposite wall. Every time she registers that Belly was there, and she sits up, only to see the dark hallway.
She pads down it now to her daughter’s door. After a moment’s hesitation, she gives it a soft knock.
No answer.
The room is dark—pitch black, in fact—when Laurel eases the knob open and lets herself in. A soft rustle textures the silence.
“Mom?”
Laurel shuts the door. She makes her way to Belly’s bed by memory, sinking down onto the edge and waiting for Belly to make room. When she does, she swings her legs onto the mattress, curling against her daughter atop her duvet.
Belly curls into her chest, as if she’s still three years old. For a long time, neither of them say anything.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she finally whispers.
“I’m sorry, too.”
Laurel presses her mouth to the crown of Belly’s head.
And then they sleep.
2027
The silence rings worse than a headache when the front door slams, the summer heat rushing in, Belly and Jeremiah striding out. From the house, and possibly from Laurel’s life.
Laurel descends the stairs and peers out the window. Their car has gone, her driveway is empty, and now, fully alone, she sinks down onto the first step and buries her face in her hands.
Maybe she’s making a terrible mistake. She’s made plenty of them, but this feels like one she can’t come back from.
The way Belly’s face had creased with fury—she’s never seen her daughter so furious and hurt, and below all of it, sad. It’s an undercurrent that never runs itself dry, no matter how many years pass. Instead it grows, that deep current widening, rushing beneath everything, as the flicker in Jeremiah’s eyes has gotten darker and meaner than ever.
They are turning into people Laurel doesn’t recognize, and that loss of self is one Laurel knows well.
You’re not this person! Laurel wants to run out of the house and grab her daughter and shout some more. You’re you, but this isn’t you!
She doesn’t know what to do. Her own mother had wanted her to get married young. Laurel has no idea how to persuade her daughter to at least wait until she’s out of college to make this decision, if that persuasion is even possible.
She wishes someone would tell her what to do.
And, a month later, Conrad calls her out to dinner.
Laurel doesn’t think she’s hungry until she bites into her burger.
“Fine,” she says, chewing. “This is good.”
“I told you,” says Conrad, squeezing a frankly demonic amount of mustard into his own. “You really can’t beat an old-fashioned diner burger and unevenly cut fries.”
Laurel snorts. She can think of a lot of things that beat those things, but she’ll let him have this. “How did you find this place?”
“They’re the only place open past midnight, which is coincidentally when I’d remember I’d forgotten to eat dinner.”
“Jesus, Connie.”
“I’m very routine about dinner now.”
Laurel dips her fries in ketchup. For a while the two of them eat in silence, raining salt from their fingers as they brush them clean on napkins, wax paper crinkling as they unwrap their burgers. The diner is playing some pulpy jukebox tune from the 50s.
“Thanks,” he says, starting on his second burger half. “For agreeing to talk.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything else.”
“Yes, but you came out here, which was half the battle for me.”
He says all of this without looking at her, like none of it really matters to him and that this is about as interesting as a business interview.
But he’s hunched. His shoulders are rolled in. Laurel’s not sure she’s seen him stand up straight, without slouching, for months, or years, like he’s always braced for some awful, smiting force to hit him without warning. She tilts her head so he might look at her, and he does, briefly, until he registers she’s about to say something he doesn’t like.
“Life is so very long, Connie,” she says. “For plenty of people, ‘the one’ happens multiple times.”
“I know.”
“I’m not saying you need to do anything or feel any which way,” she says. “Just that you can count on heartbreak not being eternal.”
He doesn’t respond.
After another length of silence, he says, “After a person’s wounded, and after they recover, there’s usually a scar.”
“You’re saying you feel scarred.”
“I’m saying,” Conrad corrects, “that you’re right. Wounds aren’t forever. They heal, then scar. And eventually they’re just a pale line of silverskin.” He pauses. “You know if you get scurvy, your scars will literally reopen?”
“What.” That sounds fake.
“Yeah. Because vitamin C is essential to maintaining the production of collagen, which is what holds scar tissue together.” Conrad meets her scrutinizing gaze. It’s been so long since he’s turned the full force of his piercing eyes on her, and they’ve gotten colder and flintier as he’s gotten older. “I’m trying, Laurel. I’m trying not to get scurvy, so to speak. I’m trying everything. Believe me, I know how many people I’m due to meet in life. There are more people in the Bay than there are people in the entire state of Massachusetts. I know.”
His but goes without saying. He’s starting to shutter. His face is closing. Laurel reaches for his wrist and gives it a hard squeeze before he can retreat completely.
“Hey,” she says. “All I’m saying is that I hate seeing you hurt. And that, no matter what happens next month, you’re always going to have room in my life. Don’t ever be scared to reach out to me for anything.”
His expression travels through a gauntlet of conflicting emotion before he gives her a dry chuckle. “Scared. I’m not scared of anything.”
“When you were four, you ran to my room with a blanket because you were too scared to sleep.”
Conrad wrinkles his brow, agog. “I literally did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
“Scared of what?”
“Can’t even remember. Ghosts, I think.”
2028
Belly has missed two calls for their morning catchup—a weekly appointment—so when a Facetime call comes in from her at noon, Laurel answers immediately, despite the fact she’s at a book festival and is taking lunch with fellow author panelists.
“Belly! Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s great, Mom! Sorry I missed your calls. I had bad reception all day—because guess where I am!”
Belly certainly looks alright—her skin is glowing, she doesn’t appear hungover, and a gorgeous sunset is turning the sky behind her into an oil painting. Over her shoulder is a towering gothic spire of a castle. A castle. Europe is not a real place.
“I don’t know, Belly. Last time you pulled that, you said you were in Paris. Is that Saint Peter’s Basilica behind you?”
“No, Mom. That’s in Italy. I’m in Brussels!”
“That’s exciting—is it a work thing? Or are you there with Gemma and Celine?”
Belly’s reception is decidedly poor. Her face pixelates, her voice cutting out. “—know you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m doing, but I swear I’ve thought this through—”
“Wait, wait, I lost you. What’s going on? Last thing I heard was Brussels. Are you there alone, Belly? You don’t know a lick of German.”
“Oh.” Belly’s face is flushed. She’s holding a coffee and takes a long, stalling sip. “Uhm, no. I’m not here alone, don’t worry. And they speak French here! Dutch and French and German.”
“Who are you with? Benito? I thought you called things off with him.”
A panel assistant to the festival ducks into the spare conference room, keys jangling against their badge. “Ten until the Career Author panel, Laurel.”
She raises a hand in acknowledgement.
“No, not Benito.” Belly chews her lip onscreen, pink smearing over Laurel’s phone. “I’m—here with Conrad, actually.”
“Connie’s there?” Isn’t he on rotations in California right now? Laurel tries not to sound as relieved as she feels, because if he’s there, then she won’t have to worry about Belly’s safety. But Laurel can’t discern whether his presence is something she should be giving congratulations or condolences for, so she restrains any visible emotion aside from neutral surprise. “For work?”
“Yes, he’s here for work.”
“Ah, so you’re visiting. That’s sweet, how is he?”
Belly chews her lip again, but swallows whatever she’s thinking of saying. She sits down in the shade of an umbrella outside of a cafe, mulling over her response, when the reception abruptly improves and the resolution of their call sharpens.
“Oh my God, don’t answer that,” Laurel says, holding the phone away from herself like it’s radioactive. “You have a hickey the size of China on your neck, Belly. Jesus Christ.”
“Shit, do I really?” Belly yanks at the collars of her jacket, which doesn’t look like it belongs to her, either. “I literally asked him—”
“I actually do not want to know!” Laurel says in a high, almost manic voice.
Belly laughs, and it’s the truest, fullest peal of laughter that Laurel has heard in a long time. It’s always been full of heat and sun-warmed sand, but it’s been missing something for years—like music without a melody.
She settles, softly, into a smile. Laurel smiles back, quietly shimmering with pride. For the first time, she glimpses Belly as someone outside her own life, her own orbit—a young woman on the verge. A lady full of future.
“He’s good, Mom,” says Belly. “We’re good. I know—I know what you’ll say to me, and I promise we’re not rushing into anything. I’m just—happy.”
“That’s good, Bean.”
“Like, my life is so full in Paris,” she goes on. “It has people I love, places I love, and food I’m good at cooking. If I go too long without texting, my friends worry about me. Gemma rings me whenever there’s a particularly pretty moon outside, so I don’t miss it. I ride a scooter because Benito taught me how. I can make any cocktail, because Celine says my American palate is unrefined and embarrassing. And it was like…” Belly draws her shoulders up toward her ears, rummaging for the words. “All of that is beautiful, but time was just—passing. And now that Conrad’s here, I can finally feel the seasons again.”
“That’s everything I want for you out of love,” says Laurel. “Someone that puts seasons back into your life. And then stays for all of them.”
“I really will do it right this time, Mom. I promise.”
“I’m not worried. You’ve grown up, Belly.”
“I know this is stupid, but I was—I don’t know. Worried, somehow, that I couldn’t start over. Not with him, not with anything.”
“Belly,” says Laurel, “to live is to begin again for the rest of your life.”
But her daughter doesn’t catch that, because her attention is pulled away. Her face brightens like a coin tossed into a fountain, and her voice cuts out slightly as she beckons to someone outside of frame.
“—say hi!”
Conrad’s image lurches into view, reception wobbling as Belly moves. She’s grinning so widely that her low-resolution face is red lipstick and a smile.
“Hey, Laurel,” he says, and has the tact to sound sheepish.
“Lovely to see you, Connie. Take care of my daughter.”
“Of course—we’re just going to get dinner, and I’ll make sure she gets back to Paris in one piece—”
Good. That’s not what she meant, but she’s glad he’s planning concretely.
The connection breaks up again. “I’ll let you go now, Mom,” Belly says, taking the phone back. “I know you’re at that book festival. Send pics later!”
“I will,” says Laurel, and after another round of reminders to keep her eye on her ID, they hang up.
The AC inside the conference room rumbles to life. Laurel shakes her head, straightens her clothes, and walks out to her panel.
2032
The only time Laurel ever sees a flash of red gingham dress—so fast that, for days afterward, she will question what she saw before being at peace with believing it—is on the night of Belly’s wedding to Conrad, down on the shore outside the summer house.
John and Adam deliver speeches first. Adam’s is comically short, but John’s is heartfelt. Earnest applause follows.
After them comes Laurel.
She steps up to the crystal podium—good grief, it’s real crystal—and positions the mic toward her mouth, laying her note cards flat. The sprawling backyard of the summer house has been lit with fairy lights woven into flowers and climbing vines, tastefully placed candles in vases, and walkway spot lights. Her heart pounds. It’s one thing to address a sea of strangers who have already read and loved her work, a different thing entirely when they’re people who are important to her family.
She clears her throat and squares her shoulders.
“Thank you, John, Adam, for your words,” she opens. “And thank you all again for making the trip to Cousins. Some of you have driven in from just out of town, some of you have flown across the country, and some of you still have crossed oceans. I can only hope my remarks are worth your time, and if not, my daughter and son-in-law have been kind enough to feature an open bar, which you can no longer find at most American weddings.”
A low hum of laughter ripples through the evening.
Laurel meets Belly’s gaze where she’s seated on a private table beside Conrad. The two of them are glowing, as if from within, her daughter’s unruly hair escaping its chignon in sweet, princesslike ringlets. Conrad has his arm around the back of her seat. She’s leaning into him.
“I also have the task,” Laurel continues, “of speaking to you not only as Belly’s mother, but also as Susannah.” She pauses. The air sobers, tightens, then loosens again—a brief, tight ache before it passes. Conrad’s eyes flicker in the candle light. “During her last days of hospice, when she knew she would not be around to see this day, Susannah asked me to speak for her at Conrad’s wedding, regardless to whom it may be. She would not give me the gift of a finished draft outlining what she wanted me to say, because that was the kind of free spirit she was. She believed anything I would say in her place would be exactly what she thought, too.
“When you become a mother, for many years, it feels impossible to divorce yourself from the idea that these new, small people in your life are not chunks of your own soul, and thus are not reflections of your own thoughts and feelings.” Wind rifles its thieving fingers through her note cards, and Laurel presses them flat beneath her palms. “And in many ways, the history of our families in particular has made that harder. But one day, against your will, you look to your children and realize that there are entire worlds and lives inside them that you will never quite be privy to. It is, at first, an intensely lonely feeling, before you realize that, if you have done right by them, their sharing it with you is an intensely special feeling. You look upon them and think, I have created you. And now, this world that has grown and filled itself with its own reality and ley lines is speaking back to you. I have been lucky enough to not only do this for my own children, but watch as it happened with the children of my best friend.
“So instead of speaking only of my daughter, of her life, and her accomplishments—of which there are many—I want to speak of Conrad and Belly in tandem, together. Writing this to them was harder than I imagined, not because they have a shortage of stories together for me to share, but the opposite: that, any time my daughter was the happiest, any time my daughter was the best version of herself, was a time touched by Conrad’s presence in her life.
“Recently, Belly graduated with a masters in clinical psychology, specializing in adolescent mood disorders,” Laurel continues. “After her return from her time abroad, I watched her throw herself into her studies. Many nights, I would have to text Conrad to know where she was or what she was doing, and the answer was always that she was holed up in her room in their shared townhouse, studying. She applied to and was accepted to some of the best psych programs, and the night before I helped her move in, I asked her—why psych?”
Belly smiles from her table, remembering the conversation.
“She told me that she wanted to become someone her younger self would be proud to meet,” says Laurel. “But most of all, because she wanted to help teenagers who are struggling, in ways that she and the people she loves most could have been helped when they were younger and weren’t.”
Beside her daughter, Conrad thumbs tears from his right eye. He doesn’t know about this conversation.
“Also recently, Conrad had the opportunity to be a speaker at a conference for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases—one which is held annually and sees an attendance of almost ten thousand doctors and specialists in the field—and I only knew about it because I caught him on a night when he was practicing his presentation. Looking, again, to him for an update about Belly. He told me that he wasn’t sure, but he’d get me an answer in the next few minutes, and I was confused what he meant until he explained that Belly was taking a power nap in the middle of her studies, and so he was rehearsing his lecture in the car. It was the middle of November, storming, and while it doesn’t get cold out in the Bay Area like it gets cold here in New England, I listened to him run through the rain back to the house, all because he didn’t want to wake my daughter from her hard-earned sleep. She was the one who had pushed him to register for the conference, he said, and also the one who urged him to accept the invitation to speak, so the least he could do was do it right. And, for anyone who knows Conrad, you’re probably aware he’d rather be mute for a week than give a TED talk.”
The wedding congregation laughs again, harder, night speckled with that sound and the sweetness of wind-tugged candles. Laurel shuffles her index cards, smoothing her hands over the podium, looking back at Belly and Conrad.
“My point is this: these are two people who are made better by their love for each other. Alone, they are remarkable. Together, they are a force. I think I speak for many of us when I say that they are inevitable and gravitational, and I have had the privilege of witnessing their mutual orbits for many years. Belly,” Laurel glances to her daughter, “I have been the luckiest mother in the world to have watched you become a girl, then a woman, with the verve and drive that you have today. And Conrad,” he inclines his head when she looks to him, “you are not of my blood, but my love, and I have seen you grow from a gangly child to a man that I can go to my grave knowing will treasure what I leave behind.”
Laurel has been so focused on reading the words without stumbling, but someone nearby sniffles—Taylor, she thinks—and abruptly, her own throat is full of cotton and wire.
“From a person who has loved and lost and continues to love,” says Laurel, her handwriting blurring beneath her, “I wish you two the happiest life together. If there are any people in this world for which forever is possible, it is you. I am so grateful to have witnessed it.”
Laurel exhales and leans back from the mic. The congregation erupts into applause. Belly and Conrad stand from their table as Laurel crosses the floor to them, and the two of them envelop her in a hug that smells of sweet peach champagne and salt. Tears. Ocean breeze.
“I love you,” she says, chin hooked over the meeting of their shoulders. “Congratulations, you two.”
Belly’s eyes are swimming as she gives Laurel her own hug, squeezing hard enough to crush. “Thank you, Mommy.”
Conrad, too, gives her his own hug, and Laurel is patting him on the back when she sees her. Someone standing at the dessert bar, back to the podium, carefree and ignorant of Taylor beginning her speech at the mic. She’s wearing a sundress, too casual to be at a wedding, red gingham fluttering in the night like a flag.
Laurel releases her new son-in-law. He turns, following her gaze, and doesn’t react at all.
She’s using tongs to serve herself a petit four.
Laurel starts weaving between the tables. Her mouth is opening, and then—
The videographer walks past, camera held up to his face, and she—along with her red dress—is gone.
Laurel deflates. She stands between two tables, and a wedding guest she only vaguely recognizes reaches out and touches her wrist gently. They have a rolling, romantic French accent.
“Everything all right, Maman?”
The waves crash along the beach, singing. I love you. Goodbye. The sand foams, singing back.
“Yes,” says Laurel, because it is.
2038
Sadie Rebecca Fisher is born in the middle of July, on the hottest day of the year, at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
Belly had asked Laurel if she would be okay with waiting at the hotel until Conrad texted with the news; she’d been so nervous, she’d started crying before she’d even gotten the question out, terrified that her mother would be angry.
“Why would I ever be angry?” Laurel had asked in disbelief, wanting nothing more to reach through the screen of her phone to hug her daughter, who’d texted her that her third trimester was marked with nothing but daily, sobbing meltdowns about things like cut grass and slightly-too-lukewarm water. “I’ll do whatever you need from me, Bean.”
“I just don’t want to be overwhelmed,” Belly had sobbed. “There are going to be so many people looking at me.”
Conrad’s text arrives just past seven in the morning. Belly had gone into L&D at noon the day before, and Laurel’s heart hurt at the thought of how long she’s been in pain.
July 16th, 2038 @ 6:19 AM. 7lbs 14oz. Baby and Mom both doing well :)
Attached is a picture of a swaddled pink lump capped with a baby beanie, fingers and cheeks wrinkled. Another comes through with a whoosh, this one of Conrad’s hand in frame lifting the hem of her beanie.
Lots of hair!
It is shockingly blonde.
Laurel flies out of bed and hurricanes through her morning routine—washing her face, brushing her teeth, finding the right clothes to throw on. Her bones no longer move as fast as she’d like, no matter how hard she tries, and her doctor has warned her about too much strenuous activity first thing in the morning being bad for her blood pressure. Today, she can’t bring herself to care.
John texts to say he’ll arrive to visit around lunchtime.
The California sky is blue and eyewatering in the mornings, though blessedly cool even in summers, and Laurel hurries into Lucile Packard from the Uber dropoff. She checks in as a visitor and receives her nametag. Belly is on the third floor. Stanford Hospital is a veritable maze of buildings.
She knocks before she lets herself in.
Aside from the hum of the air conditioning and the slow, gentle beeps of a heart monitor, Belly’s room is quiet and peaceful. Conrad stands up from the armchair by the windows, curtains thrown open for sunlight. In her bed, Belly straightens, though she’s moving gingerly, her hair tied in a braid and swept over her shoulder.
“Mommy,” says Belly, and Laurel doesn’t even see the clear bassinet that holds her grandchild. She steps, hushed, into this antiseptic but sacred space, crossing it first for her daughter.
“How are you, Bean?” She kisses the top of her daughter’s head. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I think I died,” Belly says, “but I lived.”
“I know the feeling,” Laurel says solemnly, and Belly’s laugh is all sandpaper and exhaustion. She slides her gaze to the bundle in the bassinet.
“Say hi,” she says. “Been telling her that she’s going to be grandma’s favorite person.”
Laurel sets down her purse. “I need to wash my hands!”
Conrad has lifted their newborn into his arms when Laurel finishes scrubbing her palms for a full minute in the attached bathroom. He nods for her to take his seat. Exhaustion wears on him, too, the shadows beneath his eyes deep behind the glasses he now wears, but his smile is wide and beaming. Sadie is so tiny that his hand spans nearly the entire circumference of her soft head.
Laurel sets a pillow on her lap and waits. Then, gently, as if he’s handling a cloud or a still-beating heart, Conrad settles their new child into her arms.
Sadie is fast and firmly asleep, though she wriggles once as Laurel adjusts her embrace below her bundled body. It has been years—decades—since Laurel has held a baby, never mind a newborn, and yet a mother’s body does not forget. All at once she is the one in a bed again, needles and catheters plugged into her veins, nurses whirling around her in bloodied scrubs as the world narrows to the small and perfect point of a baby’s face. For a moment Sadie is Belly, still Isabel, and John’s arm is around her shoulders. Time stretches and contracts, released, a rubber band twanging upon itself, and the past snapping against the now. Before it breaks, Susannah is still alive and Belly is ten minutes old.
Her vision blurs.
“Oh, Mom,” says Belly, and Laurel sniffles, tilting her face up, but it’s already too late. The tears are running. Conrad has pressed tissues into her hands before she’s thought to reach for them. “I told you she’d cry.”
“I’ll get you some water, Laurel,” says Conrad.
“Oh, I’m fine—”
But he’s leaning toward Belly and giving her a swift kiss on the forehead before rising from the edge of the bed, running his fingers through his unbrushed hair and leaving the room. It’s his way of giving her space and time with her daughter, and she will allow him this swift escape.
After a beat, Laurel finds her voice. “She is so beautiful, Bean.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Laurel peeks under Sadie’s beanie. “Wow, she really is blonde.”
“I know. All that work and she comes out looking like a clone of her father.” Another papery laugh escapes her. “Her eyes are dark, though. Like ours.”
“Small victories.”
Belly lets her head drop back against her pillows as she watches her mother watch her child. Laurel tucks the blanket away from Sadie’s mouth and nose to see her face better. She goes on sleeping, none the wiser.
“What if I’m awful at this, Mom.”
Laurel looks up. Belly’s baby hairs are curled from sweat, and in this moment her daughter looks the oldest she has ever been. This woman will be her forever baby, but for now, she is a terrified mother looking to an elderly one who has walked the road, a wild, feral look in her expression like she’s just now realizing that everything will change forever and ever and ever from here on out.
“Bean—”
“What if I hurt her feelings? What if I make her wish she’d never been born? What if I fuck her up so bad, Mom, what if I ruin her life?”
Laurel raises her eyebrows. “Did I ruin your life?”
“No.” Belly slumps. “You were right about everything. Which I hate.”
They exchange knowing laughter. Laurel leans back in the armchair, pensive.
“Do you remember what I said at your wedding? During my speech?”
“You said that Conrad and I were gravitational forces.”
“I did. I also mentioned what it was like to become a mother.” Laurel relaxes further into the armchair. “And it will come to you too, the day when you look at Sadie and realize she’s not just an extra organ that’s been excised from you and gained its own sentience. It will be the worst and best thing you ever learn. It’ll happen around the same time she realizes you’re not a god, that you are not powerful but that you are all-loving—at least toward her. There’s no way to prepare for it. You will hurt her feelings, you will probably fuck her up in some way that’s a complete blind spot to you, and she will learn to grow around those edges and see you for a person one day, too.”
“I’m scared, Mom.”
“Good,” says Laurel. “It means you’re ready for a child.”
“You know they refer to pregnancies after thirty as geriatric? Like, seriously. As if your life is over at thirty.” Belly pauses. “I feel like I didn’t wake up until I was thirty.”
“I believe the correct phrase now is advanced maternal age pregnancy.”
“Right, that.” A pause. “You know, Conrad almost fainted.”
“What?” Laurel laughs in disbelief. “He’s a surgeon!”
“That’s what I said!” Belly tosses an arm up, then winces. “The nurses told him he needed to sit down. He was okay in the end, thank God. But he said it’s different when it’s me. There was—you know, some blood. He was doing fine until then.”
Her daughter, like a prey animal, hides her pain. If Belly is saying there was some blood, there was probably a lot, and Laurel’s heart contracts.
“I know your life is out here now, and I know you’re happy. But if there’s any chance in the cards that you and Connie want to move back east—I’m just saying, I’m more than happy to help. I didn’t raise you and Steven alone. I don’t want you to do it alone, either.”
“I’m not—”
“I know Connie’s the gold standard for attentiveness and being present,” Laurel interrupts, “but just mathematically, if we count the hours in the day, it’s hard for anyone.”
“Steven’s in SF.”
“Yes, and he’s gotten weirdly good at cooking. I’ll tell him to bring you food.”
“Taylor has already called dibs on bringing food,” says Belly. She’s quickly tiring, and the blood loss is suddenly evident, her cheeks pale. Laurel should take her leave soon, though she wants nothing more than to take care of her own daughter. “Steven’s work-from-home half the week, he said he’d be happy to work from my place on those days.”
“Good.”
Conrad returns with water for all three of them as well as takeout for Laurel and Belly. He squints when Laurel tries to decline, holding out the takeout bag until she accepts, and he sets it beside her purse by the window.
“Did you get me sushi?” Belly’s face lights up. “Yes! After nine months—where did you go?”
“Mall’s a ten minute walk from here,” Conrad says, shrugging. “Yes, it’s all yellowtail. Chicken katsu for you, Laurel.”
“I love you,” Belly says ardently, though it’s not clear, as she’s breaking her disposable chopsticks, whether she’s speaking to her sushi or Conrad.
Not that it matters to him. “I know,” he says.
“I should get going,” says Laurel.
“I’ll see you out.” Conrad takes Sadie from her and settles her back into her bassinet. Laurel gathers her bag, her food, and gives her daughter another careful hug and kiss. She waits outside, where she hears Conrad quietly asking Belly if she’ll be okay, while Belly promises she’ll press the call button if something catastrophic happens in the ten minutes he’s gone.
He and Laurel walk in comfortable silence. At the dropoff, Conrad calls her an Uber and waves off another volley of her protests, and then stands in quiet serenity with her, plastic takeout bag rustling between them, as the day brightens toward noon. She lets this silence linger. He will likely not have much of it for the next eighteen years.
Laurel sees her Uber pulling in, a dark Honda Civic, and she turns to him.
“Congratulations again, Connie,” she says. Laurel pats herself on the back for not tearing up again. “If there’s anything—and I really mean anything—that you guys need, I’m just a phone call away. You might be a dad now, but you and Belly are always going to be my babies.”
“I know,” he says, and smiles, and when the sun hits his face, he looks so young again.
He opens his arms for a hug, and Laurel squeezes him tight. Neither of them say it, because the words have integrated themselves into the fabric of their lives, but they are both thinking it. I wish Susannah were here. I know she’d be so happy.
“Thanks for everything,” Conrad says, chin on her shoulder. “My Laura.”
Her eyes well. Laurel heroically keeps the tears in her eyes when she pulls back, when she pops the door open, even as she sinks into the backseat and lifts her hand to wave. Conrad waits at the dropoff until the car pulls out of the roundabout, his wiry frame disappearing around the trees, and only then does Laurel give a great sniffle.
Hesitantly, the Uber driver says, “I’m very sorry, if something’s happened.”
“No, no.” Laurel wipes her eyes. “Nothing like that.”
“Something good, then?”
“Yes, actually. Something perfect.”