Drew came and stayed in the West Village apartment of an editor friend who was out of town. Milly told Jared that much, and that she and Drew were going to meet after work for dinner and have a girls’ sleepover. But actually Drew met Milly in the morning at a SoHo doctor’s office with a lovely, massive ceramic vase of freesia in the center of the room, real art on the walls, and comfortable nubby earth-toned sofas in the waiting room. Finally, seeing Drew, Milly allowed herself to cry, and Drew held her.
“Honestly?” Drew looked Milly in the eye and asked. “The thing is, Millipede, you think you know what the future holds, and you don’t.”
“No,” Milly protested quietly, scribbling her way through the paperwork, “it’s that I don’t know. That’s what I can’t stand. It’d be like wondering if you’re raising a time bomb.”
Drew sighed. “Oh, Milly,” she said, leading Milly to the sofa. A nurse finally came out and summoned Milly.
“I’ll be right here,” Drew said as the nurse led Milly away.
Milly steeled herself and went into the doctor’s office and willed her mind out of her body through the procedure. The Valium helped, which was good because, now that it was actually happening, she was distressed over the fact she was aborting Jared’s baby (that he’d wanted!) without telling him. What if she could never get pregnant again? Well, wasn’t that what she wanted?
I really need to remove my mind from this situation, she told herself. So she thought about art supplies, which always gave her a good feeling; she thought about the decent budget she had for that this year in her new job and how she’d bring in a nice supply, and how she could discreetly siphon a bit of that away from school and bring it to the boys’ home on Saturdays. She’d introduce Mateo to watercolors and a paintbrush — she’d put his fingers around a paintbrush for the first time! — if Sister Ellen would let her. That would be a joyous afternoon.
See, she thought, she was able to remove herself from this situation. And this certainly didn’t mean she didn’t love children. It certainly didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother. She could be a loving mother, an attentive one, a mother who nurtures her child, not one who merely treats her like an afterthought. This was all still possible. She couldn’t even let herself think about what was going on down there, on the other side of her johnny, and she did her best to tune out the gentle, supportive murmurings of the nurse whose hand she gripped through the procedure. It was best just not to be there.
When it was over, they drew a comfy old-style quilt over her and told her to rest for a while. She turned on her side, tucked her hands under the pillow, and lay there. She certainly was relieved that was over with. And she certainly would not be forgetting her Pills again any time soon. She felt vaguely crampy but otherwise fine, a bit floaty from the Valium. Drew came in and sat down beside her and stroked her hair back behind her ear and smiled at her. She loved Drew, that much was certain. She was feeling bizarre alternating pangs of remorse and resentment toward Jared, but she sure loved Drew.
“How are you, sweetie?” Drew asked.
“I’m fine, it’s over,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”
“We’ll get in a cab and go back to the West Village and rent a bunch of movies and watch them all day and night,” Drew said.
“No movies with children,” Milly said.
“No movies with children.”
She called Jared from Drew’s friend’s apartment that night. He was making himself pasta and then going to Green Day with Asa and some of his other friends.
“We’re going out somewhere ourselves,” she told him. “We haven’t decided yet.” She was lying; she felt basically fine except for a little crampiness, but she was in no mood to sit in a crowded restaurant and maybe run into people. Drew flashed her the tiniest look of reproach.
“You’ll be home tomorrow after work, right?” he asked her.
“Of course I will,” she said. “We’ll cook together.”
She and Drew watched silly movies till midnight, then slept together in Drew’s friend’s comfortable queen-size bed, spooning just as they’d done that night at Milly’s Brooklyn apartment before Drew went to rehab. Milly hadn’t slept with anyone but Jared in three years, since that window of 1993–1995 when she and Jared weren’t together and she’d dated a little, and now Drew’s soft, slim body and the cinnamon smell of her hair were comforting, and she slept long and well for the first time in weeks. They went to Tartine in the morning for breakfast before Drew hailed a cab on Seventh Avenue to go to JFK.
They embraced. “Thank you for being such a good friend,” Milly told Drew.
Drew cupped Milly’s face between her cool palms. “I love you, Millipede. I’ll call you when I’m home.”
Milly went in and did her half day of work, as had been planned, her heart strangely bursting at the opportunity to see her new students again and assign easels. She still felt that sense of good fortune and happiness as she shopped for dinner after work, and when she came in the apartment and saw Jared in front of his laptop at the kitchen table, some hummus and pita bread beside him, she felt not guilt and remorse but love and contentment, dropping the bags to go sit in his lap, put her arms around him, and kiss him a long, long time.
“You and Drew had sex and she obviously rebooted your libido,” he said, face flushed. “I’m lucky she’s in your life!”
She laughed. “We did not have sex! We snuggled but we did not have sex.”
Fall turned into winter and she continued going to Sister Ellen’s home on Saturdays, sometimes with Jared, sometimes without. There were the Thanksgiving art projects, the Hanukkah art projects, the Christmas art projects. She woke up on Saturday mornings happy, dying to fill her bag with art supplies and hop on the train. She loved walking in the sunny room now because the boys cheered and went wild when she came in. All except Mateo, who, immediately upon seeing her, would smile quietly and go sit off by himself at a little table he had designated as his personal art area, out of which he would carefully pull the projects he had been working on that week to show Milly. He waited patiently, professionally, for Milly’s attention, his arms folded, watching her every move as she set up the other boys. Milly knew that he knew that they were mere prologue to him, Milly’s star student, and he was right. Milly adored him, but she never let herself show it too much because Mateo made it very clear with her that he wanted them both to keep a cool tone.
On December 20, the Saturday before Christmas, Mateo turned five.
“We’ll have his cake at dinner tonight,” Sister Ellen said. Then Sister Ellen looked at the wrapped gift that Milly had brought for Mateo with Sister Ellen’s approval. It was his own paint set.
“Do you want to foster him?” Sister Ellen asked her.
Milly felt like her eyes popped out of her head. “What? Be foster parents?”
“It’s not adoption,” Ellen said calmly. “It’s a trial-basis thing. Your mother would retain legal guardianship for the time being. If it doesn’t work out, he comes back here.” She paused. “How can I give that boy the opportunities that his talent deserves as he gets older with a whole house to run?”
Sister Ellen scared Milly a little. It seemed like she could read minds, or hearts, because it was as if she knew that Milly had been running this scenario over and over in her head nearly every day for the past month. She found herself taking her cue from Ellen and being strangely, bluntly honest: “I do want to,” Milly said. “But I don’t know if Jared does. He wants us to have our own baby.”