The strongest drive.

I think I always assumed I’d be a mom. Before Julian, before Josh even, I’d tuned into the message being broadcast to me from every direction: women want to be wives, but they especially want to be mothers. Men could be ambivalent, but the natural expression of woman is as mother.

It’s not like I was being fed conservative propaganda at home about “traditional” families being the only way a family could be real. I am of the “Heather Has Two Mommies” generation — it was Rachel’s favorite book growing up, as she far preferred Mommy to Daddy and would have had two moms gladly (all boys were “yucky” back then, how things change). My Uncle Rich is gay, and his partner (now husband) Neil’s son came as part of a package deal when they all moved in together back in the late ’90’s. Plenty of my friends — like Mack and Caitlin — lived with only one parent, and Uncle Guy (my favorite uncle, the one who let me watch the really gross horror movies and eat Goober Grape straight out of the jar) has kept to his 20-something promise that he had zero intention of ever procreating, let alone marrying.

My mom gave me my first copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, when I was 11. I’d been reading her copy for years, with her encouragement: “Our bodies are beautiful creations, Melissa, and capable of creating more beauty for the world. You should read more about how powerful women are.” It was in those pages, often with my mother beside me, that I learned that my body was going to sprout hair and smell weird sometimes and change and change and change. For a young girl convinced that nearly everything about herself was agonizingly abnormal, knowing that at least my body worked and looked (and smelled) normal was no small comfort.

Unlike Rachel, who had bounded enthusiastically into adolescence, even knowing I looked normal down there (I’d taken a leaf out of Our Bodies and checked myself out years before) didn’t make me any more comfortable with leaving behind girlhood. Girls could be brave and strong and ride bikes and destroy the boys at kickball and Sonic the Hedgehog and do science experiments with baking soda and proclaim their love for The Amityville Horror (the nightmares for months afterward were worth it, thank you, Uncle Guy) and everyone thought it was wonderful. At least until you found yourself in possession of a training bra and a combination to your high school locker. Back in the late ’90s, there was still a narrow channel to navigate for femininity, and it rarely provided for repeated watchings of Night of the Lepus.

Sullivan women are, nearly to a one, petite (Mom tells me not to be precious — “we’re short”), so I knew not to expect the kind of growth spurts causing Cait agony at night. Maman, Dad’s mother, had had a chest of Partonesque proportions (always hidden beneath sensible pullovers or billowy blouses), so Rachel’s… blossoming was not unexpected. The Bosom Fairy sprinkled far fewer pixie sparkles on me when it was my turn, however, as Rach liked to remind me. Not that I cared much, or that was the lie I felt comfortable telling her.

All of this growing and sprouting and aching was for one simply marvelous end: procreation. Or so I was told in health class by Mrs. D’Angelo, the girls’ basketball coach, in 10th grade sex ed. Segregated by sex from the other half of our class, I sat in between Jen and Missy Valenciano, star forward on the soccer team, and learned of the miracle of life. In a nearby room, the boys squirmed while Coach Figueroa barked warnings about venereal disease over videos about the functions of the vas deferens and the epididymis.

“You see, girls,” Mrs. D said, snapping open the blinds after a particularly graphic video of natural childbirth. (I knew the word “episiotomy” already, but on that day got to see one up close and rather personal.) “Our bodies are capable of a singular magic trick: we can grow life within us and bring it into the world. The boys can’t say that, can they?”

“Why would they want to?” Missy piped up to my left. “That looks terrible. They cut you open one way or another and there’s so much blood. Yeuucccchhhhh. No thanks.”

“My mom said that a lot of women poop on the table when they’re in labor,” I offered, to murmurs of disgust.

“God, imagine you’ve got all these people around you telling you to push, and it hurts and hurts, and then on top of it all… you poop yourself,” Jen said. There was a twin note of wonder and despondency in her tone. (When informed that Ethan would need to be delivered by Caesarean due to his massive size, Jen was ecstatic. “No pooping for me!” she texted me after that OB/GYN appointment.)

“And then they want you to breastfeed!” Brandy Rand was Talley’s little sister, and another victim of her parents’ sadistic naming preferences. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, she pulled at the front of her polo shirt and looked down.

“Why does anyone want to get pregnant?” Missy asked, passing me the plastic bucket full of fun size Three Musketeers Mrs. D gave us as bribes to show up for every class. We could take three each, which made attendance worthwhile. I didn’t need bribing, but a fun-size is a fun-size.

“Well, I happen to love kids. I’m planning on having at least three,” Elisa Tan announced. “Two boys and a girl. I don’t know what’s wrong with all of you, labor’s, like, just a tiny part of it all, and then you have a baby at the end of it all.” I distinctly remember her squealing in delight at the end of that sentence, but time may have inserted one in there for me, as it was completely in character for Elisa Tan, whose favorite movie was Where the Heart Is. In case you’ve forgotten the plot, it’s about a pregnant teenager who is abandoned at a Walmart in Oklahoma and embraced by a community of heartwarming oddballs.

“You don’t get to choose the sex beforehand, duh,” Brandy said behind me through a mouth of Three Musketeers.

Mrs. D nodded thoughtfully. “Good, good. This is all excellent discussion, girls. Why do we have kids?” She grabbed a red dry-erase marker and wrote on the whiteboard in neat capitals: WHY HAVE KIDS?

“Because it’s our strongest biological drive,” Liz Fink said in the front row. God, I hated Liz Fink. She really thought she was smarter than me, even though she never had the grades to prove it, simply because she was determined to be an astrophysicist, and “everyone knows scientists are smarter than people who just write a lot, like you.” Last I knew, Liz Fink had fulfilled her strongest biological drive four times over and was living in Lawton, Oklahoma and teaching high school physics, so I guess she nearly succeeded.

“They’ll take care of you when you get older? Maybe?” Jen ventured nervously.

“Babies are so sweet,” Elisa squealed (she definitely squealed that). “All those cute little outfits. And your kids love you, and the more love the better.”

Missy made a gagging noise next to me as she mimed forcing up her lunch.

“Missy,” Mrs. D said over her shoulder as she wrote our ideas on the board. “Why don’t you tell us why not have kids if you feel so strongly about it?”

“How much time is left in this period, Mrs. D?” she asked innocently, batting her eyelashes.

“Because there’s so much stuff to do in life, and babies and kids are a huge responsibility.” It popped out of my mouth so easily, even though I’d never given voice to this worry.

“Go on, Mel,” Mrs. D said as she inked “TOO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY” carefully on the board.

“I want to do things. I’ve seen what having a baby can do to your career if you’re a woman. My Aunt Jane was an associate professor and then she got pregnant and took a couple of years off to stay at home with my cousin and now she can’t get her job back. She really loves her baby, but no one takes her seriously now. And what if I never meet a guy I want to have a baby with? What if I meet someone who loves me but he doesn’t want kids?”

Mrs. D’s handwriting got sloppier as she tried to keep up, but the words wouldn’t stop coming. “And I feel like it’s a trap. Like I spent all this time growing into my own self, just like everyone says I’m supposed to be doing, and then I have to put it all on hold for like 18 years? Or longer? Just to take care of someone who completely depends on me because I was the one who made them in the first place? And the guy just gets to do whatever he wants. His career won’t suffer and he can leave if he wants to, but if you’re a mom, that’s it. Life sentence.”

“Wow,” Jen whispered to me. “I always thought you wanted to be a mom.”

So did I. However, Liz Fink was almost right — procreation may not be the strongest biological urge for every woman, but that doesn’t lessen the psychological urge to conform in that regard. Girls become women become wives become mothers become grandmothers and maybe great-grandmothers, before they become cold bodies on the slab. I only wanted to be Melissa.

***

“How many do you think we should have?” Josh had asked me the summer between my junior and senior year.

We were hunched over a picnic table behind the large A-frame lodge that was the centerpiece of his family compound on Cape Cod. The day before he’d patiently shown me how to use a shell cracker and pick meat out of bright red lobster claws with a long metal prong. I watched without comment, though I was even better than he was at the task after multiple summer trips to visit the Sullivan clan in Eastern Connecticut. In my hands, I made quick work of prising open the steaming claw, though I couldn’t resist asking, “Like this?” before snapping the scarlet and white chiton like I’d been doing it most of my life. Which I had, of course. Josh patted himself on the back for being such an excellent tutor.

“What, claws?” I swirled the morsel of flesh in the butter I’d clarified with his cousin Beth earlier that day. Beth was 22, freshly graduated from Bowdoin, and in possession of the casual grace and serious beauty of a young Ali McGraw. She was moving to Manhattan — “The City” — at the end of August to begin her work as a marketing assistant, “maybe do a little more modelling, if I feel like it.”

I could tell from the way Josh bumbled around Beth, and the way the words that normally popped from his mouth in the drollest little strings stopped up, that he wanted her. Also from the way he tentatively untied the back of her string bikini — at her request — while she lay face down on her “Vieques Spring Break ’02” beach blanket, the way he slowly smoothed Bain de Soleil SPF 4 on her back. And of course how he’d nonchalantly (not really) mentioned that Beth had hooked up with Teddy the previous summer: “Hardly incest when it’s second cousins,” he’d scoffed.

Josh reached across the table for the shell cracker. “Kids. I mean kids.”

“I dunno,” I said through a mouthful of lobster. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it.”

I watched as he tussled with a claw that would not crack easily, that slipped repeatedly from the cracker’s jaws before he gave up with a sigh. “I think two is right for us, at least four years apart. Not as close in age as you are with Rachel, or me with Teddy. Too much rivalry, in my observation. It’s worse when the younger is the more successful, like you and I are.”

In the nearly 36 years I have slouched through the world, I can’t recall many times my sister has been jealous of my talents or achievements. Maybe my bank balance, or the trips to Martinique and the Maldives, the possessions I built up in that big Pasadena house to mask the blankness of my marriage to Julian. She particularly coveted the handblown amber glass nesting bowls that I’d picked up in Milan. I once caught her pushing the smallest bowl into her gym bag when she’d come over to do yoga with me and my old yogini, Shiva. (Shiva did house calls for her favorite students, especially the ones who knew her real name was Sharon.)

“Two seems… fine,” I said cautiously.

I’d been on the Cape with him for a week at that point, a surprise present sprung on me by my parents and his at the beginning of June. I say “present,” as if it was a gift to me, but it really wasn’t. I’d been tied up with a pretty bow and sent on east on a plane as a reward for Josh’s stellar high school career. And though I’d feared two weeks without my few connections to non-Josh life — my friends, my not-really-a-summer-job job at my dad’s office — would set a well-dressed stage for him to carry out his regular humiliations upon my body and mind, instead I’d found nothing of the sort on the Brookes compound.

It wasn’t just that with so many people around, all the time, barging into unlocked bathrooms unannounced, poking their noses into boathouses and literally dragging you into the main lodge to play charades or Pictionary, being sufficiently alone was impossible. No. Josh was so fucking happy all the time that he didn’t seem to mind missteps that would have brought me a session over his knee, or at least a three-minute disquisition on how wrong I was. There was the stone fox Beth, of course, but it was more than thinking he had a chance with his second cousin. (Ew.) The Fultons and the Brookeses and the Robinsons and the Blakes were an intense bunch, lots of Kafka over coffee and spaghetti with a side of Spinoza. I didn’t exactly come from a family of dum-dums, but it seemed to me everyone there over the age of 10 could have wiped a Jeopardy! board clean as a whistle. He was with his people, and at rest for that.

Josh paused in his second attempt to open the intractable claw. “Do you want more? I want you to be happy, princess. We could have three. If you want four or five, I’m certain we can make that happen.”

The idea of even one bossy, brooding, dark-haired Baby Brookes dictating the course of the rest of my life was alarming; five seemed a punishment completely unfit for the minor sin of loving Josh Brookes.

I stuck out my tongue. “I don’t think I want five more claws.”

With a sharp crack of laughter, he busied himself with finally prying open the lobster shell. “You’re funny,” he said, not looking up from drawing out the creamy flesh with the long silver pick. The afternoon sun caught on the metal as he stroked out the meat, and flashed in my eyes, blinding me briefly.

“Can I think about it?” I drew my sunglasses down and watched Beth swing the youngest Brookes or Blake or whatever cousin up high to the midday sun. Baby Brookes’ bright squeal grated on me, and the sour gripe of his wail as he twisted in her grip was like a rubber band snapping and snapping on my skin.

I don’t want this.

***

Even before we got engaged, Julian had made it clear that he wanted to be a father. “And not the kind of father mine is,” he insisted. “That doesn’t sound right. My dad is amazing. What I mean is I want to raise a child, not just visit him or her when I’m in town.”

Soon we’d return from Christmas holidays, back to Bristol in a torrential downpour and near-freezing weather. As he’d promised, Julian would be waiting for me in Paddington by the grand clock on Platform 1. But until then we were voices over a wire, growing closer and closer through our stories.

We’d talked as much as we could over the break — Jules was footing the phone bill, despite my father’s initial resistance. He seemed almost offended that I should be talking to anyone but my family in the brief two weeks I had at home, but Rachel wore him down.

“Dad, look,” she explained my first night back in Burbank over a dinner of chicken tarna and baba ghanouj from Zankou. Mom was doing rounds so we were fending for ourselves. “The guy is loaded and nuts about her. Show Dad the necklace.”

Weeks before, I’d emailed Rachel about my first date with Julian, how we started the evening sitting at the grand sweep of a marble bar drinking martinis like young sophisticates, how I felt poised on the edge of something happening at last. And how he’d slid a small grey velvet box across the table while I was ploughing my way through a lemon tart. Dessert was so distractingly delicious I didn’t even notice the offering until he coughed lightly and pointed to the box.

“Just a little something. You don’t need to keep it if you don’t like it, or you think it’s too much,” he’d said while I fumbled to peer at the contents. “Minty said you liked gold.”

Nestled on an ecru satin cushion, a single teardrop of an emerald topped with a smallish diamond flashed where it caught the candlelight. “Julian!” It really was too much, too soon, but as I pulled at the gold chain in the box to hold it to the light, I decided I didn’t really care. Even in the low light of the restaurant, the clarity of the jewels was thrilling. A bright frisson of greed zipped through me.

“You said your birthday was in May, so I thought you might like an emerald,” he explained to me while he clasped the necklace around my neck. “And your eyes, of course. Let me see you.”

When I glanced up, he looked like a puppy who’d performed a clever trick and needed to be told he was a very good boy. “It’s so beautiful, Jules. How do I look?”

“Like a princess. Lovelier, even.”

I tried not to wear it in front of Alex though, not until I gave up on him following any of the very obvious hints I dropped that I wanted to jump his bones. I’d decided to give it one last shot, right after I’d slept with Julian for the third time. Admittedly, he was distracted by playing Need for Speed when I asked if he thought I’d make a good girlfriend for someone like him (he was also half-cocked on Strongbow), but I wasn’t expecting him to say, “Sure, you and Jules make a perfect couple. You have my blessing, not that you need it. Grab me another Silk Cut from the box, will you?”

Over the dinner table, and at my sister’s insistence, I pointed to the jewel where it nestled on my breastbone. I’m fairly certain it was nicer than anything my dad had gotten for my mom until they were well into their 40s.

My dad let rip a low whistle. “Quite the gem there, baby. I think your sister is saying I should let you take this guy for whatever he’s worth.”

“Absolutely!” Rachel boomed.

“Your mother would be shocked that we raised two little capitalist pigs,” my father retorted, scooping up some baba ghanouj with a slice of pita.

“Oink oink, dad,” Rachel said with a smirk.

I found the hours when the rest of my house was still were the best for speaking with Julian — no Rachel listening at the door, no Mom demanding to be put on the phone “so I can hear what he sounds like,” no Dad yelling in the background that no, he didn’t know where the remote was and could someone please make him a coffee.

“What’s your father like?” It was 2am in Burbank, and I was drinking Diet Coke while flipping through a Macy’s Day After Christmas Sale flyer. November and December in Bristol had convinced me that I needed turtlenecks in my life, even if they gave me the sensation of being garotted by a snug, thick scarf.

“You’ll love him, Mel. Most women do. I told you he built himself and our company out of nothing. That he grew up on the streets. My granddad –” Jules broke off. I could hear the electronic buzz that sometimes hung in the background of our transatlantic calls, so I knew just to wait. After eight weeks of being his girl, I knew the silences were often a prelude for his vulnerability, and I was just a bit proud knowing he trusted me with his greatest secrets.

Jules cleared his throat twice. “My granddad,” he repeated, “was a drunk. No other way to describe it. Falling down, pissing his trousers on a street corner drunk. He beat my Nan, he beat my Aunt Sal, and when he was tired of taking out his failure on the women in his house, he beat my dad.”

I shut the flyer; circling new bras and camisoles with my pink metallic sharpie felt unseemly given these confessions. “Oh, Jules.”

It was the only thing I could think to say. Papa and Maman never raised a hand to my father or his brothers in the 1960s peace of suburban Culver City. Papa, like my Grandpa Sullivan, liked a glass or two of liquor, but I’d never seen either drunk. Grandpa Sullivan could have a sharp tongue, and I’d heard him snap at my Uncle Steve more than once, but there was no violence, never a belt or a ruler or an open hand on any of the eight unruly Sullivan kids.

“When Sal got married — she was only sixteen, can you believe it? — my dad tried living with her and her husband, but the flat was too small, and while they made it work for a bit, they didn’t want to take care of a kid. So he slept rough, occasionally getting a sofa to crash on but more often that not sleeping in doorways. Liverpool gets cold, Mel. I’ve been there. The kind of cold that gets in your bones and you can’t shake.”

“How did he go to school?” I’d had a few classmates in high school I knew were technically homeless, doing the sort of couch-surfing Ed Cranford had done in ’60s Liverpool. It didn’t seem an easy life, and none had gone on to college. Only one graduated.

“School?” Julian chortled. “Dad left school when he was 14, as soon as he moved in with Sal. Doesn’t have a single qualification but look at what he did! No thanks to the hopeless Labour government he launched himself in.”

In the stillness of the Valley night, I heard a car door slam, waking up the DiMartinos’ dog next door for a brief round of echoing barks.

“No, my dad’s a worker, not a sponger. Went down to the docks, got a job sweeping up at an importer who dealt in cheap crockery from Taiwan. The old man who owned the place liked how Dad showed up early every day, and when he found out it was because my dad didn’t have a place to live, he let him sleep in the office. The owner liked him, liked that my dad asked a lot of questions, liked that he took an interest in the business, not just getting paid. After a while, the old man started letting my dad do a little more. Run payroll, handle the books, type up letters. Dad learned everything from him, so he says, but my father wanted more. I don’t want to bore you with all this.”

Julian stopped abruptly, and the scene I’d been summoning, of a gritty Beatles-era Liverpool, faded. “Your father does sound amazing. Please, go on.” In the backyard, the security light flicked on and I watched a tipsy Rachel wobble her way from the garden gate to the back door, perilously hugging the perimeter of the pool. It had been a cold night in the Valley, but Rachel was in a thigh-high silver tank dress covered in shimmering paillettes, like a moon goddess doing night duty on the Sunset Strip.

“Not much more to say,” Julian said. “Dad got the old man’s business when he retired, and by that time they were dealing with the PRC and Japan, too. All my dad’s doing, expanding like that, and then he opened the office in Felixstowe. Met my mother at Royal Ascot through some chap he knew from Suffolk, and that was that.”

“Royal Ascot?” I had been picking up bits and pieces from the new smart set I was rubbing along with in Bristol about “society,” and its rituals baffled me. That there even was “society” still threw me for a loop. I’d sucked up enough trashy Regency romance novels to know about “the Season” and Almack’s and patronesses, but I’d assumed that England had left that all behind once Queen Victoria died. I was wrong, even if the events and locales had shifted over two centuries. I had learned that Ascot was in June, that (Jules’ exams permitting) we’d be attending, and I’d need a hat. A big one, preferably.

“Hang on a moment, Mel. I need to speak with Trudy.” The number of people who worked in Julian’s parents’ home in Suffolk was dizzying to me, but I knew Trudy was the housekeeper, and the gardener was named Rogers. Sancha had served as the nanny until very recently, but had segued into a sort of companion to his mum. And there was an ever-changing staff of Polish cleaners that Jocasta Cranford hired and fired as she felt like it, a habit she brought with her to her new home in Newport Beach. Only the nationality has changed, from Polish to Salvadoran. They’re all expendable, in her eyes.

Down the line, I listened while Julian thanked Trudy for topping up his tea, and confirmed that there was no need to set the table for four that evening. “Sorry about that. What were we talking about? Oh, yes. My father. Well, he never wanted to forget where he came from, but he wasn’t too keen on staying there. Mum saw something in him others of her class didn’t.”

I’d learn soon it was Ed Cranford’s massive bank balance, but my former father-in-law isn’t exactly a slobbering troll when it comes to looks. He had spawned Jules, after all. I’ve seen the pictures — in 1982, Ed was bright blond and trim, broad-shouldered and (in a few poolside candids from the honeymoon in St. Lucia) in possession of a six-pack. To be honest, Julian was a bit of a step down from the original iteration of Cranford blood.

“Where is he today?” It was only two days after Christmas; my own father never failed to take the entire week after Christmas off to spend with Rachel and me, well after I’d graduated and moved out. Even the first three years of my marriage to Julian, my dad made a point of making his work, well, work around me. And Rachel of course.

“In London, in the City. He was here yesterday, but work is work, Mel. He’s always been clear about that with us. I have to respect it. But…” Julian’s sigh cut me deep. “I don’t want that to be my life. As a father. To be always away and never around for my kids. Fuck, that sounds disrespectful, but if I could have had him here more… I can’t wonder if Mum would be happier, too.”

Knowing Jocasta as I do now, I don’t think any amount of Ed Cranford himself would have made her happier. His money is another matter. With COVID currently keeping the Cranfords in different countries, a government-imposed separation has been a perfectly happy state of affairs for Julian’s mum. And Alex assumes Ed is still keeping a mistress somewhere, so I don’t weep for Jules’ dad either.

“What about you? What do you think you’ll be like as a mother?” Julian asked. “I assume you want children. I mean, I shouldn’t assume anything, but it’s just most women, no, most people want them.”

“Me?” I flipped the flyer back open and circled a pair of kid leather gloves with the sharpie, then crossed them out. “I suppose I want some. I guess that’s just what I assumed would happen.” With the sharpie, I doodled a squiggle around a pea coat that was a much smarter version of Alex’s. It would be cute if we had matching coats, I thought, then reminded myself that I loved Julian, not Al. More crossing out was necessary.

“You don’t sound particularly enthused. Not that that’s a bad thing, really. It’s an awful lot of responsibility.” Julian sounded so sincere, keenly aware that he might trod too hard on the toes of his very newly-minted girlfriend.

“I’m just tired,” I mumbled, probably the first time of many I’d say this to him when I really didn’t want to talk about something he was keen to get to the bottom of that involved me. “It’s almost three here.”

“Of course, I’d forgotten. I’m sorry, I should let you sleep.”

He sounded so disappointed that I’d closed off the discussion that I felt I had to give him a little something to get him through what had sounded like a truly dull day. Soon he and his baby sister would be driving through freezing fog (a new term to me) for a visit with his mum’s parents in the tiny nearby village of Dunwich. (Jocasta had deemed herself “surplusage” and had gone for a ride with Sancha instead.) When I said, “Oh Dunwich! Like Lovecraft!” Jules had been utterly confused. He never did like horror much.

“It’s not really that I haven’t thought about being a parent,” I said, drawing an arrow back towards the pea coat. “It’s just that I have a hard time looking into the future and seeing myself with children there, too. Like, I can imagine having a career, that’s obviously going to happen, even if I’m not sure exactly what I want to do. And I can imagine getting married, too.” (Obviously I could — I’d already drunkenly blabbed to Minty of my fantasy wedding to one Alexander Carr by that point.) “But it’s really hard to see myself giving birth, or getting up in the middle of the night to change a diaper, or kiss someone’s boo-boo and make it all better.”

That peculiar transatlantic staticky hum pulsed down the line again, with no sound from Jules for a few seconds. “But you assume it will happen. That’s what you said.”

“I suppose so. Hey Jules? Can I tell you something?”

“Anything you want. You’re the Princess Melissa, are you not?” he joked, making light of the nickname Amanda had recently bestowed upon me, a nasty little dig at how the boys in our set jostled to make me happy, even those not trying to get into my pants.

“I love you.” I said it into the distant buzz of almost-silence of the telephone line. It was, I’d decided, almost true. Surely the more I said it, the more real it would be.

“I love you, too. I don’t ever think I’ll get tired of saying that.”

Well, of course he did, eventually. One makes all sorts of pronouncements of the absolutes of life when one is young, not knowing of their near impossibility.

***

Caitlin Bridget Moynihan was my second best friend, right after Jen. Not in that she was or ever has been second-best, oh no. I met her two years after Jen and I bonded over apple juice and rice cakes in the Lutheran church hall that served as our nursery school classroom during the week. Side by side on our yoga mats for afternoon naps, Jenny Fujima and I held hands and whispered our secrets, swearing we’d keep them foreverandeveramen. When you’re three and four, such promises are not lightly given.

I’d also promised Jen — still Jenny then — that I’d never love another friend as much as I loved her. How would it be possible for my heart to grow enough to fit another whole person inside? Jenny and I were two sides of the very same medallion. Both shy, but where I could never truly keep my worries and fears stopped up for long before they burst like a bottle rocket to shimmer before the entire class, there was never a flicker of misery or doubt on Jenny F.’s face. Not even when she accepted Jeffrey Mackenzie’s offer of a haircut, and she learned that a four-year-old with plastic pinking shears probably shouldn’t be trusted to produce salon-level results.

But even though I walked through the front doors of Ralph Emerson Elementary School with Jen’s small hand trembling in mine, our mothers guided us to separate classrooms on that very first day. My mother had assured my dad he had no business taking me that morning — he was likely to get far too emotional walking away from his baby girl, “and then you know what will happen, Phil,” I’d heard her say when she didn’t spot me lurking behind the door to the kitchen. “I don’t want to get called to school on the first day because Mel is convinced she’s let her daddy down and made him cry.”

“She’s a de Mornay. At least we’re capable of feeling things,” Dad spat back.

Kids are more perceptive of household tensions than their parents would prefer. I knew something was not quite right between my mom and dad, from the tension that hovered in each room like the yellowy fug of cigarillo smoke that hung around Papa in my grandparents’ living room.

The move to the big new house in Burbank had been a strain financially, or at least that’s what Rachel told me. “We’re poor now because Daddy wants us to look rich,” she’d told me as I helped her pick out her outfit for her first day at Emerson. “That’s what I heard Mommy tell Aunt Jane on the phone. So we need to be careful with our money. What do you think of this for school?”

Rachel twirled for me in her lilac corduroy overall dress, which she’d paired with a buttercream t-shirt and dainty, lace-trimmed socks. Without missing a beat, I told she looked as pretty as Kelly from Saved By the Bell, who at that time was kind of her style icon. At five, I was already learning how to manage upwards.

“Good. Now that we’re poor, you’re going to have to give up some things. Remember when we watched Annie with Maman? Remember the orphans? That could be us. Except with parents.”

“Mommy and Daddy aren’t – aren’t going to put us in an orphanage?” I stuttered. Annie had terrified me. Not Miss Hannigan (who I thought was very, very cool) or the dirty clothing or all the chores or even the rampant bullying, but it was Annie’s bright red helmet of curls that had left me shrieking and hiding behind the sofa, for reasons that are completely lost to me now. I lived for years in fear that my own slightly reddish hair would sproing of its own accord into a similar coiffure.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Of course not. It just means no more new clothing for you,” she clucked.

“But — but what will I wear?” An image floated through my mind of having to wear my cherry popsicle red pinafore until I popped its seams. Maybe I would have to dress in a sack, like a Depression-era orphan after all.

“My handmedowns, duh.” My sister was carefully peeling off her Kelly Kapowski-level outfit and laying it out on her brand new lavender easy chair, folding and refolding her shirt until it met her standards. (No wonder she got promoted at Abercrombie & Fitch so quickly.) “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of them until they get to you.”

“But what if they don’t fit when you’re done with them?” The popsicle pinafore loomed even larger as a reality. There was no way Rachel would give up that overall dress without a fight.

With a Gallic shrug of her shoulder she must have picked up from Maman, she brushed roughly past me into the hallway. “You can always wear a pillowcase if you cut some holes in it,” she snickered.

“DADDY!” I wailed out of Rachel’s open window to my father, whom I spotted leaning back against the garden shed, taking a break from trimming the lawn with our temperamental mower in the heat of a late August afternoon. He was pounding back one of the Michelob Lights he favored then. (Gross then, gross now.) “Rachel said we’re poor now and I have to wear a pillowcase!”

Rachel claims to have no memory of this exchange, but I know she’s lying.

But on that first day of real, big kid school, I wasn’t dressed in a pillowcase. Instead, I was wearing the bright blue dress Maman had cut and sewn and smocked for me on her old Singer sewing machine, embroidered with red and white thread in tiny scallops. My own mother had thought it excessive for school, better for a birthday party, but Maman had worn her down.

“I had three boys, Patricia,” my grandmother said, pressing one of her plump fingers to my mother’s mouth to shush her protests. “And Rachel would not wear the dress I made for her. I will dress this one. Bien, m’petite?” she said to me with an exaggerated wink and gathered me in her arms for a comforting squish. Even now, I can still smell Maman without thinking too hard on it, Diorissimo and a whiff of the Virginia Slims she smoked.

My mother assures me that my memory of that first morning at school is cockeyed. “I sometimes think you have this fantasy Bad Mommy who was so, so mean,” she’ll tell me when I ask her what she was thinking in some particular moment where my childhood fears might have needed more gentle handling that she’d doled out. “I didn’t push you in the classroom and walk away. I remember we put your bag in your cubby, and I gave you a kiss and told you that Daddy would pick you up in the afternoon.”

I remember the promise and the kiss all right, but I also remember the press of her palm on my spine, the well-known warmth of Mommy there, and then gone. She was gone and I was alone, one girl in a sea of twenty strangers, no moorings nor harbor. Down the hallway, Rachel was owning her second grade classroom on her very first day, competently sizing up who was in and who was out, and whom she needed to charm to scramble her way to the top. Not me.

Any one of these kids could be friend or foe. Jen and I had forged our bond through our parents — my dad and Addy Fujima had hit it off at an evening for prospective nursery school parents — but there was no Daddy to tell me: Go ahead, baby, Jenny seems nice. No, this was all me, and what if I picked wrong? What if I made a friend who was mean to me? What if I didn’t make any friends in this big room with the squishy blue floor mats and a big American flag and the four round tables with five orange chairs circling each and the great wall of cubbies, each marked with our names? What if I couldn’t make any, was too jumbled up inside, like the big tub of crayons I saw in the center of each table?

You’re not very good at this, the Melissa-Gorgon whispered to me, as I slunk over to the mats for our very first class with Ms. Rinaldi. Maybe if you make yourself small enough, no one will —

“Hi! Do you like Paddington Bear? ‘Cause your dress is the same color as Paddington’s coat. I love Paddington. I’m Cait.”

Cait was tall, even at five, with long braids of golden blonde hair pinned around her head like a crown. She was then and remains, as I once heard her older brother Jeremy say, built like a brick shithouse. (For that matter, so is Jeremy.) By the end of the very first day, I knew all about Jeremy (AKA”Jermy,” then and for forever), how she was going to marry Sean Tomaso in the other kindergarten class when she grew up, her devotion to Paddington and Miffy and Long John Silver, and how her daddy was from a place called Ireland and how he was living there right now on something she called a “Satanical” but he was coming home soon. (When I shared this story with my dad later that afternoon, he nearly choked with laughter. When he calmed down, he explained the word was “sabbatical” and we had a long discussion about what the Sabbath was. Well, it seemed pretty long for a five year old.

Caitlin Moynihan also had half the class — including Ms. Rinaldi — utterly devoted to her by the end of our first week at Emerson. Unlike me, Cait has never had problem walking into a room and owning it. It’s not really schmoozing, not really, never unctuous or gross. It feels sincere, like you’ve made this cosmic connection with her. When my dad met her several weeks after that first kindergarten morning, I heard him tell my mom, “I think that kid is going to be a senator some day. Did you hear how she asked me what I had liked about school? This is gonna sound weird, Trish, but I feel like she cared, and that somehow matters to me.”

It’s not too much of a stretch to say Cait saved kindergarten for me, and much of the rest of primary school, for that matter. Sure, Cait can work a room, gladhand and bewitch even very tough nuts like Mr. Caruso, our third grade teacher. But she has no compunction about doling out justice when injustice has been served, and when you’re already 5’7″ at age 12, often only the vague threat of unspecified comeuppance will suffice. Cait’s always been the muscle when I needed her, when any of us needed her, even though her specialty remains the charm offensive.

Until you don’t play nice. She’s always said it’s a compliment when people compare her to the Incredible Hulk: “Bruce Banner is the MAN. Seven fucking Ph.D’s. He’s a goddamn genius and tough as balls. Fuck YEAH, I’m cool with being the Hulk.”

All Cait wanted was one Ph.D. “Somebody needs to be a fucking doctor around here,” she jeered over the low din of conversation at the Blue Room, pointing her bottle of Bud at Sean. “Now that Tomaso here chickened out and said he didn’t need one to be a programmer. You’re such a little bitch.”

Sean tipped his sandy head back and laughed, wiping the sweat from his beer bottle on Caitlin’s arm. “God, I missed you, Moynihan.”

We were all back in Burbank by mid-July of that summer, all six of us with newly-framed diplomas from the six universities we’d scattered to. Sean had proposed the Blue Room for our first night out — theoretically, we could all stumble home the mile and half from the aquamarine vinyl booths after several rounds of beers and electronic darts. (I am still astounded that so many bars feature dart boards, both here and in the UK. Having been on the pointy end of more than one ill-directed missile (all flying from the hand of Miranda), it seems a colossally witless choice for a business that must already have to carry a lot of insurance.) It was also dirt cheap; we were all broke or near enough, and the large pours, chilled out staff and smoking patio — a rarity in LA — made the Blue Room our den that mild, mild summer.

Unlike everyone else, my return to Burbank didn’t come with an expiration date. I’d shucked off the job fair invitations to meet with the various investment banks and management consultants who set up shop on campus every autumn, looking to recruit the cream of the crop from the outgoing class. Even the offer of free wine and cheese wasn’t enough to get me through the doors of the student center to talk to someone from Lazards or JP Morgan or Accenture about my potential to grow and soar at their firms. Nah, pass. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but it definitely didn’t involve pantyhose and a wardrobe of suits from Ann Taylor.

Two hundred miles away from my shithole studio in Providence, Caitlin had come to a similar conclusion. At NYU, she’d been a history and English double major, writing a knockout senior thesis on the portrayal of the suffragette movement in early 20th century Anglo-American literature. Dr. Moynihan, her dad and himself a European history scholar of some minor distinction at UCLA, had been nudging her towards academia for years.

“He says I have the mind for it,” she’d told me over a late Saturday brunch at Veselka our senior year. I’d come into Manhattan to get away from the toxic, slutty, drunken sludge I was wading in back at school. That afternoon, Cait was packing away the pierogis and mimosas; I picked at a blueberry muffin for three hours but found plenty of room for cheap prosecco. At nearly 22 and six feet tall, her blonde hair pushed back in a huge puff of a messy bun, Cait looked like what I always imagined the Norse goddess Freya would look like if she favored vintage corduroy donkey jackets and skinny jeans.

“But not at UCLA,” she continued, munching through another half a pierogi. “Dad’s the best, but I’m so over SoCal. I’m thinking… Berkeley. I fuckin’ love the Bay Area.”

“Berkeley’s really, really hard to get into though,” I cautioned. My stomach longed for a pierogi, but I wasn’t allowing myself too much of anything filling that November. In an unguarded, post-coital moment two weeks before, one of my meet-cutes from the library had grabbed a handful of my butt and said how much he liked a woman with something to hold onto. It had been low fat Cheese Nips, Diet Coke and Marlboro Ultra Lights since then, with the occasional indulgence of a blueberry muffin top. (The irony was not lost on me.)

Booze, booze was also fine.

With the back of her hand, she wiped a smear of sauerkraut filling from her chapped lips. “Believe it or not, some of us plebs who go to non-Ivies can wipe our asses and write moderately well,” she sniffed. “Dad’s already got me a meeting with one of his buddies up there, says he can just scoot me in to meet the right people, help me pitch myself, get my name in there. And I took the GRE last week, piece of fuckin’ cake. Slam dunk, baby.” She mimed shoving a ball through a hoop, as she’d done season after season on the BHS varsity basketball team.

Not that I should have doubted she could get in, and her timing (and mine) could not have have been better in giving Wall Street a wide berth in the autumn of 2007. Dr. Moynihan, in possession of a near-stereotypical measure of Irish charm, had found every excuse to ring up his old pals in the Berkeley history department, the ones he’d met as an undergrad at Trinity, the very ones who’d lured him to California for his own Ph.D. Would you believe his very own daughter was even brighter and funnier and more bewitching than her old Da himself? Well, the department would be missing a trick not to grab her, to be sure.

I didn’t hear much from Cait after she’d settled into her new digs off Telegraph Ave, not far from where my old bookshop was. She posted indifferently on Facebook, mostly snaps of dinner parties that had descended into drunken messes, young men barely propping their tousled heads up in mismatched chairs as they slumped over plastic card tables, murky tableaux where at least one young woman with a chic black bob was smoking a pink Nat Sherman Fantasia in a cigarette holder. In these photos, I could practically see the red wine fumes zigzagging their way towards a ceiling that invariably sported a rattan-shaded light fixture circa 1985. fun, graduate style, a caption might read.

And then one week, a picture of a sort I’d never seen her post before. yannick here is going to run the world with me as my second in command. A young man with serious brown eyes that tugged down at the corners behind steel-framed glasses and a sunflower yellow scarf loosely draped over his tweed overcoat was kissing Caitlin Bridget Moynihan. In a photograph. That she’d willingly posted on Facebook, for the degustation of us all. It was only my quick reflexes that stopped me from spewing tea into the crannies of my keyboard.

Now you should know, this was completely out of character. As far as any of our little gang knew, Caitlin hadn’t dated in high school. How much of this was by her choice was an open question, one none of us wished to bring up. Not that she’d been celibate during that time, sweet Jesus, no. Cait had, by her own admission, a bad habit of hooking up with her older brother Jermy, I mean, Jeremy‘s friends at the UCLA parties she’d sneak into once she hit 16.

“It’s not my fault I see my dad only on the weekends, and he just so happens to live on campus,” she’d explain. “And it just so happens that he’s out on dates on Saturday nights. What am I supposed to do, stay in and watch Touched By An Angel? Fuck that. More like, touch these, Angel.” She gave a vulgar wiggle of her hands over her chest. She never was one for subtlety.

But a boyfriend? “No use to having one from what I can tell,” she told me the week before she moved up to Berkeley over a cold one at the Blue Room. “Look at you and Julian.”

“Whaddya mean?” That night was just Cait and Mack and me; the Jen(n)s had gone up to San Jose to help Sean find a new apartment. Julian had buzzed into town the week before and despite some good first impressions on my best friends, managed to spend nearly all his charm-capital in a night out at Dimples when he berated me for fucking up our karaoke duet of “Somethin’ Stupid” by Frank and Nancy Sinatra.

Mack and Cait passed a black look over their empty bottles of Bud. “Uh,” Mack started, tapping his forefinger insistently on the beermat.

“Look, this is my last night out with you, Mel,” Cait sighed, and shoved a twenty in Mack’s hand for another round. “You know I think your boyfriend is a class A douchecanoe and about as fun as a root canal or scabies. My point is, more broadly, that you spend a lot of time making him feel good about himself and not enough pleasing yourself when he’s around. I’m more into making sure I’m good first.”

“But that’s you,” I protested.

She flashed me what her dad called her “million punt smile” (now of course, her “million Euro smile” post-currency unification). “Precisely. I gotta be me.”

But now there was Yannick, seemingly everywhere on her Facebook page. Cait and Yannick eating from plastic bowls of ramen, the steam clouding his glasses. Cait and Yannick in what looked like a very serious conversation on a dire green and yellow velour couch, with her hands crossed beneath her breasts and a scowl on her face, her hair scraped back in a high ponytail, while Yannick pointed towards the ceiling (another rattan lampshade, this time in the form of a ceiling fan), his mouth cracked into a broad grin. Cait and Yannick on the ferry to Alcatraz, on the Powell and Hyde cable car, in front of their new apartment near Strawberry Creek Park.

By then, I was splitting time between London and Suffolk, watching this all at a remove of some four thousand miles and change. All I saw of her life was framed in the calming, Atlantic blue of Facebook posts. I couldn’t understand at all Jenn’s conviction that something was not right, not when Cait beamed out in pink-cheeked glee from shot after shot.

“That’s because you’re a gazillion miles away from here, spending your days wrapped up in very serious dilemmas like, dahhhhhling, which luxury hotel shall I frequent for a spot of high tea, and which of these designer handbags best suits the automobile I’m being chauffeured there in?” Jenn insisted over the phone in what was a very late night call to me in my new flat in Westminster.

“Hey! That’s not true!” I wasn’t being chauffeured anywhere, not when Julian wasn’t around, at least. I was getting a hang of the buses, and spent many of my aimless days hopping on a double-decker, bound for whatever the end of the line was. By then, I’d decided the 10 down the King’s Road was my favorite, partly because it brought me right to the flat Sasha and Jamie shared. On the evenings Jules was out at some cocktail party I wasn’t invited to, they saved me from sucking down bottles of Freixenet alone while watching Coronation Street.

“I went up there last weekend,” she continued, ignoring me. “Recon mission, had to be done. Mack came along, in case I needed some muscle.”

“Why would you need muscle?”

“You know what Cait can be like when she’s drunk and… misreading things. Not taking any chances.”

It had been a one off, but a memorable one off. Christmas 2003, our first one home from college. Barrie Jorgensen, Cait’s mom, was visiting Jermy — ugh, Jeremy — in Scottsdale, where he’d landed post-UCLA to study at Taliesin West. Barrie’s absence itself was a fluke; Jeremy had broken his arm the week before and didn’t fancy flying home in a cast. Cait was so used to being shuttled from home to home as a kid once her parents split up, sometimes when no adult was there to welcome her, that to return for a holiday to an empty house was no loss, nothing special. However, it did mean we had a clubhouse to our eighteen and nineteen year old selves for nearly a week, whenever any or all of the six of us could sneak away from the suffocating squeeze of our respective families’ embrace.

Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, under the influence of several bottles of cheap cava and very little common sense, Sean and Cait had snuck off to the backyard to see if there were any embers of their kindergarten romance to blow on again. Or at least something to do with blowing. By Sean’s telling, Cait lost her balance while he was trying to give her a kiss. He’d misread the situation, he confessed, “too much booze. She told me no, I tried one last time, and she, uh, stumbled.”

“Wrong,” Cait told the Jen(n)s and me the following day over a hangover cure of Singapore noodles. “Tomaso’s too fucking nice. I told him I just wanted some fun, and he got all offended, like ‘But I loooooooove you.’ Bleh, so serious.”

Jen gasped and dropped her fork. “He never!” Since middle school, Jen had built up for herself a world where I was the object of Sean’s unending, unrequited affection. That he might hold a torch for Caitlin — even if only when fully foxed with a skinful of bad wine in his belly — pulled out some underpinnings for her.

“I told him to get lost, and when he tried to argue his case, I got in his face, like, what, you think you’re entitled to have all of me? So he says I’m hot when I’m angry and goes in for a kiss and I shoved him off me. Like, what the fuck?”

Jen squealed again. “You never!”

Cait shook some soy sauce on her noodles. “He needs to learn that no means no, even if I know him better than I know my own brother. Maybe I pushed him a touch harder than I should have. Whatever. Pass that rice vinegar, Mel.”

“He’s got a lump on his head, Cait,” I scolded. “It’s not like he’s a rapist. He’s Sean.”

Caitlin’s face pinked up as she viciously stabbed a plump shrimp with her fork. “I have the right to set boundaries. I set one. He blew it.”

No one wanted to make more out of it. Caitlin was right, of course, but we all got a bit spooked. The incident hung around like a pizza grease stain you can’t get out of your favorite t-shirt. Barely visible and you keep wearing it, but you know it’s there.

But up in Berkeley, according to Jenn, Caitlin wasn’t setting any such boundaries with Yannick. “They’re gross, grosser than you and Julian, and you two are walking, talking PDA machines.”

“Hmph!” It was true, though. “What’s he like?”

“Hmm. Well, I guess I thought Cait would have chosen some mealy-mouthed schlub who she can roll over. Someone boring, but hot.”

“Like Patrick?” I couldn’t help poking at Jenn. When pressed why she’d left her stable, adoring, hysterically funny and brilliant boyfriend Patrick, she said he was more boring than iceberg lettuce, no dressing. A complete lie she trotted out occasionally to mask her fear of commitment.

“I really should have set them up, come to think of it,” she mused. “But no, Patrick has too much spine. Anyway, this Yannick is like fucking Ernest Hemingway.”

“What, like, in the ‘shoot yourself in the head’ way?”

“I wish. More like ‘manly man does man things’ way. Pick up artist shit. He puts her down to her face and she just laps it up. Like, ‘Ooooo, Yanny, tell me more about my faults.’ He pokes at her beer gut and says, ‘Love a woman who knows how to pack it away’ and she’ll pull down her sweater a bit further to cover it but laugh and laugh like it’s a compliment.”

“Maybe she likes it?” I tried to imagine the girl who’d wowed and wooed everyone, male and female, from supermarket checkout clerk to the principal of Burbank High, without giving up any of her “I gotta be me” joie de vivre.

“Please. It’s like ‘Bodysnatchers’ time here. I mean, she’s still herself, but she lets him make all the decisions. Where we went to drink, for example. She wanted to go to this place called the Albatross, but he gives her this look, and she backtracks and says, oh, I forgot, Yannick hates that bar. So we went somewhere fancy instead, and then she had to change into a skirt, because he said she should dress up for a change. And she did!”

“Cait owns a skirt?”

“She does now! And he got super-weird with Mack. Hey, is Julian there, by the way?” Jenn’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“No, he’s in Amsterdam. Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.

“I was going to compliment the asshole. I don’t want it to go to his head,” Jenn replied. “What I was going to say was that even if I’m not crazy about your boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with you having close male friends.”

This wasn’t exactly true when it came to Sean, but I wasn’t about to add to the “let’s roast Julian” pyre. “I take it Yannick does.”

“You could say that,” she said with a snort. “Every time Mack would come within three feet of her, Yanny baby would grab her hand and reel her in, like Mack was gonna grab her around the waist and chuck her over his shoulder like the fucking Rape of the Sabine Women.”

“Mack? Please. And nice Poussin reference.” Throughout school, Jeffrey Mackenzie was generally oblivious to any girl’s interest in him, and rarely showed any interest of his own in our female classmates, except for Jen, of course. He was into playing D&D with Sean and Ken Hazard and Pablo Thierriault, lifting weights, and taking his junior librarian duties very, very seriously.

On the phone that September, Caitlin dismissed all Jenn’s concerns. “Blah, you know Jenn. Convinced everyone’s got some ulterior motive. You seriously think I’d let some guy tell me how to live my life? Listen to this. Yannick! Who’s the goddamn boss around here?”

Faintly: “I live only to serve St. Caitlin of Burbank, blessed among women.”

“See? And he’s rubbing my feet right now. So they didn’t hit it off, big deal. She doesn’t like Julian either. Or Mack’s new girlfriend, whatsernoodle, the one with the big hair. See a pattern?”

“And Yannick was okay with Mack being around?”

“Have you spoken to Mack about this? I seriously doubt he’d see it that way. Jenn’s just mad that you and I are off living our good lives without her. She hates her job, and she really hates living with her parents. We got out, she didn’t. We’ve got partners, she doesn’t. We’ve got lives –“

“I get it.” Caitlin’s roughly sketched portrait of Jenn post-college was detailed enough to be true to life. Sour grapes, I told myself.

When the big news from Berkeley blew transcontinental and transatlantic, I was in Suffolk. Jules had, without a word to me, promised his mother that we’d attend a hunt ball in some big old house outside of Bury St. Edmunds, and promptly forgot to mention it to me until two evenings before the soiree.

“We’re going. Mum says they need young people,” he said, pulling off his tie and throwing it over the cherry valet stand in the bedroom in our Westminster flat.

It had been a miserable week in London. The constant sogginess of late November felt wrapped around my shoulders like a damp and clammy shawl. California was a sepia-tinted picture postcard memory in my mental rearview mirror, a place I was pulling further away from every day. My new life in the UK would follow rhythms I couldn’t keep time with, especially all the not-doing-ness that filled up my days. And as we edged towards Christmas, and the night snatched and gobbled up more of the day, day upon day, I knew I was drifting myself into the dark. Perhaps a chance to dress up, do my hair, would let some light in. I’d let Julian swing me around an old ballroom with my head tipped back, dizzy from the spinning and the champagne.

“Oh, and Alex is coming up from Bristol on the Saturday, as my sister’s plus one. He needs some cheering up too, I hear his sister’s been… unwell.” Julian rifled through his wallet and set down a credit card on my vanity table with a snappy plick. “Call mine tomorrow for her size, will you? You both need new dresses, nothing too chic.”

I hated living around the corner from the Cranford pied a terre. Jocasta invariably summoned me when she was in town to come shopping with her at Harvey Nicks, followed by a (very) light lunch on the fifth floor of the grand Knightsbridge store. Oh, sounds awful, Melissa, boo hoo! Well, you’d be close to tears too if the entire outing was an opportunity for your body to be dressed up and then dressed down for being “quite too large, just not done to be this big.” With Jocasta already in Suffolk, though, I could shop for gowns at Harvey Nicks in peace.

While Julian was off collecting Alex from the train station in Darsham, Annabelle was clicking through my Facebook feed with me. “Find me a husband,” she declared dramatically, throwing an arm across her brow. “I have to leave Southwold or I’ll go mad.”

“You’re 19, Belle.” click click “You could always take up your place at Merton.”

“Ugggghhhhh, you’re as bad as Dad. All in good time, Mel. Oooo, he looks nice. Sean Tomaso. Irish and Italian? That would drive Mum round the bend and back again. Where’s San Jose?”

“No,” I said, a little quickly. Sean’s mine. “Sean is needy. Look at his posts.”

Sean is wishing there was an In n Out nearby

Sean is wondering if he still has the cooties he got in third grade

Sean is asking if a dry spell is the kind of spell that black magic can undo

Belle slurped at her tea and kept scrolling up. “Sean just commented on Caitlin Moynihan’s photo. Do you know her? Should I be jealous?”

I clicked on the small thumbnail Sean had captioned with “O.M.G.” Cait and Yannick side by side in front of her father’s new home in Westwood, posed in a static and flat composition clearly meant to evoke Wood’s “American Gothic” with their serious, inscrutable expressions. Yannick even had the farmer’s glasses. But instead of a pitchfork, Yannick held one end of a banner, a string of gold letters held up by Cait at his side:

B A B Y 2 0 0 9

With a shriek loud enough to startle the Cranford family’s lugubrious and near-geriatric basset hound Frankie out of his dog bed near the fireplace, I read Caitlin’s page furiously while Belle peppered me with questions about who all the players in this drama were, and were any of them available for immigration purposes. I clicked the link to a Facebook note entitled: Bet you never thought this day would come!

Hey all — because it’s 2008 and we live in the future Yan and I are making our big announcement here. Brace yourselves: Baby Moynihan-Keller is in the oven and is due to be fully cooked on May 20, 2009, just in time for summer vacation. Clearly Baby is inheriting its father’s excellent time management skills.

Nobody was more shocked than me but hey, I think I could knock this whole parenting thing outta the park. Why not? Some people who shall remain nameless (*cough* Jenn *cough*) had their doubts I was cut out for academia but I’m fucking amazing at it. Yeah, I know 24 is kinda young to be a mom in this super-modern world, but it’s not me alone. You think after growing up shuttling between two houses I’d ever want to be a single mom?? (Sorry, Mom and Dad, but fuck that.) I straight up told Yan if he ever leaves me, he’s taking the baby. 😀

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, especially all my HaTErzzZzZz! (That was a joke, I’m not stuck in MySpace, what kind of teenage emo scene kid do you think I am? Oh yeah, I probably would have been a scene kid if I’d been born a few years later but whatevs.) Peace be with you. And also with you, Jenn Lodge.

“Caitlin?” I wanted to be happy, no needed to be happy for Cait, but it just wasn’t there.

“Apparently!” Annabelle cackled at my side. “She sounds like she’s going to be a cool mum, though. Not like you know who.”

I took much comfort in knowing my likely sister-in-law-to-be was far more open than I dared to be in our shared distaste for Jocasta Cranford. At least I’d have one ally in the family I looked almost certain to join.

Outside, the crunch of gravel in the drive and the one-two thud of slammed car doors was dampened only slightly by the casement windows. Through the fogged-up pane I watched Alex and Jules lope towards the front door, heard their twinned laughs weaving tightly around each other. That weekend loops in my memory, all the dancing and the good wine and the bad hors d’oeuvres and the laughing and crafty smokes outside and the teasing and good cheer. We were all three of us so very, very young, not yet cracked open by the world’s cruelties. For me, Alex was merely my friend, Julian’s best friend, but no more — I’d packed up our interlude with the rest of my Bristol memories, stuck it in a box along with the temporary magenta hair dye as “one of those things that made sense at the time.”

Five weeks later, Alex would be toasting our engagement and Julian’s impending move to the States, calling his best friend the luckiest man in the world. “Treat her good, Cranford,” Al warned with a sharp wag of his forefinger. “That Caitlin friend of hers sounds like she’ll have you by the short and curlies if you step out of line.”

Normally, I wouldn’t have doubted it, but I felt so very far away from Cait back then. She was a face in a thumbnail, the stark white outline of an abdomen on sonogram in which an almost-human body and mind was forming itself. The messages from the Bay were her usual brew of cheer and gleeful nose-thumbing: I’m happy, mothafuckas! Even though Jenn said Cait had been harder to reach than usual, I wasn’t concerned. She’s loved up, I explained to smooth over the raw and bumping worry I saw pricking at Jenn. If she needs you, needs any of us, we’re all on speed dial.

By the time I made it back to SoCal with a garish engagement ring glinting on my left hand, Sean had made the hop from San Jose to Berkeley to check in on the not-so-Virgin Caitlin. As the first boy of many who’d wanted to lay down his life for Caitlin Moynihan, and with Jenn’s dire warnings about Yannick ringing in his ears, Sean came ready to break some kneecaps. “I know you used to laugh at all that nunchuck practice I put in,” he told me, “but you never know when it might come in handy.”

Sean dismissed all Jenn’s reports of an overbearing misogynist sharing his chromosomes with Caitlin. “I don’t know what Jenn’s talking about,” he told me on a Skype with Mack and Jen. “Everything Mack said about Yan matches up. Okay, he’s kinda got that ‘I’m a man’s man’ vibe to him, but dude. Cait’s kinda an honorary dude herself.”

“No one can put a six-pack away like Moynihan,” Mack said wistfully.

Sean nodded. “But Jenn’s wrong. That man loves everything about her. He’s just not who Jenn would have chosen for her.”

“Jenn should talk,” Jen butted in. “Her picker has been off ever since –“

“Patrick,” I continued for her. “But Cait’s fine? Baby’s fine?”

“They’re all fine,” Sean assured me. “Cait was dropping some serious hints that one of you needs to throw her a baby shower up there in April, but besides that, the mood was very chill.”

“Twenty weeks, wow.” Jen shook her head. “Is she big yet?”

“Bigger than when she drinks a six-pack,” Sean joked. “She’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

But it wasn’t. She wasn’t. Sean couldn’t have known, nobody knew. Online, Cait slapped up the sonogram from her 20-week scan, chatted noisily about how big her tits were getting, crowed about the strong baby girl the size of a banana growing fatter and smarter every day inside her womb. “Caitlin Moynihan is skeeving her boyfriend out by chanting ‘in my womb’ over and over,” she posted on Facebook in mid-February.

Sean rang me from Alta Bates Hospital that March afternoon, but I’d missed his call. Four weeks into my new job as a marketing assistant, I’d learned that the girls — and we were nearly all female at that rank — who wanted to get ahead wore soft pastel sweaters, kept their nails short, and never left their ringer on when they were called into a meeting. And all I seemed to do in that first year (when I wasn’t inputting data in Excel files) was get called into meetings where up for discussion was some boring new medical device, where my input was never sought out.

My iPhone buzzed in the pocket of my trousers again and again, but it could easily have been Alex, given the time of day. Ever since I’d come back to California, he’d started calling on the regular, closing in at midnight his time usually, and nearly always half-cut. Though Drunky Al was often amusing, he’d recently started tapping out an irritating rat-a-tat of a drumbeat, a code I read between the lines: Don’t marry Julian. Don’t marry Julian.

Call NOW, Sean’s text read when I’d fished out the phone in the near-privacy of my cublicle. EMERGENCY.

Seated on my painful but allegedly ergonomic desk chair, I stared at the framed engagement photo of Jules and me, me tucked into the crook of his arm, showing off the ring with a sly smile. No emergency scenario in which Sean would be texting me in all caps occurred to me — unlike my sister, it requires far more than WHY DOESN’T TACO BELL MAKE MEXICAN PIZZA ANYMORE for Sean to resort to textual high drama. Before I could call him back, Jenn’s number flashed up on my screen.

Mel? Mel? Did you hear from Sean about Cait? Cait, she’s, oh Mel. It’s bad, bad, oh god. Yes, the baby. It’s the baby. Placental abruption, do you know — you do? What does it mean, Mel? Are we going to lose her? Jen and Mack are meeting me at the Esquire at 7 and you have to come too and please, oh Mel. Call Sean. Please.

Of course I knew what a placental abruption was after all those hours poring over Our Bodies, Ourselves. It doesn’t have to be fatal, to mother or baby, I reminded myself. Cait’s probably just been overdoing it, what with the teaching undergrad history sections and prepping for the birth and the massive drop of coursework due two weeks before her daughter was set to slither out into the world with a howling wail, ready to take it all on. She’ll need bed rest, but she could still write at home, surely.

Everything is going to be fine, I told myself, and gave a firm nod to the engagement photo. Jenn’s just overreacting to something super scary. With a peek around the corner of my cubicle — my co-worker Dana never failed to listen in on each of my personal calls, which I knew from other colleagues filtering back details about my upcoming wedding that I’d never openly shared — I squared my shoulders and called Sean.

“Little Em!” His tone was ragged, like he’d been shouting in the rain for hours and lost his voice and caught a chill. “It’s so bad and I’m scared. Cait’s –”

I let him sob it out. Sean’s always been a crier. A sentimental boy, my mom called him, and unlike me, he rarely regretted letting his sadness show. (A topic for another time: having acquired 20,000 followers for reasons that elude me, Greta dumped Sean two weeks ago for a fitness Instafluencer she’d met during a virtual workshop on swag bags. While I tutted and there-there’d as Sean bawled about what a fundamentally decent human being his ex-girlfriend is and the universe must have chosen a better path for her, I was cackling my sea-haggiest laugh inside.)

After his breathing smoothed down from its juddery bursts, Sean explained what he knew from Yannick: Cait had come home from teaching an undergrad seminar section and gone straight to bed, complaining of cramps. She’d also pooh-poohed a visit to the university health clinic, and said all she needed was some sleep. An hour later, she’d wandered back in the living room where Yan was working and said something was very, very wrong; behind her, a trail of blood led from the bedroom to the doorway she now clung to for support. Stopping to grab only Cait’s handbag and phone, Yan gathered her in his arms and bundled her in his ancient Fiesta, headed west three miles to save a life. Two lives, maybe, Yannick had confessed to Sean.

Yan had called Sean from the waiting room — Cait’s parents were making their way north, but could Sean get there sooner? She’d been hemorrhaging, she’d lost so much blood. Sean started rambling, about the chances a 29-week preemie would make it in the NICU, about how Cait couldn’t die, about how Yannick couldn’t even look him in the eye when he was getting Sean up to speed about Cait and the baby’s condition.

“He kept telling me he’d let her down, but I don’t know how that could be. These things just happen, the doctor said. And she’s a fighter, both of them are fighters. They’ll make it, I know it.”

Caitlin made it. Baby Anneliese didn’t.

I saw a picture once, of a tiny, perfect, birdlike baby, cradled against her chest. Cait’s messy blonde head dipped to press a kiss on Anneliese’s dark thatch of hair, but her baby was already gone. Within a week, Caitlin was home in Burbank, tucked in her childhood bed that she didn’t rise from much. She wouldn’t see me or Jenn or anyone, not even Yannick, who slept on her mom’s sofa downstairs for a week. Going back to Berkeley with him for the rest of the term was out; Dr. Moynihan handled the paperwork for a leave of absence.

But she never went back — not to that apartment near Strawberry Creek Park, not to her Ph.D. program. Nor even to Yannick, who’d won all of us around in the weeks that followed the loss with his sorrow and sincerity. Later that year, when she began to speak of this time, Caitlin told me she felt she didn’t deserve to be loved by him anymore, that her body had betrayed him in letting Anneliese go.

“I’m so used to letting people go by now,” she said to me from New York, where she’d moved on later that summer, the first of several unsuccessful tries to reinvent herself in the years to come. “Dad went first, over the hill and far away into Westwood, of course. All those boys in college, some of them really fun and smart, but they all wanted too much of me. I know how much I want to share, and it was never all of me.”

I was sitting on the tiny stub of a concrete stoop — I called it my porch, what a lie — stuck below the front door of my Pasadena bachelorette abode, chainsmoking Marlboro Ultra Lights, reeling in my own recent loss of letting Jules go over his stunt on that forum. Caitlin’s misery distracted me from my own, deadened the nerves nearly as good as the wine I’d sloshed into a mug to accompany the chainsmoking.

“And then Yannick came along, and he was happy with the amount I’d share with him. He didn’t stammer and plead or shout and scream about needing to be my everything, or wanting me to show him all of myself. I didn’t know where exactly we were going, but it was comfy. He made me feel sexy and smart and competent, stuff I was pretty convinced I wasn’t.”

“But you’re all of those things, Cait,” I broke in.

“Oh come on, Mel. You know what it’s like, impostor syndrome. But Yan was really good at just low key loving me, you know? And then Anneliese came along, and she was like this reality growing in me, this bundle of all-love inside. For the first time, ever, ever, I wanted to give everything to one person, one little person, and I did! I did for so long, and I loved her every moment she was with me, and it wasn’t enough to keep her safe.”

Across the cracked asphalt of the parking area, my neighbor Ray raised his hand in greeting as he climbed out of his sun-bleached Fiero. It was late on a hot July afternoon; the thermometer had already started to plummet but it was too hot to be out here for long.

“Come home, Cait,” I said through a drag on my cigarette. “Sean told me Yannick just wants you safe, wherever that is, but you don’t need to be there.”

The cube in her glass clinked loud over the phone. “I might. But I’m not going back to Yan. I don’t… Mel, I don’t think you’ll understand me when I say this, but I’ll try. I love Yan, but I can’t face him. He lost his daughter because something went wrong inside me. Don’t interrupt — yes, I know it’s ‘not my fault’ and ‘things just happen.’ I understand these things and everyone talks at me like these are really foreign concepts to me. I get it.”

“Then what?”

“Anneliese was the bridge between our buildings, and the bridge fell down. I don’t want to visit his building anymore, not without the bridge.”

She was right. I didn’t understand. Not until I knocked down a bridge of my own.