Then Came You (26 page)

“Hi there, Annie,” he said. His eyelashes were long and curly, the kind a girl would spend forever torturing herself with
an eyelash curler clamped against her lids to achieve. I remember exactly what I was wearing: a red jersey Henley T-shirt with three buttons at the collar and my favorite pair of jeans, the size-ten Calvin Kleins, a silver locket on a heart that my father had given me for my sweet sixteen. My hair was long, in ringlets that I crafted each morning with a curling iron, and I wore big hoop earrings, studded with fake diamonds, that swung almost to my shoulders and made me look like J.Lo, my fashion icon at the time. “Want to go to the Sweethearts Dance with me?” Frank asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah, I’d like that.”

My girlfriends started giggling. I blushed, admiring him for the way he’d asked, for approaching me in public instead of with a phone call, for risking embarrassment. I also couldn’t quite believe that he knew who I was, that I wasn’t just one of the faceless girls who moved through the same hallways and classrooms but might as well have inhabited a different world. But I also had the strangest sense that I knew him . . . that, somehow, my entire time in high school, maybe even my entire life, had been leading up to this conversation.

“I’ll pick you up at six,” he told me. He was very calm, looking at me steadily, ignoring my friends. “We can go to dinner first, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” I said again. “I live on Crestview.”

“I know.” He walked off, and my girlfriends fell on me, scooping me up like a quarterback in a huddle.

“Oh my God! Frank Barrow!” I smiled, feeling flushed, almost feverish. I still couldn’t quite figure out how he knew me. The next week revealed nothing. Frank smiled when he saw me in the hallways. At lunch, he’d make a point of coming over and saying “hello.” But that was all. I should have been frantic with nerves, part of me wondering if he’d asked me out as some kind of joke or dare. (In the movies I loved, the ones I’d watch every
time they came on cable,
10 Things I Hate About You
and
Never Been Kissed,
things like that happened, there were pranks and jokes and misunderstandings, but the boy and the girl always wound up together, the way they were meant to be.)

My friends were useless when it came to figuring out what was behind Frank Barrow’s interest, but full of suggestions about what I should wear. I had the dress I’d bought for homecoming, but I wanted something new for Frank. So I used eighty dollars of my babysitting money to buy a simple sleeveless dress in periwinkle blue, with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swished around my ankles and had braided gold metal buckles at the shoulders, an inexpensive knockoff of the Badgley Mischka gown Kate Winslet had worn to the Oscars that year. I borrowed a pair of gold strappy sandals from Nancy and paid another twenty dollars to go to the beauty school and have my hair curled, then arranged in an updo, with a little rhinestone butterfly clipped over my right ear.

Frank wore a dark-blue suit with a light-blue tie almost the exact same shade as my dress. He held my arm as he walked me to his car, which was his father’s Buick, very old but very clean (I learned later he’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it for the occasion). It wasn’t until he was backing out of my driveway, one arm over my seat, that I realized I didn’t know where we were going. Before homecoming that fall, my date and I and three other couples had gone to the Chart House in Center City, which was, as the name implied, right on the water (the Delaware, which wasn’t one of the world’s prettiest rivers, but when you lived in Philadelphia, you took what you could get). The tables there were set with an array of silverware that most of us found bewildering, and the cheapest entrée, pasta with roasted seasonal vegetables, cost fourteen dollars.

“Burgers okay?” asked Frank.

“Sure!” My voice was too loud. I worried that it sounded like
I was disappointed and trying to hide it, but the truth was, I’d left the Chart House with a stomachache, brought on, I figured, by sitting up perfectly straight terrified that I was going to spill salad dressing or step on the hem of my dress or do something that would reveal to the grown-ups eating their meals at the tables around us that none of us had any business being there.

Frank drove to McDonald’s on Broad Street. “Wait here,” he said, hopping out of the car. Five minutes later, he came back with a steaming, fragrant bag, already spotted with grease from the fries. My stomach growled, and, instead of being mortified, I laughed—I hadn’t eaten in days so I could look good in my gown.

Frank didn’t say much, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, as he drove to Fairmount Park, then up the steep, twisting road called South George’s Hill. He parked right behind the Mann Center, an outdoor concert hall that was dark and quiet that night. This was a noted makeout spot where more than a few of my dates had ended. At that hour it was too cold and dark for the runners and cyclists to be out, and too soon for the couples. The sun was just setting, the sky fading from pale blue to indigo, and the city was spread out like a gorgeous quilt of light beneath us. We sat in the car with the windows cracked open and the heater on and a wool blanket Frank had pulled out of the trunk over our laps, eating Big Macs and fries and sipping vanilla shakes.

Sitting with him, I felt none of the nerves I’d felt with other boys, none of the awkwardness of wondering whether I looked right or sounded right or was saying the right things. Frank hadn’t offered me any liquor, nor had he made a dive toward my mouth or my bra hooks. He asked me questions and listened, respectfully, while I answered. We were talking about Dana Hightower, who’d allegedly transferred to a magnet school in Center City but who had really, my girlfriends and I suspected,
been sent away to have a baby, when I blurted, “Why’d you ask me to the dance?”

He lowered his lashes. I remember how perfect he looked, his white shirt crisp, his cheeks freshly shaven, how he smelled like soap and a citrusy aftershave. I remember the song on the radio was called “Angel of Mine,” and feeling once more that sense, undeniable, overwhelming, that this had all been arranged beforehand, that he and I were meant to be, that we were going to be, and that I didn’t even have much say in the matter. “Why?” he asked. “You don’t want to go?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s that . . . I didn’t even think you knew me. Knew who I was. We never talked, and I . . .” I shut my mouth and folded my hands in my lap. I’d taken off my shoes and was sitting sideways, my legs curled underneath me. There was a bit of ketchup on my finger, and I licked it off, tasting the sweetness.

Frank looked at me, and there was no trace of teasing in his voice or on his face. “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time.”

“But why?”

Smiling, he touched one of my cheeks with his fingertips. “You’re always smiling.”

“Not always,” I said, thinking about the fights I’d had with Nancy.

“When I see you, you’re smiling, and laughing, and there’s always people around you, you know?”

Now I was blushing, and I imagined that maybe he was, too, although his skin didn’t show it the way mine did.

“You always have people.” He sounded wistful. I could tell that this was hard for Frank—that he knew what he meant to say, what he liked about me, but was having trouble finding the words. “And remember that one time in gym class?”

I shook my head, embarrassed that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What I said about Ms. Hicks.”

“Oh, right!” Ms. Hicks had taught phys ed since the 1970s. Some years, she’d show up in September a skinny one hundred and twenty pounds, and other years she’d come for Back to School Night closer to two hundred. That year, we’d been lined up to play volleyball and Ms. Hicks, bulging in her blue polyester gym shorts, had been explaining the rules, when Frank, standing behind me, had whispered, “I think she’s been eating ’cause the Eagles had such a bad preseason.”

I’d laughed out loud, then turned around, not even sure who had spoken. Frank was staring at me soberly. “I’m serious,” he said, without even a hint of a smile. “The year we went to the Super Bowl? Thinnest she’s ever been.”

I’d been laughing when Ms. Hicks hurled a volleyball at me, hollering at me to get my head in the game. Later, I’d learned why laughter and people were so important to Frank. His mother had gotten pregnant for the first time at forty-two, after more than two decades of marriage, after she’d given up on the possibility of children and had mostly given up on her marriage as well. She’d loved Frank, but his arrival had been a disruption. Corrinne Barrow wasn’t good with disruptions. Nor was she much of a laugher. She believed in God, and thrice-weekly church attendance; she worked as a medical secretary from seven a.m. to four p.m. each day; she cooked meals for the poor and visited the sick and devoted the hours she wasn’t doing those things to peering through her blinds at the neighbors across the street, who had four kids and innumerable grandchildren and made more noise at one meal than Corrinne and her husband and son did in an entire year. Frank had pegged me right—I did like people, and laughter, music, and stories. I traveled in a crowd, and I loved to have parties, to fill my house with friends, to cook, even if it was just pizza or cookies, to have everyone together, safe and full and happy.

In the car, Frank took my hand and pulled me so close that I could feel his eyelashes on my cheek. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” I answered as he slowly brought his lips to mine. I remember thinking that this was a guy I could love, really love, in a way I hadn’t loved the other boys I’d dated, that he was steady and grown-up in a way that they weren’t. I also knew that parts of Frank would always be a mystery, that there would always be more going on in his head than he’d be able to express with his words.

Almost without discussion, we’d become a couple that night, and, again, almost without discussion, we’d gotten engaged, then married, and we’d slipped into a life that was more or less the same as the life my parents had. By the time we went to that dance, he’d already been in touch with the army recruiter. He enlisted in the spring of his senior year and was off to basic training the week after we graduated. We got married when he came home after his eight weeks in Fort Benning, with new muscles and a new tattoo. Then he went off to Afghanistan, and I got pregnant the first time he came home on leave. His father died, and we named Spencer after him. Together, we cleared out the garage, where Frank’s dad kept most of his things, and slept some nights. I’d been the one to find his cardboard box full of copies of
Barely Legal,
and I’d thrown them away without saying a word to Frank.

None of this was surprising. In our world, you finished high school and got married, and if you were a girl it was a big point of pride if you didn’t get pregnant before either of those other events. I hadn’t ever thought about college, or traveling, or waiting to start my own family, or having anything that you could call a career as opposed to just a job. I lived my life like a meal that had been set in front of me, never asking if there were other choices or even if I was hungry.

But then, after Spencer came along, and I knew he’d be
my last baby, without ever planning on it, I started seeing, and wanting, other things. A picture of a home office in a magazine, a description of Paris in a book, a restaurant review in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
of a place I knew we could never afford to go—these things, and a hundred more like them, would start a voice whispering in my head.
I want, I want, I want,
the voice would say. It wanted a new couch; it wanted a vacation somewhere other than Disney World or the Jersey Shore; it wanted to read the books Gabe gave me and not have to look up a word or two every page, sometimes every paragraph. When I asked the voice how on earth I could ever hope to get any of these things, the voice answered,
Simple. Money
.

I’d never known anyone who’d been a surrogate. A wife carrying someone else’s baby, bringing in more money than her husband would earn in a year and a half, walking around with a belly full of someone else’s child . . . that was nothing Frank and I had seen from our parents or cousins or neighbors, nothing that was even a possibility when we were kids. I should have known it would never sit right with Frank, old-fashioned as he was. What happened to us should not have come as a surprise.

At first, it all seemed easy. I got pregnant on the first attempt, in August. There were plenty of things I didn’t know how to do: drive a stick shift, swim underwater, use the microwave for anything other than baking potatoes and popping popcorn. But I knew how to be pregnant. After two boys, I’d even say I was good at it.

I started showing right away, the same way I had with Spencer. Certain things bothered me—the smell of gasoline, the sound of the spoon squishing through the mayonnaise when I made tuna salad. In the afternoons I found myself napping, sometimes on the floor next to Spencer’s crib, conked out on the carpet like I’d been clubbed in the head. At five o’clock I’d sit both boys in front of the TV and scramble to make sure the
table was set and the meatloaf or manicotti or chicken-rice bake or whatever I was making was in the oven, that the boys had their hands and faces washed, that their rooms were picked up and their lunchboxes packed by the time Frank came home, so he wouldn’t see how exhausted I was. When I was by myself, my hand resting lightly on my belly, I still felt that surge of excitement and accomplishment.
I am doing something important,
I would think. I was bringing a new life into the world, giving a family this incredible gift (never mind that it was a gift they were buying) . . . what could be better, more noble, than that?

“How’s Frank handling everything?” my sister asked me when we were at our parents’ house for dinner one night.

“Frank is fine,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t even close to being true. Frank, who was at that moment seated in front of the television set, watching the Eagles, was barely looking at me, not at my face and certainly not at my body as it started to change. That night, on the way home, with both boys sleeping in their car seats, I’d ventured a question. “Are you okay? With . . .” Frank hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.