Bella’s disapproval would vanish, though, if she ever came to the city, saw Henry, saw Sarah’s cool and charmless apartment, the nice sofa, the prettily wrapped presents. Certainly Sarah’s the daughter she always dreamed of, the daughter she thought she’d be getting. Lauren’s annoyed by her mother, yes, but always feels appropriately guilty about the fact that her mother annoys her.
Lauren is supposed to call Rob. She’d told him she would, that morning, but now she doesn’t want to. Has no interest in it, in hearing his voice, in talking to him, in trying to communicate to him what she wants or doesn’t want to do, in hearing what he wants or doesn’t want to do. What she wants is to walk, through the city, and think about nothing in particular. When she first lived here, in that apartment on Eleventh Street, sometimes she’d just walk for hours. She felt so proprietary about the city then, the city in which she’d previously always been just a visitor. In for the day, for school; in for the weekend, with Sarah. Then, at twenty-one, in for real, in this city, her city. It feels like a long time since she just walked around, not going anywhere in particular, making her way in the general direction of home, but free to stop if something—a slice of pizza, a folding table covered with used paperbacks—catches her eye.
Sarah thinks that long-ago abortion is causing her pain, after these many years. It’s touching, and telling, very Sarah. For all her money, all her sophistication, all her worldliness, there’s something so naive about her. For Lauren’s second abortion, which she’s never told Sarah about, she went with Gabe; the same clinic, where she’d had a nice experience, or a nonhorrible experience. It was at the end of things, Gabe asking her to marry him, trying to convince her to do this with him, have a baby, make a life, that it would work, that it would be wonderful. She couldn’t make him understand: that she knew it never would.
“I’m not supposed to pressure you, or question your choices.” Gabe had a huge, very prominent Adam’s apple. He was so much taller than her it was right at her eye level. “But Lauren.”
That second time was harder, she admits that. Gabe, tears in the corners of his eyes. A good man, a great man for someone else. He’d gone out to get maxi pads, sorbet. He still asked her about getting married, even after, but with less optimism, with something like heartbreak. If it wouldn’t have worked before that day, it certainly wouldn’t have worked after. From that moment on, nothing between them was the same. Sarah doesn’t know any of this, no one does—a secret you keep from your closest friend is one you share with no one. And she is that, after all this time, isn’t she, Sarah, her closest friend?
It’s the sort of evening that makes you feel very small in the world. Maybe she will give up the apartment and sell the cute little vintage sofa and go to Portland, maybe she’ll buy a dog, and learn to drive stick, and become a vegan. Maybe she’ll stay here and marry Rob and have a baby and time it to the birth of Sarah’s next baby and their children will be best friends just as they are best friends and every Sunday they’ll get together for a big, communal dinner, a roast chicken, on colorful porcelain plates. Sarah thinks anything is possible, but of course, for Sarah, anything is possible. Lauren has never quite believed that.
Lauren is not Sarah, and Rob is not Dan. There’s not going to be a fairy-tale wedding at a mansion; there’s not going to be a happy, healthy heir to the throne, or the family fortune, anyway. She’s a different person, they are different people. She knows what she wants to do, after all. There’s a movie theater on Sixty-Sixth Street, an artsy one, but there’s a stupid-enough movie playing, so she goes inside, takes her seat, turns her phone off, and watches the movie.