Confidential Page 3

  That was one way to put it. “I’ll reach out and see if he’s taking new clients,” I said. “He’s very in demand.” I swigged the rest of my champagne, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Nat was giving me a strange look.

  “Let me see your phone,” she said, and was I imagining it or was her tone ominous?

  “Why?” I tried to keep mine light by comparison, helium to her lead.

  “Isn’t he in your contacts? I can just call him myself.”

  The moment was fraught. We’d entered a standoff. Jeanie must have felt it, because she interceded, her maternal instincts kicking in. “If you go to him,” she told Nat, “then Flora might feel less comfortable going back. And she had him first, right?”

  How I loved Jeanie. She could finesse any situation. It’s why she was the best sales rep on the team, even though she was the oldest.

  Nat saw Jeanie’s wisdom and nodded slowly. Then she brightened. “I have a great idea! We should both pull up our apps and then Jeanie can do the swiping for both of us. She can show us the error of our ways.”

  Jeanie clapped her hands, no longer the truce-brokering mom but instead, a giggly twelve-year-old. “Tin-der! Tin-der! Tin-der!” she chanted. Her impeccable auburn bob was percussive, swaying to and fro.

  The twentysomethings on the next couch glanced over at us; they were holding their eye rolls until we looked away. So I kept staring at them challengingly, and they had to yield, dropping back into their own conversation.

  But they weren’t really my problem; they were a delaying tactic. My problem was, I had no Tinder account.

  “After Chicken Guy, I’m taking a break,” I said.

  “Don’t let him scare you off,” Nat said. “There are lots of great men out there. I mean, there have to be, right?” She looked to Jeanie for confirmation.

  “Of course! Just put yourselves in my capable hands. I know how to spot a douche a mile away. It was a lot of trial and error before I got to my husband.” Jeanie turned to me. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Let me swipe for you.”

  “That sounds really racy!” I joked.

  “Come on!” she said again. She was tenacious, another reason she was the number one salesperson.

  Nat was watching me, too. I had a feeling I totally hated: that I was being a buzzkill. But I couldn’t help it. There was no way I was going to come clean now, not when I was so close to being able to introduce them to Michael.

  I had an inspiration: “After Chicken Guy, I temporarily deleted my account.”

  They went back to their drinks, and my mind went to Michael. Since he was taking so long, I could probably start laying the groundwork. Funny thing, I’d tell Jeanie and Nat at our next happy hour, I met someone, and he’s actually a psychologist in Rockridge; he probably even knows my old couples therapist, wouldn’t that be crazy?

  Or, I ran into my old couples therapist right in the neighborhood, and we just hit it off . . .

  Or, I called him to go back into therapy and we acknowledged that there’d always been a hint of mutual attraction, so . . .

  I had to think this through more and talk to Michael. Get our stories straight. It might be harder than it seemed, given how borderline suspicious Nat was acting. One thing I knew was that Tales from Tinder was ending tonight. Like I told them, I needed a break.

  Michael’s ears must have been burning because a text came in. It wasn’t his name, of course, just his initials: M.B.

  What are you wearing?

  I turned the phone over.

  “Is that him, Chicken Guy?” Nat said.

  “Rookie mistake,” I said. “I shouldn’t have given him my number. He should have to message me through the app.”

  “Well, you were hopeful,” Jeanie said. “That makes sense. He took you to Zuni.”

  Nat agreed. “How could you have known?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “they blindside you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  LUCINDA

  “Are you sitting down?” Mom asked.

  I was in publishing, which meant I was always sitting down.

  I was also in a cubicle, in a largely silent room. Usually I could hear other people on the phone or talking to one another, or a stream from Pandora, some ambient noise, yet right then, it was only keystrokes. It was a converted warehouse, the drafty kind with walls that looked like aluminum rather than one with hip architectural details. Sound carried.

  “Could I call you when I get home?” I said in a low voice.

  “This can’t wait.”

  “I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  I grabbed my purse and walked outside. Verdant Publishing was housed in an industrial part of Berkeley that was rapidly developing. When I’d started a few years ago, we were the only inhabitants of the block and I had to bring my own lunch. Now we were being overrun by live-work lofts, and there were four restaurants within a couple of blocks (though they all closed by three p.m. The neighborhood was gentrifying, but nightlife still fell outside its parameters.). So at four thirty, with everyone inside living and working, the block had gone still.

  Again, I would have preferred some ambient noise, but there were no benches or trees. No camouflage.

  Fortunately, there were also no windows in the aluminum-sided warehouse, so none of my colleagues could see me, not unless they took a smoke break, and since it’s a boutique publisher in health-conscious, eco-conscious, formerly-hippie-and-now-mostly-just-hip Berkeley, no one smoked—or at least, no one wanted to be seen smoking. When the college kids in town vaped, it was organic and vegan.

  It wasn’t that long ago that I was one of them. Never as carefree as some, but it had been a liberation of sorts. Though it was only a few hours from where I grew up along the river in Guerneville, I treated it like a trek through the Himalayas. Mom missed me, but she’d stopped pressing. She must have known, on some level, that I needed space and time. Light and air. She just didn’t know why.

  She never called me at work. Full of dread, I rang her back, and she said, again, “Are you sitting down?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I leaned against the building, since it was the closest approximation.

  “I didn’t want to worry you before there was anything to worry about, but it’s Adam. It’s cancer.”

  I should say something. What kind of cancer? I’m sorry? But before I could come up with it, she added quietly, “Pancreatic. Stage four.”

  Stage four meant dying. I mean, we’re all dying, but stage four meant soon. My stepfather wasn’t even fifty years old yet, and he probably never would be.

  What should I be feeling? What was I feeling?

  “How are you?” That was a better question. Safer.

  “I’m scared.” Then she was crying, hard, and I’d never heard that before. She loved him so much. I’d always known that. I used to wonder if she loved him more than me.

  But this wasn’t about that. It was about how I could help her right then. My mother’s a good person; the strain in our relationship wasn’t her fault. “You’re going to get through this,” I told her.

  “It’s advanced, so there aren’t many options. They can try chemo, but he doesn’t want to do it. His mother did chemo, and he said that it took everything out of her and she died anyway.” More sobs. “He’s just going to let himself die.”

  “Oh, Mom. Mommy.” I was crying, too, not because of him—at least, I was pretty sure it wasn’t—but because she was in so much pain.

  “Come home and talk to him,” she said. “You know how he feels about you.”

  I wanted to help her, but I never wanted to go back. “If he’s not listening to you, he’s not going to listen to me.”

  “He thinks you’re smarter than me. You’re the one who went to Berkeley.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Something like this, it has to be in person.”

  My first visit in . . . how long had it been? A year, or more like two? “Does he look sick?”

  “No. He just
looks like Adam.” I heard her stifling her tears, and the effort at containment was just as heart-wrenching as the weeping. “Please, Lucy. Come home. I need you. Not just to talk to him.”

  She needed me to be there for her. She was falling apart. The man she loved was dying.

  It sounded like he was ready to die. Maybe our job was just to let him go.

  Was it evil to feel the teeniest bit of anticipatory relief, to think that my secret would die with him?

  I was torn. I didn’t like to say no to anyone, especially not to Mom, and especially not right then, because that would be monstrous, but I didn’t see how I could handle this. How I could be her confidante. Or his. The image made me shudder.

  It was like I was shrinking, losing a year a second, and I was a kid again. I wanted my mommy.

  But my mommy was asking me to be a grown-up. I couldn’t let her down, yet I couldn’t come through, either.

  “I’ve never known anyone who’s died,” I said. All four of my grandparents were still alive; my father was, too, as I knew from Christmas cards and nothing else. He’d been on the East Coast and entirely uninvolved, not even aware of what was happening during Mom’s drug years. Aunts, uncles, cousins—everyone was okay. Except Adam.

  “Adam is not going to die!” she said fiercely. “He needs treatment, that’s all. If he fights, he wins. We have to make sure he fights.”

  We. I was in this with her, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn’t tell her why I was hesitating. She’d never even asked why I didn’t come home all through college. Like she hadn’t wanted to know. Like she hadn’t cared.

  Suddenly, I was feeling the most unfamiliar emotion: anger.

  Dr. Baylor would be pleased. He said I needed to get mad more often, that it was the building block of assertiveness, and that I should be standing up for myself.

  It was a blessing and a curse that I was seeing Dr. Baylor that night. A blessing because I was in a horrible tumult, and because he’s Dr. Baylor and I always wanted to see him, every day, and I thought of him more often than was comfortable in one sense, but in another, he was the ultimate solace. I liked knowing that he was out there, looking forward to our time together, maybe not the same as I did, but he must have had some anticipation. Otherwise, why would he do it for free?

  But it was a curse because I was going to walk in there a total mess, and I hadn’t told him much about Adam, or even about my mother. For a therapist, he asked remarkably few questions about childhood. I thought all therapists would insist we go there, but not Dr. Baylor.

  Maybe there were things he didn’t want to know, either.

  “I’ll come home this weekend,” I said. It was the only way out of this call.

  “Thank you, Lucy.”

  She sounded relieved; I was feeling the opposite. I was having trouble breathing, wondering if it was cardiac arrest or a panic attack. Best to assume it’s a panic attack and to focus on my breathing. I told myself to think calming thoughts and visualize a serene place. Picture Dr. Baylor’s face.

  I didn’t go back inside. I texted Christine and told her that I had to leave just a little bit early, I must have eaten bad shrimp. No one wanted to make further inquiries into other people’s GI tracts.

  Then I spent five minutes beating myself up: Bad shrimp? Who says that?

  But those were five minutes not spent beating myself up for the far greater offense that lingered in the back of my subconscious, just waiting for an opportune moment to rise to prominence. Sometimes it was like I really did have a parasite living inside me, only it wasn’t in my GI tract at all.

  I tried to kill time in a café, but I was so antsy, so full of awful swirling thoughts, that I decided to go straight to Dr. Baylor’s. Just being near him, even in the waiting room, could have a positive effect. I had to hope.

  The intimacy of knowing the code to his building settled me a little. Seeing his name on the subscription label for all those issues of Psychology Today settled me more. I wasn’t alone. He’d get me through this.

  I knew it wasn’t the same as having an actual partner. I did want a boyfriend to make me tea after a hard day. But all the rest of it—the expectations, the demands, the emotional sharing, the sex—was daunting. A lot of the time, I just wanted to curl up with a book. I flipped back and forth between the dreamy pleasure of my own company and self-flagellation. What guy was going to want that?

  But for fifty minutes a week, with Dr. Baylor, I was at my best. If only I could stretch it out. After our sessions, I’d step outside his building feeling like some kind of superhero. A few blocks later, I was me again.

  I started paging through the magazines. Narcissistic personality disorder seemed to be all the rage. How to know if you have it. How to deal with a loved one who has it. When to leave. Why you’re not leaving. It sounded like narcissists often managed to find people with pathologies that clicked together with theirs, like a jigsaw puzzle. Dependent personalities.

  His door opened, and a woman emerged. She was somewhere in her thirties, more put together than I’d ever been, with blow-dried hair and glossy lips. Her clothes had a sophisticated drape, and while they didn’t reveal her shape exactly, you just knew she was skinny under there. She radiated confidence. She was pretty enough and, I’d guess, successful. I wanted to know her diagnosis.

  She was laughing and saying, “See you next week!” Her voice was gay. It was like she was exiting a very good party.

  I was envious of the way she carried herself and that airy tone. Envious that she’d just spent an hour with Dr. Baylor.

  And he’d just spent an hour with her. She was the tough act I had to follow every week. Usually, I raced in at the last minute and she was already gone. I’d never before seen my competition.

  I reminded myself she was paying for her sessions and I wasn’t.

  Of course, she could afford to pay for her sessions. She was probably about to meet her rich boyfriend for cocktails and small plates at À Côté. I was sure she would never think of me as competition.

  All this flashed through my mind in the seconds before Dr. Baylor said, “Lucy! I’ll be right with you.”

  He shut his door, and I was left with just one thought: I was utterly pathetic. Totally second-rate. That was without his even knowing the terrible things I’d done.

  By the time he invited me in, I was in tears. I couldn’t even look at him. He sank down on his knees in front of me, and I took the tissue he offered. He didn’t say anything, just let his beatific energy wash over me. When I was ready, I stood up and followed him inside.

  “Start wherever you’d like,” he said. “Or we can sit in silence for a while.”

  I grabbed for the whole box of tissues from the end table beside the couch. I had absolutely no idea where to start, how far back to go, or should I be in the present? Should I just tell him that I might be in love with him, and I knew how stupid that was, and that nothing could ever happen between us, and that he would never feel that way about me, even if he’d met me under different circumstances?

  He might say that we couldn’t work together anymore. I could lose what we did have. All I had.

  Besides, I was being a narcissist, focusing on myself at a time like this. I needed to think of Adam. No, I should think about my mother.

  “My stepfather has cancer,” I said.

  Dr. Baylor didn’t respond in the way I would have expected. He didn’t say he was sorry. Instead, he nodded and waited.

  “It’s stage four, and he doesn’t want to have chemo. My mother thinks I can convince him.”

  “That’s a big responsibility. Why do you think she would put you in that position?” He was watching me compassionately but carefully. Again, not where I thought he’d go, but I trusted him. He knew better than I did.

  “Adam listens to me. Or at least, she thinks he would.”

  “He doesn’t listen to her?” When I was silent, Dr. Baylor did another nod, like something was coming into focus for him.

>   I was gripped with fear. He already knew. It was therapist telepathy, or maybe the precise ways I was fucked up matched the contours of what I’d done. I fit the profile.

  “I guess he’s not listening to her about this,” I said.

  “You’ve stopped crying,” he observed.

  I hadn’t noticed.

  “How do you feel about the prospect of Adam dying?”

  “I believe in the right to die.”

  “That’s a belief. It’s not a feeling.”

  “I’m sad about it.”

  But I couldn’t seem to conjure any tears. What I felt was afraid. Because Dr. Baylor was close to the third rail.

  I explained that I hadn’t seen my mother in a long time and that this task was probably beyond me and I really didn’t want to let her down. It wasn’t untrue. But I knew that my affect didn’t match, that I was revealing myself in the discrepancy.

  I hated keeping things from Dr. Baylor, but I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t lose his good opinion of me.

  He knew there was more, but he left it at that. He was letting me keep my secret. He told me in our first session that I was in charge of what got shared and when. “This is your time,” he said, and I’d felt myself blushing.

  “Adam hasn’t been in my life that long,” I said. “They got married when I was fifteen.”

  “Complicated age.”

  He had no idea.

  Unless he did.

  CHAPTER 7

  GREER

  Donor Profile #1017

  Interview Notes

  Donor 1017 was tall and handsome, with an infectious smile. His blond hair was short and neat, and his green eyes matched his polo shirt, which was tucked into jeans. He wore a matching brown belt and brown sandals. He laughed easily and was quick to joke, but he didn’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, either.

  Donor 1017 grew up in the Midwest, and he’s proof that what they say about Midwesterners is true: he’s just so nice! His parents have been married thirty-four years, and he grew up in a stable, loving home. He climbed more trees than he could count!

  Donor 1017 was a high school soccer star. He was also on the debate team. It was important in his family to be well rounded . . .