Layna’s big brown eyes brimmed with compassion. “I won’t tell,” she said. And even though I’d known her less than a day, I believed her. “High this week is thirty-seven degrees. It’s not like the mansicle’s gonna thaw.”
“Can I get your number?” I handed her my phone.
She typed with her thumbs and handed it back. “Call if you need me. Don’t text anything incriminating. To anyone. Tomorrow’s Tuesday. I’ll see you at pole class, right?”
“I’m not going back to pole!” I cried.
“You disappeared with Shade,” she said. “You might’ve been with him all night.”
If that was the case, I could prove—first to myself, then to the police—that I didn’t kill anyone. The thought could hardly cheer me before another wave of anxiety kicked in. “But what if Shade roofied me?” I said. “I think somebody definitely roofied me.”
Layna raised one eyebrow. “It’d be the first time in history a gay guy roofied a straight woman.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Okay. Tomorrow night. Pole. I’ll see you there.”
Nine
Tuesday
For a split second when I opened my eyes Tuesday morning, it felt like a normal day. Then I spotted the teal vest. Yesterday afternoon I’d found it crumpled under my sweats on the floor of my bedroom, gone through its empty pockets, and left it slung over my mom’s old Eames dupe office chair in the hopes something about it would trigger my memory. But now it triggered a paralyzing surge of anxiety instead.
Still I dragged myself out of bed, shoved the vest into the back of my closet, and started the morning whirlwind of kid wakeup, teeth brushing, breakfast. Being furloughed might mean I was extra broke, but at least once I’d gotten the twins on the bus I could sit at my kitchen table, slumped over my phone and a cup of coffee, and have an uninterrupted panic attack. But my email contained a reminder from the twins’ teacher, Mrs.Glidewell, that I was supposed to speak at eleven o’clock for Job Talk Tuesday.
When Mrs.Glidewell first hit me up, I’d suggested she ask a firefighter or garbage collector. My gig at the Capitol Grill wasn’t the stuff of second-grade dream jobs. But she’d told me not to worry. “The kids are obsessed with the state capitol,” she’d said. “Just tell them about the underground tunnels and they’ll be all in.”
I considered canceling for mental health reasons. But Phoebe and Alice were so excited about me speaking to their class. I didn’t want to disappoint them. And once I went to the police, they might start scrutinizing my recent behavior. Right now, more than anything, I needed to act like everything in my world was normal.
I put my coffee cup in the kitchen sink. Like most horizontal surfaces in my mom’s place, the window ledge above was lined with fake food. A plastic peach, a wooden crème brûlée, a rainbow of inedible patisserie. If my mom had had to name a religion, it would’ve been camp. She loved outrageous artificiality, bright colors, and anything so out-of-date as to be hilarious.
Her style definitely wasn’t my style. But I couldn’t bear to throw away a single slice of plastic quiche. Even the twins knew to return Grandma Lulu’s fake food to its rightful place after playing with it. I picked up a plastic macaron, as if it might help me channel my mother’s wisdom. No such luck.
Though driving with a dead guy in my trunk was a terrible idea, black ice coated the sidewalks and roads, so I couldn’t bike. My friend Patzi—a witch who works at House of Intuition in West Hollywood—once told me that a powerful spiritual practice is thinking about things you have now that you once wanted. So to calm myself down as I headed toward the twins’ school, I thought about how much I’d once longed to be a mom.
Comedy tends to attract sex addicts, alcoholics, people who are hogs for attention and like to put themselves first. So I was as surprised as anyone when I woke up one morning at thirty-six with a longing for a baby as powerful as hunger or thirst or the kind of horniness you only feel in your teen years.
I was waiting tables at a fancy sushi place near Abbot Kinney to make rent. My OB/GYN warned me I didn’t have a lifetime left to find Mr.Mom. Any baby I carried would be at risk of a million unhappy scenarios merely because I was old enough to remember the release of Alanis Morissette’sJagged Little Pill. When I finally met the man of my dreams, I would probably yell, “What took you so long?! You’ve put our baby in danger!”
My mom was the one who said: “There are plenty of women who have babies on their own.” She didn’t have to remind me she was oneof them. She offered to pay for my IVF. “I think of my savings as your inheritance anyway,” she said. “You might as well spend it now.” (At the time, I had no idea that my mom didn’t have savings. It was a second mortgage on her duplex that paid for my fertility treatment! But maybe I should’ve known.) She promised once I had a baby, she’d come stay with me a week at Thanksgiving, two weeks at Christmas, a week at spring break, and I could come to Boise for a month in the summer. We would make it work. And in LA, I had two waitress friends I could nanny-share with and a host of pals who promised they’d babysit while I showered or ran to the grocery store, or even did an open mic night.
My mom had a pal from yoga who ran the sperm bank in Boise, so she managed to qualify me for a massive discount. I had a whole stand-up bit about that. (“You know how you should never buy chicken once it’s been marked down? Food poisoning lasts twenty-four hours. Bad sperm lasts a lifetime.”) But the joke was on me, because the sperm was super-powered—I got pregnant on the first round.
The wildest, most intense moment of my life happened when my OB first showed me two heartbeats. Twins! I’d never imagined such abundance. Sobs wracked me. Two babies! I was terrified, sure. But more than anything I felt like the Universe had seen my yearning and blessed me twice over. Twins are strange. Twins are a phenomenon. Twins are Nature herself whispering that life is full of mystery and magic.
No one tells you that if twins are magic, carrying twins is an ancient, fairy-tale-level curse. By the time I was eight months pregnant I was almost as big around (60 inches!) as I am tall (64 inches!). I was literally shaped like a beach ball. A bumpy purple-gray rash called “prurigo of pregnancy” made my skin resemble the hide of an elderly elephant.
When the doctor laid both babies on my chest, my mother was there with me. They were the most wrinkly, gunky, funny-looking creatures—perfectly identical except for Phoebe’s Florida birthmark—and I loved them so much something inside me cracked open. I promised myself I’dbe the best mom, always there for them. But I’d also show them a woman could be a mother and still pursue her creative dreams. And with the help of my own beloved mom and my misfit gaggle of artsy weirdo LA friends, I would raise them surrounded by love and community.
But sometimes life doesn’t go according to plan.
Now as I slipped into the twins’ second-grade classroom, Alice’s wave was enthusiastic, Phoebe’s too-cool-for-school. At their elementary school in LA, they’d been in different classes, the policy being to separate twins so they had a chance to develop their own identities. But in Boise, they’d been put in the same room, and I hadn’t objected.
A bulletin board dedicated to the Heroes of the United States of America was decorated with kid drawings. Martin Luther King Jr. George Washington. Thomas Edison. Meanwhile, Phoebe had drawn Joan Rivers with a halo and real sequins glued all over her kaftan. Alice had sketched a stooped woman in a hat, clearly meant to represent comedic trailblazer Moms Mabley. Often my life felt like a long series of failures. But when I saw those drawings, I had the sense I was doing something right.
A dad stood at the front of the room wearing crisp jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A hot dad. Maybe Mrs.Glidewell had found a firefighter after all. School events like this made me worried for the day my kids would come home upset they didn’t have a father. But if that happened, I’d tell them what I’d always told them. That I’d wanted babies so much. That I loved them so much. That our family was perfect and enough.
That last part was maybe a lie. Because while my mother had loved the girls as much as a second parent, without her our family was a wagon missing a wheel.
A kid in the row in front of me picked his nose and ate it. Hubert the Booger Eater. The twins had told me about him. I tried to focus on whatever Hot Dad was talking about. But his pecs were distracting. A glance at his left hand revealed a bare ring finger. Interesting.
