“I can have it.” She wouldn’t cry. If nothing else good in this damned world happened tonight, she’d keep from crying.
“Alone? Like your mother?” Nathan ran his hand over his chin. “You of all people know what a hard road that is, right, sweetheart?”
“Where are you going to be? Are you planning to die? Disappear?” Behind her brave front, Tia shrank to walnut size. She knew where Nathan would be. He'd be in his beautiful house with Juliette. The wife. The wife she’d once spied on. The wife who looked like sun and sky, whose blonde shine had blinded Tia.
for whatever you need to take care of . . .”
“‘Take care of, take care of,’” Tia mimicked. “Take care of what?” She wanted to force him to say the word abortion.
“My sons are so young.”
Tia clutched the arm of the chair. She craved the forbidden wine.
“I can’t stretch between two families. Please. Look at what this means,” he begged.
Dry skin peeled from her cracked thumb as she wrung her hands. Already this pregnancy had changed her, somehow drying her out while also making her pee twice an hour.
Nathan came and put his arms around her. “Pregnancy makes women romanticize things. You think after seeing the baby, fatherly love will overwhelm me and I’ll change my mind. But I can’t. I’m not leaving my family. Wasn’t I always straight about that?”
Oh God. He was crying.
His family.
She’d thought she was having his family.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Finally she spoke. “I can’t do it, Nathan. What you’re asking—I can’t.”
Nathan drew away. “I’m sorry, but there’s no possible way we can be together, Tia. Please. Take care of this. It’s the best thing for both of us. Honestly.”
By her sixth month of pregnancy, discomfort had become Tia’s new normal. Once upon a time so skinny that people pressed milkshakes on her, now she lumbered. She stuck a cushion behind her as she sat on the couch, surrounded by begging letters, photos, and essays from couples hungry for her baby.
Tia had refused to “take care of this,” as Nathan wanted. St. Peter’s nuns and Tia’s mother had done too good a job. She couldn’t rid herself of the pregnancy for fear of being haunted into the afterlife, and she couldn’t find the courage to hold her child in this life, so here she was, six months pregnant, choosing a mother and father for her baby.
Picking adoptive parents, she was faced with impossible choices. She sorted through hundreds of letters from men and women desperate for the baby growing inside her. Potential mothers and fathers swam before her until she could barely remember who was the librarian from Fall River and which was the couple reminiscent of her scariest Sunday school teachers. They all promised nurturing love, backyards the size of Minnesota, and Ivy League schools.
After three cups of sugary mint tea, missing coffee more with each sip, Tia narrowed the choices to the three most likely couples. She sifted through their pictures and letters, and then laid them out like tarot cards. Then, with the fear of continuing to face this task hastening her decision, she picked the man and woman she deemed most likely to be good parents. She balanced their photos on her big belly and then moved them around like paper dolls, acting out everything they’d said during the phone conversation she’d had with them, both of them sounding so sure of themselves, so smart and together.
“Hello, Tia,” she imagined Paper Caroline’s voice squeaking. “I want your baby. I’m a pathologist researching children’s cancer. My husband has a very large family, and he’s always been drawn to children.”
“Tell her about being a counselor at Paul Newman’s camp. What’s the name? You know. The one for kids with cancer?” Paper Peter laid a gentle hand on saintly Paper Caroline’s arm.
“The Hole in the Wall Gang.” Paper Caroline bowed her head so as not to appear boastful.
A month later, when Caroline and Peter learned it was a girl, they told Tia they were naming the baby Savannah. An idiotic name. Tia called the baby inside her Honor, her mother’s middle name─also an idiotic name, but it wasn’t meant to be used out of utero, and besides, idiotic or not, it certainly beat Savannah. Why not simply call her Britney and be done with it? If she wasn’t so busy caring for her ailing mother, she’d choose new parents for her daughter.
Tia stumbled as she fumed over the choice, bumping into a food cart in the hall of the hospice that had become her mother’s home. Clumsiness was Tia’s companion. Clumsiness, the constant need to pee, and a life of seclusion. She’d gone from existing for Nathan’s visits to carrying a relentless reminder of him. Each time she stroked her stomach, she felt as though she were caressing him. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t replace sadness with hate.
Her mother was the only person with whom she spent time. Every other friend from her past—except for Robin, in California, too far away to visit—thought she’d gone to Arizona for a year to work on a masters in gerontology, based on her work with the elderly. In reality, she moved to Jamaica Plain, an entirely different sort of neighborhood from Southie.
Unlike her old neighborhood, where she’d see people she knew on every street, Jamaica Plain was always in flux—a mix not just of ethnicity and race, but class, culture, and age. Her only acquaintance was the librarian, with whom she had a nodding hi, how are you, relationship. JP was an easy place to remain anonymous.
She’d wanted to be where nobody knew her name. Being the object of gossip or pity wasn’t in her plans. Her mother’s supported both of them—Tia rarely left the house. Life became mainlining novels, watching TV, and caring for her mother, who’d moved in with Tia until her pain overcame Tia’s nursing ability.
She crept into her mother’s room on angel feet. That’s what her mother had called it when Tia the child tried to sneak into the kitchen for extra cookies. “Sweet one, mothers can hear their children, even when they use their angel feet.”
Though Tia tried to pretend otherwise, her mother lay dying as Tia’s baby grew.
“Mom?” she whispered.
The room remained silent. Tia dug her nails into her palms and bent over the bed, watching until she saw the slight rise and fall of her mother’s chest. Her mother was only forty-nine. Liver cancer had overtaken her in a matter of months, although Tia suspected her mother had hidden the truth for some time.
Her mother had been in hospice for twenty-three days. Maybe the younger you were when you became sick, the longer you held on, or maybe twenty-three days was average, normal—whatever you’d call the amount of time from entering a hospice until you died. She couldn’t bring herself to find out. Perhaps if she had a sister or brother who’d team up with her, she’d have the courage to ask such a vulgar question, but it had always been just the two of them, Tia and her mother.
Dying could be such a long process, which surprised Tia. You’d think that working with the elderly would have taught her more about death and dying, but she’d provided senior recreation, not counseling. Word games were her specialty. In her work world, a client didn’t show up for Scrabble, and the next thing you knew, he or she was dead.
You didn’t see the person die.
Losing her mother seemed impossible, as though someone planned to cut the string that held Tia to earth. She’d be floating without ballast. Tia had none of the usual family: no aunts, no uncles, no cousins—her mother filled all those roles.
Tia settled into the chair next to her mother’s bed. She wondered why, when they so stressed comfort, the hospice didn’t provide chairs where a pregnant woman could sit pain free. She slipped a paperback from her tote: a mystery so simple that even if she retained only a quarter of what she read, she could still track the plot. Her mother’s copy of Jane Eyre, complete with the magical happy ending, was in her bag, but she saved that to read aloud to her mother after supper.
Her mother opened her eyes. “Been here long, sweetheart?” She reached for Tia’s hand. “Tired?”
T
ia ran a hand over her large belly. “Always.”
“You don’t have to come here every night, you know.”
Her mother repeated this daily. It was her version of “I’m worried about you.”
“Tired isn’t life threatening.”
“When you’re pregnant—”
“When you’re pregnant, it’s what you are. Remember?” Tia asked. “Was it like that for you? Did I drive you crazy even before I was born?”
Her mother struggled to sit up. Tia offered a hand for leverage and then tucked pillows behind her mother’s back. Her mother’s skin, once such a pretty, pink-tinged white—pale Irish skin that burned with one wink from the sun; that was how her mother described herself—now looked mean yellow against the sheets.
“I remember everything about being pregnant,” her mother said. “Are you going to be able to forget?”
“Mom, please don’t,” Tia said.
“I have to, honey.” Her mother retrieved her glasses from the metal tray attached to the bed. Once the wire rims were firmly in place, she looked healthier. Glasses, jewelry, and other accoutrements seemed like totems against death. Tia constantly bought bright trinkets to cheer her mother. Electric blue beads threaded onto silver cord clanked around her mother’s wrist. “They match your eyes,” Tia had said, after buying them the previous week.
“Why don’t I get you some ice water?” Tia said.
“Don’t run away. Listen to me. You need to face how sorry you’ll be if you go through with this.”
This was the word her mother used to describe Tia’s plan to give up her baby for adoption.
“I’d be a horrible mother,” Tia said.
“You think that now. Wait until you hold your baby.”
Each skirmish in her mother’s battle to stop the adoption made Tia feel worse. Every reason Tia laid out sounded lamer than the last.
“I’ll be a bad mother.”
“I don’t have enough money.”
“I’m too ashamed of not knowing who the father is.”
Rather than telling her mother the truth, Tia pretended to be a woman who’d slept with too many men and, thus, didn’t know the identity of her baby’s father. The horror of that lie was still better than the truth. She couldn’t bear telling her mother she’d been sleeping with a married man—and had tried to steal him.
Everything she said sounded ridiculous. Maybe she’d be a bad mother, God knows she had no money, and immature should be her middle name, but if that were all it took to give up a baby, the world would be filled with orphans.
Tia caressed her belly. Sweet little baby, I’m sorry.
Tia had grown up in the wake of her father’s vanishing. In a vacuum of knowledge, her mother assumed he’d chosen a life with another woman—living a life with more fun and liquor than Tia’s puritanical mother would accept. In her mother’s estimation, sleeping with a married man was a sin only exceeded by abortion.
Without the truth, Tia could offer no reasoning that would make sense. How could she admit that she was giving up a child whose existence would remind her of a man she loved but could never have? How could Tia say this to her mother when Tia had no idea if she was being the most selfish she’d ever been, or the most selfless?
“The baby will have a better life than I’ll ever be able to give her,” Tia said. “Really, Mom. You saw their letter, the pictures. The baby will have good parents.”
Her mother’s eyes watered. Tia’s mother never cried. Not when Tia broke her leg so badly that the bone stuck out. Not when she found out about the cancer. And not when Tia’s father left—at least, not in front of Tia.
“I’m sorry.” Her mother blinked, and the tears disappeared.
“Sorry? God, you’ve done nothing wrong.”
Her mother folded her arms and clutched her elbows. “I must have done something awful to have you believe your baby will do better without you. Do you think your life at this moment is as well as you’ll ever do? Don’t you see that your future lies in front of you?”
Tia shrugged as though she were a child shutting down against shame, aching at the thought that she might let her mother die thinking she’d failed in raising her.
“Mom, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“I just don’t think it’s my path.” Tia covered her belly with both hands. Every lie she told felt as though she were pushing her mother further away, now when they needed closeness more than ever. “I don’t think she’s meant to be mine.”
“Please don’t make your decision yet. Something’s tormenting you, and I know it’s not what you’re telling me. That’s okay. But believe me, if you pick giving in to your pain over choosing your baby, you’ll never recover from either.”
The Comfort of Lies is published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster
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23
The Murderer’s Daughters
Lulu: 1971
I wasn’t surprised when Mama asked me to save her life. By my first week in kindergarten, I knew she was no macaroni-necklace-wearing kind of mother. Essentially, Mama regarded me as a miniature hand servant:
Grab me a Pepsi, Lulu.
Get the milk for your sister’s cereal.
Go to the store and buy me a pack of Winstons.
Then one day she upped the stakes:
Don’t let Daddy in the apartment.
The July our family fell apart, my sister was five going on six, and I was turning ten, which in my mother’s eyes made me about fifty. Daddy didn’t offer much help, even before he left. He had problems of his own. My father wanted things he couldn’t have, ,and he hungered for my mother above all else. Perhaps growing up in the shadow of Coney Island, Brooklyn’s fantasy world, explained his weakness for Mama’s pinup façade, but I never understood how he missed the rest. Her sugary packaging must have kept him from noticing how much she resented any moment that didn’t completely belong to her.
Mama and Daddy’s battles were the heartbeat of our house. Still, until the day my mother kicked him out, my father was the perfect example of hope against knowledge. He’d return from work each night looking for supper, a welcome home kiss, a cold beer. Mama considered his homecoming her signal to rail against life.
“How many hours a day do you think I can be alone with them, Joey?” Mama had asked just days before he moved out. She’d pointed at my sister, Merry, and me playing Chutes and Ladders on the tiny Formica table stuck in the corner of our undersize kitchen. We were the best-behaved girls in Brooklyn, girls who knew that disobeying Mama brought a quick smack and hours spent staring at our toes.
“Alone?” Beer fumed off Daddy’s lips. “For God’s sake, you spend half the day yakking with Teenie and the other half painting your nails. You know we got a stove, right? With knobs and everything?”
Mama’s friend Teenie lived downstairs on the first floor with five sons and an evil husband whose giant head resembled an anvil. Teenie’s apartment smelled like bleach and freshly ironed cotton. Ironing was Teenie’s Valium. Her husband’s explosions left her so anxious that she begged Mama for our family’s wrinkled laundry. Thanks to Teenie’s husband, we slept on crisp sheets and satin-smooth pillowcases.
I dreamed of deliverance from my so-called family, convinced I was the secret child of our handsome mayor, John V. Lindsay, who seemed so smart, and his sweet and refined wife, who I knew would be the sort of mother who’d buy me books instead of Grade B faux-Barbie dolls from Woolworth’s junky toy section. The Lindsay family had put me in this ugly apartment with peeling paint and grade-C parents to test my worth and I wouldn’t disappoint. Even when Mama screamed right in my face, I kept my voice modulated to a tone meant to please Mrs. Lindsay.
Mama sent us to take a nap that afternoon. The little coffin of a bedroom Merry and I shared steamed hot, hot, hot. Our only relief came when Mama wiped our grimy arms and chests with a washcloth she’d soaked with alcohol and cold water.
Lying in t
he afternoon heat, impatient for my birthday to arrive the next day, I prayed that Mama had bought the chemistry set I’d been hinting about all month. Last year I’d asked for a set of Britannica Encyclopedias and received a Tiny Tears doll. I never wanted a doll, and even if I did, who wanted one that peed on you?
I hoped Mama’s recently improved mood might help my cause. Since throwing Daddy out, Mama hardly yelled at us anymore. She barely noticed we existed. When I reminded her it was suppertime, she’d glance away from her movie magazine and say, “Take some money from my purse, and go to Harry’s.”
We’d walk three blocks to Harry’s Coffee Shop and order tuna sandwiches and malteds, vanilla for Merry and chocolate for me. Usually I’d finish first, wrapping my legs around the cold chrome pole under the leather stool and twirling impatiently while I waited. Merry sipped at her malted and nibbled itsy bitsy bites from her sandwich. I yelled at her to hurry, imitating Grandma Zelda, Daddy’s mother. “Move it, Princess Hoo-Haa. Who do you think you are, the Queen of England?”
Maybe she did. Maybe Merry’s secret mother was Queen Elizabeth.
After Daddy moved out, Mama instituted inexplicable new rules. Don’t open the door for your father. When you visit him at Grandma Zelda’s, don’t say a word about me. That old bag is just using you for information. And never tell anyone about my friends.
Men friends visited Mama all the time. I didn’t know exactly how to keep from saying anything about them. Not talking about Mama meant being outright rude and disobedient, since seconds after kissing us hello, Daddy’s questions started:
How’s your mother?
Who comes over the house?
Does she have new clothes? New records? New color hair?
Even a kid could see Daddy was starving for Mama-news.
I felt a little guilty at how relieved I was by Daddy’s absence. Before he left, when he wasn’t demanding, or later, outright begging Mama for attention, he’d be staring at her with a big moony face.
19 Myths About Cheating: A Novella Page 16
