“That is hilarious coming from you,” Lauren said. “The hock—the hiccup—” She shook her head and flushed.
“Are you trying to say hypocrisy?” Mom asked.
“You are a joke,” Lauren said.
“I am a hypocrite, Lauren,” Mom said. “I confess to it. But right now, we’re not talking about all the craziness from before. We are talking about today. We are talking about you.” Mom looked away from the rearview and into the mostly empty parking lot. “I’m not proud of what I got caught up in,” she said. “With Father Steve and all of that. I made a mistake.”
Lauren pfffed a scoffing sound.
“You made a mistake, too—”
“You know nothing,” Lauren said, and Mom shut her eyes against the impact.
“Lauren,” Mom said, “who—who did this to you?”
“I did this to me,” Lauren said.
“Honey—was it the Rosen boy? Skip?”
Lauren threw her head back and gagged. “Yeah, Skippy Rosenboy. That’s the one. We’re getting a shotgun marriage, just like you and Dad did.”
“Honey—”
“The abortionist’s son. That could be the title of a great romance novel, right?”
“Lauren, was it Skip?”
“His name is Stitch, and no. We’re friends. Is it so beyond you that a girl and a guy could just be friends?”
“Who is it, my love?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my choice,” Lauren said, in a mocking whine. “Just like you said. That’s all you need to know. I decided.”
“Lauren—it’s so early. You understand me, yes? It’s so early. We wouldn’t have known for weeks, for months, maybe, if you hadn’t needed to see the doctor anyway.”
“So what?”
“It’s barely even—”
“It’s barely even what?”
“They could take care of it and it would be like it never happened. You’ve—it’s barely started.”
“It’s barely a baby?”
“It might—end on its own. It happens a lot.”
“It’s barely a baby? Is that what you mean?”
“This doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life. You can decide something different for yourself.”
Lauren said nothing.
“You don’t have to go through—you can decide to end—”
She couldn’t say it. She was talking to no one. No-Lauren.
“We also have to consider the practical side of things. If this happens. How will I be able to help you and also care for Mirela?” Mom asked.
“I don’t need your help.”
“What help don’t you need, Lauren? Financial help? Help taking care of a baby?”
“Any of it. I can do it. I can decide for myself.”
“Oh, it’s that easy, is it, Lauren?”
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s hard. But that’s no reason for murder. Isn’t that your whole thing? That it’s murder?”
“I don’t know what my whole thing is anymore, honestly, Lauren.”
“Using Mirela as an excuse for murder is pretty gross, Mom.”
“Shush,” Mom said, eyeing Mirela in the rearview. No-Mirela was still staring, eyes filmy, lips parted.
“You want me to do it because you wish you’d done it,” Lauren said. “When you had the chance.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It’s not true that you wish you’d done it? Admit it.”
“First of all, this isn’t about me. It’s about you and your future. And second—”
“I have a future because you had me. Because you didn’t do it. So I don’t want to do it, either. There. Done. End of story.”
“It’s different. It’s not the same thing. You are you, and I am me—”
“I am me because you didn’t do it!”
“—and our lives are different. Your life belongs to you.”
“What if this was me? What if it was me inside of me?”
“It’s not you. It’s not you! You are here.”
“But I wasn’t always! Not like this!”
“No—what—”
“You regret having me! Just admit it!”
“We’re not—Lauren, keep your voice down, remember Mirela—we’re not talking about me, we’re—”
“Yes, we are. If we are talking about you and the decision you made, we are talking about me. It is literally the exact same thing. You are—”
“Lauren, honey, listen to me. Your life has value—”
“I totally agree! Thank you for proving my point!”
“—your life has value independent of any other person or any other thing. Independent of me. No one’s mother can regret their—regret doesn’t work—it doesn’t work like that. A person is not someone else’s decision.”
Mirela was softly humming.
“You can’t regret a person,” Mom said. “That’s not a sentence that makes sense. I can’t—”
“You are the one who is not making sense,” Lauren said. “You are twisting things. I am here because of a decision you made. I would not be here if you had made a different decision.”
“And now you are here and you can make your own decision. Your life is not my life.”
“And clearly I ruined your life.”
“No. No.”
“Say it. Have the guts to say it. You regret that I was born.”
“I cannot say that.”
“You can’t, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I can’t because it’s a lie.”
“You would have gone to college. You would have left Buffalo and had a whole other life. You wouldn’t have gotten stuck with Dad.”
“Wait, what? What’s wrong with your dad?”
“He wouldn’t have been my dad, and you would have a whole other life.”
“I do not regret that you were born.”
“You do, you do, you do!”
The humming grew louder, as loud as Lauren’s voice, rhyming and dissonant.
“Lauren. You are my life’s treasure. You are the core of my being.”
“What if you had aborted me? If you’d had an abortion, we wouldn’t be here right now having this stupid conversation!”
“Lauren, stop it, right now—”
Hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM
“You wish I wasn’t born, but you love me and you don’t want me to make the same mistake you did. Is that right?”
“That’s not what I think. How are you so sure of what I think?”
“I don’t know exactly what you think. I just know you are lying.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
Hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM, MMM-mm-MMM-mm-MMM-mm-MMM
“Then tell me something that’s true.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“You seem to think only terrible things can be true.”
“Just be honest. Like that’s so hard.”
“Lauren. You are the love of my life and you have been from the moment you were born.”
“You want to know who did this to me,” Lauren said. The tears came all at once, fast and hot, spilling and sidling past one another. “You’re dying to know.”
“You can tell me if you want to. But I’m not going to ask again. It’s up to you.”
Mirela’s shoe thump-thump-thumped against the plastic bottom lip of the car seat, in rhythm with the hm-MM-hm-MM.
“You do want to know. Don’t lie.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“It doesn’t matter to me. You can tell me or not tell me.”
“You can’t stand the idea of me having sex. Your daughter had sex. With a specific person. And not just once!”
“Lauren, please, Mirela is—be careful—”
“I chose it, and I liked it.”
“Lauren, my God, stop it, please stop—”
“I was inside you. Me
. It was always me. I was there. I was there all the time. I was waiting. From the very first second.”
“Lauren, we’re not—”
“I was there! It was me!” Lauren was really crying now, sobbing, one fist pounding her own knee, and Mirela’s humming abruptly halted. “You can say all you want that we’re not talking about your situation, but that doesn’t change anything. It’s still a person, no matter who it is. You say I made a mistake—well, that makes sense, right? Because I’m a mistake?”
“No. Never.”
“It’s one of the few things Mirela and I have in common, right? We are your two big fat fuckups!”
Mom turned around in her seat, wrenching her head to meet Lauren’s eyes over the headrest. “Lauren, don’t you dare.”
Lauren pressed her head against her window, unable to speak. Mirela began hmming and kicking again, arching her back.
“I just wish . . .” Lauren inhaled. “I wish we could have an honest conversation about this.”
“Honest?” Mom turned back and stared at the dashboard. “Okay. I can be honest with you, Lauren. Do you know what I honestly wish? You said you were waiting for me? I wish I had waited for you. You were worth the wait.”
Lauren exhaled.
“You were worth the wait,” Mom repeated.
Mom thought it was over.
“But,” Lauren said, “I wouldn’t have been me.” She was newly in control of herself. “If you’d waited.” She paused. Slowly, slowly. “You would have waited for me all your sorry life, because I would have been dead before I was born. Your precious baby girl.”
“Baby!” Mirela said.
“Only God knows such things,” Mom said.
“And you think God—”
“Baby, baby, baby,” Mirela said. Each baby paired off with a kick to the back of the front passenger seat.
“I don’t think anything about what God thinks,” Mom said. “I don’t presume to know. Why do you?”
“Bay-bee! Bay-bee!” Mirela sang.
“All you do is think about God,” Lauren said. “You don’t do anything without thinking about God. You got Mirela because you thought it would make God happy.”
“Having faith in God is not the same as having understanding in all of his ways. I do know he loves you, and me, and Mirela.”
“He loved Mirela so much he dumped her in some shithole and fucked her up.”
“Lauren, you can’t—”
“Some shithole you can’t even bring yourself to talk about.”
“You can’t say something like that about God. You—you place your soul in such danger when you talk like that. Do you understand?”
“Mom?” Lauren asked.
“Lauren.”
“When I was a baby, didn’t you love me? Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“God in heaven, Lauren, what a question—”
“When I was baby?” Mirela asked. The kick to the back of the seat was punctuation, a question mark.
“Didn’t you love me, Mommy?” Lauren asked. “You will love this baby, too. You will, Mommy. You will. You will.”
“Lauren, Lauren, my sweet girl, listen to me: I found Mirela too late, and I found you too soon.”
Mom bit down on the words like shards of glass.
“I’m so sorry,” Mom said. “Please, girls, I am sorry.”
Lauren listened as her mother gripped the car wheel and bumped her forehead against it—mumph-mumph-mumph.
“Oh God, forgive me,” Mom said, as if to herself. “God, please forgive me.”
“When I was baby!” Mirela said. Her voice was gaining in volume. She kicked harder and more. “When I was baby! When I was baby!”
Lauren felt the violence of what she had done, and a quickness and agility in herself—in the violence—that had otherwise completely abandoned her. Her pain was deep and honest and alive, and that meant she could sharpen it into the curve of a blade. She could make her pain into other people’s pain. There was a heinous beauty in it. It glinted in her eye. It was the violence of it that held her in place in the back seat, hidden from Mom’s eyes. It kept her from saying a gentle word to Mom, placing a hand on her shoulder. The slightest little thing. She had won, but one false move you lose.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get there eventually,” Rajiv said over his shoulder as he passed Lauren in the hallway between classes. Giggles from whoever was walking with him. It wasn’t worth the effort to register who they were. She could sit down right there in the stream between class periods without caring who saw her or what they thought. She was fumbling through a sandstorm.
“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Rajiv was keening down the hallways. Mocking sobs. Even Stitch had told him how crazy-making it was.
She was encased in a suit of armor. Lifting and maneuvering her limbs took a great, crushing, cranking effort. All the passageways of her body constricting, her blood flow slowing, rerouting itself, turning on itself, jellifying. Hands and feet gone blue and cold. Her skull screwed on too tight—her bones had thickened, too, and they were expanding and contracting, and her brain jangled around inside. Sirening white streaks at the corners of her sight. She rattled and chanked around, most people too polite or dismayed to ask her what was wrong, her steel boots sliding deeper into the sand.
She could drop out of the musical. Even now. The day of. It could be done. Lauren’s understudy, Leslie Cochrane, attended every rehearsal, whether she was required to or not. Lauren’s stupid Pink Ladies jacket would fit Leslie just fine, even if her saddle shoes were a half size too small—Leslie would accept any hardship for the sake of the role. But dropping out meant drawing on empty reserves of energy. Finding an acceptable excuse for dropping out, finding the right time and words for telling Mr. Smith, finding the courage to say the words and deflect his reaction, having to tell Mom and her classmates and her teachers, having to tell Paula and Stitch, and the whispers and scoldings to follow, and worse, the clucks and warbles of sympathy—it was too much to bear, too much to think about, far more trouble than the drudgery of chank-chanking through her paces in the company renditions of “Shakin’ at the High School Hop,” dimly aware of the laughing boys and the squinting girls and Mr. Smith in the middle distance, arms crossed. If she dropped out, then there was officially, formally, something wrong.
She could not disappear completely, but oddly she could come closer to disappearing onstage than if she refused to go on it. Mindy had decided to turn “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” into an ensemble number for all the Pink Ladies, “addressing their shared insecurities as young women,” she explained, patting Lauren’s arm. They would sing and dance in unison, no solos. They’d gone to all that trouble just for her.
“Lauren can’t do anything by herself,” Brendan said. “Can’t sing by herself, can’t dance by herself, can’t sleep by herself . . .”
“You are so fucking stupid,” Deepa told him.
“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Andy brayed at her. Rajiv’s disease was catching.
Leslie kept telling Lauren she could take over for her. “You know, if that works for you,” Leslie said. “Don’t think twice about it.” Like stealing from her would be doing her a favor, like Leslie’s greedy pity was a gift.
“Honestly, Lauren, Ted wouldn’t be so hard on you if you didn’t have such an attitude,” Claire said on the afternoon of opening night, during pizza break in Tedquarters. Lauren sat in the saggy center of one of the sad couches, a paper plate of pizza on her lap, Claire on one side of her and Stitch on the other. Lauren shifted positions constantly and winced as she did it. She didn’t try not to wince; perhaps she winced more than was strictly necessary. Her hip touched Claire’s hip, her knee touched Stitch’s knee, and she felt the space she took up in their imaginations. They wondered what was going on with her but wouldn’t ask, not directly. Or they knew and didn’t need to ask. She would remain in the room with them after she’d left it. Maybe they talked about her the way Paula talked about her roc
k stars.
Abby drew up a chair to the couch. She had a Pyrex full of salad. “Do you want some, Lauren?” she asked. The voice of a cool cloth on a feverish forehead. Abby crammed a lettuce leaf into her mouth, as if to demonstrate. Lauren shook her head and lifted her slice of pizza off the paper plate almost to her lips. Her stomach hitched forward, and she put the slice down again. The cheese was congealing; the oil dotting the pepperoni slices was changing from translucent to a lurid orange. The paper plate was starting to sweat into her jeans.
“Here, Lauren, I can hold that for you,” Stitch said, and Lauren nodded. He took the plate and set it down on the table.
The object with pizza break, as with any other unit of time—a class, a rehearsal, the gap between class periods—was to wait it out. Not only make it to the end but stretch it out long enough to delay the transition to the next task, and perhaps through this delay she could eliminate a few of the other tasks that the day demanded of her, like when she would be so late to class that it would be disruptive and quite frankly unfair to the teacher and other students to show up at all, like if she lay on the bathroom floor with her face on the cool tile long enough it would be too late for Mom to bother kicking up much of a fuss about whether or not Lauren came to dinner, that is, assuming Mom had noticed whether or not Lauren came to dinner and was not instead focused on the proven fact that Mirela had dumped her own dinner into a basket of freshly folded linens.
“Save it for later,” Mirela would say. One of her first sentences in English. That’s right, Mirela. There would always be a better time than now.
“Lauren,” Abby was saying. “Honey. What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
Lauren tried for what felt like a long time to respond, staring at the slice on the table as it succumbed to a yeasty rigor mortis, the greasy edges of the paper plate starting to curl around it like a carnivorous flower, her lips opening and closing around the thing she couldn’t say.
A voice was calling in the distance. They were needed onstage. Claire and Stitch got up from the couch but Abby stayed in her chair beside Lauren. Someone standing behind Abby asked her to come, or told her—a surprise and affront in the request—and still Abby stayed. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap.
The Fourth Child Page 30
