by Lily Foster
“Are we back to this?”
She looks confused for a moment and then lets out a breath, shaking her head. “No, I’m not talking about your options anymore. This baby is going home with you. I know you’ll be a good mother to him.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m just trying to make sure you don’t leave here thinking only in the short-term.” She looks down and caresses Ethan’s cheek. “I want you to start now, start setting and reaching goals. I want you to set a date in the near future to ace the GED, I want you enrolled in an online college entrance exam prep course, and I want you taking college credits come next September. Local community college, online through University of Michigan, whatever. I just want you to keep moving forward.”
“I want that too.”
“Be the exception, Charlotte. The most depressing part of this job is meeting so many young women like you, women with unlimited potential who get caught up in the struggle and stop pushing themselves.” She seems to weigh her next words. “I feel like I can shoot straight with you and be brutally honest. Do you know that only two percent—”
“Of unwed teen mothers earn a college degree before the age of thirty?” I can’t help the sarcastic edge when I add, “Yes, I’m well aware.”
She has the nerve to laugh. “Of course you know. You just proved my point. And don’t get defensive, Charlotte. My job is to help you.”
“I know what I need to do.”
“I know you do, sweetheart. But you’re seventeen, and motherhood is hard, even when you have resources. I keep in touch with my young mothers. More often than not, that gung-ho attitude falls by the wayside after weeks of midnight feedings. The realization that your life is forever changed is too much for most to handle. You go from having a social life, dreaming of a bright future, worrying over clothes and boys, to sitting in the waiting room of social services, filling out paperwork for food assistance and medical benefits. Dating seems ridiculous when you’re leaking breast milk on and off during the day, and your baby is going to cry nonstop at the most inopportune times.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it, Mrs. Ryan.”
“Oh, I won’t. Not for you I won’t.” She stands and rests my sleeping baby back in his bassinet, smiling down at him for a moment before turning back to me. “I told you what the worst part of this job is, but the worst actual moments? That’s when I get a call or an email from one of my young women telling me they’re pregnant again. They’re back with the baby’s father or they met a nice guy.” She rolls her eyes. “He loves them, he wants to take care of them. They give up on the idea of taking care of themselves. I picture the double-wide on cinderblocks while they’re tell me about how great everything’s going to be.”
“Simon grew up in a trailer.”
She pauses. “I see.”
“Father took off when he was just a baby, had an older brother in jail.” I meet her eyes. “He’s destined to fail, he’s the personification of a hopeless case—except that he’s not. He has an opportunity now and he’s worked so hard for it. I won’t take it away from him.”
“You believe in him and you want what’s best for him. I get it and I respect you for it.” She takes my hand. “But I want you to know that I believe in you and so does Janelle. So make a pledge to your baby. Promise him you’re going to get an education, and that you’re going to provide a good life for him. And if you ever find yourself struggling, lean on the people who care about you. You can do this.”
I turn over onto my side after she leaves my room, not wanting anyone to catch me crying. Later that evening, with Ethan resting peacefully on my chest, I fill out the birth certificate application one handed. Ethan James Mason. I fill in my information and leave the other side blank. Looking the completed form over, I can’t help but feel as if I’m cheating my son. Will he ever meet his father? Will he ever know how strong, or how smart, determined and brave he is? Will he forgive Simon for not being around? And when Ethan is old enough to hear the truth, will he understand my decision? Will he be able to forgive me?
Chapter Eighteen
Simon
“Everyone meet back here at five o’clock and we’ll head over to Elder. You have to suffer through one dinner with your RA and then you’re free to tear up the campus.”
I get smiles from most, and a few nervous giggles from the more pensive freshmen I am now officially somewhat responsible for. I hope they aren’t a needy bunch. I’m taking eighteen credits this semester and don’t have time to be drying tears or wiping anyone’s ass. One father actually tried to hand me a syringe pen device for his kid’s peanut allergy when they were getting his dorm ID card. “I’m just the RA, Doug’s in charge of his own meds.” The guy looked offended, but I have to make my role clear from the beginning. I’m here to help ensure that these dipshits didn’t drink themselves to death, light the dorm on fire or commit any crimes against humanity. The operative word being help. I’m not their warden or their mama.
Being a resident hall assistant gets me what I need: free room and board. Even better, my room is a single. No walking in on my roommate screwing his girlfriend in the middle of the day, no listening to him play video games so loud his headphones do little to muffle the artillery fire, and no worrying about waking him up when I come home from work late at night. I regret that I ever troubled myself being courteous to that asshole.
Classes are starting in two days, but I feel itchy, like I’m already behind schedule. I took the standard fifteen credits last year for fall and spring semester, tacked on three during winter break and took six credits over the summer. I have to up my game if I’m going to graduate a year early. I know I can’t work as much this year, but the RA gig and the two shifts I have stocking the bar at an off campus favorite will hopefully keep me in the black.
“Knock, knock.”
Her lilting, sing song voice should lift my spirits, but the sound makes my throat constrict and my shoulders tense. I turn to see Samantha standing in my doorway with a hopeful smile, and struggle with the effort it takes to smile back in a way that at least looks genuine.
“Hey, I thought sophomores weren’t moving in until tomorrow.”
“What can I say? Having a department chair for a father works to my advantage sometimes.”
Samantha moves through my room, straightening the corner of my bedspread, arranging my textbooks into a neat pile and tossing a wayward sock into my hamper. What the fuck?
“What are you doing here?” I don’t intend for the words to come out in the clipped way that they do, but her incessant need to look after me, to situate herself into my life, to cling—it drives me freaking batty.
“Figured I’d come to dinner with you and your freshmen. You know…keep you company.”
Let me clarify. Samantha isn’t some pathetic hanger on. She’s a gifted writer, smarter than most people our age, she looks like a model and she’s basically good natured. But she set her sights on me the moment I walked into Professor Westfield’s home for dinner last October, and she doesn’t take no for an answer. Her father is my mentor, which makes this all the more awkward.
Last fall, when my head was in such a bad place over losing both Timmy and Charlotte, I was crystal clear with Samantha about my lack of interest in dating. She swore that she understood and was just looking to be friends. To prove her point, Samantha dated a few guys, discussed her love life with me, and even made sure to bring them around. Please. She couldn’t have been more obvious if she tried. If she were any other girl I would have resorted to being rude just to get her to back off, but I couldn’t play that card.
At her core, I believe she’s a good person, but this subtle campaign she’s been waging to win my heart is fucking tiresome. And I don’t do well with feeling manipulated. It’s common knowledge that her father is the one who makes my scholarship possible, but Samantha also understands how I’ve come to rely on his guidance as well. I’m the first Wade to ever step foot on a college campus, and the
learning curve for stuff other than academics has been steep. It’s thanks to Professor Westfield that I know how to carry myself in a room full of well-educated undergraduates, law school students and successful attorneys. I know which fork to use when the salad course is served at a formal dinner, and I know to maintain eye contact and give a solid handshake when I meet someone new. He talks about my bright future in law as if it’s a foregone conclusion. He says he admires me, and praises my determination and work ethic. His brand of positive reinforcement is the reason I finally feel like I kind of have my shit together.
So Samantha will tag along tonight, and she’ll wedge her way into the same study groups this fall, and she’ll make sure she’s at the few parties I show up to this year. But she won’t ever get what she truly wants. I’ll never lie awake at night thinking about her. I’ll never miss her or rub my chest trying to ease some phantom ache because of her. I’ll never reach for her in the middle of the night because she’s invaded my dreams.
She will never be Charlotte.
Chapter Nineteen
Simon
I shake my head and smile every time I pass by one of the campus tour groups jamming up the pathway in front of Deering Library, holding back when I really want to call out to these idiots: It is called the Windy City for a reason. It’s November, and while the parents are bundled up in wool coats with scarves and gloves to ward off the icy nip in the air, their offspring are shivering. They fall into two categories. You have the eager beavers who insist on wearing the Northwestern sweatshirt they purchased at the campus bookstore just this morning, and then you have the rebels without a cause. They typically sport nothing warmer than an unbuttoned denim jacket, convinced it makes them look cool and unaffected.
It’s cold where I’m from, but it’s a different kind of cold here. The air that whips off Lake Michigan is wet and hostile, chills you right to the bone. The admissions brochure is filled with pictures of tulip-lined green spaces and coeds sprawled out reading on the sandy lake shore. And it is beautiful here—don’t get me wrong—but that beach is comfortable for the first two or three weeks into September. That’s it. It’ll be snowing here before you know it, and you may not see the ground again until a few weeks before final exams this spring.
The badass who captures my attention today is a white girl with dreadlocks wearing a black leather moto jacket. It’s unzipped over the Baby Gap-sized tee that’s exposing her midriff. She mistakes my smile for interest and proceeds to do her best Britney Spears circa 1998 impression, wetting her finger and dragging it across her bottom lip. I shake my head, feeling embarrassed on her behalf. I want to pull her aside and tell her that’s the wrong way, but I don’t know her or any of the other high school juniors and seniors packed around the bored looking tour guide.
Shoving my hands into my pockets as I pick up the pace, I can’t get that girl out of my head. But it’s not her I’m thinking about, I know that. Just as I know there’s a reason that I scan the face of every person in every tour group that I come across. I look for her. She’s nearly eighteen now. She’s a senior in some high school in some city in some state.
I don’t know where she is.
Mr. Vargas sort of came through for me last year. He did what he promised and no more. He called me back, assured me that he’d personally spoken to Charlotte’s new guidance counselor. Told me she’s living with extended family and she’s adjusting well to her new school. Vargas wouldn’t tell me if she was still in Pennsylvania, wouldn’t tell me if she was in the north, south, east or west. I knew he wouldn’t, but I tried and failed to get more info out of him anyway.
Faced with knowing next to nothing, I broke down and called Garth. He wasn’t even aware that she’d left town, so he was no help. But a month later he called me back. At first I thought he’d just called to tell me the craptastic news that he’d proposed to Sierra and—wait for it—she said yes! And, Oh yeah bro, you better be coming back for the wedding. As I was hedging my way around the invitation, he changed the subject and told me about the sweet new truck he’d just bought. He took my old job at the hardware store, so I knew how much he was raking in and it wasn’t much. I felt sad in that moment thinking of Garth, with his high hopes and low expectations. Satisfied with a dead-end minimum wage job, and at nineteen, already making bad decisions that will leave him sinking in debt for years to come. But he’s so damn optimistic, wants so little out of life.
“Yeah, her dad sold me the truck, and Sierra’s there with me so she starts asking questions.”
“What?”
“Mr. Mason. He sold me the truck.”
“You asked about Charlotte?”
“Sierra did, but we didn’t exactly crack the case for you. Just said she’s doing great, going to some school for academically, uh, really smart kids. Sierra asked where exactly she was, but you could tell he didn’t want to tell us, which is weird if you ask me. So he just says she’s living with her aunt in a way that was kind of, uh, end of story like. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, he’s a dick.”
“And at that point, I didn’t want him tacking any more points onto the interest I was paying, so I gave Sierra a look and we let it go. Sorry man.”
“No, really, thanks for trying.” I was replaying everything he’d just told me, but it got me nowhere. She never spoke of family, never mentioned an aunt. “Hey, did you see her brother there?”
“Yeah, I saw him.” Garth let out a chuckle. “Heard he got his ass kicked a few weeks ago. Got caught messing around with a married lady.”
“Good…I hope it hurt.”
So aside from doing weekly searches that led me nowhere except back to the damn website for the family car dealership, I had nothing to go on. I toyed with creating a page for myself, in the hopes that maybe she was trying to find me, but I didn’t because I knew she wasn’t looking. She knew exactly where I was, could look me up in the school’s directory, could contact me through my brother Mike—she could find me.
I tried to erase her from my memory, but I knew I’d never be able to do that. Knew I didn’t want to. Some of the best nights of my life were spent with her down by the river, lying side by side on our backs, fingers laced together, shooting the shit about nothing and everything. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I was with her for just four months. It doesn’t seem possible.
It’s been well over a year since I ran off. Maybe it’s the shitty way I left—maybe that’s why I can’t let this go. Some sick need to set things right, to make sure she knows it wasn’t easy to do what I did. That I’m not some callous prick who got what he wanted and then discarded her. I want Charlotte to know that in leaving her behind, I might have hurt her, but I destroyed a part of myself that I don’t know or even care if I can ever reclaim.
Mostly I think about the times we were together. I try to remember what touching her felt like. I think about that day she got so mad at me, the day she wanted me to and I denied her. I want to be back there again, lying on that blanket with her. I want to run my hands over her soft skin and kiss her. I want to be tender with her and show her how a man should love her. Those memories turn into daydreams that always end with me moving inside of her. And it hurts, because fuck, I’d give anything to see her again.
When I let myself go back to the very last time I saw her, pained and devastated, I’m overcome with guilt. And the only way I can make myself feel better is to imagine what her life is like now.
I see her living a good life. She’s living with family, with an aunt who loves her and takes care of her the way her mother would have. I hope it’s warm where she is. Hope she’s somewhere like Florida or the Carolinas because she told me she hated Pennsylvania in winter—said the gray sky and the howling wind made her feel lonely. Yeah, I can picture her in some sunny place. I can hear that tinny singing voice of hers trying and failing to hit the high notes along with Adele as she drives down some coastline. I bet she still dances all the time, moves her hips in that way that use
d to slay me. In my fantasy she’s at an all-girls school, but in reality I know she’s probably the new girl in town that every boy wants to get to know. But the girl I knew had her priorities straight, so I’m sure she’s focused on kicking ass in school and finishing up her college applications right about now.
Smiling to myself, I can picture Charlotte Mason getting ready to take on the world.
Charlotte
If you go out our back door and walk about a hundred paces to the left, there’s a boulder with a flat surface big enough to lie down on. It’s where I’m curled up right now on this chilly November afternoon. It’s four o’clock. Janelle has come to call it the witching hour.
Ethan will be seven months old tomorrow. And it’s not like he cries all day, he doesn’t. In fact, he’s a dream most of the time. But there’s something about this time of day that frays his nerves, and as a result of the high-pitched squeals that will not stop, it frays mine too.
About ten minutes ago I gave Janelle a look, grabbed the afghan off the back of the couch and walked outside, leaving Ethan in her care. My head and body are resting on solid rock and it’s the most relaxed I’ve felt all day.
Everyone tells you motherhood is hard. In fact, you hear it so often that you begin to ignore people when they start droning on about the lack of sleep, the anxiety, blah, blah, blah. I am currently wearing the baggy sweats I fell asleep in last night, I’m sure my hair looks like I fixed it with an egg beater, and my nostrils are being assaulted by the smell of stale breast milk. Ethan spit up on me earlier today. Several hours ago, in fact, and I still haven’t mustered up the energy required to shower or change.
Not every day is like this. Usually I get four hours between feedings, and after Ethan burps I fall back into a coma-like sleep right along with him. But last night I woke up off and on all night.
