Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  They were all so stunned by Emma. She was like the elephant in the corner that no one would talk about, so they began talking about anything but.

  Stan from Accounting said, adjusting his steel glasses, “Did everyone read the new Smythe? God, it’s a dog if I’ve ever seen one.”

  “Well,” said Constance, winding her finger around a strand of short red hair, “you know, dog is God spelled backwards, so maybe it’s a good omen?”

  “We’ll just throw a ton of money at it,” said Minerva from Publicity, settling herself into the sofa. “That’ll fix it.”

  “Not my money,” said Stan from Accounting.

  “We’ll just spin it as the latest thing,” said Minerva. “We’ll say it’s a cross between John Grisham and Sophie Kinsella, but set in Paraguay. That ought to do it. People’ll get so confused they won’t know what the hell they’re reading.”

  “But it’s not like any of those things you just mentioned,” objected Dodo.

  “Well, now, that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it, luv?” said Minerva. “If it was that, who the hell would ever buy it?”

  “Then why will they buy it if we say it’s that?” demanded Louise, whom I happened to know trimmed her blond hair with a Sabatier kitchen knife.

  “Because they’ll get curious, won’t they?” said Minerva.

  “Is it still called Paraguay?” asked Constance, a confused frown furrowing her pierced eyebrow.

  “’Course it is.” Minerva again.

  “But are you quite certain of that?” insisted Constance. “You know, they do keep changing the countries’ names over there all the time.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Minerva.

  “Yes, they do,” said Constance.

  “No, Constance, they really don’t,” said Minerva. “You’re confusing it with Africa.”

  “You mean Paraguay’s not in Africa?” asked Constance.

  “Nope,” said Minerva. “Last time I checked, it was still in South America.”

  “Ah,” said Constance, with great understanding. Then: “Are you sure about that?”

  I ticked off hair color around me, not counting Tolkien and Stan from Accounting, because men don’t count: blond, blond, blond, blond, yellow-red, red. Hey, didn’t Constance used to have black hair? Once upon a time, dark hair color was considered the most common, although I’ll admit my own raven was an extreme shade of dark. But still, now, everywhere I looked—except in the mirror—it was all light, light, light. Was everyone else coloring theirs?

  Meanwhile, my mother was asking Sophie, “Where’s Baby Jack today?”

  She was referring to Sophie’s own baby, now nearly four months old and never far from her side.

  “I left him with Tony,” said Sophie, referring to her husband. “I don’t know. When Jane called us all here, I just had this funny feeling…”

  “What kind of funny feeling?” asked my mother.

  “Oh, you know,” said Sophie, “the kind of funny feeling I get whenever Jane’s involved in something. I was pretty certain that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be something I’d want to be exposing Baby Jack to.”

  “You know,” said Constance, tapping her lower lip, “it might be an original idea if, instead of throwing money at the bad Smythe, if we instead tried promoting something good for a change.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Louise raised her eyebrows.

  “Actually,” I said, disbelieving all the while that I was actually about to agree for once with something Constance had said, “Constance might just have—”

  “Jane!” shouted my mother, suddenly. “Are you ever going to tell us just what the bloody hell is going on here?”

  “I asked you all to keep it down, please,” said Tolkien.

  In a whisper, my mother said, “And who the bloody hell are you?”

  I was about to answer, “He’s…” but then I stopped. What could I say? The explanation of who he was—the man I’d been in love with, still was in love with, the man who had been in love with me once and who I hoped would one day be in love with me again, but whom I’d mistakenly let slip away in favor of pursuing my own previous mad scheme—well, to tell that would feel like putting the cart before the horse, since they still didn’t know where Emma came from or about the fake pregnancy.

  But before I could stumble any further, Tolkien saved me.

  “I’m her great good friend,” said Tolkien, “that’s who I am.”

  “And your name is…?” asked my mother.

  “Tolkien Donald,” he said, “at your service.”

  “Hah,” said my mother. “Pull the other.”

  Tolkien smiled. “If you like.”

  “And if you were going to pull the other,” said my mother, “what would you say?”

  “Well, now,” said Tolkien, “I’d add Scotland Yard, C.I.D., of course.”

  “Of course,” said my mother, with a smile that showed she was convinced he was a loon.

  “Just for fun,” said Tolkien. He pulled out his ID, flashed it for her.

  “Huh,” she sniffed, embarrassed.

  “Huh,” he sniffed, smiling.

  “But that doesn’t answer the central question here,” she said.

  “Which is…?” he prompted.

  She looked over his shoulder at me. “This really isn’t Trevor’s baby, is it?”

  “Er, no,” I said.

  She chewed on that for a long bit.

  Meanwhile, everyone watched her chew.

  Finally: “Is it your baby, at least?” she asked me tentatively, as if my answer might be to slap her.

  “Er, no,” I said, reluctantly, feeling as though I were slapping her, as though I were slapping them all.

  Naturally, people wanted to know where Emma had come from.

  “I found her on a church doorstep,” I said.

  “Well, now, that’s convenient,” snorted Stan from Accounting. “It’s real deus ex machina, if you ask me.”

  “It’s a real baby who needed care, if you ask me,” I countered, nettled.

  “If only she’d have been white,” Stan mused, “you could have gone on fooling us indefinitely, eh?”

  “I don’t know what I’d have done if she were white,” I answered honestly.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Dodo, genuine sadness in her eyes. “You were never pregnant in the first place?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ohh, crap!” said Constance. “Don’t tell me there’s no Madame Zora!”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Constance is nothing, if not resilient. She brightened, nearly as bright as her day’s selection of contact lenses, which on this particular occasion were somewhere in the metallic pink range. “But he-e-e-e-y! It really would be brilliant if there were such a thing as a tarot-card-reading midwife, wouldn’t it? Why, such a person would really rake in a fortune, don’t you think?”

  “No and no,” said Minerva from Publicity, helping herself to more of the noxious cheese straw thingies I’d put out because, well, I did know this crowd.

  “I’ll second that,” said Louise, “and I’d also like to add that, no, I don’t think you think at all.”

  “Straight-haired slut,” said Constance. Apparently, being Dodo’s new assistant, which put her on the same Churchill & Stewart ladder rung as Louise, had gone to Constance’s tiny little head.

  “Weird-eyed illiterate,” countered Louise. Then Louise did a horse-shaking-off-gnats gesture that caused me to empathize with her for once (Constance does have that effect on people) and said, “But that’s not the point!”

  “The point being…?” I asked, still empathizing and thus wanting to be helpful.

  “The point is you!” Louise j’accused me. “The point is you and this wool-over-our-eyes thing you did to all of us these past nine months. Please, tell us all, Jane, what was that all about?”

  No longer feeling at all empathetic, I was tempted to call her a “straight-haired slut” myself, bu
t it wasn’t the time. Everyone in the room had closed in on me, save Tolkien rocking Emma in the corner, and they all wanted answers.

  Well, could I really blame them?

  “It all started with me really thinking that I was pregnant…” I began.

  And, to reverse what they usually say, I went on as I should have begun so long ago: I told the truth. True, it was my truth, but do we have to quibble on everything?

  “…So you see,” I wound down, after telling them about the false-alarm pregnancy, the attempted pregnancy, the false-through-and-through pregnancy, and everything else—well, except for the book contract and who Tolkien really was, not wanting to be judged on the first and not wanting to have the sanctity spoiled around the second, although God knows I’d done my own share of sanctity-spoiling, “you really could say that it all began with a tiny mistake—”

  “A mistake?” fishwifed my mother.

  “Yes, a mistake,” I said.

  Everyone else seemed at a loss, confused really.

  “A mistake?” questioned Sophie.

  I realized that I had to think of something quick. Unable to think of anything better, I spoke the first thing I thought of:

  “Okay, I had a bad day.”

  Well, isn’t that the source of over half the world’s problems? Someone somewhere has a bad day, and before you know it, some country’s at war or there’s cyanide in your painkiller or Tom Cruise is doing another running scene in a new movie. I mean, it’s nearly always about someone’s bad day.

  Leave it to Louise, however, to adopt the bitch approach. “You. Had. A. Bad. Day???”

  I actually cringe-winced. “You make it sound so…unlikely.”

  It may not have sounded like much of an alibi, it may not have satisfied the crowd I was working, but to my way of thinking, it was a sight better than explaining what a small-minded person I’d been. The kind of person who wants something more because everyone else is doing it than the thing itself.

  Back to…Christmas Day, early-ish

  Nobody ever tells you how hard it will be to bring a new baby home.

  In the early hours of Christmas Day, still dark out, Tolkien and I had brought Emma back to my flat.

  First, of course, we made a stop. Using the same Scotland Yard C.I.D. ID he would later flash at my mother, he did his Scotland Yard thing to get a very tired and cranky shopkeeper to open up just long enough for us to get what we’d need for Emma’s immediate comfort: bottles, formula and what seemed to me like a ridiculous amount of nappies.

  “Will she use these in a lifetime?” I asked.

  “She’ll use them in a day,” Tolkien answered.

  Tolkien’s answer made me recognize how little I knew about what I was getting myself into.

  I’ve always felt that there are certain names that should be permanently retired—Adolf, Jesus, certainly—names that have served the world sufficiently in one shot, for good or ill. Even though Tolkien, to my knowledge, had never been used as a first name before, I would have said that it was a name, so unique, that it should be retired as well. Well, I hadn’t given him the name. Apparently, though, Tolkien’s parents had not been of similar mind. Former hippies who had jumped on the groovy bandwagon late in life, they’d renamed Tolkien when he was small, from his original name of Donald John to Tolkien Donald, in homage to the man they credited with turning them on to a more psychedelic life; don’t ask why they then made what had been his first name his last name. Of course, since they were no longer into doing ’shrooms or lighting incense themselves, Tolkien’s parents were more conventional now. But by the time they were ready to trade in love beads for matching Gucci watches, having traded in being hippies for being in the bond market, he was used to it and had never changed it back.

  At any rate, when we got Emma back to my place, I finally asked the question that I should have asked hours ago, the question I was afraid to ask.

  “Tolkien, if I were a normal person, what would I be doing right now?”

  He smiled gently. “If you were a normal law-abiding citizen, you’d be required to bring her to a police station.”

  “Oh.”

  “But, speaking in the most barely technical sense, you’ve already done that. You brought her to me.”

  “What would happen then?”

  “She’d be taken to a hospital to get checked over.”

  “Shouldn’t we do that? We should do what’s right by her.”

  He took her from my arms, gently laid her on the sofa, undid the blanket, examined her.

  “Ten fingers and toes, no signs of harm whatsoever, fabulous color—she’s fine.”

  “That’s a relief. And then? What would happen to her next?”

  “Social Services would need to be called. They’re responsible for abandoned children as soon as they become aware of them. They’d place her in foster care, under the assumption that the mother might eventually show up.”

  “I see.”

  He moved to the phone, dialed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Shh,” he said, “it’s ringing…Hello, this is Tolkien Donald here, Scotland Yard, C.I.D. I’ve got a situation here with an abandoned baby.”

  “Tolkien!”

  He went on, ignoring me. “Anyway, I’m glad that Mr. Triplecorn is on call ’til after Boxing Day, but he doesn’t appear to be picking up. The baby’s doing perfectly fine, as it happens, so why don’t we leave this one on hold until everyone has had a chance to enjoy their Christmas hols? I don’t mind taking care of her until then and I’ll get back with you in a few days. Merry Christmas.”

  He rang off.

  “I was talking to a machine,” he said, and I felt my heart rate begin its return to normal. “The main office is closed for the holidays. They have someone on call, but…”

  I looked at him. He really was the most amazing man.

  “Are you going to get into a massive amount of trouble for this?” I asked.

  “Probably.” He shrugged.

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  “Partly, I’m doing it for you.”

  “And the other part?”

  “For Emma, of course. Things would go exactly as I said—police station, hospital, the Social, foster care. She’d be getting juddered around from place to place over a forty-eight-hour period. Sure, people would be friendly enough, maybe they’d even rock her occasionally, give her a moment of love here and there. But she’d be getting processed, a problem to be solved. It wouldn’t be like this. And she deserves this, not bureaucracy.”

  I carried her around for the longest time, whispering to her.

  “This is where I sit when I’m writing,” I said. “I’m a funny lady, you know, don’t always get credit for that, but I’m a funny writer, too. This is the window I look out of when I’m thinking. That’s another thing people don’t think I do much of, but I can assure you I do think. This is where I cook. Well, I don’t really ever cook here and you don’t really need me to cook just yet. But, someday, when you do, I’ll learn how. I promise.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” interrupted Tolkien, “but you may not really cook, and God knows women these days never eat anything anymore, but I am getting a bit hungry. Do you think we might—”

  “Oh!” I could feel myself reddening in embarrassment. Here, he’d been kindly helping me for hours and I hadn’t even thought to offer him a slice of stale bread. I started going through cupboards, Emma cradled in my arm.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I can look for myself. I just didn’t want to be going through your drawers without permission first, that’s all.”

  Once upon a time, I would have given anything to have Tolkien go through my drawers—would still give anything.

  “Ah!” he said, finding a half-finished jar of peanut butter. “Success!”

  He opened the twist on a loaf of bread, quickly discovering what I already knew: it was stale.

  “No matter,” he said, unscre
wing the jar and having at it with a spoon. “Would you care for some dinner?” he offered, sitting down at the table.

  I shook my head and watched him dig in.

  “Is this really all you have to eat in the house?”

  “Well—” I tried to smile, sitting down to at least join him “—my personal shopper hasn’t been by yet this week.”

  “You should fire her then. It’s a holiday. What were you going to do, survive on wine and a half jar of peanut butter for two days?”

  “Beats starving,” I said.

  “You’ve gotten skinny,” he observed, licking the spoon.

  I shrugged.

  “Women love hearing that,” I said.

  “Well, men don’t particularly like seeing it. I’d rather see you healthy.”

  It amazed me how much care he still had for my well-being.

  “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.” I was beginning to feel really uncomfortable. Of all of the things wrong with me—and God knows there were a lot!—one of them has never been an eating disorder. “I just haven’t been feeling that interested in food the past few months. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  “Yes,” he said, the dryness of his response coming from far more than peanut butter, “I know what you mean.”

  I wondered whether the details of the “lot” that was on his mind included our relationship.

  During the sixth month of my fake pregnancy, not knowing that I was faking a pregnancy elsewhere in my world, Tolkien had asked me to marry him and I’d declined, not wanting to give up the fake pregnancy, which the merging of my two worlds would have forced me to do. Then, in my eighth month, he’d come across me while I was out having tea, my cloth baby strapped on beneath my clothes. He’d naturally assumed the fake baby was real and that it had somehow resulted in our breakup. Now he knew that pregnancy was fake and yet he was helping me to care for this baby I had found.

  A part of me longed to find out what he’d been going through for the past few months, what he was going through right this minute. But that part of me was a braver part of me than the person I mostly was.