“What?” said Candy, her eyes feigning an innocence that clearly wasn’t there. “Are you scared of a little controversy?”
It’s amazing the things you never plan on, the big-ticket items that are so big, you never take them into account as they hide there in plain sight, waiting to blow your world apart. You think you have all the plot threads of your life under control. And then…
The moment I’d been waiting for forever was finally here.
My book came out.
People who want to be writers live their whole lives waiting for a single moment. For each one, it’s different. Some are waiting for that first call from an editor, the calls that we in publishing love to make the most, those life-changing moments when you get to hand someone their dream by saying: “I want to buy your book.” Some are waiting for that first paycheck, sometimes the amount doesn’t even matter, just so that they have financial validation of themselves as A Writer. And then there are those of us who, for all the excitement of having our books bought by publishers or receiving money, are waiting for what we think will be the grandest moment of all: seeing our books, with our own names on the spine, on the shelves of our local bookstore.
For some of us, that is the dream. We know, if we are smart at all, that the dream is ephemeral and human memory all too often short. We know that as soon as the moment passes, even while it is yet passing, we’ll move past that dream to a new level of wanting: we’ll want the book to be bought, to be read, to be reviewed, to be reviewed well, to sell, to sell well, to sell phenomenally, to sell internationally, to outpace Harry Potter XXII, to outpace England, the United Kingdom, Europe, planet Earth, the universe.
And then we want the next contracted book to do even better and earn more money.
That’s the foolish stuff we writers are made of. And, for at least some of us, there’s no point at all in dreaming the dream, if we’re not going to dream it larger than our imaginations, larger than life.
And, if we are smart enough to be smarter than the smart part of us that knows we’ll only want more, better, bigger tomorrow, we do take that first moment in a bookstore with our own book in our hands and we freeze that virgin moment of pure joy in our memories, an investment against future disappointment.
After a lifetime of wanting to be a writer, after months writing the book, months revising the book and months of just plain waiting…
“My book is out! This is my book!”
Then the moment was past, part of my history.
But what do you know? There were new moments!
It turned out that, my book, The Cloth Baby, had struck some sort of cultural nerve.
Back when I’d first contracted with Alice Simms to write the book, she’d been excited about it mostly because she thought the idea so original.
“Either fact or fiction,” she’d told me at one point, “it’s a safe bet that your book will be the only fake-pregnancy book on the market.” And she was right about that, as far as it went, but what she hadn’t planned on, what neither of us had ever guessed, was that two things would happen.
One, women would actually identify with acerbic-as-acid me. Oh, not the acerbic part. But apparently people were more familiar than they liked to let on with the theme of someone wanting a thing more for the shape of it than for the actual thing itself.
Two, it seemed that every other person who got in touch with me, had a similar, crazy story.
Them: “My cousin did that.”
Me: “Did what?”
Them: “Faked a pregnancy.”
Me: “For how long?”
Them: “Why, for the entire nine months, of course.”
Who knew there were so many of us out there?
I’ll tell you one thing. I didn’t want people to start mistaking my book for some sort of prescription for behavior.
It got so bad, so quickly, I called Alice Simms.
“Do you think we could put some sort of warning sticker on the jacket?” I asked.
“What sort of warning?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe something along the lines of ‘Hey, kids, don’t try this at home’?”
“You worry too much, Jane,” she replied with a laugh. “People might do this sort of thing on their own, but nobody is going to do it because you did it.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
Then she explained, something along the lines of me being “not role-model material” and rang off before I could get offended.
But who cared really?
My book was out, mybookwasout, mybookwasout!!!
And people were buying it. Not only were they buying it, but they were talking about it.
And not only were they talking about it, but the talk shows wanted me to come on and talk about it some more.
I was an overnight success.
And then the bottom dropped out.
Once upon a time, Alice Simms had told me that I’d be forgiven all my previous lies if my book were successful enough. She’d pointed out that people have a romantic notion about writers and writing and they’d be willing to let a lot go, provided I was published and published well.
And how right she’d turned out to be, in so many ways.
My mother—Ladies and Gentlemen, my mother—was even proud of me. So what if my book revealed me to be something of a nutcase? I was a nutcase who was a writer and who had received payment for her work. What mother wouldn’t be proud?
Even Martin Amis had loved The Cloth Baby, calling it a “bizarrely pro-creative tour de farce” in the Guardian.
As for the people at work, they couldn’t be happier, except for Louise, of course.
We were crammed into Dodo’s office—Minerva, Stan, Constance, Hilda and me—making it quite a tight cram. Even Louise was there, because we were drinking champagne, and even Louise won’t pass up free champers, whatever the reason for drinking it.
“To Jane,” said Dodo, glass held aloft. “May The Cloth Baby sit on the bestseller lists until her next book comes out!”
And it was on the bestseller lists! Every now and then, a book comes along that goes miles beyond expectation. For whatever lucky-star reason, The Cloth Baby was this year’s surprise winner, an instant bestseller. We’d just gotten the news, hence the drinking of the champagne.
Everyone except Louise held their glass in the air.
“To Jane!”
I had my glass to my lips, was ready to take the first sip from my celebratory drink, when there came a hard knock on Dodo’s opened door, the kind of knock that demanded attention. No “excuse me, so sorry to interrupt you” about it. It was a knock from hell.
It was Stephen Triplecorn, of course, with an angry look on his face, of course, carrying a copy of The Cloth Baby clenched tight in his hand, of course.
I was surprised; shocked senseless, I would have said, if I could only speak. But just one single heartbeat later, I saw how inevitable this all had been. In my efforts to plug up all the leaky holes, I’d forgotten about the book. Oh, not about the publication; I’d remembered my book was coming out and the date. But somehow, the writing thread of my life and the Emma thread ran parallel. I’d never stopped to think that one day they would intersect.
And if I had stopped to think? Would I have done things differently?
Are you kidding me? I would have called up Alice Simms. I would have told her I wanted out of the contract. When she told me, as she undoubtedly would, that they’d already paid me the money, I’d offer to return it, all of it, if I had to work three jobs for the rest of my life to pay back the part I’d already spent. When she said that wasn’t good enough, I’d tell her I was getting a lawyer. She’d laugh and tell me she had at her disposal the law offices of one of the finest firms in London, which she did. But I’d tell her I didn’t care about that, and I didn’t. I’d tell her she could financially and professionally ruin me, destroy me, it didn’t matter what she did to me, because the train was now rolling down the tra
cks, I knew exactly where that train was heading, knew exactly what it was going to hit, and I’d do anything, lose my dream of being a published writer, anything, lie down on the tracks, anything, to avoid—
“You lied to me!” Stephen Triplecorn j’accused, except that he wasn’t pointing at me. He was pointing at Dodo.
“I—” was all he let her get out.
“You told me Louise was lying! You said Louise was your crazy cousin!”
“You said what?” Louise whipped her head around to stare at Dodo.
“You said the story about Jane’s fake pregnancy was a lie!”
Nobody said anything.
“What did you think?” Stephen Triplecorn fired away, waving my book in the air. “Did you think I was the only person in England who can’t read?”
“Well, heh,” said Stan from Accounting, “you do work for Social Services.”
There was a nasty gleam in Stephen Triplecorn’s eyes. “That’s exactly right,” he said, nodding in angry rhythm to his words. “I do work for Social Services. And, as such, it is my duty to tell you, Jane Taylor, that we will be removing…”
Here came the train.
“…the baby…”
No longer Emma, she was the baby now.
“…from your care.”
NO! my mind screamed and in the very same instant, “No!” yelled Dodo.
“What do you mean, no?” demanded Stephen Triplecorn.
“I mean no,” said Dodo. “No, you can’t take Emma away from Jane.”
“Of course I can,” he said. “She’s a pathological liar. She fabricated an entire pregnancy.”
Her expression was one of wonder. “How can you take Emma from Jane, when you’re in love with her?”
“In love with who?” asked Stephen Triplecorn.
“In love with Jane,” said Dodo.
“In love with Jane? Are you bleeding mad, woman? No one in their right mind could be in love with Jane. She’s nuts!”
“But you like her,” Dodo protested. “That’s why you’ve dragged this case out so long, so you’d have an excuse to keep on coming to see her.”
“This case has gone on so long,” he said, “because we’re bloody underfunded. And I didn’t keep coming by because I was in love with Jane, you stupid cow.” There was the Triplecorn charm. “I kept coming by because I was in love with you.”
Now we were all speechless, and I have to say, despite what I knew had to be coming next, I felt sorry for him. He may have been showing his anger at Dodo, but it was the pain of her betrayal of him that I was seeing.
“But none of that matters now,” he said, just prior to taking that j’accusing arm and sweeping any powers I had ever had of empathy, sweeping my life away, “because you lied to me,” he said pointing at Dodo. “And you lied to me—” he pointed at me “—and by the time you get home—” he pointed at me a second time “—that baby will be gone.”
I raced home so quickly I could have sworn I had beaten the wind.
But I hadn’t, of course.
As I fumbled with the lock on the door, let myself in, I realized it was too quiet. It was too goddamned quiet.
There was no sound of happy gurgling, or even I-want-my-milk-now crying. There was just Tolkien, who had been watching Emma, standing there in the middle of the room, silent tears running down his face.
Over on the sofa, was the costume I’d made for Emma. We had been planning on taking her out in it that night.
It wasn’t the greatest costume in the world—one arm was a little longer than the of her, never having been able to get it right after that day Simon and Candy had visited me at the office—but I’d gotten the ears in the right spot, the cottontail as well.
I picked up the costume, held it to my face. I could still smell Emma on it—she’d laughed when I tried it on her, laughed when I’d shown her what she looked like in the mirror. It smelled like baby, like Emma-baby, like milk and soap.
I held it to my cheek and I cried.
And I cried.
And I cried.
Over the course other tenth month, Emma had mastered two new accomplishments. One, she could indicate her wants in ways other than crying. Oh, I don’t mean she was saying, “Mummy, may I have another biscuit, please?” But she had primitive-sounding utterances for particular desired objects, however no-reasoning-behind-them they might seem to an outsider. “Ca” was for “cookie,” because I kept them in the cupboard, “ball” was now for the fuzzy bunny, because she liked to pretend she was playing ball with it all the time.
Her other accomplishment?
She was walking.
Ever hear that one about “be careful what you ask for”?
Mothers the world over buy books like What to Expect so we know what milestones to anticipate and work towards. So what happens?
You wind up encouraging a tiny creature, whom you could formerly expect to stay in a reasonably small geographical place, to start walking.
As a result, Emma was into everything now. There was just no stopping her. No stopping her eagerness to explore the world. Walking also meant that one day, and not just to chase after the ball, Emma would be walking away from me.
I’d dreaded that day, thought it was far in our future still.
But it had already happened.
Emma was gone.
November, the eleventh month
Halloween was officially behind us and we were now two hours into All Saints’ Day.
I picked up the phone, dialed David’s number.
“Yes?” he answered.
“It’s Jane.”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs.”
“Can you tell me why you’re calling me at 2:00 a.m. from downstairs?”
“Because I miss you.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him yet that we’d lost her, we’d lost Em. I could tell him the next morning. There would be time enough then, it would be better when there was some light once again in the sky.
“That’s strange,” he said. “I am, after all, right up here.”
“And I’m feeling kind of strange.”
“Hardly surprising, given your life.”
“Tell me something, David. Why does my life have to be so strange?”
He made a sound I’d been hearing him make often, ever since he’d begun spending more time with Christopher’s circle of friends: “Heh.” It sounded incongruous on him. “Heh. Good question. A lot of it is a result of the choices you make. As I believe I have remarked once or twice before, you have a larger-than-life quality about you. I’m afraid an ordinary life just isn’t in your cards.”
“I sometimes wish that were different. Or, at least, if I have to live an extraordinary life, that it was a different extraordinary life.”
“Yes, I believe you. Still, life can be different. If you were to live a different extraordinary life, what would it be?”
“I dunno.” I sighed. “Tax inspector. Ambassador to Bora Bora. Queen.”
He laughed softly. “No point in ever aiming low, right, Jane? Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
“Who said I was joking?”
“There’s things one can change, you know.”
“But change is so hard for me,” I said.
“You’re kidding, right? Please tell me you’re kidding, Jane.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are the embodiment of change. I’ve never known anyone before who was so much of a whirlwind of evolution.”
“A whirlwind of what?”
“I’m just trying to say that whatever you want to change, whatever you want to do or be, you can. That’s not true of everyone, you know. But it is most definitely true of you.”
It’s tough when you’ve been a funny person all your life—both funny ha-ha and funny strange—when tragedy strikes. Where does the funny part of you go?
Losing Emma was a grief unlike any I had ever known. It was a bottomless pit.
>
I’d tried calling Stephen Triplecorn—called him daily, several times a day, as a matter of fact—to ask him where he’d taken her. But he wouldn’t tell me.
I suppose I could have gotten an attorney, tried to challenge Emma’s removal, but given my track record, even I wouldn’t represent me.
I even tried trailing Stephen Triplecorn one day, to see if I could figure out where he’d placed her—if only I could see that she was all right!—but he caught me at it and told me I had to stop.
“Emma’s care is no longer any concern of yours,” he said. He said it over and over again. “Emma’s care…”
Emma’s care. Without Emma, I suddenly had time on my hands. Where for the past ten months my life had revolved around fulfilling the needs of another, there was now just an aching emptiness. There was no more worrying if she was getting enough to eat, there was no more splashing in the bath, there was no more lying on our backs on my big bed with me holding a book high over us, watching her face scrunch up in delight as she looked at pictures of Horton hearing the Who. If I had never known it, I wouldn’t have missed it. But I had and I did. In a way, I realized, my life had revolved around a fiction—the notion that I would somehow be able to keep this baby I had found—and now that fiction had been smashed, taken away, the ending I’d longed for had been rewritten even before I had the chance to read it.
In my grief, my incredible raging grief, I threw myself into Tolkien, took everything he had to give, and he gave everything.
Then, I threw myself into the search for Sarah Johnson. Somehow, I knew, that if there was any salvation left for me in this world, it lay there; it lay in bringing Mary Jr.’s niece back home to her.
November 11, Armistice Day, was coming up on us.
Some say that World War I, the war Armistice Day commemorates, was the shaping trauma of the British people in living memory. Before 1914, the British hadn’t fought a war in Europe since the Crimean War in the 1850s—in fact, the phrase “The Thin Red Line” originated in that war—and before that Waterloo. And even those wars were fought entirely by long-service career military volunteers.
Crossing the Line Page 22
