“But she was trying to do something good for Emma.” Mary Jr. raised a brow. “Besides, you lie to people sometimes in the course of your duty, for the greater good, don’t you?”
“But that’s different!”
“Is it?” Mary Jr. asked. “Besides, look what she did afterwards. She changed our lives.”
“How so?”
“Well, just look at this place.”
Tolkien did. He looked at the toys, the books, the clothes on baby Martha—things I had brought.
“Those are just material things,” he said.
“She got the new playground built, didn’t she?”
“That’s still just money,” he said. “She took from you.”
“What did she take from us?”
“Information. What she came for in the first place.”
It was true. I had originally come there for information, information that would help Emma and I make our way in the multicultural world.
But what had I found? I’d found that people I assumed to be different than people like me, different than people I couldn’t help but think of as “us,” were no different than us at all. They were just like us—loved like us, fought like us, worried about their children like us. So maybe the music was different, the food was different, some of the words were different. But the love and humanity and desire for something more were just the same. We all wanted the exact same thing: a better life for our kids.
“Hah!” Mary Jr. laughed, but there was no malice in it. “She took information from us? Are you kidding? The first day she came, she could have learned everything she wanted to know—what we talk like, how we are with our kids, what we eat, what we listen to. She could have got all that the first day. Then she could have left and never returned. So, why did she keep coming back?”
Tolkien was at a loss. “But she took from you,” he repeated.
“And she gave back,” said Mary Jr. evenly. “Sure, she lied in the first place, but she didn’t mean any harm by it. She meant to do good. And when she could have stopped coming, because she’d already got everything from us that she needed, she didn’t stop. She kept coming, every week. Besides me, she was the only one who never missed. She came, and she didn’t just bring things. She listened to us. She listened to Charmaine’s concerns and Chantelle’s and Jade’s, she listened to Marisa’s obsessions, and she listened to my worries, too. And she tried to help.”
I felt so humbled by her. “I didn’t do anything, Mary,” I said. “It was you who all listened to me, helping me with my worries about being a new mother and all, helping me with everything—helping me get through these last weeks without Emma.”
“We all helped each other,” Mary Jr. said.
Finally, Mary Jr. looked Tolkien dead in the eyes, hands on hips. “And she got you to bring Sarah home to us. Oh, yeah. I’d say that for whatever Jane took, she gave back plenty.”
But Tolkien didn’t see it that way. I could see that, looking at him. It was just that one lie too many and he could no longer forgive.
I watched him go—how many times in my life would I have to watch that man, the only man in the world I wanted, walk away from me?—and I knew that it was useless to follow him.
I knew where he was going, what he was going to do.
I knew that by the time I got home, his things would be gone.
Rather than going home, I stayed on Mary Jr.’s couch. She didn’t seem to mind, seemed to understand that whatever my previous definition of “my home,” that geography no longer existed.
So I was there the next morning when Sarah rose, was there to hear her as she began the tale, which would spin out over several tellings.
“Denny said it would be great, didn’t he,” Sarah said.
“Who’s Denny?” Mary Jr. asked gently.
“He is,” Sarah said, “he was my main man.”
“She means he was her boyfriend,” Mary Jr. translated for me.
“Ah,” I said. Of course, even color-challenged me knew that, but this was not time to be making that point with Mary.
“He had a couple of hundred pounds saved, see, from working the odd job…”
“What kind of work did he do?” asked Mary Jr.
But Sarah didn’t answer that. “He said we were both old enough to be living on our own. Well, he was anyway. He was eighteen when we left. He knew Dad and the rest of the family would never take to him.”
“Why did he think that?” Mary Jr. was nervously wringing her hands.
“Dunno,” shrugged Sarah. “Because he was a singer. Because of the drugs.”
I could see Mary Jr. fighting with herself, wanting to ask the tough questions, wanting simply to be grateful that Sarah was back.
“Do you know,” Sarah asked, “that a couple hundred pounds don’t last very long?”
Mary Jr. smiled. “Yeah,” she said, looking around. “I do know that.”
“We thought he’d get a good job, you know, playing in a club or something. But I guess he wasn’t as good as we thought, because no one would hire him. And then the money ran out, and then we lived on the streets…”
I could see the war in Mary Jr., wanting to ask, because she should know; not wanting to ask more questions, because she really didn’t.
It didn’t matter, though, because Sarah had said all she was going to for the time being.
“If it’s all the same to you,” said Sarah, “I don’t want to talk about it no more.”
I could see she was holding something back, something big, something that caused her both pain and shame, but it wasn’t my place to say.
“What I’d really like,” Sarah said, “is to see the rest of the family. I’ll bet the little ones have gotten bigger.”
Seeing how easily and unconditionally Mary Jr. welcomed Sarah back, it was easy for me to understand why Sarah would turn first to her aunt in times of trouble rather than to her parents. Mary Jr., being so much closer to Sarah in age, must have seemed more like Sarah’s own wise big sister, rather than her father’s youngest sibling.
Emma, wherever she was, could now say three words other than “mama” or “dada”—I was sure of it. In addition to “ball,” she could say “cat” and—yes!—she could say “book.” I was sure of that, too.
In just one more month, my baby would be a year old.
December, the twelfth month
I imagined what my life would be like if Emma were still with me.
According to What to Expect the First Year, it was time to plan Emma’s first birthday party, a prospect that thrilled and saddened me at the same time. Life, the whole “things are going forward as the past is receding” stuff, was getting to me.
As I looked at the beginning of the last chapter heading of What to Expect the First Year, I saw that Emma—the Emma that kept growing in my mind, if not right in front of me any longer—could do everything they said she should be able to do, would probably be able to do, might possibly be able to do and might even be able to do. My dream Emma could even do the very last thing on the list, which was to respond to a one-step command without gestures. In other words, if I asked her for the fuzzy bunny, and if she was inclined to let me have it—which she often was (she was a good sharer)—she would give it to me without me needing to put my hand out, a feat most children wouldn’t reach until after their first birthday, some not until after sixteen months.
Yeah, Emma was all that.
And if she hadn’t been?
I couldn’t imagine ever loving her any less.
Even in her absence, she still took up the whole world.
In a moment of weakness, grief-stricken at the thought that I wouldn’t be there when Emma’s birthday came on Christmas Eve at the end of the month, I went knocking on Tolkien’s door. I knew, even as the rain pelted me as I waited for him to answer, that it was a selfish thing to do. But I’d lost Emma and losing him as well was just too hard.
Like the Good Samaritan he was, he let me in.
> “I just don’t understand,” I said, my tears mingling with the rain that was already on my face, so you couldn’t tell one from the other. “Why can’t we try…?”
I reached out my arms towards him and felt him grab on to my wrists, hard. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was me he needed to restrain or himself?
“Because you’re always making things harder than they need to be,” he said with a strangled kind of exasperation.
“It was bad enough when I first learned about your pregnancy charade,” he went on. “But then, when you somehow tied it in to your not wanting to hurt Dodo, I believed you. I wanted to believe you. And yes, given the cast of characters in your life that you were duping, and how poorly they’d treated you in the past, I reasoned that their behavior somehow made it okay. But to dupe someone like Mary Jr…”
“But she said she didn’t mind!”
“It doesn’t matter if she didn’t mind! Is it okay to…I don’t know, rob a bank, if the teller doesn’t mind? You told unnecessary lies. And for what? Are you self-destructive?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to smile. “Maybe.”
“Actions have consequences, Jane. You can’t always get away with things that easily. Sometimes you lose.”
I knew that!
“Why can’t you be more like normal people, Jane?” His voice had a pleading quality as though he still wished things could somehow end differently. “Why did you have to crash someone’s funeral? Why couldn’t you have just…put up a flyer on the church bulletin board where the funeral took place, simply asking for what you wanted?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. “Maybe I just never expect to be given what I ask for.”
After that, there really didn’t seem to be any more to say. I’d caused pain before. I was causing it still.
It was time for me to go.
I got on with my life.
Emma was with me all the time now. I imagined her in her new life, happy, loved. How else could I imagine her? I didn’t want to think about her sad, crying, missing me, wondering where I had gone to.
So I imagined her happy, getting on with the business of living.
There comes a time when no matter how big the grief, a person has to return to work. If I didn’t show my face at Churchill & Stewart soon, even though I’d been taking care of many of my responsibilities from home, I’d return to find Louise sitting in my chair. And I did need my work right now, if for no other reason than to silence the sounds from the monkeys constantly scurrying around in my brain.
I’d phoned ahead to Dodo to let her know I was coming. My hope was that in doing so, my return could be treated as just another day at the office for everybody.
Of course, it wasn’t like that at all.
Every time I passed anyone in the hall, I saw a look of pity that I recognized because it was the same look I’d seen on Sophie’s face at my mother’s house.
But they’d get over it, I told myself. Eventually, everyone would learn to act normally around me once again. Either that, or they’d redefine normal; after all, this walking-on-eggshells treatment I was getting from everyone couldn’t go on forever. It was good to be back, I told myself.
Still, did it have to turn out that on my first day back I was confronted with Schmuck and Likme?
“Simon Schmuck and his Candy are here to see you,” came Hilda’s voice over my phone.
“It’s Smock,” I pointed out. “And he doesn’t have an appointment.” But that didn’t stop Simon and Candy from coming in anyway.
“Candy had me ask Dodo to let us know when you returned to work,” Simon said, settling himself into the chair across from me as golden Candy took the chair next to him.
Candy was the only author I’d ever known who couldn’t even meet with an editor without her agent present. What did she think I was going to do—bully her? Actually make her write better?
“What’s wrong?” I asked a trifle testily. There was a time I would have smiled brightly at anything where an agent or author were concerned. But those days were gone. Too much had happened for me to present my feelings as anything but what they were. “Is there a problem with the cover? Have you decided to do your own author photo now, too?”
“I heard about your loss,” said Candy, “and I wanted to tell you about how sorry I am.”
Did everybody in London know my life story? Apparently, they kind of did. Simon explained. “There was an article in the Globe about it. Now that your book has made you a literary celebrity of sorts, and you did cancel all your interviews, some reporter, presumably annoyed at you for leaving him with print space to fill, decided to run a story on your finding and losing your foundling.”
“Emma,” I said. “Her name isn’t ‘foundling.’ It’s Emma.”
Simon coughed, clearly embarrassed. “Of course. Emma.”
Candy ignored Simon. “I wanted to come,” she said, “because I’ve been there. I know what you’re going through.”
“Excuse me?” I heard her words, but they made no sense to me.
“I lost a child too.” A tear came to her eye.
“How?”
“I wasn’t looking.” She shrugged, tried to smile, failed. “My ex and I had a bitter breakup and he lost custody. I thought he’d finally accepted that, but then one day I went to pick up Robert at school and apparently my ex had beat me there. Of course I called the police, but I haven’t seen him since.”
I vaguely remembered reading something in the papers about such a tragedy befalling Gayla Gladstone—maybe that was one of the reasons for wanting to change her name? A desire to start fresh?—but I couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. I thought to ask her, but I couldn’t bring myself to lift the spear, poke it around in the wound.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said, and this time she really did smile. Then she tossed her head. “But I didn’t come here for sympathy. I just came to say I understand. It doesn’t matter how the loss happens. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks you should or shouldn’t have done. In the end, the pain is just the same.”
I looked at her with new respect. For an all-white-clothes, too-much-gold, fake-fur-masquerading-as-real-fur-to-make-some-bizarre-sort-of-point kind of woman, she was smart.
“Of course, there’s always some good that comes out of tragedy,” Candy added, spoiling my newfound respect for her nearly instantaneously. That sort of platitude-impersonating-wisdom always makes me wince with annoyance; that and the one about it being “part of God’s plan,” as if God were some kind of capricious bastard saying “I feel like saving you today, but today I also feel like pissing on you.”
Yes, loss can make one bitter.
“And what might that be?” I asked Candy, tiredly, since her statement demanded the question. Then I pre-empted her response, “That tragedy makes you a better person?”
“No, of course not.” She looked at me as though I were an idiot. “There’s nothing across-the-board ennobling about tragedy. Tragedy sucks. But it does somehow liberate you to finally be yourself. You realize that life is simply too short to keep being someone you’re not.”
I was in my kitchen, doing the most uncharacteristic of things. I was making dinner.
I’d been feeling lonely but disinclined to impose on the usual suspects. David wouldn’t be home anyway since it was Saturday night and you can’t miss Saturday night in the restaurant business. And just Christopher without David was, oh, I don’t know, like the vegetable without the main course. As for my family, although the saying goes that they are the people who, when the world turns you away, have to take you in, I still had some doubts. So I’d phoned up Dodo, who was available with no notice on a Saturday night—no surprise there.
“What would you like to do?” she’d asked over the phone. “Go to a film?”
“No,” I’d said, realizing exactly what I wanted as I said it. “I want you to come here. I want to make you dinner.”
A
nd I did want to do that. Dodo had done so much for me, it was a little thing to be able to do in return.
“But, um, can you really cook, Jane?”
“I’ll see if I can learn how before you get here.” I tried not to sound testy, since my intentions were to do a nice thing.
By the time Dodo arrived, I had the water boiling for the pasta. Even if salad and pasta doesn’t qualify me as the next Jamie Oliver, I’d made the dressing (balsamic vinaigrette) and the sauce (whole tomatoes, chicken, broccoli and mozzarella cheese) myself and I’d opened a nice bottle of Chianti just in case the food sucked.
I was startled, when I answered the door, to see Dodo in jeans. I’d never seen Dodo in anything other than business clothes before and it seemed somehow wrong, like seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury in a grass skirt or something. Of course, I had jeans on too, but that was somehow different. My jeans I wore with an old purple V-necked T-shirt I’d used when painting the flat, figuring more splatters from the sauce wouldn’t show. Dodo’s jeans were worn belted with a red jersey top tucked in and a silk scarf of red, white, blue and gold draped around her shoulders in a casual manner I’d never be able to perfect.
I poured Dodo a glass of the Chianti, brought it to her as she sat down on the sofa, taking my own position on the floor across the coffee table from her.
“Do you need any help?” she suggested brightly, chin going in the direction of the kitchen.
“No,” I said, “the water’s rolling so much, I need only stir it a time or two.”
“Ah.” She looked at her wineglass. “Well.” She took a sip. “This is—”
“—awkward, isn’t it?” I finished for her, making a face.
“Actually,” she said rather primly, “I was going to say ‘This is nice.’”
“And awkward.” I squinched my nose a bit. “Admit it. It’s awkward.”
She tried to look serious. “It’s…” She began to fail, a smirk creeping up on her mouth. “It’s fucking amazingly awkward!” She burst out laughing. “Why do you think that is?”
Crossing the Line Page 24
