“I don’t know,” I said, having laughed along until there were tears in my eyes. “Because the dynamic’s different? Because we’re used to having the office as our common ground and whenever we’re together outside of it, we’re always either surrounded by other people or are engaged in some joint purpose?”
“You’re right, Jane. This is just too casual for us.”
“We don’t know how to do casual,” I added.
And then for some reason, we were laughing again and were still laughing, off and on, as she helped me put the salad things out and kept me company as I stirred the pasta, served it on big heaping plates, and poured more wine.
“Oh, this looks good,” Dodo said, picking up her fork. “And things are so much more relaxed, now that we’re not—”
“Awkward anymore?” I finished again for her, which set us off laughing once again.
“Oh, we have to stop.” I had one hand on my side. “My mother always used to warn that if I laughed too hard, someone would die.”
“What a truly awful thing to say to a little girl,” she said.
I shrugged. “Her mum probably said it to her.”
“How do you think we ended up like this?” Dodo asked, serious. “Alone. You and I having dinner together. Do you think somehow our mothers—”
“Bollocks,” I said, pouring us another round. “It’s not our mothers’ faults we’re doing this on a Saturday night. A lot of it is simply the life decisions we ourselves made.”
Dodo looked wistful all of a sudden. “I liked him, Jane,” she said softly.
I knew she was talking about Stephen Triplecorn and even though I didn’t like him myself, I knew that she did and that her hurt was very real.
“I know,” I said, feeling helpless to help, covering her lovely hand with one of my so-so hands. “I know.”
“You must mind terribly,” she said, “me still feeling this way, after what he put you through.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You can’t help it. You feel what you feel.”
She picked her pasta fork up, set it down again without eating anything.
“Besides,” I said, “you need to remember, we put him through a lot, too.”
She laughed a bit. “Oh, but didn’t we? Remember the thing with me telling him Constance was nuts?”
“And the whole thing with Stan from Accounting,” I added, “and Dog With A Bone? Woof!”
She laughed harder. “And remember when Louise…” But then she stopped herself abruptly. That was too close to when things turned serious, too close to the end.
“It’s okay, Dodo,” I said, rubbing the back of her hand once more before taking mine away, tiredly picking up my fork again. “We did the best we could.”
“What can we do now?” she asked balefully, which may have been the wine, but somehow I knew she was talking about our futures. Hers without Stephen, mine without Tolkien.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. But I did know one thing: I was glad to finally recognize Dodo, not just as my boss, but as my very good friend.
“Eventually,” I added, “we’ll think of something.”
Sarah was ready to tell the rest of her story. And she wanted to tell it to Mary Jr., in my presence.
Having met Luke Johnson, Sarah’s father, just once, and having seen how Mary Jr. and Sarah were together on my last visit, I could well imagine why she’d prefer to tell it to gentle Mary Jr. As for the latter, all I could be was honored that, as Mary Jr.’s friend, she trusted me too.
“Not long after Denny and I ran off, and the money ran out, I found myself pregnant.”
“Oh no!” Mary Jr. couldn’t help herself from exclaiming. “You must have been so scared…”
“Scared? I was bleedin’ terrified. But Denny said that we’d manage somehow. I wanted to go home, but he said that we were adults now, weren’t we, with a baby coming. He kept saying it would be okay.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“He had a friend who knew someone at a clinic who was able to get some of those prenatal vitamins for me.”
“But how did you live?” asked Mary Jr.
“Oh, we were still on the streets,” said Sarah mildly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
It all seemed so foreign to me, the kind of thing that never happened to anyone you really knew. But then I thought about those people you see on the streets sometimes, about the stories you read about young girls getting in trouble and fearing to tell anyone about it, and I realized there’s a whole other world that most of us are lucky enough to never have to see.
“When it got to be close to the end, I started to get really scared, that’s for sure. It was December then, last December, and it was very cold out. Denny still kept saying that it was all going to be okay, but I kept saying, ‘How? How is this all going to be okay?’”
I was hearing the words, but it was beyond me to imagine the reality of it.
“Denny borrowed a room in a friend’s flat. He’d got a job, he said—I didn’t ask doing what. And he got some books. He said that we could do it ourselves, that no one would ever need know. He said that people had been delivering their own babies at home for centuries, that it was only in modern times that people thought they needed hospitals for what women throughout time had been doing all on their own. He got his friend at the clinic to get him things, scissors…”
My mind nearly shut down at this. I didn’t want to hear any more, didn’t want to hear how lonely, how scary it must have been for her, giving birth in someone else’s place, with no one to help her but a guy with a book and a pair of scissors.
I had to ask. “Why didn’t you go to a hospital?”
Sarah shrugged. “Denny said we couldn’t. That if we did, my dad or someone would come and take the baby away.”
I shook my head, started to object, but then stopped at the futility of it. It was done. What point was there now in telling her that she could have done things differently, that she might have avoided some of the pain and loneliness?
“It wasn’t so bad, really,” said Sarah, trying to smile, failing, “but then the baby was there, she was right there, and I thought this was going to be the part that Denny’d kept promising about, this was the part where everything was going to be okay. Except it wasn’t okay, because he began freaking out, saying that it’d been hard enough for him to keep both him and me alive, and how could he do it now with a little baby to take care of too? He couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it, he said, the only way for us to keep ourselves alive was to give her up…”
Oh no.
“But we were scared of being caught.” It was obviously difficult for her to say the words. “We were scared of being caught abandoning her, so we didn’t want to bring her to the cops or to the hospital, although we knew we should. And then Denny said ‘What about a church?’”
Oh no.
“And even though I was still so sore, I couldn’t let him be the one to leave her there. I had to be there to make sure there would be someone on the street who would see me do it. And so that’s what I did. I waited outside a church, late last Christmas Eve, when the streets were deserted, waited until I heard someone coming and then I placed her on the steps—she was so beautiful!—and moved on up the street and then turned, just in time to see a pregnant woman coming and I knew that she had to have heard my little girl cry when I’d set her down and I told myself that Denny was right, that he’d been wrong about the way in which things would become okay, but that it would somehow be okay all the same.”
Oh no.
“Not long afterwards,” Sarah said, visibly tired now, “Denny took off. I think the guilt did him in. And I’ve lived on my own ever since, until Jane’s friend found me. I never stopped wondering about my baby, of course, what became of her, not for a second. But I had to stay alive, didn’t I? If nothing else, Denny was right about that…I was in no position to take care of a baby. Still, I’ve wondered…”
&nb
sp; I knew that in telling her, I would probably lose any remaining chance—as if there were any remaining chances—of getting Emma back. After all, if there had been one thing I’d known all along, it was that if the birth mother ever came back, there would be no contest over who would get to raise Emma. But I had to do it. Sarah had to know.
“Sarah.” I put my hand gently on hers. “I think I can tell you what happened to your baby.”
My fingers were shaking as I dialed Tolkien’s number.
“Yes?” he answered.
“It’s me,” I said.
We hadn’t talked since that night I’d visited him at his place.
After I’d gotten home after his revelation at Mary Jr.’s, after I’d seen his things were all gone, I’d experienced a different kind of loss than the one I had upon losing Emma. It was a separate ache altogether. I’d thought of the last time we’d made love—an uncharacteristically solemn lovemaking, and yet of course there had been some laughter; there was always laughter—and I didn’t want to let myself think, didn’t want to wrap my mind around the impossible idea that it was the last time I would make love with him in this lifetime.
But that night I’d visited him in the rain, I’d been forced to recognize that that was exactly the way things were going to be.
“What do you want?” he asked.
I told him what had happened, how, through listening to Sarah’s tale, I’d come to realize that the baby I’d found had been her baby. Emma was her child.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I told her,” I said. “And then I called Stephen Triplecorn. And then I left before he could arrive with Emma.”
“That must have been hard for you,” he said.
I suppose he could have been referring to any single one of those things. But they’d all been hard, each in their own awful way. There was no point belaboring it, however. There weren’t enough words in the English language to describe just how hard it all had been.
“Yes” was all I had left to cover it.
“Well,” he said, “thank you for calling.”
“I just thought you’d want to know. After all, you loved her, you love her too.”
I lay on my bed, alone, imagining Emma’s return to the Johnsons.
I allowed myself to picture what Emma’s homecoming had been like, her coming to the home of someone other than me.
Before, when they’d taken her from me, I hadn’t allowed myself to picture Emma with her new foster family, not really, because a part of me still entertained the small hope that the situation might somehow be temporary, that fortune could somehow be reversed.
But now I had to face the facts: Emma was with her real family. There was no turning back from this.
They would all be so excited to see her, of course, Sarah, Mary Jr., Luke—all the Johnsons. She belonged to them. Something Sarah had believed was missing forever, something the rest hadn’t even known was theirs, had returned.
And how would Emma feel? How had Emma felt, that first time Stephen Triplecorn had taken her, after she’d lived with me for ten months, after ten months of knowing me as the center of her world, as she’d been mine?
I knew that, if she never saw me again, she wouldn’t remember me, not years later; I’d just be a story people told her. Or didn’t tell her. But what about now, right now, after six, seven, eight weeks? Did she remember me still?
I knew that Emma would be happy with the Johnsons. I knew that if I wanted to, they’d let me come visit her; Mary Jr. had said as much. I knew that it would kill me to watch Emma grow up at a remove, a visitor to her life.
I did not know if I could bear that.
I pictured myself, at some point, doing the Jane thing: standing on the street across from Mary Jr.’s place or going to the playground Christopher had made for the kids, watching, waiting, hoping to get a glimpse of Emma.
But then I realized that whatever I saw would break my heart: if Emma looked as though she’d grown unhappy without me, my heart would break in one helpless direction; if she looked happy, relieved as I would be by that, my heart would break in a different, selfish direction.
And the ultimate truth had not escaped me. Whatever I’d done, no matter what—if I had never been the fake-pregnancy woman, if I’d been the most normal person in the world when I found Emma on those church steps, if I’d been the blessed Virgin Mary—Sarah would have still come home. Sarah would still have decided, as she had clearly done, that she wanted Emma back.
No matter what I’d done, I would have still lost Em.
December 24, last chapter
Stephen Triplecorn had called to say he wanted to see me in his office, that the Johnsons had wanted a meeting.
I was in a dither.
I called Tolkien.
“Please come with me,” I said. “They probably want to arrest me for never having done the right thing in the first place.”
And Tolkien, perhaps feeling guilty about his own part in that—he had, after all, fixed all of Stephen Triplecorn’s parking problems, so that he’d be more amenable to cutting me a little slack—agreed.
Then, for good measure, I called up David and Christopher, and Dodo, hoping for some extra support.
Against what? I didn’t know. I guess I figured that if I got enough people who knew me in one room, one of them was bound to be willing to speak up for my character.
Dodo was the only one who objected.
“I don’t want to see him again,” she said, “not after what he did to you.”
What was left unsaid was that she also didn’t want to see him again because of how she still felt, because of what seeing him would do to her.
But I was feeling selfish. “Please, Dodo,” I said. “Do it for me. If they’re going to have me arrested, I’m going to need all the friends there that I can get.”
“All right, Jane,” she said, “if it’s what you want.”
When I arrived at the office, they were all already there. The one thing I hadn’t counted on, however, was…
“Mama!” It was Emma, her face lit up with glee, straining to get away from Sarah and come to me.
She hadn’t forgotten me at all.
“She’s been asking for you ever since he brought her back to us,” said Sarah, nodding at Stephen Triplecorn, a sad look on her face. “We tried to tell her that I was her mum now, but she wasn’t having any.”
“You’re the only mother she’s ever known,” said Mary Jr., gently, sadly. “You took care of her from nearly the moment she was born, did everything for her. She loves you more than anybody.”
“Mama!”
“It’s not right, us keeping her,” said Mary Jr. “It’s not right to take her off the track that she’s been set on.”
“What do you want, Sarah?” Stephen Triplecorn asked.
Sarah looked at Emma long and hard, with such a look of wistful longing, but then she tore her eyes away.
“I want to go back to school,” she said. “I don’t want to live hard anymore. I want to go back to school, get a good job, have something better. And, one day, if I’m very lucky, I want to have another baby, one I can properly care for.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
From birth, due to circumstances neither of us had chosen, our life paths, Sarah’s and mine, had been on different tracks, each somehow lacking an important ingredient.
In my case, I had education, an adult life, successful career and the support of those around me, whether I deserved it at all times or not. And yet I was certainly willing to give up those things or modify the time devoted to them, if that’s what was somehow called for in caring for Emma. I was yet smart enough to realize that it was having had those things that made it possible for me to sacrifice them.
Sarah’s situation was almost the reverse. She had an incomplete education, an interrupted teenaged life and no certainty that she’d ever even have a career, although she clearly wanted one. I will say this, she had a
family who obviously loved her. It was apparent from the way Mary Jr. and her parents stood by her. Whatever she decided, they would give her their full support.
For me what was lacking was another being that I could put whole-heartedly ahead of my selfish self; in Emma, I had that. For Sarah, what was lacking was the simple time that a few more years might have given her to feel confident enough in herself to reach for that which was already there. And so…
Sarah took in a great lungful of air. “I want Jane to keep Emma,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Stephen Triplecorn asked.
“We’re sure,” said Mary Jr. gently, speaking for Sarah, who had tears in her eyes.
“But maybe Sarah’s parents would like to—” Stephen Triplecorn tried again, looking this time questioningly at Luke and his wife.
“No,” said Mary Jr. firmly. “It would be one thing if Emma were still a newborn. Do you honestly think we don’t want to keep her, that we wouldn’t love to keep her with us if it were reasonably possible? But Jane had her for ten months. Not ten days. Not ten weeks. Ten months. To do anything else, to try to keep her, would just be too selfish.”
Stephen Triplecorn looked at me.
“You can keep her, Jane,” he finally said. “Of course, there will be formalities, but once it’s known that this is what Emma’s birth family wants…”
Sarah handed her to me, carefully avoiding looking at Emma, as if she were already taking steps into a different future, and I saw Dodo looking at Stephen Triplecorn and he back at her. Somehow I knew that, in time, things would work out for them.
Then I looked at this little person who had once been dependent on me, who would now be dependent on me again, and I realized that however far I’d come, however much better I ever became, I would never be good enough for the grace of her, and yet, whatever I was, it had to be enough.
I had one of the two things I wanted most in the world. It was time to reach for the second. It was time to ask for what I wanted straightforwardly.
I looked at Tolkien.
“Will you marry me?”
Crossing the Line Page 25
