The Nature of Jade

by Deb Caletti

  "He sounds wonderful," she says.

  "He is."

  "His maturity, it's something you like."

  "Yeah. It's so different. The guys at school . . . Well, you know the guys at school."

  "Like Alex Orlando." She holds her cup by the handle, swirls the liquid inside, a mini-tornado. 1

  m sorry.

  "The fact that you've been lying--that's the thing that really made me mad. It hurt. Hurts." "I can understand that."

  "It'd be reasonable for your dad and me to freak out. He's got a baby. You know? This is not just you going to the prom. This is jumping into the deep end of adulthood. Sebastian's had . . . He's had deep relationships."

  256

  "Had sex, you mean. And you talk about the prom like it's this great big innocent punch-bowl-and-corsage life moment. We don't even have punch bowls anymore. We've got police. The prom's about sex, for most guys. Definitely for Alex Orlando. You think Alex cares about love and dancing on prom night?"

  "I don't just mean sex." She stops swirling her cup. "Not just. Responsibility, too. Of having a child. You're not exactly going to be having a carefree time."

  "Can you honestly say that any relationship is carefree?" I ask. I consider what I've just said.

  Mom and Dad, Onyx and Delores, Sebastian and Tiffany, Me and Hannah, Jenna and God--Tess and Sebastian, even. No relationship is carefree-- more the tangle that Tess talked about.

  Complicated, if beautiful.

  "Mostly carefree, okay? Before it needs to be otherwise? And why does Sebastian live with his grandmother? Where's his family? What's with Bo's mother? You never said where she was."

  "Dead." The word slips out before I have a chance to think. Quick as instinct. Like a python zipping under sand to hide, or the tail of a gecko instantly dropping off to distract a predator.

  Sometimes, they would be quick. Sometimes, not quick enough.

  "Dead? She died?"

  "Childbirth." Shit.

  "Childbirth?" Shit, shit! "I know it happens," Mom says, "but, Jade, that's really rare."

  "I know," I say. My backstage mind has completely abandoned me. I could see it off in the distance, waving its nasty little fingers at me, Whoo hoo! Jade.1 Over here'. Childbirth, for God's sake!

  257

  "I just. . . Jade, please. I want the truth." I think for a moment. What comes to me then is Abe, his words. His urging to give this truth a chance. "Not childbirth," I say. "No," my mother says.

  "Mom, you've got to promise. This is important, and you've got to promise. ..."

  "Okay, Jade. AH right." Her voice pulls with impatience. "You can't talk about this with anyone." "What is going on, Jade?"

  "The baby's mother, Tiffany. She didn't want anything to do with Bo after he was born. She never saw him. Sebastian raised Bo. And then Tiffany's parents, they talked her into getting him back."

  "Sebastian?"

  "No, Bo. The father, he's some hotshot plastic surgeon in Ruby Harbor, where Sebastian used to live. They've got a ton of money. They can afford all the attorneys they want. Sebastian is the one that took care of Bo. She didn't want anything to do with him."

  "What are you saying ? Are you saying he took off with the baby? Oh, Jade. Tell me that's not what you're saying."

  "You don't understand. Bo doesn't even know her. She didn't care about him."

  "Obviously, she does!" Mom pushes her chair away from the table as if it is something gruesome.

  "Does he realize how he's hurt himself now? What is this grandmother thinking?"

  She doesn't know Tess. She doesn't know the first thing about her. It is shocking, really, how fast things can go from great to horrible. I think about my computer and its "system restore."

  258

  How the whole thing can revert to an earlier time and place before the mistake happened. "He hasn't been served papers yet," I say. "He isn't in violation of any order. There is no order."

  "Yet!"

  She just doesn't get this. She doesn't understand Sebastian and Bo together. "He thinks Tiffany will get tired of this. Mom, she's a beauty queen! She doesn't want to be a mother."

  "But she is, Jade. She is a mother."

  "Knock, knock," Dad says.

  My humanities paper is going along just great, as you can imagine. Who gives a shit about exploring history and author motivation in After the Fall? I am acting out my own play-- During the Fall. I have lit one of my patron saints for support, the Infant Jesus of Prague. Patron saint of families and children, which is why he's been chosen. His picture looks a bit creepy, like those dolls well-meaning people buy for you when they visit a foreign country. Those beady, swinging eyes in hard plastic, elaborate dress. But he also wears a puffy velvet king hat with a cross on top.

  The picture may have been vaguely unpleasant, but the prayer on the back is user-friendly, and it has the essential elements:

  1. Kiss-up: Dearest Jesus, little infant of Prague. So many haue come to you and had their prayers answered. I feel drawn to you by loue because you are kind and merciful.

  2. Submission, aka I'm Counting on You!: I lay open my heart to you in hope, as I am at your feet.

  3. Request: I present to you especially (and anyone else who's listening, if we're going to be honest) this request, which I enclose in Your louing heart. (Insert request here.) 259

  Then, of course, you get the whole thing again in Spanish. The Infant, who isn't an infant at all (and I have no idea where the Prague part comes in), is also handy for colleges, freedom, travelers, peace, the Philippines, and foreign service.

  "Come in," I say to Dad.

  He is wearing his sweatpants and a Sonics T-shirt. There is something slightly embarrassing about Dad in sweatpants-- something loose and childlike. Too uncontained.

  "God, Dad, un tuck your shirt."

  "What?" He looks down, checks himself out.

  "It's dweeby like that."

  "I'm not here to talk about my fashion sense," he says, but un tucks his shirt anyway. "I'm guessing not," I say. "Can you stop typing for a second?"

  I look at him, and he sighs. "This thing, with this boy," he says. My backstage mind is hurriedly stacking stones to make a wall against the assault I know is coming. This is the man who told me I would have to buckle down and apply myself if I wanted to "get anywhere" after I got a B in science in the eighth grade. "Anywhere," I assumed, was someplace with a high credit limit and a BMW like his. "Anywhere" was where you listened to news radio and had a retirement plan and where you took a vacation once a year, which usually meant the falsely enthused idea of "Let's play tourists in our own city!" because your wife was too afraid to fly. This is the man who told me I would one day regret not "getting my cardio," who got pissed when I couldn't help him clean the garage that time they were having the Honor Society picnic. The anywhere Sebastian might bring me is certainly not the anywhere he had in mind.

  260

  Dad slings his first arrow at my stone wall. "We only want the best for you," he says. That all purpose phrase, both barbed and soothing, which may be true but is too often used to cover a multitude of parenting sins, usually involving some sort of overreaction on their part.

  "When I was your age, all I had to think about was college and pretty girls ..."

  "And you had to walk to school in twelve feet of snow even though you lived in Arizona."

  He sighs again. I wait for him to use Arrow Number Three in the parental arsenal: As Long As You Live Under My Roof. But he only stares at the flickering yellow from my patron saint candle.

  "I sound like my father," he says. "I know I do."

  I wait. He seems vulnerable, which makes me uncomfortable. Dads shouldn't be vulnerable.

  Dads leave cave, kill meat, drag home. Dads protect and serve, bring home the bacon, fight fire with fire. Dads fix broken things and remove dead birds from the lawn on a shovel without getting squeamish. They don't hesitate, or look lost.

  "Jade, I'm realizing as I get older that
I know less and less, not more and more." He sounds a little like Tess, but nothing like Sports Dad. It occurs to me why people are so fond of stereotypes--their simplicity makes you feel the ground is safe and firm, more safe and firm, certainly, than the layers and complexities of the unknown. This man--I don't know him. I'm not even sure how, exactly, to start to know him. "I don't have any answers for you," he says.

  "Honestly, I don't. All you can do is make the best decision you can at the time after looking around from where you stand. That's all I can ask."

  261

  "That's all?" "Yep."

  "Okay." I'm relieved. Actually, I'm kind of shocked and relieved. He really doesn't have the answers, and he's not expecting me to have them either. There's something so, I don't know, human, about that. I feel a lightness that comes with a release of expectations. This vulnerability-

  -maybe it's okay after all. Maybe we can just be human together.

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  "If Mom tells anyone about this ... I asked her what she's planning to do, and all she'll say is, she needs to think it ouer. What does that mean? I've asked her not to tell anyone, but she just says she can't make that promise." God, oh, please, God, Infant Jesus of Prague, and everyone else.

  "You want me to make sure she doesn't?" He gives his head the smallest shake, chuckles. It's the kind of laugh one gives when a friend asks for a favor--to spy on a boyfriend, to help them cheat on a test. The laugh of the stupid request, of the impossible. "I can try," he says.

  He is right to give that laugh, I know, and that's what keeps me awake that night, long after the printer spits out the last pages of my paper, which is somewhere around one A.M. He has tried to get her to do lots of things--travel, ski, meet other couples. And she has tried to get him to do lots of things--understand her, hear her, accept her for who she is. The possibility that he would sway her is small, finished years and years ago, and this may mean I have ruined Sebastian's life, Bo's, Tess's, my own. Actions and their reactions, all right. I fall asleep finally, but have disturbing dreams. Tsunamis and hurricanes, the doors flying off of airplanes.

  262

  I wake about six in the morning. The sun is already out, the sky blazing blue. I watch the changing forms of the punctuation clouds--the casual wisp of a comma, an apostrophe, the curve of a question mark--turning now into seagulls flying.

  263

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A caged animal will come to fear his freedom. When first taken captive, put behind bars, he will fight and attempt escape. Finally, though, he will resign, and once resigned, the doors of the cage can be opened, but he will cower within . . .

  --Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

  I go to school that next day, and then put in my time with the elephants, weighing them, cleaning the outdoor enclosure with Elaine. I hang out near Hansa, just because she makes me feel good, the way she sniffs my hair and hunts in my pockets for apples. I don't see Damian, and leave straight for home afterward. Jake Gillette, the traitor, isn't in the parking lot, but Titus gives me his usual "hang loose" wave.

  I call Sebastian and tell him I won't be coming over. My paper, I say, although I had turned it in that afternoon. It's the first time I've lied to him. I keep our conversation short--That paper ...

  crazy last days before graduation ... because I'm afraid I might tell him everything, panic him for no reason. Maybe I'm just delaying the fact that he will inevitably hate me for putting him in jeopardy as I have.

  I also want to hurry home because I think if I stay near Mom, hover, watch, that maybe I can prevent her from doing anything crazy. She would have to look at me, remember who she would hurt. If I let her out of my sight, she might forget that.

  264

  It might make it too easy for her to do what she feels is right.

  Hawthorne Square is engaged in summer--Mrs. Chen is washing her car, her baby, Sarah, in a playpen on the grass. The fountain has been turned on, and little Natalie Chen is surfing her Barbie in the waves, Riding Giants style. Old Mrs. Simpson is filling the bird feeders hanging off her porch, and I am surprised to see my mother in the front garden of our house, her knees in the dirt, her hands around the roots of a geranium plant.

  "Hey," I say.

  "Hey," she says. She positions the geranium in the hole she's made, pushes the dirt in around it.

  "How was school?" She doesn't look at me. Natalie shrieks as her arm gets drenched in the fountain. Don't get soaked now, Mrs. Chen shouts, her own shorts wet from the leaking hose. I notice Milo standing in the window. Looking out with a face so devastated, you'd have thought we'd all gone away on vacation and left him behind.

  "Good. You know."

  "You get your paper done?"

  "Had to stay up until one, but, yeah."

  She stands, brushes the dirt from her knees. She rubs her nose with the back of one gardening glove. "Stupid allergies."

  "Really."

  "Jade, I think we better have a conversation."

  "All right." Sunshine makes the lawn and the flowers and the bricks of the buildings look new and optimistic. I hear the music-box notes of the ice cream man driving up the street, playing

  "The Entertainer." But it's black dread that edges up my insides.

  "Can you run in and pour me a lemonade? It's getting hot out here."

  265

  "Sure."

  Oliver isn't home yet, but Milo jumps around my legs and barks with nearly-abandoned-now I'm not joy.

  "Relax," I say, but someone needs to say it to me. I feel a little light-headed. Am I light-headed?

  Am I going to faint? I think I'm nauseous. I stop with one hand on the refrigerator, trying to see if I'm nauseous enough to throw up. I can breathe, though. I am breathing, yes. In, out. In, Jade.

  Out. No, my heart isn't pounding, it just feels ... It hurts. It feels like it might be broken.

  I remove the cool pitcher from the fridge, clink ice into two tall glasses, and pour the liquid over the crackling cubes. This is what she used to do for me. Pour me a glass of lemonade in the summer, so that I could have it as I sat on a towel on the grass of our old house after running through the sprinkler. Lemonade, and those boxes of animal crackers with the circus train on the side, the elephants and giraffes and hippos inside. That red box with a string for a handle.

  I carry the glasses out, pushing open the door with my foot, hedging sideways so Milo can't escape.

  "Oh, thanks," Mom says. She's sitting on the porch step, her gloves tossed near her feet. She reaches for the glass and rests it against her forehead for a moment.

  "It's warm," I say. It's what you do when you can't say what you need to--you talk about the weather.

  She takes a drink of lemonade, and so do I. It's cool and sour-sweet.

  "Jade--I just want to tell you that I love you." Those words-- sometimes they aren't what they seem. Sometimes we say it to hear it said. Sometimes they're an excuse. Sometimes, an apology.

  I'm quiet.

  266

  "You're not going to like what I have to say." She sets her drink on the brick step.

  Dread, creeping blackness. Heart . . . yes, there it is. That heavy ache. Breaking. I can only think of one thing: I think of Bo, first with no mother, then taken from his father. I think of Bo, twice broken.

  "No," I say.

  "Jade, you can't keep this child from his mother. She has a right to be in his life. He has a right to have her in his life. It's wrong for you to take part in this."

  "You don't understand. You don't know anything about this. About them."

  "I called . . ."

  "No!"

  "I called directory assistance. For plastic surgeons in Ruby Harbor."

  "No, no, no."

  "There was only one. I left a message. An anonymous message, Jade. No one will know who called." "How could you?" "He can't go on like this."

  "How could you do this!" I scream. I see Natalie Chen with her B
arbie turn around suddenly. My hand is around the glass, wet with condensation. I throw it against our house, where it shatters.

  I want out of there. I turn then. Oliver is just coming up the drive. He has his backpack on, and is carrying a large brown grocery bag, stuffed full. They've just done the end-of-school desk-cleaning ritual, I can tell, and he has likely walked home happily with his reclaimed treasures--

  glue sticks and half-dry

  267

  markers, crayons with the paper rolled off, stubby pencils, bits of loose glitter and pieces of artwork taken down from the classroom walls, staple holes in the corners. That was always a good day in elementary school, bringing home your stuff, the ice cream man playing as you walk.

  But now he just hugs his bag. He looks stricken.

  I run past him. I head for the bus stop, the 212, but change my mind and go to the 76 station instead. I realize I've left my backpack and cell phone at home in the hall, but I dig in the pocket of my jeans for a dollar, get some change from the guy inside. I push open the folding door of the phone booth. That cramped sticky place where bad news is delivered, because only bad news has the urgency required to stop here. I'll be late, honey. I'm lost, honey. I'm never coming home, honey.

  "Sebastian?"

  He's at the houseboat. He's outside on the dock--I can hear the motor of Tess's boat in the background.

  "Jade! If you finished your paper, come over. We're getting in the boat."

  "I can't. . ."

  "Your voice sounds funny." "Sebastian," I cry. "I'm sorry."

  He tells me to come over. He asks me to meet him. At the end of the dock. Where we would have some privacy. He needs to go now. He has to tell Tess quickly.

  I am almost too ashamed to go. I wait for the 212, ride in silence in a seat by myself until a guy with an army jacket and body odor slides down beside me. I grit my teeth, feel deservedly 268

  punished. I get off the bus, walk to the dock. I wait at the end, near the street. No Sebastian.