“I need to know who my father is,” I say.
“Jesus Christ.” She brings her hand up to her forehead and squeezes tight, as if she’s suddenly sprung a migraine. And it starts to make me angry that she thinks this is such a big hassle to her. Like I’m this annoyance in her day. She exhales deeply and shakes her head. “You need to talk to Elsie.”
“She won’t tell me anything. I asked her last night.”
“What did she say?”
“He was a fling. Some guy she didn’t know.”
“I don’t like this, Snow.” Aunt Sharon fiddles with the ring on her finger, nervously twisting it around and around.“I don’t think this makes things better.”
“It’s not going to make anything worse. It can’t get much worse. If I know the truth, I can go from there. I mean, was he in jail? A murderer or something? A priest? Her teacher? A perverted school janitor? A—”
“It was Mitch,” she says, cutting me off. She stares at me intensely, waiting to see what I’ll do.
I feel like life just whipped out its hand and slapped me hard in the face. “What?” I say, even though I’ve heard her.
“This isn’t good, Snow. I told you.” Aunt Sharon’s eyes dart around her, as if the helicopters are going to appear on the horizon and she’ll be gunned down by secret agents. She’s said too much.
I start to feel sick to my stomach. A rush of memories speed through me. I think of all the times Mitch has been in the apartment. I see him on the couch, I see him at the kitchen table drinking a beer, I see him standing at the bathroom counter shaving. I see him hovering over my face, that night he was in my room. “Did he rape her?” I ask, preparing myself for the worst.
She turns to me with a disgusted look on her face. “Rape her? God, no. I think she loved him.” My jaw drops as the whole world slips out from underneath me and I’m left alone, feet dangling in the air. I have no idea what’s real anymore.
Aunt Sharon silently motions for me to follow her. We go into the building and through to the stairwell. I lean up against the metal railing while Aunt Sharon sits on the concrete steps. Her voice is dry and bare in the hollow stairwell. I collect her words like bread crumbs marking a trail back to my beginning.
She tells me that a couple of years after their father left Elsie, Mitch moved in. Mitch was younger than Elsie, about thirty at the time. My mom was fourteen. She and Aunt Sharon liked him because he partied with them and didn’t pull the man-of-the-house crap that Elsie’s other boyfriends did. But since Aunt Sharon moved out a few months before Mitch arrived, it was really only my mother who got to spend much time with him. She says Mitch and my mom got along really well, like friends, and that used to make Elsie mad. Everyone had a feeling they were sleeping together but no one knew for sure. And then, one day, my mother announced at a Christmas family gathering that she was pregnant with Mitch’s kid. She said it in front of everyone and Elsie flipped her lid, almost killing her. Some great-uncle I’ve never even heard of had to split up the fight. My mom was sent to the hospital with a fractured skull, two missing teeth, and a broken nose. She never went home again.
“And after that?” I ask.
“Mitch disappeared. I don’t know if he saw your mom during the pregnancy. He’s the one who brought you to Elsie a few months after you were born. I saw him at your mom’s funeral and never again after that, until Jed left. You were about six then.”
“Why would Elsie let him come back?”
“You think Elsie could ever survive on her own? Who do you think paid your rent?”
“Fuck off,” I say in disbelief.
“What did you think? Jesus, Snow. For someone so eager to know the truth, you certainly have your head in a cloud. Elsie can’t afford that place, never could. She spends all her cash on booze. Besides that, she’s so pathetic, she still loves him.”
“If my boyfriend fucked my daughter, I’d kill him.” I start to think more about this, the anger growing. “I’d fuckin’ kill him. I’d shoot his balls right off.”
“Well . . . your mom wasn’t exactly a victim.”
“What?” I glare at Aunt Sharon.
“She wasn’t exactly an angel in all this.”
“What are you saying?
“Forget it.”
“No, what? You think my mom was a little slut, don’t you?” “No, I don’t,” she denies, but I can tell she’s just backing down. I can tell she’s lying but she continues on, anyway. “Elsie did want to kill Mitch. At the beginning. But then your mom died, and Jed left her about three years later, and she totally lost it because there’s no way she could handle things on her own. She was drinking more and taking pills, and then Children’s Aid got involved. I don’t know exactly when Mitch started coming back around, but all of a sudden Elsie started to blame your mom for all her problems. Saying that your mom seduced Mitch. That she asked for it.”
“Asked for it?” I shrivel my face in disgust.
“Came on to him. Like Mitch was some victim.”
“You think that?”
“No,” she says. “But I think Elsie convinced herself of that because she felt guilty. I told her so.”
“And what’d she say?”
“Uh, let’s see. What did she say? I believe it was, ‘Get the fuck out.’ Yes, that’s probably it. She stopped talking to me. Wouldn’t let me come around for years.”
We sit a few moments in silence. I don’t even feel upset about it all. I don’t have the energy. There comes a point when you just feel nothing. When the shit is piled so high, whatever’s dumped after that just slips down the outside of you.
Aunt Sharon clears her throat. “You okay?”
“I wish it wasn’t him,” I say, my eyes locked in a bug-eyed trance. “Anyone but him.” I hear a sniffle and quickly glance at Aunt Sharon. For the first time I realize that maybe it was as hard for Aunt Sharon to say all this as it was for me to hear it. “Thanks for telling me,” I say.
“I’m sorry you’re a part of all this.” She stretches her legs out in front of her, knees cracking.
“All what?”
“This family.”
We stay a little while longer in silence. I feel the baby squirming and kicking, as if it were reading my mind, getting ready to flee this moment. Finally, Aunt Sharon extends an arm and grabs the handrail to haul herself up. “You know, I look at you and see her,” she says.
“You do?” I ask, deflated. I can tell she means this in the best way. And there was a time when I would have taken those words and carefully preserved them between my thoughts like dried flowers between the pages of a book. But hearing it now only makes my heart sink, as if I’ve been told I’m a carrier of some defective gene. And it’s like all of a sudden I realize that all this was bound to happen. Like an indoor plant that only blooms in the spring, I am guided by a memory that precedes me.
25
When you are born I will lay you down, flat against my chest, or I’ll stand above your crib, and I will tell you about the women in your family. I will tell you about your life, so that there are no surprises, so that you don’t waste your time believing that you will be any different. I will tell you that you will be born smart, that you will be good at school, but that teachers won’t like you because you miss too many classes and you have the occasional outburst. You will do things without thinking, like put crayon shavings in the kindergarten guinea pig cage or bite the hand of the fat boy who won’t let go of the blue ball. You’ll have what people call a temper and that some days you won’t feel like getting out of bed because just the thought of breathing will feel like a chore. I will tell you that you will have these awful tendencies: you will crave things on your lips, like cigarettes, joints, or the burning of vodka. That boys will like you because you’re pretty and you will like the power this gives you over them. I will tell you that you will become pregnant too soon, and that this will be the best and worst thing that ever happened to you.
I will tell you that you are n
ow a woman in this family. And even though you know all these things, even though I warn you, you will do them anyway.
You’ll see.
The visions come to me more and more now. Only, now they linger a little longer, so that I can actually see my face all tight and twisted during my free fall from the bridge. Or I can actually see the tiny bloated wrinkles on my fingertips as my lifeless hand floats like a white lily-pad in a bloodied bathtub.
I am no longer my body. I am a capsule for you. I eat only to feed and water you, as if you were a plant on my windowsill. I start to sympathize with discarded banana peels and empty milk jugs. All things with skins and shells. I take boiled eggs from Sam’s kitchen up to my room and spend hours carefully peeling away the shells. The small white pieces overflow out of a glass beside my bed, but I insist Karyn not throw them out.
I pretend I’m listening and laughing and thinking, but really, I am so far, far away. I force my body through the day just so I can sneak under my covers at night and cut myself, feel the warm blood trickle down skin like watery confirmations of my existence. Then I cut again, because even blood doesn’t convince me anymore.
I long for sleep, so my mind can be still. Only the second I close my eyes, it’s like my thoughts are wildly spinning in a blender and the only thing that surfaces clearly out of this messy whirlwind is Mark’s face. I breathe in the faint smell of sweat from his old T-shirt that I keep under my pillow. I press my nose into the armpit and breathe deep. I imagine Mark in soap-opera scenes, picture him at the hospital, the day of the delivery, our eyes locking through the small square window of the birthing room. In another scene, I see him lying on a bed with red satin sheets, rose petals scattered everywhere. He’s holding the baby on his bare chest, tenderly stroking her face the way he lovingly caresses Spliff.
During the day it’s different. My head is vacant. A sludge of half-digested thought settles at the bottom of me each morning. Chunks, like my mother’s truth, are whole while other thoughts, like my hate for Elsie, are thoroughly minced into tiny pieces.
Staff keeps coming into my room and trying to force me to talk. They tell me that if I don’t start communicating with them, they’ll have no choice but to send me to the hospital.
“Can you at least try to tell me what’s on your mind?” Karyn asks when she brings her offering of chocolate milk.
I try to answer, I open my mouth, but my tongue is heavy and confused. “I can’t put it into words. It’s like I need another language.” I say, frustrated, and she returns fifteen minutes later with a sketchbook and a box of pencil crayons.
I call Delcare to talk to Jasmyn, but Miranda tells me that she left the house a few days ago and hasn’t been back since. “She was really going through a rough time,” Miranda says carefully, and I roll my eyes at her so-called confidential vagueness. “We’re hoping she comes back.” She quickly changes the topic. “And how are you doing? It’s so good to hear from you! You’re due soon, aren’t you?”
“Ya, a couple weeks.”
“Well, I’m not the best substitute for Jasmyn, but I’d love to meet you. Are you up to it?”
We meet on the corner the next day at Coffee Time. I am nervous to see her. Even though it hasn’t been that long, I feel like the person she knew is gone. As if each new house makes me a new person. I’m afraid Miranda will be disappointed in what she finds.
“This place is sort of raunchy, isn’t it?” she says, shivering her shoulders and looking around.
“I think it’s okay,” I say, taking a second look around me. It’s like any other coffee shop. People drinking from cardboard cups, a couple of men smoking by the window, playing backgammon. An old lady sitting by the door, shopping bags at her feet.
I start to think that this is a bad idea. I can just imagine Miranda going back to Delcare, telling Staff how badly I’m doing. I can hear the satisfaction in their we-knew-it response: We knew she’d screw up at some point. I try to fake that I’m happy and fine, but I know Miranda can tell something’s wrong. She buys me a rainbow doughnut and I put all my focus into picking off the yellow sprinkles.
“You don’t like the yellow ones?” Miranda asks, poking fun at me.
“I just don’t feel like yellow today,” I say seriously, continuing on my mission. I want to leave. It feels different. Awkward. Like we have nothing to talk about anymore. Luckily Miranda is in a chatty mood. She tells me about Delcare. She tells me that one of the youth workers is taking pregnancy leave and that Pat is looking into buying a new van for the house. She says that most of the remaining residents are doing all right. Nicole is finally going to school every day and Mary will soon be applying for independent living. As I continue picking at my doughnut, she begins to go into detail about the road construction out in front of the house and the zoning proposal for the building across the street.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” I say, piling the sprinkles into a pyramid on my napkin.
“What?”
“Have a baby.”
Miranda laughs, like I knew she would. “Well, hate to tell you, kiddo, but you can’t reverse it now.” She is trying to make light of this. But when I don’t laugh back, she gets serious, her eyes darting back and forth as if she were searching for the right words.
“How am I supposed to do this?” I don’t look at her. I lean my face down to the napkin and blow at the pile of yellow sprinkles, scattering them across the table. “How am I supposed to raise a baby if I can’t even stay in school? If I can’t even keep a boyfriend?” Miranda sighs deeply. “I don’t know, Snow. I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be hard. You’re too smart to hear that. But you have supports. You have people who can help you. You’re not alone.”
Alone. How can she possibly understand its meaning when her partner’s small black initials are tattooed on the back of her hand, just at the base of her thumb.
“What if I can’t do it?” I ask, my voice small. So small that if she chose, she might not hear it.
“You can,” she insists, but the words hang like stones in the air, unclaimed by either one of us. “Snow, do you want this baby?”
No one had ever asked me that. Straight out. With no bushes to hide behind. Do I want the baby? If I say no, I’m selfish because I am putting my needs first and I don’t want the burden. If I say yes, I’m selfish because I won’t give my baby the best chance in life with a good family. It’s an impossible question, with only one right answer that will let you sleep at night.
“Yes,” I say, “sort of.”
“Well,‘sort of’ ain’t going to cut it, Snow.” She starts ferociously stirring her coffee with the stir stick. I watch her lips tighten and her nostrils flare as she stares into the cup. Finally she slams her opened hand down to the table. “ ‘Sort of’ isn’t going to get you through a night of crying and wailing and stinky diapers. This is a huge commitment. You’ll have this kid forever. You have to think about this.”
I start to get upset and angry all at once. I don’t hide it, not anymore. I just let tears pour out of me, down my chin. I don’t care who sees.
“I’m sorry if this is upsetting you, but frankly, I don’t care. You better start making some choices.”
“I want it, I want it—okay?” I say, wanting her to just shut up. “There’s my answer. You happy?”
“Am I happy? Listen to yourself. It doesn’t matter if I’m happy. It’s you that matters. Are you happy?”
“No.” The tears tickle as they slowly drip down my face. I reach up to rub them off. “No, okay. I’m obviously not fuckin’ happy. What do you want, blood?” I wipe my face on my sleeve and Miranda passes me a rough napkin. She won’t say sorry. I know her. She won’t fold to my tears like most people do. She used to say crying just makes her more angry. That most of the time crying is just manipulation. And whether it’s deliberate or not, it’s a very clever way of getting people to back off.
“I’m not supposed to do this,” Miranda says. She reaches into her bag and
pulls out a piece of paper. She writes down her home number and gives it to me, telling me I can call any time I want.
“You mean a lot to me, Snow,” she says before I go. “I want you to know I’m here for you.” She reaches out her arms to hug me. But it’s not the kind of hug Miss Lucy or Aunt Sharon gives me. When they hug their bodies fold, delicately absorbing my round stomach, fingers lightly touching my back. But Miranda presses me tight into her, her hipbone jabbing my belly. And it’s like she’s the first person who’s ever tried to stretch around this baby to reach me.
Now, when I sit in the TV room and stare at the screen, my mind isn’t always blank. I think about things. Like about Betty Corrigal, and how people still put flowers on her grave. And about all the other unwed girls of the past whose secrets grew in their bodies like death warrants. I wonder what happened to the ones we don’t hear about. The girls who were washed up on distant shores, their swollen bellies at the feet of puzzled fishermen. Or the ones who collected poison berries in skirt pockets and then hid behind woodpiles, dropping the sour red balls into their mouths.
I think about what Ms. Crawl didn’t say. What’s left out of Betty’s story. The dull parts of her life. The details that are either too insignificant or too dirty to be considered. About fetching water at a well or mending the hole in her father’s sock. Or about her lying spread-legged in the barn, leading her lover’s fingers to a place she and her mother don’t discuss.
And then I think of worse things. Things no one likes to talk about. Like, what happened before she strung that rope around her neck? What if it wasn’t her seafaring lover’s baby, anyway? What if it was her uncle’s or the priest’s or the married man’s down the road? What if that noose was something she longed for since she was young and the baby just gave her a legitimate reason to make it so?
26
My water breaks and I’m convinced I’ve pissed my pants. I had expected it would be like in the movies, fluid exploding out of me as if from a sudden broken pipe.
As She Grows Page 23
