Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  Hannah didn’t think much of the theologian but she liked her theory even as she laughed at it. She had looked into Eddie’s eyes when he was only a day or two old and seen someone or something very wise gazing back at her. Soon after, his eyes were only baby eyes; but she never forgot that fleeting glimpse as if for an instant she had spied upon eternity.

  Hannah was not opposed to abortion on any moral grounds. An abortion might be many things—a sorrow, a waste, a great relief—but it wasn’t murder even if the theologian’s theory was only New Age blab. But a baby with Liz’s hair and dark brown eyes, the thought of that particular baby trashed . . .

  Hannah considered herself a feminist and would argue for any woman’s equal rights with a man. But the Movement, as it had once been called, angered her because it demeaned what she did best. Not that people like Gloria Steinem and the other one, the homely one who wrote the book, ever meant to put motherhood down. Hannah had never believed that. But it happened anyway; and now, because she had never wanted a career away from home, Hannah had no place, no stature, not even daydreams to sustain her. From early childhood she had fantasized being a mother and last night Dan as much as said that proved she needed psychiatric help.

  Hannah didn’t need a therapist, she needed babies and they needed her. She was a mother; this was her particular skill only no one wanted her to use it. Which was a big part of what was wrong with the United States of America. Motherhood was treated like a stage meant to be survived—like menopause or adolescence. A woman born to nurture and raise a big family got labeled wacko because she cared. And never let her dare admit the fun of being a mother, never let her say how she enjoyed the challenge. Especially don’t use the word challenge. Compared to closing a big real estate deal? Be serious, Hannah Tarwater. Get your feet on the ground. You’re going through a syndrome. Empty nest. As if she were a stork, a chickadee, a goddamn ostrich.

  At Resurrection House she parked the Volvo and went inside, noting as she opened the door that the screen had been mended. Betts met her in the hall.

  “Get a cup of coffee and come on into my office, Hannah.”

  Alarms rang in Hannah’s head. In the common room she poured a coffee under the outstretched and protective gaze of the guardian angel and felt imperiled.

  “Last night I got a call,” Betts said when Hannah joined her in her office. “Just move those papers off the chair.”

  Hannah sat.

  “From Angel’s mother. Shannon.”

  Hannah sat so straight her back ached between the shoulder blades. Shannon. She had not imagined a name so innocent.

  “She said she wanted to see her baby so I told her to come over this morning.” Betts jerked her head in the direction of the nursery. “She’s in there now.”

  “How can she come back here like nothing’s happened? Where does a person get that kind of nerve?” Hannah jumped up and charged around the office. She was vaguely aware of looking overwrought but didn’t care. “You’ve read Angel’s chart. This Shannon person smoked crack right up until she went into labor. She was probably a hooker, Betts. It’s a bloody miracle Angel is even alive with all the crap she’s got in her system.”

  “You know the law.” Betts took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, nodding. “I can’t break the law. I have to let her spend time with her child.”

  “What if she wants to take her away?”

  “If Shannon is trying to stay clean and make something of her life then she can go to court to get Angel back. That’s always our goal, to put families back together, better than they were.” Betts stood up. She looked formidable in her long black-and-white muumuu, a floral tank running right over Hannah.

  “What about the child advocate?”

  “What about her?”

  “She wouldn’t let her go.”

  “Hear me, Hannah: If Angel’s mother can show she’s ready . . .”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Don’t forget the name of this place. It’s not called Foster Mother House. It’s not an orphanage. It’s called Resurrection House. Resurrection means forgiveness and a second chance. If we can give a baby and her mother an opportunity to get a new start in life, then we’re doing what we aim at.”

  Hannah wanted to slam her fist through the wall. She’d had about enough lectures from people who did not know the first thing about what it meant to be a mother. Or care that it was what she knew best.

  “Does she have a place to live? A job?”

  “She’s staying with a friend.”

  “Oh, great.” Hannah went into the little bathroom off Betts’s office. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. Obsolete. Splashed water on her face and washed her hands and returned to the office. Betts had not moved, and as soon as Hannah sat down she began talking again in her kindly patient way.

  “I know it’s not a good situation, but this girl does seem determined to turn her life around. I’ve talked to her and—”

  “What did she think of Angel?”

  Betts rolled her eyes. “Her first words were, and I quote, ‘How come she’s so scrawny?’ ”

  “Damn.”

  “But the truth is, Angel is scrawny. You and I, we know what she used to look like, what a wonder her development is. She’s come a long way in ten months and that’s what we notice. But Shannon sees her the way she really is.” Betts settled back in her chair with a heavy sigh. “Angel isn’t your baby, Hannah. Caring for her doesn’t give you any rights.”

  Talking about the welfare of a baby as if they were all the same and their lives could be settled by a line in a law book. Hannah refused to cry. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll learn the drill.” She stood up and walked into the common room. She pulled on her smock as Betts looked on.

  “I don’t want you to minimize how you feel, Hannah. And I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate you. Not just me, all of us here. You have a great deal of love and so much to give. The connection you’ve made with Angel is a wonderful thing, a blessing for both you and the child. You’ve probably saved her life. I’m only saying, you mustn’t hold too tight. Stop by the chapel and say a little prayer before you meet Shannon. It might help.”

  Hannah looked down at the hand that took hers. The fingers were short and thick and practical looking, the veins stood up like a trail of molehills. In one she saw a pulse beating.

  “Light a candle, Hannah.”

  “For Angel.”

  “No. For Hannah.”

  The chapel—once a butler’s pantry—had been fitted with a pair of kneelers, an unadorned and ecumenical altar and a shelf of votive candles. Hannah didn’t go in, but as she watched the flickering candles a thought came to her. Something Liz had said during their conversation on Thursday. The world’s not bad, it’s just more complicated than it used to be. But for Ingrid and Eddie and kids their age, it’s just the way it should be because they’ve grown up with it.

  Was that a hopeful thought? Or profoundly depressing?

  At the end of the nursery a thin young woman with fair, raw-looking skin stood looking down into Angel’s crib.

  “You must be Shannon,” Hannah said in her best Rinconada-doctor’s-wife voice.

  Shannon’s large eyes peered at Hannah’s name tag and she laughed nervously. “‘Volunteer Mother.’ You don’t have kids of your own?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl. Grown up.”

  “She’s my baby.” Shannon pointed at the sleeping Angel. “Kinda funny lookin’, huh? I expected different.”

  Hannah remembered all the rules of conduct her mother had taught her. Smile at people you don’t like. Make strangers feel welcome. Be tolerant of those less fortunate.

  “When she first came here from the hospital, she couldn’t even be in a lighted room. She had so many seizures we had to keep her tied down for fear she’d hurt herself.”

  “I didn’t know she had fits.” Shannon’s expression registered alarm and disgust.

  In spite of herself Hannah felt
sorry for the girl. The scope of her ignorance was as real as if it stood beside them banging on a drum.

  “Crack damages the brain. Didn’t you know that?”

  Shannon lifted her shoulders and let them droop. She was so thin her shoulder bones stuck up like tabs on a paper doll. “There’s not much I don’t know about crack.”

  “Are you still using?”

  She shook her head.

  “How long has it been?”

  “A month.”

  “Not long.”

  “Feels like forever.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  Another head shake. “But I’m gonna start lookin’. There’s a place over the east side does mass mailing. You know, like junk mail?” Shannon paused. “When’s she gonna wake up?”

  “We let these babies sleep as long as they can. Sleep is precious to them.”

  “Yeah, I’m with her.” Shannon snickered.

  Hannah wanted to grab this girl and shake her; she wanted to hold her; she wanted to wring her neck on the spot.

  “It’s not because she’s sleepy. Her nervous system needs as much downtime as it can get. It’s so messed up by the drug that she can’t relax like a normal baby. When she came here from the hospital she couldn’t even cry.”

  “Shit.”

  Hannah nodded. “Shit.”

  After a moment Shannon drew a chair near to the crib and sat down so she could just see over the top of the slats.

  “I never meant to hurt her, you know. I was just stupid.”

  And you’re not now?

  Shannon put her arm across the horizontal bar on the crib and rested her chin on it so she could stare down at her baby.

  “I’m getting it together though. I’m gonna make it.”

  Hannah turned away.

  In the hall Maryann labored with a laundry hamper almost as big as she was. She gushed gratitude when Hannah volunteered for wash duty.

  Maryann said, “Angel’s mom’s applied to live here. Did Betts tell you? Remember that grant proposal we wrote last winter?”

  Hannah had typed it on her own computer. She had even paid to have it copied.

  “The city’s giving us enough money to have four mothers on-site. They can learn how to keep house and take care of their kids while they’re getting it together.” Maryann glanced back over her shoulder into the nursery. “She doesn’t seem like a bad kid. Just sort of dumb, you know?”

  “But she won’t be approved? . . .”

  “We have to start with someone, hon. If we wait for a Rhodes Scholar we’ll never get the program going.”

  “And it’s a good program,” Hannah said. She really believed this. But not for Shannon and Angel. For everyone else, but not for them. She lifted the laundry basket to her hip. “I’ll start the wash.”

  On the back porch she unloaded the clean laundry that had just finished cycling through the machine, emptied in the dirty, added soap and bleach and checked to make sure the water setting was at HOT. Lifting the basket of wet clothes, she pushed through the screen door and walked out across the dry grass to the carousel clothesline at the back of the yard. There was a dryer on the porch beside the washer, a noisy old thing; but it was only used when the weather was wet.

  Which it probably never will be again.

  Hannah ran her hands down the sheets and pillowcases she pegged to the line, feeling still the warmth from the machine as she smoothed the wrinkles and straightened the edges.

  A redwood playground apparatus filled one corner of the big hedge-enclosed yard. A contribution, a tax deduction for the manufacturer. The sandbox had chicken wire spread across it to keep the cats out. In violation of the law a plumber friend had rigged the pipes from the washing machine, diverting gray water into the vegetable garden. Tomatoes and beans and pepper plants thrived there surrounded by a frame of bright green grass.

  She thought of Shannon and Angel living together at Resurrection House. She imagined seeing the girl every day. She saw in her mind how Angel’s eyes would light when her mother was near . . . The unfairness stung her. No one as irresponsible and dimwitted as that girl—She stopped in midthought. Shannon was old enough to be a mother, but she wasn’t far removed from being a baby herself. Maybe no one had wanted her. Perhaps she had been so abused and neglected that the sight of her face would have wrung a younger Hannah’s heart in the same way Angel’s did now.

  Think what others have suffered. Her mother’s voice sawed through her head. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

  Back in the house she hauled the old Electrolux and all its cumbersome attachments out of the upstairs hall closet and began to clean the bedrooms. She hated vacuuming above all household chores, but forced herself to do it because her father had told her that doing difficult things was good for the soul and she had a feeling her soul needed help today. In the dayroom she found May who, like Maryann, had been with Betts from the beginning. Surrounded by several children she sat cross-legged on the floor, building something out of blocks.

  Hannah asked a boy about three years old, “Are you building a tower?” The boy looked at Hannah, then at May, then he pushed over the blocks. The other children began to cry. He got to his feet and walked away. By the window, he stood and kicked the peeling baseboard again and again and again.

  Hannah made an apologetic face and May shrugged.

  In the hall Hannah leaned her forehead against the wall and pressed hard. The house vibrated with the boy’s kicks and the children’s rising wails. Even if Shannon stayed off drugs and alcohol and got a job, she wasn’t going to be able to change what the chemicals had done to Angel’s brain. Too soon she would be that boy’s age. And though now she was learning slowly and responding to stimulation, school would be a nightmare. Researchers agreed about crack babies. They would struggle all their lives and probably die young.

  Monday morning and Jeanne’s head hurt.

  Actions have consequences. Don’t buy the goods if you can’t pay the price.

  How old do we have to be before we stop hearing our parents talking in our heads?

  As always the new week had begun with a full-school nine a.m. assembly conducted by Teddy. He said the weekly gathering of the student body gave purpose to the week ahead. What he really liked was the audience and never mind that Jeanne needed the time at her desk to manage problems that had arisen over the weekend. She was required onstage beside Teddy. Mr. and Mrs. Chips.

  The pain stretched across her eyes and forehead like a blindfold. She wished she could rip off the front of her face.

  Back in her office by nine-thirty if she was lucky and no teachers snagged her on the way off the stage, Jeanne learned what had gone wrong since Friday: inevitably toilets had backed up and fuses blown. Equipment lost, stolen or abandoned under the bleachers. Adolescent nicotine fiends to be lectured at. This Monday there was the particular problem of Adam Weed.

  Edith White waited in Jeanne’s outer office.

  “He’s a deceitful one,” she said, standing at Jeanne’s elbow while she unlocked the door. “All that nonsense about being in the rose cloister yesterday.”

  Jeanne poured a glass of water from a carafe on the credenza and swallowed four aspirin as Edith eased her muffin-top backside into the chair opposite the desk, pursed her lips, folded her hands, and sat as primly as a schoolgirl visiting the principal.

  “Can’t trust him.”

  “How do you know that, Edith?” Evidence is too much to hope for, Jeanne thought as she sorted through and ordered the papers on her desk.

  “Used my eyes is all. His shoes were covered with mud. He went and tracked it all over that pretty Chinese carpet in my little foyer.”

  “Perhaps he stepped in a puddle somewhere on campus.”

  “In this climate?”

  Jeanne joined several documents with a paper clip and put them in an upright file on the corner of her desk. She glanced at a pile of pink phone memos—at least a dozen from parents. Had word of Adam’s
disappearance already reached them?

  “I won’t accuse a boy of lying without proof, Edith.”

  “Jeanne, you know as well as I do, there’s not a drop of mud on these school grounds except around those rose bushes of your father’s.”

  “And that’s where he said he was.”

  “Someone would have found him there.”

  “What’s your point, Edith?”

  “He was down at that blasted creek, that’s my point.” Edith leaned forward. “Saturday a.m. when I called you, that’s the direction he was coming from. That creek’s trouble waiting to happen with only a bitty old fence—”

  “Assuming your guess is right, what would you have me do?”

  “For starters, the boy needs a good talking to.” Edith preened a little in the spotlight of her opinion. “And a little detention time wouldn’t hurt either. Then, if he does it again, I suppose Dr. Tate ought to take the paddle to him. You and me, I know we disagree on this. But to my way of thinking, a rich boy like that, he’s probably been spoiled silly. A lick or two wouldn’t hurt him. Actions have consequences and some of them hurt the backside.”

  Jeanne examined her hands and counted slowly.

  “And you got to do something about that fence before some little tyke ambles off down there and takes a fall. I tell you, Mrs. T., there’s going to be a tragedy down there, mark my words.”

  You’re a few decades late, Edith.

  Jeanne stood up. “You’re a great help. As always.”

  Edith White, looking pleased with herself, waddled out of the office and Jeanne stared after her.