Giftchild

by Janci Patterson

  We didn't drag ourselves out of the waves until a kid on a boogie board nearly ran us over, and then Rodney pulled me to my feet and held my hand up the beach and all the way back to the car. We drove to the point above Seabright beach and made out in the front seat as the sun went down over the ocean. Even in my memory it felt more frantic and silly than romantic. Kissing Rodney was always like that.

  But now we weren't doing anything silly, or frantic. We were just standing in my kitchen like we did on all the mornings that Rodney drove me to school.

  Rodney raised his eyebrows at me as he finished his orange juice. "What?" he asked.

  "Just admiring your juice-chugging skills," I said.

  He grinned. "I am the champion."

  My return smile twitched, but Rodney didn't seem to notice.

  Argh. I wasn't ready to bring sex up with Rodney when I'd just begun to think about it myself. What would we talk about on a normal day?

  Physiology, and not the sexual kind. Until that moment, I'd forgotten about the exam. We both had that class before lunch, so there wasn't much time left to study. Rodney had the test first period, and I had it third. At this moment, I couldn't remember half the terms that would be on it. Maybe if we'd been labeling reproductive anatomy, I'd have had better luck.

  "Are you ready for the test?" I asked.

  "I think I might need a donut to get my brain running. You mind stopping by the grocery store?"

  I looked at the clock. We had time, if we hurried. "Sure," I said. "As long as it's your treat."

  "A whole donut," Rodney said. "I don't know that my wallet will ever recover."

  I stiffened. The donuts were always his suggestion, so him paying for me didn't make it a sign of our relationship status or anything. Yesterday I wouldn't have worried about it. But today that month since we'd last made out seemed like a long time. He didn't kiss me in the tree. But he'd wanted to, hadn't he?

  Was I crazy thinking he'd even want to have sex with me?

  On the way to his car, Rodney glanced at me sideways. "You're quiet today," he said. "Are you that worried about the test?"

  "Maybe," I said.

  "You always do fine," Rodney said. "Even after you worry."

  Today I wished that was the biggest thing on my mind.

  Chapter Four

  Week One

  After school, Rodney had a chess match. On chess club days, I sometimes waited around for him and sometimes I caught a ride with Kara. I could always text my mom for a ride, but today, I didn't want to. That was selfish, and I knew it. If she was lying at home in a pool of darkness, I should call to drag her out.

  But instead, I called Athena. She answered on the fourth ring. "Hey," I said. "Are you busy?"

  "I should be," Athena said. "I'm supposed to be writing a paper, but my eyes were crossing."

  "Can I come over?" I asked.

  "Sure. Can you catch the bus?"

  "No problem." That was the benefit of having Athena on the college campus; the bus went straight there. I texted Mom to tell her where I was going, got off the bus at the student center, and hiked up the stairs to the dorms. When I arrived at the foot of her high rise, I texted Athena so she could come downstairs and let me into the building. She opened the door in her pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, her long brown hair pulled back.

  "Didn't you have class today?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "Yeah. I changed when I got back."

  We ran up the stairs to her room, Athena's ponytail swinging to the waistband of her PJs. "How's Mom?" she asked. "I'm guessing it's bad, right?"

  I groaned. "She and Dad had a fight about whether they're going to try again."

  Athena looked at me over her shoulder. "So that's why you're here."

  I rolled my eyes. "I also like you a little."

  Athena waved a hand dismissively. "I'm avoiding my paper; you're avoiding home. I'm not going to judge you."

  We reached the top of the stairs. Athena unlocked her door and flopped onto her bed. I sat next to her with my legs crossed under me. "Thanks for letting me come over," I said.

  "Stay as long as you want," Athena said. "Though you can't avoid Mom entirely unless you move in."

  She was right. The last adoption, Mom didn't fall apart completely until the week after she lost the baby, when she had to face her next period. Some girls tracked their own periods on a calendar, but I tracked Mom's. If I wasn't careful during those days, I might be the one who made her cry.

  Mom was only thirty-four. We still had a lot of years of periods ahead of us.

  Athena kicked her feet up, resting her heels on the wall. "So did you hear if they decided anything?"

  I played with the edge of her blanket. "No. Mom wants to do in vitro again. Or international adoption."

  Athena rolled her eyes. "If they'd done that the last time, they might have a baby by now."

  "Maybe," I said. "But don't say that to Mom."

  Athena shook her head. "She won't listen, anyway."

  I picked up a piece of lint and rolled it between my fingers. "Then Dad told her that he didn't want to watch her go through it again."

  Athena's eyes widened. "Really? I didn't think Dad had it in him."

  I sighed. "Yeah. And then Mom left the house."

  Athena looked up at the ceiling. "Even odds say by tonight they'll both be pretending he never said that."

  That would be better, wouldn't it? Except then we'd be going through this again in a few months, back in this same place like we were riding a horrible merry-go-round none of us knew how to get off.

  Athena ticked us off on her hands, "You avoid Mom. I avoid homework. Mom avoids the truth—"

  "Please," I said. "You avoid Mom, too. Don't even."

  "Fine," Athena said. "But now that I don't live there, I can pretend that I don't."

  "And the truth!" I said. "That's three for you, and one for each of us. You lose."

  "Or I win," Athena said. "Ding ding ding! The most out-of-the-house award goes to—"

  I kicked my legs out from under me and flopped down next to her. "You know, if I wanted to talk about this stuff, I would have gone home."

  "No," Athena said. "When you want to avoid things, you talk to Mom and Dad. You come to me when you want to discuss."

  I sat up and looked at my bare arm where a watch might have been, if I wore one. "Gee, look at the time. Guess I should get—"

  Athena smacked me in the arm. "Shut up. You just got here. If you want to talk about something else, tell me about Rodney. Is he calling himself your boyfriend yet?"

  I lay back down, taking up half of Athena's pillow. "No," I said. "And he won't be anytime soon."

  "Please. I dated Taren all through high school, and our relationship looked exactly like yours."

  I couldn't decide if I hated or loved the way Athena had to announce everything that she thought. Mom hated it—they fought all the time when Athena lived at home.

  For me, I think it was half and half.

  "And you broke up as soon as you graduated," I said, "which proves my point."

  "Touché," Athena said. Though that wouldn't stop her from bothering me about it next week. She was a little stuck on labels, but Rodney and I were better than that. We didn't need the label to know that we cared about each other.

  I closed my eyes. Though, having a label would have made it more clear whether I could, say, have sex with him without screwing everything up. "Why didn't you sleep with Taren?" I asked. I knew she hadn't, because two weeks after graduation, he dumped her for a girl who would.

  Athena's eyebrows disappeared under her bangs. "Where did that question come from?"

  I waved a hand in the air, trying to play it off. "I was just wondering. You think you're the only one who gets to pry?"

  She laughed. "I was scared of getting pregnant. You'd think I wouldn't have been, 'cause of Mom."

  I froze. "Because you would have given the baby to her?"

  Athena's mouth dropped open. "No,
psycho. You think I want to be one of her pet birth moms?"

  "Ouch." That was harsh, even for Athena. I didn't want to be Mom's pet.

  I probably shouldn't have taken it as such a slap to the face. Athena tried to fly under Mom's radar as much as possible. She wouldn't be able to handle Mom paying that much attention to her. But Mom and I got along fine. Plus, it would only be for nine months.

  Athena rolled her eyes. "I meant because she's proof getting pregnant isn't always that easy."

  My stomach dropped. Way to be obvious, Penny. "Oh. Right."

  Athena didn't even notice. "I think dealing with her just made me hyper-aware of the possibility." She gave me a suspicious look. "But seriously, why do you ask?"

  I held up both palms in surrender. "I was just wondering, that's all. I swear." I sounded guilty, though. After that comment about Mom, would Athena put two and two together?

  She squinted at me. "You and Rodney aren't having sex, then?"

  Oh. That's what she thought I sounded guilty about. "No," I said. "Not yet."

  She grabbed the sleeve of my t-shirt and dug her fingers in. "Not yet? Didn't you just finish telling me about how you're not even together?"

  "Um," I said. She had a point. If we did have sex, what would that make me? Not a slut, exactly. Easy? Not if it took four years of friendship, right?

  "But really," Athena said, "why would you want to sleep with the guy if you're not committed?"

  My face flushed. Why indeed.

  Her eyebrows waggled dramatically. "Unless you are together. . ." Her mouth dropped open, waiting for me to fall into her trap.

  Not a chance. "It was a hypothetical! I'm not planning anything."

  Athena snorted. "You guys must be doing something, if you're thinking about it."

  "We've made out a few times." Or forty or fifty, over the years.

  Athena rolled over on her side so she could look me in the eye. "Just be careful. Even Mom got pregnant quick, when she was our age."

  Literally our ages, now that I thought about it. With Athena when she was my age, and with me when she was Athena's. "I know," I said.

  And I did know. That's what I would be banking on—that I could get pregnant quick, when Mom couldn't, anymore.

  Jeez. What was I thinking?

  Athena was right. I was a psycho.

  Athena played with the end of her hair. "And it's not just that. Having sex without commitment complicates everything, because it means different things to girls than it does to guys. My roommate comes home after spending the night at a guy's place, and she thinks they're really together, you know? But to the guy, nothing's changed. Spending the night didn't make them any closer than they were before, and it certainly didn't mean a commitment."

  Ouch. "Sucks for Wendy," I said.

  "Yeah," Athena said. "But especially with Rodney not even being your boyfriend . . ."

  Please. Even the label of husband hadn't been enough to keep our birth dad around. Kara thought being Ryan's girlfriend meant they'd last, but they obviously didn't. I sighed. "But if sex isn't a big deal to him, then it wouldn't mess up our friendship any, right?"

  Athena's eyes went wide. "That's not what I meant for you to get out of that story."

  I sat up. "It's okay," I said. "I get it. Don't worry."

  But Athena was still studying me. I climbed off the bed.

  "Really," I said. "Thanks for letting me talk about this stuff."

  Athena lowered her feet over the edge of the bed and crossed her arms over her chest. "You haven't really said much. I've just been lecturing you, which I know isn't helpful. I'm sorry, okay?"

  "I'm fine," I said. "Really."

  "And you don't have anything else you want to tell me?"

  I shook my head slowly.

  But once again, Athena didn't look convinced.

  When I got home that night, Dad's truck wasn't in the driveway. At this point he might just be working late, but another twenty minutes would push it over into clear avoidance territory.

  So that made all of us.

  I walked through the door to find a stack of brown paper bags lining the floor of the living room. In the bags were stacks of onesies, diapers, even the mobile that had been hanging above the baby's bed. I could hear noise coming from upstairs, and I went up to find Mom lying on her back on the floor of the nursery, ratchet in hand, disassembling the crib.

  "Mom," I said. "What are you doing?"

  "What does it look like I'm doing?" she asked. I'd expected anger in her voice, even tears, but she sounded calm.

  I steadied one side of the crib for her. "This isn't what Dad meant for you to do."

  She sighed. "So you heard."

  "Yeah," I said. "Let's put this back together before he gets home, okay?"

  "I already talked to your father," she said, pulling the side off the crib. "He's fine with it."

  I slowly lowered my side of the crib, so the pieces rested on the floor on either side of Mom. "Okay," I said. "We can put everything in the closet, and you can put it back up when you're ready."

  Mom shook her head decisively. "No. Your dad's right. I have to deal with reality. I have two daughters, and that's enough." Her jaw set, like she was determined to believe that, even though she didn't. And with good reason. If Mom could really just give up on a child so easily, she would have done it years ago.

  "Reality can change," I said.

  Mom gave me a hard look, like she didn't believe that, and didn't think that I could, either. And I felt a sudden stabbing of guilt that I hadn't thought about getting pregnant earlier. If I had, could I have saved us from these last few years of pain? Would Mom already have a baby in the nursery? Would she have been spared waiting so long that she felt the need to take apart the crib?

  Even in the bright light of the nursery, long shadows stretched across her face. If she gave up now, I'd be looking at them for the rest of our lives. If I had children someday, I'd know she wished it was her.

  And I'd know that it could have been her, if I'd just tried harder to help her. I sank against the doorway, and that's when I knew.

  I had the power to change my mother's life. It would be selfish of me not to do it. "Please, Mom," I said. "Let's store it in the garage. For now."

  Mom hesitated, and a flicker of hope crossed her face—not for long, but long enough for me to know that this is what she wanted. She didn't want to give up hope. She just didn't want to live with the pain anymore.

  I could fix that. I could make it better. And if the last years were any indicator, I was the only one in the world who would.

  "Please?" I said again.

  Mom looked around at the remnants of the crib, and nodded. "At least then it will be out of the way."

  "Exactly," I said. Mom's dreams, tucked quietly out of sight—far enough away that the reminder wouldn't sting, but not so far as to be out of reach.

  Chapter Five

  Week Two

  The next morning I caught Dad in the hall, looking at the empty nursery. When he heard me behind him, he shut the door and turned toward me, rubbing his forehead.

  I stood in my doorway and leaned against the frame. "I convinced her to leave everything in the garage."

  Dad's eyes looked tired, and it was only seven AM. "That's probably for the best." His eyes caught on one of the baby pictures hanging in the hall—a portrait of Athena holding me, when she was three and I was barely one year old. Dad looked away quickly and faked a smile at me, but as he did, the same long shadows I'd seen on Mom's face stretched across his.

  I collapsed against the door frame. Dad wasn't that old, either—only thirty-two to Mom's thirty-four. Plenty of people had their first child at that age. Dad had raised Athena and me as his kids, but he'd never had a baby. He hadn't even met me until I was six. I'd seen him look at our baby pictures that way before—like he wished he could have been there. I wished that, too. He should have been my father from the very beginning.

  But he wasn't. And
Mom wasn't the only one who wanted a baby in her arms.

  "Love you, Dad," I said.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. "Love you, too. Check on your mom before you head to school, okay?"

  I nodded. "Okay."

  And then Dad walked down the stairs and headed out the door to work.

  I walked down the hall to Mom and Dad's room.

  Through the gap between Mom's door and the door frame, I could see the lump of her lying in the middle of her bed, covers wrapped around her like a cocoon.

  My stomach knotted. She rarely overslept, except on the bad days. If I was already pregnant, then she wouldn't be in this state now. I turned her door handle and pulled the door the rest of the way shut, letting go slowly to avoid even the slightest click.

  It was time to put my plan into action. I opened the hall closet to find her ovulation predictors. If I was going to get pregnant, I needed more information about what my body was doing. It had been a week or two since my period, but I wasn't sure exactly how long. But I'd been living with Mom long enough to know how to track my fertility: she'd used ovulation predictors for years.

  But as I reached for her stack of rectangular boxes, the ones she kept wedged between the extra tubes of toothpaste and tablecloths for special occasions, I found the space empty. Our red-and-green Christmas napkins slid out of the center of the tablecloth pile, the whole stack slouching into the new space.

  I sighed. The nursery wasn't the only thing Mom had been cleaning.

  In the garage, I found the place where Mom and I had stacked the crib, against the wall below the weed-whacker. I poked through the tops of the bags of onesies and burp cloths and thin, flannel blankets, but found nothing.

  I stepped back, thinking I'd try the kitchen trash, when something crunched under my foot.

  I stepped aside and looked. Where my foot had been, I found a shard of tan plastic, smaller than a dime. Amid the layers of dust and leaves and last summer's grass clippings, I found more of them—tiny, brittle chunks of plastic in irregular shapes, like someone dropped a pair of glasses, but broke only the frames.