by Sara Zarr
I sit on the bed and look around, trying to think like Mandy. Not easy.
Then she walks in, swathed in a huge yellow towel, the ends of her hair dripping on her shoulders.
“Hi,” I say.
“I don’t have your hair iron.”
“Close the door.”
She does.
I try to channel my dad. How he’d be gruff but not scary. “What’s the deal with the watch?”
She pulls her towel around her tighter, and her eyes shift around the room, landing on a stack of books on the bedside table. “What watch?”
The top book is the one my mom has always had in this room, for guests. It’s an anthology of poems. Underneath that is a Denver visitor’s guide, also a standard item. And on the bottom is a Bible. Now, I know my mom would not have a Bible lying around. There’s a big family Bible on one of the shelves in the living room that my dad got when Grandpa died, but as far as I know, that’s it for religious texts in the MacSweeney home. I’ve never seen Mandy read anything thicker than People, let alone the Bible, but here it is by her bed.
I move the other two books aside and pick it up. It’s light, lighter than it should be.
“Don’t!” Mandy says, clutching her towel and looking toward the door.
“Mandy, calm down.” I hold the Bible in my lap. “I’m on your side, okay?”
That comes out without any thought, and I know it’s suddenly and absolutely true, an unexpected sense of loyalty based not on logic but instinct. Gut feeling.
She comes over and sits next to me, smelling like lavender and baby powder. “Did you tell your mother?”
“No.”
I open up the Bible, and there’s a hole the size and shape of a deck of cards cut into the pages. Lying in the hole, right under the first couple of lines of a psalm, is a little sandwich bag. I take it out, unzip it, and find:
An address label that’s been torn off an envelope or magazine or something, with the name ALEX PEÑA on it.
Some neatly folded twenty-dollar bills—I don’t know how many.
A key, like a house key, not a car key.
A cheap-looking necklace made of light blue beads.
An Iowa state ID card.
An expensive-looking gold watch. “Is this real?” It has to be, or else her mother wouldn’t be so hysterical. I take it out and hold it up.
“Kent always said it was.”
“Your mom just called here. They know it’s missing.”
Mandy blinks, takes the watch and holds it. “He never wore it. The only reason he cares about it is for poker. He pawns it and buys it back and pawns it and buys it back all the time.”
“You gotta return it.”
“But I need it.”
“Mandy, let me tell you something about money. It’s never been a problem for this family, okay? So don’t worry about it. My mom will do the right thing if you need help. She always does.”
While Mandy stares at the watch, I pull out her ID. Amanda Madison Kalinowski. In her picture, her eerie eyes stare out from behind her big hair. I waste all kinds of time checking out her height and weight and address and wondering why she’s not smiling. She just looks kind of stunned. What grabs me is her birth date. Not because there’s anything weird about her age—that checks out—but because her birthday is March 18. This Thursday.
“Hey,” I say, “you’re—”
“Jill?” Mom’s voice sounds about halfway up the stairs.
I grab the watch out of Mandy’s hand, stuff it and everything else back into the Bible, and put the Bible back under the stack. By the time Mom knocks on the door, I’ve got three hanks of Mandy’s thick hair in my hands, pretending to be making a braid. “Yeah?” I call.
Mom opens the door, looking as surprised as I feel that I’m in here. “Oh. Jill, do you know where the soup pot is? The big one Dad used for chili?”
I drop Mandy’s hair and stand up.
“Let me come down and help you look.”
Mandy
You have to go to the doctor a lot when you’re pregnant. We’re up to once a week now, and after one month and three appointments, Dr. Yee still doesn’t like me. I don’t think she believes anything I say even though I mostly tell the truth now.
“What did you have for breakfast, Mandy?” She gives me a little finger stick to check my blood sugar, plunging the lancet in quick and without much warning, as if it’s not something that hurts.
“Whole-wheat English muffin,” Robin says, “with an egg and some soy sausage. Herb tea. Orange juice, but not too much.”
It’s true. That is what I ate, and since I knew I was coming to the doctor, I didn’t also have any of the organic peanut clusters I usually have as breakfast dessert. The meter beeps. “Could be better, but not bad,” Dr. Yee says.
She takes my blood pressure. “Okay. Could be better.”
I’m under stress, I want to say. Of course it could be better.
She measures me and does the handheld thing that monitors the baby’s heart rate. It has a name—she told me last time, but I forgot. I wait for her to say “Could be better” again, but she pats my arm and smiles. “Everything’s where it should be.” Robin beams. Then Dr. Yee tells me to get dressed and that when she comes back, she wants to talk to us both. My heart beats a little faster than usual; from the sound of Dr. Yee’s voice, it’s like I’m about to get in trouble. Robin is happy, though, checking her phone every now and then because she has a meeting to get to after this. While I button up the soft new cardigan, she catches my eye and smiles more. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? How close we are.”
“It is.” Sitting with Jill on her bed Saturday morning, the hug from Dylan the week before that, meeting Jill’s friend Clark, shopping with Robin, the way Jill promised not to tell about the watch and said she was on my side and would help me send it back with the right insurance and everything. It’s true; we’re all getting closer every day, and so much has happened.
“Just three or four weeks now,” Robin adds.
Then I understand. She’s talking about how close we are to the baby coming. How close the due date is. Not how close we are, not how we’re practically a family. Dr. Yee comes back in. “Get comfortable,” she says to me, pointing to a chair I could move to from the end of the exam table, where I’m sitting now.
“I am comfortable.”
Dr. Yee sits in the chair and angles it so she can look at both me and Robin at the same time. “I wanted to talk to you about delivery day.” Her voice is serious, her stare direct.
“Good,” Robin says, nodding. “Me too. It’s been a while. I’m sure things have changed since I gave birth to Jill.”
“Oh, we’ll go over all that. What I mean is…” She looks at the wall above my head. “Have you thought about who’s going to be in the delivery room? Have you thought about the time period following the birth, the hours and days right after?”
“No,” Robin says. “Well, of course, we’ll figure it out.”
“What I mean is,” Dr. Yee says again, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, “I know you feel like your situation is unusual, but I’ve been through a few adoption births.” Now she’s speaking only to Robin, as if I’m not here. “Have you thought about things like whether you want Mandy to be allowed to hold the baby after she’s born, or do you want the baby given directly to you? If you want to allow Mandy to breastfeed for a period of time?”
Allowed to hold the baby?
“What I’m asking is,” Dr. Yee continues, still only to Robin, “have you decided when, exactly, the baby becomes yours? When you become the mother?”
Robin glances at me. Her eyes fall to my belly, then climb back to my face. “Well. We… there’s a conversation, I know, to be had, but… what do most people do?”
Dr. Yee leans back, including me again. “Every situation is unique. I’ve seen birth mothers and adoptive parents choose from a range of options. Normally there’s a social worker around, helping them make th
ese decisions and helping them stick to them. I know you hadn’t planned to go that route, but the hospital does have some social workers on staff, and if you like—”
“No,” I say.
“Maybe we should think about it, Mandy,” Robin says. Her voice is unsteady. “Just one meeting to talk it through.”
“No.” She can’t do this to me now, when everything is going so well and Jill finally likes me and everything. I can’t look at her. “You promised.”
“We don’t have to do what they say. It’s still totally up to us.”
Dr. Yee stands up. “You’ll figure it out. I just wanted to bring it all up while there’s still time to sort through your options.” She smiles, like this is a regular appointment, like nothing has happened here that anyone has to worry about. “See you next week!”
In the car, Robin changes the station every sixty seconds and doesn’t talk. She wants to, I can feel it, but she won’t. I look out the window. It’s a pretty day—blue sky, the last snowfall melted. People walking dogs, holding coffee cups, doing yard work in front of the nice old houses. Like a scene from TV.
Dr. Yee had talked to Robin like this was her decision. When I’m the one who is making this all happen.
Robin and Dr. Yee, they’re on the same side. Everything works out for people like them. They’ve lived a life where things go according to plan. They had good childhoods and college and then a career. I bet everyone in their lives followed the rules of the system and the system gave them back an A+ and said, “Here is your perfect life.” They don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us who don’t have a system or don’t know about the system or are forced to live with people who break all the rules, all of them, about what a responsible adult is, about paving the way for your child to wind up in a doctor’s coat or to be needed at meetings that decide things for a whole city.
I know Robin’s husband died, and that’s not part of a perfect life. But everyone dies eventually. That happens no matter what.
Jill, she’s on their side, too. Part of their life. She may be on my side about keeping the watch secret from Robin, but that’s only because she loves her mother and knows it would upset her, and you protect people you love. That’s how it should be. And it’s easy for her to say money is never a problem and that Robin always does the right thing. What if we disagree about the right thing? The person with the money and the house and the good job gets to decide.
As we drive into Robin’s neighborhood—which, until fifteen minutes ago, I’d started to think of as my neighborhood—the houses get nicer and trees tower over them, stretching their branches to protect the families inside. The cars driving down the street aren’t rusty or too loud. Drivers stop at the stop signs. People keep their bird feeders filled so that little sparrows and chickadees can live through winter. All the people here have everything they need, and on top of that they have most of what they want. Still they want more.
What I know is this:
I’m the only one who’s ever been on my side.
And this is my baby. My baby. Mine.
When Jill gets home from school, I ask if I can use her laptop while she’s at work tonight. After a hesitation she agrees, if I let her log out of her e-mail and everything first.
Robin and I eat leftover soup in front of the TV and don’t talk about what Dr. Yee said we should talk about. Or anything else. Usually we at least talk about her day at work and my day at home. Tonight is the first night when we don’t say anything.
After dinner I go to my room and use Jill’s computer to look on the Internet. Watches like Kent’s are selling for about eight thousand dollars. It’s not a fortune, I know that, but it’s more than I’ve ever had at once, and it would be enough to get started. To get a small life started. I wouldn’t have to live in a neighborhood like this or have a car like Robin’s, or even have a car at all. Just a little apartment. A crib. Diapers. A few toys and things, and then for eight thousand dollars’ worth of time I could think about what to do when it runs out.
I look up different towns—places that wouldn’t be too far to get to from here, since I don’t have much time to get settled, but far enough away that no one would find me. Every few minutes the computer screen blurs so bad that I have to use a tissue to clear my eyes and blow my nose. This isn’t what I wanted or planned and there’s a part of me asking, What are you doing, Mandy? Another part answers back that I only ever wanted to do this if I could make all the decisions. There’s not one single important thing in my life that I ever got to choose. Christopher, and this, which is part of that. Maybe. And I chose this for my reasons. I thought Robin understood. She promised we would do this my way; she promised it all along.
It’s right here in my e-mail, in the account I set up just for talking to Robin, the one I always used from the library. I’ve saved everything including her post on the Love Grows website that first made me write to her:
DO YOU HAVE A HEART THAT NEEDS A HOME? I HAVE A HOME IN NEED OF A HEART.
Hello. I’ve never done anything like this before. Where should I start…
I’m a fifty-two-year-old professional woman living in a major urban area of the Intermountain West. I am successful in my business, own my home in a good neighborhood and good school district outright, and have more than sufficient retirement savings.
That all sounds so formal. I should cut to the chase instead of dropping this bomb at the end of it all: My husband of nearly twenty-five years died suddenly this past April.
And she said even though she was still grieving, she felt hopeful about the future.
I will never marry again, but I’m not ready to call it quits on love. He and I talked for years about adopting a baby but foolishly never got the ball rolling, which is why I’m here at this site.
She wrote about her daughter, who was graduating and moving out soon, but didn’t say Jill’s name. She said love is something you do, and if no one is there to receive it, it’s incomplete. She said it’s like an electric current with nowhere to plug in. No one soaks up love like a child, she said.
As you will find out, your children are your heart. Let me give your heart a home, if that’s what you’re looking for.
I remember reading this on December twenty-eighth at the library, where I’d started to look up information on adoption. In most of the posts I found, women and couples were practically begging, desperate, with long stories about how many years they’d tried to have a baby on their own until they finally gave up and decided to adopt, or God told them to adopt. There were a lot of religious people. There were a lot of people trying to make themselves sound perfect. A lot of people posted pictures of themselves, and every time I saw a picture of one of these men, one of these potential fathers, I worried: What if he turned out to be a Kent kind of a person? I know most men aren’t, but some are.
A lot of the sites were run by agencies, and all the communication happened through a between person. Love Grows was different. Just people who posted vague things in public, and then everything specific happened in e-mail. I saw the post on the twenty-eighth and thought about it for a few days, and then on New Year’s Eve, while Kent and my mother were out, I got onto Kent’s computer to write to Robin. Normally I’d wait until I could get to the library computer, but I didn’t want someone else to get her before I did. So I wrote to her and then deleted all my history so Kent couldn’t see. The next time I checked at the library, Robin had written back, and we made our promises. I believed in her. Until today, when she and Dr. Yee were talking about me being “allowed” to do things like hold the baby, and when Robin said maybe we should use a social worker.
I can’t believe she did that.
She should know that children aren’t sponges only for love.
They soak up whatever they’ve been given.
My whole life has been one big broken promise.
I don’t know why I thought this could be any different.
Jill
By Tuesday nigh
t at work, I’ve not only not listened to Ravi’s messages, I’ve deleted them. His text only said, “Did you get my messages?” Whatever I told myself about it being no big loss if I messed up with him was clearly a shameless lie; otherwise I wouldn’t be so scared to know what he thinks of me.
Annalee is in a pissy mood, closing the register drawer harder than necessary, snapping at Ron the one time he’s not at the customer service booth when someone wants help, and striding through the store with her long skirt making angry I’m too busy to help you swishy noises that I can hear from six aisles away. When I finally catch her in a standing-still moment, compulsively neatening a stack of remainders, I ask, “Is Ravi… R.J…. going to be around tonight?”
“How should I know?” She swishes away from the remainders over to an adjacent endcap, where she continues her needless arranging. “He doesn’t work here. He works for the region. He could be at any of the stores, or none of them.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not his boss.”
“Okay.”
“If you need him to come here for some reason, talk to Corporate.”
“Okay, but…” I catch Ron’s eye from the customer service booth, and he gives his head a tight little shake and clears his throat, which I take as a warning to back off. “All right,” I tell Annalee. “Thanks.”
She mumbles something else, which I don’t ask her to repeat, and stalks off toward the café. It doesn’t take a genius to gather that something has gone down between her and Ravi.
I’d counted on him coming in tonight; seeing his face when he sees mine will tell me more than any voice mail ever could. I want to apologize. I want to tell him it’s not like I want to be suspicious of every good thing and push it away before it can hurt. I want to trust the world again. Trust friendship.
