by Sara Zarr
Also I know that what Robin said is true: This is an experience all yours, and whatever kind of relationship you have later with your baby, it ties you to them forever. My mother is tied to me, and me to her, even if we never see each other again. And I can feel sad and let some of these tears be for her.
About the hundredth time someone yells at me to push, I think, No. I would say it out loud if I thought I had the strength. I’d look at Robin and say it, but I know what she’d say back. That I have to start saying yes.
I have to start saying yes.
I give my whole body to yes.
Yes to trust, yes to a new family. Yes to hope. Yes to staying.
Yes to my daughter.
Yes to me.
Yes.
Jill
When Dylan gets here, we sit with one seat between us and keep our eyes on the nurse’s station. I tell him everything I know. We look at the magazines he got for Mandy. He did a good job; they’re super trashy, full of gossip and pictures of celebrity cellulite. We say nothing about anything until Dylan says, “I should have answered my phone that night.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He laughs. “Hello, because (A) I’m scared of you. You’re brutally frightening sometimes, Jill. And (B)—and this is the big one—I really thought I was doing the right thing. Something about Mandy, like, moves me. That day she told me about her mom. I mean, me and you…” He shifts in his chair, touches my arm, and I worry he’s going to say something about us and our couplehood and how we’ll work through this and go on. “Me and you have no freaking way to begin to begin to imagine growing up with a parent who treats us like that. My parents are cool, and yours—”
He freezes. He’s scared to mention my dad, because of the way I react when he does, the way I’ve reacted every time. Tears are already working their way up when I tell him, “Go ahead.”
“Your dad. Loved you. Like crazy. Crazy.”
I dissolve. I melt. And let Dylan scoot one chair closer and hold me and comfort me exactly the way he’s wanted to for eleven months, without me resisting or getting mad or pretending I’m okay. “I know.”
“You guys were like twins,” he says into my hair.
“It hurts so much.” And it hurts to say it hurts. The words themselves plus saying them brings on another wave of pain. “I’ve just felt… lost.”
“I know. I’m really sorry, Jill.”
After a few minutes, when I’m sure I can say it coherently, I reply. “I’m sorry, too.”
“I know.”
I sit back in my chair and make use of the box of tissues on one of the side tables. “Why have you put up with me?” I ask.
Dylan leans on his elbows. “Because I love you. I mean, I know this is kind of it for us. It’s time.”
I nod.
“But I’m still going to love you, always. And in the rock-paper-scissors of life, love is rock. Fear, anger, everything else… no contest.”
Love is rock.
“That’s deep,” I say. “You should write a song about that for the Potato Rebellion.”
“Maybe I will.”
After a little while I get up and buy a bag of pretzels from the machine in the waiting area. When I turn around, Dylan’s head is in his hands. I go to him and rest my hand on his back. “I’ll always love you, too.”
“I know.”
Mandy
They do like Robin promised. They lay her on my chest right away, and they say, “Here she is, Mandy. Here’s your daughter.”
She’s covered with goo, and I can’t see her face very well, or what her skin is like other than red and slimy, but now I understand why Robin says it doesn’t matter how this baby was made.
She is miraculous and innocent.
All possibility.
Love.
Later, when she’s washed and dried, Dr. Yee holds her up in front of me, and even Dr. Yee is smiling and maybe even a little bit emotional.
“A good head of hair on this one,” she says, beaming, stroking my daughter’s black, black hair.
I nod and touch the beads around my neck. “Just like her father.”
Jill
There’s a flurry of activity down the hall—we look up. Mom rushes into the waiting room, looking like crap but gigantically happy. She presses her hands to her mouth and nods. The doctor follows behind her and extends her hand to me. “Congratulations on the birth of your niece.”
I stand and shake the doctor’s hand. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Dylan stands, too. “Niece?”
I hug my mom, and hug her and hug her and hug her.
“We’ll explain it later,” Mom says to Dylan over my shoulder.
The doctor puts her hand on my back. “Wouldn’t you like to see her?”
Mandy Madison MacSweeney
In sixty to ninety days, that will be my legal name. Then we’ll get an amended birth certificate for Lola, and she’ll be a MacSweeney, too. Jill will be my sister. And Robin will be my mother.
And I’ll sit at this table each morning at breakfast and each evening for dinner and wake up to the cheerful orange walls, without secrets or worrying that I might mess up or thinking about when I have to leave.
Really it was Jill’s idea.
She remembered something from three years ago. Robin and Mac volunteered to help do something with foster kids. I don’t remember what. But when they did it, they learned about how some foster parents really wanted to adopt their foster children but couldn’t, because the biological parents wouldn’t give up rights or other complications. But then when the children turned eighteen and could make their own choices, the foster parents adopted them.
If it was possible to adopt adults, could Robin adopt me? Instead of the baby? Jill asked. Jill asked. That day after I thought I wanted to leave.
When Robin finally wasn’t throwing up anymore, we went down to her computer and looked online. She called her friends in the government.
“We could do this, Mandy,” she said, getting more excited with every phone call and piece of information.
And I said, “But you wanted a baby. Not a nineteen-year-old.”
I didn’t believe it could be that easy. Nothing in my life is that easy. Nothing ever has a solution that makes everyone happy. You don’t get anything without giving up something. And I knew Robin would be giving up something, and I wanted to make sure she was thinking of that and not just being scared to lose the baby completely.
She rolled herself in her office chair around to where I was sitting in another chair, across the desk. “Here’s what Mac’s death taught me about life, Mandy: Be prepared for detours. We had a whole plan. For our marriage, for Jill, for retirement and old age and burial.”
“Death changes things,” I said. “It happens and you can’t stop it. You don’t have a choice. This is different.”
“Life changes things, too.”
And then, like Lola had heard us and couldn’t wait three more weeks to change our lives with hers, my water broke. Robin started the paperwork for adopting me as soon as I was home from the hospital.
And that’s how I belong to her and she belongs to me and we all belong to each other and I’m home.
Jill
He’s there already, at our table at Dazbog, wearing old, ratty jeans and a sloppy sweater and glasses, looking devastatingly gorgeous. I can admit it to myself now without all the anxiety: Ravi Desai is one of the best-looking guys I have ever known.
Even though he’s dressed so casually, I wish I’d tried harder to look nice. But I didn’t want to seem like I was trying. Yes, we are still in that complicated phase.
“Hi,” I say, and sit down.
“I got you an au lait.” He slides the mug toward me. “That’s what you like, correct?”
“Correct.”
Mandy’s dossier is on the table between us. “Why did you want me to bring you this?” he asks, tapping it. “I assumed case closed.”
I slide it towa
rd me and flip through it, running my finger over Ravi’s handwritten notes, his printouts about adoption scams. “Hey, look.” I hold out my phone to show him the latest picture of Lola, who I’m falling for fast.
Ravi takes it. “Wow.”
“You should see her in person. She’s totally serious. Furrowed brow, stern looks. Like we’re all in trouble with her. Considering she has none of my dad’s genes, she’s an awful lot like him.”
I close Mandy’s file and push it back toward him. “I was thinking you could help us find the baby’s father. Mandy doesn’t know his last name. He lives on a reservation in South Dakota. She thinks. She knows the general vicinity.”
He puts his palms on the table. “At this point… I should probably confess: I don’t actually know how to find people. I mean, I have your basic Internet search skills, but that’s about it.”
“But when I asked about Mandy, you made it sound like—”
“Yeah. Because I wanted to impress you.”
“It worked.”
“I know.”
I laugh, and we spend a good number of seconds grinning like the fools we are.
“Did you ever think,” I say, “the night I elbowed you in the face, that we’d wind up here?”
“I hoped.”
“You did not! Did you?”
“If you’re asking when terror turned to lust, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment.”
“Lust? Is that all this is?” I’m playing, helping to keep things as light as he’s trying to. We both know that there’s a lot going on right now for me, too much to get as serious as we sometimes feel.
“Isn’t that always what it is, at first?”
“No. At first it’s friendship.” I sip my au lait and say, as if I’m indifferent, “I’m moving away, you know. Or traveling. After graduation.”
“So you’ve repeatedly claimed.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You’re an aunt now. And a sister. Family ties.”
While I still sometimes struggle to feel connected to Lola, who is alien in her baby-ness, it’s easier and easier to think of Mandy as my sister. We bicker like siblings. I’m bossy, like Ravi’s brothers. We’re different. But we experience the same life now, together.
“Do you think, maybe, you’d like to come over for dinner next week?” I ask.
“As Clark?”
“No. As you.” I hold up my au lait in a toast. “And I’ll be me.”
Mandy
The view from the train back to Omaha is different from the trip to Denver. The time of day is different, the light is different, and since then spring has come and summer is coming. Wildflowers are up, trees are leafing.
Jill, in the seat next to me, yanks out one earbud. “How long did you say? Nine hours?”
I nod. Jill groans. “I know taking the train is all meaningful for you, but I still think we should have driven. I’m going to get some coffee. Want anything?”
“Something sweet.”
“Of course.” Then she leans over Lola in my arms and talks in the voice she always uses with Lola, low and silly and with her lips pursed, trying to make Lola smile. “How ’bout you? Tea, coffee? Raspberry scone? No? All you ever want is milk. So predictable.”
Then she looks at me again and frowns, reaching to fix my hair. “You should keep it off your face. The whole point of this haircut is to show off your eyes.”
“Okay.”
After Lola was born and I could walk around again, I told Jill I wanted shorter hair, and she took me to the place where she goes. The man who cut my hair had a shaved head and three nose rings. I got scared and told him, “Don’t make me look like Jill.”
Jill put her hands out, pretend strangling me, and they laughed. I don’t know why that was so funny. The haircut turned out good, though. I’m still me, only more free-feeling.
“Mom?” Jill asks Robin, across the aisle from us. “Want anything?”
“I’d love some tea, honey, thank you.”
They’ve been getting along better. We usually all eat breakfast together now. Since Jill’s done with school, she’s not always rushing, and she’ll come down and eat at the table and not stand in the middle of the kitchen like she has somewhere else she wants to be. Sometimes if she’s up late, she’ll even sit with me in my room when I’m nursing in the middle of the night. One night I told her she didn’t have to do that, she could go to bed.
“Remember when you told me liking some people takes time?” she whispered.
I nodded.
“I’m starting early with Lola.”
Jill
Mandy thinks that once she sees the fairgrounds, which she knows how to get to, she’ll figure out how to find the reservation. It all sounds a little overly optimistic to me, but my ideas about optimism might be changing. Mandy’s been wearing the necklace Christopher gave her, and sometimes Lola reaches up and grasps it in her fingers, and Mandy is convinced this is a sign of something.
It was a summer one-night stand. Mandy says it was love. She says love is love whether it happens in five minutes or five years. Usually I just try not to laugh. But once in a while, I decide that I don’t always have to be right.
As we drive in the rental car out of Omaha and into the country, where it’s just acres and acres of green, I put my hand out the window. Life is always moving forward, forward, forward. Relentless. If someone offered me a time machine right now and I could go back to before my dad died, I would, of course, if only to see if I could save him. But then I’d want to come right back here, to face the next unknown moment and the next and the next.
Lola becomes her most quiet, serious self. Mandy says she can sense Christopher getting closer, closer. “I can feel his energy,” she says.
My dad would laugh. He’d call it all mystical bullshit. He’d say, “Take your dream catcher and sell it somewhere else, sister.”
But he was a romantic. Tenderhearted and sentimental.
Secretly he’d believe.
And so secretly, secretly, as the cornfields fly by, I believe, too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With grateful thanks to the following folks for research help: in Denver—Susan Bettger and Scott Kingry for hospitality, happy hour, rowdy stories, chauffeuring, and three memorable trips to Casa Bonita. Steve Inman for additional insights, tales, and bar service. In and about Omaha—Mark Peach, Jaafar Talha of Happy Cab, the Bookworm, the staff at the Magnolia Hotel Omaha, Sarah Sproul, Lois, Kaylie and the guy who drove me to the train station so that I wouldn’t have to haul my bags through the snow like Mandy, and the man next to me on the plane who answered all my questions about corn. Also—Mitali Perkins, Sherman Alexie, Melissa Marr, Dr. Bernadette Kiraly, and that person on Twitter who named the bookstore that employs Jill.
A debt to Bret Anthony Johnston’s Naming the World, which contains the prompt that inspired me to write this story.
Tara Altebrando is a generous and smart reader and friend. Top secret thanks to Bob.
Love and gratitude to Mike Martin, my second self, whose friendship saves my life a little every day.
Thanks to Pam Garfinkel, Victoria Stapleton, Zoe Luderitz, Barbara Bakowski, Ames O’Neill, Andrew Smith, Megan Tingley, genius Alison Impey, and the whole incredible LBYR crew for everything that helps keep the wheels of this career turning.
I would not be the writer I am without the guidance of my editor, Jennifer Bailey Hunt, who also gave me the time and space and encouragement needed to make the process good again. Thank you, Jen, for your particular wisdom when it came to this story.
Love and gratitude to my agent, Michael Bourret, who, along with God, makes all things possible.
And, always, my heart to Gordon, for being my home.
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Jill
Mandy
Jill
Mandy
Jill
; Mandy
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Mandy
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Mandy Madison MacSweeney
Jill
Mandy
Jill
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Sara Zarr
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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