“Didn’t I tell you? I was fired.” Babs pulled a cherry off its stem with her teeth.
“What?” Mia’s voice startled Tom behind the counter. She waved apologetically and continued with a softer tone. “You lost your job?”
“I did,” Babs said, her eyes glinting in mischief. “Isn’t that so romantic? I’ve never been fired before. And my first time was for the sake of my illegitimate grandchild.” Babs’s eyes filled with a longing for Wuthering Heights. “Someday I’ll be able to tell this little one how much I sacrificed to witness the birth.”
“Mother,” Mia said, blotting the sides of her cone with a napkin to catch the drips. “You should go back. This is not something to lose a job over.”
“It most certainly is,” Babs said, huffy. “I can’t think of a better cause. Besides, they’ll take me back.”
“They will?” Mia didn’t know how much stock to put in Babs’s job security awareness.
Babs waved away Mia’s concern with five nails painted Rousing Raspberry. “Of course. I’ve already had one call from Stan in personnel. I’m not easily replaced, I’ll have you know.” She pointed her plastic spoon at Mia for emphasis.
“I know.” A memory of Mia’s father sitting on the couch, head in hands and weeping quietly came back to her so forcefully, she caught her breath.
“What is it? A contraction?” Babs jumped up from the table, nearly toppling her dish of ice cream. “Oh, dear Gussie. Tom! Tom! My daughter’s going into labor!” She looked at Mia in horror. “But you still have five weeks left!”
Mia shook her head and called to Tom. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
Tom was clutching his heart with one mottled hand. “Thank goodness. I don’t know how to deliver babies.” He shuffled to the back room, face still etched with panic.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Babs lowered to her chair with reluctance.
“Mother, you are way too reactionary,” Mia said. She took a deep breath. “When you said you were irreplaceable, I had a memory of Dad right after you left.”
Babs’s eyes clouded over and she picked up the dish of melting ice cream. “What did you remember?”
“Coming into the living room and seeing him on the couch, holding his coat over his face and crying into it to muffle the sound. He didn’t know I was watching.”
Babs picked at the few remaining spoonfuls of cream. She waited so long to speak, Mia thought the conversation was over. When she looked up at Mia, her eyes were large and sorrowful. “I know you weren’t there to see it and that you have no reason to believe me on this, but the divorce was very hard on me, too.” She closed her mouth and Mia saw the muscles in her jaw flex.
“What happened?” Mia asked. “And please give me a more complete response than ‘We grew apart.’ That has never satisfied.” She spoke softly and concentrated on keeping her emotions in check. This was the closest Mia had come to a civil conversation with her mother about the divorce. She didn’t want Babs to abort the mission before they got to new territory.
“What happened?” Babs repeated quietly. She folded a paper napkin into a neat triangle. “We spent nearly twenty years building a marriage that was completely out of balance. Your dad and I both made lots of mistakes, lots of teeny steps toward not knowing each other, not loving each other well. And in one quick motion I kicked the whole, fragile thing to the ground and took off.” The words seemed to pain her. She closed her eyes briefly, wincing. “It must sound cliché, but I couldn’t take the cage anymore.” She stopped abruptly, jarred back into the moment and her present company. “Your father was a good man, Mia. We all have our faults, but he was a good man.”
“Mother, please.” Mia pleaded with her eyes. “I’m a grown woman. I need more of the truth to make sense of what happened. Please.”
Babs swallowed hard. “He was very controlling. Nothing that you would have noticed. Most of what happened occurred between the two of us. We were very careful to shelter you and John from any conflict we had.” She shrugged. “Maybe that was a bad idea. When the whole façade shattered, you two were so shocked. The rug was pulled right out and you didn’t even know there was a floor underneath.”
Mia watched her mother’s face. “I do remember some things. Like waking up in the middle of the night and hearing you two argue.”
Babs raised an eyebrow. “We tried keeping it down.”
“Did you go to counseling?”
Babs snorted. “I tried it. But your dad thought it was a waste of money. And since the money was his to distribute …” She faltered. “Listen, I wasn’t innocent, either. I said things, did things to get his attention that, looking back, were only adding fuel to the fire instead of quenching it.” Her face softened. “In many ways we stayed at the emotional maturity we were when we married. We were so young,” she said, her head shaking in retrospective disbelief. “I was eighteen. He was not even a year older. We should have grown up together, but we didn’t.”
Myriad questions peppered Mia’s thoughts, but she settled for one. “Did you love him?”
“To the very last,” Babs said without hesitation. “I suppose a part of me will for the rest of my life. I was free without him, but a marriage binds you in ways that go further and deeper than the license and the ring. I will always love him.” Her voice caught. She began to unravel the folded napkin before her.
Mia watched her mother, feeling like a voyeur in such a moment of raw grief. The two women sat there, holding the sorrow between them, cradling it carefully lest it wash over its cracked and broken surface and bring them to their knees.
The window air-conditioning unit in Mia’s apartment provided a grumpy soundtrack to the silence in the room. Mia, Adam, Frankie, and Babs hovered over the Scrabble board, waiting again for Frankie to take her turn.
“We need a time limit,” Mia said. She shifted her weight to her right side, taking a sharp breath when pain in her sciatic nerve hollered from her hip.
Adam’s face was eighty percent compassion, twenty percent goof. “Sorry. Anything I can get you? I can run down to the store. We got an extra shipment of Vicks VapoRub. My dad uses it for everything.”
Frankie snorted but Babs nodded. “Your father is a wise man, Adam. In addition to clearing up blocked sinuses, Vicks has been known to soothe earaches, prevent tooth decay, and build strong bones. I had a cruiser once who said she used it in her banana bread to clear up a head cold.”
“Really?” Adam was intrigued.
“Ignore her,” Mia said. “Frankie, seriously. Take your turn or Adam will run and get Vicks and then he and Babs will be lost to the evening.”
Adam grinned at his wooden squares and his low laugh made Mia’s heart jump. She quickly averted her eyes downward and took inventory of her game pieces.
“All right, all right, testy pregnant one. I’m ready.” Frankie set down her pieces with a flourish and spread her hands in victory. “Xanadu. Sixty million points for using an x and an extra fifty thousand for being so culturally aware.” She grinned at the group and commenced an awkward victory dance involving an excess of elbows.
“What’s a xanadu?” Babs asked. She wrinkled her face with the word as if she feared the definition had to do with a tropical fungus or unsightly face rash.
Mia rolled her eyes. “Really bad Olivia Newton-John film, circa 1980. Currently experiencing a rebirth as a kitschy Broadway production in New York.”
Adam let out a low whistle. “Impressive, Frankie. Both in terms of points racked and knowledge of the music theater scene. Too bad you can’t use proper nouns.”
Frankie whined as Adam cleared the board of her pieces and did his own version of a victory dance.
Babs sighed and fell back into her armchair. “I’ll never win at this game. And to be honest, I don’t care a who-diddy. I hated playing it as a child,
I hated playing it as a housewife in Highlands Cove, and I hate playing it with you young people who know what’s showing in New York City.” She smiled sweetly at Adam. “I only came because Adam asked me so nicely.”
Mia took great pleasure in seeing Adam blush. “He is a nice boy, isn’t he?” She reached over and pinched one of his cheeks.
“Shut up,” he said like a surly adolescent, though the spark in his eye betrayed how much he enjoyed her ribbing. “I merely brought your mother a box of Godiva dark and a slice of toffee caramel cheesecake from our deli.” He lowered his voice. “You have the same gift waiting in your fridge.”
“I heard that!” Frankie said, already up from her chair and skipping for the kitchen. “What? Don’t best friends count for anything? Adam, you must assume the best friend will want Godiva dark too.”
They could hear her rustling around in the fridge when the telephone rang.
Adam jumped up from the couch. “You sit,” he said to Mia. “Pregnant people don’t need to answer phones.”
“Well, la-ti-da.” Babs’s blue shadow framed bulging eyes. “Must be nice to have someone dote on you in your condition.” She looked at Mia knowingly.
“He’s a very good friend to me, Mother,” Mia said. She drew out the consonants to dispel any doubts.
“Mia.” Adam had one hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s someone from St. Jude’s Hospital.” He shrugged and whispered, “She said she was calling from labor and delivery.”
“Do they make advance calls now?” Babs said in a loud voice. “Like reservations at a hotel?”
Mia took the phone from Adam. “Hello?” she said.
“Mia Rathbun?” The woman at the other end sounded like she had a cold.
“Yes, this is she.”
“My name is Claudia. I’m an OB nurse at St. Jude’s and I’m calling about a patient, Flor Rodriguez?”
“Flor? Is she all right?” Mia’s mind raced. Flor’s due date was after hers by at least five weeks, which meant she had two months before she should be anywhere near the delivery room.
“She had her baby,” Claudia said and paused to blow her nose. “Sorry. Allergies. Ms. Rodriguez had her baby and will recover fine. The baby has been taken to NICU and will be in the hospital for a while.”
“Oh.” Mia realized she was gripping the phone so hard her fingernails had blanched. “Can I see her?”
“Yes, that’s why I called. Ms. Rodriguez has you down as an emergency contact and we nurses thought we should call. She’s been here over a day and hasn’t had one visitor. You can stop by tonight before eight o’clock. Just check in at the labor and delivery desk and they’ll point you toward her room.”
“Thank you,” Mia said and clicked to hang up. She turned to face Adam, Frankie, and Babs. “Flor had her baby. It’s in neonatal intensive care.… I didn’t even ask it if was a boy or girl.” Her eyes welled up.
Frankie sat beside her on the couch. Mia leaned into her and let her head rest on Frankie’s scrawny shoulder.
“I’ll take you to the hospital,” Adam said, already punching in a number for a cab on his cell.
“I’ll go too,” Frankie said. She hugged Mia around the shoulders. “She’s going to be okay, right?”
Mia nodded. “I think so. I can’t imagine how she feels.… I barely know her and she put me down as her emergency contact. Her mom probably didn’t even go with her to the hospital.”
Adam rose and helped Mia to her feet. “Ms. Rathbun, do you want to come?”
“Oh. Um, not exactly.” Babs’s face had a tortured expression. She looked at Mia.
“You stay,” Mia said, attempting a wobbly smile. “It’s okay. Hospitals creep her out,” she said to the friends who walked with her to the apartment door.
“I’ll just be here praying then,” Babs said, waving at the group until the door closed.
25
Pressed but Not Crushed
Flor’s eyes were closed and the room was beginning to darken as waning sunlight filtered through flimsy yellow curtains. Mia, Adam, and Frankie huddled in the doorway, watching her frail frame rise and fall with each breath. The room was spacious and with only a bed and a small sofa to fill it, Flor’s tiny body seemed overcome with the extra space, a mile separating her from the window, another mile between her and the bathroom door. Mia turned to her friends and motioned for them to leave, but Flor rustled under the bedcovers and opened her eyes.
“Hey,” she said, a shy smile spreading across her face. “Come in, you freaks.”
The three of them moved as one entity toward the bed. Frankie held onto Mia’s arm. Adam had both hands shoved into his jean pockets.
“You guys look like you’re on your way to the principal’s office,” Flor said. She pushed herself up and gained about an inch before wincing.
“Are you okay?” Mia asked. “Should we call a nurse?”
Flor let her head drop softly onto the pillow and rolled her eyes. “Just wait, sister. You’re next.”
Frankie patted Mia’s arm at a frantic pace and said nothing, content to stare with wide eyes at Flor, the wonder woman of sixteen who’d just birthed a real live baby and lived to be a smart aleck about it.
“I’m Flor,” the girl said. “I’d shake hands and all that, but maybe that can wait until I’m not hooked up to an IV.”
“I’m so sorry. Flor, these are my friends, Frankie Irving and Adam Malouf.”
A round of soft hellos circled the room. Frankie cleared her throat. “Flor, how are you feeling? And you can answer that however you’d please: emotionally, physically, spiritually …”
“Or you could say nothing,” Adam said, too loudly. “We’re cool with silence.”
“Jeez,” Flor said. “You people are crazy.” She shook her head but Mia could see in her face that she was enjoying the attention. “Well, let me see. I just squeezed something the size of a cantaloupe through an opening that’s normally about the width of a grape. Maybe a lime, if the need arises.” She cast a glance at Adam, who was taking great care to memorize the serial number on a beeping monitor. “Sorry, dude. Just being honest.”
Adam nodded quickly. “You know, I think you ladies might be more comfortable, and Lord knows I would, if I spent some quality time in the waiting room. Flor,” he looked into her face and couldn’t suppress a grin, “good work.”
“Thanks,” she said. She raised her hand for a high five and he complied.
“A five,” he said, relief spilling out of his voice. “I know what to do with a high five. And in more mundane circumstances, I feel very comfortable with citrus fruits and their respective sizes, but—”
“We’ll see you downstairs, Adam,” Frankie said. She turned his shoulders to the door and he nearly skipped out.
Flor laughed and looked at Mia. “You should totally go out with him. He’s really cute. And he talks funny.” She nodded. “It’s important that a relationship maintain a sense of humor and unpredictability.”
Mia cocked her head to one side. “Excuse me?”
Flor shrugged. “One of the nurses brought me an old Marie Claire this afternoon. There’s some really great advice in that thing.”
“So … where’s your mom?” Mia tried to keep her tone casual.
“Probably at work. I’m not sure.” Flor picked at the fuzz on the hospital blanket. “She left a message with the desk that she’d come by sometime today but I haven’t talked with her yet.”
“And the baby?” Mia leaned her elbows on the railing of the bed. She wanted to hold Flor’s hand, hug her, do something more tangible for her friend when she asked this difficult question, but she stayed rooted to the floor, careful not to assume what Flor would need from her.
“The baby.” Flor sighed. “It’s a girl. She’s really tiny. Just under five
pounds.” She fixed her eyes on the ceiling as she talked. “I held her for a while after she was born. She looks like me.” Her voice broke and she closed her eyes tightly.
Mia took her hand and Frankie moved to the side table for Kleenex. She already had two rivers of black mascara forging paths down her cheeks.
“What did you decide?” Mia’s belly pushed up against the side rail.
Flor took a shaky breath and let it out slowly. She took the tissue Frankie offered. “I’m giving her up.”
They cried in silence, Frankie sitting at the foot of the bed, Mia holding Flor’s hand. Darkness continued to fall around them but no one moved toward the light.
Flor’s voice sounded prematurely ancient. “I want her so bad, it’s making me hurt. But I looked through all those files at the adoption agency, you know?” She shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “And I know I can’t take care of her like those people can. I don’t have a job, I don’t even have a diploma for a job. She wouldn’t have a dad. She’d barely have a mom.” She shook her head. “I want to do it by myself but I want to be real about it too.” Her shoulders slumped under the hospital gown.
Mia clung to Flor’s hand as she wept.
Frankie blew her nose in a most unladylike way. Mia startled, which made Flor laugh.
“Sorry,” Frankie said, shaking her head. “I can make a lot of noise through this schnoz.” She blew again to prove her point. “But since I have your attention,” she said, pulling another tissue out of the box, “I want you to know.” She searched Flor’s eyes through the semidarkness. “You are the most courageous woman I have ever met.” Frankie bit her lower lip as it trembled.
A new wave of hot tears fell down Flor’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll try to remember that. Because I don’t feel very brave right now.”
The baby pulled what might have been an elbow or a foot across the middle of Mia’s belly and she instinctively placed her hand on her womb. She kept one hand firmly gripping Flor’s, watching the care with which Frankie poured a glass of water for the girl. She could hear the musical voice of Silas’s pastor at Ebenezer Church, lifting and falling while he exhorted his congregation to bear each other’s burdens. This burden, she thought, hurts with its weight. She brushed a strand of cocoa-colored hair off Flor’s brow. But it will not crush us. There, in that darkened and quiet room at the bedside of a young and abandoned mother, they were not crushed.
Stretch Marks Page 19
