“Your mama? Boyfriend?”
“No,” she panted.
“Well,” the woman said comfortingly, “that’s okay. One good parent’s one more than a lotta kids get.”
“No,” said Portia. “It’ll have two. It’s being adopted.”
Her hand, on Portia’s shoulder, seemed to turn instantly cool and even slightly clammy.
“You giving your baby away?” she said in a whisper.
Portia, in the grip of a contraction, with no breath to spare, only nodded.
“Why you wanna do that?” said the nurse. “It’s your baby.”
Astoundingly, no one in the room seemed to react to this. Perhaps they couldn’t hear it. Perhaps, thought Portia, it had not actually been said aloud.
“I have to,” she said, or possibly said.
“’Kay,” said Dr. B. “This is it.”
A hand—that same hand?—patted her shoulder.
“I have to,” she possibly said again, but louder this time. She had to say it louder, over the din of the pain.
“You gonna see your baby now,” the nurse said matter-of-factly, and Portia waved her hand to say no, she didn’t want to see the baby. Nobody had said anything about having to see the baby. Wasn’t that optional? They couldn’t make her, she thought, and shut her eyes, idiotically, like a five-year-old.
But she could hear it, crying even louder than she was crying, bitter wailing that ricocheted against the bones and the walls and the tiles. Portia pressed her hands against her ears. “Little boy,” said the most deafening voice in the world. The physical pain was suddenly gone, lifted from her like a sodden tablecloth, and now there was only the other thing: the tearing, searing agony that had irreversibly replaced it.
I don’t want to, thought Portia. She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, hands over ears. “Please,” she told the nurse, whose hand had left her shoulder, giving way to a blast of frigid air.
They had taken him to the far corner of the room, where three nurses who had come from nowhere attended him, rubbing, cutting, wrapping, lifting. The soreness was her legs, coming together. I don’t want to, she thought again.
“Would you like to hold your baby?” said a man, and it took Portia too long to realize that this was Dr. B., who could say other things aside from “’kay” after all, and that he was standing close, just past the hands covering her ears, and already holding the baby, who was also, as a result, close. Very close. She shook her head, bereft and also enraged, because hadn’t she already said no? Hadn’t she said no? Had she said no?
“I don’t want to,” Portia said to the insides of her eyelids and the insides of her hands, because if they took him now, before she truly looked and truly heard him, then she could still retain this delicate skein of not knowing. It was possible. People did it. They did it for things even worse than this, far worse than this: affairs and diseases and men who fell out of love. She remembered, quite suddenly, the man her mother had married, who had died a long and terrifying death from a disease no one understood. The Chilean musician who might have been her father but wasn’t, she thought, curling up tight on the hospital bed, kicking away the nurse at the foot of the bed who was trying to clean her and dry her. He had died childless in a hospital bed like this one, surrounded by his friends and lovers, half of whom would die soon after of the same baffling thing. His name had been Renaldo. Portia and Susannah had visited during his illness, Portia just old enough to recoil from the sores in his mouth, the furious dark patches on his arms, legs, and chest. He was a very sick man, but not a mournful man. He had swung her hand from his hospital bed. He had told her: “I wake up every morning and pretend I’m not dying.”
He could do it, and he was covered with stigmata—the world knew what he refused to acknowledge. Perhaps there was a life in that, she thought. Perhaps it will be possible to wake up every morning and pretend there was never a baby. I’ve never been here. I’m not here now. I never even opened my eyes.
“’Kay,” the man said softly. He took a step back and turned to carry the baby away. She took her hands away from her ears, and white noise came pouring in. She opened her eyes and saw white light. Of course she did not intend to look after him as he left the room. She was so close to escaping, sight unseen, but some rigid claw turned her head and held her there, insisting that she witness this tiny shock of the new: protruding from the striped hospital blanket, a head of darkest hair and a nose momentarily flattened by birth. That hair took hold of something inside her and wrung it wildly. Portia tried to sit up and made a sound she couldn’t really decipher. They had all finished with her. There was no one left in the room, even to vaguely pat her shoulder, even to disapprove.
It was just—she would later think—that she had not been expecting what she saw. Tom’s hair was blond, like his parents’ and brother’s hair. Her own hair was the same as Susannah’s: dark brown, stubbornly wavy. The meaning of this would not be immediately clear, but in the years that followed—years and months and weeks and days—she would come to understand, and with devastating impact, just what it signified. The black-haired child they took away was not only a child, but one of the very few people in the world she knew for a fact was related to her. And the only chance she would ever have to see her father’s face.
PART IV
DECISIONS
For as long as I can remember, my most important goal has been to make my way to a great university, where I could spread my academic wings and engage in intellectual exchanges with my peers. I have been thinking about this, dreaming about this and, yes, also worrying about this since I first discovered what the acronym SAT stood for. Now, all these years later, I look at what I’ve accomplished and discover, to my great concern, that I am only one of thousands just like me, ambitious and well-prepared for college, but not particularly outstanding in the context of your applicant pool. Of course, I wish that I had written a novel or won a Grammy or modeled for Vogue, but to be totally honest, I just don’t understand the necessity of completing or even beginning my life’s work by the age of seventeen. And the fact is, I was really busy with Honors Calculus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WHO AMONG US HAS DIED?
For the first time in weeks (and thanks to John), there was heat in the house, but Portia still could not seem to get warm. She lay beneath all available blankets, quilts, the duvet from her own bed and the one from the guest bed, clenched like a fist and wild for relief. She was discovering, first, that she had somehow known this would happen, that the baby she had once refused to see would one day materialize before her and force her to look at him. And also that the act of excising those nine months from her memory, and the life she had after all saved by carrying to life, and the phantom child growing without her in some unknown place with some unknown woman pretending to be her and some unknown man pretending to be Tom, was a fearful, constant presence. It was the rasping monster resurrected by the monkey’s paw, drawing closer and closer to home. It was the silent corpse of Eurydice, always a half step behind every step she had taken since Lawrence, Massachusetts. She did not remember ever actually deciding to tell no one, but she had never told, never even considered telling. Instead, she had filled the place her son might have occupied with shame. Shame: like poured cement, assuming exactly the dimensions of the missing child.
But shame about what, exactly? Portia refused, then as now, to feel disgrace at having become pregnant at the age of twenty. She declined to apologize for not choosing to terminate, bizarrely old-fashioned as that was. Even now, she wasn’t completely sure why she had done it. She hadn’t, after all, been shunned by her family, thrown out of school, church, community, dumped in one of those terrible places for bad girls to be warehoused until she could produce an infant for some superior woman to raise. Her mother would have embraced her, certainly would have enabled her to continue school. And Dartmouth, despite its macho bluster, would not have blinked an eye—or not much of an eye—at a single mom finishing up he
r degree, commuting to campus from Hartland.
But she had never thought of keeping him, and the shame of that had become the body within her body. She was suffused with shame, drenched with it, riddled with it like something metastasized. Her bones kept it erect and her muscles made it move and her skin contained it, and everything she had ever felt or thought or done since that morning seventeen years before, when the baby had left her body and the room and—she believed—her life, had been felt in shame, thought in shame, and done in shame.
Now it felt as if that shame were leaking from every pore of her, leaking and leaking as the first day passed, and then the next, and then the next. The bed was soaked with it, and the blankets and duvets made a damp tent to huddle beneath. It was, she would later think, a kind of an afterbirth, seventeen years in the making, and she wondered how long this was going to take, how long until, finally, she was dry and done. Her body claimed not to understand the logic of this. There was, it seemed to her, no end to the backlog of weeping.
It had never occurred to her to tell Tom. Not senior year, when she’d had to turn away her face at the sight of him. Not when she read about his marriage to the very Winky or Stinky (all right, all right, in fact Binty, née Elizabeth) Caldwell Hemming, who had waltzed away with him that day in Paris, or the births of his other children in the alumni magazine. She knew this was wrong. She knew that he had the right to know there was a child, to be a father if he chose it, not that she believed for a minute that he would actually have chosen it. But it was still wrong, even increasingly wrong, she supposed, after he’d had other children and perhaps understood the enormity of what had been kept from him. He didn’t deserve that baby, was what she told herself, not after the way he had left her, not after failing to know—magically, she supposed—that they had conceived a child. Coming and leaving, impervious and nonchalant, where she, at least, had endured the variant pains of carrying the baby and giving birth to the baby and hardening herself against the baby, an effort that had now lasted for many years and blasted every other part of her life out of its way, while he had married and made a family and gone on to lead the life he was always going to lead. How must he remember her? The exotic Jewish girl who had his mother so riled up, who seemed to understand that it couldn’t be a lasting thing, a real thing, they were too differently wired, and who had become, of all things, a Dartmouth admissions officer—I mean, who could have seen that one coming?
The truth was that she had long ago consigned Tom to his own life, with his family and unsurprising career path, in the very Boston suburb from which he had sprung. Once a year, on average, she did dream of him, but the Tom in her dreams did not confront or condemn her. He didn’t cry or wring his hands. On the contrary, he did mindless things with her, mundane things. Married things, it occurred to Portia now, like going to a movie and walking out because it was boring, or kissing her on the cheek, or watching children in a Christmas pageant. It was hardly passionate (even the kissing) and never emotionally fraught, except for one time many years ago, when her dream self had stood in Tom’s (imagined) tasteful kitchen, with hands on hips, and reminded him (reminded him?) that he had another child, and what kind of father did he think he was? She had woken from that dream in a motel on the Oregon coast, heart pounding, the waves outside pounding, sweaty and cold and unable to calm herself. But only that one time. And when it happened next, a year or more later, they were back in the school auditorium or at the movies.
Away downstairs, the phone was ringing again, its tinny, accompanying voice a half step behind:
“Call from… Princeton… Univ.… Call from… Princeton… Univ.…”
Surely the office. Clarence or Corinne or possibly Martha, checking to see when she would be back. That was a relief. Yesterday there had been several, presumably from John:
“Call from… cell phone… NH.… Call from… cell phone… NH.”
Which she, of course, had not answered either. John, she could not face. She couldn’t stand to think of him waking up (in the morning? in the middle of the night?) to wonder what had happened to her (bathroom? kitchen? insomniac nighttime jog through the muddy Pennsylvania countryside?) or, worse, somehow intuit everything, know everything. Perhaps by now they had all gleaned the meaning of her abrupt departure, or perhaps she had been seen, frozen in place in the upstairs hallway like Lot’s too curious wife, punished forever for what she had done.
Once, in the application essay of a young scientist, she had read a graphic description of latent tuberculosis: deactivated infections walled off behind a casement of immune cells in the lung. They could stay that way for years, the boy had written, silently ticking, doing no outward harm, and then, without warning, burst open to flood the body with what he had memorably termed an “untidy” form of death. But that’s me, Portia had thought, fighting off a wave of dread as she checked “High Priority—Admit” at the bottom of that page, how many years ago? Her latent disease, outwardly doing no harm, inwardly building to a slaughter: necrotic, poisonous, infectious, terminal. In August, it would be eighteen years. Eighteen years a-growing, like the child himself. Eighteen years of searching faces on the street and in the crowds. Eighteen years of declining to hold other women’s babies or play with their children. Years of walled-off longing. Of letting her few friends know that they should not ask about this, of letting Mark believe that they had actually decided not to have children, of telling herself that if she were meant to be a mother, deserved to be a mother, she would now have a one-year-old child, or a seven-year-old child, or a thirteen-year-old child, or an eighteen-year-old child, but she didn’t deserve it because she had failed that child in the very first moment of his life, and wouldn’t she just do the same thing to another child?
Merely adequate mothers, mothers harmed by their own terrible mothers, rotten mothers who destroyed their children in manners too numerous to conceive—they didn’t give their children away. They held them and brought them home and took care of them—sometimes poorly, sometimes wrongly, but as well as they could. Those lousy parents, at least, had tried. Portia hadn’t even tried. She had done what none of them had done, refusing even to look at the baby who moments before had been inside—inside—her own body. She hadn’t touched him or carried him. She hadn’t named him, even to herself. There weren’t words for the terrible thing she had done, the terrible thing she was. Her only hope had been to keep it from herself and thus from anyone else who might have some misconceived inclination to think well of her—to love her.
She had phoned in some fraudulent malady to the office and also fraudulently claimed to be working at home, and ordinarily this would have been true, but in fact she had not been able to face a single one of the files Martha had pressed on her. Without them, there was no buffer, no distracting wedge to place between herself and herself, as she had—she now understood—been doing for years. In the great annual bombardment of lives—little lives, lives unmarred by the kind of gruesome and incapacitating flaw in her own life—there had lain the means of constant evasion, and now it occurred to her that this might be the very reason she had thrown herself back into it, year after year, to wade among the hundreds and thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of seventeen-year-olds, all fresh and new, none of whom could possibly be the one she had been looking for all along.
Now, that was finished. Now—this year—all of the names and aspirations and batting statistics and Latin citations and FFA honors and part-time jobs tutoring the neighbors’ children in math belonged to seventeen-year-olds who might just possibly know her son. They might have run cross-country alongside her son or smoked cigarettes behind the maintenance shed with him. They were the cohorts her son might have had and the girls he might have once been in love with or the kids on his language immersion program in Barcelona. They were the classmates who might have beaten him in the student body president election or fouled him on the basketball court. They were the possible deadweight on his biology lab team, the cheerleaders who
perhaps bounced alongside his football games, the buddies he theoretically passed time with in the inane way teenage boys passed time. Maybe they knew him. Maybe they could tell her what he was like.
Or maybe they could, actually, be him. Her own son. Born Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 19, 1990. Name unknown. Parents unknown. Address unknown. Interests unknown. Talents unknown. Future plans unknown. Thoughts about her, the person who had sent him out into the world without seeming to care in the slightest, never to answer the questions he must have had or offer him the smallest comfort, never to come after him—unknown.
And the worst of it was that none of this was new. She thought, bizarrely, of an old ghost story she had long ago loved in a shivery, prickly way, about a woman who dreams the same dream every night: old road winding through woodland, house glimpsed in the distance (on a cliff above the sea, of course), and how she walks up the long, long drive and knocks on the door to ask the old man inside if the house is for sale.
“Oh, you wouldn’t want it,” he tells her with a curious expression. “It’s haunted.”
“Haunted?” the woman asks. “By whom?”
“By you,” says the man, closing the door in her ghostly face.
All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of these two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?
And then it occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.
Downstairs, the phone clicked alive in the empty rooms.
“Call from… Princeton… Univ.… Call from… Princeton… Univ.…”
Once, long ago, this would almost certainly have been Mark, phoning as he walked home to see if he needed to stop at the store, or checking in on his way to whoever’s house they were meeting at for dinner, to ask her to bring a bottle of wine from the cool corner of the basement, their most unscientifically maintained “cellar.” Neither of them cared overly much about wine. When they found something that seemed good to them, they tried to remember the name, but if the wine store on Hullfish Street didn’t have the exact bottle, they were soon once again in the morass of lyrical names and vibrant labels, as likely to vastly overspend as they were to buy something everyone else seemed to know was dreadful. She hadn’t set foot in the cellar since January, when she’d made one pointless visit to the chilly furnace, and took a moment to congratulate herself on at least not having drowned their breakup in whatever Shiraz or Merlot or, she supposed, unredeemable plonk might be down there. She wondered if Helen had been drinking wine or anything else as she slouched toward delivery. Europeans, Portia had noted, maintained a disdainful skepticism about the proscription against alcohol in pregnancy, citing various intellectuals whose mothers had apparently drowned themselves in Bordeaux; but Portia had once taken a class with Michael Dorris at Dartmouth and had seen, many times, the professor with his adopted son, an addled, vacant boy destroyed by his mother’s alcoholism before he could escape her by being born. When Dorris wrote his book about fetal alcohol syndrome the following year, she hadn’t even needed to read it to know the connection was true.
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