Learning to Breathe

by Janice Lynn Mather

  “Well, wait,” Smiley snips, faraway but still audible.

  “I’ll wait right here,” he says.

  “You ain got nothing better to do?” she protests.

  “Guess not.”

  I can imagine him, the phone pressed to his ear, looming over Smiley on the sofa. Be careful, I want to tell her. Run like hell from him. He’s her brother, though; he’s not gonna do anything to her. I put the phone back up to my ear.

  “Who you talkin to anyway?” Gary says on the other line.

  Don’t tell him, I think as hard as I can. Don’t tell him anything, Smiley, don’t say a word.

  “None of your business.”

  “You talkin to man, ay? Or you found our runaway? Let me talk to her.”

  “Leave me, man, your head ain no good,” Smiley complains. “Five minutes, then you could have the phone.”

  “Wait till Mummy get home.” He speaks like I’m not even on the line. “I ga tell her you talkin to her, an you ga be sleepin out too, before she know it.”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Hurry up,” he says, annoyed. There’s the click of the phone as he hangs up.

  “Gary and his big head!” Smiley shouts after him, more for my benefit than for his. She continues talking, something about school, someone she thinks is cute. Every few words drift in, and the rest pass me by. Her voice makes me sad. I can never tell her about him, what he did. We’re so different, and the words from my world don’t translate anymore. Maybe they never did. “Hey?” she says.

  “What?”

  “I say when you ga tell me bout the daddy.”

  “One day.” I wish I could tell her. Would she even believe me?

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  There’s a click on the line again. “Yeah, Indy, who’s the daddy?” Gary’s voice is flippant. He could be talking about what to order for dinner tonight. “You even know?”

  I hurl the phone away from me, hard as I can. It’s swallowed up in the darkness. “Owww!” someone yells—someone real, someone here, not across the phone line. A light flashes on from deep within the beach shrubbery in front of me.

  “Who’s there? You better not be the bastard who spray-painted my walls. If I catch you!”

  Joe.

  If I open the door to run into the cabin, she’ll know I’m here. I lie flat and hope she thinks it came from someplace else. Except there’s no other cabin nearby.

  “Who’s that up there?” Footsteps, running, the flashlight swinging back and forth, painting the porch in wide strokes of light. I cower beneath them. Don’t find me, don’t find me, don’t find . . . “Who’s that there? I got pepper spray, don’t even think about trying anything.”

  “Don’t spray,” I call out, scrambling to my feet. “It’s me, it’s me.”

  “Indira?”

  I cover my eyes from the flashlight’s glare as Joe steps up onto the porch.

  “Sorry.” She reaches forward and pulls a string to turn on the porch light. “What you doin out here? It’s past nine o’clock,” she says. I pull my shirt down fast, but it’s too late. She only looks at my belly for a moment before her eyes are on my face again. A moment is all anyone needs to make up their mind. “Let’s go in the cabin,” Joe says. “We can talk. Now that everything’s out in the open.” There should be surprise on Joe’s face, or at least her usual anger. Instead, she looks tired.

  What does she mean, out in the open? I wonder as I follow her inside.

  “You must be past your first trimester now.”

  Trimester. The word falls like a rock she’s been carrying around for some time. How long has she known? Since we went to Mariner’s? Since the day I first set foot over that wall, dripping wet?

  “How long you knew?”

  She shakes her head. “I ain blind.”

  I feel naked. If Joe could see, Dion knows, then, too. And Maya, and Susan. I must be an idiot to have thought otherwise.

  I pull my bag onto my shoulder. My legs are tired; I don’t want to run anymore. I edge toward the doorway, but Joe steps forward, blocking my way, and rests her hand on my arm. I flinch, pulling away, hating myself for doing it, but I can’t help it. I have to get out of here before she starts asking more questions.

  “I’m going,” I hear myself say, my mouth dry. “You ain gotta throw me out.”

  “Only place you’re going is to get dinner.” Joe props herself under my arm, guiding me out the door. She is warm, and smells of herbs and Earl Grey tea. “I know you didn’t eat tonight. Let’s go. You look about ready to collapse.” At the mention of food, my stomach lets out a growl—I can’t deny it.

  Unlike Dion or Smiley, Joe doesn’t babble to fill space. She and I walk to the pavilion in silence, my breathing so shallow it might as well not be there, hers loud and deep enough to be its own ocean. The dining area is almost empty, with only a couple of guests left at a table, talking. Joe nods at them as we pass. The women don’t seem to notice me, too deep in their own conversation. We cut through the back and into the kitchen, where Joe turns on lights and yanks open the door of the massive fridge. She moves so confidently, dishing out two plates of food and pushing them into the oven to heat up. I wait for the questions I know will come.

  “I had Dion young,” she says instead. “I was about your age, I guess. Seventeen. Girls didn’t get pregnant in my family, and if you did you got married off quick. I didn’t want no husband, and everyone was after me to do something. Get rid of it. Give it up for adoption. At one point, my family was pushing for my auntie to raise the baby. Bring it up as her child.” Her brow is furrowed as she speaks, the memory jostling something in her. It’s not the same, I want to say. She probably ran off with some high school boyfriend and forgot to use protection. “What’s that look?” she says abruptly, reading my mind.

  “Nothing,” I say guiltily. “What did you do?”

  “Well, obviously I kept him. Ain nobody was gonna make me give up my baby. I lost a lot of other things, though. I had to quit school, cause in those days they didn’t have the special classes for teen mothers. I had a scholarship to go off to college; I lost that. Even though I still wanted to get my degree, even though I finished high school after, as soon as they found out, they took my award and gave it to some little flat-bellied girl who they thought was smart enough not to get herself pregnant.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It did suck.” She opens the oven, testing the food with the back of her hand. “Half my family disowned me, they told me to stop coming to church until my shame had passed. I surely did stop.” She closes the oven door with a bang. “When I went to the hospital, the nurses talked to me so bad. Tell me, ‘What you screamin for? Bet you scream when you was getting it!’ Tell me ‘You need to learn. It feel good when he was givin it to you, but it hurt now.’ ”

  Why is she telling me this? To scare me? To warn me? To show me what to expect? I go over to the sink and start washing dishes to give myself something to do. To drown out Joe’s words.

  “I had a hard time after, and I left home when he was a year old.” Her voice reaches me over the sound of the running water, the clink of pots and plates. “I worked at one of the hotels over on Paradise Island, cleaning the rooms to get by. I rented from this miserable woman who used to cuss me for being a mother so young, and no husband, but she never charged me to look after Dion. I learned about yoga from two guests who would go and practice on that quiet end of Cabbage Beach, before they built the new hotel. When their stay was over, they left a yoga book in their room. It took a lot of years of hard work after that, but you see us here now.” She glances out the window at one of Dion’s defiant vegetable patches. “Tell me something, Indira. How old are you, really?”

  I turn the water pressure up. “Eighteen.”

  “Come on, now. I told you my whole story. Least you could do is be honest with me.”

  “Sixteen.” It comes out as a hoarse whisper.

  She comes ov
er, turns the tap off. “And when was your birthday?”

  I take my hands out of the water, drying them on my clothes. “March.”

  She looks away from me, shaking her head. “So when this happened, you were fifteen.”

  “I’m not what everyone thinks.”

  “And what does everyone think, Indira?”

  “That I’m a screw-up. Even people who don’t know my mamma think I’m the same as her, some girl who gone and got in problems. They think it’s my destiny. That’s what you thought when you first saw me. You didn’t even ask questions, you already knew what I was.”

  “The first day—”

  “You knew I was somebody who didn’t belong here, you knew I was a troublemaker. You told Dion so, in front of me. You were ready to throw me out before I even stepped in.”

  “You appeared out of nowhere, dripping wet, the day after we had graffiti appear on the side of the office,” Joe explains. She opens the oven and pulls out the plates with a pot holder, then sets them down on the counter and hands me a clean fork. “I might have been in a bad mood that day,” she says in a voice that is almost apologetic.

  “And a bunch of days after,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows at that, but instead of answering, she bows her head over the food, murmuring a quick prayer, then opens her eyes. She’s quiet, working something out. “Here’s the deal. You’re underage.”

  “Sixteen’s old enough,” I say. It is. It’s going to have to be.

  “Sixteen’s the age of consent. If the baby’s father was older than fifteen, he committed a crime.”

  She might be right, but age of consent doesn’t matter when it’s all against your will. Anyway, right now what I want is to start over someplace safe. I need Joe to see that. “What if you don’t pay me? I could stay here and work for my rent.”

  Joe sighs. “You can’t leave your family. You need to be with a parent or legal guardian, which I’m not. If something happens, I’m responsible.”

  “I don’t have no place else to go.”

  “Yes, but you can’t just stay here—”

  “You want me go now?” I push my untouched plate away, starting to get up.

  “You wanna let me finish?” Her voice is abrupt, but her hand on my arm is light, stopping me. “Sit down. If we can’t talk, I can’t do anything for you. You can’t stay here if I’m responsible, unless I know things are fine with you. And your baby. So first off, if you stay here, even overnight, you got to get checked by a real doctor.”

  “Only doctor I could afford is a fake one.”

  She glares at me. Then, strangely, her mouth twists like she’s found something interesting between her teeth. I think she’s trying to hold back a smile. “Know what? Your mouth almost faster than mine. I’ll get you checked by my doctor friend who won’t charge. Make sure you’re healthy.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And the baby? You have to be realistic, Indira. You away from your home, I doubt you’ve been taking any proper care of yourself. What if something goes wrong? I have to think of the retreat. How that headline ga look in the newspaper? ‘Runaway teen mother loses baby.’ ‘Stillborn found dumped in trash at yoga retreat.’ You think I want that?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not my mamma. I told you, I’m fine.” I stand up and haul my bag over my shoulder.

  Joe’s voice is quieter now. “I don’t know your history. I don’t know why you’re here, why you don’t want to go home. I don’t know your mamma, but I know this: you are not fine.”

  One of the bag’s straps gives without warning, ripping apart at the side where once it was carefully stitched. The rest of the bag opens, spilling my belongings out onto the tiles. I gather them up quickly, the old duct tape bra, underwear, toothbrush, everything. I scramble to find the pregnancy book, then remember I don’t have it anymore.

  Joe reaches down, closes her fingers around the one sound strap, and lifts the bag.

  “I’m fine,” I say again, my voice cracking.

  “You ain fine. But you will be. First step, you’ll finish eating and stay here tonight. You’ll need that cottage swept out, and some towels and sheets. In the morning, you get checked by the doctor. No arguments. Agreed?” She doesn’t wait for my answer, is already walking through the doorway and outside, down the path, carrying my bag back to the cabin for me. She’s brisk and determined, like she cares. Like Grammy.

  15

  THE CLINIC SIGN MOCKS me in the morning’s half-light. Dr. A. Palmer, Dr. C. Adderley, Dr. S. Johnson. Unbelievable. Of all the doctors’ offices in all of Nassau, Joe’s friend had to work at this one.

  “All right,” Joe says. She hops out of the driver’s side of the jeep, all business, and closes the door. “Ready?”

  “I can’t go in there.”

  “You can do this.”

  After what I did yesterday? No way.

  Joe rests her arm against the ledge of her open window. “Then I have to drive you home. I can call Dion and find out where you live.”

  That almost makes me desperate enough to tell Joe about setting off the alarm, and pretending to be Marcy. Maybe I don’t have to. Maybe Joe’s taking me to see one of the other two doctors. “Which doctor is it?”

  “Palmer.”

  I turn away from Joe, wishing for an escape. But to where?

  “She’s a friend of mine,” Joe continues. “She’s good. She’s gonna see you confidentially, check and make sure everything is fine. And she’s not gonna charge.”

  “I can’t see her.”

  “We’ve already been through this, Indira. If you’re under my care, even unofficially, I’m responsible not only for you, but also for your child.”

  It’s so real when she says it. Your child.

  The door to the office swings open, and I’m out of time to hide or explain; Dr. Palmer comes out in a T-shirt and jeans. She looks like she didn’t plan to be here; she came in just for me.

  “Morning.” Dr. Palmer waves at Joe. “I got your message. You all come in.”

  I have no choice. I reach for my bag, its broken strap freshly bandaged up with duct tape, and get out. The ground feels unsteady.

  “This is Indira, my young friend I told you about,” Joe says to Dr. Palmer as we reach the door.

  There’s a brief flash of surprise across the doctor’s face; then it’s gone and she smiles vaguely, the recognition disguised. “I’m Dr. Palmer,” she says, ushering us in with a wide wave of her arm, like we’re stopping by for a cool drink and a slice of cake.

  “I’ll be out here if you need me,” Joe says, settling into one of the waiting room chairs.

  “We have a patient this early?” another voice calls from down the hallway. A face appears, smiling. It’s the same nurse who took my form yesterday. Her gaze lands on me. “Hold on, where I know you from? You’re that girl!” She turns to Dr. Palmer. “Remember? She filled out paperwork as Sharice Ferguson, for the procedure with Dr. Adderley.” The nurse lowers her voice. “The termination?” The nurse’s frown deepens as she brandishes a file. I look quickly at Joe, whose face is unreadable.

  “All right, Nurse Mackey,” Dr. Palmer says firmly, and takes the file. “It’s under control. Come on back, Indira. Let’s see what’s going on.”

  In the room, Dr. Palmer sits on a stool and opens up the file. I take a seat on the end of the examination table. “Now, is Indira your real name?”

  I nod.

  She draws a neat line through Mamma’s name and writes in mine. “It says here you’re nineteen.” She peers over her glasses at me. “Is that correct?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Is anything on this form true?”

  “My last name.”

  “You know a doctor could lose their license, performing procedures on a minor who’s lied about her age.” She tosses the file aside, opens a drawer, and pulls out a fresh form. “Look, how about we start again. Indira?”


  “Indy.”

  “Okay, Indy. You tell me what happened.”

  That familiar tightness takes over my chest. She could mean anything: what happened to make Joe bring me here two hours before opening on a Saturday; what happened yesterday in this same room, room number two; what happened five months ago; what started long before. An ocean of answers surges up, threatening to drown me. Just breathe, I can hear Joe saying. I pull in a little puff of air, let it out, and pick the easiest of the answers: what happened yesterday.

  “My friend set up the appointment for me. For the . . .”

  “The termination,” she says gently.

  “Yes.” I look over at the new form, blank except for my name.

  “And you pretended to be Marcy, and then you ran out.” She doesn’t add any commentary; I’m thankful for that. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

  I shake my head.

  “So what can I do for you? Are you keeping this baby or not?”

  “Joe said I had to have a checkup or I can’t stay by her.”

  “I’m not asking Joe. I’m asking you.” She leans forward, listening, waiting. I wait too, for a flutter, for some confirmation inside. But there’s nothing, and right now, it’s just me and Dr. Palmer, asking—not telling, not announcing, not already knowing. Asking. Like what I want actually counts.

  “Keeping it.”

  “All right,” she says, and pushes her glasses high up on her nose, signaling that it’s time for business. I decide I like her. She goes through the new form, asking about how I’m feeling, when my last period was, how easily or often I go to the bathroom. “The next thing,” she says, “is a physical exam to make sure you and the baby are healthy. Normally, I would see my patients starting much earlier than where you seem to be, but we’ll make the best of it.”

  “What kind of physical exam?”

  Dr. Palmer smiles reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about. First, I’ll do a pelvic exam. I make sure it’s quick, and it shouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Then I’ll check your stomach and see how things are going in there.” She leaves, and Nurse Mackey returns to take my blood pressure and weigh and measure me. Nurse Mackey doesn’t say much—Dr. Palmer must have said something to her before she came in. When she’s done, she hands me a gown and a sheet.