If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Claire takes my hand. So does Patrick. We walk to the front door. We take this big collective breath, like we are one person.

  I try to twist my face into a smile and I can feel it forming, as if I am making it out of modeling clay.

  We let go of each other’s hands. We shift our feet.

  Here we go.

  I knock.

  We all wait.

  Nothing.

  I knock again. And again.

  Nothing.

  And then: we hear it. Shuffling and hacking coughing and then the door cracks open. “Can I help you with something?” A very fragile very old woman with age spots across her face and scalp, which I can see through a layer of very thin hair, cracks open the door. Her pink scalp shines through the layer of yellowish-white hair.

  My first thought is that she is a ghost. It’s like I can see through her.

  I peer in and I can tell in one look that she is human and those curtains are not flowered. The smell of cigarette smoke and maybe a few cans of soup that have been opened for, say, three years, and old wet dog breath smacks me in the face.

  I can hear our sociology teacher, Mr. Engles, saying: “The number of rural Americans living in poverty is at thirteen percent.”

  “What?” she says when we are all sort of stunned silent.

  “Children,” Mr. Engles says, “make up a disproportionate share of our country’s poor.”

  Patrick says, “We’re looking for someone who used to live here. Maybe still?”

  I nod, dumbly, like an idiot, frankly. What if this person is my grandmother, say. Or great-grandmother. This is what I am thinking and I can’t stop myself from thinking that one day I might look like this. These could be my genes. Then again, we all might look like this one day. Right? I look at Claire. Even Claire. But not Mom. She has this, like, I don’t know, handsome quality about her. I can’t imagine her ever looking like this lady. Which makes me sad that I’m not biologically related to Mom. My beautiful, sweet mom. I miss her.

  Claire steps up. “Yes, from about sixteen years ago. How long have you been here?”

  “Me? Not more than ten, honey. Not more than ten. My nephew rents this place. But he never lived here. I had to leave. . . .”

  “I see,” Claire says. “Do you remember who was here before?”

  “Who are you? It’s a lot of questions from a stranger, honey.”

  I could tell she was trying to be nice. But what did we look like to her in our new jeans and long pretty hair and our teenageness? With our shiny Subaru Outback at the end of her drive?

  “Friends of the previous owners?” Patrick says, and I get why he makes it a question.

  “Owners?” she says.

  “Residents?” says Patrick.

  “No,” she says. Her hands, her knuckles, huge with knots, are holding the door tight. She doesn’t want us in. And you know what? That’s just fine with me. “Never met the previous tenants. I remember they left a lot of crap here, though,” she says, her body rattling with a cough.

  “What kinds of things?” I ask.

  “Lord if I remember. A lot of clothes. The daughter, she was in some kind of trouble. Drugs maybe. Or some kind of law thing. I don’t now recall.”

  “Drugs?” Patrick says.

  “Law thing?” Claire asks.

  Relief courses through me and I am ashamed. I would rather my birth mother be run out for drugs or some kind of law thing than share DNA with this person. Whose only crime, far as I can tell, is being old and not in control of her finances. I do know what that says about me and can’t help it.

  “I have no idea but they seemed to be leaving town for good. That was a lifetime ago now. I was still working and—”

  “Thank you,” Claire says. “Any forwarding address? Did they leave anything like that?”

  “Forwarding address?” There was a little cackle. “Honey, hell if I know. I had my own troubles then. Still do. You’re standing on some of them,” she says, and we look down, shift our feet on the rotting wood of the steps. “Dump,” she says.

  We nod, sort of stunned, because to be honest I’ve never seen people living like this. I’ve seen it on television, but that is mostly footage of people after disasters or people in other countries being forced to leave. So close to home, this is. So close. And again, I feel that wave of shame.

  But I still can’t wait to get out of here and so we thank her and we stumble down her slippery rotten steps and we get in the car again. We are silent as we pull out. Turn left! says Boy Band, and I just want them to be turned off because it all seems messed up now. It’s not fun anymore. Another left! they trill because I can’t figure out how to do it. Turn them the hell off. Stay straight, they say and the joke is just so over and I scream at Claire to please for the love of God make them shut up.

  Riiight, says Boy Band, and Claire shuts them off and no one says anything as Patrick shifts into second, then third, and, without asking, takes us onto the highway, fast.

  It’s cold for spring, even for up here. I can feel the temperature dropping and I feel sort of scared. I’m scared that I didn’t bring warm-enough clothes, just a light fleece and a jean jacket, but also scared of everything. Like, the world seems like a very scary place to me. One second I’m all, let me out at you, world, stop holding my hand, and then the next it’s like, let me go home and crawl into my bed beneath my warm down comforter and my soft gold silk blanket.

  “That was weird,” is what I say as we drive. Trees flank the highway. Like they do everywhere.

  I see Patrick nod and his eyes search again for mine.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Claire says.

  I feel other things, though. Aside from the gratitude that that lady is not related to me. Aside from being ashamed that I did not know how much less people had, so close to me. But other things, deep inside, like: I might not want to know. Her. Maybe she said don’t find me for a good reason. Maybe all these things are for a reason. I feel the rock in my pocket, just jabbing me in my hip. Everything hurts a little bit.

  When you’re not adopted, there are things you don’t know. You accept it, the way we all accept that no one knows when it will be over, say. When your grandmother will die, or your dog. When you will even. It’s going to happen to us all sometime. If I were related to that lady in that horrible house with the horrible smell, would that make anything different to me?

  Well, it would. Because I would know that person has passed something down to me. Through blood. I don’t know, though, what that would be. I am still me. The same person I was before I met her. I am so much more me than my blood and all those genetics.

  “I hope that lady is going to be okay,” Patrick says.

  We are all silent. We all feel the asphalt of the road beneath us. We all see the trees whipping by.

  Who knows how much time has passed when Claire says, “I could really use something with whipped cream and caffeine,” she says. “Let’s see, a good café. Closest café, Siri,” she says, and we are turned around and headed off the highway. This little building hangs over a creek. It’s almost like it used to be a house.

  No one’s in the lot. I peer inside and I see that no one’s in there, either. It’s all closed up, all the chairs turned over on tables, the paintings—of different birds in nests—knocked crooked.

  I look over at Claire. “Can you get your girly coffee in town?” I ask.

  Patrick laughs.

  “You know you want the same thing,” I say to him.

  We trudge back to the car and Patrick puts “Town” into Waze and Boy Band starts up again. Leeeft, they say.

  I hate them.

  There’s a common lined with stores and cafés and Patrick looks for parking. I’ve been here a couple of times before, with my moms. There is a famous Buddhist sanctuary here, and sometimes Mom used to go for the afternoon. Mo and I would wander around and eat mushy vegetarian food or go hiking at the Falls nearby. Butterpeak. It all looks so familiar to m
e, but also, so foreign. Like a town I’ve seen in books or something. A place I was in in another life.

  Patrick parks and we head toward the Commons by foot. There’s a café on the corner and the three of us go in and order hot chocolates with lots of whipped cream and then we go sit down on stools looking out at the street and dip our faces into the steam and watch the people in the town move around. College students. White girls with dreads. (Seriously bad idea.) Old men professors in corduroy jackets. Hikers. A lot of hippies. A man in a pickup pulls into a spot on the street in front of us, hauling all kinds of wood and also copper wire, and he looks so familiar but I cannot place him. A white guy with dreadlocks (worse than the girls) walks into the café and orders something complicated.

  Patrick says, “What if that had been your grandmother?”

  I look at him. Like, stare at him. There’s stink eye in my stare. There’s a lot of other things, too, but I can’t really name them.

  “I just feel sad,” I blurt out. I start to cry.

  Claire takes my hand under the counter. Patrick takes my other hand. I have no free hand to drink my chocolate, so I just lean in and lick at the whipped cream.

  “We haven’t even started yet,” Claire says.

  Patrick nods. “We’ll find her. It’s, like, our mission now.”

  The man in the pickup has a paunch and a toothpick in his mouth, a wool hat because spring is like a lie here. He secures a lot of stuff on the back of his truck. There’s a woman in the car with him—black black hair. She turns to throw her bag in the back and I can see her pretty face. He opens the door and Alicia Keys streams out: Some people want diamond rings.

  They’re right. We haven’t even begun.

  I want to go home but I don’t say so. “Why do I even want to find her? I just want to have a look at her and then go home.”

  Claire’s head is bobbing. “Get that,” she says. “Just a peek, right? And then have everything be the same.”

  It hurts me to think of things changing. Of me changing them. But it’s so hard to not know.

  “Want to walk around?” Patrick asks. “I saw a used bookstore up there.”

  Claire and I nod.

  “Then we’ll go back?”

  I nod again. Back is fine with me. Back and back and back.

  As we’re walking into the old bookstore—dust, paper, weird wood smell. Kind of like Patrick’s house, actually. I don’t know why but I always go first to the children’s section in bookstores. I just love the picture books—all the colors and the wide-open happiness of the covers. My moms read to me all the time. Books remind me of being young and safe, before I knew anything. Also, they’re like my memories. Here we go: Pickles the fire cat. Harry the dog. Frog and Toad, Curious George. All the animals of being a little girl.

  The girl in the bookstore with her nose ring and her shaved head, she doesn’t talk to us. I secretly love her. Patrick goes with me and Claire, always looking for a new cover of the magazine, goes predictably to art, but I can’t blame her: we don’t have a store like this in our town, all wood and high rafters and everything you want just on the shelf, even things you never knew.

  I can see her looking at these massive photo books. Then she takes out a smaller paperback and thumbs through it.

  We slide out a book with a llama in red pajamas on the cover and I think of that old lady in her boarded-up falling-down house. I wonder was she cold all winter? Did anyone look after her? I wonder what it looked like when my first mom lived there. The stupid llama makes me laugh.

  Claire holds up her book. “New York Foundlings, 1950–1970!” Claire screams. “This is so great!” She calls me over. “Foundling. I just love this term. Don’t you? Can we change Crossroads to Foundlings?”

  “Foundlings?”

  “You know, orphans,” she says.

  I can’t tell if she is being insensitive on purpose or just totally clueless. The word bothers me. Like really bothers me. “No,” I say. “We can’t.”

  “Okay, how about The Foundlings? Everything sounds better with a the in front of it, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Okay, but just look at these kids,” she says to no one. “Any one of these would be an awesome cover.”

  I want to strangle her.

  I don’t care about the cover of Crossroads right now. Or any of the poems either. I’m standing there watching the shaved-head woman, her fingers covered in rings, rings on her fingers. . . . Mom used to bounce me up and down and sing that.

  It’s like I’ve conjured her because just as I am about to say something to Claire about the upsetting book she seems to have no idea is sad and upsetting, my phone rings and it’s her, Mom.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi, honey, how are you?”

  “Good,” I say.

  “Anything else you want to offer? I’m not asking about the weather after all.”

  “Well, she wasn’t there, if that’s what you mean.”

  I can hear her breathing but she doesn’t say anything.

  “At the house.”

  “I see,” my mother says.

  “You knew that, didn’t you?” I asked her. I feel so angry. But I don’t know if it’s at her or not.

  “No, Ivy. I didn’t know that. I suspected it, but I didn’t know it.”

  I feel like I will cry. I want to weep right now. I step out of the bookstore and the little bell rings behind me. Bells on her toes . . .

  “There was this terrible old lady there!” I say. “And it was an awful old house. It was disgusting.” I virtually wail this. I feel bad because it’s not how I would normally talk about that house or that woman but it just comes out that way.

  “I’m sorry, Ivy.” Mom is getting upset, I can tell. For me. I know she is upset for me. “Come home. We will figure out another plan.”

  I’m sniffling. “Yeah? How?” That last bit comes out like a howl. I can hear myself but I can’t stop myself. I wipe the snot off on the corner of my sweater, look in and watch Patrick and Claire through the window in their separate sections. Patrick’s head is bowed toward the picture books, still, and Claire moves to the register to pay for her foundling book. The girl/woman goes to ring her up without even looking at her.

  “Come back. We will all figure this out together,” Mom says.

  “Okay,” I say. “We’re coming,” I say as I open up the door to go back inside.

  Ivy

  2017

  Patrick drops Claire off first, even though it’s totally out of the way, and then he pulls into my driveway, which is long, packed dirt, framed by trees. Now the branches look like those old lady’s brittle fingers, but in early summer they are magic. I used to ride my bike beneath the cave of leaves and think I was in some kind of fairy tale.

  I am in a fairy tale. Anybody’s happy ending.

  It’s nighttime now. I can hear the swallows swooping in and soon the wings of the bats from the woods will start flapping, all of those night things that take place that we can’t see or know about. It’s the in-between time now, though, and I can feel all the things changing from light to dark. I can’t explain it. It’s a happy time and a sad time that time of the day. The gloaming. The gloaming, a word I love. It’s a word I will use forever and ever until I die because I think it’s a romantic word and I love it.

  Patrick turns off the car and the lights and he looks over at me, in the front seat, hands in my lap.

  Patrick. Last year when we started, it was in English. Patrick sat behind me. As Mr. Lewis read, his long, hairy fingers keeping the book open, the covers furled back, and Patrick would draw on my scalp. Gave me goose bumps. “I’m writing our names,” he would say and I’d feel the sharp “I” that starts my name.

  He’s all in, but right now it’s not boo or bae or hey-ho kk how goes it, Nuffer, another name I’ve got from how I love Marshmallow Fluff and Nutella, but it’s this fierce searching look. He leans in. There is barely any light and there is the sound of th
e ticking of the engine, still hot. His hand is at my chin and he guides my face to his. He kisses me.

  It’s different than our usual kissing, which I only understand is happening when he presses harder with his lips. He brings his arms around me and he makes a little tiny noise, like part sigh, part whimper. Not too much that it’s disgusting, just a little sound to tell me, I think, that he loves me. This.

  I kiss him back and as I do I realize I am kissing Patrick like I mean it. It’s almost like it’s the first time I have ever meant it. I am kissing him about this day, which means I am kissing him as a different person because I am changed. And he was there. And we did this hard, sad thing together. I lean back a little bit and he is sort of leaning into me now, not hard or anything, but I feel his body, his slender kind of lanky Patrickness on me. The seat belt thingie is at my head and the chain of my locket is kind of strangling me, but I don’t make a joke about that or anything else because that will end this and also, I hold him, too, just as tightly, just as hard, because I am here, too, now. We are the same now. And then.

  And then! The house light switches on and I can see Mo opening the door, looking out into darkening yard.

  “I?” she calls. “Ivy?”

  I can see Court beside her, also looking out to the yard.

  Patrick gets up, creaking like an old person, and I sit up and clear my throat and straighten out my sweater, picking off invisible things as if we’ve been rolling in fallen leaves.

  “Hi,” he says, pulling on my sleeve.

  I don’t even care it’s the snot sleeve from earlier. I nod, not looking at him.

  “Hi, my intense girlfriend.”

  I look at him. I like his nose. I like his sweet face. “Thanks for today,” I say. I tilt my head to my left shoulder, make a smile frown. I open the car door. “Bye, Patrick,” I say, and then I head toward my house. Toward home.

  Ivy