Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  She couldn’t help it anymore, she went into Anne’s room.

  Anne snored slightly. Her face was damp. Sara moved in closer and she felt a ping deep inside of her, like the twisting of a sharp wire. Her hand floated toward the baby, who stretched and moved toward her fingers, and Sara drew her hand back.

  She thought suddenly of all those Girls in Trouble stories of her mother’s. The last story Abby had told her had been about a girl who had made the mistake of looking at her baby after it was born. She had seen the baby was deformed and the nuns told her God was punishing her and her baby both. She would never forget the sight of her baby, and her baby would have to live with being deformed.

  “Can you imagine saying such a thing?” Abby had asked. “The very cruelty!”

  Sara looked down at Anne. Perfect. Her baby was perfect. And here she was, alone with her child, in this big, quiet house and she felt so happy.

  Sara pulled the light blanket up over Anne. It was white, printed with hopping yellow rabbits. She knew Anne when she was carrying her. She knew Anne liked to bunch up along her left side, that Anne hiccoughed every time Sara drank soda. She knew Anne now, too, more every minute she was with her. She brought her face close to Anne’s and hummed something low and deep, and she swore Anne sighed. “You like that, don’t you?” she said.

  She kept one hand on the baby’s bare chubby leg. She looked up at the wall, at the Sesame Street calendar Eva had hung up. Big Bird waving. A few days had big red Xs. Pediatrician appointment. One-month anniversary with a big exclamation point after it. At the bottom of the calendar were two minicalendars of the next two months. August. Then September. Sara looked away from the calendar. September. Then school.

  Anne fussed and Sara bent and picked her up. Anne gummed the edge of Sara’s blouse and Sara placed one hand gently on the baby’s head.

  “Hey.” Eva suddenly stood in the doorway, a bottle in her hand. She was in a blue dress Sara had never seen before, and strappy blue shoes. Her

  wet hair was held back by a black velvet headband. Energy seemed to bounce off her skin, which was flushed and damp. “What are you two up to?” Coming closer, Eva reached for Anne’s fingers. “Thank you Sara for taking over so I could shower.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What would I do without you?” she said, and for a moment, Sara wasn’t sure whether Eva had been talking about her, or Anne.

  Even though she wasn’t so sure of her place now, Sara came over to George and Eva’s every day. Eva seemed glad to see Sara and Sara made sure to make herself useful. Eva and George had a cleaning lady, but even so, there was almost always laundry to fold and put away, and Sara did that, even though Eva never once asked her to. “What a help you are!” Eva kept saying, and Sara had to admit she was just as surprised because all she ever heard from Abby was how she couldn’t do anything right. At home, the few times she tried to make dinner, the fish burned, the vegetables got overcooked, but here, the dinners were so delicious, everyone asked for seconds. At home, her room was messy, but here she liked order. She could straighten up the chaos in the time it took Eva to shower and dress. And most important of all, most surprising, she could somehow look at the baby and know what Anne needed, like a secret spring welling up from deep ground. “She’s hungry,” Sara said, when Eva started tugging at the baby’s diaper.

  “She can’t be, I just fed her—” Eva said, but when Anne kept crying, Sara went ahead and fixed her a bottle. “I told you I fed her,” Eva said, but Sara held the bottle out to the baby, and Anne hungrily grabbed for it, her mouth greedily working at the nipple. When later in the day, Anne started fussing, Eva put on music and began to talk to Anne. “What do you think about macaroni and cheese for lunch?” she said. “With, say, a nice tossed salad, dressing on the side?” Anne flailed her arms.

  Sara lifted Anne up and sat with her, rocking her, and Anne suddenly calmed. Thrilled with her triumph, Sara beamed. “Pretty good, right?” she said to Eva excitedly. She felt flush with power, but Eva had this strange new look on her face that made Sara uneasy.

  “How did you know to do that?” Eva asked quietly.

  “I didn’t. I just did it. I thought it would work.”

  “I guess I’m a little anxious,” Eva said finally. “It’s so new to me.”

  “It’s new to me, too,” Sara said, but Eva didn’t respond.

  Sara got into the habit of just sitting with Anne, and she began, like Eva, to talk to the baby. She didn’t tell Eva, but she swore the baby understood her, that Anne was communicating just in the way she fluttered her fingers, the way her gaze changed. “I know,” Sara said to Anne. “I feel just the same way.” She told Anne what she did the evenings when she wasn’t with her, and once, when Eva was taking a bath, Sara dared to tell the baby about Danny. “Lie’s your father,” she whispered. “We were in love and I know he would love you.” Anne stared solemnly up at Sara. “He loved tinkering with cars. He loved swimming. He could talk and talk for hours.” Sara’s breathing slowed. “He just got scared, that’s all. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.” She moved her finger, making circles in the air. Anne’s eyes followed Sara’s finger. She made sounds as if she were going to speak back. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us,” Sara whispered.

  One night, they all took a drive. George and Eva sat very close together. Sara sat beside the baby in the backseat. The little plush car seat was turned, facing the back. I’m the only one who can see your face, she thought. She held one hand on the infant seat even though it was bolted in tight. Anne’s eyes were glued to hers.

  “So, everything okay at home?” George said, and Sara started. She glanced over at his reflection in the rearview mirror, trying to gauge what was going on, if there was something she didn’t know. Anne’s slate-colored eyes followed Sara. George’s voice was soft, considerate. He looked at her with real concern. How could anyone be that nice to her, that kind? Eva was so lucky. Eva told her that she had fallen in love with George the first week she had met him. “Big, bald, goofy-looking. I wouldn’t have looked at him twice,” Eva said. “But the day after our first date, I got sick and he sent me over soup and sci-fi videos. He left a lullaby on my answering machine.”

  “Your parents giving you trouble?” Eva said.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes.” She shrugged, embarrassed.

  Eva cleared her throat. “Ever hear from Danny?” she said.

  “Not yet,” Sara said slowly. She saw Eva and George lock eyes and she sank down lower in the seat. All anyone had to do was mention his name and she yearned for him.

  “It would be good to find him,” Eva said. “Just so he knows what’s going on here,” she added quickly.

  “Do you know where he might be?” George said.

  There was that fishtailing in her stomach, as if she had swallowed live minnows and there wasn’t enough water for them to swim. They flopped around in her stomach, gasping for air. “Please. Can we not talk about this?” Sara said.

  “Oh, of course,” said Eva quickly, and Sara saw the way Eva glanced at George.

  “Well,” George said finally. “When you get upset, go into yourself. That’s my advice. Or better yet, you get out. Take a walk, a drive.”

  “I don’t know how to drive.” “I’d teach you if I had a car,” Danny had told her.

  “What?” He gave her a look of mock alarm, then he glanced over at Eva. “Did you hear that, Eva? Why, that’s a travesty. That’s un-American. A teenage girl not driving.”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me touch their car.”

  “You didn’t take driver’s ed?”

  “The math teacher taught it! He told me to keep looking at the side of the road to keep the car straight, to put my foot on the gas like a sponge—”

  “Like a what?” Eva laughed.

  “And then he pulled over and told me that some people weren’t meant to drive, and maybe I was one of them.” She looked out at the traffic ruefully, at all the young ki
ds driving. “And my parents agreed.”

  George snorted. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  He looked at his watch and then grinned. He made a right and then a left, until they were in a big, empty schoolyard. There was a huge blacktop playground. A few benches under leafy trees. “Oh, Anne will love that,” Sara said.

  He got out of the car. Eva got out and started unbuckling the baby from the seat. Eva lifted Anne up and held her in her arms. “We’ll see you guys later,” Eva said.

  Sara got out of the car.

  “Back in you go,” George told her, opening up the front door. She was still. “Come on, get behind the wheel,” he told her. “I’ll be right beside you. There’s nothing here you can hurt. I love this car. It’s a dream to drive.”

  “You’d teach me to drive?”

  “At your service,” George said in a courtly voice.

  Excitement snapped on inside of her. She couldn’t wait to get in the car, to scoot behind the wheel, grabbing it, four o’clock, just the way the driving instructor had told her. “No, no, not like that,” George said gently, and repositioned her hands.

  She wasn’t very good, but it didn’t matter to her. The car jerked and pulled. “Whoops,” she said, but he didn’t seem concerned. He sat calmly beside her while every cell in her seemed to be flying out to space. He didn’t lean in close every time she made a turn. He didn’t even press his foot into an imaginary brake on his side of the car. “You’ll get it,” he said kindly. He made her drive around and around. He showed her how to park and U-turn and go in reverse, and then she finally relaxed. She leaned over the wheel, putting on a bit of speed. She turned the car this way and that.

  “See? Now you can go anywhere. You don’t have to depend on your parents or Eva or me. It’s freedom.”

  But Sara wasn’t thinking of freedom. Wide open spaces didn’t interest her. Instead, she wanted this small circle to grow smaller, tighter, closer. Instead, all she could think about was the feel of the car speeding beneath her, the glide of the blacktop. All she could imagine was the incredible fact that George loved his car and he had let her drive it. She felt the warm night. She and George and Eva and the baby were all family.

  She turned the wheel again and George beside her disappeared. She imagined she was older, driving in this car, and the person beside her was Anne, a sturdy little girl with Sara’s hair tucked into two braids. Maybe the two of them were going to Anne’s kindergarten play or out to Brigham’s for hot fudge sundaes. The two of them would be singing along to the radio, laughing, or telling goofy jokes. Maybe they were even dressed alike, in jeans and black T-shirts, in high-top sneakers. The two of them would get out of the car and all anyone had to do was look at them and know they were mother and daughter. Everyone would see how much they loved each other.

  “Good job!” George said, and Sara’s reverie dislodged. Instantly, she was bumped back beside him in the car again. Eva and Anne were back outside, waiting patiently for the car to stop so they could get back in.

  After a while, Abby and Jack stopped asking Sara where she was going, when she might be back. They didn’t ask her how her day was when she returned. Instead, Jack kept to himself. Instead, Abby left college catalogs on Sara’s dresser. She kept the Help Wanteds on the table, dead center, where Sara couldn’t miss them, and a few times she had circled things in bright purple ink. Intern. Library helper. Tutor for grade-school kids. Sara, walking by, swept the catalogs into her top drawer. Her hand dusted the Help Wanteds onto the floor. Instead, the books she read were recipe books so she could cook dinner with Eva. She went to the bookstore, but the books she gravitated to weren’t the ones Eva picked up like party nuts, The Wise Parent, The Good Baby. And the one title that made Sara laugh, What Every Baby Knows, as if every baby had a secret and it was an adult’s job to tell you what it was. Sara picked up Charlotte’s Web, a book she had loved all through her girlhood. She grabbed for bright colorful books Anne could touch.

  It was two in the afternoon and already George was irritated. Cora, his office manager, was out sick. She had overbooked and now he had a root canal in room one, and an abscess in room two, both cranky and miserable and demanding his attention. Teresa, his hygienist, had told him that morning that she was quitting with only a week’s notice. “What I really want to do is write,” she said.

  He had too many patients for one day, and for the last few nights he hadn’t been getting any sleep at all. The baby was two months old now, and she still woke every two hours, like a little alarm clock, her wails splitting the night. They both stumbled up, grabbing for their robes, shuffling their feet into their slippers. Eva padded to the kitchen to warm the bottle, and he stood over her crib, watching her.

  He couldn’t get over Anne. “You with a kid?” one of his friends had said to George when he had mentioned they were adopting. He could hardly have imagined it, either. He liked and appreciated kids well enough, loved going into the schools to talk to them, to have them clamber up on his lap, imprinting his cheek with sticky kisses. But he loved leaving them, too. Loved being fancyfree enough to go to movies whenever he wanted, and theater, and good restaurants, and have all that child bounce and joy be a memory he could retrieve happily whenever he wanted. And Eva. He wanted Eva all to himself. He’d be lying if he didn’t think that a child might change his relationship with Eva. “You have a child, you lose your partner,” someone had told him once, and George worried over it. He loved Eva, he couldn’t bear to be the cause of her unhappiness, and maybe he had agreed to children not just because he wanted her to be happy, but because not to agree might be a way of losing her, too.

  When they had first brought the baby home, there was so much noise and commotion, and he and Eva were so sleep-deprived, that he had looked forward to going back to work, to getting away from all the diapers and feedings, to being back in a circle of adults. But once at work, to his surprise, he couldn’t stop thinking about Anne. He could be making amalgam for a filling and the shape would suddenly remind him of a toy she had. He’d be walking on the street and he’d see a stroller and his breath would skip. He was filling a tooth when he heard a baby cry and he had to stop for a moment, leaving his patient, to go into the waiting room where a woman and a baby sat, the two of them smiling. “New patient,” she said, but he couldn’t unlock his eyes from the baby.

  Last night, he was drawn into Anne’s room as if she had cast a spell on him. He slipped in, just for a look, he told himself, and then, before he knew it, he sat for hours beside her crib, and just watching her sleep seemed the most miraculous thing in the world to him. It tickled him how small she was. How she blew bubbles in her sleep, how her tiny fingers curled. How all he had to do was look at her and be filled with feelings that even the most basic thing—eating, sleeping, wetting her diapers—seemed amazing to him now.

  He spent as much time with her as he could. Imagine that, a tiny baby and he missed her, she flooded his thoughts. He came home for lunch, he tried to schedule appointments no later than four so he could get home early to see her, and a few times he called Eva. “Put her on the phone,” he said, and Eva laughed and went to get Anne and he listened, just for a few minutes, to her breathy sighs and burbles.

  “You ought to get a load of the look on your face,” his hygienist told him, walking by, her arms laden with files. She laughed. “It’s just wonderful,” she told him.

  He was in love and he knew it.

  He had to admit Eva was a little better with the baby than he was. And why not? Hadn’t he come to her class and stood outside, leaning in the doorway, watching her with her kids, their faces turned to her like little daisies to a sun. He had seen her with her friends’ babies, how good she was, how gentle, how the babies all seemed to adore her. But he could learn. He could catch up.

  And seeing Eva with the baby did something to him he never expected. He had come into the house last night to find the two of them asleep on the couch and he was flooded with
emotion. “Eva,” he said softly and she roused, blinking up at him, and suddenly he wanted her so much, it made him dizzy. Walking toward her, he bent and kissed her full on the mouth, he stroked back her hair.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love us,” he told her.

  Now, he checked his watch. He’d never get out of here in time.

  “Doctor.”

  He finished the root canal and gave the abscess patient novocaine. “Be right back,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. The patient glared at him. “I promise,” he said.

  He passed the waiting room. Six patients, leafing through magazines, shifting position. They looked up at him expectantly. One put down her magazine and leaned forward. “Soon, Mrs. Lido,” he lied. Soon, baloney. He went into Cora’s little office. He picked up the phone and called Eva and as soon as he heard her voice, bright and lustrous as a piece of silver, he felt soothed.

  “I can’t come home for lunch today,” he apologized. “But I’ll get out of here early.”

  “Well, okay,” she said. “Anyway, Sara’s here.”

  He glanced at the clock. “Really? Again? I thought you and Anne were going to go out to see your friend Christine later—”

  “Sara came by.”

  “Shouldn’t she be home? Or with her friends?”

  “Doctor,” someone called.

  “Look, I’ve got to go. Love you. Love our baby. See you at dinner,” he said.

  At four, he was finished, an hour earlier than he had hoped. His last patient had been another emergency, a woman who had come in with her bridge still attached to a bright red taffy apple she hadn’t been able to resist biting. She left with a temporary and a list of foods she shouldn’t eat. He’d have to place an ad for another hygienist. He wished he could place an ad for a clone. Most dentists worked solo, and he had never wanted to be in a partnership, but maybe it might help things. He wouldn’t have to work so hard, such long hours. But of course the question was, who would be the partner? You had to be careful with things like that. The only person he could think of was his old friend Tom from dental school, who lived in Florida and was always trying to get him to move down there. “Blue skies, sandy beaches,” Tom urged, but George hadn’t really wanted to move.