Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I never had an abortion. It was too late. And I never blamed you.”

  A door slapped open at the house next door and a taffy-colored dog bounded out.

  “We had a baby?”

  “A girl.”

  “What?” He stepped back from her, stunned. “What are you telling me? We have a little girl?” He stood back from her, looking at her as if he didn’t know her.

  Sara swiped at her nose, at her eyes. “I would have gone anywhere with you,” Sara said. “I would have done anything,” she said, and then she remembered. Danny’s mother standing outside, telling her she knew what it was like to lose a child, what you had to do to protect the ones you loved, and suddenly she felt sick.

  “Oh God, Sara. You let someone else have our kid?”

  She swallowed, feeling suddenly dizzy. “What was I supposed to do? You were gone! I was only sixteen!”

  “A kid! I wouldn’t have let anyone else have my kid—never, never. I wouldn’t have deserted my child like my old man did with me and my brother. I wouldn’t have deserted you if I had known you still loved me, if I had known you had the kid. Never, no matter what. How could you not have known that?”

  There it was, the pulse in his face, the one he used to get when he was angry. His eyes were so black she couldn’t see the pupils. He was so furious at her, she drew back.

  “The papers were signed!” she said. “They told me the papers were signed.”

  “I never signed any papers. I never knew about any hearing.”

  “But someone did! The server has to ask for ID, go by a picture. Something, anything. And the server had to sign his name, too, right by yours.”

  “So maybe the server screwed up. Maybe he signed them himself. Who knows? All I know is I didn’t sign any papers. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know anything about this, Sara.” He stared past her. “I can’t believe it. A baby.”

  “Maybe you didn’t sign your rights away.” She looked toward the house. “Ask your mother about this. Maybe she knows something. She was here, wasn’t she? I’ll ask her.”

  His eyes narrowed. His shoulders grew straight. He suddenly looked different to her, as if he were traveling far away from her and nothing she could ever do would let her catch up. “This isn’t the time—it isn’t the place—”

  “Someone signed! Maybe your brother signed—”

  “My brother was living in Texas—”

  “Well, maybe he came to visit—maybe he thought he was helping—couldn’t you ask him?”

  “My brother was killed five years ago in a car accident in Alaska. It just about destroyed my mother.”

  “It destroyed your mother?” Sara said faintly. She looked toward the house, and he grabbed her arm. “My wife’s in there!” Danny cried. “I told you this wasn’t the time!”

  “Your wife! You never told her?”

  “Of course I never told her. I was a mess when she met me, but I didn’t want her to have to worry about this. I couldn’t let myself think about it anymore, either. It hurt too much. It almost destroyed me, Sara.” He looked toward the house and then back at Sara. He looked suddenly older to her.

  She freed her arm from his hands. “Danny, the baby was so beautiful, so perfect. You would have been so amazed to see her. She had these full lips. She had these slate-colored eyes and red hair, Danny, and this rippling laugh—”

  “Sara, stop—” Danny said, pained.

  “Her name’s Anne, Danny. She’d be sixteen now. Can you imagine?”

  “Sara, stop! It was a long time ago. What difference can it make now?”

  “Because I could have gotten my daughter back! Because it’s fraud!”

  “So what! So it’s another bum rap! There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “We could go find her.”

  Danny started to walk away and then whipped back around. “Find her? What are you talking about? Find her and do what? I have Charlotte, I have a job. Charlotte’s pregnant, Sara. I’ve finally done something right. My mother adores her, and because of that, she adores me, too. They go to church together when we’re in town! And Sara, you know what, sometimes I even go, too. Charlotte knows I’m not a believer, but she likes having me there. It’s a little thing, it makes her happy, what does it cost me?”

  “It costs,” said Sara, pained. “Look at you pacing. Why can’t you admit you’re angry about this, too? You’re angry! I know you are!”

  “And where’s anger going to get me?” Danny asked. “I have a wife. I’m a good man and for the first time I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to be anything different. I have a place in the community, can you believe it? Me, the rebel? I like feeling that people are proud of me, that they look up to me. Why would I want to ever stop feeling like that? Please. I can’t tell Charlotte I lied. I can’t make her feel she can’t trust me.”

  “It’s not just in the past—”

  “Our kid is what sixteen? If she’s got any of my genes, she’s already thinking about hitting the road, making her own trouble, hating her parents’ guts because they’re trying to keep her down. Why would I want a share of that?”

  “Because she’s your kid—” Sara said. “You know there was never anybody but you,” Sara repeated. Never had she felt more desperate. “And you know we could find her. Even if you didn’t want to be her father, you could do it for me—” she said. “We made this child together. You could help me—”

  “No—”

  The front door slapped open and Sara looked up to see Danny’s wife, Charlotte, slowly making her way back to them, and now that Sara could see her from the front, she saw how pregnant Charlotte was, and she saw, too, the way Charlotte looked at Danny, how her smile brightened, her eyes sparkled. “Hello, there,” called Charlotte, and her voice was like a spell breaking over Danny. He turned toward Charlotte and then he turned back to Sara, as if he had remembered her, like an afterthought.

  “No, Sara,” he said firmly, his voice still low and hard. “It’s the past. Drop it.”

  And then Charlotte was there beside them, in a cloud of perfume, all pineapple blond and pink, flushed skin, freckles sprigging her nose. She draped one arm about Danny and gave him a kiss on the side of his face, then she waved her pretty hands like a fan. “Woo, it’s a hot one, isn’t it?” she said. He grinned at her and then gave Sara a quick, warning glance. Charlotte put one hand on her belly. “Are you one of Danny’s old friends?” Charlotte laughed, nodding her head at Sara, studying her. “We’ve been averaging one an hour since we got here.”

  One an hour. Which friends were those? When Sara had known Danny, he really hadn’t had any friends. It had been just the two of them. “Us against the world,” Danny had said, but now he grabbed for his wife’s hand, now he refused to take his eyes off her.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” Charlotte said. “We’ve got enough food to feed the whole state.”

  Danny interrupted. “Sara has to go,” he said, not meeting Sara’s eyes.

  “Oh, now, that’s a shame,” Charlotte said. “Another time, then.”

  “Sure, another time,” Danny repeated, as if she were no more important to him than the person who tossed the newspaper onto the front porch.

  “Well, it was good to see you,” Danny said. He clapped her on the shoulder, friendly, the way he might any buddy, but she felt the push in his hand. Her face was frozen, but she struggled to smile, to show he hadn’t hurt her, and then she shook Charlotte’s hand, and got back on her bike, and as she turned around to look at him, one more time, the last thing she saw was Danny kissing his wife, the way he used to kiss her, blatantly, right out in public so the whole world could see it, as if he were proving that neither she nor Anne nor anybody else had any claim on him but Charlotte. He put his hand on Charlotte’s blossoming belly. He swayed her in a kind of dance. And Sara saw his knuckles were white, that he was holding on to Charlotte for dear life.

  As she pedaled faster and faster, her breath came in puffs
. Huh-huh-huh. How could he not want to help her? There was a spurt of speed and then she rode over a rock, she heard something pop, and then she was falling, crashing from the bike down onto the pavement, skinning her knees. She cried out in pain. “All that stuff is in the past,” Danny had said, and then she was crying more heavily, but not about her bruises, not about her bike, which she could see had a flat tire. I miss you. All these years and I still miss you.

  She thought of a client she had had when she was studying to be a therapist. He was nearly fifty and recently divorced. He had tracked down his high school sweetheart, a girl he hadn’t seen in thirty years, a girl everyone had told him was nothing more than puppy love, and within two months, they were married. “It was always meant to be,” he said, and then he had gone on to talk about his anxiety at his job.

  There was a woman who came to her, too. She was married to a wonderful man, but she still dreamed about her fiance who had been killed in a car crash. “It’s been ten years,” the woman kept saying to Sara. “Why can’t I get over it?”

  Unfinished business. All of it. Why wouldn’t she miss Danny?—because what she was really missing was all that possibility that had been between them, all that time cut short before they had a chance to see what might have happened if they had been allowed to be together. Maybe they would have been happy. Maybe she would have tired of him and moved on. Maybe he would have found he wasn’t ready to be a father, let alone a husband, and they would have started fighting and not getting along. He might have not come home nights and then, when they had split, it would have been something they both would have welcomed. A sigh of relief. But they neither one of them got the chance to find out.

  She walked the bike home. A few cars slowed as they passed her, a few voices catcalled. “Hey, you got some fries with that shake, honey?” And she kept crying. As soon as she got inside the house, she found her father at home, gathering up his briefcase.

  “I thought I’d come home for lunch and surprise you, but you were gone,” he said. “Now I have to get back to the office.”

  “Dad—” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Honey, what’s the matter? You look so terrible,” he said.

  “Danny never signed the papers. Someone forged his name.”

  “Danny? What are you talking about? What papers?”

  “I was riding around past his neighborhood. He was there.” She couldn’t bear to tell the rest of it, to mention the wife he loved so much he’d tamp down his own anger just so he’d never risk her happiness, certainly not the way he had with Sara’s. “He lives in Pittsburgh now. Did you know where he was?”

  Jack’s face grew slack. “So he lives in Pittsburgh,” Jack said finally. “So he didn’t sign the papers. What difference does it make now? You were sixteen. You were babies.”

  “You don’t understand! You aren’t listening! It means the adoption wasn’t legal, it means Anne is mine—”

  “Sara. That’s ridiculous. Let it go.”

  “No. Never,” Sara said. “Did you know about this?” She wiped her tears with the flat of her hand. “He said he came to the house and you and Mom threatened him! He said he sent me letters and called! Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  “You would have ruined your own life!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know! Believe me, I know!”

  “It was my life to ruin!”

  “Now you just wait a minute before you start shouting at me or accusing me of things,” Jack said. “A father protects his kids, and that’s just what I was doing! Why is that so terrible? Yes, he came to the house, like some wild thing, and yes, I told him to leave because he was acting so crazy. And you were in a state yourself. I didn’t want you married and with a baby at sixteen and no future at all. Who stays married to their high school sweetheart? And you have a man who loves you now, you have a job you say you like. Things are good now, aren’t thev?”

  “Things are unfinished!”

  “You wait until you have experience. You’ll see I was right.”

  “I loved him—” she said, and Jack held up his hand.

  “Love,” he said. “The love that counts is the love for your child.”

  Sara stopped. “Did you hear what you just said?”

  But her father was buttoning his suit jacket, gathering his things to go back to work. “You’ll see I was right,” he repeated.

  After her father left, Sara sat on the couch, trying to sort things out. Sara put both hands over her face. She couldn’t let it go, no more than she could let go of her own heartbeat. She thought of Danny and Charlotte, bathed in light. She thought of Frances, in the house, not coming out.

  Danny might not have thought he had helped her, but he had, by telling her he hadn’t signed the papers. But Jesus, who had? And who had known about it? She thought of Eva and George, the way they had pulled back from her. Margaret. She thought of Margaret, the adoption lawyer at the agency. She could find her and see what had happened. Except Margaret hadn’t exactly been on her side. But back then, Margaret hadn’t known the adoption was fraudulent. Margaret had clearly fucked up—if anyone was at fault, surely it was an attorney who didn’t know enough to get the right papers signed at the right time, an attorney who made a terrified kid feel as if she had no recourse in the world but to trust her. The agency would have to help her find them now.

  But when she called, Margaret was no longer there. Instead, she spoke to a woman named Lorna Chase, who went to get Sara’s file.

  “What can we do for you?” Lorna Chase said, and then Sara began talking.

  Lorna Chase sighed. “Well, this is very unfortunate, but as far as I can tell, this agency acted in good faith. It’s not our job to get a handwriting analysis done, too.”

  “It wasn’t his signature,” Sara insisted. “It was fraud. My daughter was stolen from me.”

  “Stolen’s a very strong word. And can you prove that? Will the father go to court and say it wasn’t his signature?”

  “I don’t know—” Sara lied.

  “Sara.” Lorna Chase’s voice was weary. “Don’t think I don’t sympathize, because I do. I really do. But your daughter would be a teenager now. What’s to be gained by this? You’d have to take this to court, the birth father would have to testify, too. Maybe even the process server, if you could find him, which you probably couldn’t. And even then, what are you going to do? Did you do anything Anne’s whole first year to try and overturn the adoption? Did the birth father? Look, anyone can petition the court to hear anything, but whether you have a leg to stand on is another story. The person who should do something is the birth father, not you. And even then, the courts rule in the best interests of the child. Do you really think your daughter might want to leave the only family she’s known? Do you really want to disrupt her life at this late stage with a court case? That’s not in her best interests. The most you could hope for would be for the courts to order visits between the birth parents and the child.”

  “She’s my daughter. If you don’t know where they are, can you give me the Social Security number so I can look myself?” Sara pleaded. “Please.”

  “No can do. Against the law,” Lorna Chase said. “Surely you know that.”

  “I was fifteen when I got pregnant, sixteen when I had her,” Sara said. “They made me part of their family. I loved them. I loved my baby. And then they disappeared.”

  Lorna sighed again. “I’m very sorry, Sara. If I had a forwarding address, I’d give it to you. Or I’d contact them myself.”

  Sara hung up the phone and went to Abby’s computer, switching it on. She wouldn’t give up, she just wouldn’t. She hadn’t tried to find George or Eva in years, hadn’t thought she had a right to. Now there were a million new ways to find people, and now, she had money, too.

  She found two different sites that looked promising, but both wanted fifty-dollar fees. “We find anyone,” the sites said. Sara typed in her credit card. She’d be he
re for a few more days. That evening, and the next day, she was back and forth to the computer so many times, Jack teased her about which sites she was going onto, but the day after that, she logged on, and there it was: George and Eva Rivers, Boca Raton, Florida. And there below it was an office phone number. And a home phone. There were two addresses.

  She glanced at the phone. One in the afternoon. George would be at work. Anne at school. She’d call the office. The phone rang twice and a woman said, “Doctor’s office,” and Sara chewed at a thumbnail.

  “Is George there?” Sara said, and then Sara heard George in the background, a voice so familiar it sent a pulse of longing through her body.

  “Who’s calling, please?” the woman said, and then Sara hung up.

  Suddenly, she had things to do. She called work and told them there was an emergency, that she’d be gone a few more days. “Sara,” said Hal. “We need you here.” Hope, she thought. It didn’t die the way people thought. It just went underground and then reemerged.

  She knew, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She felt fueled, so energetic, she couldn’t sit still. Everything had a new meaning. She booked a cheap flight so she could be there in the morning, she started to pack and then the phone rang, jolting her, and she picked it up and there was Scott’s voice. “I finally got you!” he said, and she slunk down on the bed again.

  “I found us a place!” he exulted. “It just fell into my lap. A client of mine told me he’s giving up his place and did I know anyone who might want it? Sara, it’s a two-bedroom, right in the West Village, and it’s got a sunroom and a little deck and a kitchen as big as Jupiter. I know the building, Sara, and it’s perfect—so I told him yes, sight unseen.”

  “Scott.” Her throat was so parched she could barely speak without it hurting. If he’d been there, she would have gone over to him and rested her head along his shoulder, she’d have placed his arm about her, making him hold her tight.

  “What, are you mad that I made the decision without you? Don’t be, Sara. I had to say yes, but nothing’s been signed. And I know you’re going to love it. And Sara, I was a fool before. I just want to be with you. I—I want to marry you, Sara. I know I shouldn’t spring this on the phone—”