Inside Out Girl

by Tish Cohen

“A new sitter. Wendy. We haven’t had the best luck with babysitters.”

  “My neighborhood had a surprising scarcity of teenagers when my kids were small. It always made me suspicious they were hiding themselves.”

  “I think teenagers today have actual lives.” He popped a piece of bread in his mouth and shook his head. “It’s a terrible thing.”

  “Mm-hmm. You know, I’ve been sitting here trying to decide how you got that fabulous tan.”

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “That you either have a tanning booth in your basement or you slathered yourself with tinted moisturizer.”

  “And what if I did?”

  “I’m heading back to that bus stop.”

  He laughed. “Well, you can save your bus fare. I just got back from a long weekend in Myrtle Beach. Annual golf trip with the boys from college.”

  She smiled. “So, three days of beer, burping, and Doritos. Real cultural stuff?”

  “Not as bad as that. Although, I must admit we have one ritual we can’t seem to break.” He looked at her, his cheeks flushed pink. “But I haven’t known you long enough to spill it…”

  “Oh, come on. I can take it.”

  He considered this. “Okay. But remember, we go way back, the boys and I.” He swallowed the remains of his wine and studied her face. “We urinate over the side of the hotel balcony. All four of us, in unison. He who lasts longest gets free breakfast the next day.”

  She smothered her smile in her napkin. “Doesn’t the hotel have a problem with that?”

  “Oh, we never go back to the same place twice. That would be insanity.”

  Her cell phone rang from inside her purse. She glanced at the display screen. “It’s Janie,” she explained. “I’ll just be a second.” Into the phone, she said, “Hi, honey.”

  “Mom, I’m trying out for this elite summer hockey camp! Tryouts are in two weeks so you have to drive me to practice tomorrow or my entire life is over. Everyone is going, even the new kid next door, Tabitha, I think her name is. Oh yeah, and Dustin’s out of control. Is biting considered assault? Because I had no other choice.”

  Rachel smiled at Len and said into the phone. “Yes, I’m having a lovely time, Janie. Thank you for asking.” Len made an approving face.

  “Mom! What about hockey practice?”

  Silently vowing to ground her daughter once she got home, Rachel said, “I love you, Janie. Sleep well.”

  As she slipped the phone into her purse, Len’s phone rang. He held up one finger to Rachel and picked up. “Yes?” He nodded, looked at Rachel, and smiled. “Olivia,” he mouthed to her. His entire conversation consisted of grunts, “Mm-hmm,” “Really?” and “Absolutely.” She watched the look on Len’s face as he spoke, unaware he was being studied. His eyes softened as he spoke to his daughter. His mouth curled up at the sides, barely susceptibly, with either amusement or adoration. Or both.

  God, he must be a great father.

  Len told his daughter to get washed, that he loved her, and not to fall asleep under her bed again.

  Sipping from his coffee, Len laughed to himself, then said, “Olivia wanted me to ask if you were aware that mice gnawing from a magenta crayon will have magenta droppings.”

  Rachel ran her finger along the edge of her cup. “Actually, I’m curious…during the focus group the other night, why did you ask for articles about kids with special needs? Olivia could probably write for our magazine.” She dipped a finger into her coffee and licked it. “In fact, maybe she should. Magenta mouse facts might help us win back readers.”

  “She might be gifted in some areas. But she has a nonverbal learning disorder, NLD, sort of like autism without the desire to isolate. She isn’t great at expressing them, but has normal emotions. Makes her inability to ‘fit in’ that much more painful—for both of us.”

  “I had no idea.” Or I wouldn’t have come, she thought. Rachel felt sick. “Is this something you knew right away?”

  “Well, Virginia and I noticed she didn’t respond to facial cues, didn’t smile when we smiled, laugh when we laughed. That sort of thing. But babies are such mysterious creatures…” He shrugged.

  “So how did you find out?” Rachel asked.

  “She was five. It was the winter before Virginia died, actually.” He signaled to the waiter. “Would you like to head over to Chaz Madison’s to hear a little jazz?”

  Yes. No. “Excuse me,” she said, standing up too fast.

  “Don’t flee right away,” he joked. “Think it over for a moment.”

  She attempted to smile, but waved her hand and mumbled something about looking for the ladies’ room.

  Inside the restroom, she leaned over the sink and focused on breathing. It was too much. Too close. She’d never be able to look at him without guilt so thick she could taste it.

  * * *

  Rachel had been nearly eighteen when her baby was born. Josh was seventeen. The pregnancy was a reckless slipup that never should have happened. Two teenagers parked on a scenic winding road, aptly named “Skyline,” fumbling around in the backseat. It wasn’t their first time, they should have known better. Things got heated up and when Rachel opened the condom wrapper with her teeth, the latex caught on a sharp edge of the foil. But…it looked fine. A month and a half later, behind a locked stall in the girls’ restroom, pregnancy test dipstick in hand, Rachel discovered it hadn’t been.

  Josh insisted she abort. And part of her wanted to. Other people did it, right? That way she wouldn’t have to face her parents. But she stopped at the bookstore on her way home from school one day and wandered into the pregnancy section, picked up a book, and flipped to the page on fetal development. She saw the photo. The one that showed the nine-week-old fetus with already formed arms and legs. Her baby was the size of a grape. It was already moving, already had fingerprints. But what struck Rachel’s core was learning that if you placed an object in the baby’s palm, the baby would try to grasp it.

  Impossibly tiny webbed fingers wrapping themselves around…what? What could possibly be small enough to fit in those hands? The head of a pin? A blade of grass? A strand of Rachel’s own hair?

  From that moment on, she was certain she could feel movement. Faint, carbonated bubbles tickling her insides. She told her mother and father that night over roast beef and cold asparagus. There would be no abortion. Not even an army of medical personnel would be able to hold her still long enough. She’d made her choice.

  The decision to give the baby up for adoption was Piper’s. Not coincidentally, it came on the day they received results from the prenatal testing, completed in Rachel’s seventeenth week of pregnancy. In spite of Rachel’s young age, all tests pointed toward the child having Down’s syndrome. Rachel prayed the results were wrong. If, by some miracle, the baby was born with the perfect number of chromosomes, she hoped, she prayed, her mother would change her mind.

  When Rachel finally pushed the baby into the world—in a cold, white room filled with overhead lights, beeping machinery, and too many masked and gloved medical personnel to count—she knew the truth before anyone spoke a word. It was in the eyes of the doctors, nurses. In the hushed voices, the purposeful movements. They swept the baby away from Rachel and onto a scale, where they measured, weighed, and wiped the cheesy white coating, the vernix, from the infant’s delicate skin. As one nurse swaddled the child in drab green flannel, another came to Rachel’s side and took her hand.

  Before whisking Rachel’s baby out of the room, the nurse said, “You had a girl.”

  Had.

  Now, in the ladies’ room, Rachel held her hands under the icy water. How could she entangle herself in the life of someone else’s special-needs child if she had opted out of her own daughter’s life, however unwillingly?

  The guilt would crush her.

  She’d say no to the jazz club. No to any future dates. She’d bumbled along reasonably well before Len, she’d bumble along just fine without him. She took a deep breat
h, patted her hands dry, and marched toward the table, prepared to tell Len she had to get home. She had a busy day tomorrow.

  As she got closer, she noticed him spitting on his linen napkin and rubbing the paint off his wrist. Then, realizing what he’d done to the napkin, he glanced around and slipped it under the leaves of the fern behind his chair. He looked up as she approached, his face still flushed from embarrassment.

  Say it, she commanded herself. You need to get home.

  “Does this jazz club serve dinner?” she asked, her hands shaking. “Because I’m still starved.”

  CHAPTER 9

  If You Give a Mouse an Oreo

  Len opened the front door to find the babysitter asleep on the couch. Olivia’s favorite movie, The Incredibles, played on the TV. Tonight’s babysitter had been a real find. Wendy was every parent’s dream. Too responsible to have a boyfriend hiding in the bushes waiting until the coast was clear, and too industrious to leave the child alone during Sex and the City reruns. The girl stirred.

  “Hey Wendy,” Len called. “How did it go?”

  She jumped up and reached for her sweater, her hair molded into a peaked rooftop. She did not look happy. “Thank God, you’re back.”

  He didn’t need to ask. No matter how much junk food he stuffed into the kitchen, no matter how much he upped their hourly rates, they rarely came back. He watched as Wendy headed straight for the front door. When she reached for the doorknob, Len stopped her. “Don’t tell me you’re going home without being paid…” He laughed, pulling out his wallet. “I’m sure you earned every bit of this.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded, bugging her eyes. “Uh, yeah?” she said—like a question. After ramming the bills into her bag, she tossed him a smile full of pity and slipped outside.

  Ah, well. Another one down.

  There was a time when Len’s parents would have offered their assistance. Back when Olivia was younger, after Virginia died, they were determined to help Len raise his daughter.

  Glancing around the living room, on the day after Olivia’s sixth birthday, Len’s parents had made a good-hearted show of hiding their horror. Life without Virginia in the eight months since her death, without any sort of dependable child care, meant menial tasks went undone. Maybe that wasn’t quite accurate. The laundry got put into the machine, washed, and transferred into the dryer. It just never quite made it back into the dresser drawers. The basket progressed as far as the living room before some sort of Oliviarelated catastrophe drove Len to drop everything to soothe, bandage, discipline, feed, or water his daughter.

  The dishes were slightly less troublesome; they washed, rinsed, and dried themselves within the very same appliance. No transfer required. The clean dishwasher became its own cupboard. The dirty dishes, however, were left to fester in unbalanced stacks in the kitchen sink until the dishwasher was, mercifully, empty once again. If Len had known his parents were coming, he’d have made some effort to clean up. At the very least, he’d have swept the floor and hidden the dirty plates.

  Grace and Henry Bean had sat side by side, perched on the edge of the sofa. Grace’s ankles were daintily pressed together. Everyone remained silent as Henry pinched a wad of tobacco and, carefully holding his pipe over the tiny bag, filled the pipe’s bowl. After packing the moistened tobacco firmly, but not too firmly, Henry took three unlit puffs and sat back, satisfied.

  “Our gift wasn’t much of a hit, was it?” Grace asked of no one in particular. “The fellow at the toy store said it was the most popular puzzle they had. It’s three-dimensional, you know.”

  Len nodded. “Olivia loves it. Thank you.” It was a total lie. Len couldn’t imagine a worse gift for his daughter, who had trouble pushing a button through a hole.

  “Loves it? I believe her exact words were, ‘Ech. I hate puzzles,’” laughed Henry.

  Len reached for a pair of his daughter’s mittens on the floor. “She’s just cranky.” When his mother appeared concerned, Len added, “Nightmares last night.”

  “Poor thing. I chose it because it was in the shape of a princess castle. She does still love castles, doesn’t she?”

  Again, Len lied. “Absolutely. It’s the perfect gift.”

  “Maybe she’ll give it a try after we leave?” asked Grace.

  “I’m sure she will,” said Len.

  “When you were her age, you loved puzzles,” said Henry.

  Grace’s eyes had drifted back to the overflowing laundry basket. “It’s too much for you.”

  “What?” asked Len.

  She waved toward the jumble of shoes in the hall, the stack of newspapers scattered in front of the fireplace, the pizza box leaning behind a chair. “All of this. Olivia. Without Virginia.”

  “We’re doing okay.”

  “Leave him alone, Grace,” said Henry. “A little mess never hurt anyone.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s more than that. I’m going to send Marta over here once a week to clean—”

  “Forget it, Mom,” Len said. “I can hire someone myself.”

  “I’m not forgetting it. Marta’s looking for someone to replace her Tuesday client. Bob Rennert.” She glanced at Henry, whose brows had shot up. “Prostate cancer,” she explained. “It was very fast.”

  Henry shook his head and went back to his pipe. Just then, Olivia came stumbling into the room, hair curtained across her face, using Len’s tennis racket as a scoot-along-the-rug snowshoe.

  Henry perked up. “You like tennis, Olivia?”

  The child didn’t answer, just continued scooting.

  “Olivia,” said Grace. “Your grandfather asked if you enjoy playing tennis.”

  Again, Olivia ignored the question.

  “Why don’t you come over to Grandma and sit on her lap,” said Grace, holding her arms out toward her granddaughter, waggling her fingers to sweeten the offer. “Maybe we can braid your hair, get it out of your eyes.”

  Olivia pushed a thicket of hair off her forehead only to have it fall across her face again. From where she stood at the window, sunlight flooded her delicate features, illuminating her untarnished skin, electrifying that untamable russet hair. Her one exposed eye glowed as if lit from within, the gray of her iris blanched into an iridescent near-white. For the first time, Len noticed her bushy eyelashes weren’t black at all. They were impossibly dark auburn.

  Grace gasped, looked at Len, and whispered, “My goodness, she’s a beautiful child.”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly, so lost was he in the very fact of his daughter.

  Henry glanced up from his pipe for a moment and shook his head, sighing. “Going to have to fight off the boys one day.”

  Len stiffened. Henry meant it as a casual remark. A compliment. The father of another girl would be flattered. He might chuckle, ruffle his daughter’s hair, and make a lame joke. Something like “I’ll be waiting for them with my shotgun.” Or “I don’t know how I’ll survive the teen years.”

  Not Len. What boys, or, God forbid, men, might think about his daughter one day, when her body began to burgeon, made Len’s mouth go dry with panic.

  Parents of children with nonverbal learning disabilities had layers of worry, like a tightly budded rose. But parents of girls with NLD faced another, more terrifying layer. Learning-disabled females were typically overly trusting, gentle, and desperate for social acceptance. A dangerous formula when devoid of a healthy level of prudence, observation, and skepticism.

  A father’s instinct to protect his little girl was natural. Len’s instinct to protect Olivia was near savage.

  He changed the subject. “I hear we’re in for snow tonight.”

  Henry sucked on his pipe, closed his eyes, and smiled. He’d always loved a good storm.

  “I see Virginia in her,” said Grace, watching Olivia drop to the floor and drive the tennis racket across the carpet with her hands. As the handle banged repeatedly against Grace’s chair leg, she eyed her son. Len knew his mother thought Olivia’s on
-again, off-again communication skills were no different than the empty Chips Ahoy! package sitting on the coffee table. The natural consequence of family torn apart by tragedy. And, like the mess, simple to resolve.

  “Let her be, Mom. She’s playing quietly.”

  His mother looked at his father. Clearly, this was a problem they’d discussed before. Grace touched Len’s arm. “We’re not blaming you, Leonard. But sometimes if you just put your foot down…”

  Len struggled to remain calm.

  “Do you know that Zucker rats can never ever feel full?” Olivia had stopped skating and stared at her grandmother, licking her lips. “They eat and eat and eat.”

  “What about puppies, love?” asked Grace, who had never understood how a girl could birth a rodent obsession in the first place, let alone nurse it for three years.

  “They eat until they almost explode,” said Olivia.

  Grace told her granddaughter she was fascinating, and turned to Len. “She’s obviously a very intelligent girl. Don’t shortchange her because of what some doctor says.” She blinked several times. “Your father and I think it’s time we got involved.”

  So it was settled. Every Sunday morning, Grace and Henry would pick up Olivia and take her to their golf club for indoor tennis lessons and a quiet lunch overlooking the snow-covered eighteenth hole. Len would get a few hours to himself, and they’d get a crack at bettering Olivia’s meager social skills.

  His parents showed a remarkable degree of determination. They arrived at the door at ten o’clock sharp to find Olivia sitting in the front hall wearing pajamas and her father’s winter boots. Grace managed to wrestle her into tennis whites, but the child refused to even look at the gleaming Nikes with pink pompoms on the toes. Nor would she contemplate wearing her own boots.

  Grace gave Len a look that said, “Watch this and learn.” Smiling at Olivia, she set down the rules, “You can wear your dad’s boots into the car, but you’ll change into your Nikes as soon as we get into the club or else Grandma won’t allow you dessert.”