Ted sat next to Jon and took a drink from his own beer. “Used to be a charcoal guy,” he said. He tilted his bottle at the kids. “Till they came along.”
Contentment leaked from Ted. Even back when Ted and Cindy had just started dating, Ted had seemed like a dad—the mock turtleneck sweaters, the corny jokes, the receding hairline. It was probably what attracted Cindy to him in the first place. Back when they had all gathered at the Paulina apartment, Ted never quite fit in—he lingered at the edge of the circle. But on his cluttered backyard patio, wearing his apron, with a spatula in one hand and a beer in the other, although he hadn’t changed a bit, he fit perfectly into the center of it all.
“How’s she sleeping?”
Jon grunted. “Like a baby.”
“So she shits and screams every two hours?”
“Exactly.”
Ted nodded toward the house. “I haven’t seen Gail like that in years.”
Ted could see it, too.
“Yeah,” Jon said. “She’s waited a long time for this.”
“I’m happy for her. For both of you.”
Jon knew that he was supposed to say something in response, but he couldn’t quite figure out what that was, so instead, he took another drink.
“How ’bout you? How you doin’?”
Ted was persistent.
“I’m good,” Jon said. “It’s great.”
Ted laughed. “Sticking with the party line…”
Damn right, he was sticking with the party line. Jon knew that anything he said would find its way to Cindy and then Gail and then right back into his lap. “It’s awesome.”
Ted took a long drink and leaned back in his chair. “Let’s pretend I’m not your wife’s best friend’s husband for a minute.”
Jon glanced at Ted and then down at his beer. He tugged at the label on his bottle and tried to find the words that could get at it, the words that he’d tell Ted if he’d tell Ted anything real. “It feels like the terror is fading.”
Ted grunted and smiled, but for a long time he didn’t speak. “It fades,” he said. “Sometimes you won’t even feel it. But it never really goes away.”
Ted felt it? Ted, who was practically born a fully formed father, felt it? And it never goes away? They both drank their beer and avoided eye contact. Never is a long time. Finally, Ted glanced at the grill and got up. “I’m getting the meat. You need another beer?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Gail came out as Ted went in. She still looked embarrassed by her good fortune. “Can you hold her for a minute?”
“Of course.”
“Cindy’s making the potato salad, and Paige just called. I need to call her back.”
Jon reached up, took his daughter, and settled her into his lap. Gail kissed him on the lips before she went back inside. The weight of Maya in his arms was starting to feel right. Maybe she was getting heavier, or maybe he was just learning what to expect when he held her. He breathed in the Milk Duds and thought about what Ted said. He let the idea wedge itself next to that sweet scent, next to the expectations that had been sneaking into his life over the last few days. It never really goes away.
Maya woke, yawned, and stretched. Jon bent over her and wiggled his pinky into her fist. She gripped it like she always did, but this time those fingers pulled him off-balance, and something shifted. Maya cracked her eyelids and seemed to look at him for a long moment. Her pupils were gray, like granite or steel. She squeezed his pinky insistently, as if tugging him toward the future, and all at once Jon could see her hand in his own, walking uptown for ice cream. He could see those fingers around the chain of a swing, gripping a pencil, texting a friend, plucking a guitar string, accepting a ring. He could even see the tiny fingers of Maya’s own child wrapped around her pinky. The screen door slammed, and Ted set a full bottle of beer on the table. Maya’s eyes creased back to slits. That pit bull’s growl settled toward silence, and Jon was left to wonder how his father could just walk away from his own tiny fingers.
* * *
Jon was halfway through his second beer, watching Aidan push Olivia on the swing, when he heard the screen door open and close quietly. He felt the stillness. He swiveled his chair and saw Gail near the door, hugging herself, staring out at the kids. Her eyes looked hollow, and her head tilted just a bit, as if she was listening for something.
“What’s wrong?” Jon asked.
Ted looked up from the grill, spatula in hand, ready to fix something.
Gail blinked rapidly. “We have to go.”
“Nonsense,” Ted barked. “I’ve got six pounds of meat dripping grease on these flames. You aren’t going anywhere.”
Jon stood. Gail didn’t turn to him. She didn’t laugh at Ted. She didn’t move at all, only blinked. The way her mouth hung slightly open, the way her eyelids fluttered, made Jon’s throat close up. He held Maya close and breathed in the Milk Duds.
Cindy opened the screen door, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “What’s this I hear about you leaving? I just finished the potatoes.”
Gail finally tore her eyes from the kids on the swing set and turned toward Cindy. She tried to smile, but her lips couldn’t manage it. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”
Cindy peppered Gail with questions that she wouldn’t answer. Ted tried a couple of jokes, but nobody laughed. Cindy stopped asking questions when Gail began to tear up. Ted finally turned off the grill. The children gathered around the stroller to watch Gail pack it back up, looking with confusion from their mom to Aunt Gail and back to their mom. Jon just held Maya until Gail pulled her from his arms without a word and strapped her into the stroller.
Ted, spatula still in hand, stood next to Cindy on the front stoop as Jon and Gail headed down the driveway. Gail pushed the stroller this time, and the wheels clicked loudly across each crack in the concrete.
“What did Paige say?” Jon asked when they were out of earshot.
“She can’t find Carli.” Gail stared past the end of the block. “She’s called a dozen times, but Carli won’t answer her phone.”
“So what?”
Gail’s mouth twisted like it did whenever she was trying to be patient with him but failed. “She hasn’t signed it yet. The final consent.”
Jon remembered the piles of paper that he had signed himself and the too-long wait in the hospital while Carli signed papers. He remembered the accordion file full of paperwork that Paige handed to Gail when they finally went home that first night, and he remembered the thlump of the three-hole punch the next day and the snap of the three-ring binder as Gail locked all the papers into place. He remembered Gail prattling on about the paperwork, but he never really listened to her because that was all Gail’s job. So, as the stroller clattered across the cracks of the sidewalk, even though he tried, he couldn’t remember ever hearing the words final consent.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
Jon said nothing because Gail’s voice leaked venom. And because she was right.
“It means Carli still has rights. She can still reclaim the baby.”
Gail walked faster, and the rhythm of the wheels striking the cracks accelerated with her. Jon had fallen two steps behind when she spoke again.
“It means that Maya’s not our baby yet.”
Carli
Carli sipped her coffee and nibbled on a blueberry muffin. She hunched over a table near the bathroom at Liberty Street Cafe, an old two-flat turned coffee shop down by the river. Her shift didn’t start until four, but she had to get out of the house to avoid Marla. She couldn’t go back to Denny’s, and the kids she knew from high school usually went to the Starbucks out by the expressway, so she had ventured down toward the river. If she had to deal with anyone at Liberty Street, it would probably be somebody’s mom or dad or grandma, but the only other customers so far were two old men in feed caps and denim. They were talking too loudly about soybean futures and asking each other to repeat themselves. She didn’t recognize th
e woman behind the counter, either. This might become her new regular place.
She was slogging through Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, and none of it made much sense. Kohlberg studied men, which probably explained why Carli found it so goddamn confusing. She highlighted what she understood, underlined the parts to come back to. Her phone vibrated on the table. Paige again. Carli ignored it. She was still calling every hour or so. Carli had stopped listening to the voice mails. They were all the same. Seventy-two hours had come and gone, and Paige wanted that final consent. Just a formality, she said. Housekeeping. She kept calling, but Carli wasn’t ready to tell her that Marla had burned it, that she needed a new one. Or not.
Maybe the caffeine kicked in, or maybe the charts in the next section were easier to digest. Maybe it was because Carol Gilligan had only studied women when she developed her ethics of care. Whatever it was, the reading got easier. Women develop through three levels, it said. At the first level, girls make important decisions based upon what’s best for them. Wendy and Kelly spent most of their time at that level and probably always would, and Carli couldn’t deny that she was sitting in Liberty Street Cafe reading a book about psychology because of what she wanted for herself. At the second level, women make their decisions based upon what’s best for others. This was where Carli’s head started to swim with thoughts of Gail gripping her pen, bent over her notebook, making lists of things for the baby. And she thought about that wrinkled face that Marla had thrust at her. The empty place started to throb. Lots of women never make it to the third level, the book said, the place where women balance their moral choices between their own needs and care for others Do no harm to yourself and do no harm to others. The phone vibrated again, and Carli sent it to voice mail without looking at the number.
Do no harm to yourself. Do no harm to others. Which others? Gail? Marla? Paige? Jon? The baby? If she did what Marla wanted, that textbook would go away for a long time and maybe never come back. But she could feel the blood pump through that empty place with each beat of her heart. And if she did what Paige wanted, that empty place might get bigger and more painful until it was all she could feel. She underlined, and she highlighted, and she studied the text until her eyes burned, but that third level seemed to raise more questions than answers.
Do no harm to yourself and do no harm to others. Maybe Marla was right. Maybe all this stuff she was trying to learn in college was bullshit. In the end, there was only one baby. The phone buzzed again. A text from Paige. Carli checked the time—ten minutes until work. She turned off the phone and packed it with her book into her backpack. Her head ached, and her eyes itched, and the empty place seemed to unfold when she stood. There was only one baby. Someone would be harmed.
* * *
Carli counted the drawer and then wiped down the counter and all the tables. The dinner rush started at five, but the delivery calls always trickled in around four thirty. So when the first call came, Carli tucked the receiver between her shoulder and her cheek and grabbed a pad and pen.
“Giamonti’s.”
“Is this Carli?”
Paige’s voice. Carli’s eyes darted to the caller ID. Paige’s number. Carli coughed.
“No,” she said, forcing her voice higher. It sounded fake even to her. “This is Marissa.”
A long pause. Paige recognized her voice, of course. They had talked on the phone so many times over the last seven months that it only took that one word. “Is Carli working tonight?”
“No,” Carli said in her Marissa voice. “Not tonight.”
“OK. I’ll try her cell phone again.” Another long pause. “Thank you.”
Carli dropped the phone into the cradle as if it were hot. She stared at it. The clowns watched from the walls. She couldn’t avoid the decision much longer.
Paige
The bell rang when Paige entered the restaurant. She arrived a little after eight, so the dining room was empty. Carli didn’t look up, but Paige saw her stiffen. Her hair hung limp, as if she hadn’t washed it in a while. She bent over the counter, doodling on a pad of paper. She had probably been expecting Paige since Paige called, dreading her arrival. She made her way past the tables to the counter.
“What’s with the clowns?” Paige asked.
Carli looked up at the walls. She shrugged. “I dunno. They’ve been here ever since I can remember.”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”
Carli looked back down at the pad, and her hand moved more quickly. Paige saw her pen press more firmly into the paper.
“I know,” she said quietly.
“I went by your house.”
“Marla home?”
“She was.”
“How’d that go?”
“Probably about like you’d expect.” Paige tried to decide how much to say, how hard to press. “She said you weren’t going to sign the final consent.”
A tiny shrug. Carli drew lines from a circle to the rectangle next to it. Paige couldn’t take her eyes off the pad.
“She burned it,” Carli whispered.
“The final consent?”
A tiny nod.
“I have a copy in the car,” Paige offered quietly.
Silence. Stars and trapezoids and diamonds. This could go either way. Paige knew that if she gave Carli a shove, she could probably tip the balance, but she resisted the urge. It wasn’t her job to take sides. “Marla and Gail have both made it clear what they want,” she said. “What do you want?”
Carli’s hand stopped moving. When she finally looked up, she blinked, looking confused and startled, as if nobody had asked her that question in a very long time. Paige remembered with visceral clarity a day twenty-one years earlier when her aunt had finally asked her the same question.
Carli shrugged. “Marla said that she’d help me.”
Paige knew exactly how that would work out. Marla would watch Maya once, maybe twice. She would change some diapers, give her a bath or two. But then Marla would remember how much an infant demanded—all the crying and stink and constant attention. She would make excuses, make herself scarce, and Carli would realize how alone she really was. With an effort, Paige forced herself back toward neutral. “She might. For a while.”
A small smile. A nod.
“I called Gail this afternoon.”
Carli’s smile withered. “What did she say?”
“Not much. I did most of the talking.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth. I told her that I couldn’t find you. I told her that I didn’t know what would happen next.”
The paper ripped a bit under the tip of the pen, and Carli shifted her attention back to the circle and rectangle. “She must hate me,” she whispered.
“Carli. You have to decide what’s right for you. Not Marla. Not Gail and Jon.”
They were silent for a long time. The circle that Carli had attached to the rectangle now had two eyes and a little mouth. Carli was rounding the corners of the rectangle, shading it.
“But how do I do that?” Her forehead creased as she scribbled. “How do I decide?”
Right down the middle. Don’t take sides. Right down the middle. “If you’re anything like me,” Paige said. “And I think maybe you are. You’ve been trying to think this through. Pros and cons. Pluses and minuses. All that. But you can’t think your way to a decision like this. Trust me. You have to feel for it.”
Carli’s hand finally stopped moving, and she set down the pen. Paige wanted to grab that hand and squeeze it tightly. Carli looked drawn and exhausted, like she’d have trouble enough choosing the toppings on a pizza, much less face the choice in front of her. Paige wanted to help her decide, she wanted to make the decision for her, but, of course, that wasn’t her place. “I need to get back to Jon and Gail soon. It’s only fair.”
Carli nodded. “I know.”
“Sleep on it. Let yourself feel it. Call me in the morning.”
Carli nodded again, and t
hen turned and walked through the swinging door into the kitchen. Paige wanted to follow her. She wanted to wrap that confused little girl in her arms and tell her that she knew exactly how she felt. Instead, she turned and walked toward the exit. She tried to ignore the painted smirks of the clowns, and she tried to stay balanced on that skinny invisible line. Right down the middle.
Gail
It took Gail a long time to get Maya to sleep that night. It may have been the way that Gail’s hand trembled while she fed her the last bottle. Maya might have felt Gail’s heart hammering against her rib cage. Maybe she could hear the blood rumbling through Gail’s ears. When she was finally able to settle Maya into the bassinet, Gail climbed into bed and lay curled under the covers, her eyes wide.
Jon hadn’t come to bed yet—he’d been on the computer since they got home from Cindy’s—which was just as well, because he’d want to talk about it, and he’d say the wrong thing, and she’d get pissed. She stared at the notebook where it lay on the bedside table holding its useless lists. What a joke. All of them—the lists of childproofing supplies and vaccinations and medications and hypoallergenic cleaning products and emergency contacts—but especially the paperwork lists. The paperwork for the home study and for the FBI and for the Department of Children and Family Services and for the state and for the agency. She had lists of paperwork that she and Jon had to sign and paperwork that the birth father had to sign and paperwork that Carli had to sign. Way at the bottom, only one item remained on those lists. The rest had a single neat line drawn through them. What a pathetic attempt to control the uncontrollable. Gail could control nothing. An eighteen-year-old girl, with hormones flooding her system like a marsh at high tide, controlled everything.
Other People's Children Page 11
