Marla shifted on the couch but said nothing. Carli had carefully avoided thinking about Gail all day, about the promise that she had made, but the name that Gail chose brought Gail’s endless lists, and her bottomless need for a baby back into sharp focus. They had spent so much time together in waiting rooms, and the need had leaked from Gail’s pores. That need had comforted Carli back when they were visiting doctors—it helped her know that her baby would be fiercely loved—but now Carli knew that same need would wreck Gail.
“She’s gonna be a mess.”
Marla shrugged. “Kids that young don’t remember shit. She’ll be fine.”
“No. I mean Gail.”
“Gail Durbin?”
“Yes.”
Marla’s knee went still. “Fuck the Durbins.”
Just then, a knock on the door. They both glanced at the clock on the cable box—1:50.
“She’s early,” Marla said.
Carli felt warm, and she shivered, and she felt her whole world begin to tilt. It would tilt forever, but now it was going to tilt the right way. She looked at Marla, and Marla almost smiled. Something passed between them that Carli couldn’t wrap words around, something that didn’t need any words. Carli followed her mom to the door. When Marla opened it, Paige came in carrying only her bag and a worried expression. Carli hugged herself, and she shivered harder. Where was the baby? Paige didn’t have the baby. Marla peered outside to see if anyone was with her, and then turned on Paige, her face dark.
“Where the fuck is the baby?”
Paige looked around the front room as if searching for a place to hide. She licked her lips and swallowed twice before she spoke. “I don’t know where the baby is.”
Jon
They drove south toward St. Louis and littered their trail with credit card purchases. Best Buy for a computer and a half dozen burner phones. Gas in Romeoville. Clippers, bleach, and hair dye from Sally Beauty Supply. Jon withdrew nine thousand dollars from the Citibank in Joliet. The detour south would cost them some time, but when people came looking, it might send them in the wrong direction for a while. They were driving through Joliet, back toward the expressway, when Jon looked over at Gail. She’d been quiet since they left. She sat very still, staring through the windshield, blinking.
“You OK?” he asked.
She bit her lip and nodded.
Jon still couldn’t believe those five words came out of her mouth. What if we take her? A question that he hadn’t dared to consider, but as soon as she asked it, the shape of their future emerged whole from the fog of the present. Even before they had decided on Canada, his mind swirled with ideas and problems and solutions to those problems. By the time they settled on Winnipeg, everything had locked into place, and he knew what they had to do. Saying those five words seemed to cost Gail everything she had. But she had done her part.
They stopped at a light, and he studied her again. He tried to imagine how drastic this must be for her. She’d never lived more than thirty minutes from where she was born. She still talked to her dad every day. She was probably thinking about Carli, but Jon knew that would lead nowhere. Carli had made her decision to give up her baby. Maya was their daughter. For him, the rest was just the messy business of the necessary.
“Listen, I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’m about to say,” Jon said.
Gail finally looked at him.
“I’m all in,” he said. “I want to do this, but I want you to be sure. It’s only two o’clock. If we turn back now, it’s not too late.”
Gail swallowed, but she said nothing.
“After this, there can’t be second thoughts. I want you to be sure.” Jon searched for the right words. “I don’t want you to regret this.”
Gail peered into the back seat. She stared at Maya for a long moment. When she turned back to Jon, her jaw was set. “No matter what we do, we’ll have regrets,” she said. “It’s really just a question of what we’ll regret the least.”
The car behind them honked. Jon looked up to find the light green.
“We don’t have a choice,” Gail said. “Drive.”
* * *
They came up empty in Channahon and Braceville and Eileen, but when Jon saw WAYNE’S AUTOBODY AND CAR SALES carved out of the cornfields a few miles west of Coal City, he knew that he’d found the place. Half the lot was devoted to cars and trucks that ranged from dented to demolished. On the other half, a couple dozen older but hopeful used cars loitered in two ragged rows under a rope of fluttering plastic flags. An old service station lurked at the back of the lot. The counter and register had been ripped out, and a card table with three folding chairs took their place. CAR SALES. The single garage door stood open, and a dark-haired man with gray overalls and safety glasses sat on a milk crate buffing the rear fender of an old Monte Carlo. AUTOBODY.
Jon parked in front of the building and climbed out of the car. He walked the lot, surveying the choices. He kept coming back to a gray Camry. The tires weren’t too worn. The white marker scrawled on the windshield demanded $7,999, a fraction of what their Subaru was worth. The man in the coveralls approached, wiping his hands on a rag. He smiled, revealing stained, crooked teeth. He thrust out his hand, and Jon shook it.
“I’m Wayne.”
“Nice to meet you, Wayne,” Jon said. A name. He needed a name. “Allen.”
“She’s a nice one,” Wayne said, dipping his head toward the Camry. “Eleven years old, but only seventy thousand miles on her.”
“Little old lady drove it?”
Wayne’s smile widened. “That’s right. But only to church on Sunday.”
Wayne got the keys from the office, and Jon took it for a short drive. He tested the brakes, listened for noises. When he returned to the lot, he thought about popping the hood, but he had no idea what he’d be looking for. Wayne came back out to meet him.
“Whattaya think?”
“I’ll take it.”
Wayne’s puzzled look told Jon that he was expecting complaints, excuses, delays, a tire-kicking negotiation at the very least.
“OK.” Wayne looked at the time on his phone. “You can get a cashier’s check over in Coal City. Bank’s open till five.”
“Actually, I’m gonna trade mine.”
Wayne took a long look at the Subaru. “I don’t usually do trades.”
Jon knew that meant Wayne didn’t have the cash to pay him the difference between the value of the Subaru and the Camry. “Even trade.”
Wayne squinted at him. “Even trade?”
Jon nodded. Wayne turned back to the Subaru. He walked around it twice. “It run all right?” he asked.
“Yep,” Jon said.
“Even trade?”
“Even trade.”
Wayne asked Jon to start it up and pop the hood. He bent over the engine and listened to whatever Jon should have listened to on the Camry. Gail got out of the car and pulled Maya from the car seat so that Wayne could test-drive it.
Jon reached for Maya, and Gail handed her to him. She wrapped herself with her arms, stared into the corn, and shivered.
“You OK?” Jon asked again.
She squeezed herself more tightly but kept her eyes fixed on the cornfield. “Just cold.”
When Wayne pulled back into the lot, he climbed out of the car and looked back at it distrustfully. Finally, he turned to Jon and shrugged. “Bring your title and registration into the office and I’ll get it writ up.”
“See, that’s the thing,” Jon said. “I don’t have any of the paperwork.”
Wayne looked at the car again, at Gail, at Maya in Jon’s arms. “No plates on it, neither.”
Jon said nothing. He waited. He could see from the way that Wayne licked his teeth that the deal was done.
Wayne eyed Jon sideways. “Where you headed?”
“St. Louis.”
“I don’t guess you have your driver’s license.”
“Lost my wallet.”
Wayne looked again at
the Subaru, scratched his chin. “Reckon I’ll have to do some additional paperwork. There’d have to be an administrative fee.”
Jon remained silent, let Wayne calculate his risks.
“I figure about four grand’ll cover it.” Wayne kept his eyes on the Subaru.
“How ’bout a thousand? Cash.”
“Two grand and you got yourself a deal, Allen. It’s Allen, right?”
Just like that, like shedding a skin. Jon shifted Maya to his shoulder and held out his hand. Wayne shook it. “Right. My name’s Allen.”
Gail
Gail peered at the cornfields as they sped north and marveled at those five words that she had said. What if we take her? They had come to her while she lay on the couch that morning, before dawn, trying to imagine any other way. They started out murky, dark, unthinkable. They sat on her tongue for an hour as she lay there. They tasted metallic, sharp. By the time Maya woke, by the time Gail made it to the nursery where Jon held her, they felt inevitable and necessary. She could tell by the way that Jon clung to Maya that the question only had one answer. When she opened her mouth, it was like someone else said those five words. She watched Jon’s eyes widen and his mouth melt toward a smile, and just like that, those five words hardened into a blade that cut her, cut them, from everything, leaving her feeling weightless and unmoored.
Gail gripped a pen, but she had nothing to write on. Somehow, she had forgotten her notebook in their mad rush out the door. She tried to remember where she had left it. She had it when they decided and when they made lists of what they would take with them. And she had it when they chose Canada over Mexico and Winnipeg over Toronto. She had it while they packed. Maybe it was just as well that she didn’t have it anymore. She would probably just write those five words over and over.
“You still doing OK?” Jon asked.
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because your fingers are wrapped around that pen like it’s saving your life,” Jon said. “And I want you to be sure about this.”
Gail dropped the pen in the console, forced her fingers limp. She leaned against the window and looked at a billboard for the Wisconsin Dells—a picture of a family splashing at a water park. She tried to find the words for how she felt. She shoved her mind away from Carli, because she couldn’t think about Carli. “I’ve just never done anything like this.”
Jon snorted. “Neither have I.”
True that Jon never fled the country with a kidnapped baby, but it was different for him. He went to live with his aunt when he was eight, and from what Gail could tell, he practically raised himself before that. He packed off to a college five states away, and he landed in Chicago only because he knew a guy with a spare couch. After she said those five words, after they decided, she had managed only to pack Maya’s clothes and write down the lists—Jon took care of everything else. In so many ways, he’d been preparing for this all his life. She said those five words, and he had sprung into action, as if he had been waiting, coiled.
The tires mumbled against the road, and the wind pried at the windows. As they sped past an empty rest area, Gail tried to pretend that this was just another long drive, just a road trip. They had driven to St. Louis too many times to count, but they had really only taken one honest-to-goodness road trip together. That first spring after they met, about six months before they moved in together, they drove seventeen hours to Austin for South by Southwest. They talked more that time. It came easy back then, and it felt necessary. They both held stories not yet told, questions not yet asked, answers worth listening to. They were still learning the other’s preferences and opinions and pet peeves. And at night, in the tent, even after eight months together, they were still discovering each other’s bodies. The disagreements were trivial. Waffle House (Jon) or Denny’s (Gail). Beef jerky (Jon) or Skittles (Gail). Snow Patrol (Jon) or The B-52s (Gail). The level of commitment was negligible. A three-day pass. Half the gas money. Five nights in a tent. They both knew that at the end of those five days they could just walk away if things didn’t feel right. But it was impossible for Gail to pretend. When they drove to Austin, they knew that they were coming back.
“You told him your name was Allen.”
“Yeah,” Jon said.
Allen. She was married to Allen now. “Why Allen?”
Jon shrugged. “First name that came to mind. It’ll be the name that goes on the new passport.”
“And he believed you?”
“Not a word of it.”
“What if they trace the Subaru to us?”
“They probably will eventually, but without our name on anything it’ll take a while. Long enough.”
They drove in silence a bit longer, and she pushed her mind yet again away from Carli, toward Maya strapped in her car seat. They had no choice.
“What’s my name?”
“Huh?”
“My new name.”
“What do you want it to be?”
“I don’t know,” Gail said.
How do you choose a new name for the rest of your life? Allen didn’t seem to have much trouble with it. Gail wondered how long it would take her to adjust to whatever she chose. When she gave up Tomassi for Durbin, she voided dozens of checks because she signed the wrong last name. For months she accidently said Tomassi when she answered the phone at work, and for much of that first year, when someone called her Mrs. Durbin, it took a moment to realize they were talking to her. She felt cut from her identity. She had always been a Tomassi. That name came from her dad and from the generations of Tomassis before him. She’d heard her family’s story so many times that when they finally set up a website for the company, she wrote the copy in a single sitting. She could feel those five generations snaking back to the Val Rendena, that isolated valley in the Dolomites that gave the world its knife grinders.
Gail knew that her family’s story differed only in the details from every other knife-grinding family in the country. Most knife grinders trace their roots back to that same valley. Gail watched the Cracker Barrels and truck stops drift past and felt the miles pile up behind her. She tried to center her thoughts on Giovanni Tomassi, her great-great-great-grandfather. He left Pinzolo with a new pair of shoes, two sets of clothes, and a stone fixed to a wheelbarrow. He walked halfway across Europe by himself, sharpening knives to earn his bread. He crossed an ocean in the dank hold of a ship and was dumped into a city where few spoke his language. He never stopped until he found a new place that he could call home and build a life. Gail’s name was no longer Tomassi, but as she thought about those five words she had uttered at dawn, she tried to hear the whispers of Giovanni’s blood in her own as it thudded in her ears.
Carli
As they drove to the Morris police station, Carli leaned her head against the window of the truck. Tears streaked her face and smeared the glass. In the waiting room, her grief churned with confusion as she tried to piece together where Jon and Gail and Maya might have gone. But it didn’t matter where they’d gone; Maya was her baby, and they took her, and they had no right, and by five o’clock, she shivered with rage. But that kind of anger wears you out, and it was after seven before they saw a cop, and by then Carli just felt numb all over.
The cop who called her name probably wasn’t even a real cop. She was tall and thick and wore wire-frame glasses. Her uniform looked like all the other cops, but her name tag read SERVICE OFFICER, which didn’t sound like the real thing. She ushered them into a room off the waiting area. A round table and four chairs were crammed into a tiny space. Only a fist-size hole decorated the bare white walls. The service officer kept popping her gum against the roof of her mouth while she asked question after question, and each pop felt like an explosion.
Marla answered the questions, and the service officer slowly printed the answers onto a form. Even the pen scratched loudly. The woman didn’t seem to care who answered the questions, which was good, because Carli wasn’t sure that she could say anything without crying again
. Instead, she concentrated on the hole in the wall and tried to ignore the pops from the gum and the scratch of the pen and the bored questions. Most of all she tried to ignore Marla’s answers. When she finally reached the bottom of the form, the service officer flipped it over to see if there was anything on the back.
“So, let me make sure I have this right,” she said to Marla. “You say that these people, the Durbins, they stole her baby.”
“That’s right,” Marla said. That rumble lurked beneath the words.
“But they adopted the baby.”
“But the adoption wasn’t all done.”
“So you changed your mind?” she asked.
It took a moment of heavy silence for Carli to realize that the service officer was talking to her. She tore her eyes away from the hole and tried to focus on the woman’s nose.
“I did,” Carli said.
“Why?” the cop asked.
How to answer that question? How to explain in a way that fit into a box on that form that she never intended to change her mind? How to tell about that vanilla cream soda she couldn’t stop smelling since the recovery room? How to describe that face or that empty, ragged hole in her gut? Carli wondered whether the service officer had children of her own. How to tell this woman about love?
“Because she’s my daughter,” Carli whispered.
“But you gave her up, right?”
Carli’s mind crackled and sizzled. She finally looked the woman in the eyes, but she saw only boredom. She wanted to scream at the woman, but no words came. Marla leaned into the silence. Her meaty hands gripped the edge of the table as if she meant to break it. Her upper lip curled, and her eyes narrowed like they always did just before she exploded.
“Is that on your fucking form?” Marla demanded.
The service officer cocked her head, studied Marla. “I’m sorry?”
Marla leaned further across the table. “I asked if that’s on your fucking form.”
Other People's Children Page 15
