Give, a novel

by Erica Carpenter Witsell

  “What?” Leah wanted to know, but Jessie just shook her head. That was just the kind of thing Leah would tease her about. “The wind in your hair? Oh, come on!”

  Jessie laughed again, almost giddy with the relief of it, a dark mass suddenly loosened from her gut. Her life was here. She couldn’t just leave it. Her family was here—all but Laurel, at least. How had she thought she could just opt out? She saw it all differently now.

  Yes, she would tell her father that she had changed her mind. She would tell him she wanted to stay. Tomorrow, as soon as she got home. At the thought, a nervous excitement shot through her gut. How surprised he would be, she thought. How glad. She smiled to herself, imagining.

  “Well, call me as soon as you tell them,” Leah said. “I want to know exactly what they say.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Sarah

  Sarah and Len were sitting on the couch watching Out of Africa when Sarah heard the living room door swing open behind her. She didn’t turn around.

  “Jay,” she said, her voice firm. “Go back to bed.”

  “Mom, it’s me,” Jessie said. She left her hand on the door handle uncertainly. “Can I talk to you guys for a minute?”

  Sarah shifted on the couch so that she could see Jessie. “Right now?” she said. “Your father and I were just sitting down together to watch a movie.”

  Jessie winced visibly, and Sarah immediately regretted how exasperated she had sounded. She pulled her feet from where they rested in Len’s lap and sat up. “But it’s fine. We rented it, so we should be able to stop it. Len, do you know how to stop it for a minute?”

  Len reached for the remote and studied the buttons. In a moment the screen went black.

  Sarah turned to Jessie. “Come on in.”

  Jessie pulled the door closed and took a few steps into the room. She glanced at the love seat, but did not sit down. She stood beside the coffee table, looking down on Sarah and Len as if she were on stage.

  “Well, um, I’ve been thinking. A lot. And I just wondered . . . Would it be okay if I changed my mind?”

  Sarah had been watching Jessie’s face as she began, but now she looked quickly away. Beside her, she heard Len let out his breath. “Jesus, Jessie,” he muttered.

  Sarah forced herself to meet Jessie’s eye. “About?” she said slowly.

  “About where . . . About Baymont . . . About where I’m going to live.” She paused for an instant, and then went on in a rush. “I’ve done a lot of thinking and I’ve changed my mind. If . . . If it’s okay, I’d like to keep living here. I mean, I want to stay here. With you guys.”

  An awful silence descended, and Jessie looked anxiously from Len to Sarah, and then at the floor. “If you don’t mind, I mean.”

  “Can I ask what made you change your mind?” Sarah asked, and Jessie shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I mean, my life is here. I can’t . . . I shouldn’t just leave it. And the family—”

  Sarah and Len simply watched her, saying nothing, so Jessie went on.

  “I guess it’s that . . . I mean, things have been really hard at school lately, and I guess at first going to Baymont seemed like an easy way to get away from it all. But then I started thinking about everything else I was going to leave, like Leah, and Emma, and you guys.”

  “And Jay,” Sarah said, a note of bitterness in her voice. It had always irked her, the lack of closeness between Jessie and her son.

  Jessie nodded. “Yeah. And Jay.”

  Sarah pressed her lips together and let out her breath quickly through her nose. “I can’t help saying, Jessie, that it seems strange to me that all those things didn’t occur to you before.”

  Jessie looked away. “I know. And I’m sorry. I really am. But now . . . now they did. Last night . . . Leah helped me to see that. And I want . . . I want to stay here.”

  Sarah felt Len stir beside her. Even without looking at him, she could feel his temper rising. She placed her hand on his leg to calm him.

  “Jesus, Jessie,” he repeated, louder this time, so that Jessie winced again. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through?”

  Sarah watched the shock in Jessie’s face as she registered her father’s words and heard the anger in his voice. She felt a flash of irritation: how dare Jessie look so surprised! Len had given so much to raise her, to keep her safe. What did she expect? After everything he had done for her, all the years he’d cared for her . . . Did she really think that she could tell him that she would rather live with Laurel and everything would be the same between them?

  Sarah herself was not surprised—not at Len’s anger, nor at how little Jessie seemed to expect it. Jessie was fourteen; she had thought only of herself. Her daughter was little more than a child, presented with a choice no child should have to make. Still, Jessie’s decision had twisted something inside of her, because so many years ago and in all the years since, Sarah had chosen to be a mother to Jessie, but when Jessie was given a choice, she had not chosen Sarah.

  For days, Sarah had not been able to look at Jessie without swallowing hard against the bitterness that rose in her throat. She had tried so hard to make them a family. She had not understood, for one minute, how Jessie could simply choose to walk away.

  And now she said that she’d changed her mind? Goddamnit, Jessie, she thought. You could have spared us.

  Sarah took a deep breath and looked up at Jessie’s guarded, uncertain face. None of this was Jessie’s fault, and yet here she was in the midst of it, struggling for a foothold.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessie said again, and her voice cracked. “But I do want to stay here. If . . . If it’s still okay?”

  “Jessie—” Sarah began, but Len cut her off.

  “Jessie, I absolutely refuse to go through this all again,” he said angrily. “So you had better be damn sure. You can’t keep doing this, you know. You can’t keep changing your mind, jerking us all around like this—”

  Jessie’s face crumpled and tears rose to her eyes. “I know,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  Sarah watched as Len looked pointedly away. She heard Jessie begin to sob and knew that Jessie had seen it, too: her father, turning away from her, when surely she had counted on his open arms. A bleak despair pooled in Sarah’s stomach. It was so easy to see it as Jessie must: she had humbled herself, and her father had turned away. But Sarah knew what had made Len turn: Jessie, breaking down in tears, had looked—even to Sarah—so much like Laurel that it had stopped her breath.

  “Stop crying,” she wanted to say to Jessie, not cruelly, but because she knew her sobs would only make it worse. Len did not like tears. She had seen before how they hardened him. He had watched Laurel cry one too many times, he had told her once.

  Beside her, Len got to his feet. Without looking at Jessie, he said, “I’ll call the attorney on Monday morning and tell him you want to stay. You’ve got until then to change your mind, and that’s it.”

  The next morning, Jessie was red-eyed at the kitchen table, eating her pancakes in silence. As soon as Emma and Jay went to brush their teeth, she rose, too, as if she could not stand to be alone with her parents. Len watched as Jessie went to the sink to rinse her plate. Then his chair scraped across the linoleum as he stood up quickly and went to stand beside her.

  “It’s okay, Jessie,” he told her quietly. “We’re glad you’re going to stay, you know. I should have said so last night, I guess, and saved you a rough night. I just . . . It was just that I was ang—”

  “No, Dad. It was my fault,” Jessie interrupted him, her voice cracking. “Daddy, I’m really sorry. I never should have—”

  Len put one arm gently around her shoulders. “Don’t worry about it, Dessie. We all make mistakes. God knows I’ve made my share.” He sighed deeply. “Unfortunately, you’re in this mess because of some of them.”

  Jessie grimaced and shook her head. Then she turned toward her father and put her arms around his waist. “I love you, Dad.”

  “I
love you, too, Jess,” he said.

  At the table, Sarah sat motionless, her chest tight. It was so easy for him: a hug, an I love you, a tender nickname. And now there they were, holding onto each other, as if the breach had never been. Sarah felt a ripple of longing for an earlier time, when the children were still little, when they still launched themselves into her arms whenever they skinned a knee or got their feelings hurt. Back then, it had been second nature to kiss their scraped elbows or crumpled faces. They had told her countless times a day, “I love you, Mommy!” and she had never missed a beat with her own “I love you, too.”

  It was easier with children. To hold an infant close or cuddle a toddler, to drop down and hug a child who had wrapped her arms around Sarah’s knees—all of that felt like the most natural thing in the world. But her children were so big now. Jay, at nine, came up to her chin; the girls were taller than she was. It didn’t come naturally to Sarah to cuddle them as she once had, to whisper sweet nothings.

  A few months ago, Sarah had taken Emma and Jessie to see the film adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Beside her, both girls had cried rivers when Anne’s beloved guardian, Matthew, died in the fields. But it was the next scene that nearly undid Sarah, when Marilla went to Anne’s room in the night to comfort her. “You mustn’t think I don’t love you as much as Matthew did,” she told her. “It’s never been easy for me to say the things from my heart.”

  Sarah had looked over at the girls then, wondering if they had understood, if they could understand. Sarah was like Marilla. She loved her children ferociously; she would have given the world for each one of them. But it wasn’t her nature to snuggle and fawn.

  She remembered the time, years ago now, when her college friend, Kim, had come to visit them in Bakersfield. Jay had been a toddler, then, the girls five and seven. In the morning, Kim had sat at the counter with her coffee, watching Sarah do the girls’ hair for school.

  “Wow,” she had said admiringly, as Sarah parted Emma’s hair into three neat sections and began to twine them through her fingers. “You girls are lucky your mom does your hair so lovingly. I wasn’t allowed to have long hair until I was ten.”

  Kim’s words had struck her: so lovingly. Kim had been among those who had marveled at Sarah’s sacrifice when she had married Len: just imagine, a newlywed and already the mother of two. That morning, Sarah had been glad to show Kim how wrong she’d been. She was proud of her love for her girls, and pleased that Kim had seen it so clearly.

  Remembering her friend’s words now, Sarah felt a tinge of resentment. Braiding hair, putting on a Band-Aid, nursing a baby— it was so easy for others to see the love in things like that. But cleaning out the inside of a lunch bag that’s been left inside a locker for two weeks? Or scrubbing the blood stains out of period-soaked underwear? Wouldn’t you call that love, and then some?

  But children didn’t see those things in the same way that parents did. Sarah knew she had been no exception. She, too, had always taken her mother’s acts of love for granted. She remembered how her mother had always packed her favorite sandwiches in her lunchbox, even when they’d been abroad and American cheese was hard to find. And she had always been there when Sarah got home from school, ready to hear about her day, even though it meant she’d had to pick up evening and weekend shifts at the telephone switchboard where she worked, connecting the soldiers’ calls to their families and girlfriends back home.

  Sarah understood now the sacrifices her mother had made, for she had made them, too. When they had moved to Bakersfield, she had decided to wait until all the children were in school before she looked for work of her own. Jessie and Emma had gone through so much separation already; she didn’t have the heart to leave them with yet another babysitter, or drop them off at daycare every morning. Several years ago, when Jay had started first grade, Sarah had finally gotten a job as an adjunct in the anthropology department, but even now she didn’t work full-time. She wanted to be home in the afternoons when her children came home from school, just as her mother had been for her.

  Sarah knew that compared to Len’s, her career might seem a paltry thing, but she didn’t begrudge her children the choices she had made. She had all her life to work if she wanted; this was her one chance to give her children a home.

  A home that Jessie had wanted to leave. Sarah swallowed hard against the bitterness that rose in her throat. All these years, building this life for them, and Jessie always with one foot out the door, yearning for horses and forests and freedom—all the things that Sarah couldn’t give her—and never seeming to see all the things she gave.

  Len shuddered when he hung up the phone.

  “What is it?” Sarah asked, laying her hand gently on his back. “What did he say?”

  “He said that since mediation has failed and we’ll be going to court, we need the girls to be ‘evaluated by a neutral third party.’ I think those were his words.”

  “What, like a psychiatrist?”

  Len nodded.

  Sarah sighed. “Well, it’s probably not the worst idea.”

  Len looked at her. “You think so? I don’t see—”

  “It might be good for them to have someone to talk to. Someone who’s not involved. And he’s probably right, you know. The judge will be more swayed by a psychiatrist’s assessment than by anything we say.”

  “God, I just hope . . .” He shuddered again.

  “What?”

  “I just hope we don’t go through all this and then the judge—”

  Sarah reached up and put her hand over her husband’s lips.

  “Len, we can’t think like that. You just have to put that out of your head.”

  “I’m trying, Sarah, but—”

  He turned to her then, and his face was so anxious, so despairing, that her chest ached.

  “Oh, Len,” she said, wrapping her arms around him. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  She held him tight, pressing her cheek against his chest. She could hear the muted thump of his heart within. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. She would not . . . She could not let her own fears rise.

  Please let me be right, she thought. Please just let us keep the girls.

  It was Dr. Haskin’s idea that Laurel be invited for a joint ses-sion. It wouldn’t be right, she told Len, for her to give the court her professional opinion without ever having met Laurel herself.

  “We don’t need your opinion on Laurel,” Len countered. “Just an ‘evaluation’ of the girls.”

  “Well, I can’t very effectively evaluate their inner state with respect to their mother—”

  “Biological mother,” Len corrected.

  “With respect to their biological mother, of course,” Dr. Haskin said. “I simply cannot evaluate their inner state with respect to Laurel without seeing them together at least once.”

  So it was agreed, at last, that Dr. Haskin would extend the invitation. Soon after, she received Laurel’s reply, and arrangements were made for a joint session one Friday afternoon in the middle of May.

  CHAPTER 28

  Emma

  The day came, the afternoon sky so white with sun it hurt Emma’s eyes to look at it. She and her sister sat together in the back seat, their father at the wheel. The ride felt long, with Friday traffic already clogging the roads, but at last Len pulled the van into a small parking lot. Stepping out of the air-conditioned cool of the car, the heat on Emma’s chilled skin felt wonderful, like a warm blanket draped across her. By the time they had crossed the parking lot, however, she could already feel perspiration tingling just beneath her skin, and she welcomed the rush of cool air as they entered the building. Inside, Emma stood blinking in the foyer, blinded by the dark of the lobby after the afternoon’s glare. When she could see again, she took in a row of upholstered chairs, a few artsy lamps on end tables, a wicker basket full of magazines.

  “Hi, Jessie. Hi, Emma.”

  Emma’s eyes swept around. There was Laurel, rising fro
m a chair on the far side of the lobby. A novel hung from one hand, her thumb between the pages, marking her place.

  Her eyes rested on Emma for only a second. “It’s good to see you. Both.”

  “Hi, Laurel,” Jessie said, glancing at her father.

  “Hi,” Emma managed.

  “Laurel,” Len said. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Len. Or should I say Dr. Walters now?” She laughed nervously.

  Jessie sat down in a chair in the middle of the row. Emma took the leeward seat, putting her sister between her and Laurel. Len stood a moment more and then sat down beside Emma. Emma had her math homework in the backpack she held between her feet, but she made no move to get it. Instead, she studied the dark hairs on her father’s arm. No one spoke.

  Finally, Emma could stand the stillness no longer. She reached down to open her backpack, and at that moment, the door to Dr. Haskin’s office opened.

  “Ah,” the tall woman said, taking in the four of them. “I apologize for running late.”

  They stared up at her, motionless.

  “Jessie. Emma. Ms. Black.” Dr. Haskins held the door open. Then she nodded at their father, who pulled a magazine from the basket and opened it on his lap.

  “Perhaps the girls would be more comfortable if . . .” Dr. Haskin began.

  Len rose, slid the magazine back into its place. “Of course. I’ll come back. Goodbye, girls.”

  As her father opened the door to leave the lobby, the threshold seemed to glow with light. Emma felt a wave of heat break over her. Then the door closed behind him, the light was gone, and the cool resettled itself against her skin. She followed Laurel and her sister through the door Dr. Haskin held for her.