by Erica Boyce
She swept the pill into her palm and folded it into a dollar bill. She put the bill on the desk and placed her school ID flat on top of it. She brought the heel of her hand down on the pile hard, three times, checking after each smack to make sure the dollar hadn’t spat the pill out across the table. When she brought it back up to her face, the pill was not quite crushed, chunks of it still there, powder clinging to the creases in the bill. She pressed her thumbnail against the larger fragments, tried to break them up further, squeezing the dust back out from her nail bed. She held the bill up to her face. It shook a bit. She inhaled through her nose, as deeply as she could. And waited.
Chapter Twenty-Four
October 25, 1998
Annie made the right choice for herself and for the baby. She knew that. In her best, strongest moments, she even believed it.
The hospital sent her home after two days with a handful of maxi pads and a plastic thing that looked like a bed pan. “It’s a sitz bath,” the nurse said when she hesitated to take it and then left before Annie had time to ask what the hell that meant.
Walking into the apartment felt strange. The last time she’d been there, she was two, and now, only one. It seemed like a decade had passed. She put a hand to her stomach before she opened the door. Her flesh jiggled now like it’d been formed out of Jell-O.
Eve was waiting on the couch where she always was. Annie was starting to wonder how she managed to pass her classes when she never seemed to actually go to them.
“Hey,” Eve said gently, the way you’d talk to a runaway dog. “Your coworker stopped by and told us what happened. You okay?”
Annie looked out the window behind her at the sullen brick buildings across the street. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Fine.”
Sophia walked out of her room, high-ponytailed and red-faced. “Oh, hey!” she said. “Baby-free?”
Annie turned to display her profile, though what they never told you is that you still look pretty damn pregnant after giving birth.
“Sophia!” Eve hissed.
“What?” Sophia said. “She didn’t want to keep it, did she?”
Her closed bedroom door only partially muffled the arguing that followed. She fell into her bed and rolled herself in her comforter and tried to sleep.
She spent the better part of two weeks there, mostly alone. Her breasts grew hard as rocks, and she cried out whenever she accidentally rolled on them. There was a girl in her class, Shawna. She’d disappeared one summer, no one knew where, and when she came back, a boy she hooked up with bragged about her “solid tits,” not realizing such things weren’t the norm. The prevailing rumor was that she’d gone off to get a boob job—and done something to her nose while she was at it—but now, Annie wondered. She wished she had Shawna’s number.
The space between her legs was what hurt the most. It was so alarmingly painful, she peeked down there once and instantly regretted it. Eve taught her how to use the sitz bath, reading off instructions she’d found online from the other side of the bathroom door. And Helen came by once with some sort of magical frozen maxi pads she’d whipped up. She left them on Annie’s nightstand, saying, “You know what to do.” Mostly, Annie just limped from the bed to the bathroom, changing her pad when she bled through one and slurping down the soups Eve brought her in bed.
On the fifteenth day, Sophia appeared in her doorway. “Phone’s for you,” she said.
Annie held out her hand for the receiver, but Sophia tossed it onto the foot of her bed.
It was her mother. “You said your due date was around now, didn’t you?” she said. “I wanted to call and see how you were doing.”
“I did it.” Annie inhaled. “I delivered the baby. Two weeks ago, actually.”
“Oh,” her mother said. “Well. How did it… How was it?”
“It went fine. Baby was healthy.” Because she didn’t think she could stand waiting for her mother to get to it, she added, “She’s with her adoptive mother now. She’s a really nice lady,” she said, though they’d never actually met in person. The only thing she’d seen of the woman outside her file was her signature on the adoption papers.
“I wish I could’ve been there,” her mother said softly, and it almost knocked Annie back into her pillow. “Well, don’t worry,” she continued. “Your father and I will cover all the medical expenses, of course. You just tell the hospital to bill us through our insurance.”
Annie sat very still. All the resolve she’d had at the hospital to pay them back was gone now. “Thanks, Mom,” she said quietly.
Her mother paused. “In any case, there’s another reason I’m calling. Your father and I are moving to Vermont. It’s been a dream of his for a long time, and we thought we could use a fresh start. We’ve found a house in a sweet little town and are hoping to sell ours in the next few months. I’ll give you our new phone number when the time comes. And, well. You’re always welcome to come visit. Any time.”
When her mother hung up, Annie lay back, the phone held loosely in one hand. This was it, then. There would be no returning home to wake up in her old bed and pretend nothing had happened. She found she was okay with that. At some point in her pregnancy, she’d begun to sense that there would be no going back. She wasn’t the same person anymore.
That night, she wedged herself into her favorite pair of pre-pregnancy cargo pants and a sleeveless turtleneck that clung unflatteringly to her midsection. She lined her eyes and swept glittery gel over her cheekbones, hoping it distracted from the rest of her.
Her roommates were still in the living room, fueling up for the night ahead with store-brand mac and cheese. There was an SNL rerun on, and Sophia turned to look just as the audience laughed.
Sophia raised an eyebrow. “You off to a rave or something?”
Annie stepped closer. “Actually, I was hoping I could come out with you guys tonight.”
“Really?” Eve’s head popped up over the edge of the couch. “You sure you’re up for that?”
Annie shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Eve stared.
“Okay,” Sophia said. “We leave in twenty.”
On their way out the door, Sophia ran a paper towel under the kitchen faucet and used it to scrape the glitter off Annie’s cheeks. She stood back and studied her for a second and said, “There. That’s better.”
When they got to the party, Annie was glad Sophia’d done so. She’d imagined college parties would be so glamorous, like they were in the movies. There should be a shimmering turquoise pool and a live band made up of moody upperclassmen, cold weather be damned. But this was no different from the parties she’d been to in high school. It was at a frat house, and people milled from room to room, nodding their heads to Destiny’s Child and Backstreet Boys booming from the stereo. At some point, someone would probably yell out a complaint and switch it over to Third Eye Blind.
No, the only differences from the high school parties she knew were that the house was a fair bit messier and the plastic cups of alcohol were left scattered across every possible surface. No one sat hunched over their drinks, holding them close, ready to hide them at a moment’s notice.
“Punch?” Sophia held a cup out for her, sloshing with red juice and undoubtedly some sort of vodka.
Annie gulped it down as quickly as she could. Over the past few months, she’d forgotten how satisfying that burn at the back of her throat could be.
“All right!” Sophia slung her arm around Annie’s neck. “New kid can party!”
A tall boy in a backward cap offered her another drink, grinning as he held a cup out toward the nearby keg. His smile reminded her so much of her ex-boyfriend that she had to turn away. She filled her empty cup with a couple inches of rum and topped it with a splash of Coke. She’d always preferred rum above all other offerings at her high school parties for the sharp sweetness of it. In no time at all, she�
��d downed that drink, too. And then another, and another. Closing her eyes as the room spun and blurred around her. She couldn’t see her ex’s face anymore or hear the weak echo of her mother’s voice. With the drinks, her head pounded, but her mind was finally quiet.
She woke—or resurrected, rather—in her room the next morning with no memory of how she’d gotten there. Her hair was plastered to her cheek, and there was a wet continent of drool on her pillow. But she hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night with aching in various parts of her body or been kept awake by cries from a phantom baby. Even if she couldn’t remember it, she’d been alone at last.
She stumbled out into the living room.
“Morning, sunshine!” Sophia said and pressed a mug of black coffee into Annie’s hands. “You really went all out last night. Nice work!”
Eve wouldn’t meet her eyes.
It was the same that night and the night after that. She started working at the theater again that week. She’d never noticed before how many babies and toddlers were around. Pushed in flimsy strollers, begging their parents for candy, bounced in patient arms outside theater doors, screaming. Just everywhere. There was a sickening seize in her chest whenever she saw someone venturing out with a newborn. What if it were hers? She didn’t even know the baby’s name.
The next weekend, they partied again. This time, she drank even more. She winced, sometimes, as the alcohol cut its old path down into her, but she kept going, stumbling right up to the point where she could stop thinking about her parents and the little kids at work and the past endless year. The rum dulled every sharp edge of her memory.
On the third weekend, Eve refused to come out with them. She sat on the couch, eyes fixed to the TV. She was watching a really good Lifetime movie, she said. She had to keep watching to see if the husband did it. Annie and Sophia carried on without her.
On the fifth weekend, Sophia and Eve both stayed in. Finals were coming up, so they had to cram. Annie went out alone. She stood by the stereo in that same frat basement, her eyes lowered so she wouldn’t have to see people wondering who the hell she was and what she was doing there. She made sure she always poured her own drinks and that her cup was always full. She drank rum and Cokes until she couldn’t picture that hospital room anymore, so her mind’s eye could stop hunting for any trace of the baby, its toes or a finger flailing out beyond the turned back of the doctor as he walked away with her.
Both roommates went home for Christmas break. Eve stood in Annie’s bedroom doorway and asked haltingly if she wanted to come with her to her parents’ house in Connecticut. Annie looked away and declined. She’d enjoy having the apartment to herself, she thought. That whole week, she used the computer whenever she wanted and watched whatever she pleased on TV. She drank the bottle of rum they kept in the kitchen without the Coke when she was alone, letting it spill uncut through her every night. The forgetting was faster that way. She woke up the following mornings with headaches so fierce, she couldn’t focus on anything else. And if Sophia and Eve noticed that the bottle was nearly empty when they returned, neither of them said anything.
The first time she went to work drunk, she tripped over the broom while she held it in her own hands. She laughed it off with Sophia while Helen watched silently. The second time, the empty popcorn tub wasn’t quite where she expected it to be, and she dropped a full scoop of freshly popped kernels on the floor.
Helen pulled her over to the ICEE machine. “Your boozing is showing, kid,” she muttered.
Annie turned her back to hide her blush and carefully centered a super-size cup under the dispenser, then filled it with neon blue slush.
After that, she cooled down. She reserved drinking for weekends only, even if she felt a little wild-eyed when she came home from her Friday night shift and asked Sophia where she was going that night. It sort of worked. She could hardly sleep at night, and she had trouble focusing at her job. Her attention was always drawn to the infants in the theater. At least her roommates and Helen didn’t seem so worried about her anymore, though.
One morning, she was sipping her coffee in front of the TV when a jewelry commercial came on. A woman opened a velvet box to reveal one of those ugly, twisting necklaces that looked a bit like a diamond-encrusted seagull turd. A toddler threw himself into the woman’s arms, and she smiled beatifically at the man standing behind him, like the Virgin Mary herself. “This Mother’s Day,” the voice-over said, “thank her for everything she does with our beautiful Family Links pendant.”
Mother’s Day. She’d completely forgotten about it. All that week, she couldn’t get away from it. Shop windows were papered with posters for last-minute gifts. Restaurants advertised special three-course meals, sure to get you home in time to tuck the rug rats into bed. Her roommates called home from behind closed doors, crooning to their mothers and promising to send flowers, the biggest bouquets they could afford after they’d paid their rent at the end of the month. Annie began sneaking sips straight from the replacement handle of rum in the kitchen at 3:00 a.m. when everyone was asleep, just so she could close her eyes and not think for a while. It was such a cliché, moping around on Mother’s Day, but what could she do? Her own mother preferred Annie not call them in Vermont. It was an intrusion into their new life, Annie could tell. Her daughter would be six and a half months old on that very Sunday. For the rest of her life, she knew, she would measure time by how old her daughter would’ve been. How old she was, somewhere.
On that day, she locked herself in her room with a bottle and allowed herself to get carried away while the others studied. Her eyelids drooped low and her limbs loosened, and everything felt so, so far away. Her brain fuzzed up in the way it always did when she needed it to. At nightfall, she heard their voices growing louder and rowdier. She stumbled into the kitchen and dropped the empty Captain Morgan into the recycling bin in front of both of them, brazen.
“Dude, I’ve been looking for that!” Sophia snatched the bottle out of the bin and waggled it overhead. The remaining half centimeter of rum sparkled. “Did you drink this whole thing?” she said. “Not cool.”
Annie shrugged. “My bad,” she mumbled. “I’ll give you cash when I get my next paycheck.”
“We’ve been meaning to talk to you about this,” Eve said, walking over with her arms crossed. “We think you have a drinking problem, and we think you need help.”
Annie snorted. “And I think you’ve been watching too much Lifetime. I’m fine. Just a normal party girl, right?” It was only when she saw the hurt in Eve’s eyes that she realized Eve was being serious. Annie sighed. “Whatever. If you guys aren’t going out tonight, I guess I’ll just head to bed.”
When she tried to pass, Eve reached out and caught her arm. And it wasn’t the way she’d done it a hundred times before, to support her, to guide her, to comfort her. It was firm; it was hard. It meant to take Annie somewhere she didn’t want to go.
Panicked, Annie swept her free hand across the counter. The only thing she came across was a table knife, the dull blade coated with a film of old peanut butter. She gripped it in her fist and held it up in Eve’s face, only thinking: let me go.
It worked. Eve screamed and Sophia gasped and Eve dropped her arm. Something about the way Annie had lunged unleashed a flood of nausea that rose from her stomach, and then everything was dark.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Saturday, November 11, 2017
After her talk with Mack, Rebecca went upstairs to change for her afternoon shift at the library. As she pulled a dress off its hanger, she stumbled over her old boot, lying small and forgotten on the floor.
She dressed without looking at it. She twisted to zip up her dress and scooped her hair up into a clip. Before she walked out the bedroom door, she leaned into her closet, groping past her hamper and discarded sandals, and found the other boot. She lined the two of them up in front of the closet, neat as you please
, and left.
On her way to the library, she remembered Addie’s sympathy cup from the day before and stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts to order coffee just the way Addie liked it: large caramel latte, three Splendas.
“Afternoon, Addie,” she said as she slipped the warm cup onto the research desk.
Addie eyed the coffee, then Rebecca. “You feeling better today, Becks?”
Did it show on her face, what Mack had said? But no, Addie took a sip, wiggled her shoulders with pleasure, and said, “I know you and the Staybrooks were kind of close or whatever.”
“Oh, yes,” she said with a gulp. “Well.” She couldn’t come up with anything else, so she turned back to her own desk. “It’s so terrible,” she said as she walked away and felt rather than saw Addie’s shrug.
How was she going to make it up to Ella? What could she say that would possibly make any difference? She googled sympathy messages on her computer while looking up fertility specialists on her phone. Every time the door opened, she looked up only to see the usual parade of tired weekend parents and their broods. No sign of Ella.
It took a couple of hours for her to remember the money. John’s twenty, the extra one he’d slipped her the last time she saw him. She took her wallet out of her pocketbook, and there it was, kept separate from the rest of her cash in a tiny pocket she’d never found a use for so that she could give it back to him. This one, she would return. She’d leave it in her mailbox or stick it under her front door. Not because she thought it’d be any help but because it seemed somehow to be unequivocally his.
“Hey, Becks,” Addie called.
Rebecca shoved the wallet back into her pocketbook.
“You hear something in the study room?”
“I didn’t, no.”