The How & the Why

by Cynthia Hand

Date of last use:

  Last year at a party.

  ☑ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Downers (i.e., sleeping pills, barbiturates, etc.)

  Specify type:

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Cocaine (“Crack”)

  By injection? ☐ Yes ☐ No

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Heroin/pain killers

  By injection? ☐ Yes ☐ No

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Hallucinogens (i.e., LSD, Ecstasy, PCP, etc.)

  Specify type:

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Cigarettes

  Specify type:

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Marijuana

  A couple times

  Date of last use:

  Last year

  ☑ Before conception ☐ After conception

  Other

  Specify type:

  Date of last use:

  ☐ Before conception ☐ After conception

  SOCIAL AND HEALTH HISTORY☑ Birth mother ☐ Birth father

  If you wish, please add any additional information that will further describe you and your situation. (Consider your schooling, health, work, goals and hopes for the future, relationship history, religious or spiritual beliefs, challenges, strengths, etc.)

  I’m an average student, but could probably do better if I put in more effort. I’m generally a healthy person—no major health problems, and I’ve tried to eat right during this pregnancy. I always seem to fall for the wrong guy, but that’s why I’m here, I guess. I was raised Presbyterian, but I’m not religious.

  I hope to be able to go on with my life after this. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m trying to focus on finishing high school.

  I am only sixteen and I don’t think I could give you the kind of life you deserve, so I’m doing this for both of us.

  15

  It’s a lot.

  I’m sitting at the breakfast table absentmindedly stirring my oatmeal and staring out the window at the big maple tree in front of our house. The leaves have all turned. Fallen. There’s a cold, steady wind blowing, rattling the bare branches. The sun’s peeking up. It’s one of those quiet, pretty mornings, the kind where I like to walk to the bus stop even though it’s cold.

  But this morning I’m sitting here thinking. I’m sleep deprived. I was up half the night scouring the non-identifying information form Dad gave me. I read it like fifty times.

  “You okay, Boo?” My dad appears in the doorway, dressed for school. He doesn’t look like he slept much, either.

  “Yeah, I’m . . . processing. Thanks for giving me that stuff,” I manage.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I eat a bite of oatmeal. It’s cold. This is why I don’t do breakfast.

  “You know the part I like the best?” he asks.

  I blink up at him. “What?”

  “The part with the sexually transmitted diseases.”

  “Uh, Dad. What?”

  “For that section, she writes: ‘Gross. I really hope not!’ I can almost hear her voice when I read that. She’s funny.”

  I have to admit, I didn’t read that and come away with the notion that my birth mother had some great sense of humor. If I’m being honest, I’m disappointed in what she wrote. Especially that last part, where she was given the space to free write a little. She really didn’t tell me anything important. It felt like a summary of all the boxes she’d checked. She had one page to fill, and she couldn’t find anything meaningful to say.

  Maybe she’s not into writing, I tell myself. Not everybody communicates that way.

  “Talk to me,” Dad says. “Don’t hold back.”

  “It’s just . . . when I was little I used to picture my birth mother as a cartoon princess,” I say. “She wore a purple dress and had long, flowing dark hair, and she was beautiful.”

  “Of course she was,” he says. “Like you.”

  “Dad, please stop with the ‘you’re so special’ talk.” I give up on the oatmeal and take my bowl to the sink. “For some reason I always imagined my birth mother at the top of a white stone tower, locked away, and one day she lowered a basket down from the window, and inside that basket was me.”

  “Maybe we did make it sound too much like a fairy tale,” Dad admits. “I liked the alien story better, myself.”

  “I wanted there to be a locket that she put around my neck, or a note, explaining how much I meant to her, but she had to let me go, because she was always going to be trapped in the tower. She had no other choice.”

  “She wanted you to have the life you deserve,” Dad says. “That’s what she wrote.”

  I shrug. “Well, that image of the girl in the tower is kind of clashing with the one of her at a party drinking vodka and smoking a joint.”

  Dad snorts and pours himself a bowl of cereal. “The thing is, your birth mother is a real person.”

  “Right,” I murmur. “I know.”

  “She’s got flaws. Like everybody else. She made mistakes. She’s still out there, making mistakes, as we speak.”

  I flash back to the last page of the form.

  I always seem to fall for the wrong guy, but that’s why I’m here, I guess.

  “Her mistakes aren’t what defines her,” Dad continues. “It’s what she did with those mistakes, and she did something incredibly hard and incredibly giving and brave. And I’m always going to admire her for that, no matter what she did at some party when she was sixteen. And I’m going love her. Because she’s part of you.”

  I feel tears coming on. I shake my head. I need to change the subject. I focus on giving my dad crap about his cereal choice instead. “Fruity Pebbles, Dad? Seriously? Mom would never let me eat that crap for breakfast. A snack, maybe. But not breakfast. It’s pure sugar.”

  “While the cat’s away—” he says, but his eyes get a little sad the way they do when he thinks about Mom being away from us. She’s locked in her own version of a tower now. “Anyway. Give your bio mom some slack. She did the right thing. It worked out.” He pats my shoulder. “You belong with us.”

  Dear X,

  I got a call from my dear old dad today. Hip hip, hooray.

  “How are you?” he asked me. This is what he always asks me. Even though he doesn’t want to know the answer.

  “Peachy,” I said. “Can I come home now?”

  I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to come home to that house with Dad and my stepmom and the white carpet and the dishes that chip so easily and being told every ten minutes to turn down my music. Plus Evelyn made it clear enough last time I set foot in that house that I’m a disgrace to the family. Evelyn—that’s the name I’ve decided should be my stepmom’s for the sake of these letters. She feels like an Evelyn. If you knew her, you’d agree.

  Anyway, I didn’t mean it when I asked to come home. I only did it to mess with my dad—to hear that terrified quiver in his voice when he said, “Oh, honey, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’re more comfortable there, aren’t you? Around the other girls?”

  I didn’t mean it, but it also made me mad, hearing him scramble for a reason I shouldn’t be there. Because I’m more “comfortable” here, like me and my ever-growing belly surely wouldn’t fit in his big brick house on the hill. They told him about the fight with Amber, I’m sure, so he knows we’re not all sitting around braiding each other’s hair and singing hymns. And it made me mad that he was calling me instead of visiting me. Because he doesn’t want to be seen visiting me. Because he’s ashamed.

  Clearly I have family issues. We put the “fun” in dysfunctional, if you know what I mean.

  It’s a good thing that you won’t ever know these people. Trust m
e. You don’t want to know my dad. Or Evelyn. Or my mom and her new husband, Brett, which is also a perfect name for that buttoned-up tightwad, or the Waspy grandparents. Really we’re a family of assholes.

  Except for my brother. He’s all right. Of course, he moved across the country to go to college—as one does when you’re trying to escape a family of assholes—and I never see him. He doesn’t even know about you, X. And I’m probably not going to tell him.

  I’ve been picturing you, ever since the ultrasound when I saw your feet and your nose, and was told of your status as a female pre–human being. I’ve been imagining a little girl with ponytails sitting at a kitchen counter eating breakfast. A breakfast her mom cooked for her. Like pancakes.

  I try to remember. Was there ever a time when my family all sat around a table in the morning for bacon and waffles and talked about the weather and school and normal-family stuff?

  The short answer is no: Even before the divorce, my mom never cooked. She could burn a hard-boiled egg—I’m not kidding. She’s a hazard in anybody’s kitchen. My stepmom is better at it, but she’s also perpetually on a diet, and she works out in the mornings. She’s not around for breakfast.

  We’re a cold cereal family.

  Still, my parents’ divorce was a good thing, because all I ever remember them doing before the divorce was screaming at each other. I tried to live with my mom initially, after the split, but then it was like she and I picked up screaming at each other where she and my dad left off. Bad habits die hard, I guess. So I moved in with Dad, who didn’t talk to me much, but at least basically left me alone. Until Malibu Barbie came into the picture, anyway. And my mom married Brett and started screaming at him, too, but instead of divorcing him she had a kid: my half sister who I hardly know. But she’s cute. Every time I’m over there, which is like once every couple months, she always wants to play Candy Land. It’s a brainless game, and she never wants to play it just once. She wants to play like twelve times in a row. But I do it, because it feels like something normal to do: play a game with your little sister. I like it.

  I wonder if you’ll ever have a sister. Or a brother. I don’t know the rules—do they let families adopt more than one kid? Do they let them adopt if they already have a kid? Nobody’s really informed me about that stuff yet. I hope you do get to have a brother or sister someday. But then, I guess it’s possible to be lonely in a family with lots of brothers and sisters. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s completely possible to be surrounded by people and still totally alone.

  Anyway, be glad you don’t have my family, is what I’m trying to say. I did think, in the beginning, anyway, that I might end up keeping you, and maybe my family would help me. I mean, it’s supposed to be one of the options.

  But that option went out the window the first day.

  That morning—God, I’ll never forget that morning—I sat on the toilet with the pregnancy test in my hand, watching the little indicator turn into a plus sign. Like, plus one. You plus one. Have a nice day.

  And I thought, fuck. No offense, X, but FUCK.

  Then I had to go to school, so I hid the test in the back of my underwear drawer and rode the bus and floated around from class to class, and I never stopped thinking about that plus sign, not even for a minute. It felt like a problem I should be able to solve, like if I concentrated hard enough, I could make it not true. I could tell myself it was a mistake. I could go home and take another test, and it would give me a different answer.

  But when I got home my dad and my stepmom were sitting on the living room sofa waiting for me, and my stepmom was holding the test up with this triumphant expression on her face like AHA, I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO SCREW UP and my dad was looking anywhere but at me.

  My first thought was, Gross, I peed on that thing.

  I said my second thought out loud: “You don’t have any right to be messing with my stuff. That’s my private business.”

  Evelyn snorted. “Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “You’re PREGNANT, and you still want to be mad that we snooped in your room?”

  “You did,” Dad corrected her. “You snooped through her room.”

  She glared at him, and I took the opportunity to snatch the test out of her hand. Still a plus. Fuck. Then I stood there, fuming, because them knowing about it made it real. I couldn’t change it now, or deny it, or even really take the time to let it sink in.

  “Oh, no,” my stepmom said as I was about to bail. “You stay right here, young lady.”

  I sighed. “What?”

  “We’re going to talk about this. We’re going to make a plan.”

  For a second I felt a flash of hope, like the adults might be able to fix it. Maybe it would all be all right.

  “Your father started his new job this week,” my stepmom said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “This could ruin everything he’s worked for. He wants to be governor someday. Maybe more.”

  “So I guess I’m grounded then, huh?” I directed this to my dad, but he still wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t even seem like he heard me talking.

  Evelyn made this disgusted sound. “You’re a disgrace to this family,” she said.

  “I could have an abortion,” I said. I’d never picked a side of this argument before. If anything, I would have considered myself pro-life before, the opinion that my parents had carefully instilled in me over the years, that abortion was murdering a baby. That all women who had abortions were going to hell, like the minute they died they’d get put down the eternal laundry chute straight into a fiery lake to burn for the rest of eternity. But in that moment I didn’t think of you as a baby, X. You weren’t one yet. You were like a pomegranate seed lodged behind my pelvic bone, or maybe not even that. You were a whisper. A rumor. A plus sign on a plastic test.

  It seemed better if I could just erase you.

  My dad was staring at me, and then he started to nod like he agreed with the abortion idea. But Evelyn gave a disbelieving laugh.

  “She can’t have an abortion,” she said. “Someone would find out.”

  “No one would have to know,” he said.

  She shook her immaculate blond curls at him. “It always happens eventually—the things like this, they always get brought to light at the worst time. And that would ruin you, Rex.”

  (Okay, Rex is not my dad’s real name, but I think it’s hilarious so I’m keeping it.)

  Anyway, she said, “Your daughter can’t have an abortion. Ever. But especially not now.”

  There it is, X. You’ve got my wicked stepmother to thank. You’re alive because it would have been a PR problem to get rid of you.

  “So she’ll have the kid,” Dad said. “She’s sixteen. How are the optics on that any better?”

  “Well, she might be a slut, but she’s not a murderer,” Evelyn said.

  “I’m right here,” I reminded them. I don’t like bitch as a term, as I’ve explained, but I hate slut even more.

  “Who’s the father?” Dad suddenly wanted to know.

  He wouldn’t like that Dawson was older than me. My mind whirled—something about statutory rape. Dawson could be arrested, charged with something, maybe even go to jail. Isn’t that why they call it “jailbait”? And something about Evelyn calling me a slut set me off. So I shrugged. “Beats me. There are a few possibilities. Do you want me to pick one?”

  Evelyn’s mouth actually dropped open. It was super satisfying. Dad’s mouth tightened into a line and his face got brick red.

  “So there can’t be a wedding,” Evelyn said after a minute.

  God, no. Even if Dawson was somehow okay with it, I didn’t want to get married. I don’t think I ever want to get married. I’ve seen what married life is like, and I don’t want any part of it.

  “It doesn’t look good, no matter what we do,” Dad said.

  I turned to leave.

  Evelyn made a noise like she was going to detain me again, remind me of whose house I was living in, that kind of
bullshit, but Dad said, “Let her go.”

  The last thing I saw before I rounded the corner into the hallway was him dropping his head into his hands and her putting her arms around him.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll think of something.”

  That’s right, I thought. Comfort him. I’ll just be over here pregnant.

  It was a long night, that night. The longest. My brain kept turning circles, trying to find some way out. But there wasn’t a way. There was only you.

  In the morning, Evelyn tapped on my bedroom door.

  “Your mother,” she said, and handed me the phone.

  “Hi,” I said into the receiver.

  “We still on for the weekend?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long pause. Then Mom cleared her throat. “Evelyn told me that you’re pregnant.”

  I hate Evelyn.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said. That surprised me. Mom’s a yeller, as we’ve established. I expected her to yell at me, tell me how stupid I was, how careless, what a disgrace to the family, right? Let’s all agree. But instead she said, “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “No,” I answered. “I only just found out.”

  “When you’re up here Saturday, we can get it taken care of,” she said. “If that’s what you decide you want.”

  “But Dad and Evelyn—”

  “This is your life,” she said. “Your father will simply have to deal with it.”

  “Okay,” I said, swallowing hard. Mom can be a hard-ass sometimes, but this time she kind of came through. “Okay.”

  Well, obviously, X, I didn’t have an abortion. I did go to Colorado. I played Candy Land with my sister. I ate pizza and threw it up again. I took walks in the snow. I pondered the meaning of life and contemplated the existence of heaven and hell. I may have even said a prayer. I wonder how many pregnant girls suddenly find themselves with a need to talk to God. But when it was time to drive to the clinic or whatever, I got in the car. No discussion. I got in, and we left.

  We drove for a while in total silence.

  “This is the right thing,” she said finally.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know if it was the right thing or if it was simply the easy thing or if I only wanted to do it because Evelyn said I couldn’t.