by Cynthia Hand
“It’ll happen if it’s supposed to happen, when it’s supposed to happen.”
“Well, look at you,” she says, squeezing me. “How’d you get so very wise and grown up?”
“It’s a mystery,” I say.
43
I wake up later that night to Nyla jerking upright in bed.
“The picture!” she says loudly, and I want to tell her to keep it down—my parents are sleeping in the next bed over—but then she throws back the covers and jumps out of bed. She runs over to the little table in the corner of the hotel room and turns on the lamp.
I’m blinded and annoyed. “Hey. Ny. What are you doing?”
“Where did we put the picture?” she says, still way too loudly.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. “The picture. What picture?”
“The . . .” Nyla closes her eyes and her face scrunches up. “I can’t think of the word. The picture, you know?”
Dad sits up. His hair is a tangled red mess, and he looks somewhat freaked out.
“Hey, uh, girls?” He rubs his hand down his face and glances at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s two in the morning. Time for sleep?”
“Is everything okay?” comes my mother’s bleary voice from the covers next to him.
“I don’t know.” I turn back to watch Nyla dig through all of our papers—the notes and forms we’ve been working on today, S’s letters. She keeps grabbing a pile and rifling through the papers, then throwing them down with an exasperated sigh. “She’s making a mess. Something about a picture?”
“What picture?” Dad asks.
“Not a picture picture!” Nyla says. “The picture of the baby.”
“The sonogram?” Mom sits up.
Nyla looks up and points at her. “Sonogram! Gosh, I could not remember that word.”
Dad scratches his head. “Because it’s two in the morning. Maybe this could wait until the actual morning.”
“No.” Nyla crosses to the other side of the room and starts searching through some stuff there, moving like she’s made of liquid energy. She’s clearly wired, muttering to herself, but I can’t understand what she’s saying.
She can’t find the sonogram. She slumps against the wall. “Maybe I should have waited until morning,” she says. “But I can’t go back to sleep now. I remembered seeing . . .”
“Seeing what?” I demand to know. “What’s going on?”
She looks at me. “You don’t know your birth mother’s name.”
“Right. Except that it starts with S.”
“You don’t know, because it’s not in the letters,” she babbles on. “She’s careful not to give the real names of people in the letters. Remember that one where she almost writes her name, but then she catches herself?”
“Of course I remember. Look, Ny. You’re freaking out my parents. And I was having a nice dream.”
“I think her name is in there.”
I’m fully awake now. “What? No, it isn’t,” I say with absolute certainty. I’ve read the letters a thousand times by now. I could recite whole passages by heart. I would have noticed a name. “S never tells me her name.”
“She never tells you,” Nyla insists. “But she did give it to you. She probably didn’t realize. Or who knows, maybe she did.”
Now I’m really confused. “What?”
She slaps her hand down on the table in frustration. “Goshdangit, I need the flipping sonogram!”
“It’s here.” I grab my backpack and retrieve my wallet. I keep the sonogram in my wallet, because it’s the only picture, like S said, of her and me together. It’s right next to a photo my parents and I took when I was a kid at a photo booth. I hand the sonogram to Nyla, and she lays it on the table and puts her finger near the top of the grainy black-and-white picture. I really do look like an alien here. Then my eyes focus on the faded white print by Nyla’s finger. But it’s just a bunch of letters and numbers that don’t make sense.
“It’s medical jargon, I think,” says Nyla, moving her finger down the picture. “But here, below where it says, PROFILE 1. Here, Cass. You had it all this time.”
S. WHIT, it says.
“S,” I murmur.
“Yes, but ‘Whit,’” Nyla says impatiently. “That must be her last name.”
“S. Whit,” I repeat again. “S. Whit.”
“As in, Governor Whit,” Dad says from behind me. He’s fully awake now, too. “S’s father was in politics, right?”
“Governor Whit? I . . . I’ve met him. He can’t be my—”
“It makes sense, though,” Nyla says. “It fits.”
It does.
“My notes,” I whisper. “I need my notes. They’re in a yellow notebook.” We all get up, Dad in his boxers, Mom in the white hotel bathrobe, Nyla in her pj’s, and dig around trying to locate my yellow notebook. Mom finds it and brings it to the table like she’s about to read from the Dead Sea Scrolls or something. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up, goose bumps prickling up and down my arms.
Mom lays the notebook down on my desk and starts flipping through it for the page where I listed the politicians.
“Here.” Dad, from over my shoulder, points to a list. State senators, it says in my handwriting.
It’s the third name down.
“Michael Whit, junior senator,” Dad reads. “It’s got to be him, right?”
“Governor Whit,” I say.
“Ew,” Nyla exclaimed. “Your grandfather is Governor Whit?”
“He’s not my grandfather,” I say hotly. “I don’t know him.”
Nyla sobers. “I’m sorry. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
“This is pretty flimsy,” I say. “It’s, what . . . circumstantial? Just because the name Whit is on the ultrasound doesn’t mean it’s . . . Whit could be the doctor’s name. Or the sonogram technician’s name. Or something.”
But the wheels of my brain are still turning, turning, turning, ever so slowly, until they arrive at the destination they’d started toward the second I saw the word Whit.
“Wait.” I pull the notebook toward me and flip back a bunch of pages, to the yearbook notes I took last year with Nyla.
Boise High School Newspaper Staff
Kristi Henscheid
Melissa Bollinger
Melissa Stockham
Sandra Whit
Sarah Averett
Sonia Rutz
Amy Yowell
“Sandra Whit,” Mom breathes from beside me.
I look around wildly and start rustling through the stacks of papers again, until find the photocopies Mom made today of some of the yearbook pages from the high schools that start with B. “It was in the red one, I think. Boise High School.”
IN SEARCH OF THE STORY, I remember the page was called. I hope Mom made a copy of it. And yes—then I find it. A copy of the school newspaper page. The first one I looked at when I was going through the yearbooks with Nyla the day of the drama competition.
This time, the name leaps out at me.
SANDRA WHIT.
I put my finger on the name, then follow the order that the students are standing in to figure out which girl in the picture is Sandra. It’s not a great photo, and the one who’s supposed to be Sandra isn’t looking at the camera. She’s looking off to one side, like she’s laughing at something. Her long straight hair is falling directly across her face.
I can’t see her at all. “I wish there was a better picture.”
“They keep the yearbook archives online now,” Mom says quietly. “The librarian told me.”
She hands me my laptop.
I open it and do a search for Boise High School yearbooks. And it’s there. The right year and everything. I click on the yearbook. I type “Sandra Whit” into the search bar, and it informs me that this particular student appears on two pages: the yearbook page and the individual student pictures. I click on the individual one.
The photo is in black and white. S
he’s smiling, but not with her eyes. She looks bored, like there’s someplace she’d rather be.
“Cass, she’s got your teeth,” Nyla says.
“My teeth?”
Dad leans closer to the screen. “Yep. Those are your teeth. They’re small, pretty close together. Hers are straighter, but they look basically the same. You also have the same chin, but different lips.”
I stare at the girl’s chin. It is vaguely familiar. I’m not the spitting image of Sandra Whit, but there is something of me in there. If I’m not imagining things. I mean, I did look at this picture once before, and Mom looked at it, too, only a few hours ago, and neither of us saw anything to make us believe that this girl is the one who gave birth to me.
Nyla cocks her head to one side. “God, what is she wearing?”
She’s got on not one tank top but two, layered one on top of the other, both dark in color. Her hair is straight, long, and pulled over one shoulder. A beaded choker is hanging tightly around her neck. It’s the choker, I think, that Nyla is referring to. It’s pretty nineties.
I sit back. Mom leans over to take a look.
“She has your eyes,” she murmurs. “If this picture was in color, they’d be blue.”
I wonder. I also wonder if I’m in this photo, too, invisible, but there. Just out of the frame. I can’t stop staring at her face, like I’m gazing into the eyes of her former self, and I’m able to see her in real life, wherever she is.
“Nice to meet you, Sandra,” I whisper. “If it’s you.”
Dear X,
We did it. I’m lying in a hospital bed right now, wearing that basic pale blue horribly unflattering hospital gown, and you’re not in my belly anymore, X. You’re out. You’ve arrived. You’re here.
I feel empty and full, at the same time.
I’m trying to sort it out now, to tell you about last night.
It basically started out like every other night lately. Yesterday was a Sunday, so we didn’t have much to do all day, Amber and me. We don’t go to church or anything resembling a brunch or an afternoon stroll. We laze around and watch television and, according to Melly, “eat her out of house and home.”
So that’s what we did yesterday. We sat around eating the proverbial bonbons, and I worked on a paper I’m writing for English class on Romeo and Juliet. We watched The Simpsons and I wrote my paper during the commercials, and I thought about how messed up even Juliet’s life was, a simple teenage girl back in the day who only wants to know what love is, and she can’t catch a break. Amber started in on like a pint of peanut butter cup ice cream, because she said she was so hot she could die, even though it’s cooler out now, and then she and I went out on the front porch to get some air. It was late evening by then, and the moon was up and full, as bright and big as I’d ever seen the moon, casting the whole street in a sheet of silvery white.
It was so beautiful it kind of hurt. Or maybe that was just my back.
“Give me some of that,” I said to Amber.
She passed me the ice cream.
“Did you ever consider,” I said around a mouthful of peanut-buttery goodness, “how the moon is shining on everybody, all over the world, and how it’s the same for all of us?” Right then I was thinking about how this very moon was also shining down on my mom, in Colorado, and my dad, in his lonely house on the hill, and on Heather and Brit and Teresa. And Dawson, wherever he was. And Ted. And it was like in that moment the moon connected us all together, into one space.
It’s shining on us now, X. On me, in here in this room, alone, and on you, in the nursery.
But Amber, of course, didn’t look at it that way.
“No,” she said flatly. “It’s just the moon.”
“Hey, I’m trying to have a moment here,” I said.
“You’re trying to be romantic. But you can’t be romantic about the moon. It’s a hunk of cold lifeless rock circling around our planet. Big whoop.”
“Lots of people are romantic when it comes to the moon,” I argued.
“Well, I’m not.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s just the moon,” she said again.
“You know what you should be when you grow up?” I said. “An accountant. That’s the perfect non-romantic job for you. That’s still the plan, isn’t it? Because people will always need accountants. Will you do my taxes someday?”
She frowned. Amber didn’t talk about her plans anymore. She didn’t talk about her baby or cloth diapers or the support system that’s going to help her raise her kid while she goes back to school. That was bullshit that she told us back in the day to make us think she had it all together. That all ended the night she showed up here with the bruises on her neck.
“Shut up,” she said to me. “What are you going to be, like a waitress? Or one of those women who cleans hotel rooms?”
“Don’t make me punch you in the nose again.”
“Maybe I’ll punch back this time.”
Neither of us really wanted to get in a fight. We were both just irritable and lonesome, in spite of the fact that we were together. It was the moon’s fault, I think.
I gave her back the container of ice cream. “On that note,” I said, “I am going to bed.”
I waddled back to my room and got into my nightgown (I don’t wear pajamas anymore because they can’t keep up with my expanding waistline) and washed my face. Then as I was brushing my teeth I noticed something.
Three drops of blood.
Right below where I was standing, there were three bright red drops of blood.
Now I can look back at it and think, cool. Three drops of blood against the white linoleum of my bedroom floor. Like in the Grimms’ fairy tale of Snow White, where Snow White’s mother pricks her finger when she’s sewing and three drops of blood fall to the snow. And afterward she gives birth to a daughter that’s red as blood and white as snow. It’s a good omen, those three drops of blood.
But right then as I was standing there at the sink I thought, well, apparently I’m bleeding. That can’t be good.
So I wiped up the blood and put on my slippers and went to wake Melly right away. You weren’t moving around right then, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt you move—I mean, I was sure you’d moved lately, but I couldn’t remember, and I wasn’t like gushing blood but I was bleeding a little and I’d seen way too many movies where the woman starts bleeding and then in the next scene the doctors are telling her that her baby has died. So I booked it to Melly’s room.
She wasn’t asleep. For once. She was sitting in her bed reading a book. Something about Ophelia.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, and I told her.
“Are you feeling any pain?” she asked, and I said I wasn’t.
“It’s probably fine,” she said, but she told me to wait for her outside the door while she got dressed and then she’d take me in to St. Luke’s to be sure.
I was out there waiting in the dark hallway when Amber came shuffling up.
“My water broke,” she said like she was reporting on the weather.
I knocked on Melly’s door.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she called through the wood. “Can you go tell Amber that we’re going to the hospital, so if we’re not back in the morning, she’ll know where we went?”
“Amber’s here. Her water broke,” I say.
The door opened. Melly peered out.
“Your water broke?”
Amber would have answered, but by then she was bent over having a contraction. Then one hit me, too, a real contraction that started under my ribs and vibrated down through my entire body.
“Ow,” I said. “OW.”
Melly looked from Amber to me and back again. “Both of you? Oh my God, is it a full moon?”
“As a matter of fact . . . ,” I gasped.
“Come on,” Melly said, all business now. “Let’s get you girls in the car.”
She looked up as we were making our way down the
sidewalk to where her car was parked.
“Goddamn moon,” she muttered to herself.
So the pain. The pain was pretty bad, X. I won’t lie. On a scale of one to ten, one being stubbing your toe, this was like twelve point five. At least at the end there, when I actually thought I might die. At the beginning, I didn’t think it was so bad, like period cramps, maybe a little worse.
I got to the hospital and they checked me out and said the blood was probably just a little of my mucus plug, but you were fine. I was fine. But I was having contractions, small ones that I didn’t really feel, every five minutes.
They hooked me up to a monitor and had me walk around a little, which was supposed to make things move along more quickly. I was only at like two centimeters when I came in, so not very far. That was at about nine p.m. We had a long night ahead, the nurse told me.
But by 9:45 I was at nine centimeters.
“I have to poop,” I informed the nurse.
“What?” She checked my chart. “No way.”
But she checked, and yes, I’d gone from two to nine in less than an hour. And I was ready to push.
That’s when the pain got bad. Before that, I thought people were being overly dramatic about the pain. It hurt, but not too much. But now, now the pain crashed over me. I stopped talking and tried to remember how they taught us to breathe in those classes they’d made us take at Booth, because breathing suddenly became a difficult task.
“Isn’t there some kind of position that’s supposed to make it better?” I asked the nurse.
“No,” she said. “There’s no magic position. Put your feet here.”
She guided my feet into the stirrups. It felt wrong. What my body wanted to do was to stand up, or maybe squat or get on all fours. With my feet in the stirrups I felt like a turtle who’d been kicked over onto its back. Everything felt pointed in the wrong direction.
“No, stay like that,” said the nurse as I moved to get down again.
“What about the epidural?” I gasped. “You know what I’m in the mood for right now? A good old-fashioned epidural. I’m not one of those hippie-dippie girls who think it’s a right of passage to feel the pain or I want to be all-natural or anything like that. Bring on the epidural. Now, please.”