The Admissions

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “I want to,” whispered Maya, swiping at her nose. “I really want to, but I can’t.”

  —

  Before you had kids everyone told you all the wonderful and tragic things your kids would do to you. They’ll make googly eyes and you’ll fall in love! Wonderful. They’ll ruin your figure! Terrible. They’ll light up when you walk into the room. Wonderful. When they become teenagers they’ll smash up the car and say really rude things to you in public. Terrible.

  But nobody talked about the things you could do to ruin them. That was the dirty little secret of parenting. You didn’t find out about that until you became a parent, and by then, of course, there was no going back. All sales final.

  When Maya was an infant Nora took her—just her—to visit Nora’s parents and Marianne in Rhode Island. Nora’s father wasn’t up to the trip out to California. Angela was already in school, and they had a good after-school babysitter who could care for her until Gabe got home from work. The same sitter—an elementary schoolteacher who hadn’t found a job, perfect—was willing to work extra hours to care for Cecily too, because a two-year-old and a six-hour plane ride and a three-hour time change were a lethal mix. Maya didn’t know her days from her nights anyway. They’d be gone from a Monday night through midday Friday. No big deal—in fact, a bit of a break for Nora, a chance to focus on just the new baby. It was October, Nora’s favorite month in New England. She’d been working like a maniac, pulling together a sale in Tiburon. Arthur was calling her several times a day.

  Nora’s mother had said, I think you’re working too hard. Sweetheart, they’re only young once.

  (To which Nora had answered, under her breath, Thank goodness.)

  Gabe had said, Things at Elpis are going really well, you don’t need to do this.

  (To which Nora had answered, firmly, Yes, I do.) They didn’t need her income then the way they did now with college tuition looming, maybe, but it had taken a while to get back into the market after her last break. She didn’t want to lose her client base. She didn’t want to disappoint Arthur. She didn’t want to be one of those women who slipped out of the workforce when their children were young and then forgot how to do it and suddenly found themselves fiftysomething empty nesters turning an old play area into a craft room. Not Nora! No, sir. She didn’t even know how to craft.

  People said lots of things to her back then, but nobody ever said, I’m afraid you’re going to hurt the baby.

  On Tuesday they drove up to Boston and walked through the Common while Maya napped in the BabyBjörn. Pizza at Regina in the North End for lunch. That night, in the port-a-crib set up in Nora’s old bedroom at her parents’ house, Maya slept for six hours straight for the first time ever and then woke up and nursed like she’d been on a desert island for two weeks. Absolute heaven.

  Marianne took Wednesday and Thursday off from work. On Wednesday they walked at Town Beach, which was deserted but because the day was warm retained a glorious, mournful, end-of-summer feel. The leaves on a few of the trees along Boston Neck Road were beginning to turn.

  On Thursday, when her parents were off at a dentist appointment, Nora set Maya, freshly changed, freshly fed, on the bed while she engaged in an argument with her parents’ dial-up modem to get an addendum to the contract over to the office in time for the start of the West Coast business day.

  She left the room. Number one rule of parenting: Don’t leave the baby lying unsupervised on a bed. Okay, maybe not the absolute number one rule, but it was right up there.

  And Maya, who had never rolled before, thought that might be a good time to start. She rolled off the edge of the bed and hit the uncarpeted floor in the guest room. The worst noise Nora had ever heard in her life. The fastest Nora had ever moved, running back into the room from the upstairs office to Marianne’s old bedroom where the modem was.

  Maya was out for five seconds, maybe ten, seconds that lasted a year each, during which Nora’s only two thoughts as she held her were: I’ve killed the baby. And: Now, of course, I have to kill myself.

  Then Maya opened her gummy little mouth and cried. Screamed bloody murder.

  “Ambulance?” said Marianne, running up from the kitchen, but Nora said, “God, no, just drive us, please. Just drive us, faster that way.”

  Marianne drove, and Nora sat in the backseat. She’d had to buckle Maya, still screaming, into her infant seat, but she didn’t wear a seat belt herself. She didn’t deserve a seat belt! She didn’t deserve anything. She leaned over Maya the whole time and whispered useless, inane things that nobody could hear over the screaming. There was a divot on the back of Maya’s head that seemed big enough to fit an egg into, although in retrospect it probably wasn’t. Nora thought a bump might have been easier to take—a divot was such a subtraction. Like something had actually been lost, left on the bedroom floor.

  First a nurse triaged Maya. Then came a resident, who asked all the same questions that the nurse had asked, and then the attending physician, who did everything all over again. The doctor was older, maybe sixty, with thinning gray hair and deep lines around his mouth. His white coat was slightly rumpled.

  Maya scored a 14 on the Pediatric Glasgow Coma Scale! It was almost the highest score you could get. Weirdly, Nora was proud of that, like somehow it boded well for the SATs. She sort of wanted to show the other mothers in the emergency room.

  The doctor said, “How long did you say she lost consciousness for?”

  Nora said, “Ten seconds, maybe fifteen. No, maybe five. I really don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.” Like he was going to give her absolution, not medical advice. Like he was a priest.

  And Maya blinked at her, as if she were saying, Um, shouldn’t you apologize to me?

  “I don’t see any cause for real concern. But we’re going to observe her for the next few hours, just to be sure.”

  Observing sounded nice and gentle. Nora could handle that.

  While they were waiting for Maya, Marianne asked, “Should I dial Gabe’s number for you?”

  And Nora, who had meant to say, “Yes, please,” had simply said, “Not right now. I’ll call him later.”

  And didn’t. She never told him. Kept it to herself. Something like that, something so terrible, for which she’d been to blame, kept it all to herself. That was her secret: that was the one thing.

  By the time they flew back to California the divot was no bigger than a walnut. Nothing that couldn’t be covered with a hat. Babies always wore hats! Especially on planes, where the temperature was unpredictable. A couple of days later it was an almond, then a sesame seed, and then it was gone.

  When Gabe picked them up at the airport he held Maya up in the air and said, “I missed you two!” and tickled Maya under her chin until she smiled. Then he kissed Nora on the forehead and said kindly, “You look exhausted. You didn’t work too hard out there, did you? You better not have.” Nora sucked in her breath and shook her head and felt like the worst person in the entire world.

  Now, so many years later, Maya couldn’t read, and it was all Nora’s fault. Something had happened in her brain that day, the fall had loosened something that had never been put right, whatever that kindly ER doctor had said. How did they really know what went on inside such a tiny brain, when they couldn’t see anything? They didn’t know, but Nora knew. She had ruined her daughter, and she’d kept it to herself.

  If she’d been an elephant, if they’d all been elephants, none of this ever would have happened.

  Where were the allmothers when you really needed them?

  CHAPTER 24

  ANGELA

  Ten milligrams.

  Coach Don had to leave unexpectedly for a family emergency, so practice was canceled. He wanted them to do an easy five on their own if they were so inclined.

  Angela was so inclined—she was very inclined, Angela was always inclined, and she wasn’t going to do the five easy, either, she was going to hammer it—but she wanted to get some of her homework done first
. Besides the regular load (formidable) and the Harvard application hanging over her (like a specter), she was trying to figure out what to do about the term paper for AP English. Topics due in a week.

  Angela was thinking about all of this as she walked home. If she’d been a high school kid in a movie walking home on a fall day there might have been brilliant foliage framing her and a carpet of fallen leaves she could nonchalantly kick through. That would have to be an East Coast movie, though. They didn’t have that kind of variegated foliage in California. Much to Angela’s mother’s chagrin. She talked a lot about missing foliage in the fall where she grew up. This fall in particular.

  Angela was about to step onto the bike path when a car pulled up alongside her, a midnight-blue BMW. She walked a little faster—it could be a rapist or a kidnapper, even in Marin, and Angela was fast but she wasn’t very strong. Then she heard someone say, “Yo, Angela!” so she looked over and the car came to a complete stop. Which, in retrospect, wasn’t that smart, because presumably rapists also knew how to say yo. Though they probably wouldn’t know her name.

  But it wasn’t a rapist or a kidnapper: it was Edmond Lopez from school, and he was nodding and smiling and reaching over to open the passenger-side door and it looked like he was gesturing to Angela to get in.

  Her brain said, No, thank you, but her mouth, surprisingly, said, Sure. Why not? And she got in the car, feeling more jittery and weird than she did when she thought about Maria’s poems being published in those journals. (“Quinceañera,” one of them had been called. Geez, how was the white child of two white parents supposed to compete with that? Angela didn’t have anything to write a poem about. Her poem would be called something dull and ordinary, like “Making My Bed.”)

  Once Angela was in the car Edmond turned to her and said, “Want to come over?”

  “To your house?” Duh. Edmond smiled. His teeth made him look like he’d just stepped out of a Crest Whitestrips ad. He was wearing a baseball cap and a dark blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up past his elbows, and she could see the muscles moving in his forearm when he turned the steering wheel.

  “Sure. Yeah. Nobody’s home.” Edmond smiled lazily. (She could hear Ms. Simmons: Think of a better way to say it. Can a smile really be lazy? Really? Angela might fight that one. She thought a smile could be lazy. Edmond’s was. Lazy and beautiful.)

  In the Lopezes’ driveway she closed the car door carefully and slung her backpack over her shoulder. Or should she leave her backpack in the car? But that would make it seem like he was driving her home, and maybe he wasn’t. If she ran home, she could get a couple of her miles in that way. But what about the backpack?

  Oh my God, what was wrong with her?

  She’d leave it in the car. No, bring it. She brought it even though she felt weird about it, like she was carrying a puppy into a church.

  Edmond’s house was a converted Craftsman, which Angela knew her mother would call “one in a million” or something else equally corny and hyperbolic. Still, it was a really nice house.

  Angela left her backpack by the front door and followed Edmond into the kitchen. He offered her a beer from his parents’ fridge, which she declined—beer made her feel bloated, never mind the fact that she had at least three hours of homework to do when she got home, plus the run—and then he opened one himself and tipped half of it into his mouth. It was called Super Chili Pepper Madness and on the front of the bottle was a chili pepper dressed in a superhero costume. Soon enough, Edmond tipped the other half into his mouth and said, “You sure you don’t want some?”

  “I’m sure,” said Angela. Even if she liked beer she wouldn’t have liked the spicy kind.

  Did her father and Abby the Intern ever drink beer together? Ugh.

  He did the same with the next beer, but he’d turned his head respectfully away from her when he burped. (She was starting to hope he wasn’t driving her home.) After he was done with that one, he took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair until it looked adorably rumpled.

  Edmond’s parents were at work, he said; his sister, Teresa, who had gone to Princeton undergrad, was now at Cornell doing graduate work in sociology. Edmond was (his own words) on a different track. Just that one AP English class, which, according to Henrietta, was a fluke. Honors Lab Science, which he was failing. (Even though science was her worst subject, Angela considered it almost impossible to fail Honors Lab Science.)

  “I don’t care,” he said. “As long as I can play baseball in the spring.” He rumpled his hair again. His hair was very thick and dark and when he ran his hands through it they seemed to imprint themselves there.

  “I can help you, if you want,” she said. It was just Honors Lab Science; she could ace that class with her eyes closed. Not to be braggy. But. (Was this why he’d picked her up? To help with science? That was fine, she was just wondering.)

  “You’d do that?” asked Edmond. One more time with the hands and the hair and Angela’s stomach lurched. Sitting this close to Edmond, she was able to take in his scent, which wasn’t exactly clean but wasn’t dirty either. Like the soil in a garden before anything has been planted in it. No, she could do better. Like the dark side of the moon. (Ms. Simmons might say, “What does that mean, exactly?” And Angela wouldn’t really know. But it felt just right. It was from some old song her dad occasionally sang.)

  Seriously, what was wrong with her? She was sitting in an empty house with a baseball player and having an imaginary conversation with her AP English teacher. Lame alert.

  She said, “Definitely, I’d do that,” and stared at the mosaic backsplash that ran along the length of the kitchen (classy, her mother would say; it was all muted tans with a few hints of gold).

  Edmond poured Angela a glass of water while he drank his third beer and they sat for some minutes in the kitchen, both of them drinking, and Angela felt very briefly like an adult: she was not often in an otherwise unoccupied house with just one person her own age. And by not often she meant never.

  “My sister, though,” said Edmond, “man, she’s smart. She’s like you.” He fixed his gaze on Angela and she noted that his eyes were darker than dark; the pupils and the irises were pretty much the same color. She hoped her skin was behaving itself, not blushing.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Angela modestly. Teresa Lopez. Geez. “Your sister’s, like, a legend. The teachers still talk about her. She’s brilliant.”

  “Yeah,” said Edmond. “I’m sort of lucky that way. My parents don’t expect anything from me. But, boy, they did from her. Still do. She doesn’t catch a break.”

  Angela considered this. She had never met Teresa, but in a way she felt like she knew her. She trained her eyes on the built-ins above the kitchen desk and saw a couple of family photos—the Lopezes vacationing in Hawaii, wearing snorkel masks and flippers; the Lopezes at Tahoe, holding ski poles. Edmond looked so much like Teresa that if not for what she knew to be a five-year difference in their ages they could pass for fraternal twins.

  “So, Harvard, huh?” asked Edmond, as though continuing a conversation they had started earlier. He tapped his fingers against the beer bottle. “How come?”

  Angela took a long drink of her water, feeling self-conscious about the sound she made when she swallowed, and then said, “My dad went there.” She still had to finish the application. Her heart palpitated, thinking about that. Edmond scrunched up his face and Angela intuited that this was an unsatisfactory answer. Her breath got caught in her throat. “I mean, that’s not the main reason. That’s one reason, I should say. That’s the reason I was first interested. But when I went there for my campus visit, I don’t know, I just felt really at home there. You know?” What was hard to get across to Edmond Lopez was the fact that when her father had taken her out the previous year, when they’d driven together along the Charles River, when they’d followed the student guide from building to building, when they’d walked around Harvard Square and shopped at the Coop and stood outside
the dorm her father had lived in his freshman year, everything about the world felt right and good, as though Angela were a coin that had been dropped inside the exactly right slot. But she couldn’t put that into words. Well, she could, but she didn’t want to. Too embarrassing. Too pretentious.

  Edmond blinked; he had enviable eyelashes, just like Cecily’s. Angela’s stomach did the weird twisting thing again. Edmond said, “You remind me a lot of my sister. How you’re so smart and everything comes easy.”

  Angela cleared her throat. Okay, she liked Edmond, but a misconception was a misconception. “Oh my God, that’s not true. It doesn’t come easy, not at all.”

  Edmond seemed to take that in. Or not. Then he said, “How you’re so serious.”

  Angela felt a whisper of an insult at that. “I’m not always serious.” She could be goofy—with her sisters, with her parents, with her friends. She could definitely be goofy. Silly. Fatuous.

  “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it like you know what you want, you’re not wasting time on stupid shit like a lot of people do. I like that.”

  “Oh,” she said. Better. She did actually pride herself on not wasting time on stupid shit.

  “Plus I think you’re really pretty.”

  Oh!

  “Yeah?”

  Yeah.

  She ducked her head and felt a blush creep to her cheeks. (Corny? Yes.) “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious about baseball. Come to a game in the spring, you’ll see.”

  She smiled. “Maybe I will.” She reached over and lifted Edmond’s beer from the counter, took a sip. Just one sip. It was terrible. It burned going down. The actual chili pepper in the actual beer was much less friendly and accommodating than the superhero chili on the label. She coughed and handed the bottle back.