Giftchild

by Janci Patterson

  Probably me. After all, the school hadn't gotten pregnant with his child.

  I handed Athena an empty cup from the bedside table. "Would you get me some more ice?" I asked. Really, though, I just wanted to be alone.

  But as soon as Athena walked out of the room, my cell phone rang. I picked it up, hoping it was Rodney, but the caller ID flashed with Kara's name.

  Oh, jeez. Kara. I'd told her I was in the hospital, but she'd think I was still pregnant. I could ignore her call, but I'd have to go back eventually. I'd have to walk back into the halls at school like I was still a whole, high-school-aged person who cared about things like homework and yearbook and prom.

  Then again, maybe Kara had talked to Rodney by now. Maybe she'd already heard.

  There was only one way to know.

  I answered the phone and put it to my ear. "Hey," I said.

  Kara's voice shrieked through the speaker. "Hey!" she said. "Ohmygosh, are you okay?"

  I closed my eyes, still not sure what she knew and what she didn't. "No," I said. "No, I lost the baby."

  Kara gasped. "Ohmygosh," she said again. "Are you still at the hospital?"

  "Yeah," I said. "For now."

  Kara's voice dropped low, like she was sharing in some secret. "So," she said. "Are you, like, you know . . . relieved?"

  I leaned back like she'd slapped me. Relieved? I just lost a child. How could I be relieved?

  But as Athena walked back in with the cup of ice, I started to remember. I should be relieved because I was a teenage mom, and that was a bad thing. A million other girls in my position probably would have been relieved. This meant they didn't have to deal with the consequences of their actions, right? This meant they were free. So I should be, too, shouldn't I?

  "No," I said. "I'm not relieved. Not even a little."

  Athena's eyes widened, and she sat down.

  "Oh," Kara said. "Sorry, I didn't . . ." She fumbled for words. "Is that because of your mom?"

  "No," I said. "It's because . . ." But I already knew there were no words to make Kara understand. "I'll just see you at school, okay?"

  "Yeah," Kara said. "Okay. Do you know when you'll be back? Because I can collect your assignments for you. Do you want me to—"

  "Yes," I said. When I tried to think about what I must have missed, my mind went blank. Whatever Kara did, it would be better than anything I could direct her to do. "That would be great."

  "Okay, well, if you need anything else—"

  "I'll let you know," I said. Even though I already knew there was nothing I needed that Kara could possibly provide.

  Athena raised her eyebrows at me as I hung up the phone. "Friend from school?" she asked.

  "Kara," I said. "She doesn't get it."

  Athena gave a slow nod. "I'm not sure I do, either, to be honest."

  I pulled the sheets up to my chin and burrowed into the pillow. "I'm glad you're here anyway," I said.

  "Okay," Athena said. "I'll stay then, and try not to say anything horrible again."

  I nodded. Sometimes, that was the best any of us could do.

  They finally released me that evening. I came home to the same house I'd left, but I felt out of step, like I'd lived here in a past life. My aching leg muscles complained as I climbed the stairs, but I pushed them harder. I should hurt. I should be in pain. They'd sent me home with more drugs, but I already knew I wouldn't take them. If I stayed numb, how would I ever recover?

  The door to the empty room that would have been Gabriel's nursery was closed, and as I walked by it, my heart squeezed. It was directly across from my door—closer to my room than Mom and Dad's. How could I have thought that I could listen to him cry at night, and let Mom get up and take care for him as if she was his mother?

  I hurried past the door, and into my own room, closing the door behind me. The pile of papers from the doctor still lay on my desk—the one with the miscarriage symptoms on top. I jammed them inside the baby book and threw the whole thing into the trash.

  I lay down on my bed, but though my body felt exhausted, my mind kept spinning, focusing on the oddest things. The ticking of my clock. The gurgle of water in the pipes. The rush of the wind in the trees outside. The whole world was alive with motion and sound, and I lay perfectly still, unable to pass into unconsciousness.

  Eventually, I got up. My body seemed to ache more the longer I lay still, and the doctors hadn't told me I had to rest. The house was quiet; Mom and Dad's door was closed. I gathered from the silence that they'd both gone to sleep, probably assuming I'd done the same. Instead, I moved down to Dad's office. I turned on his computer and opened Rodney and my photography folder, but Rodney hadn't dropped in the pictures of Gabriel. He hadn't updated the folder in several days. I sighed. His parents might have taken away his computer. Or maybe he was sleeping—he hadn't had much more rest than I had the last few days.

  I pulled out my cell phone, trying to figure out the right words to say to Rodney to tell him that I understood he was better off without me. Now I could understand Ryan's decision to break up with Kara over text message. I really didn't want to hear Rodney's reaction, be it pain or relief.

  But I'd at least call him, even if I couldn't face him in person. I owed him that.

  I found his number in my phone—he was the last person I'd dialed. My finger paused over the call button, but I couldn't press it. I couldn't do this. Not yet. I needed to sink back into my world again, first. When I felt real again, I would tell him. It might be easier while I still felt detached, but this was the last gift I could give him: I would feel the full force of the pain when I finally let him go.

  And then I knew what I had to do—what would bring me back to my senses. I was never more aware of the world than I was when I was framing it through the lens of my camera. I went back upstairs for my equipment, dug my tripod out of the closet, threw on a hoodie, and headed into the backyard. I might not know who I was now, but I'd always taken pictures, even before I met Rodney. Even if I needed to let him go, I couldn't let that go with him.

  Beside Dad's barbecue, I set up my tripod and aimed it up through the branches of our poplar tree, focusing my camera on the sliver of moon peeking through the leaves. Its light was almost blocked by the speckle of leaves—only a few fragments of brilliant white shone through. I set the two-second timer, so the picture wouldn't blur as I jarred the camera while pressing the button, and took several shots.

  I considered them in the screen. They were good, but not great.

  I could do this after Gabriel. I could do this without Rodney. I could. If I didn't, I might disappear, and I didn't want that.

  I wanted to matter.

  Our sliding glass door opened, and I turned to see Mom standing in the doorway, rubbing her arms. She was still wearing her clothes from the hospital, but her hair stuck up in all directions. "Did you sleep?" she asked.

  I shook my head. "I don't want to."

  Mom shivered. "Just a minute," she said. "I'm going to get a coat."

  I thought about offering to come inside, but the cold air on my cheeks felt crisp, and it felt good to feel anything. Mom closed the door, and came back a few minutes later wearing a jacket and slippers, and carrying two lawn chairs. She set the chairs up on the concrete patio, facing the moon, and I sat down next to her, looking up at the sky. The stars were out—I could see the Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia, which exhausted the sum total of constellation names that I knew. Without a lot of magnification, stars didn't make for very interesting pictures, unless you did a super long exposure and found something fantastic to put in front of them.

  The tree did not count as fantastic, yet Mom and I stared up at it, looking at the leaves rather than at each other. Finally, Mom spoke.

  "Did you really think you had to do this?" she asked. "Or I would never be happy?"

  I wanted to rush to tell her that I'd never thought that, that we'd all just been upset and said things that weren't true, but instead, I breathed in the night air. "I
didn't have to be an idiot about it," I said. "That was on me."

  I expected Mom to fall apart again, but instead she just looked at the sky with quiet acceptance. "I understand what you were trying to do," Mom said. "I can't believe I didn't see it before."

  "Did you want to?" I asked.

  Mom snorted. "That's exactly what your father asked me. Did you two talk about this?"

  Busted. My cheeks burned. "Just once."

  "Ah," Mom said. "So everyone knew that you did this on purpose except me, and no one saw fit to tell me."

  "I didn't—" I said. "I mean—"

  "You thought if you said anything, I'd break down," Mom said. "You thought I couldn't bear the idea that this was my fault."

  I cringed. "Yeah."

  "Penny," Mom said. "I'm your mother. I'm not made of eggshells."

  I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth.

  Mom heaved a great sigh. "I'm sorry that I acted like I was for so long."

  I stole a glance at Mom, but her eyes weren't teary, and she wasn't holding back some horrible tide of grief. She just stared calmly up at the sky, like she'd emerged from the dark to remember how big the world was.

  I followed her gaze up to the stars. I wanted to remember that, too, but even though the sky was big, to me it still looked dark.

  Mom turned to look at me. "Listen," she said. "I was wrong. I let myself get so wrapped up in having a child with your father that I lost sight of the rest of my life. And worse, I taught you to see the world that way. That's what really bothers me, I think. It's not the years I've lost. It's the skewed view of life I've given to you."

  A cold breeze picked up, wafting down into the valley from the bay. I slipped my hands inside my hoodie, and pulled the hood up around my face. "Athena handled it differently," I said.

  Mom looked up at the sky. "Athena resents it. You adopted it. Either way, I'm sorry I made you both live like that for so long."

  I kicked the heel of my tennis shoe against the frame of the lawn chair. All my instincts told me to take the blame. The pregnancy had been my choice, not hers. But that was just more excuses, wasn't it? More taking things onto myself, so that other people's lives would be easier.

  But it didn't make them easier. Not for them, not for me. It just hurt.

  "Penny?" Mom asked. "Are you angry with me?"

  "No," I whispered.

  Mom shook her head. "You should be."

  I was sick of worrying about how I should feel. "Maybe," I said.

  Mom sniffed. I wondered if she understood how hard that was for me to admit. Mom had it hard, didn't she? Who was I to be mad at her? But to listen to her tell it, I was the one who had it bad. I was the one who had to live with a mother who rested her happiness only on things she couldn't have. "I love you," I said. "I get that it was screwed up, but that's why I did it."

  "I know," Mom said.

  I squinted at her. "And you're not mad?"

  Mom let out one burst of a laugh. "I was," she said. "At the hospital. I was angry, and heartbroken, and terrified."

  I'd been all of those places, too. "And now?"

  Mom looked up at the stars, considering. "Now I just want things to be different," she said. "Do you think we can get there?"

  I wanted to tell her that of course we could. That it would be easy. That, poof!, we could magically have a functional family. But it wouldn't. There wasn't any easy fix from broken to whole again. Gabriel taught me that.

  Still, there had to be some way to get there—some path that would lead us to a happier place. And if I didn't know exactly what that was, at least I could look at my family and have a good idea of what it wasn't. "I'll forgive you for being a crappy mother," I said at last. "If you'll forgive me for being a crappy daughter."

  Mom laughed, genuinely this time. "Done," she said. "I guess we all have some things to work on."

  We did. Dad, too, though I wasn't sure he knew it yet. Given how many times I still wanted to make everything instantly better, I clearly had a long way to go. But I could see the problem now. That seemed like a good place to start.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked. "About, I mean . . . about having a baby."

  Mom reached over and brushed my hair behind my ear, like she used to do when I was little. "Well, I have a year and a half left with this one before she goes off to college," she said. "So I have some lost time to make up."

  I smiled. Most of my friends would be pissed if their parents decided to get more involved in their lives in their last two years of high school. But Mom was right. We did need to make up some time.

  I looked down at my picture of the tree behind the moon. "I could teach you how to take pictures," I said.

  Mom laughed. "You can try," she said. "But really, I'd just like to look at more of yours."

  But then what? Mom was right. In a year and a half, I'd be gone. And Mom would still be in her mid thirties, already an empty nester. "What about after that?"

  The moon reflected in Mom's eyes. "I was thinking about foster care," she said. "I never wanted to do it before, because I didn't think it would be fair to you and Athena. Foster kids have been through a lot. You never know what kind of problems you'll be dealing with." Mom looked down at the grass. "But everybody thinks that way, you know? Everybody wants a baby. And your dad and I would be in a position where maybe we could do some good."

  I thought about that, about children without parents moving in and out of Mom's home. Not babies, but kids for my mother to love. Family, but a different kind.

  And for the first time, I could picture it: a happy future for my parents in which they never had a baby of their own.

  But when I tried to picture myself in that future, I couldn't. Logically, I knew I could still go to college. Study photography. Take pictures. Maybe even start up a portrait business myself. But it felt cold and empty, like I'd always wish that I'd done those things with Rodney, not because I couldn't do it without him, but because I wanted to be the girl who didn't screw that future up. The girl he could trust. The one who didn't hurt him. The one he thought I was before all of this happened.

  My eyes found their tears again, and my face contorted. I slipped deeper into my hood, hoping Mom wouldn't notice, but she put a hand on my arm. "Penny?" she said. She didn't ask if I was okay. I obviously wasn't. "Talk to me?"

  I wanted to hold it all in. Mom was standing on the edge of happy. It wasn't right for me to ruin it.

  But I'd just agreed that things would be different. And if not talking to my mother was what dug me into the dark, maybe the opposite would pull me out.

  I sniffled, and snot collected in my nose. "I've screwed everything up."

  Mom held her breath. "Have you talked to Rodney?"

  I bit my lip, hard. "What makes you think it's about him?"

  Mom scooted her chair closer, resting her arm around my shoulders. "After the way he was with you at the hospital, I'm honestly surprised that he hasn't come pounding on the door."

  My nose started to run. "I was thinking about calling him."

  "You don't sound happy about it."

  "No," I said. "I'm going to tell him that we shouldn't talk to each other any more."

  Mom's eyebrows shot up. "That sounds . . . drastic."

  "Is it?" I asked. "After everything I put him through? He'd be better off with somebody else."

  Mom shook her head. "Penny—"

  "You always said it was stupid to get involved young, right? And you were right. All I do is hurt him. That's all I've ever done."

  Mom grimaced, probably remembering all the times she had said just that. "I don't think—"

  My voice angled up into a wail. "He said I didn't care about his feelings. And he was right. I was selfish. But now that I do care, it's obvious this is what's best for him."

  Mom was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was sincere. "Does Rodney get a say in what's best for him?"

  Both my eyes and my nose ran. If I didn't gi
ve him a choice, I was doing what I always did: trying to solve the problem by doing what I thought was best. But in this one case, couldn't I be right? "Isn't it obvious?"

  Mom got up and knelt on the ground beside me, rubbing my back. "Penny," she said. "That boy wants to be around you. He insisted on staying with you when any other guy would have run away."

  "Yeah," I said. "Because he's too loyal. I've done nothing but ruin his life for years. It's about time I did him a favor."

  Mom planted her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. "You're not ruining Rodney's life. He's in love with you. Anyone can see that."

  I scrunched my eyes closed. Of course he was. "That only makes me the person who can hurt him the worst."

  Mom nodded. "Like I've hurt you."

  I cringed, still honestly surprised that Mom wasn't dissolving in tears along with me. How could she deal with having hurt me without collapsing?

  She wasn't trying to fix me, I realized. She was only being honest, and trying to move on.

  Why was I still trying to fix things for Rodney?

  I sat back in my chair. I was trying to control his pain the same way I'd tried to control Mom's. All I'd done was switch him for her.

  I could feel my resolve cracking. But it felt like standing on the surface of a frozen lake. Maybe my resolve was the only thing between me and drowning. "Being with him can't be the right thing, because of how much I've hurt him."

  "Penny," Mom said, "what do you want?"

  I remembered Rodney's words, from months ago on the bleachers, when I'd asked him the same question.

  I want to be with my best friend forever, he'd said. Take millions of pictures. Be stupidly happy.

  And the words cut me deep, because they were exactly what I wanted, too. I just hadn't believed it was possible.

  And now?

  I looked over at my mother, whose face was calm, despite the horror of the last few days. She'd survived it, even though I'd forced her into yet another loss. I'd survived the last few years, even though my family was a mess. Mom could smile now, even though we both knew how much we'd hurt each other.

  "How do people do this?" I asked. "Wound each other and then just go on as if it never happened?"