Wrong Highway

by Wendy A. Gordon

  “Want to feed Sophia?” Erica asked. “She’s on the bottle now.”

  “Oh yes, please,” Ashley said. She positioned Sophia carefully, head on forearm. “And they fed me all this bullshit, like, now I have the opportunity to go to this great school, my third school in three years, and I have all my life ahead of me, and I’m too young to have a baby, and blah, blah, blah. Like my life was that exciting? I’ve never been a good student, I’ve got dyslexia and ADD, and you know, I was all into partying and drugs and stuff, but then I thought, I’m going to be a mother, and it was all different, like I could do something useful in my life for once. And now that’s all over. And I miss Jared. I miss him so bad.”

  Lane was mistaken. Erica’s tonsils were a mass of tissue, without meaning once separated from the rest of her body. But having her almost-but-not quite theoretical baby torn from her, that was a different scale of injury. She’d thought about that child, or the possibility of that child, every single day, as she went on with the rest of her life, as she graduated high school, and studied in college, as she babysat her nephew Jared, as she married Ethan, as she gave birth to Dylan, and Jake and Jesse, and Sophia. She’d never forgotten the due date for her child that never got a chance to be born.

  Ashley leaned forward, positioning the bottle nipple between Sophia’s lips, periodically readjusting her supporting arm. Sophia’s bootied feet hung over her knees. Her scraggly blond hair fell over her forehead. Erica could see brownish roots at the scalp. A tendril of hair brushed Sophia’s face, and Ashley flicked it away.

  “Mom hates my hair,” Ashley said. She thinks I should grow it out into its natural color and then cut it short, layered, you know, because it’s so fine. She told me I could have a day of beauty at her spa.” She burst into a fresh round of tears, allowing Sophia to dangle a little too loosely off her lap.

  “We should burp her,” Erica said. “You put her up over your shoulder, like this.” Ashley patted Sophia’s shoulder and the baby promptly emitted a loud burp, depositing curds of formula on Ashley’s silk sweater.

  “Screw the sweater,” Ashley said. “ My Mom’s so maxed out on her credit cards. Half of them are still my Dad’s, but he’s going to stop payment. He filed a lawsuit. He’s, like, this big-shot lawyer jerk.”

  Jeff never knew he was the father of her child, if indeed that was the case. He’d broken up with her two weeks before she found out: she wasn’t intellectual enough, or her hair didn’t part neatly enough in the middle , or her butt was too fat, or a combination of all three. Plus he found out about Bernie, with the greasy hair and the awful imitations of Jethro Tull but those strangely magnetic eyes. Or Rob, it was Rob, right? Rob from Algebra II—try as she might, she couldn’t remember what he looked like.

  “Did Jared know about the baby?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Ashley said. “He did. We took a test that, you know, you could get in a drugstore. He was kinda scared, but I knew he’d get used to the idea. He’s really smart—his stupid parents just don’t see it. If we’d only stayed in Philadelphia. If they’d only left us alone.” Ashley’s tears flowed with renewed vigor, staining Sophia’s lavender dress. “He’s gonna be so devastated when he finds out.”

  Erica had confided her pregnancy only to Lane, who wasn’t even a close friend but who was notorious at school for her D&C sophomore year. Lane’s overnight stay in the hospital, prior to Roe v. Wade, had required multiple deceptions and contortions, while Erica’s afternoon at Planned Parenthood was simple to arrange. She’d told her mother she was shopping at Roosevelt Field.

  “You know,” Erica said, “I understand how sad you feel, but you are awfully young to have a baby.”

  Her words sounded hollow and false; the kind of platitudes adults blurt out when they don’t respect kids enough to speak from the heart. Ashley repositioned Sophia, who lay across her bony knees, sleeping. “There’s a girl in my therapy group who had a baby, and she’s only fourteen,” she said after a few minutes.

  “You know,” Erica dutifully tried again, “you and Jared—if you’re still together—can have another baby when you’re older, out of high school, on your own.”

  Ashley looked her straight in the eye. “That would be a different baby,” she said. “This one is dead.”

  After her abortion, Erica had dreamed of babies, babies in the abstract, creatures who would lift her to another, more deeply essential plane, who would anchor her and justify her existence. She’d felt like an inconsequential bouncing atom until the day Dylan was born, healthy and whole, binding her to the world with blood and tissue.

  All these years, she’d considered tracking Lane down—she’d heard that she lived in Brooklyn, worked in advertising—and telling her she was wrong, an abortion was nothing like having your tonsils out. She’d given her baby a name, and maybe that was her biggest mistake, lumps of tissue don’t have names. It was an ordinary name and a secret one; she’d not given it to any of her other children nor ever spoken it out loud. But ultimately she couldn’t muster the will it would have required to choose having that baby: to tell her parents; to tell her sister; to discover Jeff would not run away with her to California; to walk down the halls of her high school in West Meadow where things like this did not happen; to be the academic one and not even attend a second-rate college. She never made a choice. She made an accommodation. Her baby left its trace anyway. Out of all the decisions you make in life, you don’t know which ones are irrevocable until it’s too late. The secret name bubbled to the surface, Aaron Charles, and she spoke it out loud.

  Big bulbous sobs cascaded out of her. The ferocity of her tears shocked her, huge racking convulsions. Sophia responded with screams of her own, and the three of them rocked together on the couch, surrounded by plastic action figures and Sophia’s pink teddy bear smiling innocently at them with his yarn mouth.

  Sophia’s damp cheek rested against her shoulder, her eyes closed, her lashes long against the faint red blotches on her cheeks, her heart beating so fast she hiccupped. Erica could hear Ashley’s heart beat too and feel the boniness of her ribs jutting through her sweater, pressing into her side.

  Ashley lifted her head up, blinking her eyes, mascara running down her cheeks. “Jared’s at Dr. Rafferty’s stupid Pritima Center. They don’t let you know the address or the phone.”

  After her abortion she’d listened to Debbie bitch about pregnancy and infant care, her exhaustion, her weight gain, her never-ending laundry. Debbie and Mom would sit over coffee, bitching together, ungrateful members of the sorority of motherhood. Meanwhile, while they weren’t looking, Jared wiggled his perfect fingers and toes, soft as butter, grinning his radiant, toothless smile. Erica restrained herself from clutching him to her chest, whisking him swiftly and quietly out the door, and never coming back.

  “They hide him away like he’s a prisoner of war. . .” Ashley moaned.

  “Let’s break him out of there.” Erica blotted her face with the hem of her sweatshirt.

  “Are you crazy?” Ashley said. And then in the next moment, sucking up possibility like Sophia sucked up milk, she asked, “How could we do that?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The prospect of rescuing Jared made Erica feel dizzy and light, like peppermint flooding her brain. The vision floated before her, a cop show for which they could write the script. They would break down the walls and, in a flash of decisive action, free him.

  “Like a prison break,” she said. “We’ll save him.”

  “Gosh, I don’t know how,” Ashley said. “ I think he’s somewhere down South.”

  “Let’s do it!”

  “Well, uh, I can’t at this precise moment in time. I have to find out where he is. It might take a little while.” Ashley sat up straighter, wiped her eyes with her silk sweater, pushed back her hair, and opened her purse to apply pale pink lip gloss. “Can you give me a ride back to school, Mrs. Richar
ds? I’d better get back before my mom tries to pick me up.”

  : : :

  Upon her return home, Erica discovered Ethan rummaging noisily around the basement for a particular brand of tennis ball. Apparently he’d flown into La Guardia that afternoon and, not seeing much point in fighting the traffic into Manhattan for only a couple hours of work, had arranged a tennis game. His presence in the house during the weekday, at such an early hour, unsettled her. She slathered barbeque sauce on a tray of chicken, listening to him clatter about.

  “Erica, have you seen my Penn ATPs?”

  “Nope, I don’t even know what they look like,” she called down the stairs.

  “Well, I need them. I have a match at the club in half an hour. How many toys can our kids possibly own, anyway?” More rustling and shuffling ensued, followed by silence. After a few minutes, Ethan trotted up the stairs carrying the plastic baggie of pot she’d forgotten about, the one in the crayon carrier.

  “I think Dylan’s been holding out on us,” he said in a serious tone that struck Erica as peculiar, since he’d smoked his first joint on his twelfth birthday with his father, on the peak of Mt. Tamalpais.

  “It’s not Dylan’s,” Erica said. “It’s mine.”

  “Well, what do you know,” said Ethan, clearly relieved. “Don’t you share?”

  That evening, after Ethan’s tennis match and after all the kids were sleeping, they smoked the rest of the baggie on the balcony off their bedroom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your little secret?” Ethan asked.

  “Because if I told you little secrets, I might tell you big ones,” she thought. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d approve. Your Wall Street job and your golf and tennis and marathon training and all.”

  “I’m still me.” Ethan edged closer to her. “And I think I’m giving up on that marathon. Can’t get up the discipline.” His thighs pressed into her, itchy and sweaty. As the distance between them shrunk, her sense of exposure grew.

  “Look at Harry Crabtree’s hideous pants,” she said. From their balcony, they could see directly into the Crabtree’s family room. Harry was sitting on the couch with a bowl of chips, wearing purple-and-yellow-plaid pants and a bright-yellow shirt.

  “He’s making me hungry,” Ethan said. He ran down to the kitchen and returned with two Three Musketeer bars that had been lost in the freezer since Halloween. They nibbled on the bars, Ethan’s left hand stroking Erica’s thigh.

  “It looks like Harry’s watching ALF,” she said.

  “What do you care about his television habits? I doubt I’ve ever exchanged two words with Harry Crabtree.” Ethan swallowed the last of his chocolate and carefully smoothed out the wrapper. “I should have stayed with my dad, with Apple,” he said, apropos of nothing. “He offered me a programming job, back when we lived in Boston.”

  “You never told me that,” Erica said. Mosquitoes settled in with dusk. She scratched her arm.

  “Yeah, I’m sure I did,” Ethan said. “But then the Grant Fishel offer came in, and besides, you were pregnant.” He folded the Three Musketeers wrapper into an intricate pattern.

  “You could still do it, I guess,” said Erica.

  “No, it’s too late. Way too late.” He folded the candy wrapper one more time, into a tight rectangle, and then pulled the two opposing edges apart. “Look, a boat,” Ethan said, handing the folded wrapper to Erica.

  Their thighs separated with a damp squeak. He stretched his long legs between the rails of the balcony and leaned the back of his head against the sill of the bedroom window.

  : : :

  Erica stopped by Nick’s the following morning, but he wasn’t particularly friendly.

  “I said Thursday. Today is Wednesday.”

  She’d been under the apparently mistaken impression that Nick had a crush on her, which grossed her out on one level but flattered her more than she cared to admit. Surely she looked good enough, with a new summer tan settling in over the residual tan from Florida, lean and tight in jean shorts and a stretchy T-back tank top. She emanated a degrading neediness, she realized, that frightened her and no doubt turned him off. What was that word he’d used to refer to her last week? Urgent.

  She tried to diffuse the urgency. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I could swear you said Wednesday.”

  “You should have called.” Nick’s dress was regressing. He wore a pair of horrific plaid pants and a rumpled T-shirt announcing, “Run for Families, Family Clinic 1985.” Continuing the fashion mistake, he’d tucked the shirt into the strained waistband of his pants and locked it in with a braided macramé belt. He’d caught his thinning black hair in a rubber band to make a stringy ponytail.

  “You don’t like it when I call you,” she reminded him. “Plus, I tried your business phone, and it was disconnected. What’s going on?”

  “I’ve got all kinds of problems,” Nick said. “The INS is up my ass.”

  Erica tended to forget about Housemates, the presumably legitimate aspect of Nick’s business life. Perhaps this INS investigation explained Nick’s uptightness, though. Maybe it had nothing to do with her.

  As if reading her mind, Nick’s face lapsed into an expression both friendly and rueful. “Everything sucks,” he said. “Want to get high?”

  Erica nodded, settling in against the ripped leather of his ottoman. A cooling breeze from an air-conditioning vent ruffled the pile of old magazines at her side. Sophia commenced ripping the pages of out of last October’s issue of People.

  “So, that Pritima Center, is that down South somewhere? I’ve heard it’s got a religious orientation.” Erica extracted a wet strand of paper out of Sophia’s mouth.

  “Yeah, yeah, the power of prayer.” Nick turned up the volume on the Aerosmith album he was playing. “Dream On” blared out from the loudspeakers. Nick rocked back on his hands and closed his eyes. “I never get tired of this song,” he said.

  “Do you happen to have their address?” Erica asked.

  Nick abruptly dropped back to earth from the cloudy region he so often inhabited. He looked sweet up in the mist; back on the ground, he assumed a shiftier expression.

  He dumped out more coke onto the ceramic serving tray he used—it reminded her of a wedding present she’d returned—but Erica, for once, felt like she’d had enough. She shook her head. “No one will tell me where it is, and I’d like to write Jared a letter.”

  Nick finished up the coke himself. He fiddled with the waistband of his pants, releasing the hem of his T-shirt from its prison, letting it flop over his belt. “Even if I knew the address of the Pritima Center, I couldn’t legally tell you,” he said. “I’m an employee of the Nassau Family Clinic. I had to sign all kinds of privacy documents.”

  Nick’s face tightened officiously, but what was appealing about him was his lazy looseness—the way when she walked through his warped pine door with the ripped screen the rest of the world fell away.

  “I didn’t realize you were so much on the straight and narrow.” Erica shifted into a cross-legged position, sucking in her newly ripped belly and throwing back her naturally sexy shoulders.

  “I can be. I’ve been a neighborhood counselor there ten years.”

  “Well, it seems like a mighty odd combination of activities to me.” Erica pulled a damp photo of Michael Jackson out of Sophia’s mouth. “Say, I was wondering, when you run out of coke, where do you buy more? Like, who do you hang out with when you’re not hanging with Dr. Rafferty or West Meadow teenagers?”

  “That,” Nick said, in the same bristly, officious voice, “is none of your business.”

  “Why not?” Erica asked. “Curious minds want to know.”

  “You are so far over your head,” Nick said. “You might like to fantasize otherwise, but you are a nice wifey-poo from the suburbs. There’s a lot you don’t know, swee
tie.” Nick straightened the piles of paper on the tile table in the center of the room, positioning a stack of mail over a particularly gooey juice stain, as if to indicate he was an upstanding citizen.

  “You’re from the suburbs too,” Erica said.

  Nick dumped a clutch of dirty mugs in the kitchen sink.

  “You better go about your wifey-poo business. I told you, I’m busy.”

  “Suit yourself,” Erica said.

  The heavy gray clouds of early morning had dissolved into pouring rain. After buckling Sophia into her car seat and blotting her dry with a towel, she turned Vince’s ignition key, and got silence in return. Just like Vince, to choose a day like this to break down again. She needed to take Sophia for her eighth month checkup, and pick up Ethan’s shirts at the cleaners, and buy milk and mayonnaise. She tried again: no sound but the beating rain on the windshield and Sophia’s irritated whimpers. Pressure rose up on the back of her neck, spiking into a pain burst on the right side of her head. She tried Vince a third time. He gave a chug chug noise that with gentle pressure on the accelerator gradually shifted into a solid hum. His windshield wipers beat rapidly, transforming the street into an impressionistic blur. Her tape deck blared out another one of Jared’s selections, Rat Debris, a cacophony of drums, squealing guitar, and unintelligible lyrics. At the Pritima Center he was probably forced to chant some paramilitary incantation, or maybe sing gospel tunes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On Saturday Ethan and Erica drove with Lisa and Les to Long Island City, where they put their respective nine-year olds on a bus for Camp Whispering Wind in the Poconos. Monday, a small yellow bus picked the twins up for their first day at Sandy Hollow Day Camp. They hugged her hard, grabbed their water bottles, swung their sturdy little brave selves up onto the bus, and waved out the window. For the next seven hours, Erica and Sophia would be alone.