The Space Between Us

by Jessica Martinez

  She ignored me. “Will and Luciana! And get this: He dumped her.”

  I kept rifling through my bag, refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing my jaw drop. “I swear that lip gloss is in here somewhere.” I found it, looked up at her.

  She was wide-eyed and grinning, and I resisted the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Even if Will and Luciana had some huge, mortifying public breakup, it wouldn’t change the real reason Will and I couldn’t be together. The real reason was . . .

  My brain stalled. The real reason was pregnant. Irresistible Charly. Will was way too wholesome and traditional to see knocked up Charly the same way. Once he knew, once the world knew, Charly wasn’t going to seem so irresistible anymore.

  I stopped myself. I had some self-respect—I’d refused to be with Will, I’d dumped him because I’d known he would always love Charly.

  But that was back before I’d ever dreamed that Charly would be making herself unlovable.

  I couldn’t help it. I had to imagine what it would be like to have him waiting for me by my locker again, feel his hands on my waist, hear him talk about cross-country like it was a matter of life and death. I could be a much better girlfriend this time. More demonstrative, like he wanted. This time I could hold his hand in the hall without cringing. Maybe even kiss him in public.

  “So, you’re ignoring me?”

  I shrugged. “No. It just doesn’t matter.”

  Savannah shook her head. “Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Everyone else,” she corrected.

  “Fine. Everyone else.”

  “I’m going to be late to World History. See you at lunch?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “I’m helping Dr. Kinzer stock the choir folders. Extra credit.”

  “You have got to be the only tone deaf person in history to be forcing an A out of Kinzer.”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t listening. Will and Luciana are over. “Wait, I’m not tone deaf.”

  “Sure you aren’t. See you later.”

  A snappy comeback was in order, but I couldn’t pull one out. My brain was too strained with Charly and her irreversible mess, and single Will. Too complicated. If I relied on feelings I’d feel . . . who knows.

  I slammed my locker and went to class.

  • • •

  We found Grandma that night at the kitchen table doing her crossword puzzle. For some reason, she felt like reading a novel was a frivolous use of her time, but the almighty NYT Sunday Crossword was not. By the time she worked her way through a book of puzzles, it was nearly as well worn as her Bible.

  Head bowed, immersed in her clues, she could never have seen it coming.

  Still, Charly should have set it up better. Not that how’s it going, Grandma? would have softened the blow anyway. But she was on the verge of chickening out, her hands all jerking and jittery like they get when she’s nervous, when suddenly she just folded her arms and smacked Grandma in the face with “I’m pregnant.”

  I closed my eyes. It was cowardly, but I couldn’t make myself watch what was bound to be a mixture of righteous indignation and pure rage. Because Grandma is a fortress, a mighty pillar of strength, a beacon guiding people in their quests for salvation. And also, Grandma gets mad.

  But when I opened my eyes, what I saw was steel crumpling like tinfoil.

  Her face puckered. She placed her pencil in the spine of her crossword book, removed her glasses, and dropped her head to her arms. Her whole body bounced and shook with silent sobs.

  I wanted to sit down beside her and put my arm around her, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t want me to acknowledge that this convulsing wreck was (a) her, and (b) in need of my help.

  It was Charly—a terrified, wide-eyed version of Charly—who made me. She elbowed me and mouthed go hug her.

  I shook my head.

  She shook her head.

  So I slid into the chair beside Grandma and put my arm around her shoulders. She let me, for a few seconds, before she filled her lungs with as much air as she possibly could, sat up straight, and put her glasses back on. My arm fell limply to my side.

  “Charlotte, we’ll talk about this in the morning. Neither of you are to tell your father.”

  She stood and walked out of the kitchen, spine straighter than a steeple.

  Neither of you are to tell your father. Did she think either of us told him anything? Ever?

  I left Charly in the kitchen, walked to the hall, and looked down to where a sliver of light glowed beneath the den door. I could hear his voice. He was talking to himself.

  • • •

  The next morning I had an early practice (Saturday practices were Coach Hershey’s answer to the blitzkrieg launched by Baldwin’s Teutonic coach), and when I got back, Charly and Grandma were sitting at the kitchen table, just staring. Grandma was staring at Charly, and Charly was staring at her Froot Loops.

  “Good morning, Amelia,” Grandma said, voice flat, eyes swollen. “We were just discussing prenatal care. Your sister seems to think babies thrive on high-fructose corn syrup and food dye.”

  Charly took another bite of cereal.

  “You’ll be seeing an obstetrician in Tallahassee next week,” Grandma said, nodding at Charly, “and we’ll buy you some prenatal vitamins while we’re there.”

  “Not Dr. Reed?” I asked, pouring a glass of orange juice and leaning against the counter a safe distance from both of them.

  Doctor Reed was Tremonton’s only OB. He’d delivered both Charly and me and pretty much every other baby born in Tremonton in the last thirty years.

  “No, not Dr. Reed.”

  Grandma took a rag from the sink and wiped down the already clean countertop.

  “They sell prenatal vitamins at the Walgreens,” I offered. Will worked at the Walgreens, so I used to spend way too much time wandering the aisles waiting for his shift to end.

  “We aren’t buying prenatal anything from Walgreens,” Grandma said. She sounded tired. “Do you want the entire town to know?”

  “No, but . . . ” Grandma had to know where this whole thing was going. Charly was going to slowly expand until she was the size of a whale. I’d seen enough 16 and Pregnant episodes to know it was the skinny girls whose bellies ended up looking like skin-wrapped basketballs.

  I shuddered involuntarily.

  Grandma looked up at me suddenly, panic lines creasing her forehead. “Where did you buy the pregnancy test from?”

  “Me? I didn’t buy it. I didn’t even know she was pregnant until four days ago.”

  Grandma looked down at Charly, clearly more than a little skeptical of her ability to diagnose herself.

  Charly refused to look up from her bowl. She was the only person I knew who ate an entire bowl of Froot Loops by color. A glance over her shoulder revealed a bowl of greens and yellows. She was going to be a mother. This had to stop.

  “I bought it in Baldwin,” she said, “but I peed on it in Tremonton. Should I not have done that? Do you think maybe people could sense that a pregnancy stick was being peed on somewhere in town and just assumed it was me?”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Grandma said quietly, wiping down the table now, even though it was spotless.

  Charly put the spoon down and looked up. The Grandma I knew would have chewed her out.

  “Are you ready to be serious?” Grandma asked. She moved to wiping the fronts of the cupboards.

  Charly nodded.

  “You are not having this baby here. I won’t let you break your father’s heart, not to mention his credibility as the moral compass of this community. I won’t let you become the next Marnie Croll, or Serena Torello.” She paused, letting those names sink in.

  Marnie was four years older than me, but I used to be friends with her little sister Paula. Once Marnie was pregnant though, Paula and her family stopped going to church regularly so we saw each other a lot less. Marnie had done the “right thing” and married the dad,
or at least it was the right thing according to all the conversations I overheard. She didn’t graduate with her class, but she did get her GED, so when her eighteen-year-old husband ran off a year later she didn’t have to start at minimum wage. She went straight to night manager at the Texaco station, which was not a bad gig, she claimed, when you had a toddler and your mom worked full time and couldn’t babysit for you during the day. We talked sometimes when I filled up the Jeep. Grandma didn’t like Charly and me hanging out at Paula’s anymore.

  Serena didn’t have it nearly as good. She was my age, but she hadn’t seen the inside of PHS since she got pregnant when we were freshmen. Since then she’d had one of those on-again/off-again things with the baby’s father that provided the whole town with entertainment. Screaming fights in the Dairy Queen parking lot, the Dollar Store parking lot, the post office parking lot. Grandma’s bridge group loved talking about her with sad faces, shaking their heads, because she’d been such a sweet little girl and had done pageants and everything. Now Serena wore sunglasses that covered half her face to work at Winn-Dixie, and her boyfriend stayed home with the baby.

  Marnie and Serena weren’t like the lepers cast out of cities in the Bible, though. People were subtle. It wasn’t as obvious as rooms going quiet when they entered, at least, not for more than a second or two. And people still did their Christian duty and smiled, but eye contact was optional and not sustained. Nobody wanted to be seen condoning teenage pregnancy, or aligning themselves with girls who were flaunting it. Or just being it.

  It was just a feeling in the air. Disappointment. And pity.

  I didn’t want Charly to be pitied.

  “I don’t understand. I’ve got nowhere to go,” Charly said, tears glimmering in her eyes.

  I didn’t understand either. Unless Grandma was sending her to a convent. Except we weren’t Catholic, and it didn’t seem like pregnant girls were still getting sent to convents.

  “How late is your period?”

  “I don’t know. Three weeks.”

  “Good. You won’t show for a while. Four or five months with looser clothing. I expect you to hold it in until Christmas.”

  Hold it in? Under other circumstances I would have laughed, but Grandma wasn’t kidding, and Charly was nodding like holding it in was something she thought she could manage with willpower, never mind that it was a rapidly expanding human being in her abdomen.

  “After Christmas,” Grandma continued, “you’ll go to Canada.”

  Canada. A stream of references came flying at me, none of them possibly relevant to this situation. Cold. Bacon. Maple syrup. Avril Lavigne. Justin Bieber. Bacon. Cold.

  And of course, Mom.

  “I don’t suppose you remember meeting your Aunt Bree at the funeral,” Grandma said.

  The graveside photo appeared in my mind. It was in an album in Dad’s den, and I’d looked at it a million times to stare at the sixteen-years-younger versions of the people I knew. In it, a rounder, brown-haired Grandma is holding a fat baby on her hip and a scowling toddler by the hand. Us. Grandpa stands on the far left and Dad is alone in the center, looking like he might float away if someone doesn’t step on his foot to anchor him.

  On his other side are the rest: Mom’s family. Strangers. An over-glitzed woman I’d been told is my other grandmother, wearing a boxy fur coat and a theatrical sad face, clutching the arm of a tall man who’s been caught midblink. Her third husband, according to Grandma. Then come two tall, bored-looking teenage boys, obviously belonging to the man, and the nanny they forgot to push out of the shot before the picture was taken.

  At the photo’s edge, a ten-year-old girl with shiny platinum hair and a pointy chin has the only smile. Bree. It’s her half sister’s funeral, but she obviously doesn’t know you’re not always supposed to smile for the camera. She’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses, which for years made me think she was a child genius. She would have to be twenty-six now.

  Relief trickled down my spine. Canada. Why didn’t I think of that? Charly can live with Aunt Bree and Dad will never find out.

  “I spoke to Bree last night and she said you could stay with her in Banff until you have the baby. The adoption will take place up there.”

  “But . . . ,” Charly stammered. “But she doesn’t even know me. I don’t even know her.”

  It was as if she hadn’t spoken. Grandma was brokering a business transaction. Deals had been made. Goods would be exchanged.

  “You already called her? What if I want to stay here? What if . . . ”

  Grandma glared at Charly, and for a moment I thought the dam was going to burst. I could see Charly bracing for it too. There had to be a world of anger bubbling behind that somber front, but Grandma shook her head and spoke just as calmly as before.

  “Charlotte, you’re confused. You use the words I want like they still mean something. You’re pregnant. You made that choice, thinking only about what you wanted at the moment. Now what you want is irrelevant.”

  Charly shrank into her chair. The last few green Froot Loops bobbed around in the milk, looking spongy and anemic.

  “You’re acting like I’m about to explode,” Grandma said evenly as Charly cowered. “Relax. I’m not going to yell at you. It’s too late. Discipline has failed.”

  I poured the last of my orange juice down the sink. I didn’t want to be here for this anymore.

  “Sending you to Canada is the only way we can survive this without your father finding out.”

  “He’d never forgive me,” Charly said, still staring into her milk.

  She was right, but I wasn’t so sure she deserved forgiveness.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  “But what are you going to tell him?” I asked Grandma.

  “That you girls are flying up north to get better acquainted with your aunt. That it’s important for teenage girls to connect with their mother, even if it can only be through her relatives. That you’ll attend an excellent school up there.”

  I didn’t hear a word after you girls. “Charly, you mean.”

  “No. I mean you girls. You’ll go with your sister.”

  “What?” Panic twisted every muscle in my body. “Why?”

  “Stop shouting.”

  “I’m not shouting!” I shouted.

  “Calm down.” Grandma pointed to the chair next to Charly, but I shook my head.

  “I’m not the pregnant one! I don’t need to sit!” I thought I’d been exhausted from practice, but I suddenly had an urgent desire to run.

  “Fine, then. Stand there and listen. You need to go to Canada too or this story will have no credibility. A girl going to visit a relative for half a year means one thing and one thing only to some people.”

  “Maybe in the 1960s,” I argued, realizing as I said it that Tremonton was probably at least fifty years behind the rest of America.

  “People will wonder, then gossip, then assume it as truth—all of it, if Charly goes alone. If you both go, you especially, if you go, nobody will think that.”

  She meant it as a compliment, but it didn’t feel that way. Nobody in this town would imagine I could possibly get pregnant. Probably not even if I was still with Will. “And this is my reward for being good, then? Being sent away just in case people start to wonder about Charly?”

  “Your dad would never let Charly go on her own.”

  I exhaled, feeling every ounce of breath leave me. “But he . . . ” But he nothing. She was right. I met Grandma’s eyes and saw a faint softness behind them.

  “Amelia. You have to take care of her.”

  “But it’s my senior year,” I said, still not really believing this conversation was happening. She couldn’t be asking me to do this. I had Savannah, and field hockey, then soccer after that, and graduation.

  And just maybe, I might have Will.

  I looked to Charly, but she was staring out the window. Of course, anything to avoid being mentally present.

  “When do I stop getting punishe
d for her mistakes?” I asked, gripping the countertop behind me with both hands. “She is and will always be a complete disaster. Does that mean I have to be collateral damage for the rest of my life?”

  “That sounds eerily similar to what Cain told God when He came looking for Abel,” Grandma said.

  “Are you kidding me?” I yelled.

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” she quoted calmly.

  “I haven’t murdered my sibling yet!”

  Grandma raised her eyebrows, as if I was the one committing blasphemy. Could she not hear herself?

  “Do you have a better solution?” she asked.

  “Yes! Send her by herself!”

  Charly pulled her eyes from whatever it was outside that was so captivating and turned to me. “Please.”

  “Has the whole world gone insane? You want to be exiled to Canada? Seriously?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want, right?” She glanced in Grandma’s direction, then back at me. “I need for Dad to not find out, which means I need to leave, which means I need you.”

  There was too much pleading in her eyes. It made me want to drive my fist through the microwave.

  I left the kitchen without saying another word.

  Chapter 7

  In the weeks and months that followed, I went through the motions of my normal life, of school and of friends and of making everything fine. I played along. I hid Charly’s secret. I sold Grandma’s semester-in-Canada charade to Dad, ignoring the possibility of Will, ignoring everything that was supposed to be happening next semester, just holding on and waiting waiting waiting for one thing.

  December 15. Acceptance day.

  Also, ten days after Dad’s birthday and ten days before Jesus’s birthday. That had to mean something.

  I’d never been idealistic enough to force symbolism onto real life before, but AP English had clearly warped my brain because I’d started seeing metaphors in much less—Charly’s sudden aversion to eggs, the untimely death of Grandma’s magnolia bush (bacterial blight), Dad losing his bifocals again. Life just seemed so literary now.