The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  She forced herself to wash her face and stumble off to her three o’clock French class, where she would find Emily and they could sit together. To be with Emily, who knew how she was torn open and bleeding, gave her comfort. Among all these indifferent students, Emily, her only real friend, was there with her, helping her to hold on. She sat through the class, she even answered the questions the instructor put to her, while all the time she felt numb. She had no hope. Nothing awaited her but pain and after pain, boredom forever, to the grim grey horizon.

  After picking at her supper, she trekked over to his dorm, rehearsing speeches in her head. This was the breakup she had dreaded, and now it was happening. She would never love anyone the way she had loved Blake. She would start off, she decided, saying, “I know now you have lied to me. That our whole relationship was a lie. That you care nothing about me and were just using me to get to my father, because your father was a murderer and my father brought him to justice. So let’s say good-bye and end this sorry farce.”

  She thought that said it all with dignity. Then she would leave immediately, before she did something humiliating like cry. She was sure her face was still puffy from the afternoon, but what did it matter if she was ugly? It was over.

  He was waiting for her, standing in the middle of his room. “Your mother told you who my father was, and you think you know something about me you didn’t know last night.”

  Of course. He was reading Rosemary’s e-mail, so he had expected this. She must have been communicating with Rich and Merilee about her discovery before she called her third child. She began her speech. “I know now you have lied to me. That our whole relationship was a lie—”

  “No!” He leapt toward her, putting his hands on either side of her face. “We belong to each other, and nothing about our parents can change that.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “If I’d told you right off what your father had done to mine, you would have been terrified. You would have walked away.”

  “I should have.”

  “No. You don’t believe that.”

  His familiar scent. Leather. His lemon verbena aftershave. A tinge of sweat. A smell like gingerbread that emanated from his skin. The scent of his body had always excited and comforted her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth during all these months?”

  “I was afraid. Afraid to lose you. Have I lost you?”

  She meant to say yes, but now she was clinging to him and the words would not come. She could not let go of him. “Make me understand. I can’t endure this. It hurts too much!”

  “It’s a whole world of pain, Lissa. This is at the core of me. If I let you in, will you be able to endure what I endure? Or will you run away?”

  “Tell me. Talk to me. I’m so confused I don’t know what to do, what to think, what to believe.”

  “Believe me. I’m the one who loves you.” He led her to his bed and they sat there against the wall. He looked as haggard and exhausted as she felt. “So you want to hear my story?”

  She nodded, swiping at her eyes.

  He gave her one of his big white handkerchiefs. “My father was Toussaint Parker. Named by his own father for Toussaint L’Ouverture, who emancipated the slaves of Haiti in war against several armies and made a free black state—whatever came down the pike later. Anyhow, my father took his name seriously. He was in the Black Panthers when he was sixteen. He was a community organizer all his life. He was not, in his later life, a violent man. I don’t know what he was like at sixteen, but at forty he was a determined but nonviolent organizer. He was a powerful speaker and he could move people.” He reached into his desk drawer, leaning forward and then immediately sliding back to put his arm around her, holding her tightly against him. He put a photo in her hand, the care-worn face of a man who had been handsome, prematurely grizzled, his arm around his little grinning son. “He cared for people and he stood up for them. He was not popular with the city administration, and the police hated him. He put tremendous pressure on them, about how they policed African-American neighborhoods.”

  “But he killed a cop.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “You still believe he didn’t? He was convicted and all his appeals rejected.”

  “Melissa, I know he didn’t. I was with him when he was supposed to have done it. They wouldn’t let me testify—a child just turned five. He was home with me. It was my birthday, and we were waiting for Mama to come home from the hospital.”

  “Your mother was sick?”

  “She was a nurse. An RN. She was white. Theirs was not an easy marriage, but it was a love match. She was as political as he was. She served as a medic in demonstrations and was gassed I don’t know how many times, even though she had asthma and could easily have begged off. The riot police often target medics in demonstrations.”

  “So your mother was working and you were home alone with your father.”

  “My grandma had been there earlier, but she left.”

  “You could have fallen asleep.”

  “On my birthday? I was too excited. We were waiting for my mother to come home when we’d have cake and ice cream. My father had hung bright blue balloons from the lamps. We lived on the ground floor of a town house with all these plants my mother grew. She loved begonias and scented geraniums. I remember geraniums that smelled like roses, like cinnamon, like lemon. We had a big chocolate cake my grandma made, but we hadn’t even cut it because we were waiting for Mama. Instead the police came. They never listened to me. They never believed me. They didn’t want to. My father would never have shot that cop, but besides that, he couldn’t have. He was with me the whole evening. He would never go out and leave me alone, and he didn’t. He was playing with me and reading to me all that evening, until they came.”

  “You remember all of it?”

  “Of course. It was my birthday. And it was the night the world of my childhood ended. Ended cold.”

  She tried to imagine what that would feel like. To know something but never to be listened to, never to be believed because you were a child, because they thought you couldn’t remember. To know that if they listened to you, you and you alone could save your father—but they wouldn’t listen. “So you knew he was innocent, but you couldn’t make them hear you.”

  “It was a nightmare that just kept getting worse. He was treated badly in jail and then in prison. They did their best to keep him away from the other prisoners—they knew he was a hero to many of them. They wouldn’t let him have his books. They kept him in solitary for months at a time.” Blake was sitting with his long legs pulled up to his chest, his voice slightly muffled as he pushed his face into his knees.

  “That’s why you won’t celebrate your birthday. Why you won’t let me give you presents.”

  “It’s nothing to celebrate for me. It’s when everything went wrong.”

  “How did your father’s lawyer come to adopt you? What happened to your mother?”

  “It was tremendously hard for her. She was involved in the early appeals, and she kept going off to see him whenever she could. All the plants died. She began doing drugs. You know, nurses and doctors, they can get drugs as easily as I can buy a packet of gum. I don’t actually know what she was doing—some kind of downers. It kept her going. Now, my father was in a prison way in the corner of the state farthest from Philadelphia. It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive in the best of circumstances. She generally had to drive both ways in a day, in order to get back to me and to go to work the next day. She was driving back late at night, as usual. She got in an accident on the Pennsy Turnpike. A truck that veered. She was killed instantly. I remember, I was sleeping at my grandma’s and the phone rang in the middle of the night.”

  “How long was this after your father was arrested?”

  “Two years. I was seven. That’s when Si and Nadine adopted me. My grandma wanted me, but she was too weak to take care of me. She had crippling arthritis. I knew the Ackermans, from my father’s
trial and all his appeals. They had tried to make things easier for my mom, but nothing could really help. So I became theirs. They’ve been very good to me—but you see, I’m not their son and I never can be…”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? I keep coming back to that.” Seven. She had been crazy about horses and dogs, and her father still made a fuss over her. Her worst fear came from a video of Snow White, all the grasping trees. She played Mommy to Billy and pretended to spank him when he was bad, although none of them had ever been spanked. Where did she get that? TV, probably. She was happy then, adoring her parents, with her little brother as playmate.

  “For years I haven’t told anyone. Si said I shouldn’t—that it would cause me trouble. That the authorities—principals, teachers, administrators, bosses—would expect the worst from me, and I’d be having to prove myself all the time. So I haven’t told. Not friends, not girlfriends, nobody. I thought of telling you, but it seemed such a big thing—at first, I wanted you to know me before I spoiled everything. Then I kept thinking it wasn’t the right time yet. And then I’d waited too long to suddenly say, Oh, by the way, actually I do know who my parents were. Guess who.”

  “But you didn’t get involved with me to get back at my father?”

  “I was watching you from the first day of class, don’t you know that? At first, who your father was put me off. That’s why I waited so long after we spoke the first time to make a move. I didn’t know if I could handle your family being who they are. Then I decided, it’s not your fault. You didn’t choose them.”

  And he hadn’t chosen his birth parents. She had almost broken up with him because of them. She put her arms around him, huddled as he was with his knees drawn up, and tried to hug him. “Neither of us had a choice. We got what we got.”

  “I’m not ashamed. Don’t think that. But it’s still an open sore. My father was killed for something he never did. I’ve always known that, and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it. I’ve always been powerless.”

  “And now you aren’t? Because of me.”

  He put his knees down finally and turned on the bed, pulling her against him. They lay side by side with the length of their bodies pressed together. “I can’t lose you,” he said into her hair. “I can’t. You’re the first, you’re the only woman I ever loved. We’re supposed to be together. It’s our fate to find each other and be together.”

  Tears ran slowly down her face again, and she clutched him. “We are together,” she promised. “It doesn’t matter what I know now. Rosemary can’t pull us apart. No matter how hard she tries.” He was hers, he really was. She was not a fool. What she had learned made no difference between them except to give her an understanding of what he had gone through, the pain inside him. She did not love him less for that. She loved him more.

  He was pushing his prick at her. She helped him pull her panties down, and then he thrust into her. They weren’t even undressed. But she felt the same dumb compulsion to couple, to push themselves into each other and hold on, to move together like frightened children rocking themselves to sleep. They were proving to each other and to themselves that they were still joined. He needed to feel that and so did she. It was not pleasure, not desire but the compulsion to know they had each other that drove them, with him pounding into her and her thrusting up at him, on and on because for a long time neither could come. Finally, sore already, she shivered with her orgasm and shortly afterward, as she bit the insides of her cheeks because it hurt, he came with a loud groan.

  “Together we’ll set things right,” he said. “Together.”

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE •

  Melissa was on the telephone with Rosemary. “I won’t leave school just seven weeks into the semester. I won’t!”

  “We’ve decided it’s better for you to return home. Alison has checked, and we can get you into American University in January.”

  “Better for whom?” She articulated carefully, putting on the m as she never would with anyone else. “Not for me. I have friends here. I’m doing well in school, and you want to yank me out. No, thank you. You’ve paid my tuition and my room and board for the year, and I’m staying.”

  “Melissa, you’ve behaved irresponsibly and you must accept the cost.”

  “Of seeing a boy whose parents you don’t like? He didn’t choose his father. He didn’t choose who adopted him. Why blame me? Why blame him, for that matter? I think you should just chill out. He’s one of three guys I’ve been seeing. You only met him because I ran into him in Washington. I’ve gone out far more with Jed—whom you’d really like. But he’s also seeing another girl…. Blake’s just a student here. He has a better grade point average than I do.”

  “Your father is under attack now and we need to circle the wagons. Seeing that boy is potentially embarrassing, and could prove dangerous. Ridiculous stories the Inquirer is running could hurt Rich’s campaign, as well as potentially damaging your father.”

  “I don’t see what newspaper stories have to do with occasionally dating a boy here. He’s not a reporter. He doesn’t work for a newspaper. He’s just a student, like me.”

  “He’s nothing like you, and don’t forget that for a moment. Why are you being so stubborn about this? Are you sleeping with him?”

  “Absolutely not! But I have to be free to choose my own friends in college. As I told you, he’s not even the guy I’m most interested in.”

  “You can never be free to make poor choices, Melissa. It reflects badly on your father, and we are a public family.”

  “If I dumped him because of who his dead father is, wouldn’t that reflect really badly on me?”

  “Melissa, this is not negotiable. This is not a request. We will not allow you to see that boy any longer, for your own good and for the good of your family. A modicum of loyalty, please.”

  “I will consider what you have said. Carefully.”

  “Do more than ‘consider’ it. Implement it.”

  When she hung up, Melissa was quivering with anger. Rosemary was not the least bit concerned with her well-being but only too willing to sacrifice her desires and her happiness to Dick, to Rich, to Rosemary’s own considerable ambitions. Could they really pull her out of school? Her tuition was paid, her dormitory was paid through January. She had to talk to Blake right away.

  She caught him just after his web design class. “Blake, my parents are putting tremendous pressure on me to break up with you. They’re talking about pulling me out of school.”

  “We won’t let them do that.” He started to head toward the student center, then spun around. “Let’s go to my room. We can talk there.”

  They sat cross-legged, facing each other on his bed. “I’ve been saying that we just see each other casually, but they may guess that isn’t true. Rosemary’s adamant about getting you out of my life. She’s afraid of you, I think.”

  “I can tell from her correspondence with Rich that she means business. He advised her to pull you out of school, and she’s ready to do so.”

  “I won’t go! I’d feel humiliated. Like someone sent home from camp for wetting the bed. I won’t break up with you at her command. I won’t!”

  “We have to stop them.” He rose to pace the room. “Do you have any money?”

  “Not much. But everything’s paid through January.”

  “I have some money. Friends of my father put it into a trust that Si arranged after my mother died. I mean, it’s not a lot, but it’s mine. It was in trust until my eighteenth birthday so I could go to college no matter what. It could pay for you if your parents won’t—there’s enough I think.”

  “You’d just give it to me?”

  “I know if we were married I could.” He was still pacing, turning on his heel, running his hands roughly over his close-cropped hair. “Maybe it’s time we do that.”

  “Get married? Like, for real?”

  “We’ll do it eventually anyway.”

  “I always hoped we would.”

>   “If we marry, your parents can’t touch us.”

  “So are you asking me, Blake?”

  “Sure. Why not? We’ll be safer.”

  “How do we do it? I mean, so it’s legal and all.” See, she was right and Rosemary was wrong. Not only did he really love her, he was ready for them to get married. She was so excited she jumped up and hugged him, hard. She would be married way ahead of Merilee. She was loved and she would have her own family, away from them.

  “I’m not sure. I think we get a license and a blood test—like to tell if we have syphilis. I don’t think they test for AIDS. But whatever.”

  “When should we do it?”

  “As soon as possible, to head your mother off at the pass. I’ll go online and get the facts for Connecticut. We have lots of states to choose from in New England if there’s a problem. I’ll get on it right now.” He headed to his computer and booted up.

  She almost said that she’d checked Connecticut law, but she was afraid to sound as if she had already been thinking about marriage. “Should I, like, go home and get packed?”

  “Don’t do that until I see if we have to leave. I mean, we don’t require a honeymoon. We just need to make it legal. I have a test in web design Friday, so I don’t want to be away then. But we could get married in the morning and still get back in time for me to ace that test.”

  She giggled. “It sounds so unreal. Getting married in the morning and going back to class in the afternoon.”

  “We’re mated already. It’s just a legal thing, so they can’t push you around, you know?” He stood up and came around his chair to put his hands on her shoulders. “This is okay with you, right?”

  “More than okay. I want to.”

  She ran back to her room. She was delighted to see Emily at her desk with her laptop on, writing a paper. “Em, guess what? No, don’t. You’ll never guess in a hundred years.”