Look at You Now

by Liz Pryor

  “Nope, gotta make snow angels,” I said.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Come on, lie down.”

  “Not gonna happen, too cold.”

  “Wren, Tilly, come here … Amy. Who’s made snow angels before?” I asked, but I was met with blank stares. Seriously? None of them knew about this? I decided to demonstrate.

  “My God, okay, watch.” The other girls stood around me in a circle as I began moving my arms and legs back and forth through the snow. Then carefully, I stood up and jumped to the side so as not to mess it up. A perfect lone imprint of what looked like an angel with wings glistened on the ground.

  Tilly laughed. “Cool.” She and Nellie lay down and started making angels. Wren and Amy watched for a second before they got on their backs too. We made more than twenty angels in a line, going almost all the way up the hill to the schoolhouse. Alice sat on the bench, watching. When we stepped back to view our masterpiece, we noticed that every fifth angel in the line looked twice as big as the others.

  “I’m a fucking fat angel, all right?” Nellie said.

  Alice looked over, and finally spoke. “You’re a cherub, Nellie, a real cherub, especially with that mouth-a yours. Let’s go. You guys are soaking wet.”

  We headed back inside and hung our wet coats on the radiators in the lounge. The snow and the walk were a tiny reminder that there was life beyond the lounge. Deanna was standing by the window. I wondered what she thought about in those moments. The TV was off, and a few other girls were scattered around the room. I’d barely ever seen Deanna out of her chair. I stood warming my hands at the radiator when Deanna finally spoke, addressing the room.

  “Elaine’s baby died in her stomach,” she said. A long silence passed.

  “What are you fucking talking about?” Nellie said.

  “I’m fucking talking about that her stepmother came to get some of her things and told us that the baby died inside her.”

  Tilly stared at the ground. “I didn’t know a baby could die in your stomach.”

  I thought, Me neither, and said, “How does that happen?”

  “That’s just the way, sometimes, is what the stepmom said.” Deanna was back in the recliner. She curled herself in a ball. Everyone was quiet.

  “She hates that stepmother,” Amy said. “She told me she ran away for long enough so that lady wouldn’t make her have an abortion. She lived on the streets waiting to get to four months. She really wanted the baby. She named it Angel. Are they coming back? Will we see her again?”

  In my worst wildest imagination, I hadn’t even considered a baby could die in someone’s stomach. I made my way to the phone booth. The phone rang several times with no answer. I hung up, tried again, and let it ring more than ten times. Finally someone answered.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Hi, sweetheart. How are you faring?”

  “Do you know anything about babies dying inside people?”

  “My gosh. Why are you asking me such a thing?”

  “Because a girl here had a baby die inside of her, and it’s freaking me out. Why, how does that happen?”

  “I suppose there are a number of different reasons, but sometimes it just happens. God makes decisions that are difficult to understand. In her poor case, he decided to take the baby before it was born. It’s rare, honey.”

  “Well, I think that’s terrible and mean of God.”

  “You never know why and how things happen, Liz.”

  “I want to come home.”

  “I know you do.” We sat in phone silence a long time. I didn’t want to make my mom feel bad—of course I couldn’t come home. But I wanted to.

  “I went to the doctor here today, it was horrible.”

  “Well, sweetie, people in your condition must go to the doctor often, it’s not pleasant but it’s part of it. Liz—you have to try to make it work there.”

  I knew that already. But I didn’t like being reminded.

  “Can I speak to one of the twins … please?”

  “Yes, yes you may. Let me find them. Hold on a minute.” My heart panged as I heard the yelling and recognizable chaos of home in the background. After what sounded like the phone dropping to the floor, I heard another familiar voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Jen?”

  “Liz? Hi, oh my gosh, how are you?”

  “I’m okay, how are you?”

  “Well, we had two snow days in a row. How do you think we are? It’s fantastic.”

  “I’m so jealous.”

  “We took the toboggan and went sledding down the driveway out onto the street. It was totally empty. You should have been here. Leann from next door got her dog to pull her sled. It was hilarious.”

  “Wow, sounds fun. How’s Tory?”

  “She’s fine, she’s soaking wet with snow right now. When are you coming home?”

  “I … don’t exactly know.” The lump emerged in the back of my throat. I wasn’t coming home for a long, long time, but I couldn’t tell her that.

  “You feeling okay? You feeling sick?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sound different.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Well … I’m the same.”

  “Call us again, okay?” My mom came back on and said she’d see me next weekend—only a week away, but it felt like a lifetime.

  I stayed a long time in the phone booth, thinking about what my sister Jennifer said. I sounded different … because I was different … and I didn’t want to be. I could feel myself changing, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I could visualize the happy, normal life I used to know in my mind, but I couldn’t feel it. It was unreal now, fading away. So many things in life were bigger than me. I decided I hated change. It was like a frightening beast. The more I fought it, the harder it pushed its way in. All I wanted was to go back to the old, safe me. But the beast was winning. I was changing.

  • • • •

  The girls were quiet when I returned to the lounge, still in shock from the news about Elaine. I sat down and looked at the clock on the wall. It was just like the clocks at school. Big, with black hands and numbers, and a red second hand. The quiet was killing me. I watched the red second hand and listened to the hard click of each second passing. “Time passes slowly here,” I said.

  “You want to see time stop, radio girl?” Deanna said. “Just take your lily-white ass over to juvie.”

  I thought about it and said, “I don’t want to see it stop, no, thank you.”

  Deanna laughed a good, long laugh. “This is a fucking hotel compared to that shit.”

  Tilly was biting her nails, looking around the room. “I feel so bad for Elaine. Angel, that’s a sweet name for a baby girl, isn’t it, Liz? I know the name of this little guy in here, but I ain’t telling till he comes out.”

  Nellie looked at her. “It’s gonna be Rick Junior, duhhhh, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  Deanna chimed in, pointing to her stomach. “If this thing’s a guy, I’m naming it Rubin, and if it’s a girl and it better be, I’m naming her Tracey. T-R-A-C-E-Y.”

  “You got a name for your baby, Liz?” Tilly asked.

  “No.”

  “I have a baby name book if you want to use it.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Then you do have a name?”

  “No … I’m not gonna need a name.”

  “You can’t not name your baby.”

  “I’m not keeping my baby, Tilly,” I said. Tilly stopped biting her nails and stared at me. I looked at the snow—it had started again—pouring outside through the window behind her.

  “Why? Your parents won’t let you?”

  “No … I don’t want to keep it.”

  “Listen to this shit, she don’t even want her own baby,” Deanna said.

  Tilly put her arm on mine and asked, “What are you doing with it, then?”

  “I’m giving
it up for adoption. I’m too young to have a baby.”

  Deanna snickered. “Says fucking who? If you were too young to have a baby, you wouldn’t be able to get pregnant.” She was sitting up in her chair now, paying attention. Nellie took her taped glasses off her face and looked at me. They were all looking at me. Like I was some sort of freak. Someone who would actually choose to give up their baby? Deanna looked down at her belly and said, “Yeah, well, I ain’t going through all this shit to not have anything at the end. I ain’t giving my baby to no one.”

  Nellie chimed in. “Yeah, you are, you got more time in juvie, girl, you’ll be giving that baby to someone when it comes.”

  “I’m trying to get my sister to take the baby till I get out.”

  “Your sister ain’t old enough, Deanna. You know that.”

  “Well I ain’t giving it to some family I don’t know and never seeing it again, not gonna happen.”

  Amy turned and asked me, “Will you get to meet the people that adopt your baby? I mean, can you choose them?”

  “I don’t know. I think I get to know about them. I mean, they get to know about me. But I’ll be finding out more when I talk to Ms. Graham this week.” Deanna scowled at the mention of her name.

  “So you don’t know who is adopting your baby, Liz?” Tilly asked.

  “There’s an adoption agency. They have all sorts of husbands and wives who can’t have babies who might want my baby. My parents told me there are a whole lot of people in the world who really want to have kids and can’t.”

  “Do you know anyone who’s adopted?” Tilly asked.

  “Yeah, my three cousins, and my sister’s best friend Carrie.”

  “What are they like?” Nellie asked. Suddenly everyone had a lot of questions. “Are your cousins creepy? Do they seem like they don’t belong there?”

  “Why, because they’re adopted? No, they’re just my cousins. They’re cool. I mean, I never even think about that they’re adopted. My aunt and uncle got all of them when they were like two days old. So you know, they’re family, just like the rest of us.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be adopted.” Deanna shook her head. “I’d want to know my people, see my mother, know where I fucking come from.”

  Nellie looked deep in thought—it seemed like she might be starting to get it, how someone could choose to do this—and then she turned to Deanna.

  “Would you rather be adopted into some family who wants you real bad, where you know you’ll live forever? Or go from one foster home to another, waiting for your mom to come get you, but she never makes it?” There was a long silence. Deanna didn’t say anything.

  “Were you in a foster home?” I asked Nellie.

  “Yeah, a ton of ’em. It fucking sucked. I moved from bad place to bad place almost every year till I was nine.”

  “And then your mom came for you?”

  “No, my grandparents came. Then my mom ended up there later. She was always in and out of trouble, couldn’t keep her shit together.”

  Amy finally chimed in. “So if you’re adopted, does the government give the people money? No, right? That would be better ’cause of all the shit-foster families who do it for the money. But I wouldn’t have wanted to be adopted without my little sister. We were a team. We got separated once, into two foster families for more than a year, worst year of my life.”

  Amy got me thinking. So much of how I fit in the world came from how I fit in my family—my mom, my dad, my siblings. It was my place, my reliable constant. I’d always thought being with your family was the one thing that could never change. But I’d suddenly learned that wasn’t true, not for everyone.

  • • • •

  After dinner that night, The Wizard of Oz came on TV. Most of the other girls hadn’t seen it before. We brought our pillows and blankets to the lounge, and I brought out the rest of the SweeTarts and pretzels from my room. The girls were mesmerized, watching the scary flying monkeys tormenting Dorothy and the scarecrow. Just as the wicked witch was plotting her scheme, watching Dorothy and Toto in the little glass globe, we heard the door squeak open. Elaine walked in. Her long black hair was in a bun on the top of her head. She looked pale, and her big pregnant stomach from that morning was gone. Her stepmother trailed in behind her, yakking about Elaine moving too slowly. Elaine stopped in the middle of the room. “Bye, you guys,” she said.

  Amy and Wren got up and hugged her. Tilly walked over, took her hand, and said she was sorry about the baby. Elaine started crying, and then Tilly started crying too. And then Elaine said, “I guess God knew I’d make a shitty mother, so he took her from me.”

  The room went silent. The stepmother had gone to Elaine’s room. She came back a while later, carrying Elaine’s suitcase and stuffed bear.

  “Come on, Elaine, let’s go,” she said. The woman reminded me of a carnival version of Cruella de Vil. She had on plastic red Barbie shoes and a fake leopard fur overcoat. She reeked of perfume. Elaine took the stuffed bear from under her stepmother’s arm and walked over to Wren.

  “Here, take him, and take care of yourself, Wren.” Wren looked up, with her long scar running down her face and her big sad eyes. She held the bear by the paw and dangled it at her side, which made her look even younger than she was. She was only a kid—all of us were. Elaine patted Wren’s pregnant stomach, one last time, and left. On the television, Dorothy had closed her eyes. She was clicking her heels and saying, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

  chapter 7

  “I appreciate you being so prompt, Liz, it’s very considerate.” Ms. Graham was sitting at her desk, same look on her face, same tweed suit, same tall glass of water halfway filled, sitting on the wooden coaster in front of her legal pad. Since I was a little girl, my father had been drilling the significance of being on time into my young, malleable mind. To Lee, lateness was a crime of disrespect—it was robbing people of their own time for you to be late.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “You look well. How are you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re adjusting?”

  “I guess.” I swallowed hard, twirling the pass in my pocket round and round. Ms. Graham was writing something down on the legal pad. I didn’t really feel like talking. I felt like coiling up in a ball and disappearing. Ever since it happened, a week ago, I’d been imagining Elaine’s baby drowning in the water in her stomach, or getting its neck bent while Elaine slept in the wrong position, or getting the stomach flu and choking on its own throw up. There was so much that could go wrong, so much that overwhelmed me about the process. We sat for several minutes before it came out of my mouth. “How did Elaine’s baby die?” I said.

  Ms. Graham put her pencil down. “She had what they call a stillborn child. In her case they believe it had to do with an abnormality the baby had from the beginning. It is terribly unfortunate, a sad, sad situation.” I looked down at my stomach, then up at Ms. Graham. She kept talking. “Elaine is the first to have this happen in all the years I’ve been here, Liz. It is extremely uncommon.” I wondered why adults hide the truth, as though it will spare young people from some damaging reality. When the fact is that what we make up in our minds is a hundred times worse than the truth could ever be.

  I took a deep breath. “I think someone should have told us what happened, a doctor, not the doctor here. But maybe a nurse or Alice, so we could know how it died instead of having to guess. Everyone is really upset.”

  “You have a good point,” Ms. Graham said. “I’ll make sure Alice explains to the girls what went on, so they know.”

  “Do they bury the baby and have a funeral for it?”

  “Yes,” Ms. Graham said. I’d also imagined receptacles at the hospital for babies who didn’t make it, and rooms where the mothers of those babies go to wail and cry in the dark. I fought to get the picture of the dead baby out of my mind. It had haunted me all week.

  “Elaine will be okay, Liz. She’s
young and healthy.” Right, I thought. And hates her stepmother, and wanted the baby girl she named Angel so badly she ran away and lived on the streets so they wouldn’t make her have an abortion. We both waited in the sad quiet before I asked, “When will you know who is going to adopt this baby?”

  “Your baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we actually put some calls out and have found several couples who might be a good match. There is a lot of interest from people all over.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re healthy, and you come from a nice family, that kind of thing.”

  “Will I be meeting the people?”

  “No, no, it will be a closed adoption. But I will be a part of the interviewing process and can share some things with you.”

  “Could some of these people adopt the other girls’ babies too?”

  “They could, I suppose. But none of the other girls are giving up their babies.” Ms. Graham opened the desk drawer and pulled out a cream-colored folder. “Some of the folks have asked to know a few things about the father.”

  “Daniel,” I said. I hadn’t said his name aloud in weeks.

  “Yes, Daniel. You don’t talk about him much.”

  “He’s in college. I mean we try to see each other as much as we can, but he’s kind of far away. And after I go to college, we probably won’t stay together. He feels really bad about all this, but he also doesn’t get it. He’s busy at school. I mean it’s hard to explain what it’s like here.”

  “I see,” she said. “Tell me a little bit about Daniel.”

  I thought about Daniel, and the first time we met and how young I was, and how incredibly long ago it now felt.

  I met Daniel in the cafeteria at school when I was almost fifteen years old. He was my first real boyfriend, and I adored him. Daniel was one of those people who had an extra skip in his step, all the time. He was a blast to be around, funny and sweet. He had a way of turning everything we did into something we would remember. That’s just who he was. There was a day last summer, when I was sixteen, a boiling hot, boring day. We were driving around the neighborhood with nothing to do. Dan decided to pull a U-turn and parked the car on the side of the road near the lake. I’d never been to that section of Lake Michigan, and I was whining about it being so rocky. He took my hand, and we walked out onto these big rocks along the water. He told me to close my eyes for a minute. When I opened them he was standing on a huge lone flat rock at the very edge of the water with his hands up in the air. It looked like he was floating in the sky with the water behind him. We sat on the flat rock for hours, doing what we did best, talking and laughing. He kept looking out at the water and telling me he wanted to go to a million different places all over the world with me. And I remember thinking we didn’t need to go anywhere. He took a hundred pictures of me that day. Most of them with my hands stretched out in front of my face trying to get him to stop.