“I already knew. I knew the moment I picked you up and saw you standing next to him on the pavement.”
She knew all along? Not that I was pregnant, but that I had had sex? She knew? “But how?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “There was just something about the way you two looked together that night. I remember feeling happy for you.”
“Happy?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh, and then when you told me he was going back to Germany, oh honey, I swear, it almost broke my heart, too.” She smiled and squeezed my hands tight. “First time love is really powerful, it’s really special, but most people don’t have first time sex with a guy they love,” she added.
“I know,” I said, thinking of what Hans had said to me right before Mom had flipped the car around. “Don’t you ever forget, Ella. I love you.” Those were his exact words and still, I had been so stupid to let him leave, without a trace. “I know it sounds really corny, but it did feel like love at first sight, and I kinda think he felt the same way.”
“I know,” she said with a knowing smile, “I could tell. So, has he called you?”
“He hasn’t but—”
“—He hasn’t called?” she cut me short. “At all?” she added, raising her voice. She leaned back in her seat, letting go of my hands.
“But Mom, it’s not what you think. He can’t. He won’t.” I felt an instant sting in my heart, hearing myself say it out loud for the first time. How could I’ve been so stupid?
“He can’t or he won’t? Which is it?” She leaned further back and tapped her fingers on the armrest.
“It’s not what you think, Mom, I told him not to,” I explained. I, as in the stupid person who made that stupid decision, “but as we were leaving, and I saw him standing there, looking so damn cute and sad and ... symmetric, I instantly regretted saying that.”I looked down at my feet. I had on the same ladybug socks that I’d worn that night. He had smiled when he took them off of me, saying something about the tree hugger’s beautiful daughter. I looked out the window and took a deep breath. “And now the number I have—some Seattle area cell number—is no longer in service. I guess he couldn’t use his cell in Germany.”
“But there must be some other way to find him?” Mom grabbed her cup from the table, got up from her chair, and started pacing. “There must be,” she repeated, twisting her hair.
I shrugged. I had tried pretty much everything that night, when I had almost burned down my laptop, looking up all the Hans’s in the world. “I tried, but no luck,” I explained to her. “I don’t know anything about him, besides his first name. He was an exchange student from Germany and he has a grandmother in Liverpool who went to school with Paul McCartney.”
“For real?” Mom stopped her compulsive pacing at the mention of Paul McCartney. “She did? For real?” she repeated, staring at me with eyes the size of golf balls.
I nodded.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” She narrowed her golf-ball-sized eyes at me and crossed her arms.
“Why? How could that have helped?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I could have forced you to force him to stay or something.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know? So, we could go to Liverpool and meet that granny of his—meet someone who has actually touched a Beatle,” she said, with a smile in her voice.
“He never said anything about touching,” I said, already feeling a little better. I looked up at Mom and smiled. This was what I loved the most about her; no matter what I had done to her, she always tried to make me feel better.
“C’mon, she must have ... just a tiny pinch or at least a little whiff or something.” She leaned over and sniffed my hair and smiled.
“Well, enough about sniffing.” She grabbed the chair next to me and sat down. “So, what do you think about all of this?”
“This?” I said, rubbing my neck.
“Yes, this!” She nodded. “You tell me you’re pregnant, and you went to see this,” she paused and looked at the pamphlet lying on the table, “Mrs. Dexter person. I guess you must have done some serious thinking since you found out?” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.
I nodded. I had gone from denial, to acceptance, to thinking about abortion, adoption, motherhood, baby feet, crying babies, cute Pottery Barn babies, no babies.
“I have,” I said, sliding further down in my chair.
“And?” she said, looking down at her defensive posture. She untangled her arms and crossed her legs instead, trying, I guess, to express a more open and accepting stance.
How could I explain how I felt if I wasn’t sure myself? How could I ever be sure? Besides, it wasn’t just about me; it was also about Mom and Dad, Grandma, my family, my friends, and the world outside.
Everyone always has such strong opinions about teen pregnancies, me included. When I had met Stella, I somehow felt that I was better than her, that I had been more responsible and grownup than her, but the truth is we both ended up pregnant. So whatever choice I made it would be judged by someone, and I was probably the toughest judge of them all. Being surrounded by Mom, Martha, and Miss T who had been struggling a lifetime to get pregnant and who talked about parenthood and having children (with little feet and golden voices) like it was the Holy Grail, sure didn’t help me think clearly. In this infertility alliance there could only be one “right choice” but was it the right choice for me?
I was simply surrounded by too much love. Too much noise. I looked up at Mom, still waiting patiently for me to share what was “in there.”
“I have,” I said again.
“I know you have, and I know it’s all really confusing, but what was the very first thing that popped to your mind when you had just found out?” She leaned all the way back in her chair and reached for her cup on the other side of the table.
I looked out the window and tried to go back to that moment in the dingy restroom, looking at the two blue lines appearing way too fast. I remembered I felt like screaming as loud as I could. “Fuck, I guess. Motherfucking fuck. Sorry, Mom.” I looked at her and tried to smile.
She nodded. “I guess if there’s such a thing as the right time to say something like that, this would definitely be it. Miss T wouldn’t have minded.” She smiled. “But once you moved on past that, what did you think? What did you see in there?” She leaned over and pointed at my head. “In there?” she repeated.
This had always been one of Mom’s signature problem-solving tools. When I was younger, and I was upset about something or someone, and had a hard time explaining it to her, she would always make me play “the mind game.” She would have me find pictures, matching the emotions I felt, and then she would help me put my feelings into words. Somehow, she always guided me right through it. Mom, the mother of Inception.
I closed my eyes and tried to go back to the car, sitting next to Miss T, going down the hill. “First I imagined myself sharing the news with you and Dad.” I stopped to clear my throat. “Which was, or is actually, the worst part, I guess. And then I imagined myself at the ultrasound with all that gel all over my belly. An absurd vision, really.” It was. I had tried to analyze all of this myself. Why did I see myself at an ultrasound? What did this picture tell me? I still wasn’t sure.
“I don’t think so, but...” She stopped and got up and poured herself a fresh cup of coffee. “Want anything?” she said with her back to me.
“Nope.”
“Banana, oatmeal, cookies, raisins? Anything?” she said, still with her back to me.
“No thanks,” I said, smiling to her back.
She took a few sips and looked out the window for a long time, thinking, I guess, about what to say to her pregnant teenage daughter next. When she finally turned around facing me, she looked like she was on the verge of crying. “Baby, I never told you this before, but right after we had you, um, Dad got fired... Well, you know how that is.” She rolled her eyes and wiped her nose i
n the back of her sleeve. “I was still breastfeeding and back then I was told by everyone that you can’t get pregnant as long as you are breastfeeding. Well, not quite so, as it turned out.” She shook her head lightly and repeated the last part as she sat down next to me again. “We were living in Granddad and Grandma’s basement at the time, and this was back when Granddad was still working from home in his office in the basement. You should’ve seen the place: you, me, Dad, a sofa bed, a crib, a changing table, diapers, wipes, blocks, and tons of stuffed animals squeezed in between Granddad’s heavy equipment. It was a mess. I swear, if you lost something down there, it was gone forever.” She smiled and reached for her cup. “Well, I was breastfeeding, and I think you were about six or seven months old, and Dad and I didn’t have a dime. Dad was out of a job, we were living off Granddad’s money, and then... Well, I got pregnant.”
“You did?”
She looked down into her cup and nodded.
All of a sudden, the hair on my neck stood up. This wasn’t just another story about a routine miscarriage.
“Yes, you guessed right,” she said, without looking up. “I was pregnant and not as a result of trying. It was an accident, and I really didn’t want to be. I didn’t know what to do. I just couldn’t tell Dad. He would have freaked out.” She looked up. “He was supposed to be the breadwinner. He was supposed to take care of me and the baby: you. So how could I tell him that we would have one more mouth to feed? It would have made everything worse—made him feel he had failed, even more.” She looked down into the coffee cup again. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. It would’ve been the end of us. I just couldn’t do it.” She took in a deep breath and closed her eyes.
“But what happened?” I asked, holding my breath.
She moved her hand to her mouth and covered it like what was about to come next was too bad to even escape. “I had it removed,” she said, and sobbed into her hand.
Mom’s little keeper
For a long time, we just sat there listening to the raindrops coming down hard on the skylight. I tried to imagine how the basement would have looked back then—with all Grandpa’s stuff, along with all that baby paraphernalia, but all I could see was Mom sitting there all alone with dark circles under her eyes, looking at the inevitable two blue lines appearing way to fast. Fucked up in every language!
Mom was still staring up at the skylight like she wasn’t really there. Maybe she was somewhere up there with them, all the little feet that had once been hers.
“Mom. I’m really sorry,” I finally managed to say.
She closed her eyes and nodded, her face glistening with tears.
I grabbed on to her hand and looked out into the gray morning. I couldn’t believe Mom had had an abortion—Mom, the tree-hugger. Mrs. Jensen, the “Save the Tuna” organizer. Mom, the Good Samaritan with pictures of her five Zimbabwean kids hanging on the fridge. How was an abortion even an option in Mom’s world? In Dad’s world?
“But that’s not even the whole story,” she whispered in between sobs, squeezing my hand a little too tight. “I never told Dad about any of it.”
“You never told him?” She had never told Dad that she had had an abortion? How was that even possible? I mean, Mom and Dad are as close as you can get to being Siamese twins. They are, like, Thing one and Thing Two, peanut butter and jelly, bread and butter. “Never?” I said, letting go of her hand.
“No,” she whispered, looking down at her lap. “And those are the two biggest regrets of my life: that I got rid of a perfect pregnancy, and that I lied to Dad about it. I’ve been regretting it every single day of my life. And when I say every single day of my life, I mean it.” She sighed. “Every single day.”
Fuck! On top of all the sadness, all the grief and years of going through miscarriage after miscarriage, there had been the constant guilt—the what-ifs and buts. What a cross to bear. Poor Mom. I took a deep breath and looked at the clock on the microwave. It was only ten to nine, but with darker and darker clouds moving in, it almost felt like it was late at night. “Oh Mom, I’m so sorry,”
“Oh Ella, I’m so sorry, too.” She looked up with big tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry I did this to you,” she cried, reaching out for my hand.
“To me?”
“Yes, I took away the only thing you always wanted.”
“Me?”
“Yes.” She wiped her nose and started crying. “You always used to tell me how much you wanted a little sister or a little brother for your birthday, remember?”
I did. No matter which part of the country we were living in, I remember how I always used to envy all the other kids around me. Every single one of them had one, two, or even three or four siblings to play tag, house, or basketball with in the front yard on a Sunday afternoon. I, on the other hand, only had Mom or Dad—both trying to fill the role of a stand-in sister.
I also remember the day when I stopped begging for a little sister. I think I was about five or six years old. It was a sunny day, and we were in the car, waiting to pick up Mom from the hospital. I clearly remember how she looked at me as she walked up to the car, waving at me with a brave face. But when she got into the car, and Dad wrapped his arms around her, she cried like I had never heard her cry before. Later that night I asked her where the baby had gone, and she had told me that the little baby had gone to heaven, where it had lots of shiny new toys to play with. I then asked whether the baby would have a sister to play with in heaven as well, and that’s when Mom had started crying all over again. It scared the shit out of me, and I had terrible nightmares for weeks after that. I guess that’s when I stopped asking for a sister. It only made Mom feel sadder, I remember thinking.
I looked at Mom, and, for a brief moment, I felt like that little five- or six-year-old girl again. Still, at seventeen I didn’t like it when Mom or Dad got sad. Parent tears are always scary. Parents are supposed to be happy.
“I remember,” I whispered.
“And the thing is,” she said, gasping for air, “I always felt like I was being punished. Every time I had another miscarriage, I thought about what I had done, and I thought, ‘this is the price I have to pay.’ I know it doesn’t make any sense to think like this, but that’s how I felt.” She took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly as she reached for the paper towel on the table. I watched her as she carefully folded it. “Well, now you know the truth,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose.
“I guess I do,” I said mostly to myself. I was about to say something else—something heartfelt, something about how sad it made me feel, when suddenly it dawned on me. Why was she telling me all of this? And why now? Was she actually saying that if I decided not to have this baby, then I would regret it for the rest of my life? Was that what she meant by the “truth?” But would she really say a thing like that?
I grabbed another chair and put my feet up and looked out at the rain again. I had never seen rain as heavy as this; in less than two hours the entire lawn had gone under water. Carefully, I flipped through every single word she had chosen to tell me about her abortion and a few stood out: regret, punishment, price to pay. Was she really saying what I thought she was? I looked at Mom, quietly sipping her coffee, and, all of a sudden, heat rose in my face. I leaned back and crossed my arms over my belly, over my belly.
“Are you saying,” I began, trying to control the anger in my voice, “is this, um, your way of saying that if I choose to, you know, and then I’ll—”
“—I’m not saying anything,” she interrupted with a calm voice. “I know it sure could look like that, but no!” She leaned over and started rubbing my back. Just the way I liked it. “I’m only saying this because I want you to understand, that I know how tough a decision this is. There’s no easy way out of this. And I’m saying this because I want you to know that I understand what’s going on in there.” She pointed two fingers at my head like she was pointing a gun. “And I want you to know that I’m so sorry, honey, but that I’m with you no matter wha
t. You’re not alone. We’ll help you no matter what, you know that, right?”
I looked down at my feet and nodded. “Thank you, Mom,” I said. “That really means a lot to me.” It did, of course, but it also put even more pressure on me. I mean, why couldn’t she just be angry with me, or yell at me, or ground me for, like, forever, and let me grow my hair really, really long? Why did she always have to be so larger than life? Why did she always have to be so forgiving and so damned “right?” Of course, I knew she was just being her usual all-embracing self, but somehow it was putting a lot of pressure on me and my little feet. Again, I was surrounded by too much love. Too much noise.
“What are you thinking, dear?”
I looked up at her and shrugged my shoulders. I wanted to tell her how she was putting even more pressure on me, but I didn’t. So, I told her what came next to my mind. “We did use a condom, I swear.”
“I know, but things like that can go wrong, especially when you are a first timer.” She smiled. “But at least it was very special?”
I nodded. “I wanted it to be like you and Dad, you know. Two high school sweethearts and a first time that would last a lifetime.”
“Oh my God, you make it sound like some cheesy TV show on Soap Net. Prime time,” she added, rolling her eyes at me.
I smiled. “It does sound a little too good to be true.”
“Maybe because it is. It was.” She took in a big breath of air and held it.
“What?” I said, staring at her. What was she trying to say?
She nodded, exhaling loudly. “See,” she explained, “when Dad and I had that talk with you about the birds and bees, you were what? Ten?”
“Not quite.” I had been closer to fifteen, and I clearly remember thinking it was just a wee too late for the birds and the bees talk. Some of the girls at school were already at it—or maybe it was all just talk, but there sure was a lot of talk. I guess Mom and Dad still saw me as their little ten-year-old girl—pony tail, braces, and all. But I had definitely been a teenager, which equaled being naturally embarrassed and so not wanting to talk, not even with my free-spirited parents, about sex. “And I still remember you and Dad acting like teenagers,” I added.
Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2) Page 33