If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I look at her growin’ belly now as I warm the milk. I decide I’ll warm the cup because, well, she is my mother and she did raise me. Sorta.

  “Caffeine?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head. “De,” she says, and I know.

  She’s due in two months. I wonder if she’ll marry Joshua. He’s older—forty-five. Divorced but no kids. Such a nice guy but let me tell you there has been a trail of assholes behind us. The trail of tears, as they say. A whole country wide. And also I wonder what it means for me. Will I be like some weird aunt to this kid? I already told Mom I’m not going to be their live-in babysitter. It feels to me like she thinks we have some kind of exchange going: She gave me her teen years and now I have to give them back and over to this baby.

  I just don’t know if I’ll mind yet. How do you prepare for a baby? I wonder if my mother knew. I think she does now, judging from the amount of baby stuff that has been accumulating at Joshua’s house.

  I get to the right temp, and after that second of rest Dahlia insists on, I pour the milk, lifting the pitcher high the way she showed me. Then I push the cup and saucer toward my mother. I look up. Her face. I have been looking at this face for so long I can’t even see it anymore. It’s just my face with someone else’s skull inside it. But I’m sixteen and I’m not my mother and I have no plans to be staying too long.

  She doesn’t seem to realize that I’ll be leaving soon. Mom will have her baby and maybe she and Joshua will get married and maybe not and she and Dahlia will hang out when their kids play together and they’ll talk about what all the moms talk about, which, far as I can tell, is eating and shitting and sleeping and how much wine they need to drink to get through it.

  “Thanks, babe,” Mom says as I push the warm cup and saucer toward her. I can see a chip on the saucer but I don’t say anything. Dahl would call it homey.

  I watch her take a sip. “Hmmm,” she says, smiling. “Delicious.”

  I won’t be stopped by time either, you know. It’s not like they keep going and I just sit here, waiting.

  “Very professional,” Mom says.

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  But one day I’ll be done here.

  One day I’ll be gone.

  Ivy

  2017

  The sun is just about down over the ridge now and the tree line looks to be on fire. It’s beautiful here. In all the seasons. All the times of day. The explosion of light. I got that fire on the inside here right now.

  Mo puts her hand on my shoulder. “You okay, my banana?” That is what she calls me, still, sometimes. “I’m sorry. We weren’t keeping it from you really. Just waiting for the right time to give it to you. This is a hard thing to read.”

  The letter had been opened. And not by me. And sent five years ago. I am still wrapping my head around that. Mo and Mom talk honesty and integrity and their truth and all of it and here I am with this bulky opened envelope.

  I look up and they’re here: my people. My family.

  My mom is reaching for my hand. “No more secrets,” she says.

  I nod, but I am trying to understand. I turn the envelope over: no return address.

  I put it aside on the table. This is a moment and I don’t want to give my parents the pleasure. I just don’t want them to see me read it. Like, what will my face look like? It feels private. I want to be on my bed, I want my journal, juju charms, I want to be alone. Or no, I want to be away from my parents.

  Dinner finishes fast. Claire’s mom picks her up and off she goes and my parents don’t make me do anything to clean up. That’s how bad they feel, and I don’t mind saying, I take advantage. I leave the dogs downstairs and I stomp around, then go upstairs without telling my moms I’m leaving. Is that a three-girl thing? The third girl always tells the other two where she’s headed.

  Not tonight. In my room, alone, but I’m no good at being alone. I hate it, really. Does a tree make a noise of no one hears it fall? It’s that kind of thing.

  For reading the letter I text Patrick. I open my jewelry box—that ballerina, jerkily turning, still—and I put on my silver locket, feel the heart, cold against my collarbone.

  Hey, GG, I write, which is short for Gummy Goo, which is what I call him for some dumb reason that has to do with an infantile gummy bear in a soaped-up bathtub video we once saw.

  G here, he writes me. At my post. Just left practice.

  “Practice” is in Alex’s garage, because it’s heated and his parents are divorced and he lives with his dad. I’ve watched. Alex with this epically large mouth wide open, his huge white teeth almost swallowing the mic, and Jonny, the skinny wild-eyed drummer, and Mikey, the sweet guitar player who holds hands all day long with his girlfriend, Kristin, a cheerleader. There’s also Megs, a quiet boy with a shaved head and acne who came from a private school in Idaho—maybe rehab—who, as far as I can tell, just appreciates the music and, like, carries the equipment around. Sometimes there are girls with them, thrift-shop girls like Sophia Mallack, black straight bangs, tasteful emerald nose ring, any kind of baby doll dress, lace-up Docs. Or Audrey Siegel, with one side of her head shaved, her rolled-up T-shirts, her ripped-up jeans.

  Alex is the one you watched. If you were watching the Farewells, you don’t really notice Patrick at all.

  But I do. I like the one who’s not in charge.

  TT? I write. Talk Talk? Is it strange to have a different language for everyone? Like my thread with Mo and my thread with Mom. Those are different. I speak all different people. Shame I’m so crappy at real languages. Why is that? Because they’re like math is why. No one ever tells you that but learning languages is nothing like what I love to do.

  K.

  The phone rings: Don’t laugh but I like it poppy. Jem, This time, baby, I’ll be bulletproof, that’s my Patrick ring today. Bang, bang. His pic comes up, swoooop. Brown hair, dimple on the chin, sexy sideways crooked grin. Hey there, Patrick. Hihihi.

  “There’s a new letter.” I don’t say hi, how many ways do I need to announce myself anyway, and I want to keep calm. I want to read Patrick the letter.

  “What letter? Hi.”

  “Yeah, hi hi hi. Birth mom letter. My moms have been holding on to it. Like, keeping it from me, actually.”

  “Wow, not what I was expecting.”

  “What were you expecting?” I’m moving around the crime scene that is my room, then sitting down at my computer and trying not to go online when I’m talking to Patrick. We promise each other no S and M, social media, while speaking but both of us do it anyway. I’m handling this pretty stone. It’s cold and hot. I am trying to focus.

  Okay. “Something to do with me? Like the letter you’ve been writing to me that is telling me all the deep dark things you never say to me.”

  I giggle. “What would that be?”

  “Razzer.”

  “Am not. I don’t even want to know what you were thinking,” I say. I don’t actually. It will be soon, the what he wants to know. It will be soon that I will tell him when. I just have to be sure.

  “Read it, Boo.” It is our dumb solution to “Bae,” which I hate because it’s not a solution at all. Even my mothers use it. They think they can say anything because they’re lesbians and that somehow makes them cool for eternity, but it doesn’t. At all. I can’t follow Mom on Instasham for this reason. Mo isn’t on and doesn’t know much about what’s happening and Mom posts pictures of all Mo’s flowers and plants, also her own special ancient grain breads. You look at her feed and it’s like a National Geographic page.

  But let’s face it, Boo isn’t original or great either. It’s awful.

  Anyway. I’d say come over and I’ll read it in the real but Patrick lives ten miles away and that’s over twenty-five minutes on these roads. (No as the crow flies out here in the woods says Mo. I know: it took me years to really picture it. Crows flying.) It’s over twenty minutes to get anywhere. Alex’s garage is forty minutes from me, which is why I rarely go there. Oh,
and that’s without the snow.

  Shaking, I take it out. Nice thick paper. Watermarked. “Can you believe my parents had it?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I am extremely pissed off.”

  “That’s so unlike them, don’t you think? Did they give you a reason?” That Patrick is parented by hippies can be slightly annoying at times, most particularly when I am looking for outrage. It’s like they patchoulied it out of him.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Well, just read it,” Patrick says. I picture him on his little twin bed, the brown sheets tightly tucked in. I picture him turning all his records over. His vinyl, another term I don’t especially go in for. It’s just a record. That’s what it was always called, why do we start calling it vinyl now? There is also probably sage burning in his hallway.

  I clear my throat.

  “Okay, but I just need to say the handwriting is really lovely, also big and really careful.”

  “Neat.”

  “Okay.”

  I begin to read.

  July 23, 2012

  Dear You,

  You’re nearly twelve now. Ivy. I know it and I can feel it. I feel you every day. It’s something I can’t explain. I feel the day you were born, the way it was when you came into this world, and I feel you growing, too. Who are you? What do you love? That’s what I don’t know.

  I can’t lie to you. I have struggled. But I have worked to make my struggles meaningful and now I’m set free. I walk for you and I walk for me and I walk for the future us. I see blessings everywhere. In the natural world. Here, among the trees, along the water, wherever I am traveling, I celebrate you. Every day. What could have broken me didn’t break me. I don’t know you but I know you and you have blessed my life. Your moms, too. It’s the happiest sad really to know that you are there and happy and healthy and cared for, the bitterest sweet. That out of the wrong came this perfect right, came you.

  Do you think about me? Do you look in the mirror and wonder? I am sorry for that. I had planned to be there, always. A child can never have too much love, I know that, but I had to slip away. I hope you can feel me the way I feel you. I wonder what I am missing. Braiding your hair. Reading you books. All kinds of dresses. All the things mothers should do. You are the light inside me and I hope you know I am inside you. My light.

  I was afraid of becoming an adult for so long but I am here now. In the world of the grown-ups and I am okay in here. I know I missed your childhood.

  I walk for you I walk for me I walk for all the people in the world who need my blessings. My struggle has been meaningful. I am not scared anymore.

  You, my darling, are the light. Never forget that. If only I had known that everything happens for the best. So that’s why I want to tell you: Don’t look for me. Be free.

  There is purpose. To all things. If only I had known it.

  Love,

  Your first mom

  I feel numb when I stop reading the letter to Patrick. I’m gripping the stone, tightly. I sort of wish I hadn’t read it out loud. I wish I could stand to be alone. It feels awful to hear her voice come out of my mouth when I can’t hear her.

  I stop for a moment. Stand still. Look up. Hold out my stone. But I don’t feel the light. I can’t see a thing.

  There’s silence on the end of the line. Who’s going to break the silence? I decide it is for once not going to be me.

  Only Patrick can be quiet and okay with it a lot longer than I can.

  “What?” I finally say.

  “Wow.”

  “Wow?”

  “She’s so smart. She sounds like you.”

  I gasp because it literally takes my breath away. She sounds like me? All this time I thought all I’d ever gotten from her was her shaggy brows, her eyes maybe. But I got other things. Deep-down-under-the-earth kinds of things.

  “Like a hippied-out version of you. She could be making hemp clothes with my mother at the farmers’ market this weekend, you know? And play the tambourine.”

  “Funny, Patrick.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You think that sounded smart?” I ask.

  “I do,” Patrick says. “Like smart about the world.”

  I nod but he can’t see me. I place the letter aside. I place the stone next to it. I look at them both as if they are some kind of still life Claire might want to draw.

  “Sad, though. What happened to her? You met her, right?” Patrick says.

  As if he doesn’t know this. That first year, she was around here, and then she was gone. I wonder I wonder I wonder. “Yes, but I don’t remember it at all. I was a teeny baby. I’ve seen pictures that make me think I remember but I know I don’t.” It’s all frozen, these memories. But then again, all our memories are frozen, aren’t they? I can’t make my memory move. It’s only pictures, always. Just photographs. “I just remember the pictures.”

  “Sad,” he says.

  “I want to find her. At least I think I do.”

  “Are you sure, B?” Boo Bae Busy Bee.

  I’m silent. For real now, not just for effect. Then I say, “I do. I think I do. You know, I’m sixteen.”

  “You know I was there for the birthday party, right? That was me, like, with the bass? Looking and sounding amazing. We sounded rad.”

  “You guys kind of sucked.” I laugh. They really did suck. I think they had played three times before that night and maybe once since. Not sure when they’ll be playing again for a crowd other than in Alex’s garage.

  “We are good! You never know, you know. Basil Henderson’s band got a contract remember. I mean, it’s not all stupid.”

  Basil Henderson’s band, Guesswhat Ross, from our town, got a contract in 2001! They are legend here. They went out to Los Angeles and became hard-core and then kind of disappeared. His mother is still in the English Department at Cornell and every two years or so some student makes the connection and that’s kind of the end of that legend.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Not stupid at all.”

  “I know,” says Patrick. “We suck.” I can practically feel him brush the shock of hair out of his face. “Sixteen, though. You always said when you’re sixteen . . .”

  He could be talking about my birth mom or sex and I don’t want to know which he means right now. “Yes, G, when I’m sixteen there’s a whole year of it. Anyway, she was my age. What if that were me?”

  “A baby?”

  “What, you can talk about, umm, doing it with me, but you can’t talk about what happens a lot of times when people do it?”

  “Ouch,” Patrick says. “Too hot.” He makes some annoying sizzling sound.

  What’s he doing in his room? I hear the quick tap tap of his computer, which drives me bananas. I can tell he’s trying to hide it. “I hear you,” I say.

  Now there is the sound of what I think is a pencil knocking on wood. His headboard or his desk. Which is it. It’s a huge difference. One is not paying attention and one is all ears.

  “Let’s go find her, then,” he says.

  I’m silent now because maybe this is about to be a ton of complicated feelings. “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, I talked about it with Claire today, too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t say ‘oh.’ She’s my best friend.”

  “And me? I’m what?”

  “My fave boy.”

  “Boy? Man!”

  “Anyway,” I dodge, “judging from this new letter that’s been in hiding for nearly five years, she doesn’t want to be found.”

  “You don’t know that. You have no idea what’s happened to her in five years.”

  My breath stops. “What do you mean?” Because I have of course thought of the option that maybe the window has passed. Like she said. She missed me and I missed her. Maybe she is gone. From everywhere. Five years is kind of a forever.

  “I don’t know,” Patrick says. “A lot can go down in five years.”

  “Mom and Mo, they might have mor
e info, you know? An email or something. That’s what Claire thinks anyway,” I say. “But maybe this wasn’t all of it. I mean, maybe there’s more stuff they’re hiding from me.”

  “Hm-hmm,” he says. It’s because of Claire. He wants it to be only him, but there is always also her.

  You know what Patrick did once? He got a doctor to take an X-ray of his chest and he gave it to me. My heart, he’d said, And there it was, the outline of it. The ribs were ghost white against the black X-ray, blocking the heart, and the arms were off the page but they were outstretched, too, like he was reaching out to me. I’m giving it to you, he’d said. This cliff-jumping, bass playing boy, handed me his heart.

  Later I found out he had asthma and compromised airways, and so he had to get a chest X-ray every other year anyway, but still. He gave it to me. His heart. In the cage of his bones.

  I love him. If the heart was in color? It would be gold. It would be painted golden. I’m sure of it.

  “They have her old address, I know that. Where they visited her, like, when she was pregnant. With me. I know they met her before.”

  I imagine her in a doorway somewhere, leaning in, kind of coolly waiting for my arrival. Like an old movie or a bad commercial for cheesy perfume or laundry detergent or some feminine hygiene product that should have been discontinued long, long ago. I know she’s thirty-two now, though. She not sixteen. She’s twice my age exactly. Or: I am half of hers. Half of her. But my features and that quilt, that dumb dollhouse, empty inside but for the furniture my parents filled it with, that’s all she ever gave me, that I can see. Smartness? It comes from everywhere.

  Is it a house? That door, I mean. Is it to a house? Is it empty or full? Is it clean or dirty? What did she become?

  “You think she’s still there?” Patrick says. “I mean, fifteen years.”

  Who is inside? Her house. “She says she’s been, umm, walking. Walking where? Maybe she’s still there.” I hold the letter up to the light the same way I held that X-ray. The paper is uneven in spots, less transparent in some places. There’s a watermark of what I think is a globe in the center. A sphere. I want it to mean something but I think it’s just fancy paper. “Maybe,” I say again, cradling the phone.