“You guys can come to practice if you want.”
Really, I thought. Wow, thanks so much, Alex.
But Claire said, “Cool. We’ll come then,” without even checking in with me.
That is the other thing Claire likes about me now: Patrick.
Alex looked at Claire, and after following Alex as he jumped on and off his skateboard, here we are.
“Hey!” Patrick says, confused. “I didn’t know you were coming out here.”
“Alex,” I say, as if that is an explanation. It kind of is, though. Everyone wants to be around Alex. He’s like this bursting star or something, all jaw and muscles, and he’s an artist like on this cellular level. He writes, he draws, he makes music. He grows stuff. He’s like an art brute. What makes me choose the person who isn’t in charge?
Wanting to be wanted I guess.
“You could have texted,” says Patrick, and he’s right, but what exactly would he be doing differently if I had?
Mikey’s girlfriend, Kristin, has cheerleading practice, so it’s just us groupies today.
Soon as Alex steps up to the mic and, after checking the set list that they’ve pinned to a cork board behind the drums, truly, a set list, they launch into: Down in Joe’s garage, we didn’t have no dope or LSD, but a coupla quartsa beer and sure enough they hold up forties.
I almost never dance, unless it’s with Mo’s brother, my uncle Larry, who tends to drag me around at his kids’ Bar Mitzvahs to pop tunes like “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” but sure of herself fully formed Claire bops around to this Zappa stuff, slow as the beat. She watches for Alex, closely, while he pretty much eats the mic, but his eyes are cast downward, always.
That’s when I go sit down.
“We are,” Alex says very solemnly into the mic when the song is done, for this crucial audience of two, “the Farewells.” And then the drummer, gets a beat, too slow. And then? I—I—I—I—I’m not your stepping stone.
Alex still doesn’t look at Claire, or any of us, and I see it register with her, how he’s just performing. And then, after three songs, practice is over, like the set list says, and Patrick and Alex and Mikey and Jonny all congratulate each other on their most excellent playing and throw out some places they might be able to play soon. Everyone is like, yeah, totally, in town, and I feel Patrick come up beside me and take my hand. She’s with me, it feels like he’s saying. It’s nice to be claimed—chosen—and all but it’s also something else I can’t name right now.
“I assume I’m giving you a ride?” Patrick asks me, his face super close to mine. Hot breath on your neck in a cold basement, by the way, feels both wonderful and disgusting, should you ever need to know this.
I nod. “Obviously,” I say. I imagine waiting here for Mo to come for me, just with Alex and Mikey, and a wash of gratitude sweeps over me. “Thanks.”
Darkness creeps in through the little basement windows above our heads. Daylight savings—we live for it—is a few weeks away, and Alex’s yard, and the stones and bushes along the path to his front door, are fading fast into the night.
Claire lives close by. Everyone lives close by compared to me, but I tell her we’re going, to see if she wants to come with.
“I’m good,” she says, putting on her cute wool beanie. Claire being cute and also timeless. Claire being Claire.
“You’re not going to stay, are you?” I ask her. Because I don’t want her to go all puppy dog over Alex. I don’t want her to be like everyone else; I want her to stay Claire, fully formed, not like everyone else. Powerful. Don’t go regular, I want to tell her.
She shakes her head. “No, I’ll walk.”
I breathe out. “You okay?” I check in. Take the emotional temp.
She nods.
I shrug. Everyone starts pulling on coats and scarves. It’s cold up here forever it seems. When we’re all ready to go, Alex trots up to us.
“You guys leaving?” he asks, surprised like. “So soon?”
Guys, man. Guys.
But Claire is strong, she’s back, and she says, yeah, she’s got stuff to do at home, and we all trundle out into the dark blue evening together.
The stars are coming on, they’re coming up. I look up before getting into Patrick’s Subaru. It’s clear tonight and by the time I’m home the sky is going to be filled up with them.
I want to say, let’s cut his stupid poem! But that’s unethical. Or, should we come to practice again another time, I want to ask her, or something like this, but I don’t know what her deal is with Alex and I’m not going to find out here. “Bye, honey,” is what I do say, pulling her hair back and hugging her.
“Bye!” she says, dodging all my intensity—what else is new?—and I watch her start to jog out of the drive and down the street.
I get in the car. Patrick turns on the heat and cranks the music but I turn it off before I even recognize it. “I had enough for the day,” I say. I turn and look out the window, wave to everyone, as Patrick backs out of Alex’s driveway.
Patrick’s hand on the stick shift. Reverse, first, second, third, now I put my hand on his. The road is empty but for a truck I see far up ahead with its blinker on. The road bends and curves, the head lights flashing on trees and mailboxes, all the barns so close to the road. Patrick’s hand is warm and when he turns it over after shifting to grab mine, it’s a little clammy. I hear the swish of his parka as he moves his other hand to wipe his hair out of his face.
It’s about a half hour home. I think about Mom pulling a bubbling lasagna and one of her breads out of the oven, maybe a ciabatta, soft and doughy and dusted with flour. I picture the light on when we pull up. The smell of the house, when I walk in, like yeast and honey and oregano.
I look over at Patrick. I sit back.
I’m almost there.
Bridget
July 2000
What if it was only the me part I was figuring out. Just like everyone else. I will be this or that. I will be better now because I know I almost couldn’t have been. That thing I should be.
But I waited too long. Who knew how many ways there were to cry and this feels like all the ways at once. I had thought I would just find the right place to raise her and I had thought that would bring me some kind of peace. Doneness. Dahlia brings out some more profiles. They’re all to a special person. And what makes me special? Us special. The special people are all of us. All of us with the babies we don’t want. Or can’t want. And can’t keep.
We are the birth mothers. That is who we are. The special ones.
I’m heaving and Dahlia comes over to me. “It’s going to be okay.” She takes me in her arms and she feels so, I don’t know, bready. I feel like I am being surrounded by soft warm bread.
My mother knocks at the door. “Bridge?” she says softly.
I’m quiet.
“Can I help you guys?” she asks.
“I’m okay, Mom,” I say, and I can hear her hesitate and then move away from the door. Now I hear my mother on the stairs.
This gets harder the more she grows. Just saying. The more I feel Dahlia hugging me the more I feel the baby, too, her, and it’s harder and harder. “Why can’t we raise her together. You and me! Let’s do that. Us.”
Dahlia laughs and it looks a little like that Andrew’s city laugh, which is not a real one. So many ways to cry, so many ways to laugh. Remember when it was no or yes? Happy or sad? If you’re happy and you know it . . . clap. That’s all it used to be. Clap clap. Stamp your feet. Happiness.
Now she’s flopped on my bed, feet in the air. Her feet knock together.
“You have to do this soon, Bridge,” she says. “I mean, damn, she’s kicking.”
We are pretend girls, I sometimes think. We are doing the things that make us seem like girls. Look at our fingernails, our hair. Is that what makes us girls? Or is it this thing growing inside me? This girl thing? Is that I made a baby what makes me a girl? What will make her one? What kind of a girl will she be?
&nbs
p; “Like there is a deadline here. And the sooner you know the sooner you can relax and keep to the plan and not be so worried all the time.”
She’s right, but what if I don’t want a plan? The longer I don’t plan the more of what happens will just happen and I won’t have to decide a thing.
If she’s been here, growing, right here in this house, my mother’s not exactly going to throw her out the window.
“Also? She wants this. She will want this. It will be right, I promise,” says Dahlia.
“I do the pros and cons a lot,” I say because it’s true. “But all the pros for keeping her, well, those are mostly pro for me.” I get quiet then. It’s sad but everything good about keeping my baby has to do with what will be good for me. What will be good for her? To have everything I can’t give her. There are some pros in there for me: following my dreams. But I don’t know what those are anymore. I never knew them, not ever. I am not one of those girls.
Dahlia nods seriously. “You are the mother, though,” she says. “Don’t forget that. That is important.”
“Let’s keep looking.” I throw the pile of portfolios the agency sent on the bed. They shimmy and slide across the duvet, fan out. All the desperate people who want babies. All the people who can afford them, can afford all the lawyers and agencies it takes to get one. It’s sad, really. Why? Like, what makes these people want to pay someone to help them pay someone to help them pay someone to get a baby. How do they know what they want?
I know that’s not what it is. When I dig deep and see what I know is that these people deserve to be parents and they can’t be and they too have left their lives at the altar and they too are waiting to be heard. For someone to hear them.
Is that person me?
Dahlia sorts through their portfolios like we’re playing old maid or something. She holds up one with a question on her face.
“They look like all the others,” I say. I don’t know how you decide.
“Here!” Dahlia says. She tilts her head, touches the puppy they’re holding close.
I look over and I smile. But it is not a questioning smile. It’s true, they are different. One of the parents looks just like Dahlia’s mom. I touch her face in the photo. “She looks so much like Lulu.” And then I say, “But really? Two girls?” Because I have been taught what I have been taught about people and what the Lord will and will not accept. It’s hard to shake all that but I will say this: it’s a lot easier now that I don’t get woken up for church anymore.
“Women,” Dahlia says. “And yes,” she says, quieter, almost, I don’t know, devout. “It’s them. I can tell.”
I have been taught so many things. Good real things and also things that might not be true. I am learning to see that I can be faithful and I can question. I get it. I do. It all makes sense.
“Just look,” she says. “Closer. In a way, it’s like us raising her. Like you wanted.”
I look at Dahlia. Her face is so close. She runs her fingers over the faces in the pictures, tilts her head. She looks like Dahlia, too—the eyes and the sweet mouth.
“Just look,” she says.
Carefully, I lift the portfolio out of her hands.
“They look great,” I say.
Now Dahlia is the one crying. “I love them,” she says.
Bridget
July 2000
I want answers. For sure ones. Ones that say: yes, do this this way. There is no other way to do it. The reason people go to church I guess but I don’t go anymore. Like this? No way. My mother doesn’t even shake me awake to come with her anymore.
I go back down to the creek, alone. What would it be like to just know what will happen? Who we’ll all be? I have just been and done and acted and here I am. I have never controlled what I have been thrown toward.
Summer is all around me now. And down here as I wobble down to the grass I can see it still, people hanging out, the blunt roaches, crushed Pabsts, the cigarettes, sometimes a smashed pipe, everyone but me living like a kid in my town lives. There is the crash of sticks breaking and I know it’s people partying out in the woods. I know these woods and all the secrets we get to keep in them. I know everything now but it’s all behind me.
I untie my Docs and stumble along the little mossy bank, set my feet in the cold water. I feel the swollenness contract, and I wait for it, to go wherever the creek is going to take me while those boys whoop and hurl themselves off the cliff rocks down where the creek opens up. It’s far away and close at the same time. It’s just me, waiting. Just me and this baby kicking inside me. What does she want in there? What if I could know what she wanted? What if I could know who she wanted?
She wants me. Now she does, but after? She won’t want me. Anymore. Who could?
When she grows up? What will she be looking at then? Just me.
I look out. I crouch, feel my long skirt along the water and then run my fingers through the water, too. But all I have is my awake dreams, which are more like small wishes: how I wish my mother would crawl into bed with me and hold me like when I was a little girl, scared of the dark, scared of everything, scared of my father. And I’m thinking of what it would be like to be with Baylor again, before this, like when I made a winter picnic with a thermos of hot chocolate, and it was just nice sitting out here and talking. I remember the air so cold we could see our breath. Our breath, clouded up and knocking into each other. I’m thinking of raising this child, one last time let me think it, but it can’t be with Baylor and it can’t be with my mom and I’m thinking Dahlia would be the only one. I imagine us, older, I don’t know, like twenty-five, walking down the road, this beautiful nine-year-old swinging between us.
What do nine-year-olds do?
I’m thinking of those women.
I trudge out of the water. Feel the grass between my toes, wait for my feet to dry. They’re already swelling up again when I go to put on my boots. I look at the creek. I look at the creek running over those rocks like they have been doing since the beginning.
Maybe I know. Maybe now I just have to trust myself.
Two mothers. Three, if you count me.
That night after dinner I go back up to my room. Just me. I read the profile again. Their letter to me, which is really a letter to anyone like me, says, “to our future best friend,” but it actually feels like they mean it. Can you tell the real from the fake? Only when there is the real. Maybe. I feel myself calm. I look at their lives. Flowers and good food and foreign cities and beaches and so many people smiling. I move to the phone. I dial. It rings and rings but no one answers. I imagine the phone in the room in the house in the neighborhood in the town in the state in the country in the world. It is all just my imagination.
I smile. There’s this feeling you get when you know: calm. That part is true. She already feels like family. I’ve never had it before. For the first time in forever, I breathe. I mean, really breathe.
I put down the phone.
But I know I’ll keep calling. I’ll keep calling and calling until someone there answers the phone.
Bridget
October 19, 2000
These are the things that happen. I choose the parents. And they choose me. And then it’s summer and I lie around the house and my mother yells at me for never going outside and never getting a job. She sure didn’t like who I chose, but she was so happy to have a for-certain plan, she didn’t fight me. Also, the parents help with the rent and they buy me clothes and my mother is into that. They come for a visit and we go on a walk to the creek and we talk about the future. Their future, really. They ask about mine, but I don’t have any answers yet.
I don’t go back to school. I can’t. I’m so big and uncomfortable and worried and I just want to stay inside and watch television. They send me all kinds of books. I read some of them. My mother goes to school and gets my homework and I try and keep up that way. I plan to go back. I have to go back. This is one of the reasons, right? So that my life can go on. I can be all the things I’m
supposed to be.
But what are those things?
They do not send me a juicer, but I try to take good care and eat better than just the French fries and pizzas and potato chips I crave. My mother makes me eggs in the morning. With avocado and tomatoes on the side. I feel like there is something about that I will remember. I don’t want to remember the rest, though, like watching kids walk by on their way to school, that September smell. Leaves turning. People pulling their outside furniture inside. That smell. I get why people used to go to the nuns. Go far away and come back all new. Empty and new and ready now for a brand-new start. A whole new season.
The parents—hers—make it easier because there is a plan. Now I can just get through these days and stick to the plan and then it will be over.
It happens when I’m alone. I’ve crossed the creek and gone into the woods and I see something awful there: a fallen nest and a pile of feathers, some bloodied. I can’t see a bird body and I don’t know much about birds, but I know those are not the kind of feathers that have molted. They’ve been ripped out. Or something. But the bird, she’s nowhere to be found. I feel what I guess I would call horror. Like, what will I do now? I start to sort of kick at the overgrowth of dried leaves. It’s autumn now full on up here and the leaves on the trees are on fire and the dry dead ones on the ground are piling up and up. But no bird. No mama.
There is a feather. Separate. Longish. Shot with blue and white strips. I lean down to pick it up. It’s perfect. I hold it up to the light, look at the trees between each little line of silklike feather. It’s like a kaleidoscope of sun and bark and changing leaves. I’m dizzy from it.
That’s when I go to the nest. I lean down, afraid to touch it because of that thing where the mom animal will never come for anything that has been touched by a human. Is that true? I don’t know what’s what anymore and I certainly don’t today, but it scares me into not wanting to interfere here. And then I see what’s next to it: the nest is empty but for one perfect blue egg. This, I only now realize, is why they call it robin’s-egg blue. It is that blue. There has never been any other shade like that color.
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