If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “We’re locked out of all the buildings,” I say.

  “Now would probably not be the time to say you might have planned this a bit better?” Claire says.

  “Claire,” says Patrick.

  “No, she’s right,” I sort of groan. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, how big can NYU be?”

  We all start laughing. It’s, like, bigger than our town.

  We walk back into the park, toward the center, the fountain area, and all these people are just, like, hanging out. Hippies and punks and kids and old people and musicians and magicians and guitars and keyboards, dogs, cats, a parakeet, children screeching. A policeman is ticketing a guy playing the piano.

  “D’oh!” Patrick says, as if that’s how the boyz in the city tawk.

  “Stop it,” I say. I know he’s been so helpful and supportive, but there is one thing I know: I am just always myself. Whoever that is? It is always me. Please, I think, Patrick, just stay you.

  We sit down on a bench looking out at the fountain, buildings of the university behind the sprays of water and puppies and screaming people.

  “Man, this is a tough place. No entry. Also ticketing a street performer. Nice, friendly town.” Patrick has his hands in his jacket pockets, like two guns pointing at the police guy who hands the piano player a ticket. He has a real piano.

  “Where is she?” I say. “I really wonder now.”

  “I just assumed you knew where she was,” Claire says.

  “Claire!” Patrick says.

  “I’m sorry but we came down to do this! I am having a good time and everything but can we not forget we did come down here for a reason.”

  I don’t say anything. I am realizing as they’re talking how much I want to meet her and just see her face and who she is so that I can also be me. It’s everything. That is, anyway, what it feels like today. I know I messed up. I know that this time I can only blame myself for thinking the world will just gather in around me and, I don’t know, do its thing. Reveal itself. I know, somewhere in here, that it isn’t everything, too, as in, other things get to happen. In my life. And who knows, maybe in hers, too. In hers, too.

  I wonder.

  “Do you have anything else?” He follows my gaze until I am looking him in the eye.

  I dodge it just the same. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Like where she teaches, say?” Claire asks.

  I just look down. I wriggle my toes but of course they can’t see that.

  “Okay,” Patrick says, breathing. “How long did it take her to write Pretend Andrea back? When you wrote her on the site?”

  “Like twenty-four hours?” I say. “Maybe less. It was really surreal. Like maybe she wants to be in touch.”

  “Okay, let’s just go back on to the site and ask her where she is. Like in an unthreatening Andrea kind of way. Man, this is just so unethical, Ivy.”

  “Like what’s your day like? That kind of a thing.”

  “Unethically, yes,” Patrick says.

  “Unethical? I mean, I can’t go on the site until I’m eighteen. And I didn’t want to get my moms involved. And I think I have a right. Ethical?”

  “Okay. She’s kind of right,” Claire says. “She does have a right.”

  I take my phone out and log in. I start to type a message, but then I’m stuck. Utterly. What do I write? Her last message had said: I am in school now, finally. What do I say? That’s fantastic and can I get the address and class times? In case I want to stalk you?

  I hand the phone to Patrick. “You,” I say.

  Patrick types something. His swiftness is shocking and kind of, umm, thrilling. “Okay?” He turns the phone toward me. That is wonderful to hear, Bridget. Where are you student teaching? I used to live in New York, remember?!? Best of luck to you.

  “Okay,” I say, because that is exactly what my mom would say, and, again without hesitation, I hear the swoosh of him sending it.

  Nothing to do but wait now, I think. I look at Patrick and Claire. I shield my eyes from the sun.

  “Now what?” I say.

  What we do is walk toward that ticketed piano, silent now, and there’s a dog park over there, too, all the bizarre city dogs in one teeny space, the smell of pee and poop and sawdust. Big dogs on one side, little ones on the other, yipping and yapping, barking.

  I miss Court and Spark.

  A group of kids sits on the benches by the dog park. Old-school boom box, splattered with paint. On purpose? All different kinds of boys. One’s got a feather in his hair, dancing, one’s got an Afro with a comb still stuck inside it. Our life? Me and Claire and Patrick? Whiteville. This is like, all the stuff. The boy with the feather dances on the seat, dogs yapping behind him: Wreckin’ shop, when I drop these lyrics that’ll make you call the cops, goes the music but I’ve got no idea who’s singing it.

  I think we’re all staring. At everything but also at these three boys because they are our age. I can just tell, the way I can tell when a dress I see online will be perfect on me. I can see it and feel it and know it to be true. Now a girl turns the corner, all decked out, Goth: black ripped tights, black Docs, black kohl, blue-black hair, white white skin but it’s powder; you can’t tell her color underneath. She’s not really having any of it from these boys.

  “Stop,” she says. “I’m going home soon, just cool yer jets,” she says. She doesn’t smile but there is a smile in there anyway.

  There is this crazy golden afternoon light. Spring light, though, so it’s white, too. It’s wonderful. It’s all so transfixing.

  “What up?” says one of these boys to the others.

  “Baruch atah Adonai Chelsea Ping-Pong at the Twins’ or BK with Jonathan?”

  Then one of those boys looks over at us. “What up, kidz? You need somefin’?”

  We laugh nervously.

  “Where you from there, children?”

  Claire, the fearless, says, “Upstate.”

  “Ha,” one of the boys says. “Not bridge and tunnel as suspected. Just full-on tourists. Full-fledged foreign.”

  “Funny,” says Patrick. I know it’s killing him. He loves to be the cool one, and where we are, he usually is. Unless Alex is there. Alex trumps all. Somehow, though, Patrick fits in everywhere.

  “We’re on this kind of mission,” Claire says, like, totally trading in my story for love and respect.

  “Yeah?” Cocked head.

  The girl looks up, curious.

  “Hmmm,” Patrick says, sensing approval.

  They look at me but I’m not going to say anything. These people are strangers.

  “Her birth mom lives here.” Claire points at me, like, outing me.

  “Got it.”

  “She’s looking for her, I mean. Ivy is. She’s never met her.”

  The kid with the giant ’fro comes forward. “Really?” he says.

  I nod. “Yup. I’m from adoptionland, really.” So I guess I say something.

  Everyone sort of snaps to. Hello, they seem to be saying. Funny person gets the hello. Always.

  “I’m adopted,” the guy who has approached us says.

  Patrick, excited, says, “That’s so cool. From where? Ethiopia?”

  “’Scuse me, man?”

  “What?” Patrick asks, already turning red.

  “Patrick!” I say. It comes out like a gasp. He has just undone the handsomeness of sending that email. I can see Claire shaking her head, her eyes closed.

  “My first mom is in New Jersey. What are you talking about, brother?”

  Splotchy red Patrick nods. “Sorry, man. So sorry.”

  “He knows,” I say.

  “Knows what?” says Patrick through his embarrassment.

  “Well, that not all black children are from Africa, for one,” I say. “Adopted ones or bio kids.”

  Patrick nods. “I do know that,” he says. “I so know that. God, I’m so sorry.”

  He nods. “Yeah, well, she’s in Jersey,” he says, just to me. “I�
�ve met her, but it’s not that pretty anymore.”

  This alarms me and my heart rate speeds up. But I play it cool, shrug. “Who knows,” I say. “Don’t even know if she’s here. I think she’s at NYU.” I nod vaguely behind me to the building we were just in. “They won’t let us in without any ID to try to find her.”

  “Right on,” says the light-skinned boy. He’s got black hair, combed close to his head, shined and flattened with some sort of pomade and kind of a ’stache but more like trying.

  “Jonathan,” the adopted one says. The adopted one. I can’t imagine if someone referred to me this way. I’d slice her in half.

  Jonathan goes to shake my hand. Long, bony fingers. I shake this hand. Then Claire, then Patrick, clearly still mortified that he thought this kid was from Ethiopia and that he actually said it, too.

  “Can’t unknow her once you know her. All’s I’m saying. She expecting you?”

  I shake my head, think of her believing she was writing to my mother. I can switch it up, too, am I right? I get to choose, too, okay? NYU, she wrote back. Finally I’m in school, finally I’m in the city.

  Well, I got some power, too.

  The boy with the boom box, covered in paint, twirls over. “Avi,” he says, waving.

  We wave back.

  “And this”—he curtsies—“is Andre.”

  Andre wiggles his fingers.

  “And Tina? Don’t even bother with her. She’s here because we’ve been in school together forever. Otherwise? Where would you be otherwise, T?”

  Tina says to the ground. “Anywhere.” She looks up briefly. “Else.”

  “Okay, so let’s go hang out at my place in Brooklyn,” Jonathan says to his friends.

  “So that’s the decision?” Pomade says.

  Jonathan nods. He is so clearly the Alex of the bunch here.

  Patrick nods.

  Jonathan looks at him, shakes his head. “You guys can come if you want.”

  He slings his backpack over his shoulder, Pied Piper–style.

  “We’re waiting on a message from the birth mom,” Claire says.

  I give her the stink eye. But then I realize: he’s the Alex, so he’s got Claire’s attention. “I messed up, okay? Anyway, it looks like we’ll be looking for her tomorrow.”

  Tina rolls her eyes.

  “Totally!” Patrick says, so eager, so embarrassing. I can’t tell if it’s because he believes he’s been forgiven or if it’s because he wants some kind of adventure.

  We all do. We all want both those things.

  You can’t unknow her, I hear this Alpha Jonathan tell me again and again like some kinda movie voice-over.

  Claire smiles in her kitten way. “Yes,” she says. “Okay, Ivy?”

  Gee, thanks for checking in, best friend. But I get it. It’s all an experience. Our New York day. Who will we tell when we return to school? And how would we say no? What would that make us? Losers is what. Tourists is all.

  “Here’s what we do. We go eat us some wasabi Belgian fries and then we hop on the F train and we go to Jonathan’s place.”

  “Why are you acting all too cool for school?” Tina asks them, hopping off her bench. Then, moving her head side to side, she mimics, “We’re going to eat some fries and go to J’s, like we do. It’s not all hop the F train shit, aight. Don’t freak out the foreigners. And also? Hate that wasabi sauce.”

  “Umm, we’re not foreigners,” Patrick says again.

  They all look at him, death stare. But Patrick is right—it’s not so different from how we hang out. I mean, it’s just the setting is changed. The background.

  “Really,” Avi says.

  Patrick shrugs. “Not that foreigners are bad or anything. We’re just not. Foreigners,” he says. “Just saying. But foreigners—and immigrants and refugees—are cool.”

  Everyone looks at Patrick. Everyone cracks a smile. “And migrants?” says Jonathan.

  “Totally,” he says, not realizing there’s a joke at his expense.

  And then the joke is over and it’s true. We’re all the same, I want to say, but I don’t say it. I don’t say anything at all.

  They all start moving, even Tina and what the hell, dang if we don’t follow, dang if we don’t all get extra-large fries with curry ketchup and then go down into the subway, down again, deep below, humid, hot, smell of pizza and stale beer and sweat, board the F train, hold on tight, feel like we’re in this gang, like this New York kid gang and then we get off a few stops into Brooklyn and out we come, shock of the end of a sunny day, streets lined with town houses (brownstones, we are corrected), little kids screaming in a park, legs pumping on their kid swings, dogs on leashes, wagging tails, like this urban suburban paradise, this Brooklyn. And then we are at an old brick building, an ex–candy factory we are told, climbing up stairs and then key in the door and then we all file into this Jonathan person’s apartment.

  Lulu

  1973

  Ithaca, New York

  It is the second letter Lulu has received since she turned eighteen. She retrieves it from the mailbox at the end of the long, twisty driveway before her parents will have the chance to see it.

  Indeed, the contents from the state are the same as they had been from the city. The records are closed. She will not be permitted to see her original birth certificate. She will never see the name of the woman who gave birth to her next to her own. She will likely never even know that woman’s name.

  But often she imagines her, and her birth father as well. As she watches her own mother pouring cream-of-chicken soup onto noodles and adding tuna—every Tuesday night!—Lulu imagines her mother, the real one, is Joni Mitchell. The song “Little Green” torments her: You’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed. Little green have a happy ending. She listens to the album, Blue, over and over and over, the grooves on the record scratched from use on this song. She imagines that it could be her. Canada, where the musician hails from, is not, after all, so far from this cold, hard place in Upstate New York. It is possible.

  Lulu rips up the letter and throws it in the trash, takes out her box from under her bed, the one with her 45s (the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Aretha, the Beatles) and the letters from Ray, two George McGovern pins, even though her parents were both for Nixon, both of them!, and also a roach clip with a blue feather attached. She lights up and sucks at the very end of it, lies back in her bed, and does what she has done so often in this room, which is to think about the what ifs. The if onlys. Like regular ones: like, if only Ray hadn’t gotten drafted. Would they still be together? Maybe. He’d be home, that’s for sure. She wouldn’t have to read his sad, desperate letters begging her to wait for him. She will wait, though. It’s the least she can do, isn’t it? And what else is there anyway here?

  If only her dad had gotten a job in Boston or New York City or any city at all like he’d always said he would. Then they wouldn’t be stuck here in this teeny town where everyone knows everyone’s business. She wonders, for a moment, what it had to have been like for her parents when they brought her here. People, still, say the stupidest things.

  Then her thoughts drift as they always do, to all the other things. Like who were they? The parents. Hers. Were they cool? Were they glamorous? Were they beautiful? Were they young? Old? Were they the same religion? Were they artists? Were they bankers or lawyers or candlestick makers? Did they like the beach, like she does? Did they climb trees and mountains and sail seas? Did they travel? Did they want to? Could they curl their tongues? Were they double jointed?

  Could she whistle? Her birth mother. What is her name?

  Lulu can’t whistle. She can’t curl her tongue, can’t wink. Can’t do anything but the usual stuff with her face, and she wonders if that isn’t a genetic trait. If it means something.

  Is she alive? Her birth mother.

  Lulu knows she is alive. She knows if she were dead that she would feel it, somewhere, like in her cells.

 
She does this thing: She makes up her own mother. Her own father. The mother is in a sundress and she has dark straight hair, like Lulu has. She is always in this yellow dress even in winter. She is always tan and shining as all girls in yellow sundresses do. There is a father, too, but Lulu thinks of him less. It’s her mother she pictures, her blue eyes, her freckles, the bones of her clavicle.

  It’s winter here. It just snows and snows. It’s always snowing here. Everything hushed. Swish swish is the sound everyone makes in their parkas, their mittens against their faces, snow in their eyelashes and hair. It’s late December but they’ve been bundled up for months. Snow covers their houses, the front lawns, the cars, trash cans. Snow: It covers everything but it also outlines it. In a way, it makes everything more clear.

  We are all so far away from each other when it snows, Lulu thinks.

  Soon it will be the new year, but what has changed?

  Is Ray even alive? She wonders that, too, because he hasn’t written in a week and that could mean anything. She would feel his passing, too, wouldn’t she? There are so many different kinds of love, really, too many ways to feel it leaving you. But, Lulu believes, he is still out there and he will be back.

  A new year. 1973: the past is blank and white and unreachable. She wonders about Ray in some rain forest, his boots filling with mud. It’s like that, isn’t it? Over there. But so is the future. There is nothing out there that she can see. It’s all emptiness and blackness.

  And now? Here? In her bedroom in this house in this town in New York State, where she hangs out alone and sometimes with her friend Valerie whose boyfriend is also in Vietnam, she smokes her weed and listens to Janis and Joni. This is nothing, too.

  This is 1973, thinks Lulu. I am eighteen years old. This is just the beginning.

  Where did everybody go?

  Ivy

  2017

  Brooklyn

  It’s light in here at Jonathan’s place, I’ll say that, but it’s teeny. Like, kitchen in one corner, a counter, facing a living room. Everything’s got personality I guess. Lots of paintings on the walls. Black-and-white photographs of dancers. I go look at the photos on the mantel and there’s Jonathan at all his ages, framed by two white people, a man and a woman. She’s pretty—long hair, bangs that get longer as she gets older, light freckles splashed across her face, gifts from the sun, Gram calls them, pretty patterned dresses. Like what Claire might look like when she’s older. And he’s good-looking, too. A dimple in his chin, nice black hair, grayer and grayer as Jonathan gets older. Jonathan is cute as all get-out when he’s a baby. You can tell they don’t know what to do with his hair for a while, and then they do. And then he does. In every picture they are staring at him the same way my moms do: just all this love. Like, so much. Like, they know this is a gift they almost didn’t get to open.