If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Joanne, Andrea, and Ivy

  October 19, 2000

  Ithaca, NY

  Joanne takes Andrea’s hand but she shakes it away. It’s not that she doesn’t feel they can hold hands here, per se, it feels safe enough, but she’s not sure she can do it. Anywhere. Maybe ever again. Connect to another person right now, even her person. They were supposed to be leaving with a baby. Maybe her time on this planet being connected to anyone is over.

  “She’s keeping her,” Andrea says, walking through the parking lot slightly ahead.

  “We don’t know that,” says Joanne, her head down. She is trying to get the image out of her head of Bridget holding the baby tightly to her chest. The way she had looked up at them both so plaintively. It would be hard after seeing that, it’s true.

  “We can’t take a child from someone who wants to keep her. It’s wrong.”

  “She’s a child herself. She doesn’t know what’s best yet,” Joanne says. “When she was rational, she made a plan and she chose us.”

  They go to their car and Joanne gets in the driver’s seat.

  Andrea is sobbing. “Rational? It was before she had her baby.”

  Joanne places a hand over Andrea’s shoulder and she shakes it off. “We can’t take that girl’s baby. Not if she wants her! This is all so messed up.” She looks over, “I wish you were a man!”

  Joanne stares at her, stunned.

  Andrea starts laughing. “I so don’t wish you were a man. I don’t know why I said that. It just would have been easier. The kid stuff, I mean, you know? Logistically, it might have saved us.” She reaches for Joanne’s hand.

  There.

  Finally. Joanne looks over at her girlfriend. Her partner. Her wife. Her person. What if she is never the same now? That light in her eyes. It could be gone now. Never to return. “I love you,” Joanne says softly. “This is going to happen for us.” She is gripping the wheel but she doesn’t turn the key.

  Andrea shrugs. “Let’s go to that café. Remember the one with the bluebirds? Where we had tea after we met her the first time.”

  Joanne nods and, as if remembering, she turns on the car and pulls out of the hospital parking lot toward the highway and the café. She remembers it, too. It had felt like a house that was about to fall into a creek and they’d had the most hopeful afternoon there after meeting Bridget for the first time.

  They will order scones and tea and they will sit side by side on that little bench in the café and they will gather themselves up, together.

  And they do. They go there and they sit down in that same spot looking out over the creek and the scones are warm, with oats and currants, and they add fresh butter because who cares now?, and they hold hands across the table and they put their new flip phone on the table, the phone they got so they could talk to birth mothers at any time. And they do what they have been doing for so long now. They wait.

  And they wait and they wait and they finish up and wipe away invisible crumbs and Joanne puts the phone in her pocket and they go back to the Holiday Inn in town, which takes dogs, but they didn’t bring Pearl and Passion because they were supposed to be there with a baby. The baby would meet the dogs at home, they’d thought. They will only worry about the baby.

  They have diapers and a portable bassinet. They have no messages at the desk and they go upstairs and kick off their shoes and snuggle up on the king-size bed and watch the gray sky turn dark.

  And the phone doesn’t ring.

  No one calls.

  They wait and wait and none of the phones in the room ring and dawn comes and they are both still awake, and then the gray morning, thick with clouds and a cold autumn rain, a steel sky. They rise, together, bend over their suitcases filled with bright white onesies and glass bottles that clank together now.

  They zip up. They close up. They button up and snap up. They go downstairs and check out. And then they go home together, alone.

  Ivy

  2017

  New York City

  “My meeting got postponed,” I say to Gram while looking hard at the knife I am using to spread obscene amounts of raspberry jam on my croissant. I see my eyes flash and glint in the silver. My head hurts. I haven’t showered.

  “Well, good you’ll have the day today, then. Have you rescheduled?”

  “I have,” I say. Is she, like, going to pretend I’m meeting with a college counselor or something? Is she truly not going to ask me about this? It’s so insane the way Gram is talking about this whole thing. Or not talking. But in a way, I guess, it’s easier.

  “Shall we phone your mother?”

  “My mothers?”

  “Yes, yes, your mothers.”

  “I texted earlier. They’re alive and well. I’m good. I’m in touch with them just fine.”

  “Well then,” Gram says. “Everyone settled okay?” She looks over to Claire and Patrick, who are also paying very close attention to their breakfast pastries.

  They nod furiously.

  “Well, I’m going down for a swim, then,” says Gram. It is something she is very proud of, her swimming. That she still swims. That she has swum, would swim, swims, will forever swim.

  “Terrific, Gram,” I say. I watch her pad off to her room, her robe flying behind her in a busy witch sort of way. I wonder if she will come out in her bathing suit and bathing cap for my friends the way she used to for my mothers.

  She peeks out of her door and into the hallway. “Ivy, dear?” she says.

  I look up. “Yes?”

  “A moment?” she asks.

  I get up and obediently follow her into her room.

  “Darling.” She closes the door. She holds her arms out to me. She is warm and she smells like roses. She puts her dry powdery hand on the side of my face. The duvet on her bed is all crumpled and lived in, not perfectly made as usual, and I notice Claire’s book, New York Foundlings, is butterflied, facedown next to her pillow.

  Gram’s eyes are shot through with red. “Will you meet her today?” she asks.

  “I think so,” I say, grateful that finally she is asking me. That she cares. “I don’t exactly know yet.” I search her face but she doesn’t offer me anything.

  Gram holds me tight, to her heart. “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t!” I laugh, but it turns into a little cry, too.

  “I do, darling,” she says. “Better than you know. I am not a monster.” She takes in air, like she is sipping it, about to tell me something. “I . . .”

  I wait.

  She shakes her head, to herself really.

  “I didn’t think that,” I say. “Anyway, I just want to see her, you know? Finally.” I shrug. “I can’t explain it.”

  “I imagine it will be wonderful,” Gram says, patting my hair and kissing the tippy-top of my head.

  I look at my grandmother, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “If you think you want to see her, then you must!” She dabs her eyes with a balled-up handkerchief she’s removed from her robe pocket. “Or you will regret it,” she says. “Believe me. You will be filled with regret if you have the chance and you don’t do it.”

  She takes her thumbs and rubs my cheekbones, hard. It feels like she’s erasing me. “These cheekbones!” she says. “Like the Alps, I tell you.”

  Gram. “Thank you, Gram,” I say, hugging her back.

  “Of course,” she says, straightening. “Now go on and let me get ready for my swim.”

  “Kooky Gram,” I say when I get back to the table.

  “I like her,” Claire says. “I want to draw her.”

  I imagine Gram being drawn by my friend, just constantly looking at what she’s doing, not really going with it, saying, Oh, my, do you think I have those eyebrows, really, dear? I see.

  “She’s got your orphan book in there,” I say as I go and check the adoption registry site. Yesterday in the park when Patrick sent the note feels like three thousand years ago.

  Cla
ire looks over my shoulder and I don’t know why but I shield the phone with my hand.

  “Really?”

  Suddenly this feels private to me. Maybe it just has been all along.

  I look up from my phone. “Let me just see if there is anything after last night, okay?”

  Maybe it’s my serious tone but she turns back to her breakfast, dabbing jam onto another croissant.

  The registry. Sure enough, two red dots. One, I am assuming, confirming my own response—well, Patrick’s—and the other, well, perhaps it is from her. I click on.

  Hi, Andrea. I am already doing my hours at PS 30 in Harlem. Taking classes still but doing this for credit three mornings a week. You probably don’t know this school—let’s just say not in your part of town, I don’t think? It’s amazing and I am lucky to do this work, to have these students and to be in the world this way. I am ready to meet Ivy when she is ready to meet me. This is my email if you or she or Joanne would like to communicate with me: Bridget2000@gmail.com. Not running anymore. I hope you all are thriving.

  “Harlem,” I say out loud, and for a moment I feel like I’m in one of those stories I read when I was little where these kids got clues from a librarian and then travel to all these places in their magic tree house. All they have to do is point to a place on a map.

  Patrick stares out the huge window, sort of vacant like. I watch him and think of last night, Patrick, who was almost my lover but now is my best friend. I see how it flips around in all these good ways. I love him.

  But now I am feeling anxious and just ready to go. And I suddenly realize maybe it’s best to go it alone today. Actually, I am quite sure of it and I’m sure I’ve known it all along.

  I’m about to say so when, as predicted, out trots Gram.

  “Off to swim!” she says.

  She looks like she has sprung out of the pages of one of Claire’s vintage fashion photo books. Flowered bathing cap, blue one-piece that seems to be cutting off her circulation at the thighs, some kind of cork-wedged sandal that is also flowered, metallic, sequined terry robe, goggles swinging in hand, an Hermès towel hooked over her other arm. She is turned to the side and one leg is bent, photo-ready.

  We are all speechless. We are staring. I watch Patrick slowly close his mouth.

  “Amazing!” says Claire, standing. “You look a-mazing.”

  “Would you like to join, darling?” says Gram, shuffling toward the door. “Pool is just downstairs and, lucky for you, you know a very prominent member!”

  “No suit!” Claire says, bringing her hands up, empty.

  “Anyone else, then?”

  “No, Gram,” I say. “Have fun.”

  “Ta!” she says, and, truly, goes out, dressed this way, out into the rotten cabbagey-smelling hallway.

  We don’t say anything because really, what can we say?

  I want to get going. My bones ache with wanting to leave.

  “You know what?” I say to Claire and Patrick. “Let’s separate and meet back in a few hours.”

  “What?” Patrick snaps to attention and he looks away from the view of the swath of blue sky.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Claire says.

  Patrick looks at Claire and takes a breath. “Do you need me?” he asks.

  Claire rolls her eyes.

  “I needed you both to get me this far,” I say. It’s true. I never would have gotten down here without them. Detour and all. “But I want to just go by myself, I really do.”

  “Okay,” Patrick says.

  Claire nods. She looks at Patrick. “We’ll wait for you here,” she says.

  I imagine Gram coming back from her swim. I don’t even know what that will look like and what seeing them here will mean for her.

  “You should go out,” I say. “Walk around, something, I don’t know. It’s New York City, kids! I don’t think I’m going to be that long.” I shrug. “I mean, I have no idea.”

  “You sure?” Claire asks again.

  “I think I just want to gather and, like, do it on my own. I just do. You guys are so amazing to be here for me and do all this. I mean I have the best friends. Hashtag blessed!”

  “Stop it,” Patrick says.

  “Okay, truly, then. Blessed for sure. Thanks for coming with me. I don’t know what the day is going to be, so I just want to do it on my own.”

  Claire smacks her hands on her legs. “All right, then!” she says.

  “Or stay around here, whatever,” I say. I push back my seat and throw my napkin on my chair. “Draw my insane, mysterious, vintage grandmother,” I say.

  Patrick stands, too. “Are you sure?” He touches my elbow.

  I nod. I smile. “I’m sure,” I say. I push my chair out. “I’m going to shower in Gram’s bathroom.”

  Patrick nods.

  “What should we do today, Patrick?” Claire asks.

  “There’s not much around here,” I say. “But you can walk to the Met. I remember walking to the Met for some reason.”

  “I could do that,” Patrick says.

  “Maybe we can find a great cover.”

  “What, you’re going to put Rembrandt on the cover of Crossroads? Or a mummy?” I ask.

  Claire ignores me. “How about,” Claire says to Patrick, “we go for a run?”

  Patrick shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I will walk briskly with you to the Met, though.”

  Claire laughs.

  “You guys can shower in the guest bathroom.” I nod, not necessarily suggesting anyone needs a shower, but just letting them know it’s a good option. “There are towels in there and everything.”

  They both nod and I pad off for my shower.

  I go into Gram’s room, which is a funny thing to do when she’s not in it. It’s all her stuff—blue glass bottles and lamps and reading glasses—and her rose smell and her bed is still unmade, as if she got up and left her imprint, an angel in snow.

  Claire’s book is gone now and then I see it on Gram’s bureau, next to a dusty dried Japanese flower arrangement in a square black veneer vase.

  I take the book. It’s closed, but it opens easily to the page it had been open to clearly for some time.

  On the left side of the page, there is a photo of a massive building, sort of off-white brick, the site of some kind of horror movie to be sure and on the right there is a photo of a baby. She’s seated on a cushion, in an old-fashioned white nightgown. Her hair is black and shaggy as can be. You can tell someone tried to comb it to no avail. “Lulu,” Susquehanna Valley Home for Orphans, it says in the caption. February 1957.

  All babies do look the same to me, but there is something so familiar about her. Maybe it’s the rouge on her cheeks, which looks strange in the black-and-white photo, that is so similar to the photo of Gram hanging above the stairs in my house. There’s this mop of shaggy hair, but it’s not just the hair and it’s not just the strange photo coloration. It’s the shape of the eyes, too, and just the way they look out at the camera. It also reminds me of one of the baby pictures I’ve seen of my mother. She doesn’t have that hair, but the eyes are the same. And the little coin purse of her mouth, too.

  I can’t place this baby’s face.

  You will be filled with regret, Gram just said to me, and for a moment, I wonder if this baby is her. But then, cursing my math skills, I realize, that is impossible, of course it can’t be Gram. It’s from 1957.

  Perhaps this was when Gram was in school, I think. I think of Claire, too. There are just so many reasons a person can look at a photograph. So many things to see.

  I close the book and place it back on the bureau. I go into the bathroom and turn the shower on hot hot hot, the warm steam already rising when I step inside.

  When I’m all showered, my night in Brooklyn, my night of almosts, scrubbed off my skin, I head back out to Patrick and Claire. I go to take Claire’s book back to her and something stops me. I hold the book again and again it falls open to the picture. “Lulu.” Is it that all babies
from that time looked the same or is it that she looks like my mother?

  It’s something you can’t see but it’s there. For a moment I wonder if my mother is adopted. And she doesn’t know it! But then I can’t shake all the pictures of Gram and Grandpa Harry holding her in the hospital, Gram turbaned and eyelined and rouged but still wearing that been-through-a-war look. I don’t think even Gram could stage that look.

  When I go out to Patrick and Claire, they haven’t moved much and they’re working on their second pastries.

  “We’re going,” Claire says when I come out, as if I care.

  I so do not care. “This is yours,” I say to her.

  Patrick intercepts it and thumbs through it, also ending up on the marked page. “These look just like the ones in your weird baby photo museum,” Patrick says.

  “What weird baby photo museum?”

  “The one along the stairway in your house,” he says. “Inescapable.”

  Claire is laughing.

  “You, with the hanging crystals and burning incense are going to tell me my house is weird?” I say.

  They both nod. “Eerie.” Claire shakes her head. She cocks her head and looks at the photos again. “These are so sad. I never thought about them. I guess I just thought they were cool photos. And weird. But really they’re mad sad.”

  I think of that girl in this horrible huge building. Was she all alone? Did people take care of her and kiss her and change her and love her? I can’t help but wonder if I might have ended up in a place like this. It could have happened. A different set of butterflies; a different set of wings. I feel so sad for this baby. What happened to her?

  “I wonder who she became,” I say.

  Claire nods. “I hope it was everything.”

  This catches my heart.

  I can only know all the becames in my own story. I must find them. This is what I know.

  I don’t know why, but I go and place the book back on my grandmother’s bureau, just where I found it. So she won’t notice anything was missing at all.

  Ivy

  2017

  Uptown

  Milton is back because it’s daytime and so, when I get downstairs, he salutes me and then when I ask he tells me there is a nice place to sit across from Gram’s, by the river. I don’t have a plan but it’s this beautiful, breezy spring day. I sense everything thawing out, the heavy feel of winter disappearing from my bones.