by Wendy J. Fox
“What else?” Kathleen asked.
Her mother shrugged. “She can tell you, if she wants to. I know she had her baby young, too, though,” she said, looking at Irene. Kathleen’s mother said Mae had been a teenager, and she only a child when it happened.
The other siblings, they decided they could not tell. They would let them believe what they hoped everyone else would believe—the baby was Kathleen’s, and she was mum on the father. It felt like a treacherous secret to keep, keeping part of Sammy away from them, but they agreed it was the best way to keep the child close, and the best for Irene, not yet fifteen.
Irene hoped her friend, her lover’s sister, would not feel shame in this, and she wondered about the counselor at school, who had already noticed her, who had already tried to kick her out, and she decided that he would probably forget all about her and just think Kathleen was another wayward girl, if he even heard about her, since she would be graduated by then.
Irene’s father, they would not tell. They were not sure how to handle this, but Kathleen’s mother said she would think on it. She had known the man since she was in school herself, and she had never liked him. She apologized to Irene for speaking of her family like that but she spoke with such vigor it made both girls wonder if there was history with them. She said it was his meanness that made Irene’s mother leave, and Irene blanched, realizing people around her knew more about that time than she did.
“I heard she went back home,” Irene said.
Kathleen’s mother suggested one of the women Kath worked with at the hospital kitchen—Francine Parker—might know. She and Irene’s mother had been friends, a long time ago.
“If you get her drunk, she might tell you,” Kathleen’s mother said.
Irene was silent. She did not want to ask anyone about her mother. She did not want to get Franny drunk. Her mother knew where she was, so she could have come. Her father had never moved, probably never changed the locks. She wondered if he had ever tried to look for her or if he had pined. What Kathleen’s mother said, she knew, was right—he could be mean, mean as a deep cold, mean as a slap, but he was not always that way. She was surprised, sometimes, that he had not found an aunt or a cousin to drop her off with, but maybe there was a limit to one person. Maybe he could not go quite that far. Maybe he kept her, his penance, in the shape of a girl. There were good memories with him, and she wondered if it would make him even meaner, if she kept this from him now.
“I think we have to tell him,” she said. “It will be easier for me when I come back.”
Kathleen’s mother sighed, and she wiped at the table. She nodded and said that it was Irene’s choice, that they would support her either way. Irene startled some, realizing that this was what family meant.
* * *
Though most of her morning sickness was gone, when Irene took the steps up her own porch with Kathleen’s mother, she thought she would double over. When she turned the knob, the door opened easily. They never locked it. Nothing to lose, less to steal.
Her father was not home yet, so they tidied up and checked the fridge. Kathleen’s mother found potatoes in the pantry and said she could make a quick soup with what was there.
“Sometimes a meal makes news easier,” she said, and Irene said she thought her father would like that.
“Do you know how to do a biscuit?”
“Not really,” Irene said.
Kathleen’s mother rolled her eyes, just barely, and asked her to get flour, soda, and salt. First she sniffed at the flour, and then she spooned some out with a teaspoon and checked it. The flour was old, but okay. She chopped up the few wilting vegetables from the fridge and put them in the pot to boil down while she walked Irene though the biscuits. Irene followed her instructions like a prayer, with hope for abundance and good things. When her father got home, she was just sliding the pan out of the oven—perfectly golden, and on her first try—while Kathleen’s mother was putting the browned cubes of a cheap cut of beef into her broth and telling Irene that sometime she would show her how to do gravy from pan drippings.
“You’re a natural in the kitchen,” she said.
When Irene heard her father’s voice, there was a clatter, for a second, of the biscuit pan onto the stovetop, and the hiss of steam from the soup.
Her father and Kathleen’s mother greeted one another, her father looking like he meant to reach his hand to shake in greeting, but then did not.
Irene felt nervous then, her fingers clammy inside of an oven mitt, her belly turning in a way that made her sure it was the child sending her a message, but she could not decipher if it was yes or no, or somewhere in between. Her father would be wondering why they were there, why they were cooking. It was Saturday afternoon, but his Friday, and Irene removed the oven mitt and brought him a beer. She asked him if he would wait, just a few more minutes, and his dinner would be ready.
Irene set the small table with their mismatched silverware and chipped bowls, and they all sat with the food steaming in front of them, the quick stew and the fresh biscuits, thick and buttered.
“Do we say Grace in this house?” Kathleen’s mother asked.
“We never have, but we could,” Irene’s father said.
No one said a word, but they all tipped their heads in thanks for a meal and in hope for the old wounds washed clean, and the new ones, so raw they were not even showing yet, to heal without a scar.
Their dinner went slowly—compliments first, followed by silence. It was hard for Irene to say anything. The room felt pressurized, and she could not stop thinking of her bedroom window, the last place where she had seen Sammy alive.
Her father looked like she felt, tired and anxious.
“I’m pregnant, Daddy,” she said, even though she had not called him that in years, and he closed his eyes.
He finished swallowing and she could tell he was not sure what to say, and he looked at his bowl, filled with remnants of stew and a shred of biscuit. She could tell he had held at least a small hope that it was going to be a different conversation.
She was glad then that Kathleen’s mother was there, glad for whatever history they might have had, and when Kathleen’s mother told her to go to her room, she went, as obedient as a girl half her age, her stew only half finished and the biscuit crumbled at the side of her plate. She wondered if this was what it was like to have a mother—someone who knew what to do—and she heard them talking about her in a hushed tone, just out of reach.
It was already planned. At Aunt Mae’s, Kathleen would finish the few classes she needed to get her early graduation, and Irene would study at the unwed mother’s home. The baby wasn’t due until summer, but they would try to stay away from town for a few months after, to let Irene recover and Kathleen adjust.
The voices started to raise. Her father grumbled, and there was the sound of a beer bottle being launched into the bin, glass breaking, and the refrigerator door yanked open and slammed shut as he grabbed another. Kathleen’s mother, trying to stay calm, but sounding urgent. It’s better–we’re not–goddammit, Don.
She listened to them argue for a long time. She was not sure what her father wanted, but she could tell he was getting angrier. He kept the low tone that she knew meant he was very upset, and the smoke from cigarette after cigarette wafted into her room. Finally, she opened her bedroom door and went into the living room, deciding that if she was old enough to give birth, she was old enough to talk to her own father.
As she came around the corner, she looked down, avoiding the soft spot underneath the hallway carpet, going toward him where he sat in his chair next to the sofa, where Kathleen’s mother perched, leaning toward him.
He opened his arms to her, and she fell to his feet.
* * *
The Florence Crittenton Home said they would help with the paperwork and that Irene could deliver there and see their doctor. They said
it was not so irregular to have girls staying at a family residence. They were short on beds, anyway.
When they had talked the whole thing through, before telling her father, Kathleen’s mother had shaken her head, and looked down. “You’re both so young to have to be working so hard already. I wanted it to be different for you, Kath.”
“It’s different,” she had said. “I’m choosing this.”
“I chose it too,” her mother had said, her tone getting sharp. “I know what it’s like to be young.”
Kathleen had stared at the cloth that covered the table. “It’s for Sammy.”
Kathleen’s mother had sighed, and she pulled Kathleen close to her, and Irene saw the hope. The youngest daughter, her tomboy. Kathleen had been the one who might get out. Maybe it would be good for them to be with Aunt Mae. Aunt Mae sounded brave.
For Sammy’s child, Kathleen would work, and she would save. Irene would study, and she would keep herself healthy. After the baby came, Kathleen’s parents would sign responsibility for the adoption, but Kathleen would raise the baby, as hers. This also was not too irregular, the home assured them, but the woman who they spoke with wondered aloud if it was a good idea to go from one unwed mother to another, even while agreeing that it made a difference since Kathleen had her family and would be a high school graduate. Irene was only fourteen, so young. Too young.
Irene packed her things very carefully in a suitcase loaned to her by her father. In the days since their dinner, she felt closer to him. She wanted to tell him that the baby had been an accident, but not a forever kind of accident, just a timing one. Sammy wanted her as his bride, and they might have even given the child a sibling, if they had not rushed everything
If the ice had held.
She wished that night that she had not made Sammy so scared of her father, so that when her father had come home, instead of running off he might have been calm as he slipped back into his pants and come around to knock at the front door, winking as he asked if Irene might be at home.
Every day, in a way she never had before, she wanted to ask her father if he had ever heard from her mother, if there was something she should know, but she was not sure how to start the questions. She wanted to ask him what he thought—should she write her? She would tell her that she understood now, she understood the fear of having another person inside of her, she understood how it changed everything.
Before her mother left, even though there had not been much family around, she had an aunt and uncle who came around often when she was little, and they would bring her teenage cousin, Lucy Estelle. In elementary school, if Irene was sick, she had stayed home by herself, occasionally looked in on by a neighbor.
Her aunt and uncle had died in a highway accident when a semi-truck full of chickens had run over a passenger sedan, and after that, her mother left, and she didn’t see her cousin.
From what Irene knew, they had been just behind the car that was hit, and her uncle swerved to miss the wreck of shattered glass and feathers, overcorrecting, sending their truck off the deep side of the road, jumping the ditch and tumbling down an embankment. They might have been okay, but no one found them for a while, no one saw what had happened or the wheels of their truck, wrong way up just out of the line of sight. There was a girl in the sedan who lived, but Irene did not know who she was. She was ten when this happened, when her father had buried his brother. Their own parents were already gone.
Still, even when Irene’s mother did not come back from spending some time with Lucy Estelle—to get her settled, she had said—he held on to Irene. He had done more than she could do. She figured her father must be like a lot of people, struggling to keep his life going, trying to go forward.
Maybe what had made him mean was that somehow he had seen it all coming, and he had to live knowing he would have so much sadness.
He was supposed to drop her off at Kathleen’s, and Kathleen’s parents would drive them both to Denver to the home, but in front of the house, he asked if Irene minded if he took her himself.
“I’ll just follow behind them,” he said.
“Of course,” she said.
“I want you to come back home after this,” he said.
“I will,” she said. “You can come visit,” she said, and he nodded.
He tried, she thought, and she loved him for that.
The highway felt very slow as they went to the city, the sides of the road flanked by rangeland with just the outline of the foothills visible in the low fog. She was not sure what to say, so she scooted into the middle of the truck’s bench seat and leaned on her father’s shoulder. She could not remember ever sitting with him like that.
What had he thought about, the night his wife did not come home? What had he thought about, as the dark grew deeper and she, their child, their tiny, dark-haired girl, keened and howled? She could almost remember, if she clamped her eyes shut and leaned deeper into him, with the hum of the road, the tobacco smell of his jacket, the way he would have picked her up, and pulled her to him. Maybe he decided then how they would be—that they would stay together.
He must have waited a few days, even weeks, for his wife to return tearful, broke, or missing the mountain skyline. Irene wanted to tell him how much she forgave everything now, now that she knew what it was like to be sure the person who had helped make a child was never coming back.
The highway was very straight, with wide-open lanes, and the bumper of Kathleen’s parents’ car easily visible. They followed at a safe distance, and Irene felt her father roll back his arm some, to make more room for her, like she suspected he always had.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Melanie
Summer, 2007
Melanie was thinking of Irene’s voice as she drove to the hospital. Wrapped in the clean upholstery and polished plastic of her car, she tried to balance safety and urgency. When she imagined her mother, at first there was a curtain of blood, but then she blanked this from her mind, and focused on what was in front of her—the city streets with light afternoon traffic, the summer sun lighting the dirty curbs and reflecting off the filmy building windows, and the brake lights of the truck in front of her with one bulb smashed and hanging like a broken tooth, the other missing its lens.
When she was anxious at work, she tried very hard not to speculate about what would or would not happen, and she used this approach now. She thought of being at her desk, with the glow of the Repti Glo terrarium lights and the yellow walls she had painted herself; she thought of being irritated at her email or her instant message or at Alex or another of her co-workers. In her car, she rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension, the hum of the road was calming to her, just like the buzz of the servers and the whirring fan of her computer, the drone of her reports spooling off the printer.
The drive was progressing just fine, she thought, until she came down the crest of a small hill, and her tires collided with an already partly smashed corrugated box. The sound of rubber against the cardboard jolted her, and her eyes opened very wide for a second and her breath caught. It’s nothing, just garbage, she thought, and she reached for the radio dial to make sure it was switched all the way off. When she blinked, the imprint of unattached limbs and digits, not gory, just images like illustrations from a textbook or models made out of clay, flitted under her lids, and blinking harder only made her tear. At a stoplight, she closed her eyes fully, clamping them shut. She concentrated hard, but eventually a scrap of fingernail slid away, a knuckle found its mate with a joint and a finger, a wrist that flicked and turned on an arm that bent at the elbow to wave floated to the side of an intact torso. She was trying to will the body whole, and she heard Irene’s words of caution again, while the car behind her honked. Opening her eyes, she saw the light had turned green, and she hurried through the intersection, going a little more quickly than she meant to, and because the car felt wobbly rounding the next turn
, she braked harder than she needed, slowing almost to a stop. Touching the accelerator very gingerly, she slowly gained momentum while the driver behind her honked again.
At the hospital, the parking garage was still dusty with ash blown in from the fires, the covered concrete having missed the rains, and the winds having been still for some days. Parking carefully, perfectly straight between the white lines, she was relieved when she turned back the ignition and heard the engine disengage.
Inside the hospital, the time it took to check in felt like forever. There was the front desk of the emergency room with its sign to notify the attendant immediately if one was experiencing chest pain—a good shortcut, she noted, if she were to ever need it, but her mother had not come in this entrance, and she probably would have not walked. Melanie waited her turn at the desk, identified herself, asked if she was in the right place, and identified her mother. Kathleen Henderson, she said, saying her mother’s name as if pushing the syllables from her mouth was about more than simply vocalizing them, as if her tongue between her teeth, tapping the roof of her mouth, was a ritual, as if the sound could make her mother appear and hold them both.
The front desk attendant checked the records, marked some paper, pressed a button at her desk, and told Melanie to go through the double doors.
“134-B,” the attendant said. “It’s kind of a walk—if you come back again, come in through the other side of the building.”
Melanie did not know if that configuration of numbers and the letter meant good or bad, but she thanked the attendant. Good, she thought. They are letting you go in. Or, Bad. They are letting you go in to say good-bye.
After a long corridor, she followed the signs for B ward, passing through set after set of double doors, all opening wide enough for gurneys and tandem wheelchairs and closing with the gentle whoosh of hydraulics. Behind the last doors, there was another set of waiting rooms, these ones slightly more equipped for the long haul and outfitted with square furniture and coffeepots with coffee that she could smell had been brewing for too long. There were cups for the water that came from a rattling stainless steel box mounted to the wall and a vending machine with most of the slots empty and dark behind the smeared glass.