Me, Him, Them, and It

by Caela Carter

  Please write back, Lizzie.

  Ev

  P.S. I know I shouldn’t say this, but please don’t tell anyone! The whole point of being in Chicago is so that no one needs to know!

  6 Months and 30 Days Left

  She barges into my room after my huge puke and endless hours of flipping around in my sheets while switching between telling the bean stories, cursing it for ruining my life, and briefly picturing it in the arms of other people—Todd, Lizzie, my dad, Todd. Even in the pictures that my brain makes it looks like an artificially enhanced chickpea, not an actual human. And I still might hate it. If I didn’t hate it, I wouldn’t think about it so damn much.

  She opens the door without even knocking and shoves her behind onto my bed.

  She strokes my hair like she’s going to be Mom, but it’s the Lawyer who speaks. “We have a lot to talk about, Evelyn. The car is coming to take me to the airport in an hour, and we still have a lot to work out. I guess I thought between the drive and two days in Chicago, there would be more time to talk. And now we have to talk it all out in this last hour.” She pauses. “I wish I could stay longer.” No, no. Please don’t stay any longer. “But I just can’t take any more days off.” I wonder why I feel disappointed.

  I roll over but I don’t look at her. “Good morning,” I say.

  “Oh, don’t give me that attitude,” she answers and I know that she will never understand me and I will probably never understand bean.

  “What else is there to talk about?”

  “Evelyn, everything! We haven’t even scratched the surface.”

  I’ve decided not to have an abortion, I’ve gone through hours of counseling, I’ve lied to and probably lost my best friend, I’ve broken up with the boyfriend I never had, and now I’ve moved across the country into some stranger’s house—and she says I’ve barely scratched the surface? Please.

  I do my best to keep any edge out of my voice when I say, “Everything like what?”

  She’s dressed in a suit, ready to go straight to work when she gets back to Jacksonville. It makes me feel embarrassed to be under the unicorns and in a pink tank top with no bra.

  She sighs like I’m stupid. “My biggest question is if you’re going to keep the baby. I have opinions on this, but Dr. Elizabeth and Dr. Moran both told me to keep them to myself. The rest of the decisions really stem from there. But you can’t have this baby until these decisions have been made.”

  Obviously I’m keeping the baby. I just went through all that decision making. Besides, it’s too late, isn’t it? The possibility of abortion slinks back into my brain—a scantily clad belly dancer. It wiggles up to me and says, “You could still opt out of this. You can go back to being a kid. You can go back home.” But I know I can’t. I have nothing to go home to anymore anyway.

  “I’m having the baby. I told you that. Besides, I think it’s too late not to,” I say.

  “No,” my mother explains. “I know that you plan to carry to term. I respect that, Evelyn. That was a difficult decision, and, as much as all of our lives would have been easier if you decided otherwise, I am proud that that is the decision you made.” God, she even talks like a lawyer when she’s trying to sound mushy. “I am asking about after you give birth: do you plan to parent this child or do you plan to place it in a home for adoption?”

  Adoption. I’ve mostly decided against it, but I’m not ready to say that out loud.

  “You haven’t even thought about this, have you?” my mom says, not giving me any credit.

  What are her opinions anyway? Aunt Linda was adopted but that was from China and she would have been killed or something if she wasn’t, so that’s a different story, right? And Mom lost all of those babies and it was awful, so does she think I should keep this one and “parent” it, as she says? Or does she think I should give it away because she couldn’t tell me that I wouldn’t be a lousy mother and she doesn’t want to have to deal with it anyway?

  I don’t want to give away my cluelessness, so I don’t say anything.

  “Jesus, Evelyn, how could you not think of this? Do you even realize you are pregnant?”

  I wish she were Mary, even sitting on my bed and encroaching on my space like this. Mary annoyed me, but she never made me feel like I was the size of bean.

  I put an edge in my stare.

  “And pray tell, my dear, how do you plan to go off and study at some Ivy League school if you have a child?” Ah, so there’s the opinion she wasn’t going to state. But then she keeps talking. “And how will you ever pick up your life and move on once you have to leave this baby? Have you thought about that? You might choose adoption, but you’re a mom either way.”

  “Both ideas sound terrible.”

  My mom sucks in her breath.

  “Besides,” I continue, “do I really need to decide so soon? I have until April.”

  “You’re making big decisions here, Evelyn. You need to be responsible. Either choice is going to be compounded by a whole new list of decisions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how will you choose a family? Will you have an open or a closed adoption? Or where will you live with the baby? What will you do for money? Who will care for the baby while you’re at school? How much will you expect from Todd?”

  “Nothing,” I answer, flinching at the sound of his name. The sting of him telling me “I just can’t” buzzes like a wasp in my ear.

  “Well, that hardly makes sense. He’s around; he has as much time and money as you. If you end up parenting you should insist that he help financially and/or otherwise.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “See, you need to think about these things, Evelyn.”

  I give up. “You said you had opinions. What are they?”

  Mom shakes her head, her bun plastered, unmoving, on the back of her neck. “I’m told that if I share them, I risk isolating myself from you even further. I risk you following my advice blindly and then resenting me for it. Or else I risk you assuming that I am upset with you for your choices forever.”

  If the Stiff-Ass is going to tell me she has opinions, she needs to tell me what they are. If she isn’t going to tell me about them, she shouldn’t tell me she has them.

  She gives me a death stare. I pull up my blankets, still feeling awkward for wearing pajamas during this conversation.

  “Evelyn.”

  “I’m keeping it.” The truth is that adoption appeals to me the same way abortion does: I get to be a kid again, smoke weed, have (protected) sex, go to college far away. But I’ve screwed up. I don’t deserve those things anymore.

  Mom breaths a stiff sniff up her nostrils. I gave the wrong answer. “And you’ll live with me? With the baby?”

  Do I have another choice? “Are we welcome?” I don’t bother to hide the edge from my voice this time.

  She chokes as my words go in her ears. “Of course you are. I’ll help however I can.” The doorbell rings. She looks at her watch. “We have so much more to discuss, but … I have to go.” I nod but I’m thinking: Take me with you, please. Please take me with you.

  She stands, and I can tell from the way her eyes rest on the car outside my window that she isn’t even thinking about taking me with her. “We’ll talk every day,” she says. We will? Oh, goody.

  She starts to go, then quickly turns back on her heel. She bends hastily and pecks my forehead. It tingles like Tinker Bell has just alighted above my eyes. “I’ll miss you. I love you, Evie.”

  I’m still considering whether I want to respond to either of these statements when she shuts herself out of the room. If she’ll miss me, why’d she drop me here?

  Pregnant and Parentless

  The five days until school starts swim by in a slow-motion blur. Aunt Linda’s little house is a lot louder than the one I grew up in, but I don’t do any talking. I sit still and watch nightmarish visions of myself—holding a baby, nursing, changing a diaper—on repeat while real life goes on outside my head
. My body spends the day sitting in front of the TV, switching channels every five minutes or picking up books and magazines and putting them down. In an early evening flurry of activity Nora and Cecelia and Tammy burst in the front door and all at once there are toys on the floor and screaming and laughing and dinner preparation and I’m banished to my room the second that Cecelia asks me to play and then called down for dinner where I sit at the table while Nora cuts Cecelia’s hamburger into bites and tries to get Tammy to answer a question about her day with more than one syllable. At some point, Aunt Linda will call and Nora will roll her eyes and explain over the girls’ braids that Aunt Linda is working late. The food goes in my mouth but I can’t taste it; the prenatal vitamins get swallowed without any sort of lump registering in my throat. I do dishes without feeling the suds on my fingers. Cecelia asks to play with me and either I’m allowed or Nora is too busy to supervise and I’m not. Aunt Linda rushes in the door for bedtime, swinging by to kiss me on the jaw, and it strikes me that I could try to talk to her about all this but she’s been working all day and probably doesn’t want to hear any more problems. It should make me angry that I’m barely living with Aunt Linda; I’m living with three people I didn’t know a few days ago, but I don’t have enough brain left to be angry. Aunt Linda and Nora get busy with bathtime and storytime and I’m so exhausted that I put myself to bed earlier and earlier—9:30, 9:15, 9:00, 8:15. The sounds of Nora and Aunt Linda arguing creep under my door while I close my eyes and beg sleep to come over me and quiet my brain. But it never quiets.

  All day—if I’m asleep or awake—it’s the same thing inside my mind: the baby taking over, my world shrinking to just my Silent House, which grows noisy with the baby’s screams, and I’m always feeling bad because I have no idea what I’m doing.

  What kind of mom should I be? I wouldn’t be like my mom—never talking, stiff and formal. I wouldn’t be like Aunt Linda either—always working, then showing up like a magical fairy. I wouldn’t be like Lizzie’s—hugging and kissing my daughter even when she outgrows me, bestowing the same kind of boundless affection onto all of her friends. I don’t even know how to hug. I wouldn’t be like Nora—she’s just like Mom. Even if I wanted to be a mom, I would have no idea how. I have to decide everything for this thing: its name, its last name, where it lives, what it eats, where it goes to school. If it’s a boy I have to decide whether to circumcise it. How do you even decide that?

  I can’t be a mother. It’s like asking me to be a man. Impossible.

  But I already am one. As much as I don’t like him/her, bean is here. Already here. How can I say that I will make space for it in my body but not my life? What does this thing deserve?

  And really, it’s ruined everything already, so I might as well just keep it.

  I note the days, minutes until the start of school—if I can’t even concentrate on a fashion magazine, how the hell am I going to read a chemistry book?

  My dreams are the same stressful succession of words; I’d prefer nightmares of demon babies or being thrown into hell to the string of words continuing into my subconscious.

  The night before the first day of school a question flies into my brain that causes me to sit upright: Why does this feel even harder now? I already have one decision down—I didn’t kill the thing. Shouldn’t that be a check on the to-do list? Shouldn’t each check make it a little easier?

  It’s because I got so used to talking. Mary made all of these crazy sentences leave my brain during those hot afternoons in her office. That witch. I feel a pang for her stronger than I have for anyone yet. I don’t want to miss the little lady. Who knows what the hell she would say to me, but she would let these damn nightmares escape my skull. I need to talk to Aunt Linda.

  My eyelids are heavier than lead blocks. Maybe I don’t need some conclusion in order to be able to move on with my life; maybe I just need to know how to make a step forward.

  6 Months, 26 Days Left

  I stand outside my Jeep about twenty feet from the entrance to Santa Maria High School, gaping as swarms of students rush by me, hugging and squealing. They are all girls—chatty, squeaky girls in maroon-plaid skirts that reach their knees. They flock around each other, hugging and kissing and playing with one another’s hair. And even though I can see hundreds of students from where I’m standing, I’m fairly sure not one of them is white. You’d think someone would mention these things to me.

  I scan the parking lot for anyone who looks male or white or Bad or just slightly out of place. My eyes land on a swollen abdomen—just a tiny throw-pillow shape underneath the blue cotton shirt of her summer uniform. She leans against a car in the junior parking lot, batting her hands at another girl who is giggling loudly. Her hair is a black glossy curtain swinging back and forth over the car’s hood. She must not be pregnant. She’s too happy.

  But when I dodge my way through the crowd and settle in a seat in the back of the dingy auditorium for what they call morning assembly, I see them everywhere—girls with just throw-pillow-sized bellies to undeniable watermelon ones. I notice maybe five of them among the three hundred and fifty girls who wander into the auditorium, chatting English peppered with Spanish. Maybe when I start to sprout a belly I will just blend in. Maybe no one at this place will even notice.

  Of course, I’ll never blend in here. I’m the wrong freaking color.

  But I’m not going to make friends this year anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

  As soon as they can tell I’m pregnant these girls will know this is the reason I got pawned onto my Aunt Linda—just another girl whose parents kicked her out and gave up on her.

  I’m looking at the spot where my shirt is tucked into my pleated uniform skirt, wondering if they can possibly see the little preggo-pouch I see. I stare at that spot as they start the day with some nun saying some prayer and some teacher explaining the theme for the year. My eyes move up to inspect my boobs, which make actual mounds beneath my collar, and I don’t know if you can tell they’re pregnancy boobs or if they just look like natural B-cups. How long until these strangers know my secrets?

  And why are there more pregnant girls here? It has to be because Santa Maria doesn’t punish you if you’re pregnant. This means there were probably more pregnant girls at St. Mary’s than I ever realized and they all either got an abortion or just disappeared. Like me. I wonder if I will be able to find them when I get back.

  A girl plops heavily into the seat next to mine and leans over the arm. “Can I sit here?” she asks, which is weird because she’s already sitting there.

  At that moment, Aunt Linda steps onto the stage. The girl leans toward me again. “That’s your aunt, right?”

  How can she possibly know that? We’re only ten minutes into the first day of school and I haven’t said a word to anyone. And I might be the only white girl here, but Aunt Linda is Chinese. That doesn’t seem like it could be a hint. Is it bad to have an aunt who I live with be the social worker at my school? Can I deny it?

  “I wish Ms. Clark was my aunt. She gives better advice than anyone I’m related to,” she says, and I finally look at her. My eyes automatically spring to her belly.

  “Five months,” she says. “How about you?”

  Shit. She can tell. How can she tell?

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “Ms. Clark told us that you’re going to be joining our group.”

  “What group?” What does a social worker even do, anyway?

  “Our group. Expectant Young Mothers. We meet with Ms. Clark during sixth period on Wednesdays.”

  I blink. This is impossible. “She told you that?”

  “Didn’t you know that already?”

  I shake my head. There was something about some group on the list of rules, but I didn’t bother figuring out what it meant.

  “Well, it’s good actually. It’s good to talk to other people who are kind of going through the same thing.” She’s talking fast, like she’s trying to cover her ass, or maybe Aunt Li
nda’s. She’s talking crap, but I love the way her voice lingers whenever she makes an l sound.

  “So she basically told you that I’m pregnant?” All I remember Aunt Linda saying about school is that I’m not supposed to mention Nora or that she is gay. But she gets to spill my secrets.

  “She …,” the girl stammers. “She did.” She looks at me dead on. “I’m sorry. I love Ms. Clark, but if people blabbed that about me on my first day at a new school, I’d go ballistic.”

  “Evelyn,” I say. It’s a gift. I didn’t plan on saying even that much to anyone today.

  “Huh?”

  “Evelyn. My name.”

  She holds out her hand, “I’m Maryellie. I’m in all the APs possible, so I think we’re going to have some classes together.”

  This girl is the loser. She has no friends. She’s jumping at the first opportunity to scoop up a weird-looking, pregnant new kid. But the second Aunt Linda says, “And God bless, students,” seven or eight girls reach over chairs to hug Maryellie. They pat her belly and ask how she’s feeling and when was the last time that she puked.

  I turn to leave, but she starts to introduce me. I’m forced to spend the day with a plastered smile so phony my cheeks ache within seconds. I keep raising my eyebrows to prevent bean from forcing my eyes closed in the middle of the day.

  Then it’s over. I trudge to the front door of the school, my back weighed down with textbooks and lists of homework already, my front weighed down with bean and the fact that I can’t talk to Aunt Linda about it anymore. On my way out, Aunt Linda leans out of her office and calls down the hall for me to stop. Her voice is nails on chalkboard. All this time she’s been a fake too. I really thought she was perfect, and then she goes and tells everyone what I want to hide the most. I traipse over to her.

  “How was day one?”

  I shrug.

  “Okay, you’re being quiet again. I won’t push it.” She lowers her voice. “Can you tell Nora I’ll be home late and to go ahead and start dinner without me?” So I get to go home and deliver her bad news when she can’t even keep mine to herself.