Me, Him, Them, and It

by Caela Carter

  “And don’t go to bed until I get home. We need to start having those heart-to-hearts, you and me.”

  I make it a point to be entirely asleep by the time she gets home. I don’t want her catching me pretending, so I force myself into a kind of wordy coma—What kind of mom will I be? How will I name this thing? Do I really have to push it out of my vagina?

  My brain spins when I lie down and when I fall asleep and when I wake up to pee every three minutes and when I fall back asleep. It rolls in endless circles.

  Finally I give up. I need to talk to someone, and it can’t be Aunt Linda. But I need to talk to someone.

  I go to my computer and e-mail her. I ignore the list in my in-box alternating between Dad’s and Todd’s e-mail addresses. I know she doesn’t want to hear from me, but maybe if I apologize …

  Lizzie—

  It’s me again. The worst friend ever.

  I’m sorry again, Lizzie. And I really need you. Can you call me tomorrow?

  —E

  And even though she’s mad at me, I’m sure she will. She always does.

  She Doesn’t

  During group with Aunt Linda the next day, I keep my teeth glued together, saying only my name. There are seven other girls in the room, fawning over Aunt Linda and talking and talking but I let my brain get caught up in the nightmare that my life will become in seven months and tell myself not to hear anything. And I don’t.

  A week and a half without Lizzie’s voice has driven me to desperation. When Lizzie still hasn’t called or texted or e-mailed or anything, several hours after I get home I call my mom before she has a chance to call me.

  “Evelyn!” I picture her in her office. She probably just put down some brief she is working on to talk to me. I better talk.

  “Aunt Linda told all these girls at school that I’m pregnant.”

  “She shouldn’t have done that,” Mom answers, letting my heart go light before slamming it down again. “Have you thought any more about a plan?”

  When I don’t reply, she keeps talking.

  “Like how do you plan to ensure this baby is cared for while you finish your senior year? How will you apply to colleges? How will you work out a plan with Todd?”

  She stops and the silence on the phone is a screaming banshee in my ear. Finally I say, “I don’t know.”

  She sighs. “Evelyn.”

  “I don’t understand why you get to ask me all these questions after you kicked me out of your house.” I didn’t mean to say that out loud.

  My mom emits a one-note sob like the one when she first found out I was pregnant, and I immediately wish I could take it back: sweep the words off the floor and cram them into my lungs again.

  “We didn’t kick you out, Evie-Teeny! Is that what you think?”

  Stupidly, I shrug. She keeps talking anyway.

  “We thought you wanted to make sure no one at St. Mary’s knew, so we let you hide out at Aunt Linda’s. And we know you’ve been missing your aunt Linda for years now.” She’s using the voice she used to when Aunt Linda first moved away: one made of such thin glass that if I speak back it will break. So I stay quiet. But then she says, “Do you want to come home? I’ll book an airline ticket right now and drive back with you.”

  “No,” I say, and wow, I don’t. This phone call has been hard enough. Living there would stress me out in that way that Mary said is dangerous. “I guess you were right. Thank you.”

  “Okay.” She should tell me that she won’t make any more plans for me without talking to me first. She should tell me that I can come home whenever I want. She should tell me she’s sorry.

  “Honey, I’m in the middle of a brief here. I’ll call you back after dinner and we can try to iron out a plan, okay?”

  “Okay,” I lie. But I can’t make a plan. I’m being dumb, but I just can’t. I don’t know what else to do but avoid my mom now.

  Pregnancy Brain

  By the time my first marking-period progress report is mailed to Aunt Linda’s house, my stomach is the size of a mixing bowl and my life is nothing but panic. Loneliness, indecisiveness, and anxiety pile in my gut every day, like layers of dirt under the earth’s crust. I get home from school afraid my heart will stop. By the time I go to bed, it’s hard to breathe.

  I’ve stopped checking my e-mail altogether. What’s the point? I don’t want to hear another word from Todd. Seeing the Stranger’s name on the screen brings back my morning sickness. And my mother calls me. She strings endless lists of questions together, terrifying questions that I have never even thought of before. They scratch into my voice mail and I call her back during study hall or lunch, when I know she’s in court.

  Outside my head, life in Aunt Linda and Nora’s house moves slowly. The girls zoom in and out of rooms but take forever to actually accomplish the smallest tasks—changing clothes after school, brushing teeth, even spitting out a sentence.

  Today, I’m sitting at the little desk in the purple unicorn room, letting the letters in my chemistry book shuffle around and rearrange themselves into words I don’t want to see: pregnant, baby, crib, labor, name, parent, abortion even. I’m trying to take notes on acids and bases, but the layers in my chest won’t dissipate. At least if they suffocate me or stop my heart I won’t need to figure out my life: if I die, so does the baby. That will be the end.

  Someone knocks on the door, which is already open, and without looking up I call, “Come in.” My head is still bent over my pencil, which is converting pH levels completely separately from the actual workings of my brain. When no one surfaces after a few moments, I look up. In the door frame, Tammy switches from her left foot to her right foot and back, the beads on the end of her braids swinging with the momentum.

  We stare at each other.

  If this were Cecelia, I would know what to do. I’d send her down to Nora, who would be in the kitchen or doing some work in the family room, to ask if she can visit with me. Nora always says she should let me rest or let me finish my homework.

  But Tammy doesn’t seek me out. I’ve been living here for over a month now and the only times Tammy has actually spoken to me are when she’s directly told to.

  She freezes in the doorway, leaning onto her left foot, her little peanut-butter hand clutching a sheet of paper and a pencil.

  “I need help with my math.”

  I still don’t know what to say for a few seconds, the kind of seconds that feel like minutes. Her feet stay solidly outside the threshold of my door, but my heart starts beating wildly, aware of how close we are to breaking Rule 8 right now. But I think about what’s on that page in her hand—I could show her how to count on her fingers. I could draw her a number line. I know how to help her, and maybe if I do, the bean bean bean on my brain will stop for a minute.

  “I’ll help you, but go ask Mommy Nora if it’s all right,” I say.

  “She’s on the phone,” Tammy says, barely audible. Her eyes look into mine like she wishes she could just transmit whatever is in her brain and never need to say anything out loud. “And she doesn’t help me that much. I don’t get what she explains.”

  I stand up and scoot past her. Her little body stays planted in my doorway. I tiptoe down the stairs and peer over the banister to see that, in fact, Nora is involved in a heated conversation on the phone. I recognize the lawyer in her voice and body language. As a state’s attorney, she trades the astronomical salary she could get at a firm for a five p.m. sharp stop time, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Her back is toward me, and I see that it’s straighter than it would be at, say, dinner; her chin pointed slightly up, one hip thrust out. It strikes me that when she comes home she is actually Mom-Nora, not Lawyer-Nora. Her mom self is that stiff. I lose a second just looking at her before scurrying back up the stairs, which I feel in my knees.

  Tammy has swiveled her head but not moved her feet. She’s watching me, her expression impossible to read.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s get this math done.” />
  I expect her to look happy, but her demeanor barely changes.

  “Here’s how we’ll do this. You sit right where you are, and I’ll sit on this side of the doorway.”

  “On the floor?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I plop myself down to show her it is not a big deal.

  She sits. Both of us are still in Catholic uniform skirts and, sitting Indian style, our legs make a nest for her homework. I know that even though we’re not technically in the same room, I’m breaking Rule 8. And I don’t even care. The list of rules I used to break is so long it would take an entire notebook for Nora to write them all down, so why have I been sweating her stupid list? This is just one rule. I used to rebel by drinking beer and smoking pot and having sex. Now I’m helping my tiny cousin with her homework. Sue me. Seriously, try to kick me out for this one, Auntie Nora.

  The homework is harder than I thought. It’s fractions. It’s asking which fraction is bigger: one-half or one-third? One-fifth or two-fifths? Was homework really this hard in the first grade?

  It takes about thirty seconds before I start to doubt myself, start to wonder if I can teach this little girl first-grade math, but she’s trying so sincerely. I feel some of the nausea in my system drain out of my fingers.

  I’m saying, “Bigger number on the bottom means small. Bigger number on the top means big,” and showing her a pie on the back of the homework sheet that I keep shading and erasing with her pencil. She’s on the verge of getting it, so I’m leaning almost out of my room, my butt barely on the carpet. She grabs the pencil from me, saying, “I can shade in one-third of the pie,” and she starts to make a scratchy back-and-forth motion with the pencil. I’m stretching toward her, thinking that she might actually have it this time—it might have actually sunk in—when I hear Nora say, “Evelyn.”

  That’s when I see her feet, right behind Tammy’s bottom.

  Tammy and I both freeze, as if she also knows that meeting with me is not allowed.

  When I first look at Nora, I haven’t quite finished wiping the fear off my face, but by the time she starts talking to me, I’ve met her eyes in a “bring it on” expression. If you want to kick me out, just do it. What the hell do I care? You think I’m not used to this shit by now?

  “Tammy,” she says, and Tammy jumps. Nora’s face softens. She squats behind her daughter, leaning her blond hair into Tammy’s dark braids. “It’s okay, sweetie. Just go work in your room for a few minutes because I have to talk to Evelyn. I’ll send her in there to help you when we’re done if you want, okay?”

  She’ll what?

  Tammy nods, but her chin is wobbling like she’s close to tears.

  Nora closes her in a hug before Tammy disappears into what the girls call the Pink Room.

  I feel grateful to Tammy at this minute and not just for distracting me from my puke-layers with fractions, but also because when Nora speaks, the edge in her voice is gone. “You were doing really well with her,” she says.

  How long had she been there? “I … I’m sorry.”

  Nora sighs and drops onto my bed. “Don’t be. She came to you, that’s good. She’s so skittish and afraid; I just don’t know what to do with her.” She’s talking to me like I’m an adult, like I might have something useful to say, like I’m also a mother, which—I jolt—I am. Maybe. Well, definitely. Right? Well, maybe.

  What makes you a mother anyway?

  Nora is clearly a mother, and she was never even pregnant. My mom is barely a mother, and she was pregnant four times. And when I have this baby I’m going to be a worse mother than either of them.

  I say, “I know you don’t want me talking to her without you around.”

  Nora shrugs. She has made such a big deal of this anytime one of the girls wants to do anything with me, so how can she just be shrugging it off now?

  “So how are things going, Evelyn?”

  I look at her, startled, then quickly look away. Things are sucky. But that’s not her fault. It’s mine for getting pregnant. And things were always sucky anyway.

  My gaze drifts to the window where the colors in the backyard tree compete with the blazing blue sky. Everyone warned me about freezing weather and massive snow piles in Chicago; no one mentioned the leaves. When it is time for all the nature to die, it suddenly bursts into more life than you can see in a single glance. No one mentioned the way that driving down the highway, orange and red and yellow and brown would streak by my window, painting the world happy. The way a tree could take weeks to adopt a sort of noncommittal peach and then suddenly burst into the brightest red you’ve ever seen for an unsatisfying twenty-four hours before settling into a cardboard brown.

  I’m still contemplating the leaves when Nora says, “Evelyn?”

  Maybe my baby is like that too. Maybe if it bursts into a frenzy of activity right at the end of my third trimester, it will mean that it’s time for it to disappear, to live again, but somewhere far, far away. Maybe I can give it away. But how can I wait that long to know?

  “Evelyn?” she says a third time.

  “Fine,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  “Evelyn,” she says, and hands me a coaster-sized piece of cardboard with my name at the top: my grades. A row of little half-moon Cs laugh at me for thinking that disappearing to Chicago would mean that I could be valedictorian after all.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Is she going to kick me out for this?

  “Let’s not just say that. Let’s talk. Is this just pregnancy brain?”

  What the hell is pregnancy brain? “Maybe.”

  “How do you like Santa Maria?”

  The truth is, I have no idea. I go through the day like a very visible ghost—everyone staring at me but no one speaking. Except Maryellie. I eat lunch at her table, and the other girls seem to put up with me out of pity or grace or something but I don’t have any friends. I stupidly froze them out with my silence the first few days. Lectures and labs and tests whoosh by my ears and regular high school life swirls around my head, but my brain is located in my uterus at every second of the day.

  Still, I’ve never gotten a B before, let alone a C. I’m a failure as a mother and a student.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “Is it harder than your old school?” she asks.

  “No. It’s easier.” Then, thinking about how being a visible ghost is better than being the slut of the school while I dodge Todd in hallways and pine for Lizzie’s voice, I say, “Please don’t send me back. I’ll work harder.”

  I expect an argument but she just says, “Okay, whatever you want.” Then she stands to go.

  I realize that I don’t know if I’m supposed to finish helping Tammy, so I say, “Nora?” This might be the first time I’m calling her by name.

  She crosses the room in two steps and collapses back on the bottom bunk. She doesn’t hug me or take my hand, but she looks at me like we’re in the middle of a genuine moment. “Yes? Evelyn, tell me what I can do for you.”

  “What?”

  “Aunt Linda and I, we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  They don’t?

  “We don’t know how to help you. We’ve never been pregnant. We’ve never had ex-boyfriends to move away from or little bodies inside of ours. We—neither of us—had stakes as high as valedictorianship or”—she breaks to swallow—“an unloving house either.”

  How does she know about my house?

  “I thought what you would need coming here was structure, and, except for this”—she gestures to the progress report, lying facedown on the carpet at my feet—“you’ve maintained the structure perfectly and still managed to secede from the family. You get smaller every day even as you get bigger. I have no idea what you’re feeling or thinking about but I know whatever it is, it’s deeply sad. And even Linda has no idea how to pull you back into the world, but you need to be in the world for that baby. And for you. For yourself too. Please, what can I do?”

  She’s like Lizzie at this minute, asking
for even just a pinky’s worth of who I am. She’s open and vulnerable and pleading. And I almost consider telling her that I think I might want to give it up, but I don’t know her. I don’t trust her. She doesn’t trust me. And I can’t do that, anyway.

  So I give her less than a pinky.

  “Could you buy some ginger ale the next time you’re at the store? It calms my stomach.”

  She laughs. Before now, I’ve only heard her tiny laugh aimed at SpongeBob or some silly song. Now her laugh matches her looks—beautiful and sharp, high enough to hit the ceiling. I can’t help laughing back. The sound escaping my lips is as unfamiliar as Nora’s and I wonder how long it’s been since I laughed—even just a two-syllable chuckle like this.

  “I’m going to take Celie out for a minute before dinner,” she says. “Will you keep helping Tammy?”

  There’s a warm feeling in my chest, like a washcloth on a sore muscle, when I nod. I think about wringing it out and spilling some warm drops on the bean, because it could use them too.

  When Tammy and I walk down to dinner, she’s playing with her index finger, examining how it’s divided into thirds, and her homework is done. At my place there’s a can of ginger ale and it hits me like a baseball bat that that is where Nora took Cecelia. And maybe I could be a mom if I was like Nora. Maybe she’s the best mom I know.

  The warm feeling dulls but lingers through dinner, and washing dishes, and a shower, and a chapter of my history textbook that I actually pay attention to. It lasts until bean makes my eyes close on the book and I climb my expanding body into bed, listening to the mattress squeak.

  But then I’m back on my chemistry book, the blue ring humming in my ears and casting an eerie glow on my pale flesh. I look to the book, for some reason checking to see if it’s my Santa Maria chem book or my St. Mary’s chem book. Just then it tips and knocks me forward and I fall into nothingness. I fall faster and faster, air and black swirling around me, and when I wake up I’m sweating and freezing and my heart is beating so fast it shakes my newly grown boobs.