Me, Him, Them, and It

by Caela Carter

  I don’t have anyone else to talk to, so I jump across the room, flip on my computer, and dig in my still half-packed suitcase for the little business card of the only person I know will always listen to me:

  MARY MULDOON

  PLANNED PARENTHOOD

  Jacksonville, Florida

  I ignore my brimming inbox, open a new mail window, and type as fast as I can.

  Mary,

  I still need to talk. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do. I know you thought you were done dealing with me, but I don’t know who else to talk to.

  Evelyn

  P.S. I’ve been taking my vitamins and stuff, just so you know.

  When I climb back into my bed, I’m actually expecting to fall asleep the way I did a month ago when I wrote to Lizzie and truly believed she’d write back. I know Mary will write back. She’s the wrong person, but she’ll write back.

  She’s tiny and she never just tells me what to do. She’ll probably try to mail me pamphlets or she might even just show up at SMHS and hand me a ginger ale and expect me to understand what she means when she tells me some other cryptic story. But I also know she’ll tell me something. She’ll give me some other piece of information that I don’t already have. First, she’ll tell me to write down everything I do know. I’m not sleeping, so I lug my laptop into my bed, thinking maybe putting it on paper will allow me to fall asleep, and maybe it will impress Mary if I have a list already.

  I type:

  1. Raising a baby is hard work.

  2. I don’t know how to do it and I will probably be very bad at it.

  3. I will have to move back into the Silent House.

  4. My parents will help me but they won’t be any better at it than me.

  5. I need to find something to do with it while I’m at school and stuff.

  6. I need to figure out how to go to college with a baby.

  7. I don’t even like bean, and I’m supposed to love it if I’m its mother.

  8. That’s not its fault.

  9. If I work hard enough, I think I can learn how to be a mom and love it.

  10. I don’t know how to name it.

  11. Once I have the baby, Todd will have to stay in touch with me.

  But I delete that one immediately.

  I’m still pressing backspace when I hear murmured voices in the hallway. My first impulse is panic—technically my lights are out but I’m pretty sure sitting in my bed with an open laptop at 3:04 a.m. breaks the “lights out” rule. And I don’t want Nora to kick me out. I want to be here while I decide what to do with this thing—away from Todd and Lizzie and my Silent House. I can focus on bean here.

  I snap my laptop shut so they won’t see a glow underneath my door and hold my breath, waiting for Nora to catch me. Instead, they keep talking. And then I start to hear my name passing back and forth between them. At first it’s just my name I notice—a football tossed in a snowstorm—but then I start to hear the context.

  “Her mother said she hasn’t talked to her in weeks?” I hear Nora ask. “Who’s she talking to, then?”

  Aunt Linda’s voice is more muffled: “… friends … Evelyn is … father …”

  “Does Evelyn speak during your group at school?” I don’t need to hear Aunt Linda’s answer because I already know it: no.

  “She doesn’t seem to have any friends there, really.” That’s not my fault. They ignore me. But even as I think that, I know it’s mostly my own fault.

  Nora’s pointing a lot of fingers at Aunt Linda, which isn’t fair. I mean, they’re just supposed to give me room and board. They didn’t sign on for anything else. They aren’t my parents.

  I’m expecting Aunt Linda to raise her voice, because she always does. Not the kind of screaming explosions that used to startle me awake in the Silent House, but some loud, earnest communication that for some reason always makes me picture them both naked.

  But Aunt Linda’s voice is laced with more concern than I’ve heard since my days as a burrito and she says, “You’re really worried about her, aren’t you?” I know she has taken strong and stiff Nora into her arms, right there in the hallway. She says, “I think you’re right. She’s not really talking. She needs to be.”

  “I tried to talk to her tonight,” Nora says. “Do you know she even got Tammy talking? Evelyn helped her with her math homework. She has your gift.”

  Gift? With math? That’s definitely not true.

  Nora goes on. “She wouldn’t talk to me, Linda. You have to take care of it. I’m not as good as you are.”

  There’s several seconds of silence and I think that they went to bed, but when they start talking again I’m pretty sure that they just paused to kiss for a while.

  Then Aunt Linda says, “But you are good at letting me know where my services are needed. I’m not too good at that. Let’s let Evie take the girls costume shopping and trick-or-treating. What do you think?”

  My heart races. I’m not sure why. It’s not like I’ve been pining away for the old days of trick-or-treating. But I find my brain saying, Say yes, Nora, please say yes. I don’t hear her say anything, though. I hear their bedroom door open. I hear it click closed. I’m glad they decided to have that conversation in the hallway, even though it makes no sense.

  “If I get to go trick-or-treating,” I tell the bean, “I’ll think of it as practice. And I’ll know how to take you trick-or-treating next year.”

  5 Months, 22 Days Left

  Mary writes back and tells me to call her. She doesn’t have my phone number, so when I don’t call, she writes and writes and writes and sends me links to websites that are supposed to tell me about adoption and how to do it and I don’t want to know anything about that so she didn’t understand my question at all.

  She says that I can choose adoption right up to the end and that I need to be very careful about having a plan for this baby after it’s born—a solid plan that I don’t change once I give birth—and all that, blah-blah. All she does is put that damn belly dancer back in my brain again. The abortion/adoption ship has sailed. I’m having this baby. She has no idea what she’s doing. She’s about as much help as Lizzie.

  I know I should start listening to somebody but whenever I try, it just seems too hard.

  I leave all the e-mails that piled up during that panic spat glowing unread in my inbox. But I read the new ones.

  Todd sends one about once a week. Dad writes every day and it’s usually completely boring and all about anthropology or archaeology or some crap. He’s trying. He’s finally really trying to be the old Daddy-Dad from before, so sometimes I think about writing him back. But with everything that’s going on in my life, it’s so much easier to stay mad at him.

  Today, I’m sitting at my desk drawing molecules for my chemistry homework and trying to keep my head from wandering into my uterus. Aunt Linda yells my name the second she walks in the door, the way people at a party yell “surprise!” She’s like this at school—she greets every girl like a long-lost friend. She hugs them. She gives every student a birthday card every year. She smiles and frowns through their stories. She looks them in the eyes like they are the only thing existing in the world anytime they try to talk to her. I used to think all of this affection was just for me. Moving here, I was prepared to share it with Cecelia and Tammy, but not the whole city.

  “Evie, get your butt down here,” she says. “I’m taking my favorite niece out to dinner.”

  I almost call back “I’m your only niece,” but that sounds too lovey-dovey sitcomy and that’s just not me. I pull on a coat, the one my mom bought me during that crazy Michigan Avenue shopping trip, and pound my swollen body down the stairs.

  “Olive Garden?” she says, and I think about how I’ve never been there because it’s not the kind of place my parents would ever go.

  Over our salad, Aunt Linda says, “I talked to your mom yesterday. She misses you.”

  I feel my mouth open with shock when my eyes well up. The way I’
m reacting to my own body makes me laugh and then I’m crying and laughing and gaping in shock all at once. I feel Aunt Linda’s eyes on me as I start hiccupping with excess emotion. She hands me a tissue and says, “Well, I’ll be damned,” which makes us both laugh harder. It takes a good five minutes before I’m breathing normally and my face is wiped off.

  “Is crying a symptom?”

  Aunt Linda chuckles. “It can be, I think, but maybe it’s not. When we first got Celie and Tammy, I cried every day for weeks.”

  “You?” I try to picture it. It’s impossible. My imagination can’t even iron her smile into a straight line.

  “I had no idea what I was doing,” Aunt Linda says, helping herself to another breadstick.

  “You didn’t?”

  Nora was the one who read all the books and she was ready for the day-to-day stuff—bedtime routines and balanced diets and educational options. I was supposed to be ready for them emotionally—talk to them about the adjustment, about having parents that would always be there for them, about learning to trust again. And on top of that, I knew that one day I’d need to prepare them for how unusual their family looks. Cecelia was still so little and so full of affection. She trusted us immediately. Of course, that trusting nature comes with its own concerns. But Tammy is a different barrel of monkeys. Every time I tried to talk to her, she just went stiff as a board. I was a total failure.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  Aunt Linda laughs. “I’m glad I give off that impression. I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

  But that’s exactly how I feel.

  “If you have no idea what you’re doing …” I pause, a breadstick halfway to my mouth. I don’t know how to ask the question. “Then what do you do?”

  Aunt Linda hears the question I was really asking, the question with words that are too scary and binding.

  “I just love them so much. There’s no choice but to do what I think is best. They are the little loves of my life.”

  For some reason, my eyes start stinging again. Our food arrives and I watch the waiter until they dry out. He puts a steaming plate of chicken alfredo in front of me.

  “Evie,” Aunt Linda says, looking at her plate while I pause to look at her. “Your mom says you haven’t talked to her in a while. Why is that?”

  Excuses fly to my tongue—I’m busy, I don’t want to, I’m mad at her, I’m hiding my progress report results. But I think about Nora in the hallway last night, saying that I need to start talking to someone. Nora doesn’t need to care about me. She’s not my family. I guess I owe it to her to try.

  My voice, same as whenever I’m trying to tell the truth, gets small and high.

  “She’s rushing me into figuring everything out. And Mary keeps telling me not to rush.”

  Aunt Linda’s eyebrows knot in the center of her head. “What do you mean, rushing you?”

  “She wants me to have everything figured out.” It gets easier with each word. This is Aunt Linda. And she can still love me even if I’m not Cecelia or Tammy—the little loves of her life.

  Aunt Linda raises her eyebrows so high I think they might bounce right off her forehead. “You mean you are considering adoption?”

  I expect to see disappointment fall on her face, the way I imagine it did when she first found out that I got pregnant or the way it would if she found out I’d done drugs. But it almost seems like a light goes on behind her eyes.

  “Sweetie, you need to talk to people about that.”

  “But I’m not really considering it. And I don’t have anyone to talk to anyway.” The words fall on the table faster than I can catch them. They feel huge and incriminating, but Aunt Linda dismisses them with a wave of her hand.

  “Please. You’re falling down with people to talk to. Starting with yours truly.”

  I nod.

  “So let’s start here. Why aren’t you considering adoption?”

  I shrug.

  “Would it be too hard to give up your baby after all this time? Do you feel like no one can love it the way you will?” Aunt Linda spears a piece of chicken and blows at the steam.

  I shake my head. “Nothing like that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  My life is over anyway. It’s my fault the bean is here, so I’m the one who should have to deal with it. But I don’t say anything.

  “Okay,” she says. “I don’t want to push you so far that you stop talking to me. We’ll enjoy our meal. Tomorrow you’re going to call your mother, but not until after I talk to her and tell her to stop pressuring you, because Mary—whoever she is—is right. You need to make all of these plans seriously and carefully.”

  I’m relieved.

  “But what we do need to do immediately is start to fill in the ifs about those decisions. Like: If adoption, what agency? What kind of family? Or, if parenting: Where are you going to live, get money, what will you do about school?”

  I feel my pulse quicken. “I’m not thinking about adoption.”

  “But for now, we’ll just enjoy ourselves. Serious talking starts tomorrow. Am I a good person for this talking to happen with, or do you want to use someone else?”

  Lizzie’s face appears in my head, and, strangely, so does Nora’s. “No. You. You’re good.”

  “And you’ll talk to your parents, if I get them off your back?” she asks. She hasn’t said anything about the Stranger before this and I know I should tell her that I haven’t been talking to him at all, but I nod because she said that was the end of the tough conversation for tonight.

  “And will you talk at group on Wednesday?”

  Geez. I thought we were going to just enjoy ourselves. I shrug.

  “Will you at least talk to Maryellie before group? That girl’s tongue is going numb trying to talk to you while you just smile and nod in her face as if she can’t tell she’s part of a two-month-long, one-sided conversation.”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  She nods. “So who is Mary anyway?” she asks.

  And I start to describe how little she was and her crazy curlicue handwriting and how I never knew what she was writing. Aunt Linda laughs. I know she’s kind of just laughing to be nice, but she’s laughing a lot.

  “The best thing she did for me was turn me on to this,” I say, tapping my glass of ginger ale.

  Aunt Linda laughs again. “I know. Nora says we’re going to spend all four thousand dollars this month on ginger ale alone.”

  I stop laughing immediately. The money. I can’t believe she brought it up. It makes me want to ask the question I’ve been itching to ask since I first got to Chicago. But I can’t. Or can I? Maybe I can decide to be Talkative Evelyn the way I decided to be Bad Evelyn. “Why did you and Nora take me, anyway?”

  Aunt Linda pulls my hand across the table into both of hers, even though I’m still holding a fork. “We wanted to, Evie-Teeny,” she says.

  I could let it go there, but she didn’t answer my question, so I push the rest of the words out of me. “But you just said it has been hard with the girls already and I know things aren’t perfect with you and Nora, so why? I mean, why take on one more thing?” Aunt Linda squeezes my hand. I keep talking. “If it was really for the money, just tell me, because it’s okay, but I need to know.”

  She shakes her head and now her smile disappears and tears gather in her eyes. “Evelyn, don’t you know you’re the love of my life? How could I not help you? We would have done it for free. We could use the money, so we’re taking it. But you better believe we would do it for free. We would pay to help you if we had to.”

  My cheeks feel wet again, and I yank my hand to get it out of her grasp because I hate these stupid tears and I hate seeming like such a sissy and I’m just not used to it. But she won’t let me.

  “And you’re wrong, you know?”

  I look at her. Now I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “About Nora and me. You’re wrong. We’re different as different can be,
and sometimes it takes talking—a lot of talking—to figure out where the happy medium is, but I love that woman and she loves me. We’re in good shape.”

  I think of my mom and dad and how they will never, ever find a happy medium. And I wonder if Todd came back to me if we could ever find a happy medium. But I know we couldn’t because he’s a dumbass and now he’s a jerk and there is no way to know if I will even have anyone to talk to about bean back in Jacksonville, or if I’ll ever get to talk to someone so honestly that it sounds like an argument even when we’re in good shape. So the tears just keep flying and I hate them and we’re in public and it’s so embarrassing the way they pile up on the table in front of me until Aunt Linda finally says, “Do you want to take Cecelia and Tammy costume shopping tomorrow? And take them trick-or-treating next week?”

  I smile in spite of myself and imagine Cecelia’s little hand in mine as she yaps in my ear and Tammy walks next to us with big eyes looking at everything there is to see in the mall.

  “So she said yes?” I don’t realize how this incriminates me of eavesdropping until the words are already out of my mouth.

  “Both Nora and I would be thrilled if you would do that.” She doesn’t seem to notice.

  When we get home, I have an e-mail from Todd.

  E—

  Bethany brought you up at lunch today. She was talking about how you used to do those impressions when you were drunk. Remember how you used to imitate Sister Face? Your voice would be all high and your back would be all hunched and you would even use the words she would use, like “negligible” and “youngsters.” It made me laugh thinking of you.

  Do you have anyone to imitate at your new school?

  I hope things are good and you feel all right and all that,

  Todd

  It’s the first one I’m tempted to answer. Somewhere in my mind I know my life would be easier if I started answering some of these e-mails. But I don’t.