Me, Him, Them, and It

by Caela Carter

  I won’t be happy like Maryellie is when bean is born. All I want is to get this thing out of me and run away from it so everything can go back to normal, back to the way it was before.

  Mario stands and takes Emanuella back, and when Maryellie is saying “Don’t you just love her?” I’m already mumbling congratulations and wandering out the door, past the lonely woman, ignoring the fact that my body already misses Emanuella’s little weight and warmth in my arms.

  On the way home, I call Todd.

  “E!” he answers, surprised. But I don’t let him talk.

  “This is your last chance.”

  “Last chance for what?”

  “This is your last chance to do anything right. You know it’s your fault that my life is over now and there’s not a single thing you will do about it. Not a fucking thing. All you do is screw Amber Sallisbury and pretend like you’re a hotshot. I’ve had enough of your shit.”

  “Evelyn.”

  “No. You’re not talking. You’re listening. You better be fucking glad I’m not keeping this baby because if I was, I’d be calling your mom or Amber or both and telling them exactly who you are, you stupid, fake bastard. You know I loved you. And you just screwed me over.”

  “Evelyn,” he says, and my name just hangs there like a dirty sheet abandoned on a clothesline.

  “What? Do you have anything to say?”

  “You aren’t keeping the baby? What are you going to do with it?”

  I hang up.

  When I get home, I slam the front door harder than I mean to, and Aunt Linda comes rushing into the kitchen. “Evie-Teeny? You okay?”

  “I don’t want to do this, Aunt Linda. I’m done.” Those stupid tears paint my face pathetic.

  “Oh, sweetie.” She puts her arms around me. “You’ve barely begun.”

  “No, I’m done. I’m going to get this thing out of me, give it away, go to Jacksonville, and let everything go back to normal.”

  Aunt Linda starts to make those circles on my shoulder blades again. “It’s not going to work like that, Evie-Teeny. It’s just not.”

  I pull away so I can face her. “Listen, Aunt Linda. I don’t want it anymore. I’m done.”

  She puts me back into her arms and sways me from side to side. “Okay. If you’re sure, Evie, okay. But nothing’s ever going to be the same anyway.”

  But she’s wrong about that. She has to be.

  Done Means Done

  Aunt Linda starts bombarding me with adoption information. I refuse to look at it.

  My mom calls to try to get me to think about it. I hang up.

  Aunt Linda resorts to shoving bits of any idea into every conversation imaginable: different agencies, different kinds of families, different visitation rights. I keep walking away. She pulls a Mary and starts leaving pamphlets everywhere I’m sure to see them—at the sink when it’s time for me to do dishes, on the kitchen table at breakfast, even in my bed. I could call an agency that specializes in Catholic families, or one for gay couples who want to be parents, or one for open-minded families. I could choose a family that already has some kids or a family that doesn’t have any. I could choose a family that lives in Chicago, or a family from Florida that would have to come all the way up here when I go into labor. Or I could choose a family from somewhere else completely.

  I open a pamphlet with glossy pictures of smiling babies and young, beautiful, upper-class parents of all races and sexual orientations, and I just look at them until I feel my heart start to race and then I put them down. I pick up a school book and take deep breaths until everything evens out.

  How is anyone supposed to decide this anyway? I’m supposed to interview people and meet with them and let them reimburse all my medical bills. And Mom says to go with a Catholic family and Aunt Linda wants me to choose a gay couple, I’m sure, and Dad says I need to make sure they love each other when I go meet them and I keep hanging up or walking away from conversations because I just can’t do it. I just want to be done with it and have everything go back to normal.

  I call Lizzie.

  “Just let your aunt Linda decide,” she says.

  “Can I really do that? Is it, like, legal?”

  “How would anyone know?” Lizzie asks.

  I think about it. I don’t know if Aunt Linda would do that, but if I just refuse to do anything about it, she’d have to.

  “So when’s your spring break?” Lizzie asks.

  “The third week in March,” I say.

  “Good! I’m coming.”

  “What?” She shoves me so fast into another conversation topic it feels like rolling down a hill.

  “Yeah, I’m coming, and you’re going to drive me around. This is how you’re going to make it up to me that you were such a bad friend.”

  That’s it? Drive her around Chicago during spring break? Let her visit me?

  “Um, okay. When are you coming?”

  “I’m booking my ticket right now. You’re not going to believe this, but my dad, he lives in Chicago. We’re going to find him.”

  “Oh.” Can I tell Lizzie that I barely know my way around Chicago or that I’m not sure if my aunts will be okay with her coming or that I’ll be so huge by March I won’t want to go anywhere or that I don’t want her to see me this pregnant or that I don’t want to make any plans at all until I’m done with this thing and I can go back to my normal life in Jacksonville?

  But she hears all the hesitancy in my voice. “You have to do this for me, Ev. You have to.”

  And I know I do.

  All These Parents

  “I want you to do it,” I tell Aunt Linda while we do the dishes.

  Her eyes go wide. “Oh, Evelyn. I don’t think we can. We have our hands full with these two and that would just be … I mean …”

  “No!” I interrupt. Although if Aunt Linda and Nora just took bean, I’d always know it was okay. I know they would love it and I know it would grow up safe and educated and healthy. Unless it wasn’t healthy. Unless it gets leukemia or something and then I wouldn’t want to know that. Or if that day I got drunk right after I found out means it’s born with fetal alcohol whatever like I read about in Mary’s dumb pamphlets, I wouldn’t want to know that either. And then when it finds out that its cousin is actually its mom. That would just not be fair. We wouldn’t go back to normal that way.

  “I mean, I want you to decide on the family.”

  Aunt Linda looks even more surprised. “But, Evelyn, these people are going to be in your life forever. Don’t you want to decide who they are?”

  “What do you mean they’re going to be in my life forever? Your parents aren’t in your life,” I spit back.

  Aunt Linda nods. “My biological parents were in a different situation. They live somewhere in impoverished China. Since the resources are available to you, I thought you’d want an open adoption.”

  I know I should know what an open adoption is by now. I know Aunt Linda is trying to do everything for me and I’m just closing myself off. I know I suck. “What does that even mean?”

  I can hear all the research Aunt Linda did for me and all the ways she tried to make my life easier the past few months in her sigh. “It can mean a lot of things. It can mean you get pictures and yearly updates on how your baby is doing. It can mean you visit or you’re legally allowed to visit a certain amount.” Even as she’s talking, I’m shaking my head.

  “I just want everything to go back to normal.”

  “Evie-Teeny, that’s not going to happen.”

  Yes, it is. “I want a closed adoption.”

  “I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure you’re really thinking anymore.”

  “I want a closed adoption, and I want you to handle it.”

  “I don’t think I can find a family for you, sweetie.”

  “Then I’ll ask my mom. Or my dad.” I didn’t even realize this plan was wedged into the back of my head. “But I trust you more. And I’m not doing it.” I’m exactly like T
odd. If he gets off scot-free, then so do I. Even if that means I have to hate myself as much as I hate him.

  Aunt Linda just stares at me, her hands frozen in the soapy sink. I’m like a little kid holding my breath until I get my way. I’m crazy; my brain is swimming with questions about open adoptions and the right way to do this, but I’m not inside my brain right now.

  “They’d do it for me. Either one. The second I ask.”

  She nods. “I know they would. I’ll call them. The four of us will do it together.”

  2 Months, 10 Days Till Normal

  I go back to ignoring the bean in my belly. I mean, I’m still eating right and going to the doctor and swallowing those crazy-huge vitamins, but I think about school. I come home after my last class and log hours of homework. I open books at lunch because Maryellie isn’t there anyway.

  When Aunt Nora shows me my third-quarter report card, my Bs have all pulled themselves into pointy As.

  “This is impressive, Evelyn.”

  I shrug, but I let myself smile. I’ll go to college, and no one will know this happened to me.

  Cecelia catapults herself into my room and slams her little body onto my lap.

  “Congratulations on your reporter card.” She nuzzles into my neck.

  Then she starts bouncing, her knees in my lap, her little palms right on bean.

  “Medium, you have to be careful,” I say, taking her hands in mine. “Remember, there’s a baby in there.”

  “When’s the baby coming?” Tammy asks, and I jump. I hadn’t even seen her hovering in the doorway. Nora watches from a few feet away, her eyes on the top of our heads.

  “April.”

  “Is she going to live here?” Tammy asks.

  “No.” I have no idea how to explain this to a four-year-old and a six-year-old who are themselves adopted. “It’s going to live with its own family, just like you live with your mommies and they are your family.”

  Cecelia starts bouncing again, her braids flying across her face, ignoring Tammy’s questions.

  “Will the baby look like you and Mommy Nora or like Mommy Linda or like Cecelia and me?”

  “Well.” I stall, motioning for Tammy to come closer so I can put my hands on her shoulders over Cecelia’s little body. “I think the baby will look like me, but I don’t know.”

  “Will me and Cecelia get to meet the baby?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.”

  “And once you have the baby, are you leaving?”

  So there’s the real question. “No, I’m here until the summer. Right, Nora?” I look at her for backup.

  “If that’s what you want, Evelyn, you got it.”

  “After you leave, when will you come back?” Tammy asks. “I need you for my math homework.”

  I look at Nora. “I’ll visit.”

  Tammy runs away and Nora runs after her. But it’s not my fault I’m leaving, Tammy.

  After the girls and Nora have cleared out of my room, after we’ve eaten family dinner and I’ve done the dishes, after Tammy’s math is complete and packed away for tomorrow, after my own homework is done and sitting in a folder on my desk, my mom calls.

  “We think we found them,” she says, and I know she means the family for bean but I don’t care. Or at least, I’m trying not to care.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Your aunts met them last week but they wanted me to tell you. We’re hoping this is it, but the final decision is yours. We’re all going to meet them during your spring break. Your father and I will fly out.”

  “Not me.”

  “I think you have to, Evelyn.”

  “Lizzie’s going to be here for break.”

  She answers like that’s no big deal. “Lizzie will understand if you have to go somewhere for one afternoon. You need to do this, Evelyn. I’m not sure you’ll forgive yourself if you don’t.”

  “I’m not going.” A tiny part of my heart detaches and flies around my rib cage, reminding the rest of me that I haven’t even thought about it. It’s a mistake, but I ignore that little part and say, “I don’t think you and Dad need to come all the way out here anyway. Aunt Linda and Nora already met them. They have to be fine. I trust Aunt Linda.”

  “I’m going to give you some time to think about this,” Mom says, even though I already decided. “You also need to start thinking about with whom you would like to live when you return to Jacksonville.” Full lawyer mode.

  “I just want everything to go back to normal, Mom.”

  She laughs the lawyer laugh that makes even my huge pregnant body feel puny. “What is normal, Evelyn?”

  1 Month, 17 Days Till Normal

  A few days later, I call Lizzie.

  “Do you think I need to meet this family?”

  She laughs. “I mean, combining your mother, your father who is now heartbroken by her, and your crazy aunt … they must have come up with the best possibility, right?” She says it like a joke, but I actually believe it.

  “I don’t want to go meet them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just … I don’t want to know who they are. I want to be far away. I want everything to go back to normal.”

  “Not me,” Lizzie says. “I’m hoping everything changes when I meet my dad. Maybe he’ll be rich and give me lots of big presents. There are rich people in Chicago, right?”

  “Yeah, rich people and poor people.” Lizzie is crazy to think her dad wants her stalking him and finding him this way after all this time, but I can’t say that. I have to do this for her.

  “What do you think he’ll say when he sees me?”

  I pause, still thinking of bean and the strangers, real strangers, raising it and all that. Maybe I should just keep bean myself. Whenever I think about bean just out there in the world, I get so worried. But if I don’t think about it, it seems okay to just go through labor and send it on its way. With strangers. I could meet them, but if I do, then won’t I be worried forever?

  “I think he’ll be surprised.”

  “Good surprised or bad surprised?” she presses, not bothering to squelch the excitement lacing her voice.

  Bad, I think. But I give her what she wants. “You’re the amazing Lizzie. Good surprised, of course.”

  1 Month, 10 Days Till Normal

  Maryellie finally comes back to school in March, having found day care she can afford. I start driving her home after school—now that I know where she lives—because the bus takes too long and she wants to get back to Emanuella as quickly as possible.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to go through all this and let someone else watch it grow up,” she says, but I see the dark circles lining her eyes, I hear her complaining about gross diapers, and even though Mario is still working at the gas station, it doesn’t look like Maryellie is moving out of that crowded apartment anytime soon.

  I know I have things that she doesn’t—money, parents who will buy cribs and pay for day care. But if I had to decide between our resources, I’d choose hers—a baby daddy who loves the baby, a mom who can’t stop hugging. She’d probably choose mine.

  “I’m serious!” she says, seeing the doubt in my eyes. “I’d give up everything for Emanuella now. She’s the happiest thing to happen to me.”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, it would be even happier if she happened a decade from now,” Maryellie admits with a bashful shrug. “But now that she’s here, I couldn’t stand to have her be somewhere else. I just wish Mario would help take care of her more.”

  “You’re going to go to college, right?” I ask. I’m still not completely used to the way this is not an obvious outcome at SMHS.

  “Community college, maybe.” Maryellie shrugs. “For a while.”

  “Maryellie, you’re in AP chem.”

  She nods. “I just can’t imagine spending four years focused on studying more than Emanuella. I’m going to graduate, though, don’t worry.” I lower my eyebrows. “Oh, I d
on’t know,” she says. “Maybe Loyola or DePaul will let me go part time or something.”

  She’s playing with her fingers, and I feel bad for pushing, like Lizzie, so I say, “Aunt Linda and my parents want me to go with the three of them to meet the baby’s family next week.”

  “Oh, good,” Maryellie says, still looking out the window.

  I laugh. “No, Maryellie. I’m not going.”

  “Evelyn.” She puts her hands on my right bicep, even though I’m driving. “You have to go. You have to meet them.”

  “Why?” I ask, eyebrows still lowered.

  “What if you hate them? They’re going to be your baby’s parents,” she says.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m not like you. I don’t need to know anything about them.”

  “Evelyn, you have to go,” she says again.

  I feel the tears coming back, those stupid tears. I pull over, shoulders shaking. My entire eyeballs turn into liquid and spill into my lap in big, goopy globs. I’m trying to tell Maryellie that I’m sorry for the delay because I know she wants to get home to Emanuella, but I can’t even get words out between all the goop running out of my eyes and nostrils and all over my face.

  I feel a tissue dabbing at my nose. I can’t believe she actually just wiped my snot.

  The tears slow down enough that I can look at her. “I just need everything to go back to the way it was before I got pregnant.”

  She reaches out and takes another swipe under my nose. She’s so motherly right now, as if going through labor actually turns you into a mother.

  “But wouldn’t that mean your parents would have to be together?”

  “Well, besides that.” Because I can’t control that.

  “And would that mean you’re sleeping with Todd?”

  “Well, not that either. Screw him,” I say, and I win a little laugh out of her.