Daughter's Keeper

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Nothing. Morning sickness. Can you shut the door? Please.” Olivia heard the door click shut. She lay in bed for a long time, miserable with queasiness, but unwilling to leave her room to get the food that would settle her stomach. Hours later, when she finally heard the door to Elaine and Arthur’s room open and shut, she got out of bed and crept into the kitchen. She made slice after slice of toast, which she ate dripping with butter and jam. She ­didn’t bother washing her face or brushing her teeth before she returned to her bed, and during the night, whenever she licked her lips, she tasted blackberries.

  The next morning, she awoke after Elaine and Arthur had already left the house. She spent the day in her pajamas, watching television and eating cold cereal, toast, leftover Chinese food. She discovered that if she made sure her stomach was full at all times, the nausea was manageable. After the sun faded, and the dusk had begun to settle around the house, she heard a car pull into the driveway. She grabbed a bag of almonds and a block of cheddar cheese and ran to her room. She jumped back into bed, and lay, still and silent, listening to Arthur bustle around the house. He didn’t come to her door, and she didn’t leave her room. When Elaine came home, Olivia heard the rumble of their voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. An hour or so later, Olivia heard her mother’s steps come down the hall. She held her breath. The footsteps stopped just outside her door, and Olivia waited for Elaine’s knock. It never came. After a moment or two, her mother walked away. Olivia fell asleep, and woke in the middle of the night to a dark and silent house. She made another midnight raid on the kitchen, this time eating the remains of a roast chicken she found in the fridge.

  The next morning, Olivia woke to Elaine’s hand on her shoulder. “Honey, wake up. We have to be at the clinic in an hour.”

  Olivia shrugged the down comforter up above her head. She buried her face in the cool softness of her pillow and concentrated on the gentle buzzing in her ears.

  “Olivia.” Elaine shook her. “Olivia, that’s enough. It’s time to get up.”

  “In a little while. I’m really tired. I just need to sleep for awhile longer,” Olivia mumbled, her voice muffled by the bedclothes.

  “No. Not in a little while. Now. You’ve been in that bed for two solid days. We have to leave in an hour. Get up.”

  Olivia sank deeper under the covers and shut out the sound of her mother’s voice. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get up. She could very clearly imagine the steps involved in getting out of bed. If she wanted to, she could sit up, move her feet to the floor, stand up, walk across the room to the pile of clothes in the corner of the room. She could even imagine getting dressed. It was not that she was unable to leave her bed. There just didn’t seem to be any particular reason to engage in such protracted activity. And the bed felt so very soft.

  Olivia felt her body shift as Elaine sat down next to her. She closed her eyes against the sudden glare of light as Elaine drew the covers down from her face.

  “Honey, I know what you’re feeling. It’s depression. I know because I’ve been exactly where you are. You just have to get up. Otherwise it will get harder and harder every day until finally you won’t be able to do it even if you want to.”

  Olivia looked up at her mother’s face. Her eyebrows were furrowed in a look of concern that was entirely different from the anxious, worried expression Olivia had planted there so many times before. This time her mother looked almost compassionate. Olivia’s eyes filled with tears, and she half-sat up. She fell across Elaine’s lap, and felt her mother’s hand softly stroke her hair.

  “I don’t want to have an abortion,” she mumbled into her mother’s lap. She hadn’t thought about the words before they left her mouth, but suddenly she realized that they were absolutely true. She did not want to have an abortion. She wanted to be pregnant. She wanted to feel the baby grow and take shape inside of her. She wanted to create a little person, to make this hypothetical being real. After that, who knew. She wasn’t sure she wanted a baby. She had, in fact, no idea what she was going to do after it was born, but she knew, suddenly and for certain, that she wasn’t going to end her pregnancy.

  Elaine sighed and said, “That’s just the depression talking.”

  Olivia sat up, shaking off her mother’s hand. “Being pregnant is the only good thing that has happened to me in all this. I’m not going to have an abortion. I’m just not going to.”

  Elaine bit her lip. She reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Will you give it up for adoption?”

  Olivia shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes and imagined holding her baby, a warm wriggling creature with its father’s black hair. She felt curiously detached from the imagined infant. It was hard even to fantasize about a baby, about her baby. And yet, it was harder still to imagine the baby gone. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is that I’m not going to end it.”

  In a soft and almost wheedling voice, Elaine said, “Have you given any thought to what you’ll do if you end up being ­convicted?”

  “I know you couldn’t keep him. Right?” It was impossible to disguise the hope in her voice, but her mother began shaking her head almost before Olivia could finish her sentence.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia. But that’s just not a possibility. Arthur and I are not at a place in our lives right now where we could be parents. We’re planning our wedding. We’re preparing for retirement. We’re beginning to work less and enjoy ourselves more. Neither of us could start all over again at this point.”

  Olivia wasn’t surprised. She’d known from the very moment she’d seen the faint pink lines in the pregnancy test that her mother would not be able to help her, that she would be entirely on her own. She wondered for a moment what it would have been like to have a different mother, one who would have embraced the idea of a grandchild with joy, one who would have automatically assumed that it was her job to care for the baby if her own daughter ­couldn’t. A mother, for example, like Jorge’s.

  Olivia had first met Jorge’s parents, Araceli and Juan Carlos, only a few weeks before she had left San Miguel and returned home to the United States. One evening when he picked her up, Jorge told her they were going to a party. Olivia didn’t know until they arrived at the restaurant on top of a hill overlooking the city that it was his younger sister’s quinciñeros, her fifteenth birthday celebration. At first she had been embarrassed, dressed as she was in nothing more elaborate than a pair of jeans and a white embroidered shirt she’d bought in the market. The other women wore shiny gowns and glittering makeup, and tottered around the room in spiked heels.

  Her self-consciousness soon evaporated, however, when Jorge’s mother and sisters pulled her into their tight knot of women sitting crowded around a table in the center of the room. Laughing, they waved Jorge away and piled Olivia’s plate high with tamales and carnitas. Jorge’s mother, Araceli, a tiny, plump woman stuffed into a pink taffeta gown like a sausage into a casing, grabbed Olivia’s hand in her own and held it tightly for the rest of the evening. She stroked Olivia’s hair and, after drinking two or three small glasses of tequila, made Olivia promise that when she and Jorge had babies, they would be blond like their mother.

  “I’ll teach you to make birria and menudo, all the food that Jorge loves. And when you two want to go away for a little romance, maybe to the beach, to Coyuka de Benitez or Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, you’ll leave the babies with me. You’ll come home, and they’ll be fatter than ever! Right Yolanda? Manuela?”

  Her daughters and daughters-in-law smiled and laughed. “If she had her way, they’d all be round as soccer balls!” one of Jorge’s sisters said. Every time Olivia tried to get up, Araceli would squeeze her close, call her mi hija, her daughter, and insist that she remain seated by her side. By the end of the evening, Olivia had spent more time in Jorge’s mother’s embrace than she had Elaine’s in the twenty years since she was a baby,
and had fallen more in love with the sprightly little woman than she was with the son.

  “Yeah, I know you can’t take the baby. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I get convicted. I’m just not going to go there right now, okay Mom? I can’t think about that now. I just have to trust that Izaya will figure something out. The case will go away, and then it’ll be me and the baby.”

  Elaine heaved a resigned sigh. “I suppose you could go back to college. When you were a baby, I lived in student housing. You could do that. I could give you money to help with child care.”

  Olivia tried to imagine herself back in school. Almost despite herself, she could see it so clearly. She would carry the baby to her classes in a sling on her back; the baby would sleep in its cradle while she studied. She smiled for the first time in days.

  “That would be great. I mean, I really should go back to school. Especially if I have a baby to support.”

  “That’s definitely a possibility we can discuss. That and adoption. You will at least consider adoption, won’t you?”

  Olivia closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that. The fantasy of carrying her baby across campus like some kind of school mascot was too appealing.

  “Olivia, you will at least consider it, won’t you?”

  She snapped her eyes open. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

  Elaine smiled at her. “Good. Now, how about some breakfast?”

  Olivia swung her legs across Elaine’s lap and hopped over her mother and out of bed.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  ***

  Arthur was squeezing oranges for juice when Elaine and Olivia walked into the kitchen. Olivia was still in her pajamas. He raised his eyebrows behind the girl’s back and opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, but Elaine shook her head, and he pressed his lips shut.

  “Arthur, honey, will you make us some breakfast? Something special?” Elaine asked.

  He wrinkled his brow. “You don’t like breakfast. You never eat breakfast.”

  She pinched her mouth into the frown she generally reserved for Olivia. While not the first time she’d aimed it at him, it was certainly rare. He felt immediately chastened, and then resentful.

  “Okay, I’ll make breakfast,” he said.

  Within twenty minutes, he’d concocted a spread of scrambled eggs with chives and cheese, toast with butter and blackberry jam, and banana pancakes. Olivia had tucked in happily, but he could tell that Elaine was forcing down the food. In a moment of contrition, he refilled her cup with coffee.

  “You don’t need to finish it,” he said quietly, and slid the plate away from her. She blinked at him, gratefully, and he realized with a shock that she was just barely holding it together. Her lips were clenched so tightly they were white, and her hands scrabbled at the place mat, shredding the straw fibers. He moved behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders, drawing her head back against his taut belly. She rested there, and he thought he could feel her unclench.

  “So what’s the deal, Olivia?” he asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting an abortion today?” Elaine’s shoulders stiffened under his hands, and she lifted her head away from his belly.

  Olivia paused, a forkful of pancakes halfway to her mouth. While he waited for her to answer him, he watched a bead of syrup gather under the bowl of the fork and then drop off. It landed on the placemat in front of her.

  “Watch out. You’re dripping,” he said.

  She looked at him quizzically and then shoved the food into her mouth. “I’m not getting an abortion,” she said, her mouth full.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. But of course, he could. If he had sat down and tried to figure out a way for Olivia to make ­matters even worse than they already were, he might well have arrived at this particular scenario. Of course she wasn’t going to have an abortion; that would have simplified things.

  “Believe it,” Olivia said, in precisely the same tone of defensive smugness she’d adopted when confronted with a bad report card or a letter from the university notifying Elaine that her civil disobedience had gotten her placed on academic

  probation.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Elaine, leaning over to look at her face.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Olivia has decided not to have the ­abortion, but she hasn’t yet decided to keep the baby. Right, Olivia?”

  The girl shrugged and nodded. Arthur felt an intense rush of relief. When she said she wasn’t having the abortion, he hadn’t thought of adoption. But that’s what she would do, of course. She’d give the baby up for adoption. It would not be Elaine’s responsibility.

  “Does your lawyer know you’re pregnant?” Arthur asked.

  “No,” Olivia said

  “You should tell him. I’ll bet it will help with the trial. You know, make you more sympathetic or something. No judge is going to put a pregnant woman away for ten years.”

  ***

  Izaya was working late when Olivia called him. His cell phone rang, to the shrill tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and it took a minute for him to find it. He reminded himself, for perhaps the twenty or thirtieth time, to change the ringer setting.

  “Hey,” he said into the phone when he finally dug it out of the pocket of his leather jacket.

  “Um, is Izaya there?”

  “This is Izaya.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Who is this?” he asked, although he recognized her voice.

  Olivia identified herself, and then, without any preamble, and not particularly gracefully, she told him she was pregnant.

  “You are not serious,” he said, and then frowned at his reaction. His client’s pregnancy had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Why, then, had it inspired in him an emotion that felt entirely too akin to anger?

  “Yes. I’m serious.”

  He rubbed his hands across his jaw. “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean are you going to go through with it? Are you going to have this guy’s baby?” He winced at his own words and was ­immediately sorry he’d said anything. She didn’t answer. “God, I’m such an asshole. I’m sorry. What I should have said is, congratulations.”

  There was a moment of silence on the line. Then Olivia said, “Thank you. I just thought you should know in case it makes any difference. You know, for my case.”

  He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the pocked tile of the dropped ceiling. “Right. Well, thanks for telling me,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He flipped forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ve got piles of work here.” He flicked at the papers lying in front of him as though she could see them.

  He ended the call and then turned off his phone. Reaching one hand around the back of his head, he snapped the rubber band off his dreadlocks and ran his fingers through them, loosening them around his face. Izaya never wore his locks down at work and almost never wore them that way at all. He kept them tied back off his head in a neat band. The truth was, he was not entirely comfortable with the heavy weight of his hair. He had started growing it in high school, while in the throes of a short-lived Ziggy Marley obsession. He had not anticipated how much work it would take to grow dreadlocks, how each lock had to be twisted and waxed, meticulously constructed and maintained. While he took pleasure in the clarity of this identifiable badge of his African-American identity, it was really the thought of the years of wasted effort that kept him from cutting his hair.

  He pulled at his soft, spongy locks and thought of Olivia. This particular client seemed to consume far more of his energy, of his emotions, than any other. He had no explanation for his curious devotion. It was not merely that she was pretty; the world was full of pretty girls, girls the dating of whom would not result in disb
arment and the loss of his job. Neither was it entirely the fact of her dependence on him. Over his years as a public defender, Izaya had become inured to his role as champion. But Olivia possessed an adamant innocence that compelled his attention. She was so certain, so sure of her righteousness, and at the same time so vulnerable.

  Whatever he felt for this young woman, when the case ended, so would their relationship. That he had to remind himself of this and of the fact that he had absolutely no business being jealous because she had gotten herself knocked up by an incompetent fool of a boyfriend who couldn’t even manage to do a simple drug deal without getting the two of them busted, was troubling to say the least.

  He gathered his hair in his fist and snapped the rubber band back around it. He flipped through his Rolodex until he found Olivia’s number. She answered almost immediately.

  “Hey, I just had a thought,” he said, his voice falsely jovial. “This pregnancy is the best thing that could possibly have happened, at least from the perspective of the case.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just one more reason for the jury to love you. You’re just a poor, innocent, pregnant little white girl.”

  He was greeted with a burst of laughter, a giggle really. And he smiled.

  “I’m telling you, girl, this is going to push the jurors right over the edge. They’ll be knitting you baby booties.”

  “I hope you’re right. I could use some booties. I’ve never knitted anything in my life.”

  When he hung up the phone, he stopped smiling. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. After a moment or two, he grabbed his Rolodex and started flipping through it, searching for a number to call. Finally, he found what he was looking for. Patrice Lajoie, a sweet-tempered woman who had never once, since they had met in their first year of law school, turned down his last-minute invitations. Izaya left his briefcase on the desk and spent the night in her friendly, comforting embrace. It was the first time in weeks that he hadn’t taken work home with him.

  ***