“The fax will explain everything. I have to go now.” Olivia hung up the telephone before her tears could overwhelm her.
She stood over the machine watching the paper feed through, feeling like she was sending her baby farther away with every inch that slipped beneath the roller. Elaine came up behind her and stroked her hair. Olivia shrugged away her mother’s hand.
“Honey, I promise I won’t just drop the baby off. I’ll make sure everything is okay. And I won’t just send money. I’ll go visit the baby. I’ll make Arthur swap years with me, and instead of taking that trip to Morocco we put off until the fall, we’ll go to Mexico instead. I promise. I’ll write them, and call, and go see the baby. I promise.”
“You can’t call. They don’t have a phone.”
“I’ll get them a phone. How much could a phone cost? How about that? I’ll get them a telephone when I go to Mexico, and I’ll even pay their phone bills. That way you can call them yourself. How about that?”
“It takes years to get a phone installed.”
“What about a cell phone? They must have those in Mexico. They’ve got them all over. I’ll get one of those international cell phones and give it to Jorge’s parents.”
“Okay.” Olivia tried to feel the gratitude she knew her mother deserved. Instead she felt numb, blank. She let her mother hug her.
***
“It was a compromise verdict,” Arthur said. “It has to have been. Some of them probably wanted to convict her. And the others wanted an acquittal. So they settled on the telephone count.”
Arthur had a way of making Elaine believe he knew what he was talking about even when the chance of that was relatively slim.
They were lying in bed, neither of them able to sleep after the tumultuous and devastating day in court.
“It was that woman with the pink bag,” Elaine said. “The one who looked so mean. I never liked her. And Izaya didn’t either. Remember, he wanted to throw her off the jury?”
“Did he?”
She nodded vigorously. “It was a mistake. He had used up all his challenges. It was her. I just know it was.”
“It could have been any of them.”
Arthur punched his pillow a few times, fluffing it. Elaine flinched at the dull thuds.
“I’m not really surprised,” he said.
“What?”
“Well, she was technically guilty, Elaine. We all know that.”
Elaine sat up. “What do you mean?”
He reached under the bed for the specially fabricated neck-support pillow he used when his head was hurting him. He tucked it under his head. “She took that phone message and passed it on to Jorge. She was guilty of that.”
Elaine felt her face begin to burn. “Are you saying she deserves this? That Olivia deserves to be convicted?”
“No, of course not. I’m as outraged about it as you are. The whole prosecution was a farce. It’s ridiculous that that telephone count thing is even a crime. But you know what they say.”
Elaine gritted her teeth. “No, Arthur. I don’t know. What is it that they say?”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
And so saying, he closed his eyes, and without another word, fell soundly asleep.
Elaine slipped out from under the blankets and padded in her bare feet into the dining room. She had wanted to get online, to tell her friends on the FAMM list what had happened to Olivia, as soon as she had returned from court. She had been desperate to spill her story, to howl her anguish to people who would understand, but she had been afraid that Arthur would have gotten angry. He hadn’t grown any more understanding of her need to participate in the online community. On the contrary, he seemed more resentful of it than ever. She felt better getting on the computer when he was asleep, although the truth was that at this moment she was so furious with him that she might have logged on even were he not snoring in the bedroom.
Elaine posted to the group. She had been giving daily updates since the trial began, and there were already messages waiting, asking her how the closing arguments had gone and whether the jury had reached a verdict. She didn’t bother with the good news about Olivia’s acquittal. The joy she had felt at hearing the words “not guilty” had by now been almost entirely overwhelmed by the misery of the single count of conviction. After she had posted a short and bitter message, she clicked over to the chat room, hoping there would be someone to talk to. There usually was, even late in the night. The wives, mothers, husbands, and children of convicted drug offenders had a hard time sleeping. When the bustle of the day’s business gave way to the familiar loneliness of the dark hours, they congregated online, anxious for any contact, no matter how virtual. An imaginary room full of recognizable voices was a significant improvement over a forlorn bed.
Once again, Elaine posted her story, and this time the responses were immediate. She was congratulated on the counts of acquittal, as if she, and not Izaya Feingold-Upchurch, had engineered what felt to her to be a terribly minor victory. More importantly, she was inundated with messages of support for the conviction. Elaine didn’t need to explain what the telephone count meant. These truck drivers, librarians, ministers, teachers, waitresses, and others were all experts in the intricacies of the federal laws, drug offenses, and sentencing guidelines. They knew just how long a term Olivia was facing.
Dear Elaine, wrote a woman, also the mother of a daughter who had followed a boyfriend to prison. This is so hard for you. The night of Brittany’s conviction I thought I would die. Really I did. Hugs to you.
Brittany, Elaine knew, had just finished the fifth year of a twenty-year sentence for the importation of ecstasy; her boyfriend, and the father of the three small boys she had left behind in her mother’s care, had served two years in a Danish prison and been released. Some of Brittany’s mother’s postings were expressions of rage at the inequity of her daughter’s sentence, especially when compared to that of the man who, as even the prosecutor agreed, was the kingpin of the smuggling operation. Most, however, were about how difficult it was to care for children who both missed their mother terribly and could barely remember her face.
At least you’ll have your grandbaby, Brittany’s mother wrote.
After weeks of silence on the subject, Elaine had finally confided to the group about Olivia’s pregnancy. She wasn’t sure what had made her tell them at last. Perhaps it was something as selfish as wanting to become the focus of their outpourings of support once again: within a week or two of her first post, other voices had joined the Internet support group, and Elaine was no longer the only new person to whom everyone sent messages of encouragement. It was at this point that she had told them about the baby, and for another week or so had basked in a flood of sympathetic emails so plentiful that it took her hours to reply to them all.
Elaine’s fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then she typed a few words about Olivia’s plans to send her baby to Mexico. Just then, another line of chat tumbled across the screen.
Honestly, if it weren’t for Brittany’s three boys, I don’t know how I’d get through the days.
Amen to that, someone else wrote. Jack Jr. is my heart and soul.
Before she even realized what she was doing, Elaine deleted her unsent line and typed out another. Yes, thank God for the baby. For Olivia’s sake, but especially for mine. It will be a true comfort to me.
Elaine sat looking at the words she had written. She knew she had, in fact, absolutely no intention of keeping the child. She wanted it no more than she had before Olivia had been convicted, no more than before she had gone online. And God knew that Arthur wasn’t going to let her keep it.
She hit send.
A rush of solicitous chat followed, messages filled with advice on raising a baby whose mother was incarcerated, which she graciously accepted, pretending to jot down the visiting rules at diff
erent women’s prisons. She stayed up long into the night, lying.
It was only after the others had all gone to bed, and she was the last member of a now-empty chat room, that she understood what her dishonesty had wrought. She would never be able to face these people when she sent Olivia’s baby away. Neither could she lie for the next however many years, pretending to be caring for a child who was in an entirely different country. She had cost herself the only support she had left.
She stared at the screen, her back hunched, and her fingers twisted on the keyboard. And then she sent another message, this time to the list manager, asking him to unsubscribe her from the list.
***
The next morning, Aida called.
Olivia’s fingers trembled while she held the telephone receiver. Her voice caught in her throat, and her greeting sounded to her own ears like the croak of someone very ill.
“We have been so worried about Jorge, and about you,” Jorge’s sister said.
“I know,” Olivia answered. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Olivia. You need not apologize.”
“Will they take the baby?” she whispered.
“Yes. Yes, of course. We are all so grateful to you for allowing us this chance, for letting us do this for you, and for Jorge.”
“They understand that it will only be for a few years, that I’m going to want the baby back as soon as I get out of jail?” Olivia said.
“Yes, Olivia. They know. They promise they will give the baby to you.”
“And what if Jorge comes back? What if he wants the baby? What will happen then?”
“We promise to you on the blessed Virgin that we will give the baby back to you. My father is a man of his word.”
“Thank you,” Olivia said. She hung up the telephone and wished that she felt reassured. She knew that Juan Carlos and Araceli meant what they said, that they were not lying to her. And yet, what guarantee was there that they would feel the same after four years? After they had raised her child, cared for it, and watched it grow, would they still be so willing to give it back? And what if Jorge was released? What if he came home before she did? Would he take her baby away from her?
Olivia hugged herself, covering her belly with her arms.
Olivia was trapped. There was no other way she could keep her baby, no other person who would care for it. She determined, at that moment, to believe that Araceli and Juan Carlos would return the child to her. It would take all of her energy to survive the years of her incarceration; she could not face them weighed down by the anticipation of Jorge’s family’s betrayal. She had to muster every ounce of hopefulness and optimism of which she was capable.
Olivia put her hands on her belly and imagined, for the first time but by no means the last, what it would feel like to hold her four-year-old child in her arms after so many years had passed.
She shook her head before the tears could come again and hoisted herself to her feet. She’d taken Aida’s phone call in her bedroom, and now she walked out to the kitchen where her mother sat, warming her hands around a cup of tea.
“It’s all set,” Olivia said.
“They’ll take the baby?”
She nodded.
“And they’ve agreed to give him back when you get out?”
She nodded again.
Elaine sighed. “Well, I suppose that’s a relief,” she said.
Olivia caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit down, hard. “I suppose so,” she said, once she could trust her voice not to betray her.
part three
Olivia woke one morning, a week before her due date, feeling a dull ache in her back. She tossed from side to side, trying to get comfortable, but finally got up to pee. She sat on the toilet, staring down at her distended stomach with its line of darkened skin leading from her protruding belly button to the top of her pubis. She wiped herself and was startled to see a clump of something, streaked yellow and red, on the toilet paper. She stared at the paper for a moment or two and then smiled. The baby was coming.
Olivia spent the rest of the day by herself. She didn’t tell Arthur or her mother what was happening, and the two of them went to work, leaving her alone in the empty house. She sat down in her favorite chair with her legs drawn up under her and her knees spread wide. At some point she realized that the dull ache in her back had traveled around to the front of her body. She looked up at the clock on the wall the next time she felt the tug of pain and noted the time. Twenty minutes later, it came again.
Olivia slipped on a pair of her mother’s old running shoes and tied the laces very loosely over her feet. She went out for a walk, stopping every few blocks or so to lean against a tree or telephone pole while her belly tightened in spasms that were slowly growing stronger and more intense. When it seemed as if the pains were coming closer together, she walked slowly back home and drew a bath. She tentatively lowered herself into Elaine’s oversized tub and lay there, breathing through the contractions until the water grew cold. Only then did she call her mother.
Olivia felt as if the very moment after she hung up the phone her mother was there, standing next to her. By then Olivia was on all fours in the living room, doing the cat stretches her birthing instructor had taught her.
“What time is it?” she murmured as Elaine crouched down next to her.
“Almost five. Are you okay? Do you need anything? Do you want some water? Ice chips? Are you hungry? Remember, Dorothy said you’d need to eat to keep your strength up.”
“Five? Wow. It felt like just a couple of hours.”
“How long have you been in labor?”
“More or less since this morning.”
“Oh my God! Olivia are you out of your mind? Have you called Dorothy?”
“I’m okay, Mom. Really. You call her.”
Elaine rushed to the telephone where she’d prominently tacked up a piece of paper with the midwife’s phone number. She punched in some numbers and then hung up. She hustled back to Olivia’s side. Olivia, meanwhile, was crouched over, her knees bent and spread under her, her belly hanging between them, her cheek resting on the carpet. Every time she felt a contraction begin, she began a deep, slow inhale. She felt the pains; in fact, she sank deep into each painful wave, but she almost didn’t mind them. She welcomed them, imagining her body gently pushing the baby out.
In the middle of the next contraction, Olivia was distracted by the sound of the telephone ringing. She shut her eyes and ears to the noise and tried to catch hold of her breath to think of softening and opening. Elaine began tapping on her shoulder, trying to hand her the phone.
“C’mon, honey. Dorothy wants to talk to you. Just take the phone.”
Elaine held the phone to her ear, but Olivia batted it away. Finally she gave in to Elaine’s insistence and listened to Dorothy’s voice. She tried to answer her the best she could, describing her contractions, how they felt, how long they’d been going on, but another one came just then and she began to breathe, shutting out the sound of the midwife’s voice.
At the end of the next contraction, Olivia felt her mother pull her to her feet. “We’re going to the hospital, honey. Dorothy’s going to meet us there.”
Olivia began to protest. She didn’t want to go to the hospital. What she wanted was to get back into her mother’s tub, to give birth there. Elaine grabbed an old afghan from the couch and wrapped Olivia in it. She pushed and pulled Olivia to the door, and finally Olivia gave in. She let Elaine settle her in the front seat of the car, but when they had driven no more than half a block, another contraction overwhelmed her, and she desperately tried to get on top of it. She started fighting the contraction, beginning to cry as the pain became unbearable.
“Stop! Stop the car!” she screamed. “I can’t get comfortable here!”
Olivia felt that if she didn’t get out of the car in a minute s
he would die. She began to cry harder, so hard she didn’t even notice that they’d pulled up in front of Alta Bates Hospital, which was mercifully close to the house. She saw Elaine toss her car keys at the parking attendant, and then felt her mother half-carry her to a wheelchair that was parked in front of the entrance. Another contraction clutched at her belly as they rolled through the doors of the hospital, down the hall, and to the elevator. She began crying again in the elevator, begging her mother to take her home so she could give birth in her own bed.
She was sobbing, and saying over and over again, “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here,” when they arrived at the labor-and-delivery floor. A nurse in a pair of pale yellow scrubs took one look at Olivia weeping and writhing in the wheelchair, smiled, and said, “Looks like someone’s in transition here.”
When Olivia’s panic abated, she found herself in a small, dark room, lying on a bed. She was naked, and her mother was standing next to her, talking to the midwife who had her hand up inside of Olivia. Olivia had not passed out; she had simply been too caught up in her fear and her dread to notice what was happening to her. Now, as though a lightness had overcome her, her fear was gone.
“I want to push,” she said, surprised at how calm her voice sounded.
“So push,” Dorothy said.
After what felt like moments but was actually closer to two hours, the midwife said, “Okay now, Olivia. One more.”
Olivia tucked her chin into her chest and pushed one last time. She felt a slithering and a pop, and then Dorothy held something up and put it on Olivia’s chest. She reached out her hands and stroked the pink and white creature with the shock of black hair. Its huge brown eyes were wide open and it stared at her, its mouth an O of surprise. Olivia picked it up and looked at the baby’s kicking legs and its little gray feet.
“It’s a girl,” Elaine said. Olivia looked at her mother, who was smiling and crying at the same time. “A beautiful girl. A perfect girl.”
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