“Do I know you?” the woman asked.
Olivia ducked her head, shaking it at the same time, and stepped forward. She turned her face away, wrapping her finger around a strand of hair that had pulled loose from her braid. The woman leaned over her and peered into her face.
“I know you, girl. You have your baby already?”
Olivia looked up, startled, and then it dawned on her. She’d met the woman in lockup when she was awaiting trial.
“Queenie?” She was surprised at the hoarse croak of her voice, then realized that she had not spoken a word in days.
“That’s me. What your name again?”
“Olivia.”
“Right. O-Livia. You get rid of that baby, or you have it?”
Olivia paused. “Both, I guess. I had her, but…” Her voice trailed off.
“But you can’t keep no babies in here.” Queenie nodded. “You had a little girl? What her name?”
“Luna.”
“That’s pretty. That’s moon in Spanish, am I right?”
“Right.”
“My girls are Cassandra and Deandra. They twins.”
“How old are they?”
“Six. Six tomorrow. I’m calling them today in case I don’t get the phone tomorrow. You calling your baby?”
Olivia shook her head. She felt the tears rise in her eyes. “My mom’s taking Luna to Mexico, to her grandparents. She’s going to live there while I’m here. I’m calling my mom’s boyfriend to see if she made it okay.”
“Oh, baby,” Queenie reached out a sympathetic arm and drew Olivia in to her ample bosom. “That so hard. You so far away from her. She can’t even visit you. You poor baby.”
Olivia began crying in earnest, but had to dry her tears quickly. It was her turn for the phone.
***
After leaving the Rodriguez home, Elaine took Luna back to her hotel room for their last night alone together. She changed the baby’s diaper and prepared a bottle. She stretched out on the bed, nestled Luna in the crook of her arm, and watched her. The baby’s lips moved vigorously at first, and she stared into Elaine’s eyes as she drank. When she was awake and wriggling, Luna felt small and light in Elaine’s arms. But as her eyes drooped, she seemed to gain weight, grow dense and heavy. Elaine rubbed her face gently against the top of Luna’s head. The baby’s dark hair tickled her cheek, and she took a mouthful of it. She tasted just a hint of salt.
Careful not to wake the baby, Elaine reached across the bed and picked up the telephone.
Arthur sounded pleased to hear from her and launched into a long description of a new cross-county trail he had found. Elaine listened to the hum of his voice, but, busy stroking Luna’s soft cheek, paid little attention to his words. It was only when she heard Olivia’s name that she focused on what he was saying.
“What? What happened?” Elaine asked anxiously.
“Nothing happened. She called, that’s all.”
“How did she sound?”
“She sounded fine.”
“Fine? I find that hard to believe. She hasn’t sounded fine in any of her previous calls. Why should she sound fine now?” Elaine’s voice was sharp and pitched higher than normal. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
“Apology accepted. How are things going? Do Jorge’s parents seem like nice people?”
“Oh yes. Lovely. Very sweet. They don’t have much money, but it seems like a happy home.”
“Thank God. I was worried. What a huge relief.”
Elaine felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Nothing was going to make what she had to say any easier.
She knew that Arthur was, simply and absolutely, not interested in having Luna move into their home; he had barely taken an interest in his own children. He had moved across the country when they were very young, and had seemed more than satisfied with their twice yearly visits. Although he had scrupulously paid child support for as long as the courts had obliged him to, the last thing he would do was raise someone else’s child.
Elaine put her hand on Luna’s belly and felt it rise and fall with her breath. The baby pursed her lips and mewed softly in her sleep. She wrinkled her forehead at some troubling baby dream. Elaine smoothed it with a gentle finger. Then she gathered herself together and sat up in the bed.
“I’m bringing her home, Arthur.”
“What? What are you talking about? You just said everything is fine. They’re nice people. What could possibly be wrong?”
With the weight of Olivia’s daughter nestled in her arms, Elaine allowed herself, as she never had before, to confront the fact that she had failed as a mother. Somewhere along the line, very early on, she had decided that she would give Olivia only so much and no more. She had withheld herself, providing for her daughter, dressing her wounds, accomplishing the required routine tasks, as if mothering were itself a kind of mandatory minimum sentence, as if there were some minimum amount of love you were required to give your child, some minimum responsibility you were obliged to assume. Elaine had resented the vast extent of even that minimum and had tried to limit it in any way she could. Her life as a mother had been a series of calculations, of estimations: what was required of her, what she could get away with, what she might avoid. Motherhood was a language that Elaine did not speak and had never bothered to learn. She had viewed it as a series of tasks, of duties, that would pass as soon as her child reached adulthood. The ultimate standard of behavior for her was and had always remained the responsibilities incurred by and the freedoms granted to a woman who was nobody’s mother at all. She had never understood, until now, the fundamental truth: that the sentence of motherhood had no limit. There was no cap. There was no maximum amount of love you were compelled to extend, no point at which you would have served your full sentence.
Elaine had never allowed herself to experience the infinite love a mother felt for her child. She had not realized that it was possible, nor felt ashamed of its absence in herself. Though she had certainly been plagued over the years by a kind of amorphous guilt, she had always dismissed it without understanding it as a message that, somewhere deep within, even she recognized her own failure. Now Elaine wondered at the source of her limitations. Why had she been such a pinched and constricted mother? Perhaps it was because she had not been ready when Olivia was born—the responsibility came too soon and was so unlooked for. But plenty of mothers rose to that same unexpected occasion. Why had she failed to do so? Perhaps, she thought, it was because the father of her child had deserted her. Yet many women loved children of absent fathers, loved them all the more because of their abandonment.
Now Elaine recognized that, while she might never understand the reason for her failure, she had been offered an exemplary model of a mother who reveled in the maximum sentence of motherhood: Olivia. Like her, Olivia had been surprised by a baby that came when she was too young and even worse off materially than Elaine had been. Jorge’s abandonment was so much more profound than that of Olivia’s own father that it seemed hardly logical to compare them. Yet with no example to follow, Olivia loved Luna effortlessly with immeasurable, bottomless devotion, celebrating the terms of her sentence, seeing it not as a confinement but rather a form of liberation. Lying there, in a Mexican hotel, Elaine determined to learn from her daughter. She vowed, now that she had been granted a second chance, to take care, completely and finally, of her own child. She would care for Olivia by loving Luna.
“This is wrong. All of it,” she said. “Luna belongs with me. She belongs with me because I’m the only person who can take care of her and make sure she visits Olivia as often as they’ll allow it. She belongs with me because she’s my responsibility.” Elaine cupped the top of Luna’s head with her hand and felt the beat of the child’s pulse in her palm. “She belongs with me because I love her.”
Elai
ne heard nothing but the crackle of the phone line.
“Arthur,” she asked. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m bringing her home.”
“I heard you.”
“Well?”
“Well, what? It doesn’t sound like you’re asking me if I agree with your decision. It doesn’t sound like you’re giving me the opportunity to object. It sounds like you’re telling me what you’re going to do.”
Elaine stroked the baby’s hair. “Yes. That’s right. I’m telling you that I’m bringing Luna home. I’m going to take care of her until Olivia gets out of jail.”
“And what about us?”
She inhaled softly. She imagined Arthur’s face, his back, the muscles of his legs. She pictured him in their kitchen cooking dinner, running ahead of her on a wooded path, posing for her camera with his effortless, automatic smile.
“I think that’s up to you,” she said, softly.
“I can’t hear you. This line sucks. What did you say?”
She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “I said that’s up to you.”
Luna’s face wrinkled, and she wriggled closer to Elaine.
“I suppose it is,” Arthur said.
“I love you, Arthur. I really do.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He sighed. “I love you, too, Elaine.”
***
Arthur didn’t meet Elaine at the airport, of course. She was not sure why she had not told him she had arranged to come home a few days early. It certainly was not because he appreciated a surprise. She didn’t know what she had expected to greet her on her arrival, but it was not an immaculate house. Carrying the baby on her hip, she wandered through the empty rooms. The first she entered was Olivia’s. It looked much as she had left it, with the bassinet set up in one corner, and diapers, baby wipes, and a changing pad laid precisely in the middle of the desk. It was only after a moment that she realized that there was an extra bag of diapers and another box of baby wipes on the desk. New bottles of baby shampoo and bath soap stood next to the changing supplies. Arthur had done the shopping.
She walked down the hall to her own room. The top of Arthur’s dresser was empty. She pulled open a drawer. Nothing. His side of the closet was abandoned but for a row of empty wire hangers; he had taken the wooden ones. She wandered out to the dining room. His computer had disappeared, as had the stacks of papers and folders from the table. The printer she had bought him sat in a corner of the room, on the floor, covered with a folded sheet. In the kitchen, his basket of vitamins was gone, as were the boxes of nonfat soy milk from the cupboard. Arthur had replenished the baby’s supplies and then erased all trace of himself from the house.
Elaine wondered why she wasn’t crying. Perhaps the morning’s emotions had drained her of any further capacity for tears. On her way out of San Miguel, Elaine had stopped at the hotel where Aida worked. She had presented Jorge’s sister with a cell phone, prepaid with enough time to call the United States every couple of weeks for a year. Luna slept in her car seat at Elaine’s feet.
“I’m going home,” she had said. “I’m taking Luna with me.”
“But Olivia wants us to take Luna. She said so,” Aida had said.
At the young woman’s insistence and because she knew herself that the confrontation was unavoidable, Elaine had waited in the lobby of the hotel until Araceli and Juan Carlos could be fetched. They rushed through the arched doorway. There had followed much weeping on all sides, but finally the grandparents had agreed that the baby should live in the United States, within visiting distance of the prison where her mother would spend the next few years.
“And Jorge?” Araceli asked through her daughter. “Will Luna visit her father?”
Elaine didn’t answer for a moment. She did not want to lie to Araceli. Neither did she want to carry out that particular promise. And yet, how could she refuse? “If Olivia wants me to, I’ll take Luna to visit him,” she said.
Araceli opened her mouth to object, but Juan Carlos shook his head at her. “Es justo,” he said. No translation was necessary.
Araceli and Juan Carlos promised to call, and Elaine promised to send photographs and to come visit the following year. Elaine left San Miguel as she had arrived, with her granddaughter sleeping in the carseat, next to her.
Feeding, changing, bathing, and putting Luna to sleep kept Elaine too busy to cry on her first night back at home without Arthur. Her dry eyes made her believe, incorrectly it turned out, that she would never weep for the loss of the man who had shared her life for such a long time, that the gap he left would be filled by Luna’s needs and her blossoming love for the baby whom she reminded herself never to think of as entirely her own.
***
Arthur saw Elaine only once more. A few weeks after he left their home, he came into the pharmacy. He paused in the doorway, watching Elaine in her white coat, her hair shiny and impeccably colored, her face bearing its professional mask of interest and concern as she patted the wrist of an elderly man clutching a small white bag filled near to the bursting with bottles of pills.
Arthur heard his name and turned to greet Ralph, who was staring at him with frank surprise. At the sound of Ralph’s voice, Elaine raised her head, and even from across the store Arthur could see her face pale. He raised a hand, and she smiled tentatively. He crossed through the aisles of cold remedies, diapers, and shampoos until he reached her counter and waited patiently while she finished with her customer.
Once the man was gone, Arthur said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Elaine said, softly.
“How are you?”
“Good. Good. And you?”
“I’m okay,” he said, not bothering to hide the heaviness in his voice. “I’m dealing with it, I suppose.”
A red flush crept up Elaine’s neck. She reached up a hand and tucked her hair firmly behind her ear.
He leaned against the counter. “I needed a refill of my Ambien prescription,” he said.
Elaine raised her eyebrows. “What?”
“My Ambien? I still have one refill left on my old prescription.” This was, of course, the truth. Arthur had a single refill left, and he hadn’t wanted to explain to his doctor, a cantankerous old man with rather Puritan opinions on the efficacy and necessity of sleeping aids, why he needed an entirely new prescription. It was also true, however, that Arthur had wanted to see Elaine. He missed her, and he wondered if she missed him. He was not confident that she understood the extent of their mutual loss. It was important to Arthur that Elaine fully comprehend what she had given up in choosing to indenture her life to Olivia’s once again.
“Are you seeing anyone?” he said, suddenly.
Elaine laughed, a single short bark. “Of course not,” she said. “I have Luna.”
Arthur nodded and knew that the moment had arrived for him to ask about the baby. He could not bring himself to.
“Are you?” Elaine asked.
He shrugged. “No. Soon, I suppose. But not now. Not yet.”
She nodded.
Warren poked his head around from back behind the counter. He was holding the telephone in his hand. “Elaine? It’s Ana.”
Elaine jumped. “I’ll be right there.” She turned back to Arthur. “It’s Luna’s nanny. She probably can’t figure out what to give the baby for lunch.”
Arthur nodded. “Anyway, my prescription?” he said.
She reached her hand out for the phone. “Warren, will you refill Arthur’s Ambien prescription? And any others he’s got left?”
Arthur stared at Elaine, wondering if he would always remember her as the woman who had finally, irrevocably, broken his heart.
She smiled at him blandly, the phone tucked under her chin. “I’m pretty sure there’s a Zantac, too.”
Even in FCI Dublin, Mother’s Day is a holiday. The volunteer organization dedicated to helping incarcerated mothers makes a big deal out of Mother’s Day. And it’s a good thing, too, because were they not there, if they did not arrange for the single red roses and the visiting children, it would be a long, lonely day, and lonely women might be more disposed to do things like hurt themselves or the other women next to whom they were crushed and crowded.
Elaine and Luna visited Olivia regularly, as often as every weekend. They were used to the drive; they had their favorite truck stop along the way. Luna was a fan of the fries in gravy.
Elaine always dressed the little girl in something nice for the visit—something Olivia would have chosen if she could have, like overalls and a bright-colored top, or a hat knitted in the shape of a strawberry. But today, Mother’s Day, the baby was even more adorable than usual, in grape-purple pants and an Indian print shirt in complementary shades. She also wore purple high-top sneakers, a new addition to her wardrobe bought to celebrate a recently acquired skill—walking. Her shoulder-length hair was held off her face with a lavender ribbon. She was, at thirteen months, much the same as she’d been at three, cheerful and good-natured, and newly loquacious. She spoke both English and Spanish, thanks to the Honduran nanny who watched her while Elaine was at work.
They arrived early, standing in line with the other grandmothers, aunts, and foster mothers. There were no fathers in the line. Elaine had never once seen a father there escorting his children to visit their mother. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe the men were in jail, like the women. Or maybe they weren’t the ones caring for the kids. Or maybe they just couldn’t bear to visit the prison.
Luna sat on her grandmother’s hip, chattering in her just barely unintelligible language. She stuck her tongue out merrily at the children running under her grandmother’s feet. She put one hand on either side of Elaine’s cheeks, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “Down.”
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