by Nicole Baart
“Drink first?” Meredith asked, reading Jessica’s mind.
“Sure.” Jess dug her hands deep into the pockets of her parka and waited for the warm rush of wonder that usually accompanied her first holiday walk downtown. It didn’t come. It wasn’t coming, she realized. Not this year. She glanced at her watch and calculated the amount of time it would take to grab a drink at The Humble Bean. Then a bite to eat, shopping . . .
“Stop it.” Meredith gave her a sidelong glance and paused in front of the door to the coffee shop. The light from inside cast perfect, buttery squares on the sidewalk, a succession of fat blondies reminiscent of The Humble Bean’s most famous dessert. But Meredith wasn’t charmed by the magic around them, either. “You’re killing me here.”
“Sorry,” Jess said automatically.
“You don’t have to apologize. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken you out tonight.”
“It’s fine,” Jess rallied. “I’m fine. This was a good idea. You were right.”
“Liar,” Meredith said. But she pushed open the door to The Humble Bean and Jess followed.
They both ordered the holiday special, a pair of hot buttered rums, and a charcuterie board with extra olives for Meredith. Jess resolved to try harder, to be more upbeat and fun, but her heart was anchored firmly in some deep, impenetrable place. She was halfway through her drink when she mustered the courage to ask the question that had been nibbling at the corner of her mind all night.
“You work with birth moms, right?” It was hard to even say the words, but she managed. Of course Jess knew that Meredith did exactly that. But she was tiptoeing in, taking the easiest route she knew.
Meredith looked surprised at the turn of conversation. They had been discussing whether or not it was worth it to spend $250 on a hoverboard for Max. “You know that I do.”
“I was just wondering about letters.”
“Letters?” Meredith seemed genuinely floored. “What do you mean?”
“You know, like the kind of letters birth moms write. For the file, I mean. In adoptions like ours.”
Understanding bloomed on Meredith’s face. Her lips pulled into a soft, genuine smile as she rolled a thin slice of prosciutto between her fingers. Popping it into her mouth she said, “It makes sense that you would have a lot of questions right now. Are you wondering about Gabe’s birth mom?”
Jess wasn’t sure why she had opened this particular can of worms, but she couldn’t sit here and pretend that her world wasn’t unraveling around her. Her suspicions were wild, fanciful things, and they wouldn’t be tamed. The question popped out before she could fully contemplate it. She might as well follow it through now.
“Yes,” she said. “I have to know, Mer. Did she ever write?” Jess considered telling Meredith what she knew, but in the end she decided it was better to play dumb and see if her friend had any information to offer.
Meredith’s smile faded just a bit. “I don’t know, Jess. I left Promise right after Gabe’s placement. You know that. And Gabe’s birth mom wasn’t my client. It was kind of an accident that she ended up choosing you at all.”
Jess did remember, but she had to ask anyway. She knew that their profile had been shared with a young woman who wasn’t working with Meredith, but once the decision was made she was unwilling to back out. They made it work. And it shouldn’t really have mattered since it was a closed adoption and all. But clearly it did matter.
“What’s in those letters?” Jess asked, toying with the handle of her glass mug. The caramel-colored liquid inside was still steaming. “What do people typically write?” She took a quick, shallow breath. “Contact information?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Meredith said. She looked uncomfortable. “Are you sure you want to talk about this? We’re supposed to be having fun.”
“I am having fun.”
The corner of Meredith’s mouth pulled up doubtfully. “I call bullshit.”
Jess shrugged. “I want to know, okay?”
“Fine,” Meredith sighed and leaned back, throwing her napkin on the table in defeat. “It’s your night. You want to know what’s in those letters? The absolute best. It’s an art form, really. People know that it’s often the only contact they’ll ever have with their birth child or the mother of their child. So they work at it for days or weeks, making it as perfect as they possibly can. Every word is scrutinized and the final result often sounds nothing like the person who wrote it.”
Jess picked up an olive and then put it back down. “That’s kind of awful,” she said quietly.
“I don’t know if it’s awful, but it’s not necessarily real. It’s a bit of a false narrative. A spit-polished version of reality.”
Jess digested this without comment. “What do you know about Anthony Bartels?” She hadn’t planned to mention him, but all at once she felt bold. Why not? Why the hell not?
Meredith’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. But Jess had known her long enough to spot the tiny wrinkle that creased at the corner of her mouth. “Nice guy,” Meredith said lightly.
Liar.
“He makes me nervous,” Jess admitted, watching her friend.
Meredith shrugged one shoulder and took a sip of her drink.
So she didn’t want to talk about Anthony. Jess wasn’t sure what to do with that. It could be because he took Meredith’s place when she left Promise, but Jess couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than that. The mood around the table had turned sour, pungent as the garlicky tapenade on their rustic board. Jess knew it was her fault.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said again, because she was. Always right now, for a dozen different reasons. She was so very sorry for everything.
“You don’t have to be,” Meredith said. But when Meredith turned away, Jess could have sworn her friend was crying.
* * *
CONVERSATION WITH LASHONNA TATE
(June 1, 2018)
LASHONNA TATE: HEY, IT’S ME.
EVAN: SORRY I COULDN’T TALK YESTERDAY. THANKS FOR TRYING AGAIN.
LASHONNA: WHATEVER. IT’S FINE.
EVAN: HOW ARE YOU DOING? I’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT YOU.
LASHONNA: YEAH.
EVAN: YOU FEELING OKAY?
LASHONNA: NOT REALLY.
EVAN: THE LAST MONTH OF PREGNANCY IS SO HARD. YOU SLEEPING OKAY? TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF? IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP?
LASHONNA: NAH.
EVAN: HAVE YOU HAD A CHANCE TO TALK WITH YOUR MOM?
LASHONNA: NOT YET.
EVAN: BUT YOU’VE MADE YOUR DECISION, RIGHT? YOU WANT TO KEEP THE BABY?
LASHONNA: IT’S ALL I’VE EVER WANTED.
Andrea S.
21, Caucasian, HS diploma
Former goth, black hair, pale skin. Homemade tattoos. Scared.
Disowned.
PROST, 60m, 4m 1w
CHAPTER 13
MAX WORKED ON cleaning the wall every single morning for the rest of that week and the next. Jessica tried to talk him out of it, tried to convince him that she could meet again with the principal and the local police and help them to understand that their punishment was doing more harm than good, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Every morning they got up early, grabbed a breakfast to go, and headed to school an hour earlier than normal. Gabe played in her classroom while Max scrubbed the gymnasium bricks.
On Friday morning Mason Vonk rang Jess’s classroom. “You’d better come down here,” he said.
“Is something wrong?”
He paused for just a second longer than Jess would have liked.
“Just come.”
They raced through the building, Jessica holding Gabe’s hand—partly because she wanted him to keep up and partly because she needed something to hold on to. She crushed his small fingers in her own until he cried out and yanked them away. By the time they arrived at the middle school office, Jess was panting and Gabe was shaking out his hand.
“Where’s Mason?” Jess asked breathlessly.
The receptionist
, a new girl whom Jess barely recognized, pressed her siren-red lips together and gave Jess a cryptic look. Her expression was unreadable. “He’s outside.”
“With Max?”
The woman just pointed.
They hurried down the hall, through the tall glass doors, and around the side of the building where the evidence of Max’s crime had been slowly but surely fading away. But the moment they turned the corner, they met the impenetrable wall of a growing crowd. People were lining the sidewalk, making it impossible to go any farther. Students stood arm to arm, talking and laughing and pointing. Jess quickly scanned the scene and saw several parents, too.
Jessica’s heart skidded painfully and she instinctively wrapped her arm around Gabe’s shoulders.
“What’s going on?” he asked, peering up at her. His eyebrows were scrunched together, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.
Jess didn’t answer. “Stick with me,” she said, angling her body and pushing through the mob. At first people resisted, but when they turned and realized it was Jessica, they backed against one another and parted the way before her and Gabe. She wanted to ask someone what was going on, why they were grinning at her and whispering, but she was too hurt, too angry. This was exactly what she had been afraid of all along. They had made a spectacle out of her son, and now her broken little family would have to face the disdain, the ridicule, of their community. They were judging her, judging her boy, and it tore her heart to shreds.
By the time Jess and Gabe emerged from the crowd that had gathered, Jess was shaking, ready to quit her job and leave Auburn and do whatever it took to put the pieces of her life back together. But the scene that greeted her was not at all what she had expected. For a stunned minute she just stood, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
The scaffolding had been removed as Max reached the bottom of the graffiti, and standing shoulder to shoulder at the wall were a dozen young men. Their backs were turned, their bodies bent, and as one unit they sprayed and scrubbed and washed away the last of the paint. They laughed as they worked, jostling each other with their elbows and flicking water at one another.
Max stood in the middle of it all. He was smiling, a bemused half grin that took Jess’s breath away. He was so handsome. Such a young man. And she had nearly forgotten what it looked like when he smiled. It was everything.
“What is going on here?” Jess whispered to no one in particular.
But she had emerged from the crowd at Mason’s side. “They’ve been here for an hour at least,” he said.
“All of these people?”
“No. The audience is a more recent development.”
“What are they doing?” Jess breathed.
“They’re helping him!” Mason laughed and put his arm around her briefly. It was an affable, almost-embrace. “Has Max told you what’s been going on this week?”
Jess shook her head.
“Well, it started with the applause. Some kid—I don’t even know who—clapped for Max when he got dropped off one morning.” He slid Jess a quick glance and shook his head as if to ward off any suspicion at the nature of the gesture. “It was sincere. He was trying to be encouraging. They all were.”
“All?”
“It’s been a thing. The last few days, as kids arrive at school, they’ve been greeting Max with high fives.”
“What?” Jess hardly knew what to think. Max hadn’t said a word to her.
“He’s become a sort of symbol. Of sticking it to the man or something. I don’t know.” Mason shrugged. “But really, it’s grown into such a positive thing. They’ve all been pulling for Max. And this morning, his last morning, a bunch of kids showed up to help. They’ve been here almost the entire time.”
As Jess watched, Max stepped back and surveyed the wall. There were still faint strokes of color, but nothing the sun and snow and rain wouldn’t fade over time. The last of the bright marks had been scrubbed away, and Max stood with his hands on his hips and nodded once.
A cheer erupted from the crowd, and the boys who had stood beside him, who had rolled up their sleeves and gotten dirty with him, gave Max fist bumps.
Gabe was clapping too, and when he looked up to see why Jessica wasn’t, he patted her side good-naturedly. “Why are you crying?”
Jess didn’t even realize she had been. “I don’t know, bug,” she said, her voice so unsteady it came out as a squeak. She swept her palms across her cheeks and tried to laugh around the thickness in her throat. “I guess because I’m happy.”
“That Max is done?”
“And that so many people wanted to help him.”
Gabe nodded sagely. Then he raced to where Max was standing and threw his arms around his brother’s waist.
“You’ve got yourself a good boy there,” Mason told her. “These are defining moments, you know?”
Jess knew.
People were already leaving, kids filtering into school and parents getting back in their cars. But Max lingered with his hand on the top of Gabe’s head and waited as Jess stepped slowly toward him.
“Hey,” she said, faltering a few feet shy. “You didn’t tell me about . . .” She waved her hands around, trying to encompass what had just happened. “This.”
“I didn’t know this was going to happen.” Max shrugged, but there was a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
Jess had the feeling there were a lot of things that Max didn’t tell her. Still, she wasn’t about to ruin the moment. Maybe there was hope for them after all. “It’s pretty amazing,” she said. “What you’ve done. And how so many people saw what you were doing and respected you for it.”
“I spray-painted the school,” Max reminded her, tilting his head as if he couldn’t quite believe she was praising him.
“I know. But you handled it so well.”
“I also changed the combinations on all the lockers and flooded the bathroom in the teacher’s lounge and—”
Jess stopped him by waving her hands in front of his face. “No! No more.” She couldn’t help it. She erupted in giggles. It felt so good to laugh, to really laugh, that she almost started to cry again.
“You did all that?” Gabe asked. He was staring openmouthed at his big brother. “You’re so bad.”
“No,” Jess said, pressing her fingers to her lips. She kneeled down so she could be eye level with Gabe. “Your brother is a good man. We all make mistakes, but only good men make things right. Max made things right. And I respect him for it.”
“Me too,” Gabe said.
The first bell rang and Gabe went rigid. “I’m going to be late!”
“Run,” Jess told him. “On the sidewalk. I can see you all the way. I’ll bring your backpack later.”
Gabe tolerated a quick kiss, and then he was off, racing down the sidewalk. Jess watched him go but snagged Max by the wrist when he began to move past her.
“I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,” she said, parroting a phrase that she had used on her boys since they were toddlers. “You can’t get away with anything.” It wasn’t true, of course. They got away with so much. There were so many secret places and hidden havens inside her boys. That scared her. But it also awed her. Max was his own person, his own universe of hopes and dreams and fears and secrets. And maybe that wasn’t such a terrifying thing after all.
Max didn’t pull away from her grip, so Jess chanced it. At first, when she wrapped her arms around him, he didn’t move. But then she could feel his hands on her back. He hugged her hard for just a moment. It was enough.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”
Max pulled away and gave her a look that made her heart twist inside her chest. It was somehow sad and dignified and wistful all at once. “That’s what Dad always used to say.”
* * *
“He was so brave,” Jess said, tucking the phone between her cheek and shoulder. She stuffed a thick stack of papers that she had to mark inside of her messenger bag and then zipped
it shut. She’d be up for hours grading them tonight, but it didn’t matter. Jess didn’t sleep much anyway. “You would have been so proud of him, Dad.”
“I am proud of him,” Henry said. But it came out a little too fast. They both knew that Henry had been devastated when his grandson was caught red-handed. Quite literally.
“Well, I just wanted you to know that it’s done.” Jess slipped the strap of the bag crisscross over her chest and grabbed the phone in hand. “Look, I gotta go. The boys will be waiting for me.”
“Will we see you this weekend?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t really thought that far.”
“Anna and I would love to see you and the boys. Maybe lunch after church on Sunday? Anna has a sweet potato chili recipe that she’d love to try out on you.”
Jess rolled her eyes. As if the boys would touch sweet potato chili with a ten-foot pole. They were more the meat and white mashed potato sort. “We’ll see, okay?”
“Fine. Just let me know by tomorrow.”
Sweet potato chili and awkward conversations with her father notwithstanding, Jess was in a more buoyant mood than she had been in months. Well, maybe buoyant was overstating it, she decided, but the veil had lifted. If only a bit. Though it wasn’t hope that blossomed beneath her breastbone. It was resolve. If Max could do hard things, if he could stand out in the freezing cold day after day and hold up beneath the scrutiny of almost the entire community, she could surely face one of her greatest fears: Caitlyn Wilson.
Jess hadn’t liked Cate from the start. When Auburn Family Medicine hired the perky new transplant in town, everything in Jess had recoiled in distrust. Cate was young and lovely, a svelte redhead with striking green eyes and an adorable sprinkling of freckles across her perfect ski-slope nose. Worst of all, she was as kindhearted as she was pretty, and her abandonment at the hands of one of Auburn’s own (a thirtysomething dentist who inconceivably found someone younger and sexier than Cate and ran away with her to Fort Lauderdale) cemented her as one of the most desirable—and tragic—girls around. “Men love messed-up girls,” Meredith said, her lips puckered in shrewd disapproval. “Ergo, she’s irresistible.”