by Sara Taylor
We sat there for a while, in the sunshine, drinking slowly and not talking, but in a good way, and I’d just gotten used to the idea that this was going to be our afternoon, sitting and sipping, when Ma’s eyes locked on something and she sprang up, tense again.
“Come on, time to get hustling,” she said, pulling coins out of her pocket to leave as a tip with one hand while scooping up the cigarette pack and lighter with the other, moving fast without seeming hurried. She pulled out a cigarette one-handed on the way to the door while I tangled in my chair and sucked down the last inch of my coffee; she paused just outside to light it and give me a chance to stumble after her, then started off down the street with me in her wake, puffing streamers of white like a steamship, leaning slightly forward and taking long steps, shoulders square and hands jammed in her jacket pockets, not looking back to check if I was coming after because I always came after, clumsy and stumbling and two jumps behind.
We turned corners, found a square crammed with white canvas booths stuffed with things for sale. I kept losing her in the people—she’d finished her cigarette and not lit the next one; this wasn’t the type of place you smoked tobacco in public, so there were no white plumes to follow. There was homemade cheese and barrels of brined olives, mounds of the usual vegetables plus the weird-looking varieties, hand-dyed wool, vegetarian food and Lebanese food and all the things you’d expect or hope for, but every time I started to get a good look at something I had to break off, run after to catch up to the dark hair and breadth of corduroy-covered shoulders that was leaving me behind. I hoped that this would turn out to be the source of the dinner that had been foretold, but it was not: we passed quickly, if meanderingly, through without even a sprig of cilantro to show for our time. We settled down in another coffee shop, this time opposite a hair cuttery, and when Ma brought my cup—and an egg sandwich—to the two-top by the window that she’d pushed me into this time, I asked, “Are we following someone?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“It’s either that or you’re gearing yourself up to commit a murder. Or maybe you’ve had a psychotic break and we’re going to erratically walk the city like the wandering Jew until caffeine poisoning sets in.”
“You were so nice to be around before you became a teenager.”
“It comes with the territory. Now please tell me what’s going on.”
“OK. We are following someone.”
“Are we going to kill them?”
“No.”
“Are we going to make them think that we’re going to kill them?”
“Yeesh, where do you get your ideas?”
“I dunno, maybe somewhere between Florida and Reno? You remember that time when you pulled out a gun and made it look pretty damn certain that you were going to, don’t you? Because I’m pretty sure that I didn’t just imagine it.”
“My mother always told me that one day God would punish me by giving me a kid exactly like myself.”
“I’m pretty sure that at the very least I drug less than you did, and we both know that I run away less. Now, who are we following?”
“Eat your sandwich.”
I took a massive bite, then asked again, muffled by bread and mouth as wide open as possible without losing the bite, “Who are we following?”
“No talking with your mouth full, that’s disgusting.”
I chewed and swallowed, and repeated my question.
“Someone.”
“That narrows it right the hell down.”
“I can always lock you in the car until I’m done.”
“This is California, there’ll be a massive uproar. Might even make the newspapers.”
“You’re not a dog, no one would care.”
I sullenly chewed the sandwich and watched her watching the doors across the street, not wanting to push her too far—she wouldn’t bother with dragging me all the way back to the car, but she might leave me alone in the café for a few hours, which was not something I really wanted. I devoured the sandwich but nursed the coffee. I was feeling buzzy already and if I finished it she might get me another one, to legitimize our claim to the table. I stole one of the inner pages from the drifts of random newspapers on a bench by the door, found a pen and the crossword, and tried to think like a smart person. Which was entertaining for maybe five minutes. I wound up holding the pen over a nine-letter word for “ennui” while staring out the window, taking note of who went in and out of the hair cuttery and of the apartment doors to either side, but mostly thinking about people I’ve hated and what I wished I could say to them.
I noticed the couple because of the way that Ma tensed up, how her breathing changed, not like a Predator with Rambo in sight but like she’d seen something she didn’t want to see but couldn’t look away from, like she’d burned herself.
It was a young guy and a girl, maybe ten years older than me—but I’ve always been bad at guessing ages—and I recognized the girl, or felt like I should. Maybe we’d been chasing her across the entire country. She was neatly dressed, the kind of person who wore outfits rather than clothes, and I just knew that her bookshelves weren’t only alphabetized, but stayed that way.
“Is that Laura?” I asked. They were holding hands on the sidewalk for a moment, finishing a conversation before they got going.
“That’s what I called her, but that’s not her name anymore.”
“Is she an old girlfriend?”
Ma was out of her chair, sliding her jacket off the back and drinking down the last of her espresso with her free hand.
“What? Christ, no, what kind of cradle robber do you make me out to be?”
“You don’t look that much older than her.”
“I was seventeen when she was born, you can do the math for me.”
“OK, that’s a bit of an age gap, but—”
She shushed me as we stood in the doorway to the café, as she shrugged on her jacket and took my hand and we began walking. We followed them, on the opposite side of the road and a ways behind, as they went to a park and listened to the reggae band playing for free, then onto a university campus. We should have been caught in the last place; it was a Sunday evening and not many students were around, but locals were playing fetch with their dogs, enjoying the space. We hung back as the girl let the two of them into the Thurman Laboratory with a keycard, settled under a tree to wait.
“What if they’re spending the rest of the evening in there?”
“They aren’t—she’s either checking an experiment, feeding the birds, or picking up some work to take home with her.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s working to become a large-animal vet. She pretty much lives here.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’m good at finding things out.”
CHAPTER XX
She didn’t explain until later that evening, after we’d called it quits for the day. We’d trailed not-Laura and her boyfriend the rest of Sunday, across the university campus to the library, through town and back to the apartment, sat on a bench on the opposite side of the street until it seemed pretty clear that they were in for the night. On the walk back to the car I dropped hints until Ma consented to stopping for an actual dinner, though she wouldn’t go so far as to spring for a decent place to sleep. Instead we moved the car out of the garage to the parking lot behind a church, put the blankets in the windows to block out some of the light, and settled in. I was half asleep when Ma began telling the story.
It was just after her stay with the artist, when she was living with her parents for the last time and working her way slowly through eleventh grade. This final stab at a normal home life ended when it was discovered that, somewhere between the end of summer and the beginning of winter break, she’d gotten pregnant. The circumstances under which this had come about, who the father was, she refused to say.
She’d spent the first four months or so in complete denial, unable to accept what was happening inside her body, to
her body. Though she told no one, the father didn’t have the same qualms, and when her brother brought the rumor home that she was pregnant her parents investigated. This was followed by a month of indecision, of her mother crying and her father angry and her brother hiding from her as she crept through her life, as if by not drawing attention to herself she could slide back into normalcy when it was all over. A quick wedding was difficult without a groom. Abortion was, religiously and culturally, out of the question; single motherhood was likewise gaining acceptability in wider society but still a badge of shame in the world her parents inhabited.
She couldn’t remember if it was more the case that her parents had thrown her out, or that Social Services had taken her away. It may have come down to an agreement between the two that she was sent to a group home, given a place to hide until her condition passed, allowed to finish out eleventh grade at a public high school because the parochial school she and her brother had gone to had expelled her when she started to show.
It was pretty much accepted from the word “go” that she’d be surrendering the kid when it came; no one even asked her how she felt about that. No one told her much about the situation, either. Not her social worker, or the councilors at the home, or any of her teachers; they all seemed to assume that, since she’d managed to get a baby in there, she should already know what to expect when it came to getting it out once it was cooked. The baby will be born; a nice married Christian couple with a house and money will adopt it and give it everything it could ever want; you’ll forget all about it and your life will go back to normal. That was what they told her, over and over, when she met with her social worker and with the woman from the Catholic agency who was handling the adoption. All she had to do was sign the papers when the time came, and it would be as if this part of her life had never happened.
Her water broke in the middle of the night, and she’d had no idea what was going on, thought that she’d spilled something on herself, that one of the other residents had pranked her. They’d taken her to the hospital, left her alone for hours as her insides worked and kneaded and she wished that she could die, or at least pass out. And when it was over a nurse laid a blanket-wrapped bundle on her shoulder, said, “Congratulations—it’s a girl,” and she’d been too shocked to do anything, somehow hadn’t equated the previous hours of agony with the inevitable appearance of something wiggling and alive.
“They handed her to me, and she squished her face against my neck, started batting her hand against my mouth—probably looking for food—and something happened. For months I couldn’t wait for it all to be over, wished that she’d just go poof! and stop existing, but the moment I smelled her I didn’t want to put her down.”
Seconds later there was a flurry of whispering and another nurse swept in.
“Whoopsie! That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she’d said in a sing-song, and snatched the baby away. Weak and confused and out of her mind on drugs, my mother let her go.
Over the course of the three days that my mother stayed in the hospital they allowed her to hold her baby a handful of times, and always reluctantly; it wasn’t until she was getting ready to leave that she realized it was because she wasn’t meant to have caught sight of the child, that they were supposed to have been separated as quickly as possible after the birth. The baby was sent to foster, Ma back to the home she’d been in immediately before. She was in pain and being driven crazy by post-natal hormones, wanted to hold the baby that she hadn’t been able to accept she was going to have, unsure of what would happen to herself next and frankly uninterested, and that was when the caseworker appeared to have her sign the surrender form.
She’d refused to do it at first, argued for an hour, but the woman wore her down: what she was feeling, her need to keep the baby, was nothing more than hormones, and the moment that she recovered she would realize that giving her up was the only right thing to do. She had no husband, no job, nothing to offer a child; she’d been stupid and selfish in getting herself pregnant but she could turn the situation to good by letting the baby go, giving a childless couple the chance to raise her as their own. The agency had paid her hospital bill with the understanding that she would surrender the baby; was she prepared to pay them back all that money, now that she was refusing to give her up? Was she even able, or would her kid sit in foster care for years while she tried to earn enough to pay the fees, earn enough to support the two of them?
The woman wore her down, then sweetened her with promises: the adoption would be open, she’d know where her baby was living, know about the parents, get yearly updates on how she was doing. It would almost be like she was off visiting relatives, like Ma hadn’t given her up at all.
Those promises were what got her to sign in the end; she didn’t know that you couldn’t trust words unless they were in writing. The people who took her daughter didn’t want to meet her, see her, acknowledge that she even existed. There would be no news, no updates, no information whatsoever. It would be as if she never had a baby.
When she realized what had happened she bussed her way across two counties, back to her parents’ house, broke in while they were both out, took everything she’d left behind, and walked out for the last time. For a few weeks she slept in her car, until the idea of killing herself became far too appealing, and she realized that she needed help. So she phoned her social worker, the one that would push her to go to college, and checked herself back into the system.
Her requests for information about her daughter were blocked until the girl turned seventeen, when the parents said that she’d run away from home. Then they’d initiated contact with the birth mother, trying to get some answers.
They had never told her that she was adopted, but they suspected that the drugs they assumed that Ma had done while pregnant had screwed up her brain chemistry, her behavior, permanently. There had to be a reason for how rebellious she was, how much she pushed back against their efforts to do what was best for her. They hadn’t believed Ma when she insisted that there hadn’t been any drugs, was no reason that she knew of for their daughter to be acting out apart from the environment in which she had been raised, the person who she naturally was. They had ceased responding to her then, but Ma didn’t care: she had something to go on, finally. It had taken her some time, using the tiny amount of information that had been revealed by the adoptive parents’ short communications, but she had tracked their daughter down—and that was why we were in California, following a young woman who looked uncannily like both of us, who didn’t know that she was adopted and who probably wouldn’t know what to do if a woman who claimed to be her birth mother appeared out of the blue.
“I thought that it would be enough to look at her, know that she was alive and healthy, see if she looked happy,” Ma said. “If I can’t talk to her by tomorrow night, we give up and move on.”
We were at the coffee shop again when she came out her front door the next morning. Ma tensed to stand up when she emerged, but to our surprise she crossed the street and came in the café. She joined the line up to the counter, and I recognized in her my mother’s wild hair, her narrow shoulders, the economy of movement when she reached for her wallet. The woman greeted the barista by name, got a latte and took it to the condiment counter to be doctored. I kicked Ma under the table: do it now. She stared at me, not looking at me but rather actively not looking at her other child. I kicked her again, and she rose up in her seat a little, then settled back down. Her daughter—the cashier had called her Carla—snapped a lid on her cup and walked out. When the door closed behind her my mother moved, leaving me to flounder two steps behind as we left the café, nervous-excited and wondering why she hadn’t spoken in that unexpected moment of proximity.
We followed her to the university, up to the doors of a lecture hall, turned back and settled on a bench in the sun a few hundred yards away. Sometime after the first hour I fell asleep, leaning against Ma while she read a paper that someone else had left behind. The recent spa
te of car-sleeping hadn’t been treating me very well.
I was elbowed awake what felt like mere moments later as Carla left the building. I tensed to get up, but needn’t have bothered: she crossed the green space where we sat, head down and steps purposeful, and keyed herself into a building on the opposite side. It was an improvement on the lecture theater in that, with a judicious change of bench, we could watch her through the broad windows as she dumped her gear into a locker, moved her ID card and lanyard from trailing out of her jacket pocket to around her neck, then plunged farther into the building, out of sight. I was acutely aware both of how creepy our behavior was and of how extremely boring stalking was. Ma still had the newspaper that she’d picked up, but she was only holding it in front of her now, looking instead to the horizon, the sky, the movement of students back and forth and around us. I made her give me a middle section of the paper, both to hide behind and as a prophylactic to boredom. I felt bad for her, for what had happened and for the naked longing on her face, and because I felt that the whole thing couldn’t end well, that whatever she wanted to result from this exercise wouldn’t go to script.
When Carla emerged and strolled away we waited a few breaths and then followed: to the café on campus to buy a sandwich, to the quad to eat it, to the library for an hour and then to another lecture theater, where we waited outside, Ma’s eyes on the door and my attention fixed on the watch on her wrist, on the change in texture from noon sun to the thicker syrup of pre-dusk light.
“We’re running out of day,” I said. Her eyes remained fixed on the door of the lecture theater; I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. “Time’s almost up. You need to do it soon.”