Give, a novel

by Erica Carpenter Witsell

  “No.”

  The judge looked up at the vehemence of her response. Then she nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, but I need to ask.” She paused. “Can you tell me why?”

  “I just don’t . . . I don’t consider her my mother. She didn’t raise me like Mom did. She didn’t want me. She didn’t take care of me. She’s just not my mother,” Emma said. Her stomach felt sick. What would the judge think of her, denying her own mother? You don’t have to love someone to have a Coke with them. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to the judge that she didn’t love Laurel. Maybe the mere fact of her biological connection to Laurel trumped all that. She studied the judge, who was jotting something on her pad. She could see the tiny clumps in her mascara behind her glasses.

  The judge looked up. She smiled sympathetically and Emma let out her breath.

  “So you want to live with your father and stepmother . . . Sarah, I mean, who is, to you, your mother,” the judge said. Emma nodded.

  “But with respect to visitation? Do you want to visit your . . . Do you want to visit Laurel as you used to?”

  Emma shook her head. “No.”

  “Could you explain?”

  “I just . . .” How could she say it all here, in this room? How could this woman possibly understand? How could she understand about Raisin, about the afternoon at the dam, about that awful night waiting for the ambulance with Jessie writhing on the floor? That wasn’t Laurel’s fault, everyone had told her again and again, but it didn’t matter. Because it wasn’t about any one of those things. It was because every time she was around Laurel, she felt something inside her shrink; she felt her true self wither and grow cold. No, she didn’t want—

  “I understand you had some frightening experiences while at her house,” the judge said kindly, interrupting her thoughts.

  Emma nodded, felt her tears rise at the sympathy in the judge’s voice.

  “What happened with your sister there. That wasn’t your mother’s . . . That wasn’t Laurel’s f—”

  “I know!” Emma snapped, her voice cracking. “I know it wasn’t her fault. But what about the rest of it? She never wanted . . . Oh, she never loved . . . I just don’t want to go there!”

  Emma felt the judge go motionless. She looked up, met her eye, waited.

  There was the briefest moment of silence. Then the judge clicked the end of her pen with her thumb. “Fair enough,” she said.

  Emma held her eyes. “You don’t think I’m—” she began, but she couldn’t finish. Cruel, a bad daughter . . .

  “Oh no,” the judge said, shaking her head. “I’m just sorry to have upset you. But I had to ask. And I believe I understand. Here,” she said, reaching for the Kleenex box on her desk. “Take one of these. We can wait while you . . . while you pull yourself together.” She smiled gently at Emma. “It shouldn’t be much longer now.”

  Back in the lobby, she could feel Jessie studying her face, felt her unspoken question: “What did you say?”

  Emma shrugged, managed a smile. She sat down next to Aunt Margie. She felt deflated, hollowed out.

  “Are you hungry?” Aunt Margie asked anxiously. “We could see about some lunch—”

  Both girls shook their heads.

  “The judge told me it wouldn’t be long now,” Emma said. “Let’s just wait.”

  Emma was sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs, her eyes closed, her head leaning back against the brown wall, when she heard her mother’s voice.

  “Jessie! Emma!”

  Emma’s head snapped up and her eyes opened. She felt her aunt startle beside her.

  And there were her parents in the doorway, coming toward them, their eyes bright but their faces so serious—

  “What happened?” Aunt Margie asked, before Emma could open her mouth. “Is it over?”

  “It’s over,” Sarah said. “‘Len will retain full custody. Supervised visitation in accordance with the wishes of the girls.’” Suddenly, her voice caught in her throat and Emma gaped, open-mouthed, as her mother burst into tears. It was the first time she had ever seen her cry.

  “Mom,” she said, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  But already Aunt Margie was in motion beside her, stepping forward to take Sarah in her arms. Sarah hid her face in the other woman’s neck. “I’m sorry, Margie,” she muttered. “It’s just—”

  “Shhh,” Aunt Margie hushed her. “It’s over now. It’s all over now.”

  Emma looked at her sister. Jessie’s face looked pale, stricken. Suddenly, Emma felt light-headed; she sat down again heavily, her mind muddled. The judge’s decision—wasn’t it what she had wanted? Yet there was something in the cool finality of it that took Emma’s breath away. Laurel had no claim to her. Supervised visitation in accordance with the wishes of the girls. That meant that Emma would never have to see Laurel again. The judge had said that she—that they!—could choose.

  But supervised visitation? What would that mean for Jessie? Emma understood at once: no more summers alone at Baymont. Suddenly, she understood her sister’s face. Jessie, in choosing not to leave the family—had she lost Baymont?

  No, Emma wanted to call out. That was not what this was all about. This—this whole court case—it was about her, Emma. It was all because she hadn’t wanted to go to Baymont anymore. But not Jessie. Jessie loved Baymont. Jessie loved . . . Jessie loved Laurel. It was the first time Emma had ever admitted this to herself. For her sister, Baymont and Laurel—they were inseparable. Jessie loved them both.

  How Jessie could love Laurel, Emma could not understand. Except—well, maybe she could, a little. For Emma, Laurel was nothing that a mother should be. She was neither sympathetic nor loving, offered neither safety nor solace. But to Jessie, Laurel was something else entirely. To her sister, Laurel was independent and free-thinking, strong-limbed and strong-minded. She was . . . she was . . . the best parts of her anyway . . . She was a little like Jessie, Emma thought.

  Emma looked back at her sister in dismay and tried to meet her eye. But Jessie was staring at the floor. She looked instead to her parents who were embracing now. She wanted to share in their relief, but instead she felt a small bubble of despair. Oh, why could it never be clear? She had thought that if she could shut Laurel out of her life, things would be simple. That was all she had wanted. She had just wanted them to be an ordinary family, without Laurel’s awful presence looming over her like Darth Vader: “Emma, I am your mother.” She hadn’t meant for Jessie to lose Baymont. She hadn’t meant for her to lose Laurel.

  She looked at Jessie again and finally caught her sister’s eye.

  “I’m sorry,” she mouthed. “I’m so sorry.”

  But Jessie just shook her head and looked away.

  CHAPTER 30

  Ten Years Later

  Jessie

  Jessie was grading biology tests on the small deck behind her house when the phone rang. She had rented the house almost two years ago now, when she had moved to Pendleton, Oregon from Albuquerque the summer after she turned twenty-four. She had thought the house would be temporary, just until she got her bearings, but she had never moved. The little house suited her, with its large garden plot in the back yard and the gnarled cherry tree that shaded the desk.

  Now, hearing the phone, she rose from her chair and went inside to the kitchen. But the receiver was not on the wall mount, and it was several rings before she found it on the dresser in her bedroom.

  “Hello?” she said breathlessly, racing the answering machine.

  “Jessie? It’s your mother.”

  “Laurel? Oh, Mom, thank God. Why haven’t you called? Are you okay?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine.”

  “Mom, I’ve left you a gazillion messages and you never called me back. Where were you?”

  Laurel laughed gleefully. “Oh, I had to go out of town for a few days.”

  “You could have let me know. I was worried about you.”

  “Well,” Laurel said. “It was nice of you to
be concerned, but you needn’t have been. I’m absolutely fine. Wonderful, actually.”

  Jessie shook her head in surprise. Wonderful? Until five days ago, Laurel had called her practically every day in tears. Jessie did not begrudge Laurel her grief—Laurel’s mother, Pearl, had passed away suddenly of heart disease three months ago—but still she had been surprised by how much Laurel had included her in it. After all, it could be no secret to Laurel that between Pearl and Jessie there had been little love lost.

  Pearl had moved to Baymont to live with Laurel in 1993, when she lost her Los Angeles apartment. Jessie had been a junior at UC Davis then and had visited Baymont—just two hours away—as often as she could. But when Pearl arrived, a little of Baymont’s magic had been lost. Cantankerous and lazy, Pearl rarely rose from her recliner, a cigarette pinned between two yellowed fingers, her ashtray balanced on the chair’s overstuffed arm. Jessie had never gotten used to coming downstairs from the attic bedroom and seeing her grandmother already slouched in her seat in the living room.

  There had been a time when Jessie had thought that Baymont had been lost to her. After the judge’s verdict, Jessie had thought with despair that she would never be allowed to have another summer there. And it had seemed, for a while, that this would be true. The summer after the custody battle, she had not gone to Baymont. Her father, perhaps trying to make it up to her, had taken the family on a long road trip that summer: The Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Arches. Jessie had learned to love the desert on that trip. But it had not been Baymont.

  The next summer, she had pleaded with her father to let her go, if only for a few weeks, but he had refused. Supervised visitation, the judge had said; Baymont was not supervised. The next year, however, he gave in, and by the following year she was eighteen and could do as she pleased.

  Being at Baymont with Laurel had been strange at first, a new distance between them. Jessie felt sheepish about her change of heart, and Laurel, feeling herself slighted, did not forbear from playing the martyr. But in time the old ease had returned, and with it a new bond: Jessie was the loyal daughter now, without whom Laurel would have no one.

  Jessie had never outgrown Baymont’s joys. Even as a teenager, she had never stopped loving the cool of the pond closing over her head, the plunk of blackberries in cut-off milk jugs, the ache in her thighs after a day in the saddle. In Baymont, she was no longer the Jessie of the dirty nails and unstyled hair, the never-quite-right clothes. In Baymont with Laurel, she was just herself—brave and burly and rugged.

  But then Pearl had come to Baymont. Laurel’s mother had come close to tainting it all. Jessie had never managed to completely squelch the revulsion she felt for the older woman, with upper arms like loaves of unbaked bread dough and a yeasty, sour smell that wafted from beneath her faded muumuus. She had always tried her best to ignore the similarities between Laurel and her grandmother: the ease with which their bodies plumped to fat, their sharp judgements of anyone but themselves and those they loved. But Pearl was lazy, slovenly, a whiner; how could Laurel have chosen to share her home with such a woman?

  But as the years went on, Jessie could not deny the affection Laurel clearly felt for Pearl, nor the strange affinity that bonded the two women. Pearl had had Laurel young and raised her almost single-handedly; she was the only family, other than Jessie, that Laurel had. Jessie knew that Laurel would take her mother’s death hard, but still she had not been ready for the cavernous depths of self-pity that Laurel’s grief had opened up in her.

  Everyone leaves me, Laurel had wailed to Jessie on the phone day after day. Two husbands. Her daughter. Now her mother, too. So this is what it is like to be a motherless child, she wept, her voice cracking into breathless sobs. Even Jessie had left her; why had she moved so far away? Jessie tried to be sympathetic, but it irked her that her mother had included her in the list of abandoners. Hadn’t she been the steadfast one?

  For over a month, Laurel’s almost daily phone calls had continued. Then, abruptly, they had stopped. Worried, Jessie had called Baymont again and again, leaving message after message until the tape on Laurel’s answering machine had run out. That had been four days ago. And now Laurel had called at last, her voice startlingly bright, and said that she was wonderful.

  Jessie carried the phone back out to the deck and glanced at the stack of tests on the table. It was nearing the end of the spring quarter at the community college where she taught, and Jessie had planned to give the tests back to her students tomorrow. But it wouldn’t kill them if they had to wait until Wednesday.

  “Okay, Mom,” she said, capping her red pen, her curiosity roused. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Well,” Laurel said, her voice girlish. “You are never going to believe what I’m going to do.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going canoeing.”

  Jessie sighed. “Really,” she said dryly.

  Laurel laughed. “I don’t just mean I’m going canoeing, Jessie. I’m going on a canoe trip.”

  “You mean like overnight?” Jessie asked skeptically. “Camping?”

  On the other end of the line, Laurel pealed with laughter.

  “I know. You can’t believe it, right? I couldn’t either. I still don’t really believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  “I told him I know absolutely nothing about canoeing. Well, except once when your dad and I were married, but that was just for an hour or maybe not even that long—”

  “Mom, I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you back up a little?”

  “Jim!” Laurel said triumphantly. “Jim knows all about canoeing. He even has a boat. A canoe, I mean.”

  “Mom, who is Jim? I don’t even know who Jim is,” she said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You don’t?” Laurel laughed again. “I can’t believe I haven’t told you. But it has all been happening so fast—”

  “Mom,” Jessie interrupted her. “Who is Jim?”

  “Jim? Jim is my new . . . my new lover!”

  Jessie was stunned into silence. “Oh,” she managed to say. How was it possible? Laurel was overweight, with a mullet of long, dingy hair. Even for a more attractive woman, the dating prospects around Baymont were surely limited. Most of the men that Laurel knew were the petty criminals she met in the small law office where she now worked as an office manager. As a rule, they were not good catches.

  “Is he a . . . Did you meet him at work?” Jessie asked.

  “No,” Laurel giggled.

  “So how did you meet him?” Jessie asked impatiently.

  “Well,” Laurel said. “If you must know, I answered a personal ad.”

  Jessie sighed. That Laurel had answered the ad did not surprise her. Laurel was lonely; she could imagine her answering an ad. What surprised her was that whoever had placed the ad had reciprocated Laurel’s interest.

  “Well?” she asked. “What’s he like?” She tried to imagine the kind of man who would be eager for Laurel’s attention. “Is he older?”

  “No.” Laurel was indignant. “He’s actually quite a few years younger than I am. Forty-five, I think.”

  “And . . . ?” Jessie prompted.

  “Well, he lives in Northfield. Near Minneapolis.”

  “He lives in Minnesota?”

  “Is there another Minneapolis?”

  Jessie shrugged this off. “I meant, isn’t that sort of far?”

  Laurel ignored this. “He’s a chemist. At Carleton. Didn’t you think of going there at one point? It’s a very good school.”

  “Wow,” Jessie said. She tried to think of something else to ask, but the only question that came to her was “What’s wrong with him?” Because why would a young, normal, Carleton professor be interested in her mother? He must be extremely—

  “He’s polyamorous.”

  Jessie never finished her thought. “He’s what?”

  “You know
, polyamorous.” Laurel was giggling again. “Many loves.”

  “Yeah, okay, Mom. But what does that really mean? That you’ll be one of many? That he isn’t looking for commitment?” Jessie wondered if that was a line he fed to everyone: “I’m polyamorous” code for “Don’t be surprised when I cheat on you.”

  “That’s actually a common misconception of polyamory,” Laurel was saying, her voice suddenly serious, pedantic. “But actually we are very committed—just not to a single partner.”

  “We? Are you polyamorous now, too?” Jessie immediately regretted the sarcasm that had flooded her voice.

  “It’s not that I’m polyamorous now, Jessie,” Laurel said. “I’ve always been polyamorous. I just didn’t have a word for it, and there is such social stigma, you know. Your father always said I was promiscuous, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. But really . . . I don’t think I’ve ever been cut out to be in a relationship with only one person. And who made that rule anyway? Do you know that humans are the only mammals who mate for life? And they’re terrible at it. It’s an unrealistic expectation. Look at chimpanzees. They share ninety-nine percent of our genes, and they have multiple partners . . . Jessie, are you still there?”

  Jessie rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m here. But I’m not sure that’s right, Mom. What about gibbons and prairie voles?”

  “What? They don’t share ninety-nine—”

  “No, they’re mammals who mate for life. You said—”

  Laurel laughed. “Well, almost the only mammals then. And you get my point.”

  “Okay. Fine. So—so you’re polyamorous. That should work out nicely with Jim, especially since you live, what, at least a two-day drive away from each other? You can both see other people—”

  “Well, that’s not exactly what he’s looking for,” Laurel said.

  “What is he looking for?”

  “Another primary.”

  “Another primary what?”

  “Oh, Jessie. Don’t be obtuse. Another primary partner.”

  “Another? He has one primary already?”

  “Yes. Sue. They’ve been together almost twenty years.”