Daughter's Keeper (23 page)

Jorge closed his eyes again and pushed away the memory of Olivia's tear-streaked face. Better not to think of her at all.

***

“I had an abortion once, before you were born.”

Elaine didn't look at Olivia when she spoke. She kept her eyes firmly on the road in front of her, and she gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. She had no idea why she was telling this to her daughter. Perhaps to make Olivia feel less alone; perhaps merely to fill the thick and cloying silence in the car. She had never told anyone before, not the baby's father, not even Arthur. Yet her reticence was as confusing to her as her sudden confession. She ­hadn't been ashamed of the abortion; she wasn't ashamed now. She certainly had never had any ambivalence about her decision. She had only just arrived in San Francisco from New Jersey, had been living in the commune in the Haight for no more than a month or so when she found herself pregnant. There had never been any question in her mind about what she should do; she didn't want a baby, and more importantly, she wasn't entirely sure who the father was. There was one man, a boy really, with a crooked beak of a nose and an oddly high-pitched and nasal voice, who Elaine thought was the most likely candidate. He had a narrow fish-white chest with black hairs sprouting around small nipples, and she didn't like him very much. She had never been particularly promiscuous, but in those first giddy days in Haight Ashbury she had done a lot of things for the first time. She took up the guitar; she dropped acid. And she slept around. Any one of three or four men might have fathered the baby who had taken up residence in her womb for so brief an instant, but Elaine was, for some reason, convinced the responsibility lay with the one she found most repugnant. She ­wasn't sure he would have cared about the abortion, but she hadn't wanted to find out. She'd gone alone to a clinic at the far end of Ashbury Street. Now, more than twenty-five years later, she remembered almost nothing of the experience other than that it had hurt much less than she had expected. Perhaps the real answer to the question of why she never talked about it was that it simply wasn't particularly important—it had made very little impression on her at all.

“Did you think about keeping the baby?” Olivia asked.

“God no.”

“Why not?”

“That would have been a ridiculous thing to do. For one thing, I was much too young.”

“How old were you?”

“About your age.”

Olivia didn't reply.

Elaine continued, “The last thing I was ready to be was somebody's mother.”

Elaine pulled into the parking lot of the anonymous low brick building that housed the clinic. She pulled into a spot and got out of the car. She waited for Olivia, but her daughter didn't come.

Elaine walked around to the passenger side of the car and knocked on the window.

“Olivia?”

Olivia heaved a sigh and got out of the car. She walked off in the direction of the clinic entrance, and Elaine followed.

The waiting room was decorated in a kind of shabby multicultural chic with posters of smiling black and brown women on the walls. Olivia and Elaine sat next to one another on a low lumpy couch that looked better suited to a frat house than a doctor's office. There were a few other women in the room. One, a pretty girl who looked about sixteen or seventeen, was accompanied by a nervous boy in a Bishop O'Dowd football jacket. Another girl looked about twelve, but surely she must have been older. Her mother, a fierce-looking woman with braids molded into an elaborate sculpture on the top of her head, held her daughter's hand tightly, as if afraid she would run away. The girl was gnawing the thumb nail of the hand not clasped in her mother's iron grip.

The jiggling shoe of the football player tap-tapping against the leg of his chair was the only sound in the room. Then the front door banged open and an obviously pregnant woman walked in, leaning heavily on the arm of a man who could only have been her husband. She was Asian, with thick dark hair bobbed at her chin. Her face was red and puffy and her eyes swollen almost shut. She held a soggy tissue in one hand. Her husband was a dark-haired white man with thickly lashed, dazzling blue eyes that looked out of place in an
otherwise inconspicuous face. He led his wife to the receptionist's window and, holding her up with one arm, tapped the bell.

The window slid open, and Elaine could see the face of the same earnest-looking woman who had signed Olivia in.

The man tried to say his wife's name, but his voice cracked, and Elaine was surprised to see tears filling his eyes and running down his face. She hadn't seen many men freely weeping. Arthur, on the rare occasions when he was so moved, tended to screw up his face and rub frantically at the one or two tears that gathered in the corners of his eyes. This poor man, this father, wept openly, his face wet, his nose running, his luminous eyes aglow with grief. His wife put a small hand on his back and leaned into the window. She whispered something, and within seconds the young woman had opened a door for them and was leading them inside.

Elaine turned to Olivia who was gasping as though she were hyperventilating.

“Honey,” Elaine whispered. “Are you okay?”

“Why are they here? She's so…so…pregnant!”

“Well, I imagine that there is probably something wrong with the baby.”

“God. I never thought about that. That people would have to have abortions even when they
want
the baby.”

“Poor things,” Elaine murmured.

Olivia sat for a few moments, swallowing air in short gasps. Suddenly, she sprang to her feet. “I don't want to do this. I'm not going to do this.” Her face was pale and her lips had compressed to a thin white line. “Do I have to do this?”

Elaine put out a soothing hand. “It'll be fine, Olivia. Sit down.”

“
Do I have to do this?
” Olivia asked again. Her nostrils flared with each breath, and beads of sweat stood out on her forehead.

Elaine glanced quickly around at the others in the room, embarrassed of Olivia. Only the young girl was looking at them. All the others kept their faces averted.

“It's okay, honey. What you're feeling is perfectly normal,” she whispered.

“Do I have to?” Olivia said, again, her voice louder.

“No, of course you don't
have
to do anything. But let's not be rash. They'll call you in a minute, and then you'll have a chance to talk to the counselor. I'm sure she'll be able to reassure you.”

“I want to go,” Olivia said. “Mom, I have to get out of here.”

“Take that girl on out of here,” the woman with the young daughter said, suddenly. “Take her on home.”

Elaine stared at her, and the woman looked back, nodding. “Go on. Go on home,” she said. Elaine felt at once that they were in a sorority of two; grandmothers whose grandchildren could not be born. Except she could see that the other woman would have, under other circumstances, rejoiced in a grandchild. That she fully expected one day to do so. Elaine knew that the other woman could never comprehend the dread with which Elaine looked forward to Olivia ever having a baby. Elaine felt a paralyzing shame at what she was sure was her entirely unnatural horror at the prospect of becoming a grandmother.

“Go wait in the car,” she whispered, pushing Olivia in the direction of the door. Then she went to the window and rang the bell. When the receptionist finally reappeared, Elaine said, “We aren't going to stay.”

“Are you sure?” the receptionist said. “Would you like to reschedule?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't wait too long. It's a different procedure after twelve or thirteen weeks.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.” She looked toward the door through which Olivia had disappeared. “Can you give me another appointment? For tomorrow?”

The receptionist pecked at her keyboard, her eyes on a computer screen that was hidden from Elaine's view. “We can do the day after tomorrow, Saturday, at nine. How about that?”

Elaine nodded, gratefully.

The receptionist paused, her fingers hovering over the computer keys. “This has to be
her
decision, you know.
You
can't make her do it, and we certainly won't.”

Elaine frowned at the receptionist, but the other woman returned her gaze steadily, sympathetically, and not at all self-­righteously.

In a cold, firm voice, Elaine said, “We'll be here on Saturday.”

***

Olivia wanted to explain to her mother how she felt. She wanted to describe her disconcerting sensation that she was watching all of this happen to someone else. Someone else was going to jail, someone else was contemplating an abortion. And someone else was drowning under a creeping tide of panic whenever she stopped concentrating on keeping it at bay, whenever she lost her focus for even a moment. Olivia wanted to tell her mother, too, that the only time she felt like a real person, a single, whole human being, was when she contemplated the little blind fish swimming in her womb. When she put her hand on her belly and felt the firm swell underneath the soft roll of fat at her waist, she awoke, for a moment. She was sure that if she could explain it well enough, her mother would understand.

“I just really want to stay pregnant,” she said.

Elaine, who'd been driving silently back up the freeway toward Berkeley, didn't take her eyes off the road.

“You can't stay pregnant.”

“Why not?”

“Because at some point you'll have a baby, and you won't be pregnant anymore. You'll be a mother, with something absolutely dependent on you for every breath it takes. You'll never have a minute to yourself again. You'll be overwhelmed by the responsibility.
If
you're lucky. If not, you'll be in jail. And then what?”

“I can deal with it.”

“Oh, Olivia. For goodness sake. You
cannot
deal with it. What do you intend to do? Even if you don't go to jail, you don't have any money. You haven't even tried to go back to work, have you? You have no idea what a burden being a single mother is. How could you possibly raise a child? You'll just ruin your life more than you have already.”

“I haven't ruined my life.”

“Haven't you?”

Olivia thought about that for a moment. Was her life ruined? She was twenty-two years old. Were the next fifty or sixty years going to be defined by that one night, that single moment in her car, in front of that run-down house in Oakland? If she were sent to prison, would those ten years really haunt all the succeeding decades of her adulthood? With a clarity that surprised her, given how murky everything had lately seemed, she realized that her mother was right. Her life, the fantasy of her future that she had been imagining ever since she was a small child, was irrevocably changed. Ruined. But if that were the case, then what did it matter if she had a child or not? You couldn't wreck something that was already destroyed.

“You did it. You raised a child on your own.” Olivia's voice was plaintive and whining, and she saw her mother's jaw clench. For the briefest of instants, she wondered whether Elaine was going to slap her. But of course she wouldn't. Her mother had never hit her, never even spanked her.

Instead, Elaine lashed out with her tongue. “Right. I raised you on my own. And who knows what my life would have been like if I hadn't had to.”

Olivia had always told people that Elaine wasn't particularly warm, that she wasn't the kind of mother who knitted sweaters or kissed owies. She had even suspected that Elaine had blamed her for the limitations, the compromises, that had marked her ultimately disappointing life. But now Olivia felt oddly vindicated by her sudden comprehension of how much Elaine resented the very fact of her birth. And yet, she also understood, at that moment, that it was not she herself who was the target of Elaine's dissatisfaction. It was not that Elaine did not want to be
Olivia's
mother. But rather, she wished she were nobody's mother at all.

“What do you want me to do, apologize for being born?” Olivia said.

Elaine scowled. “Don't be melodramatic. You know I love you. But who knows what things might have been like if I'd been smarter, if I hadn't gotten pregnant.”

“I'm sorry I screwed everything up for you so badly.”

Elaine sighed. “You are misunderstanding me on purpose. Nothing is screwed up. I do work that I enjoy; I'm in a relationship with someone I love. And I have you.” Olivia couldn't help but feel that this last was added as an afterthought. “I'm not unhappy,” Elaine continued. “It's just…it's just that I'll never know what might have been if I'd waited. If I hadn't married your father and been such a young mother.”

Olivia didn't credit Elaine's excuses. For once in her life, her mother had spoken the truth about how she really felt. Nothing she said now could overshadow that, could erase those words from the air where they hung, glinting beads of pure, honest resentment.

“Well, if you're so happy, and you did so well, then why do you think it will be any different for me?”

“For one thing, I wasn't facing a criminal prosecution. And for another, I had a whole lot of help from my parents.”

So. That was what really worried her mother. She would be forced to rescue Olivia as her own mother had once rescued her.

“Don't worry. The baby isn't going to be your responsibility. Even if I go to jail, I won't make you take care of it.”

“Oh, really? So who
will
take care of it if you go to jail? What are you going to do, bring it with you?”

The thought hadn't occurred to Olivia. It seemed, suddenly, to be a wonderful idea. Being in prison with a baby would be infinitely preferable to being there alone. After all, the worst part was the crushing loneliness, the grim certainty that no one around you cared whether you lived or died. Her baby would depend on her, would need her, would love her. Caring for the baby would fill her days, would hold the persistent tedium of incarceration at bay.