Look at You Now (12 page)

“And then your mom came for you?”

“No, my grandparents came. Then my mom ended up there later. She was always in and out of trouble, couldn't keep her shit together.”

Amy finally chimed in. “So if you're adopted, does the government give the people money? No, right? That would be better 'cause of all the shit-foster families who do it for the money. But I wouldn't have wanted to be adopted without my little sister. We were a team. We got separated once, into two foster families for more than a year, worst year of my life.”

Amy got me thinking. So much of how I fit in the world came from how I fit in my family—my mom, my dad, my siblings. It was my place, my reliable constant. I'd always thought being with your family was the one thing that could never change. But I'd suddenly learned that wasn't true, not for everyone.

• • • •

After dinner that night,
The Wizard of Oz
came on TV. Most of the other girls hadn't seen it before. We brought our pillows and blankets to the lounge, and I brought out the rest of the SweeTarts and pretzels from my room. The girls were mesmerized, watching the scary flying monkeys tormenting Dorothy and the scarecrow. Just as the wicked witch was plotting her scheme, watching Dorothy and Toto in the little glass globe, we heard the door squeak open. Elaine walked in. Her long black hair was in a bun on the top of her head. She looked pale, and her big pregnant stomach from that morning was gone. Her stepmother trailed in behind
her, yakking about Elaine moving too slowly. Elaine stopped in the middle of the room. “Bye, you guys,” she said.

Amy and Wren got up and hugged her. Tilly walked over, took her hand, and said she was sorry about the baby. Elaine started crying, and then Tilly started crying too. And then Elaine said, “I guess God knew I'd make a shitty mother, so he took her from me.”

The room went silent. The stepmother had gone to Elaine's room. She came back a while later, carrying Elaine's suitcase and stuffed bear.

“Come on, Elaine, let's go,” she said. The woman reminded me of a carnival version of Cruella de Vil. She had on plastic red Barbie shoes and a fake leopard fur overcoat. She reeked of perfume. Elaine took the stuffed bear from under her stepmother's arm and walked over to Wren.

“Here, take him, and take care of yourself, Wren.” Wren looked up, with her long scar running down her face and her big sad eyes. She held the bear by the paw and dangled it at her side, which made her look even younger than she was. She was only a kid—all of us were. Elaine patted Wren's pregnant stomach, one last time, and left. On the television, Dorothy had closed her eyes. She was clicking her heels and saying, “There's no place like home, there's no place like home.”

chapter
7

“
I
appreciate you being so prompt, Liz, it's very considerate.” Ms. Graham was sitting at her desk, same look on her face, same tweed suit, same tall glass of water halfway filled, sitting on the wooden coaster in front of her legal pad. Since I was a little girl, my father had been drilling the significance of being on time into my young, malleable mind. To Lee, lateness was a crime of disrespect—it was
robbing
people of their own time for you to be late.

“You're welcome,” I said.

“You look well. How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“You're adjusting?”

“I guess.” I swallowed hard, twirling the pass in my pocket round and round. Ms. Graham was writing something down on the legal pad. I didn't really feel like talking. I felt like coiling up in a ball and disappearing. Ever since it happened, a week ago, I'd been imagining Elaine's baby drowning in the water in her stomach, or
getting its neck bent while Elaine slept in the wrong position, or getting the stomach flu and choking on its own throw up. There was so much that could go wrong, so much that overwhelmed me about the process. We sat for several minutes before it came out of my mouth. “How did Elaine's baby die?” I said.

Ms. Graham put her pencil down. “She had what they call a stillborn child. In her case they believe it had to do with an abnormality the baby had from the beginning. It is terribly unfortunate, a sad, sad situation.” I looked down at my stomach, then up at Ms. Graham. She kept talking. “Elaine is the first to have this happen in all the years I've been here, Liz. It is extremely uncommon.” I wondered why adults hide the truth, as though it will spare young people from some damaging reality. When the fact is that what we make up in our minds is a hundred times worse than the truth could ever be.

I took a deep breath. “I think someone should have told us what happened, a doctor, not the doctor here. But maybe a nurse or Alice, so we could know how it died instead of having to guess. Everyone is really upset.”

“You have a good point,” Ms. Graham said. “I'll make sure Alice explains to the girls what went on, so they know.”

“Do they bury the baby and have a funeral for it?”

“Yes,” Ms. Graham said. I'd also imagined receptacles at the hospital for babies who didn't make it, and rooms where the mothers of those babies go to wail and cry in the dark. I fought to get the picture of the dead baby out of my mind. It had haunted me all week.

“Elaine will be okay, Liz. She's young and healthy.” Right, I thought. And hates her stepmother, and wanted the baby girl she named Angel so badly she ran away and lived on the streets so they wouldn't make her have an abortion. We both waited in the sad quiet before I asked, “When will you know who is going to adopt this baby?”

“Your baby?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we actually put some calls out and have found several couples who might be a good match. There is a lot of interest from people all over.”

“Why?”

“Because you're healthy, and you come from a nice family, that kind of thing.”

“Will I be meeting the people?”

“No, no, it will be a closed adoption. But I will be a part of the interviewing process and can share some things with you.”

“Could some of these people adopt the other girls' babies too?”

“They could, I suppose. But none of the other girls are giving up their babies.” Ms. Graham opened the desk drawer and pulled out a cream-colored folder. “Some of the folks have asked to know a few things about the father.”

“Daniel,” I said. I hadn't said his name aloud in weeks.

“Yes, Daniel. You don't talk about him much.”

“He's in college. I mean we try to see each other as much as we can, but he's kind of far away. And after I go to college, we probably won't stay together. He feels really bad about all this, but he also doesn't get it. He's busy at school. I mean it's hard to explain what it's like here.”

“I see,” she said. “Tell me a little bit about Daniel.”

I thought about Daniel, and the first time we met and how young I was, and how incredibly long ago it now felt.

I met Daniel in the cafeteria at school when I was almost fifteen years old. He was my first real boyfriend, and I adored him. Daniel was one of those people who had an extra skip in his step, all the time. He was a blast to be around, funny and sweet. He had a way of turning everything we did into something we would remember. That's just who he was. There was a day last summer, when I was sixteen, a boiling hot, boring day. We were driving around the neighborhood with nothing to do. Dan decided to pull a U-turn and parked the car on the side of the road near the lake. I'd
never been to that section of Lake Michigan, and I was whining about it being so rocky. He took my hand, and we walked out onto these big rocks along the water. He told me to close my eyes for a minute. When I opened them he was standing on a huge lone flat rock at the very edge of the water with his hands up in the air. It looked like he was floating in the sky with the water behind him. We sat on the flat rock for hours, doing what we did best, talking and laughing. He kept looking out at the water and telling me he wanted to go to a million different places all over the world with me. And I remember thinking we didn't need to go anywhere. He took a hundred pictures of me that day. Most of them with my hands stretched out in front of my face trying to get him to stop.

“Daniel . . . He has a really great family,” I said. “He likes to ski, he played football in high school, and he loves music.” It felt impossible to describe who Dan was, and how well we got along. Ms. Graham probably thought I was some kind of have-sex-with-anyone slut girl. I wanted to tell her I wasn't. I wanted to tell her I regretted it, that I wished Daniel and I had talked about having sex. Had we planned some special time for it, maybe all this wouldn't have happened. But it wasn't like that, we didn't have sex routinely, and we didn't talk about it. Daniel hadn't asked me about my period, or the sex, or my body changing. We were clueless and stupid. I'd gone over it a thousand times in my head since that day in my dad's wife's doctor's office, when I heard the ocean-rolling heartbeat. My regret was enormous.

“Do you have any thoughts about what kind of people you'd like to adopt the baby?” Ms. Graham asked.

I had no idea what to say. “I guess I'd like them to be . . . nice.” That was a stupid thing to say. I looked down at the floor and watched as it slowly blurred from my tears. I'd cried more in a couple weeks than I had in my entire lifetime.

“I am sorry, Liz, I know this is a lot for you.”

“Whatever.”

“No, not whatever, this is obviously upsetting. And I want to
help if I can.” But she couldn't—no one could. I wished I could put a roadblock up at the front entrance of my mind to stop all the new things coming in that were too hard. That I didn't want to know. Ms. Graham handed me the box of tissues.

“We can take this slowly, Liz, over the weeks. There's no reason you have to think about the adoptive parents right this second, all right?” There was a light knock at the door. I turned to see the guard, Chief, peeking her head in.

“Oh, sorry, didn't know you had a visitor.” She looked over at me and smiled her nice smile. “Hey, girl, you all right? Ms. Graham treatin' you good?”

I looked down at my lap and squeezed out a “Yes.” Ms. Graham stepped out of the room with Chief. I was frozen, my brain was screaming
stop
. It didn't want to think about dead babies or kids living on the streets with no one to care about them, or strangers taking home the baby in my stomach. I asked God or anything that might be listening to help me find a way to be brave. I closed my eyes and asked the tears to stop—I promised them I'd think about the bad stuff another time. I noticed the back of a picture frame sitting on Ms. Graham's desk. I turned it around to see a picture of a young girl with a man in a park. I sensed it wasn't a happy picture. I turned it back around and noticed a book sitting next to it. The jacket read
Sophie's Choice
, in black script writing. I'd seen this book before, at home in my mom's room, or maybe in her car.

“That's a great story,” Ms. Graham said as she walked back in the room. “Would you like to borrow the book?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Do you like to read?”

“Yes.” I shifted my aching body in the chair. I was constantly surprised by the size of my stomach and how it weighed on my back and legs. Then I remembered to ask her, “Why don't they have any books up at school?”

“Well, the facility doesn't have the money to put into the school, so we have to make do. Maryann works for little money, and some
of the staff are kind enough to bring supplies and things from home.” I wondered why they called it a school at all. Why didn't they just say the girls are going up the hill to nap in a cold room? How in the world my mom got the high school to accept “credits” transferring from that room was impossible to imagine. Ms. Graham was writing something down. She looked up and asked, “How
is
school?”

“It's pretty terrible. I mean, no offense, but it's not school, or anything even like school. Some of the girls don't know how to read. Did you know that? And most of them sleep the whole time we're there because we do nothing for hours.”

“The school could use improvements, and, yes, I am aware there are a few girls under the literacy line.” I looked at the diplomas in their shiny frames hanging on the wall behind Ms. Graham and then glanced over at her bookshelf. The girls really didn't like Ms. Graham. Maybe their worlds were just too far apart. Ms. Graham was an educated, reserved lady. To me, she seemed a person who wanted to do her job well and help the girls with their lives. But she couldn't seem to get that across in a way that worked. As I thought about it I realized adults are sort of the natural enemy for teenagers anyway, and Ms. Graham was an adult in a position of authority, which was even worse. And then I decided that Ms. Graham for sure didn't have children. She just didn't have that soft/hard I-have-kids-I-have-to-be-both thing about her.

“Is there a public library anywhere around here?” I asked.

“Yes, of course there is, why?”

“I don't know. You could check out books the girls would like, and that way they'd have something to read, or at least something to try to read. No one would have to pay for it.”

She looked at me a long moment. “People have to want to learn, Liz.”

“I think they want to learn.”

“Maryann would disagree.”

“They ask
me
to read to them. Nellie is smart. She knows a lot of things but I'm pretty sure she can't read.”

“Many of these girls have not been to school regularly. And they aren't interested in learning. Nellie has yet to pass a literacy test. But the purpose of this facility is to offer a safe, comfortable setting for the girls as they wait to give birth. We can't take on their education. We're just not set up for that.”

I was confused about everything. I thought I knew so much before all of this started.

“Some of the girls' lives here are unimaginable,” Ms. Graham was saying. “I know it is very sad and, honestly, it must be very difficult for you, coming from where you do. But please remember that for some of them, most of them actually, this is a nice place to live. They are happy to be here.” She'd said that before. And maybe it was true, but it didn't feel like an answer.

“I was just thinking if Nellie can't read, she could learn. She has nothing else to do,” I said.

“You surprise me, Liz.” Ms. Graham smiled.

“I don't mean to.”

“I know you don't. I will see what I can do about getting more supplies to the school. And, Liz, I spoke to your mom today.”

“What? Why?”

“She called to say she wants to come Thursday and keep you out overnight, which is fine. She'll be here when you get out of school that day.”

“That's great, thank you,” I said. My heart leaped. . . . Thank you, God!

“You miss home?”

“Yes.”

“And there are seven children in your family, your mother was telling me?”

“Yep.”

“That's a lot of children. Your mom took care of all the kids herself?”

“Yes. Well no, when we were little, we had a woman, an au pair, who lived with us and helped her.” I thought back on those years with a new feeling of nostalgia. I was about eight years old when
our au pair came to live with us. It felt like forever ago—that life was so unburdened, so simple and steadfast. Our dad took a trip to England in the summer in search of a person to help our mom with the house and the chaos of seven children. He came back with
Helen
. We stood, all of us wide-eyed, in the front entrance of our house, staring at her. She was tall and pretty, with long, light orange hair. She was an unusual combination of gentle and strong at the same time. Dorothy called Helen a saint, Lee deemed her competent, and we all adored her, especially me. Helen had grown up in Scotland and spoke with a thick accent that made us laugh.

My parents gave Helen every other Saturday off. The very first Saturday she was with us, she asked if I'd like to come downtown on the train with her to explore the city. I was so excited I could barely speak. I put on my patent leather party shoes, pulled my fancy coat out from the back of the closet, with the matching beret, and ran downstairs. Helen asked my mom if I could join her for the day and when Dorothy looked up from the newspaper, she was visibly aghast, “For Goooooooooooood SAKES, Helen, why on earth would you want to bring an eight-year-old with you? Liz, let Helen go have fun with people of her own age, for crying out loud.”