Necessary Lies (24 page)

When we came out of the water, Mrs. Forrester went back to her car to get a big umbrella and she put it up over us. The truth is, Mary Ella and me are pretty brown from working on the farm all summer, but Mrs. Forrester is sickly pale and she put a lot of the suntan oil on her skin. I tried to keep Baby William under the umbrella as much as I could because when his skin gets brown, people think he’s colored. Little colored-looking boy with a blond mama? Didn’t look so good.

After we ate, Mary Ella and Baby William went to sleep on the blanket, but Mrs. Forrester and me sat watching the waves.

“I could watch the ocean forever and ever,” I said. “Don’t think I’d ever get tired of it.”

“I agree,” Mrs. Forrester said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a house right on the water?”

“Like a floating house?”

“No, no. A house up on the dunes. Where you’d be on safe ground—at least until a hurricane came—but you’d have this view every single day.”

I tried to remember what she’d said to me about wishing for something and how that wasted the time you had now, but I couldn’t think exactly how she said it, so I just thought it to myself.

“Is the Pacific Ocean just like this?” I asked.

“You’re very interested in California,” she said.

“I seen pictures. You ever been there?”

She shook her head. “It does sound beautiful,” she said.

I wanted to tell her about Henry Allen so bad. I never got to tell nobody about him. We sat there quiet for a few minutes, me almost shaking while I got up the courage. “You asked me if I had a boyfriend,” I said. “I do. I got one.”

She just looked out at the waves and I didn’t think she heard me, but then she said, “Tell me about him.”

The way it took her a few seconds to answer made me change my mind about telling her. “Please don’t tell,” I said. It was stupid I said anything. She’d tell Nonnie and Nonnie would kill me. “Promise you won’t tell nobody?” I asked.

“Yes, I promise,” she said. “How do you know this boy?”

“I just do,” I said. “Me and him talk about living in California someday. We both want to be teachers.”

“So … to be a teacher you have to stay in school.”

“I know that.” Did she think I was dumb?

“What I mean is, you need to be very careful about not getting pregnant so you don’t get kicked out of school.”

“We already talked about this, ma’am.” I tried to sound as polite as I could but I wasn’t going to tell her about personal things. It was bad enough with Nurse Ann.

“I just worry, that’s all.”

“He has a book on California and we spend hours looking at the pictures. That’s all we do.”

She smiled at me. Her nose was pink and she looked real pretty. “He sounds like a nice boy,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, he is.”

“When do you get to see him?”

“Oh, hardly never now school’s out.” I’d let her think I knew him at school.

“It’s very hard to be a teacher and have a family at the same time,” she said. “Have you thought about that?”

“My favorite teacher, Mrs. Rex, done it. She got two children and she’s a teacher.”

“Do you want children, Ivy?”

“Don’t everybody?” I asked. Sometimes she asked the stupidest questions.

“Well, no,” she said. “Every girl in the world doesn’t want to have children. Some of them only have them because they feel society says they should.”

“What does that mean? Society says?”

“Other people. Other people judge you if you don’t have children. As if there’s something wrong with you. But for some women, it can be the right choice because they want to do other things with their lives.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, have a career—that means a job—that doesn’t mix well with raising a family. That sort of thing. So no, every woman doesn’t want to have children.”

“That’s not me,” I said. “I can’t imagine having no children. That’s crazy. That’s what life’s about.” Then I thought maybe she was one of them ladies who didn’t want children and I just made her feel bad, because she went quiet again.

“Do you want to have children?” I asked.

She nodded, but real slowly. “Someday,” she said. “Not yet.”

*   *   *

We walked back to the car, and we was hot and the dunes steep. I didn’t feel so good and Mrs. Forrester said maybe I had too much sun. I was out of breath by the time we got to the car and really, really tired. Everyone was quiet and when I got into my seat I thought Mrs. Forrester had tears in her eyes. She turned her face away from me real quick.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She shook her head and smiled at me but it was one of them weak smiles, not a real smile at all. “Nothing,” she said. “It was just a good day.” She looked over her shoulder at Mary Ella and Baby William, already almost asleep.

“Why don’t you nap while I drive home?” she said. She reached over and put her palm on my forehead like she was checking me for a fever. She was acting strange, but I liked that she touched me. Her hand felt real soft. “Would you like some lemonade before we start driving?” she asked.

“I don’t need nothing,” I said.

She started the car and pulled into the street and I closed my eyes and before I knew it, I was asleep, dreaming of all that water.

23

Jane

“Welcome back!” I smiled as I walked into my office … well, the office that had been mine alone for the past month while Charlotte recovered from her fall. Now Charlotte sat at her desk, with her leg, still in a cast, propped up on a stool and her crutches leaning against the wall. She still had that polished, clear-skinned look I’d come to associate with her, though there was a tightness around her mouth that made me think she was in pain. “How are you feeling?” I set my briefcase on the floor near my desk. “And how on earth did you get up the stairs?”

“It took me about twenty minutes with lots of help from Fred and Gayle,” she said. “But I couldn’t stay home another day. I was going stir-crazy.”

“I bet.” I sat down at my desk. “You look wonderful.”

She brushed aside the compliment with a small groan. “I still relive that fall every time I close my eyes,” she said.

“It was terrible. I’m so glad you’re doing all right.”

“Obviously, I won’t be working in the field for a while,” she said. “Fred will stick around another month until I’m at full strength. And actually”—she looked at her watch—“he’ll be here any minute. We need to talk to you.”

Her tone told me they didn’t have good news for me, and I immediately thought of my clients. Had something happened to one of them?

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Fred walked into the room at that moment. He stood just inside the doorway and pointed at me. “You,” he said, “are a loose cannon.”

“Me?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

Fred sat down in the only unoccupied chair in the room, a straight-backed chair against the wall by the door. “I got a call from Ann Laing this morning,” he said. “She was out to check on the Hart family and learned you took them to the beach yesterday.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Jane.”
Charlotte’s voice registered disappointment and disbelief. “You can’t go carting your clients around willy-nilly at off-hours,” she said. “It’s against regulations.”

Fred looked at her. “Does she have the manual?” he asked.

“I gave her one,” Charlotte said, talking about me as if I weren’t sitting right there. She looked at me. “Didn’t you read it? Your manual?”

“Yes, of course I did, but I—”

“These people are not your best friends,” Fred said. “You had no authority to take them on a
road trip
with you.”

“I didn’t realize I was doing something wrong.” I’d remembered what David, the psychologist at the country club, had said about seeing Ivy in a different environment. “I thought it would be helpful to see Ivy someplace unfamiliar to her,” I said. “I’m so convinced that she’s brighter than her test shows and thought—”

“You’re treading on very thin ice,” Charlotte said.

“You’ve been at this job how long?” Fred asked.

“Five weeks,” I said.

“And you know better than Charlotte and the testing psychologist and the nurse who’ve been working with this girl—and others like her—for decades?”

I thought of what I’d learned on the beach trip. It had been valuable, but perhaps only to reinforce Charlotte and Ann’s case. I now knew Ivy had a boyfriend, so there was greater potential for her to have sex. But I also knew how much she wanted a family. I knew she had what the books I’d read called “native intelligence”—common sense—and I was sure her IQ was higher than 80, though perhaps not by much. But the thing I’d learned that had truly shaken—and depressed—me, had happened in the last few minutes of our time on the beach. As we climbed over the dune to go back to the car, Ivy suddenly stopped walking. When I looked at her, she was staring into space, blinking a mile a minute. Her eyes rolled up and I knew what I was seeing even before Mary Ella said, matter-of-factly, “It’s a fit. It’ll be over in no time.”

It
was
over in no time and Ivy picked up walking right where she left off, unaware of what had just happened, but for me, everything had changed. She was still epileptic. She hadn’t outgrown it, as I’d hoped. That family she wanted? It would be much harder to come by now. By the time we reached my car, my eyes had stung with tears. I’d already planned to talk to Ann about the weight Ivy was putting on. She needed some guidance to know what she should eat and what she shouldn’t. After that seizure, though, I knew I had something much more serious to talk to Ann about, and I also knew what Ann would say.

If Ivy were my neighbor, though, no one would think of sterilizing her. That was the thing. The petition was because she was poor. Poor and on welfare and unable to speak for herself.

“Ivy wants children,” I said. “If she doesn’t get pregnant now and gets good medical care for her epilepsy and good care once she’s married and pregnant, she could have a chance at the family,” I said.

“That’s a hell of a lot of ifs,” Fred said.

“Unrealistic ifs,” Charlotte added. “I was shocked this morning when Paula told me you haven’t turned the petition in yet,” she said. “She said you’re getting cold feet about the Eugenics Program. I thought we’d talked about that and you understood the benefits.”

“I—”

“How far along are you with the petition?” Fred asked.

“It’s almost finished,” I said.

“Then finish it and turn it in,” Charlotte said.

Barbara appeared at my office door. “There’s a call for you, Jane,” she said. “A Davison Gardiner? He said it’s urgent.”

I turned away from Charlotte and Fred, glad to escape their angry eyes. I picked up the phone. “Mr. Gardiner?” I said. “This is Jane Forrester.”

“Hey, Mrs. Forrester,” he said. “I’m afraid we got a situation here.”

24

Ivy

I was looping at the Christmas barn, trying to watch Henry Allen at the same time. He was driving the mule in front of the sled out in the field, and I couldn’t wait till the sled was full and he’d bring us the leaves. Then he’d be close enough for me to touch. Or at least to get a good look at. We was so careful about not looking at each other when people was around—which was always—and we never talked in front of nobody. It’d been almost three weeks since the last time we was together and I missed him so bad I felt crazy. How we was ever going to work things out, I didn’t know. Once school started in September, though, I’d get to see him more. Nobody could keep us apart at school.

It was nearly time for our morning break and I hoped Desiree’d bring us some of her deviled eggs. We’d been working extra hard that morning because Lita was home with Rodney, on account of him not feeling good, and Nonnie never did make it to the barn today herself, her hands and feet hurting too much.

“Here comes Lita.” Mary Ella handed me five leaves instead of three or four, which she did a lot when she wasn’t paying good attention. I handed a leaf back to her and looked up to see Lita coming up the path to the barn at a good clip. I had that sick-to-my-stomach feeling that something was wrong.

“Baby William’s gone missin’!” she said, when she was close enough we could hear. “Nonnie says she been looking for him all morning.”

Mary Ella dropped the leaves she was holding and took off running toward home. I stopped looping. “Did she look under the porch?” I asked Lita.

“I suppose, but I don’t rightly know,” Lita said. “It’s almost break time. Stop work now and get everybody looking.”

I knew Mr. Gardiner wasn’t going to be too happy about us stopping, but right then I didn’t care. I took off running to the house, while Lita let the boys in the field know what was going on.

Mary Ella must of run like the wind, because I didn’t see her anywhere ahead of me, but then, I couldn’t run as fast as usual. It was so hot and I was sweaty and out of breath by the time I got home. I found Nonnie sitting at the kitchen table, chewing the side of her finger like she always did when she was a nervous wreck.

“Did you look under the porch?” I couldn’t catch my breath and had to lean against the wall.

“I looked everywhere,” she said. Her eyes was red. “I thought maybe he tried to go to Lita’s to see Rodney, but he ain’t nowhere. He disappeared.”

“Don’t say that!” I said. “Where’s Mary Ella?”

“Out looking. She came home just a minute ago and went back out. Lita told me just stay here,” she said. “I ain’t much good out there, and I’ll be here if he comes back.”

“How’d he go missing?” I got a glass of water from the pump and drank it all in one big gulp.

Nonnie looked away from me, still chewing on her finger. “I was so tired,” she said. “I took some Bufferin and fell asleep. I woke up and he was gone.”

I felt bad for her and mad at the same time. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him,” I said. “Most likely he’s in the tobacco.” I headed for the door. “That’s where he always hides.” I hoped I was right. He could be lost in the tobacco field for days, but at least he’d be safe. “Maybe by now someone’s found him.” I went out the back door and started to run toward the woods, but my body told me it was done running for the day and I slowed down. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was getting a taste of how tired Nonnie felt all the time.