Pretending to Dance (15 page)

I tried to picture Russell growing up on a Morrison Ridge–type place all his own. “Your great-great-great-grandfather was really lucky,” I said, wondering how the other slaves were treated.

“Yes, he was,” Russell said, then added, “His mama, probably not so much.”

It took me a minute to understand what he meant, and I didn't know what to say when I finally figured it out. We'd come to the Hill from Hell, and Russell put the van in low gear. I waited until we reached the bottom to change the subject to the one that was weighing heavily on my mind.

“Do you think my father is happy?” I asked.

“Happy?” He sounded surprised by the question. “Why would you ask that?”

“Something Nanny said made me think about it. She said he's depressed and … I just never noticed that about him and I thought maybe he hides it from me or something.”

Russell was quiet, his hands opening and closing on the steering wheel. I didn't like his silence. I wanted him to tell me that my father was perfectly content with his life. Instead, for the longest time, he said nothing.

I was about to ask the question again when he finally spoke. “Your daddy has a hard row to hoe, Molly,” he said as he pulled into our driveway and turned off the engine. “Let's just do all we can to make his life enjoyable.” Then he looked over at me. “You're the one person who brings him the most happiness, Molly,” he said. “Don't you forget that.”

*   *   *

The meeting had been over for a while when Russell and I walked in the front door of the house. Everyone was gone and I could hear Daddy singing in his bedroom. He used to sing a lot, just random tunes as he wheeled around the house, but I realized it had been a long time since I'd heard him sing. He was belting out the Eagles' “Take It to the Limit.” I looked at Russell who smiled at me.

“He's one of a kind,” he said.

I heard Mom cleaning up in the kitchen as I headed for their bedroom. Daddy lay on the bed, his head propped up on a couple of pillows, his body still, as always. He stopped singing mid-sentence when I walked in the room.

“Hey, Moll!” he said. He nodded toward the narrow space between his body and the edge of the mattress, and I sat down—carefully. Once, a couple of years ago, I'd sat right on his urine bag, creating a giant mess for Russell to clean up. “How'd you make out at Nanny's?” he asked.

“Good,” I said. “We watched the Dorianna tape and a movie.” I wouldn't mention the tape of him dancing. “How'd things turn out with Dorianna?” I asked.

“Brilliantly,” he said. “She was a skillful pretender. Shy kids often are, since they spend so much time inside their heads to begin with. What movie did you watch?”

“Rear Window.”

“Ah, great film! I've always liked that one because the Jimmy Stewart character is disabled. At least, partially. Yet his disability doesn't render him helpless.”

“Right,” I agreed.

“Then there's what Hitchcock is saying about marriage.” Daddy raised his eyebrows. “And of course, there's the whole feminist perspective on the Grace Kelly character.”

I groaned. “You have a way of picking things apart so much that you sap all the fun out of them,” I said.

“Oh, I do, do I?” He laughed. “Your mom looks a bit like her, don't you think?”

“Like who? Like Grace Kelly?” I asked, incredulous, but I caught myself before I laughed. Stacy'd told me the biggest erogenous zone was the brain. Maybe that was the only place my father could have sex anymore—in his brain—and if he needed to see Grace Kelly when he looked at my mom, I wasn't going to ruin his fantasy. “A little,” I agreed. I folded my hands in my lap. “So, how did the meeting go?” I asked.

“The meeting was … rejuvenating.” He smiled. He
did
seem rejuvenated.

“How come Janet and Peter and Helen were here?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “It can be good to have an outside brain or two in the room to mediate sometimes.”

“So, Uncle Trevor changed his mind about selling the land?” I asked.

“Well, Trevor is still basically being an asshole, but let's not think about that right now. Lie down here and sing with me, all right?” He nodded toward Mom's side of the bed. “Pick an Eagles song and you do the harmony.”

It had been a long time since we sang together. We did it a lot when I was younger. I climbed over him and flopped down on my mother's side of the bed. “‘Lyin' Eyes,'” I said.

“All those verses!” he said. “I bet you five bucks you won't remember all the words.” He'd been doing this since I was a kid—betting me I couldn't do something that he knew perfectly well I could do. It made me feel like I was about eight years old, but I wanted to please him tonight so I would go along with it.

“You're on,” I said, and I started us out with the first verse. We sang every verse and I waved my arms in the air each time the chorus came along. I messed up the words a few times, but so did he.

“Good job,” he said when the song was over. “I'll ask Mom to give you a five tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said, happily looking at the ceiling above us. He was in such a great mood that I knew Nanny was worrying about nothing. I wished she could see him right now. It would ease her mind.

“What do you think of the woman in ‘Lyin' Eyes'?” Daddy asked. “She leaves her husband for her old boyfriend, but then she's still not happy.”

“She's a slut,” I said simply.

“Hm. A tad harsh, don't you think? What motivates her?”

I thought about the lyrics. “She's married to a man with hands as cold as ice,” I said. Then I rolled onto my side and smacked him playfully on the shoulder. “You're doing it again!” I said. “Picking something apart. It's only a song. Can't you just enjoy it for what it is?”

He turned his head to look at me and his serious expression surprised me. “You're right, Molly girl,” he said. “Life's too short to pick it all apart. I'll try to do better.”

“Molly, what are you still doing up?” Mom said as she walked into the room carrying a stack of my father's folded T-shirts.

“We were singing,” I said.

“So I heard.” She pulled open the top dresser drawer and lowered the T-shirts inside it. “But you need to go to bed, now,” she said. “It's after midnight.”

“After all these years, Nora, I finally figured out who you remind me of,” Daddy said.

She shut the dresser drawer and turned to face him “Who?” she asked.

“Grace Kelly,” Daddy said.

Mom laughed. She hit his foot lightly through the blanket, then tucked a lock of her blond hair behind her ear and suddenly she
did
remind me a little of Grace Kelly. She smiled at my father and they exchanged a look that I was no part of. I shouldn't even have witnessed that look.

“I'm going to bed,” I said, rolling off her side of the bed. I stood up and headed past her toward the door.

“Sleep tight,” she said, and she sounded a thousand miles away from me.

“Night, darling,” Daddy said, but he never moved his gaze from my mother's face.

 

19

San Diego

Sienna answers the phone and I'm instantly struck by the tenor of her voice when she says hello. Her voice is pitched low, reminding me of the actress Julia Stiles and making her sound older than seventeen. I think of Amalia who was twenty-one or twenty-two when she was pregnant with me. In my mind, I have a pregnant young Amalia on the phone and I feel those same twisty-turny feelings of love and anger that always accompany my thoughts about my own birth mother.

Ridiculous,
I think.
She's a stranger. A seventeen-year-old stranger
.

“My husband and I are so happy you want to talk with us, Sienna,” I say. “I know you're talking with a couple of other families as well, and—”

“I already talked to them,” she says. “It didn't go so well.”

My spirits rise a little. I'm dying to ask why her conversations with the other families “didn't go so well” so I don't make whatever mistakes they made, but I think better of it.

“It must be nerve-racking talking to people when there's so much at stake,” I say. “I know I'm a little nervous making this call myself.”

She says nothing for so long, I'm afraid she's hung up. Then I realize she's crying.

“Sienna?” I prod. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she manages to say.

“This is really hard, huh?”

“Really.”

“Can you tell me about it? About how you feel?” I remember Zoe saying that we should keep things light in our initial conversations with a birth mother. Talk about things we like to do. Talk about the weather. Don't just dive into the heart of the adoption. But here we are.

She is sniffling. I bite my lip as I wait. Her voice may be deep and adult, but her crying is that of a little girl and my heart breaks for her.

“Just…” she begins, “just that I want to be sure I find a really perfect place for my baby. I screwed up by getting pregnant and now I owe it to her to make sure she has a good home. A perfect home.”

Her
. It's a girl! I can't wait to talk to Aidan. “I don't think there is any such thing as a perfect home, Sienna,” I say slowly. “But there are certainly good homes and I think my husband and I can offer that to your baby. Would you like to ask any questions about us?”

“No. I mean, I got it all from your portfolio. I like how you already have a little girl so she'd have a sister. And that you have a dog. I always wanted a dog but—”

“Sienna?” I stop her, my heart sinking. “I think you might have our profile mixed up with someone else's. We don't have a little girl. Or a dog. Though we might get a dog.” We'd never talked about it, but I would happily get a dog if it meant also getting a baby.

“You're kidding,” she says. I hear her rustling papers on her end of the line. “What's your name again?”

“I'm Molly,” I say. “My husband's Aidan.”

“Oh shit. I get these all mixed up.”

I shut my eyes. I'm afraid I'm going to cry as well. I feel suddenly, fiercely competitive with that couple who has the little girl and the dog.
What's best for the baby,
I remind myself. “Well, why don't we talk for a while anyway. You must have picked our profile, too, so—”

“Yeah, okay, I just found yours. I liked yours, too. I liked those twin boys.”

“Right! That's us. The twins are our nephews. Aren't they adorable?”

“Yeah.” She's smiling now. I can hear it and I feel encouraged. “They look really happy. I think you said they live close by?”

“Just a few miles away. Your baby would get to see them all the time. They'd grow up together as cousins.”

“Cool,” she says.

Silence falls between us and my mind goes blank. I'm still shaken by the mix-up. I scramble for something to say.

“How are you feeling?” I ask. “Has it been an easy pregnancy?”

“I was sick a lot in the beginning but now it's just … I'm tired of being so fat. I just want it to be over.”

“Yes, I can imagine,” I say. I never got to the point of feeling fat when I was pregnant with Sara. I wish I had. “I think you're really brave,” I say. “You made a hard choice to have the baby and now a hard choice to place it with a family who can give it—give her—a wonderful life.”

That silence again. “My friends at school say I'm making a huge mistake,” she says finally.

“Why do they say that?”

“I go to this class with girls who are pregnant or who already had babies,” she says. “I'm the only one who's giving her baby up.”

I'm glad now for the language of open adoption. “I don't think of it as giving her up,” I say. “I think of it as finding the right home for her. You'll be giving her the things you feel unable to give her yourself right now.”

“Yeah, but they say I must not love her if I give her … if I adopt her out. But I do. I really do.”

“I think you must love her a lot to make such a hard choice for her.”

“Exactly.”

We're both quiet and I'm not sure what to say next. I don't like this. I don't like the sense of coercion I feel in trying to pick the right words that will make her like me.

“Can you tell me about your baby's father?” I ask.

“He's an asshole,” she says.

“Oh. I'm sorry. Were you together long?”

“I don't want to talk about him.”

Time to shift gears, I think. “Would you like to meet in person, Sienna?” I offer. “My husband gets home from a business trip on Friday. We could meet for lunch on Saturday if that would work for you.”

She hesitates. I hear the rustling of paper again and worry she's checking her calendar. Maybe squeezing us in between meetings with other adoptive couples. That couple with the dog, for example. “That'll be good,” she says.

“Oh, that's wonderful. You're in Leucadia, right? Is there a restaurant you know of where you'd like to meet?”

She names a place I've never heard of. I give her my e-mail address and our phone number. “Please e-mail me if you have any questions, and I'll give you a call Friday evening to firm up our plans for Saturday, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, then adds. “I just thought of something.”

“What's that?”

“Your name is Molly,” she says. “That's my cat's name. I think maybe that's a sign.”

My heart soars again. “I bet it is,” I say, smiling. “I'll talk to you Friday.”

 

20

Morrison Ridge

I spent the next morning typing for my father. I was a little slower than usual because I hadn't slept well. Even though he'd been in a good mood after the family meeting, I kept thinking of what Russell had said:
Let's just do all we can to make his life enjoyable
. I'd stared at my dark ceiling half the night, thinking of ways to do that. I'd been raised to believe I could accomplish whatever I set out to do, so it wasn't a question of
can
I make his life enjoyable but rather a question of
how
I would do it. I came up with a few good ideas, lying there. First, I'd remind him of how he always said he loved his work. His books touched many lives and he helped his patients every day. I'd point that out to him. I'd have to be subtle about it so he didn't catch on to what I was doing. Second, I'd think of ways to make this summer fun for him. I thought of asking to go to Carowinds, the theme park I loved, but then I realized that was
my
kind of fun, not his. Then I hit on the idea of the zip line. He loved the zip line. It made him feel free, he said. I knew he hadn't been on it in a couple of years. I was going to change that. I was going to change a lot of things. This was the summer I'd make him happy to be alive.