The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (14 page)

 

Following several angry, lawsuit-threatening emails to the EDD, my wish finally came true two weeks later. My benefits were in the mail.

When the P.O. box suddenly bloomed with envelopes, I was ecstatic. I had to budget the money wisely, of course.
But I also had to see Matt. The UK homeless hike in September had been postponed indefinitely. Lori was due to give birth in late November, but we didn't want to take any chances on a potential preemie.

Matt met with Lori two days after he found out about the impending baby. He was blunt with her: He was seeing a girl in the States, he was going to be there much of the time and he would eventually be moving there. He would always take responsibility for the child—financial and otherwise—but they needed to decide on shared custody arrangements. He wanted equal time in the child's life.

“How'd she take it?” I asked when he filled me in.

Not very well, he told me. She got very quiet and wouldn't say anything for a while. It was hard for him to tell exactly what she was thinking, but he got the impression that she might have been hoping for him to come back to her. He made it very clear to her that that wasn't an option.

Clearly, she hadn't counted on this unexpected wrench thrown into her plans when she set out to trap her former boyfriend into rekindling their relationship by means of her pregnancy. I can't say I felt particularly sorry for her—after all, she'd pretty much complicated our lives beyond belief by sneakily skipping a morning-after pill—but I did feel sorry for the baby, and for Matt. But, hey, we'd make it work. Somehow.

 

We hastily made plans for Matt to fly to California. Because I was working, it had to be that way. I couldn't take time off from a relatively new job to go to Scotland.

Matt was allowed to stay for up to ninety days on a visa waiver program before returning home. It was May, so we
assumed that he would stay until August. He let Lori know that he would be out of the country until then, and she threw a wrench of her own into the works—only the first of many.

“She wants me to attend the next ultrasound scan in a month. I can only stay in California until June. Then I have to go back for the scan. It'll only be for a week or so, and then I can fly back.”

I was frustrated and upset, though I tried to be reasonable. This was my money, after all, that we were spending for him to fly him here—his benefits didn't cover anywhere near that much—and I felt, perhaps unfairly, that he was treating it in an awfully cavalier manner. An extra plane ticket so that he could be present during an ultrasound? Why? What could he possibly do besides sit there while she got her belly scanned?

“It's not for me, honey. I understand why it bothers you, but we need to try to keep her happy, right? I don't want to make her angry. What if she decides to start making it difficult for us in the future, fights me on custody? Shouldn't I try to be friendly with her? Besides, she's pretty much a chav.”

“Chav?”

“It's an English slang term. Basically means a backwards idiot. What you guys might call a ‘hick' or ‘trailer-park trash.' She has no idea what kind of questions to ask the doctor. I need to be there so that I can ask those questions.”

“So arrange to listen in on a conference call from California, or something. Or get written permission from her to contact the doctor with any questions. Yes, I understand you want to keep her happy, but I'm afraid this is going to give her hope. I'm not saying that you are, but, in
her
mind, this is you choosing her over your girlfriend. You do realize that, don't you?”

“Yes, I guess I do realize that. But
you
know that I'm not choosing her over you, right? I'm just trying to make it easier for all of us down the line.”

But he
wasn't
making it easier for all of us down the line! I wanted to cry. He was letting her think that she could push and push and push until she got her way. And then it would only be harder in the future, when we were ready to get married. Please, please put your foot down now. Head off her bullshit at the pass. Do it for us.

I wanted to scream it all at the top of my lungs. But that would be crazy. After all, it was
my
fault that I was upset, not his.
I
was being unsupportive. This was his first child. He was already losing out on the whole prebirth bonding process. The listening to the baby via belly headphones, the feeling of a fluttering kick from the womb against his hand. This was all going to be hard enough for him, especially once the child was born. Just let go. Give in. Be the supportive girlfriend, the supportive
future wife
. Do this for him.

So I did. He was right. The two of us would need to be the adults in this situation; we would have to make compromises.

We booked the trip. He would stay in California for one month. On May 20, 2009, I would meet my future husband at LAX Airport in Los Angeles. The butterflies began. It was all about to become so very real.

H
e spotted me first, across the swarm of arrivals criss crossing paths, knocking into one another with their rolling suitcases.

I wore a green-and-black dress, and was shaking as though it were freezing, though the California spring was out in full force. He was tall and lanky, weedier in person, and his face slightly more creased, a minuscule tad older than the photos had shown. I would later learn that this was because he was exhausted; he hadn't slept a wink in the two hours he'd spent on the train to Aberdeen Airport, and then the sixteen-hour flight. Later, after he got a full night's sleep, his face would relax into the smoother, youthful one I knew from the past few months. He had the faintest flecks of gray just beginning to crop up around his temples. I found that distinguished-looking.

I think we had both imagined an airport meeting in which we rushed into each other's arms and kissed like we were in a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks romantic comedy. Reality won out, however. We were both too afraid of what the other was thinking. We walked quickly toward each
other, blocking the flow of traffic. I stared up at him. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He'd seen me in photos and video, but what if now, in person, he was thinking he had made a mistake? I couldn't read anything, but his eyes were kind.

“How was your flight?”

“Oh, it was…you know…long. I'm feeling pretty tired.”

“Right. Of course. Right. Let's get you back to the motel. You must be exhausted.” I had rented a motel for a week or two with some of my EDD money. It didn't seem right for me to bring my future husband back to a Walmart parking lot right off the bat.

We had spoken about what our first meeting would be like, of course. Would I take him to a secluded spot on Laguna Beach and make love on the sand under a blanket, as waves crashed around us?

Nope. This was real life. He was clearly about to drop from exhaustion. We walked briskly to the parking structure and piled into my car. Then, we just sat and chatted for a while. I can't tell you exactly what we said for the next ten minutes. Mindless prattle, mostly. Something to fill the void. Just when I was positive that this was all a big mistake and that he was quickly figuring out that he couldn't stand me, that going on a first date
to California
that you couldn't get out of by simply having a friend pretend to call with an emergency was the dumbest idea of his life, he kissed me.

And it was perfect. We stayed like that for a while, just kissing softly and easing ourselves into this.

He pulled back after a few minutes. I was trembling.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yes. You?”

“Yeah.”

“I was starting to get worried that you were disappointed by me,” I said.

“No.
God,
no. You're beautiful. Just taking my time. You seemed awfully nervous.”

“I am. I mean, I was.”

“Me, too. But everything's going to be OK now. Right?” he said.

“Right.”

“OK. Let's go.” He squeezed my hand, and we drove back to the Orange County Motel, him stroking my elbow as though it were the most natural thing in the world and we'd known each other all our lives.

Once at the motel, we checked his bags and got settled, flopping on the bed, propping our heads up and chatting some more. We both knew what was coming, what had been coming for months, but we instinctively knew that some lead-in was required. We just needed to get to know each other in person some more, settle into a new kind of energy, before we took that step. Also, I realized, he was so very tired that he would probably need some sleep before we…

He reached out and pulled me close, drawing me to him tenderly. I did what I'd wanted to do forever, burying my nose into his chest so that he wouldn't see my eyes well up with tears of relief and happiness. We took our time, exploring each other's bodies very slowly, before finally making love.

I'd never made love before, chiefly because no man had ever loved me. When Matthew Barnes looked into my eyes, his own moistening up, tears running down into the cracks on the side of his nose and plinking softly onto my face, it was the first time any man had ever said those words to me, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He came inside me, and then held me for hours upon hours, finally drifting off into the soundest of sleep together. He meant it, and so did I. It wasn't what we had imagined our first meeting would be like in the preceding months, but its essence was everything we could have hoped for and more. We awoke several times throughout the night and made love again and again. It was nothing short of miraculous to us. What we'd felt did carry across the ocean. It was real.

 

The following month was wonderful, in every sense of the word. Sure, we were switching between motels and the Walmart parking lot, but every day there was something new for me to share with Matt. He even found ways to share new things with
me
.

One day, Matt insisted that we take a walk. He spent all day alone in the motel while I was working, and would go wandering around Tustin to keep himself occupied. I was tired from work.

“Nooooo, I just wanna toss myself on the bed and rest, maybe read a book or watch TV or have sex. Pleeeeease?” The last thing I wanted to do was walk.

“Come on. There's something I want to show you. You'll love this.”

Grumbling, I pulled on a pair of jeans and took his hand. He pulled me down the residential back streets of Olde Town Tustin. We walked and walked and suddenly, looming before me, there was an old-fashioned Victorian mansion, framed with giant, luscious oak trees. I gaped.

“I knew you'd like it. But wait, there's more.”

We explored the twisty, winding roads, marveling at houses so beautiful, so old, so anachronistic to their surroundings. I could never have imagined homes like these in SoCal, home of the cookie-cutter Craftsman Bungalow and the Stucco Ranch House, much less in Tustin. Finally, he stopped me at a street corner and pointed.

“Oh, my god! It has
turrets!
” It was like my dream house come to life. He stood behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and whispering in my ear.

“I knew this one would be your favorite. I saved it for last. We're going to have something like that house, one day. There will only ever be the best for you, I promise.”

 

We had known that we couldn't rent motels forever, but it was nerve-racking bringing Matt back to the trailer. I still felt an element of shame about it, even though intellectually I knew that was ridiculous (after all, he too knew what it was like to be homeless), but he put me at ease, cuddling me on the stale mattress and having long talks with me about quantum physics, philosophy and similar high concepts that I'd never quite understood, but that he made elementary. By the time he'd explained it to me, it all seemed within my grasp. He, on the other hand, was astonished and grateful that I could keep up with him, and even hold my own in a debate—often winning, as a matter of fact.

“I used to try to talk about this stuff with my wife, and she'd just look at me blankly. ‘Use four-year-old language, please!' she'd say. And there was no point even trying with Lori, of course. Every day you surprise me more and more. You have no idea what it's like to finally be with somebody so tailor-made for you, someone with
intelligence
.”

“Yes, I do.”

We made love on the stale mattress, until I had to go to work in the morning and he would walk to what he considered the greatest American treasure of all—Denny's—for a Grand Slam, which he declared positively rivaled any British food ever invented in scrumptiousness. Then he'd trot over to the local Starbucks, buy a coffee and run Homeless Tales from the Starbucks couch, until I could escape work and rush back to him, and we'd twine our fingers absentmindedly and dream about the house on the East Coast—where it was beautiful and full of nature and history and architecture and far, far away from my family and my past—that we'd buy, once we were married and I'd saved up enough from work to make a down payment. Then we'd make love until we slept, and then do the entire thing all over again. It was the first time I'd ever known what true, ongoing happiness was.

After a few weeks, we couldn't contain it any longer. Both of us wanted to shout it from the rooftops, and we decided to announce our happy news to my readers, and to Matt's community at HomelessTales.com. Just writing about it made me a little misty-eyed, and my heart felt kind of weighted, like it was going to throb open. But it was so,
so
superbeautiful, finally getting to share it with the people following my life.

 

The one thing Matt didn't want to talk about publicly yet was Lori's pregnancy. In fact, he didn't even like talking about it much privately, with me. I thought that we should start making plans ahead of time, get things all ironed out before the birth. I figured it was important to talk to Lori about a mutual custody agreement before the baby was born; to get things in writing so that later on there were no problems, no “he said, she said.”

But I didn't understand what it was like trying to talk with her, he exclaimed irritably. If he ever tried to talk to her about
anything
serious, she either spaced out or started to cry and said that they should talk about it later. She seemed to understand about him moving to the States to live with me, and accept that there was no future for them. He had tentatively proposed sharing custody, a rotation maybe every three or six months, but he couldn't seem to pin her down to putting anything into writing.

That was all the more reason to deal with it now, I pressed. It would only be harder for her to be objective about sharing custody after the baby was born, and what if she decided to make things hard for Matt later on?

If he thought she was going to be reasonable, then that was awesome. But get it in writing. I needed him to trust me on this. I had seen a lot of single new moms turn into total ogres after the baby was born, and try to take the father to court, or keep him from seeing the baby, after promising everything would be amicable. I watched an otherwise delightful former friend of mine do just that. It's one of the reasons we're no longer friends. I watched her go absolutely nuts after the birth of her baby, and do her utmost to destroy a very good man, and a good father, because she changed her mind about their
verbal
custody agreement.

Maybe he didn't
think
Lori would pull a stunt like that, and maybe she wouldn't. I had never met her. I didn't know. Maybe she was a completely rational person and had no intention of ever taking Matt to court.
But we had no way of knowing that
. For his protection—and hers—I urged him to make arrangements and get them in writing
now,
so that we wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of misunderstandings or court actions later on. I spoke as
lovingly as I could, and from the heart, but it only seemed to make him touchier.

“Look, I'm not like you, OK? I trust people!” he snapped.

Ouch. I didn't know what the hell that was supposed to mean.

“Sure, you have
reason
not to trust people,” he continued. “I mean, look what your family and the Jehovah's Witnesses and everything put you through. But that doesn't mean everyone's like that! In the UK, things are different.
People
are different. You can
trust
people, OK? She's not the brightest girl, but I believe she's fundamentally decent!”

I was stung.

“I
do
try to trust people. I
do
try not to be cynical or overly suspicious. Believe me, I would love to live in that kind of world, Matt! But that's not the world we live in. I'm not saying grill the poor kid or anything. I swear I'm not. If you think she's a good person, I'm sure she is. But look—pregnant women are hormonal. New mothers are protective. And people forget their promises sometimes. Hell, half the time I can't remember conversations I had a week ago. I'm just saying, for the protection of everybody involved—so that
neither
of you forget later what you agreed on—sit down and hash this out when you go out there for the ultrasound. Look, I even found a binding UK legal form for it.” I pushed it toward him.

“All you guys have to do is sit down together and come to an agreement on issues like how often each of you gets to watch the baby, how you'll handle issues like school and religion and all that hairy stuff. Then you fill it all out on this form, get it notarized and boom! You both have it there to refer to later, if there's any dispute over what
you agreed to. Explain to her that this is for
her protection
just as much as yours, Matt. If she's as decent as you think, then why would there be any problem with such a basic agreement?”

He sighed. “I guess you're right. I'll give it a try when I get back there.” He broke down in tears and sobbed, pulling me close on the trailer mattress. “I just don't understand. I wish it was
you
. I want it to be
you
having our baby. It
should
have been you.”

 

Right around this time, Matt became somewhat obsessed with the idea of
us
having children of our own.

I'd just gone through the very unpleasant process of having a Paragard IUD put in. I had to deal with a rude, unsympathetic Planned Parenthood nurse who treated me like dirt when she read the descriptor “homeless” on my chart. She kept pushing me to accept hormonal birth control, which I'd already learned via trial and error turned me into a miserable, raging bear of a person—an experience I did not wish to repeat. I politely declined, explaining my reasons, and requested the IUD again. The nurse angrily jammed a speculum into my cervix without preamble and opened it all at once, like an umbrella, then refused to place the IUD when I cried out, saying, “Well, if you can't handle pain like that, you won't be able to handle the cramping of having an IUD placed inside you.” I'd had my annual Pap smear faithfully, up until this point, always with a gentle gynecologist who'd open the speculum slowly, notch by notch, always careful not to hurt me. Never before had I felt pain during an ob-gyn exam. This woman had very deliberately
hurt
me. I felt seriously violated. I left the room in shock, arriving at the front counter
in tears and shaking all over. The receptionists took pity on me.