She explained that she and my father had finally convinced Grace to let them call for an ambulance and that she’d stayed behind in the little apartment while my father took Grace to the hospital. Before Grace was carried out of the apartment on the stretcher and loaded into the ambulance, my mother told me, she leaned over Grace and whispered, “You be me.” Then she placed her wallet in Grace’s hands and kissed her good-bye.
I didn’t understand.
“Why did you say, ‘You be me’?” I asked. “And why did you give Grace your whole wallet, instead of just giving her some of the money out of it?”
My mother began to cry.
“Do you want me to tell the rest?” my father asked her gently.
But she shook her head, dried her eyes, and continued.
“I wanted a baby more than anything in the world,” she told me. “We had tried forever.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve told me a million times how you spent years knitting little booties and sweaters, and then when I finally came, the clothes were all moth-eaten and I couldn’t wear them.”
My mother got a faraway look in her eyes.
“You were so tiny,” she said, “but you had quite a pair of lungs. You could wail all night, and for weeks you did, too. I’d wrap you up tight, and rock you and sing to you until you finally fell asleep. Poor little thing, you had a hard time of it in the beginning.”
I had heard all of this before. I knew that I’d come earlier than expected and that I’d been so small and fragile, I looked like a tiny baby bird—all pink and wrinkled. I’d seen pictures of my scrunched-up little self, swaddled in a blanket and cradled in my mother’s arms. But I didn’t understand why we were going back over all of this now.
“We’d waited so long,” my mother continued, “I couldn’t believe you were really mine. I couldn’t believe I was finally—”
“You haven’t finished the story,” I interrupted impatiently. “What happened to Grace and the baby? And where was Uncle Mike?”
My mother seemed lost in thought. When she didn’t answer my questions, my father stepped in.
“Your uncle Mike was in jail,” he said, “and he still is.”
This news came as a shock.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“That’s neither here nor there, Bena,” he told me. Then he picked up the thread of the story where my mother had left off.
“I rode in the ambulance with Grace,” he explained, “and when we got to the hospital, I told them I was the baby’s father so that they would let me go in with Grace while she had the baby.”
“Did she have a little boy or a little girl?” I asked.
“A sweet little girl,” my father said. “No heavier than a sack of flour.”
“Willow,” my mother said softly. “That’s what Grace said she would have called her.”
“What do you mean, would have?” I said. “I thought you said the baby didn’t die.”
“She didn’t,” my mother said. “Though it was touch and go there for a while. Remember, Tom?”
“Of course I remember,” he said reaching across me to pat my mother’s hand.
“Where is she now?” I asked. “Where is Willow?”
My mother smiled at me, but her eyes were full of tears again and some of them spilled out and ran down her smooth, wide cheeks.
“She’s here, Sugarpea. With us where she belongs.”
I felt as if the world had stopped spinning and time was standing still as I struggled to understand what I’d just heard.
“Me?” I asked.
My mother nodded.
“You.”
“I was there when you came into the world,” my father said. “I was the first one to hold you in my arms. But it was your mother who saw you through those first few difficult weeks. She never left your side.”
I was confused.
“What happened to the other baby?” I asked my mother. “The one that you had?”
“There was no other baby,” she said. “People couldn’t tell, because of my weight. Everybody knew we’d been trying; they just assumed we’d decided to keep it a secret.”
“When we brought you home, they kidded us about how we’d pulled the wool over their eyes.” My father laughed.
I was so shocked I could barely breathe. My mother took my hand and squeezed it.
“I wanted a baby more than life itself, Verbie, but I couldn’t do it myself. So Grace did it for me. That’s why I send her a picture every year. It seems like the least I can do to let her see who you’ve become.”
I could hear my mother’s voice, but I wasn’t listening to the words anymore. No wonder I’d been feeling so mixed up and mean inside. Mike Colter was bad news, trouble from the get-go, warped, and it was his good-for-nothing blood that was running through my veins. After all these years of thinking I was somebody I wasn’t, the real me had finally decided to show up.
CHAPTER THREE
My Annie
Annie was the first person I told. It was the week before Christmas break, a few days before my birthday, and I remember we were standing together out on the playground at school in our winter coats.
“Lots of people are adopted, Verbie,” she said. “Are you going to try to meet your real parents? I’d be dying to know what they were like if I were you.”
“They’re not my real parents, and I don’t ever want to meet them,” I said angrily.
“You don’t have to take my head off,” said Annie defensively. “I was just asking.”
“Why would I want to meet them? Grace practically pickled me before I was born. And Mike Colter is in jail—for killing someone.”
My father hadn’t wanted to tell me what Mike Colter had done to get himself put in jail, but I had insisted I had a right to know everything after having been kept in the dark for so long. Finally he gave in and told me that there’d been some sort of a fight, and that Mike had pushed a man so hard it broke his neck.
“I know what you’re doing, Verbie. You’re telling me all this stuff now to make me feel guilty about not coming to your birthday party this year,” Annie said.
“No I’m not,” I told her. “I’m scared, Annie. Scared I’m going to end up being like Mike Colter.”
It was starting to snow. Annie patted her pockets, looking for her mittens. When she didn’t find them, she began blowing on her fingers to warm them up.
“That’s just crazy talk,” she said. “We both know you wouldn’t hurt a fly, Verbie.”
“I’m not the same person I used to be.”
“You look the same,” she said.
She didn’t understand. Nobody understood. My parents said that the reason they hadn’t told me the truth was because they didn’t want me to worry, but I’d been worrying all year that there was something wrong with me. And now I knew what it was.
The bell rang and Annie and I started walking back toward the school building. Lacy snowflakes, like little white doilies, caught in Annie’s dark hair and eyelashes.
“Listen,” she said to me, “I’m sorry about your party, Verbie, really I am, but Heather invited me to go skiing with her family at Holiday Mountain for the whole week. I have to go—I already bought ski pants and everything.”
Heather Merwin was a stuck-up girl Annie had never shown any interest in before.
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though it wasn’t.
Best friends were supposed to be there on your birthday, and they were supposed to know when you needed them to give you a hug and tell you that everything was going to be all right. I’d thought that Annie Bingham and I would be best friends forever, but for the first time I found myself wondering if maybe that wasn’t true.
Annie and I had met on the morning of our first day in kindergarten, and by the time we went home that afternoon, we were friends. We did everything together—rode our bikes, went ice-skating, baked a million chocolate chip cookies, and had sleepovers almost every weekend at each other’
s houses. One of our favorite activities was collecting things—pinecones, pretty rocks, bottle caps, it didn’t matter. We’d come back to my room with our pockets stuffed full, sit on the floor, and spread our treasures out in front of us. Then we’d choose a winner and two runners-up, like in a beauty pageant. Being best friends with Annie was like breathing; it was part of who I was.
In the beginning of fifth grade, when some of the girls in our class started coming to school wearing makeup and shoes with chunky heels, Annie and I made fun of them for trying to act older than they were. While we swung on the rings or jumped rope at recess, those girls would cluster in tight knots out on the playground whispering and giggling whenever a boy walked by. I remember telling Annie: “If I ever start acting like that, please shoot me.” And she laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I will.”
Then one day Annie bought some lip gloss. “It’s just clear, Verbie,” she said when she showed it to me, “Like Chapstick only shinier. It’s no big deal.”
But the lip gloss was only the beginning. Pretty soon, Annie didn’t want to have sleepovers anymore. She said that kind of thing was “babyish.” Not long after that, she started hanging around with Heather.
My mother always made a big fuss over my birthday, but that day after my conversation with Annie on the playground, I came home from school and told my mother to cancel my birthday party. She tried to talk me out of it; she’d been planning the party for weeks. She was going to make a red velvet cake from scratch and decorate the house with streamers and balloons. She’d already bought candy for the goodie bags and prizes for the party games my friends and I would play.
“A party might be just the thing to lift your spirits,” she said.
“I’ll run away if you make me do it,” I screamed at her. “I’ll run away and you’ll never see me again!” Then I threw myself down on the couch and cried.
My mother came and sat beside me.
“I’m so sorry you’re hurting,” she said, stroking my hair softly with her fingers. “If I could take your pain away and put it on myself, you know I would.”
That night after I went to bed, my mother called all the people I’d sent invitations to and told them that I’d come down with a bug and didn’t feel up to celebrating.
I spent the day of my birthday upstairs lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. There was a pile of presents waiting for me downstairs but I didn’t feel like opening them. What I wanted couldn’t possibly be inside any of those boxes. Even though I told her not to, my mother made my favorite dinner, steak and french fries, but I didn’t touch a bite. After the dinner dishes were cleared, she brought out the red velvet cake she’d made, with eleven white candles in a circle on the top and a twelfth in the middle “to grow on.”
“Make a wish, birthday girl,” she said as she set the cake down in front of me.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. And that was the first time I wished to be somebody other than who I was—somebody other than Verbena Ellen Colter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lilac Time
I struggled through the rest of the school year, keeping to myself and fighting a secret battle against the rotten forces I knew were at work inside me. I’d already lost Annie. After the Christmas ski trip, she and Heather had become even closer. By Easter the two of them were as intertwined as the milky stems of the dandelions Annie and I had spent hours together weaving into chains. The cherry on top of my fifth-grade year was seeing Chris Cartwright holding hands with Annie out in the parking lot right before the graduation ceremony. My parents and I had just gotten out of the car when my mother gasped and pointed.
“Is that your Annie with the Cartwright boy?” she whispered.
But it wasn’t my Annie. Not anymore.
For some mysterious reason that spring the lilac bush in our front yard bloomed late. After the graduation ceremony, as my parents and I climbed out of the car, the air was heavy with the sweet scent of lilac, and the full branches arched out of the bush like rockets shooting off purple sprays of fireworks. My mother held the camera in her hand, the black plastic strap tight around her wrist.
“What do you say we take the photo in front of the lilacs this year, Verbie? We might as well take advantage of this late bloom. It may never happen again.”
It had always been a tradition in my family for me to pose for a photograph on the first and last day of every school year. My mother, an avid scrapbooker, pasted the photos into a big book with a cover decorated to look like a blackboard, the words School Daze written on it in chalk. Apparently she’d also been sending copies of the photos to Grace Kincaid, and although she’d never received a reply, the cards hadn’t been returned either.
“I don’t want to have my picture taken,” I grumbled.
I had read up on fetal alcohol syndrome and knew now that in addition to my small size and learning difficulties, the damage Grace Kincaid’s drinking had caused included my bad eyesight and the unusual smoothness of the space between my upper lip and my nose. I felt hideous.
“Come here, Sugarpea,” my mother called to me as she rummaged in her purse in search of a comb. “We need to tidy you up a bit first.”
“I just told you, I don’t want you to take my picture,” I said. “And I don’t want you to call me Sugarpea anymore either. It’s babyish.”
All I wanted was to get inside and take my shoes off. There were two painful blisters the size of dimes on the backs of my heels—the price I was paying for having ignored my mother’s suggestion to try on my black shoes the day before to make sure they still fit.
“Just give it a quick once-over,” my mother said, holding the comb out to me.
“No picture,” I told her, pushing my glasses up with a bent knuckle and then pulling them partway back down my nose again.
My mother looked at my feet and frowned.
“Are those shoes pinching?” she asked.
I hadn’t told her the shoes were too small.
“There’s nothing wrong with my shoes,” I said, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw hurt. I didn’t want to lose my temper. Ever since I’d found out the truth about who I really was, I’d been trying to control the angry feelings I had inside, trying to keep the rotten part of me from taking over.
“These pictures are a tradition in our family, Sugarpea,” my mother said.
“Not anymore,” I told her, still gritting my teeth. “And how many times do I have to tell you—stop calling me Sugarpea.”
Exasperated, my mother turned to my father.
“Can you please talk to her, Tom?”
“I’ll do my best,” he told her.
My father came over and put his arm around me.
“Bena,” he said, giving my shoulder a little squeeze.
I sighed and pushed his arm away. I knew what he was going to say. He always took her side.
“You know how your mother feels about those scrapbooks of hers. Why all this fuss over one little picture?”
“She’s the one who’s making the fuss,” I said.
“Someday you’ll be glad to have a picture to help you to remember this time in your life,” my mother called from across the yard.
Red-hot anger rose inside me like lava in a volcano. Didn’t she know this had been the worst year of my life? Not only had I lost my best friend, I had lost myself as well.
“One little picture, Bena, that’s all she’s asking,” my father said.
It took everything I had, but in the end I managed to push my anger back down inside long enough to let my mother take my picture in front of the lilac bush. But I can’t look at it now without feeling a pang. I remember what I was thinking about as the shutter clicked.
My mother volunteered at the Sullivan County Humane Society. The vet at the shelter was a man named Dr. Finn, and he knew my mother had a soft spot for stray animals, particularly the ones with the saddest stories. He’d call her up to ask if she could come take a look at some poor unfortunate creature someone ha
d brought into the clinic or left in a cardboard box on his doorstep in the middle of the night. Once she was there, he would ask her if she’d be willing to foster the animal “just for a little while,” until it either died or recovered enough to be put up for adoption. He knew perfectly well that any animal my mother agreed to take home was going to end up living out whatever was left of its life in her care. Teddy was the one exception.
He was a big dog—a boxer-shepherd mix—brown and sleek and strong. He had seemed friendly at first, wagging his tail and licking everybody’s face. But deep down inside, it turned out Teddy was mean. He got into fights with the other animals in the house, and if you came anywhere near him when he was eating, he’d not only growl at you, he’d snap. I was just a toddler when Teddy came to live with us, a little girl who didn’t know better than to try to hug a dog while it was eating its dinner. So he bit me. I still have a crescent-shaped scar on my wrist to prove it. First thing the next morning, my mother put Teddy in the car and drove him back to the shelter. We never talked about what happened to him after that.
It was Teddy I was thinking about that day as I posed for my mother in front of the lilacs. I was wondering if his meanness had showed from the outside, or if, like mine, it was hidden in his blood like poison. My memory of Teddy was foggy—I was only three years old when he bit me—but my mother kept a scrapbook of pictures of all the animals we’d taken in, and it occurred to me that maybe there would be a picture of Teddy in there.
Later that same afternoon when my mother left the house to go into town on an errand, I went into the den to find that scrapbook. Friends “Fur”-Ever it said on the cover, which was decorated with little paw prints. I searched every page for a picture of Teddy, and when I didn’t find one, I began to go through the loose photographs my mother kept in shoe boxes on the tall shelves that lined the walls of the room.