Pretending to Dance

  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.

  “Had an idea,” Daddy said now as I opened a document for the second-to-last chapter of his book. He was going to make his goal of finishing the book by summer’s end. “I think your friend Stacy lives on the way to my office, right? So how about when Russell takes
me to work Monday afternoon, we drop you off at her house for a few hours, if it’s okay with her mother. We can pick you up on our way home.”

  “Cool!” I said. Stacy and I talked on the phone nearly every day but I hadn’t seen her in the week since we slept in the springhouse. Our conversations had taken a strange turn, in that I’d talk about the New Kids and she’d talk about Bryan, who she now referred to as her boyfriend, and Chris, that boy she wanted to fix me up with. Every time she changed the subject to them, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation. It made me want to hold my old amethyst palm stone in my hand to calm myself down. I actually planned to get the stone from the secret rock in the springhouse the next time I got the chance. “I’ll call her later and see if it’s okay,” I said.

  “Great,” he said, then he nodded toward the computer. “Ready for chapter eleven?” he asked.

  He started dictating again and I started typing, and we worked for another half hour before he said we should quit for the day. I saved the document, then turned to him.

  “You know what I really, really want to do today?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “The zip line!” I said.

  “The zip line?” he asked. “Where’d that idea come from?”

  “And I want you to do it, too,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “Oh man, Molly. Do you know how much work that is for Russell?”

  “He won’t mind.” I was pretty certain he wouldn’t. “And I can help him.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Come on,” I pleaded. “You know you want to do it.”

  He smiled, then glanced out the window. “Pretty day for it,” he admitted. “We’ll see if Russell has the time. But first, there’s something else I need you to do for me.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Start a new document.”

  I felt like groaning. We’d been at it for hours this morning. But I obediently opened a new document on the computer. “Ready,” I said, my hands on the keyboard.

  “Now right in the center, type the words pretend to dance.”

  “What?” I laughed.

  “You heard me right. Pretend to dance.”

  I typed the sentence. “Is this for one of your clients?”

  “Now print it,” he said, ignoring my question.

  “Whatever.” I hit print and the page worked its way through the printer.

  “Now get an envelope.”

  I reached into the desk drawer and pulled out an envelope.

  “Fold the paper up and seal it inside.”

  I did as he asked.

  “Now, what’s your favorite music to dance to these days when you’re at Amalia’s?”

  I thought about it a moment. “Rachmaninoff’s second concerto,” I said.

  “Good Lord!” He laughed. “She has you dancing to the eastern European composers? Wrist-slitting music. Way too heavy!”

  I pouted. “I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

  He wiped the smile off his face, but it looked like it took some effort. “You’re right. It’s beautiful. But we need something lighter.”

  “At the end of our lesson, she always puts on ‘Footloose’ and we just dance around. It’s our tradition.”

  “Kenny Loggins?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.” I sang a couple of lines, bopping my head to the music, and he nodded.

  “Perfect,” he said. “On the envelope, write play ‘Footloose.’”

  I held my hand above the envelope. “What’s this for, Daddy?” I asked.

  “Just write it.”

  I did.

  “Okay, leave the envelope on the desk. Mom will take care of it.”

  I propped the envelope up against the printer and looked at him. “Okay?” I asked.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Now how about you find Russell and see if he has time to take us on the zip line?”

  21

  Russell was in the kitchen, counting Daddy’s pills into his weekly pill container, and I waited at the kitchen table until he was finished. I knew there weren’t as many pills as there used to be because Daddy’d given up on the experimental drug he’d been taking. It had only seemed to make him worse. Mom wanted to get him into another study, but he wasn’t eligible because of the type of MS he had.

  Russell screwed the lid on the last pill bottle and looked over at me. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  “Could you help Daddy and me ride the zip line today?”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, but then he smiled. “That’s some smart thinking, Molly,” he said, pressing the top of the pill case shut. “He loves the zip line.”

  “Oh good!” I clapped my hands together. “You’ll do it?”

  “Yes, but I think we’ll need some help.”

  “Maybe Uncle Trevor’s home,” I said. Having Uncle Trevor with us would sap some of the fun out of the afternoon, but he was brawny and strong and I guessed that was what we needed.

  Russell shook his head. “After that meeting last night, I don’t think Trevor’ll be in a mood to help your father,” he said. “Try Amalia. We don’t need brute force. Just another pair of hands.”

  I called Amalia and she said she’d be happy to help. I told her we’d pick her up in about an hour. Then I got the two harnesses and the helmets out of our shed and put them in the rear of the van.

  Daddy sat in his chair in the middle of the second row of seats in the van, while I sat up front with Russell. The van didn’t start when Russell turned the key. It sort of made a chugging sound but didn’t catch, and my heart sank. All this for nothing? On the third try, though, he got it going.

  “I’ve got to take the van in, Graham,” he said, looking at Daddy in the rearview mirror. “What’s your schedule like next week? Is there a day we can do without it?”

  “Tuesday,” Daddy said. “Sounds like the battery.” Our van was worth nearly as much as our house, Daddy always said. It had been specially built to transport him and his chair and it was usually very reliable, but it occasionally acted up. Without the van, Daddy could go nowhere, and I was afraid Russell might nix this whole adventure. What if the van got stuck by the zip line platform and we couldn’t get it home?

  But he put the van in gear and we took off. As we drove up the loop road, it occurred to me that I could pick up my palm stone on the way.

  “Could we stop by the springhouse, please?” I asked when we were nearly to the springhouse path. “I need to get something.”

  “Sure,” Russell said. He pulled to the side of the road near the path and kept the engine running while I hopped out of the van and ran down the leaf-and-ivy-littered path to the springhouse. Inside, I climbed onto my twin bed under Johnny Depp’s watchful eyes. I pulled the fake stone away from the wall and reached into the dark space for the amethyst palm stone, slipping it into the pocket of my shorts.

  Back in the van, Daddy and Russell were talking about the Asheville Tourists baseball team, but they stopped when I got in, and Russell began driving again.

  “Get what you needed?” Daddy asked me, as if he knew.

  “Uh-huh.” I remembered telling him my palm stone was in the secret rock. He probably thought I wanted it for the ride on the zip line. I’d let him think that. He didn’t need to know I wanted it to get through those “I want to fix you up with this boy” conversations with Stacy.

  Russell turned onto the narrow lane that led to Amalia’s house. We bumped along the road for a little while, and when he pulled into the clearing by her house, she was waiting out front, sitting on a tree stump that someone had carved into the shape of a chair years before I was born.

  She opened the side door of the van and got in, sitting down next to my father’s chair, and the whole van filled with the honeysuckle scent of her hair.

  “Hey, everybody,” she said. She reached around the side of my seat to squeeze my shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said back to her as Russell started up the road again. br />
  “How’re you feeling after last night?” I heard her ask my father. Was she talking about the meeting? That was the only thing I knew of that had happened last night, but it seemed like a weird question for her to ask.

  “Excellent,” Daddy said. “You?”

  She didn’t answer right away, or maybe she’d spoken too quietly for me to hear. Then she said something that sounded like brokenhearted and my father said something even harder to hear. I glanced at Russell who kept his eyes on the road, pretending there was no conversation at all happening behind us. I tried to do the same.

  We passed Nanny’s house, then made a little turn into the woods, and the zip line platform poked up through the trees to our right. Even though it had been a year since any of us had been on the zip line, we all seemed to know the drill. Russell lowered the van’s mechanical ramp and Amalia pushed the wheelchair down it to the ground. I got the harnesses and helmets from the rear of the van, while Russell headed for the cables that hung from the platform high above us.

  Amalia wheeled Daddy to the foot of the platform, and I handed one of the harnesses and helmets to Russell, then headed for the platform stairs. “See you at the top, Dad!” I said.

  I climbed the hundred and thirty-two steps to the platform without once stopping to catch my breath, though I’d really slowed down by the time I reached the top. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was up there. I set down the harness and gulped in the clean mountain air. Standing next to the hoist, I looked over the railing to see Russell and Amalia still struggling to fit my father’s uncooperative body into the harness. I had a flash of guilt that I’d suggested the zip line at all. Maybe I was only making things worse for him. Whenever I had to move part of his body, I understood why Russell had those thick, ropy muscles in his arms. Daddy’s limbs were rigid and almost impossible to bend. It was like trying to move something far heavier than its mass. I once heard Uncle Trevor say that lifting Daddy was like lifting a “deadweight,” and Russell had cut him a look that could kill.

  “Hello, down there!” I called, trying to make my voice cheerful, mostly for my own sake.