“They gave us a form to fill out, Mom,” I say. I’d never had a problem calling Aidan’s mother “Mom.” Calling his father “Dad” had been more of a struggle. Only one man in my life had earned that title. “The form asks very specifically what sort of child we’d accept. Would we take a biracial child or a child with a cleft palate, for example, or with cerebral palsy or whose mother was an addict. You get the idea.” The form had been both overwhelming and sobering. It made us look at ourselves and our biases. And our limitations. Our fantasy was of a healthy beautiful Caucasian child. The form woke us up: reality could be much different. We spent days talking about the options. Aidan pointed out that, most likely, I would be the person giving the greatest physical care to our child and I needed to think our choice through carefully. We could handle a deformity, we thought. Could we handle cerebral palsy? We decided we could not, and yet something kept us from putting that in writing on the form. That night I had a dream about my father. He was in his wheelchair perched on a cliff and the look on his face was more forlorn than I’d ever seen it. I would have happily taken care of him for the rest of his life. I wish I’d had that chance. I know a grown man and a child are hardly the same thing, but nevertheless, when I woke up, I knew what I wanted to do with the form. Over breakfast that morning, I told Aidan I thought we could handle anything. “I agree,” he said, as though he’d only been waiting for me to come to the same conclusion. We signed the form and sent it in. And now we wait.
“So is it like on one of those dating sites where they match you up, only this time it’s with a woman who’s having a baby?” his mother asks.
“Sort of,” I say. “They make an initial match by sending the girl—the young woman—several portfolios of families that the agency thinks will be a good fit for her. Then she picks one or more to get in touch with. And then she decides.”
“You’ll meet in person at that point?” Laurie asks.
“Hard to say,” Aidan says, rescuing his now loose watch from Oliver’s grasp. “Contact can take a lot of different forms,” he says. “It might be e-mail first or a phone call and then an in-person meeting. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Nerve-racking,” says his mother. “Will you let us know every step of the way?”
I smile. When I was pregnant, she called me nearly every day to ask how I was feeling, what did the doctor say, did I need any help. When Aidan called to tell her I’d lost the baby, I could hear her sobbing through the phone even though I was on the other side of the room, sobbing myself.
“You know we’ll love that baby just as much as we love Kai and Oliver,” Aidan’s father said. “You’ll never have to worry about that.”
I hadn’t been worried about it, but I’m touched by his desire to reassure us. There are moments I need to reassure myself that I will feel the same way.
“Thank you, Dad,” I say. “I know you will.”
“Any baby that lands with you two will be the luckiest child on earth,” his mother says, and now my eyes fill.
When I’m with Aidan’s family, I want a baby with all my heart and soul and body. I feel certain I’ll be a good mother. Maybe even a great mother. Life is so normal in this house, the house Aidan and Laurie grew up in. In this house with this family, I feel none of the ambivalence that dogs me late at night when I can’t fall asleep.
I press my lips to the silky hair on Kai’s head. He is sound asleep now. He and Oliver are not biologically mine and yet I couldn’t love them any more than I do. I am sure I’ll feel the same way about our child.
* * *
When we get home, Aidan and I sit in our office to check e-mail. We have two large identical desks that face each other and he begins typing at a rapid clip while I pull my mail up on my screen. There is only one message and it’s from DanielleK422. My cousin Dani. I stare at the link without moving my cursor over it. I haven’t spoken to Dani in several years, although I received the usual card from her at Christmas. It had been a photograph of Dani and her husband, Sean, their two dogs, and their eighteen-year-old son, Evan, whom they’d somehow roped into posing with them. Evan’s hair hung down to his shoulders and he sported a barbed-wire tattoo around his neck. Dani, who looked like a straitlaced woman approaching middle age in the photograph, is getting the same run for her money that she gave her own parents. I feel for her. At least her eye makeup washed off.
Although Aidan and I also send out picture cards at Christmas, I never send one to my cousin. I’m afraid she’ll share it with my relatives, and the less they know about my life, the better. I usually get a birthday card from Nora. Although Nora doesn’t have my address, she sends the card to Dani, who sends it on to me. Letters always accompany those cards, but I haven’t read a single one. Straight into the trash. I’ve never relented. I haven’t seen or spoken with anyone from Morrison Ridge other than Dani since I was eighteen.
I click on the message.
Hi Molly. Thought I should let you know Amalia broke her leg and has to have a bunch of surgeries to repair it. Mom doesn’t know how she did it—you know they don’t talk. She just knows Amalia is going to be in the hospital for a while afterward and then go into rehab. Thought you might want to know. Xoxo Dani.
“You’re frowning,” Aidan says from his side of our double desks. “Is there something from Hope Springs?”
I shake my head and try to smile. “No,” I say. I’m staring at the e-mail. Staring without seeing. I can’t remember Dani ever mentioning Amalia in an e-mail to me before. “Just an e-mail from my cousin Dani about a family friend who broke her leg.”
“Someone you were close to?” he asks.
I hesitate before shaking my head again. I imagine the scent of honeysuckle in the room. “No,” I say. “It’s no big deal.” I lift my fingers to the keyboard and type.
Thanks for letting me know, Dani.
I don’t sign it. No little Xs or Os. Nothing that happened at Morrison Ridge was Dani’s responsibility, and yet the chill I feel for my family extends easily to her.
“I love you, babe,” Aidan says, out of the blue from across the sea of our desks.
I smile at him. “Love you, too,” I say, and I return my attention to my computer screen, although I don’t really see it.
Aidan is the last person I want to hide things from. Once a friend asked us what our secret is, since our marriage seems so strong, and we both answered, almost at the same moment, “Honesty.” When that word left my mouth, I didn’t feel hypocritical. I believe Aidan and I do have an honest relationship. I told him my relatives were caustic and crazy and I needed to cut ties with them to have a healthy future. That was the truth. Yes, I embellished as needed: my mother was dead, for example. But most of my dishonesty is due simply to omission. Sometimes he jokes about my family, calling them “inbred Southern mountain people.” I never bother to correct him. What does it matter?
He knows I’d loved my father, though. And he knows that once my father was gone I’d found living at Morrison Ridge intolerable. That had certainly been the truth.
I used to wish I could tell Aidan everything, but I’ve moved past that now. It’s too dangerous. I trust him more than I trust anyone I know, and yet, I am a lawyer. I’ve seen too many good marriages go sour, and when they do, all bets are off. Confidences shared over the years become fair game. I will never tell him what happened on Morrison Ridge. I will never tell him why I left my family. It no longer has any bearing on my life. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But this e-mail from Dani coupled with the prospect of adoption leaves me shaken. I suddenly feel as though I’m walking a tightrope and gravity is nipping at my heels.
Most days I think I’m over it. I’ve moved way beyond my adolescence and replaced the pain and anger with my degrees, my career, my volunteer work, my fabulous friends, my loving husband. But it doesn’t take much to bring it back to me. It might take an article in the newspaper about someone with MS, or something on the news about North Carolina. Or, I see now, a sho
rt e-mail from Dani. Yes, I think as I stare blindly at my screen. That’s enough to bring it all back.
8
Morrison Ridge
Two flights of steps bordered either side of the Hill from Hell. I didn’t know who constructed them or when, but it was sometime before I was born. Maybe even before Daddy was born. In one stretch, the steps were made of large semiflat stones. In another, wood. In a third, slate. All of them were in terrible disrepair, but it was still easier to climb them than to try to walk up the dirt road itself, especially since Stacy and I were weighed down with our backpacks, slices of pie in Tupperware containers, bottles of Pepsi, and a bunch of cassette tapes. We stopped halfway up to catch our breath. I really didn’t need to, but I could tell Stacy was not used to trudging up hills.
By the time we reached the turnoff to the springhouse, it was getting seriously dark and the buzz of the cicadas was so loud we could hardly hear each other speak.
“How do you know we’re on the path?” she asked after we’d been walking for a few minutes. “Everything looks the same out here.”
“We’re fine,” I said. “Trust me.” If it had been daylight, we’d be able to see the fieldstone walls of the springhouse by now, but all I could see ahead of us was the muted greenish gray of the trees.
“Maybe this isn’t such a great idea,” Stacy said with a nervous laugh. “We’re like a million miles from everything.”
“We’ll be fine.” I pointed ahead of us. “See? There it is. Wait till you see inside. It’s really cool.”
“It is cute,” she said, when we were close enough to really see the building. “So tiny.”
The door squeaked as I pulled it open and Stacy followed me into the dark interior. She let out an excited yelp when I turned on the floor lamp and my little home away from home popped into view.
“Look at the posters!” she said, turning in a circle to take them in. “I had to get rid of mine when we moved down here.” She knelt on one of the twin beds to get closer to the New Kids on the Block posters, and I could tell she was drooling over Joey McIntyre. “Oh my God, look at his eyes!” She reached out to touch Joey’s cheek. Then she suddenly seemed to notice the rest of the room—the sink and microwave and little dresser. She climbed off the bed and held her arms out at her sides. “I love this,” she said. “Oh my God, you’re so lucky, Molly!” I saw the wistfulness in her face and felt guilty that I took everything I had for granted.
“Here’s the cassette player,” I said, pointing beneath the sink. I bent over to push the power button and Step by Step started up again. I’d never get tired of that tape. Stacy started nodding her head to the music as she looked at the rest of my posters.
“You really are stuck on Johnny Depp, aren’t you,” she said, pointing to the posters of him above the other bed.
“Do you watch 21 Jump Street?” I asked.
“Of course.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “But he’s way too old for you. He’s, like, twenty-six. You could never get him.”
I leaned against the sink, arms folded. “Well, do you seriously think you could get Joey McIntyre?” I asked.
“He’s only seventeen. Better chance of getting him than Johnny Depp.”
“It’s only a fantasy, anyhow,” I said.
Stacy looked toward the window. “Those bugs are so loud you practically can’t hear the music,” she said.
“They’re cicadas.” I’d left the windows open from when Daddy and I had been in the springhouse earlier. “Help me close the windows before the mosquitoes find us, okay?” She tugged one of the unscreened windows shut while I shut the other, and the hum of the cicadas turned to a soft, distant buzz.
“Who are these people?” Stacy picked up a framed photograph from the top of the dresser. I barely noticed the photograph these days. The picture of a man, a woman, and their three teenagers had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.
“Nanny and my grandpa Arnette, who died before I was born.” I stood next to Stacy and pointed to my grandparents. “And their kids. That’s my aunt and uncle and father.”
“Oh my God, that’s your father? He was so hot!”
I looked at the picture, trying to see it through her eyes. No doubt about it. My father had been good-looking. Dark hair, strong chin, white teeth in a killer smile, and those riveting blue eyes. How had I never noticed before?
I pointed to the teenaged girl. “This is my aunt Claudia. Dani’s mother. And the other boy is my uncle Trevor.”
“Your father got the looks,” Stacy said, summing up the family as she set the frame back on the dresser. Then she flopped down on the bed beneath the Johnny Depp posters. It was technically my bed, but I’d let her have it for tonight. “Would you do it with him?” she asked, looking at one of the posters. “Johnny Depp?”
I sat down on the other bed. “Of course,” I said. I had not yet figured out exactly how “doing it” was accomplished, but I didn’t want to look like a complete moron. “Would you do it with Joey?”
“Oh, hell yes! In a heartbeat.” She looked over at me. “We should practice French kissing with each other for when we get to do it for real.”
“Um.” I laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“Have you kissed anybody?”
“No,” I said, embarrassed. “Have you?”
“Bryan Watkins,” she said. “I’m kind of going with him. But we only Frenched once and I’m not sure I did it right.”
I was shocked. Bryan Watkins was in high school. “He’s a junior, isn’t he?” I asked.
“Going into his senior year, actually.” She sounded so sophisticated all of a sudden. Even her voice sounded different, like a woman in a commercial for an expensive car. “Do you know him?” she asked. “He reminds me of Joey.” She pointed across the room at the New Kids poster. “A little bit, anyway.”
What did she mean, she was kind of going with him? I suddenly realized that Stacy and I were worlds apart in more ways than I’d guessed. “How did you even meet him?” I asked.
“He lives in my neighborhood.”
“So … you’re actually going out with him?”
“No one knows.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, her arm beneath her head. “I sneak out to be with him.”
I wanted to ask her what exactly she did with him, but it sounded way too nosy. Maybe she’d tell me eventually. She didn’t seem at all shy about telling me her deep dark secrets. She seemed so much older than me all of a sudden. I knew my birthday was actually a month before hers, but I was still fantasizing about Johnny Depp while she was sneaking out and doing who-knew-what with flesh-and-blood boys three years older than us.
“My sister’s boyfriend goes down on her, which I think is totally disgusting,” she said, out of the blue. “Can you imagine?”
No, I couldn’t imagine it because I had no idea what she was talking about. “What does that mean?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “He eats her,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I heard frustration in my voice. It was like she was speaking some language I didn’t understand.
“He licks her … between her legs.”
“What?” The image forming in my mind was revolting. “Why would he … that’s sick!”
“I know. But it makes her come.”
“Come … where?”
She gave me a quizzical look, as though I’d asked an unbelievably stupid question. “Molly.” She sounded like a tired old schoolteacher. “Don’t you at least know what coming means?”
I shook my head.
“You really missed out by not having any older brothers and sisters.” She sat up and leaned against the stone wall. “Coming’s this amazing feeling,” she said. “It’s not like anything else. It’s totally intense. And it happens when you have sex, though you can do it to yourself, too. Make yourself come. I never have, but my sister says she does it all the time.”
I laughed nervously. This was the stran
gest conversation I’d ever had in my life.
“Have you read Forever?” Stacy asked. “The Judy Blume book?”
I shook my head.
“You really should. You’ll learn everything. It’s so awesome. I can loan you my copy.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d known I had a few things to learn, but I had no idea how much.
We both went really quiet for a few minutes. “Where Do I Go from Here” came on the cassette player, and Stacy flopped onto her back again. “Ah, Joey,” she said, staring at the ceiling. She sang along softly with the song.
I lay down myself, and the moment my head hit the pillow, a memory came to me. A year ago—maybe two—I’d walked into my parents’ room one evening. I should have knocked, but I’d been in a hurry and didn’t stop to think. The light in the room was very dim, but I could make out Daddy lying naked on his back in the bed. My mother seemed to be sitting on his face, her knees on either side of his head. She leaned forward, one hand grasping the headboard, the other holding her breast. She was moving her hips and moaning. Her blond hair was out of it’s ponytail, loose and crazy around her head. I’d stood utterly frozen in the doorway, paralyzed by shock. Was she trying to suffocate him? Kill him in some weird, perverted way? And yet … I knew that wasn’t it. I’d backed out of the room, shaken and a little sick, and I’d stayed outside their closed door until I finally heard my father’s voice and knew he was still alive. Not only alive, but laughing with her. Now I wondered. Daddy couldn’t touch her with his hands. Was his mouth the only way he could make her feel good? The only way he could make her come?
“Don’t tell your parents about me seeing Bryan.” Stacy’s voice brought me back to the springhouse.
I made a face at the ceiling. “Like I talk to them about that kind of thing,” I said. I sat up and shook out my arms as though shaking off our conversation. “Let’s put on another tape.”
* * *
“Can you see without your glasses?” Stacy said as we ate the last mouthfuls of peach pie from our Tupperware containers.