No Use For A Name (23 page)

Joanna's lips quivered, and she began to sob so hard she could barely get the words out. "Oh my god. Baby, you're my daughter."

Things were weird, at first, while Joanna figured out how to be a mom, and I figured out how to have one. But it actually wasn't as hard as you'd think it might be. Having money helped, of course. When the cancer had been eating away at him, Todd had told Joanna that everything Jessie Anderson needed was in the Bible. He'd told Joanna to look in the Bible. Not 'to' the Bible, for comfort. 'In' the Bible, for something else. But she'd thought it was random babbling.

They had a huge ornate King James Bible someone had given them for their wedding. She'd never opened it. When she did, she found that the inside of the pages had been trimmed away. It looked like a book when it was closed, but it was really a hiding place. Todd had used it as a safe. I'd never seen so many hundred-dollar bills before. I wasn't even sure if they were real, at first. There was fifty thousand dollars in there, the exact amount of money that had gone missing from Joanna's and Todd's bank account back when he'd first been diagnosed with cancer. It was the money he'd planned to pay my mom, though Joanna and I agreed that Jessie Anderson would never see a dime of it.

There were documents too, contracts and paperwork from the fertility clinic, signed by Jessie, giving up all legal rights to me. She'd never been my mother, legally, according to the paperwork, not since the day the embryo was implanted. Of course, Joanna didn't know if any of it would stand up in court anyway. After the initial shock wore off, Joanna had gone ballistic, trying to figure out how her embryos could have been implanted into Jessie Anderson without Joanna knowing anything about it. The clinic was over an hour away, and we'd driven there together, only to find out that it had been a laser eye surgery place for more than a decade. The people there didn't know anything about a fertility clinic, but it didn't take much poking around on the internet to turn up the story. The place had been shut down years ago in a raid involving the ATF.

"Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?" Joanna had said incredulously as she read the story online. "What kind of a fertility clinic gets shut down by the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?"

I didn't know, but it sounded like the kind of place my mother—I mean Jessie Anderson—would have been comfortable doing business with.

"It was the only fertility clinic on this side of the mountains back then," Joanna said. "I didn't question them, I was just happy that someone would try to help me have a baby.
Maybe
if I'd taken the time to find out the doctor had gotten his medical degree in Tunisia, this would never have happened."

When she'd said that, it had felt like my throat was going to swell shut.

Her eyes had gotten really round, and she'd jumped up out of her computer chair and thrown her arms around me, hugging me hard. "I didn't mean it that way," she'd said. And I knew she didn't, but
…
it was hard not to get caught up in the weirdness of it all. I felt kind of constantly awkward. Like, I was both Joanna's unicorn and her bogeyman, all at the same time.

She was working through the court system, keeping everything legal—and trying to keep it quiet, but it was such a bizarre story that I knew it couldn't be long before it got out. I was sure things were going to go crazy, and I was just waiting for the phone to ring and for the reporters to go all Octomom on us.

I'd offered to change my name to Rose, but Joanna chose to keep calling me Baby. I was her baby, she said, and there was no name more perfect for me. I didn't call her anything. I couldn't call her Joanna anymore, even though I still thought of her as Joanna in my mind. But my brain had trouble making the leap from "Joanna" to "Mom," even mentally. It was just so weird. I knew she noticed that I didn't call her anything, and I'm sure it bothered her, but I couldn't seem to force my mouth to say the right words.

Joanna put her house up for sale, and we moved into another one across town. It was actually pretty close to Derek's. I never went over to his house though, I didn't want to risk running into Tim. Derek would come over to my house instead, and Joanna would hover and act all maternal, which I secretly didn't mind at all.

A few weeks after we'd moved into the new house, Derek picked me up for a date. He was kissing me hello on the front porch when Joanna popped up out of nowhere, clearing her throat loudly. I jumped a mile in the air. "Oh my god, Mom, you scared the crap out of me!" I gasped.

My mouth fell open when I realized what I'd said. Joanna's did too.

She fluttered her hands rapidly, and I could tell she was blinking back tears, even as she beamed at me. She turned to Derek. "You take care of my little girl. Bring her home early. It's a school night."

He grinned and nodded at her, pushing his hair back from his forehead. "I will."

I reached my arms out, and she enfolded me in a tight hug. Everything clicked into place. The weirdness evaporated, and that was it. We were a family.

"I'll be home soon," I whispered. "I love you, Mom."

This book wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a number of people. I want to thank the entire staff at Reputation Books, especially my editor Mary C. Moore for her sharp-eyed, totally on point edits, Lisa Abellera, for her beautiful design work, and Kimberly Cameron for having total faith in this book.

I want to thank my agent, Elizabeth Kracht, for believing in Baby from the beginning and making sure her story was told.

A huge shoutout to Chelly Wood, my critique partner and sounding board. Thank you for helping my descriptions shine, always letting me know when I need a weather report, and taking those difficult scenes and showing me how to make them work. Thank you also to Lynn Lindquist, for your excellent zippy dialog suggestions. You are both phenomenal writers, and I truly appreciate working with you.

Thank you to my best friends, CarrieAnn Brown and Joie Stevens. Responsibilities and distance may keep us apart, but you are there for me every single day and you mean the world to me.

And finally, thank you to my wonderful, crazy, supportive family. My husband, Travis Wright, and our daughters, Madeline and Annika. You are my whole entire heart. I love you.

Photo by Benjamin Carter

Penelope Wright spent a third of her life on the east coast and the rest in Washington state. She worked her way through college in restaurants, hospitals, factories, and everything in between, finally graduating summa cum laude from the University of Washington after an absurdly long time. She lives north of Seattle with her husband and two young daughters.
No Use for a Name
is her debut novel.

Visit her at penelopewright.com.