Authors: Rachael Herron
Birth
May 1992
I
n the maternity ward’s hospital bed, Kate clung to two things: the cold metal side rail that didn’t bend no matter how she pulled, and the fact that she hated Grant Masterson and his wife so much that she’d probably never have the energy to dislike another person again.
“You’re so beautiful, Kate,” crooned Grant, his perfect dark hair falling in a wave off his forehead. “You’re so strong. You’re doing everything right.”
From behind him, his wife, Stella, pressed her palms together as if in prayer and beamed beatifically at Kate. “If it’s a girl, we’ll give her your middle name. Out of respect for your great sacrifice.”
“And if it’s a boy . . .” Grant trailed off and looked at his wife. They both smiled.
But Kate didn’t
believe
them. They didn’t feel real. Something was wrong. She wished desperately (again) that Sonia had stayed after checking her in, but “something” had happened at the pool that needed her presence. A good old-fashioned drowning was the only thing Kate could think of that should cause Sonia to run away the way she had, but it was probably a chlorine shipment or something. It was strange, and upsetting—Sonia had been so present lately, toward the end of her pregnancy, as if she really, truly cared. As if it hurt her that her child was giving up a baby, as if she almost believed they were a real family again. And then, two hours earlier, she’d gotten a look in her eyes like a panicked horse and fled, leaving Kate to do this by herself. Hours from becoming a mother herself, Kate was pretty sure that was a fucked-up maternal instinct.
“Where will you take the baby?” Kate asked the couple she now hated.
Grant frowned. “What do you mean? You want to know where our house is? I’m not sure—”
“I mean in the world. Where will you go together?”
Stella stepped forward. “Oh, we don’t travel much. Not safe, not in this political climate. We’ll keep to the good old US of A, and that’s good enough for us.” Her words sped up. “Of course, the baby’s safety is the most important thing to us.”
Kate
had
liked them—she really had. They’d been one of two couples she’d asked to meet, and after she’d met them she’d told her adoption counselor that she didn’t need to meet the lesbian couple. It would be too hard to go through that again, looking into eyes that were desperate to take what she didn’t want. Grant and Stella had had to smile and appear friendly and, worst of all,
normal,
while they auditioned for the role of their lives. When they’d met, Kate had liked Grant’s wide, trustworthy face, but now, from her position of pain, she hated his teeth—such small incisors. They were unnatural. And Stella looked desperate, as if she were ready to rip the child from Kate’s womb—her jaw gritted in what appeared to be worried ecstasy.
Kate’s eyes rolled back as the deep red pain moved through her once again. She held on to the rail as hard as she could, trying to breathe. Nothing else existed but the pain, not the baby or even herself. Just pain. Then, after what felt like hours, the pain eased like and she lay back on her pillow panting. “Marybelle,” she said.
The adoption counselor stepped forward. “Yes.”
“Can I . . . talk to you?”
Marybelle met her gaze. “Of course.” She ushered the couple out professionally while they murmured encouraging things to her and was back in a moment. “What is it? Is something wrong?”
Kate didn’t know how to say it.
“Have you changed your mind?”
“I can’t, can I? It’s too late.”
“We talked about that. Nothing is too late. Remember?”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said on the end of an exhalation. Then, “I’m so sorry. Has my mom called you or anything?” Kate mopped her sweaty forehead with the wet washcloth the nurse had given her the last time she’d checked in, when Kate was still only four centimeters dilated.
Mom. Please,
Mom.
“I’m sorry. No, she hasn’t returned my messages. I’ve got a coworker driving by the pool now to check on her.” Marybelle squeezed her shoulder, but Kate could read the disappointment in her eyes. “What are you thinking? What do you want?”
I want my mother.
But she was gone.
I want Nolan.
But Nolan was so far away from her, so long gone that she could barely see in her mind what color his voice had been. Dark blue like jeans? Or like the ocean the day before a storm? It wasn’t clear anymore.
Three days after they’d broken up, he’d started calling. Three, six, eight times a day. The first few times, Sonia held the phone toward Kate, expecting her to take it. Kate shook her head and continued watching
The Price Is Right
. “She’s not here,” Sonia said roughly into the phone. Kate had made the mistake of answering the phone just once. Hearing his voice, the way he’d said, “Katie, please,” had made her hands tremble so hard she’d dropped the phone. As she picked it up again, she was able to find the strength to say, “Are you still going? Still breaking up with me?”
“Yes,” he’d said. “But you have to understand—”
She’d hung up.
“What an asshole,” her mother had muttered, surprising Kate. Her mother had touched her on the head then, as she passed on her way to bed. Just the one light brush on her hair, so soft she barely felt it.
The calls had stopped soon after that—she didn’t know what her mother had told him to make him quit calling, but she didn’t care. Whatever it was, it worked. Somehow, Sonia and she had reached an odd truce, as if Sonia having to readjust her measure of Nolan had given those points to Kate. She hadn’t protested when Kate told her she was switching to the continuation high school. They watched television in the dark and laughed at the same times. Kate talked her mother into getting a small pit bull mix, a gray-and-white female who wanted to cuddle constantly. Once Sonia had even put her hand on Kate’s stomach. Her face, usually so terse and drawn, had softened. “Poor child,” she’d said, and Kate didn’t know which child she’d been referring to. She didn’t ask.
Now, at the hospital alone, Kate told Marybelle, “I don’t know what I want.” It was as if she couldn’t
help
but hurt everyone now. As if it was her job or something. “But I know I don’t want that couple. It’s horrible. I’m a terrible person.” She started to cry again. She’d broken absolutely everything, from top to bottom, and this was just one more thing—breaking Grant’s and Stella’s hearts.
“Are you sure?”
Kate gulped and nodded. She had only a few minutes, five at the most, before the pain took her outside herself again. She had to be clear. “Not them.”
“I’m going to have to tell them.” Marybelle looked at the floor—this was hard on her, too.
“I’m so sorry.” The guilt and sorrow seemed to trigger the next contraction—it tore into her, and then another one, stronger and more demanding, came pressing on its heels.
“And then what?”
Kate could read the question on her face. “No. Not me. I still don’t want to keep—can’t—”
Marybelle glanced at her watch and up at the face of the large clock on the white wall. “What about that lesbian couple whose profile you liked?”
Gripping the sheet between her fingers, hating how it gave so easily, Kate said, “Tell them to hurry.”
• • •
The two women were there almost instantly, miraculously. And they were different from their picture. In the photo, Isi had looked über-butch, all flattop and button-down shirt, chest stuck out as if she had something to prove. Marta had looked a little too eager, her cheeks too red.
But as they entered the hospital room, Kate felt hope bloom for the first time. Isi came toward her, ignoring Marybelle’s attempt to introduce them formally. “You poor thing,” she said. “Who’s here to help you with this?” When Kate’s eyes filled with sudden, stupid tears again, Isi just took her hand and held on while another wave of pain rocked her for long minutes. Isi’s hand felt so much stronger than the metal rail of the bed, and when the contraction stopped, she didn’t let go.
“What’s your favorite color?” Kate asked Isi. It wasn’t a test, although Isi probably didn’t know that.
Isi smiled, and her eyes were so soft against the severe angles of her jaw. “Would you believe pink?”
Pink was Isi’s voice, a soft rose with lilac on the edges. “I believe it.”
Marta, on the other side of her, brushed the hair from Kate’s sweaty forehead. “Butch in the streets,” she said, and Isi said, “Oh, stop,” and the affection in their voices flowed over Kate like sunshine. It didn’t feel like they were auditioning—it felt like they wanted to be there, like somehow they cared, and it had been so long since she’d felt it that she leaned toward it like a sun-starved daisy.
Isi said, “This isn’t about what you choose to do. That’s your decision, and it’s none of our goddamn business. But please, let us stay? You can’t be alone for this, and we don’t want to be anywhere else.”
Kate heard truth in her voice, and that was the moment she decided.
Marybelle excused herself quietly, and when the nurses weren’t checking Kate or adjusting the IV, the three of them were alone. During the contractions, Isi propped her up, never letting go of her hand, and Marta murmured words, endearments, and encouragements that didn’t mean anything by themselves but, strung together on the thread of her dark green voice, soothed Kate. During the euphoric lulls, she fired questions at them.
“Where do you live?”
“What do you eat?”
“Favorite grocery store?”
“Dogs or cats?”
“Football or baseball?”
The answers didn’t matter—Kate couldn’t have given a crap about whether they ate meat or not (Isi did, Marta didn’t) or whether they liked cats or dogs (both). She just wanted their conversation to continue, to hear the way they spoke together, teasing gently, finishing sentences for each other. Fondness. Love. They were a family, just the two of them together.
“What languages do you speak?”
Marta’s eyes widened. “Ooops. We fail.”
But Isi said, “All right, you got us on that one, but we can ballroom dance—does that count?”
Pain was coming faster now, the contractions closer together, and Kate wished she hadn’t passed on the epidural. Stupid. What had she been thinking? Stupid,
stupid.
“Show me,” she whispered.
For the first time since they’d entered the room, Isi let go of her hand and offered it, across the narrow bed, to Marta. “Shall we?”
“I can’t believe we’re going to do this.” But as she moved around the small room to Isi’s side, Marta’s face had a radiance that Kate wanted to never look away from. They did the fox-trot to silent music, and Kate watched, transfixed. They fit each other, Isi’s leg moving comfortably between Marta’s thighs as they turned tightly in the small space. They rested against each other.
Then things for Kate sped up, and every noise was dark blue in her ears. Breathing was painful but she didn’t stop. The moments before pushing were pure hell. Pushing, though, was a deep relief, the only thing she’d ever be able to do again. The way the women held her hands hurt, too, but she begged them not to let go. And they didn’t—they held on tighter. The doctor was there then, saying things that didn’t make sense until Isi translated them, until Marta said them over again in her ear.
Then there was a darkness she couldn’t remember, even seconds later. She knew she couldn’t do it again, no one could live through this, and then she did it again, one last push as she cried for her absent mother again like a child, and then the relief wasn’t relief so much as a difference, a change of air pressure, noises of the room falling back into her ears, coming back into herself, and as the nurse prepared to hand her the baby, Kate shook her head and took her hands away from them, closing them into fists.
“Them,” she said, closing her eyes, wishing she never had to open them again. “She goes to them.”
Wednesday, May 15, 2014
11 p.m.
K
ate remembered seeing the road crew Nolan mentioned in his e-mail. She even remembered the man she’d stared at. He’d had shoulders like Nolan. She’d loved that Nolan had always been recognizable even from a distance in that his shoulder blades were so pointed, almost sharp. If he’d had wings, they’d have poked out right there. She had liked to touch them in the dark, liked to sleep with the flat of her palm on that bone, as if she could keep him from flying away in the night. She’d told him she would have been able to pick his shoulders out of a lineup. He’d laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. She could have.
Under his orange vest, that man had had those shoulders. Kate hadn’t been able to see his face under the hard hat, and she hadn’t tried. It would have been too much of a disappointment, seeing someone else’s expression over a body that looked so much like Nolan’s.
But it
had
been him. She’d driven right past him that day. Nolan had known it was her, had watched her go by in the car he’d bought her, the car his son had died in, and had just stood there. Then he’d had to go back to work. As she drove south down Highway 13, she thought about how difficult it must have been for him to do manual labor. He’d always mocked his own soft hands, pointing out the blisters he got when they gardened in the spring. Ten minutes with a shovel and his hands were practically bleeding.
She bet they were different now.
Kate exited on Thornhill but there was no crew in evidence. Just orange cones. She almost hit one and cursed as she got immediately back on the freeway, going back west.
It had been a silly, impulsive thing to try to do, to find him. He’d answered her e-mail, after all. She could tell him when and where. She just needed to figure out how, exactly, she could tell him what she needed to. What she owed him.
If that was anything at all.
She headed toward the drugstore, swooping off the exit on Broadway as the roadway threaded itself under the highway and then back up. Kate needed earplugs and sleeping pills. She’d done well for a while, and this last year had almost seen the end of the nightmares, but last night they’d come back as bad as they’d ever been. She’d woken in a full sweat, the feel of Robin’s thin arms clutched around her neck, so real her skin could remember the weight of him. She’d heard his scream in her dream, the sound he made only when he had nightmares, and the bloodiness of it had echoed in her ears for the first fifteen minutes she was awake, as if she’d just heard it, as if it had really awoken her as it had in the early days of his sickness. Those horrible days. (Living, waking nightmares, and sometimes, back then, she’d had bad dreams only to wake to find the day itself was actually worse, more unbearable.) Kate had hardly slept during the last year of Robin’s life, and after he died, she’d slept even less.
So to go back to that, to feel last night the desperation for sleep, the conviction that it would never come back on its own, was horrible. Over-the-counter sleeping pills would help. So would earplugs; the
whoosh
of her own breath would lull her to sleep.
The car was on autopilot. When she stopped at the first red light and looked left toward Lake Temescal and saw the road crew occupying the turn lane, she forgot what she was doing and where she was going. Nolan.
Kate needed to be there, where they were.
Now
. Her car shot through the red light and turned left against an oncoming red Taurus, which honked and swerved around her. It didn’t feel like it mattered that the light hadn’t yet turned green. An arbitrary law, that’s all it was.
Until the siren whooped behind her.
“Shit.”
She pulled over exactly opposite the road crew. If this was Nolan’s crew, he’d already seen her, that much was certain. Her mouth was dry.
The officer was older, with a reddened face. “You know what you did back there?”
Kate was horrified with herself. “I ran a light. Jesus. I didn’t even think.” What if that car had hit her? What if there’d been a child inside? A child with a specific name and a favorite dinosaur and a blanket his grandmother knitted for him? “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
“You could have been killed. That red car was going way too fast—I’m amazed it got around you safely.”
And
that
would have been something. To have been killed in the front seat of the car in which Robin had died. In front of Robin’s father. Kate felt dizzy with regret.
Kate, caught in this thought, didn’t notice that the officer was saying anything until he repeated, “I mean right now, ma’am. License and registration. What part of that is too difficult for you to understand?”
She was so getting a ticket.
While the officer went back to his patrol car to write up the charges she deserved, she felt the road crew looking at her.
She checked for bicyclists in her side mirror and then stepped out of the car, shutting the car door carefully behind her. The cop looked up over at her and shook his head. At least he didn’t order her back into the Saab. A taller man with a red beard wearing an orange vest started toward her also, but Nolan, already so close, said, “That’s okay, Johnson. I got it.”
The denim blue safety of Nolan’s voice. She’d heard it so many times in her mind over the last few years that it felt bizarre to hear it out in the air, actually carried to her ears by physical sound waves and not her own imagination.
She leaned back against the door and watched as he approached. Still those broad, sharp shoulders. He was so much skinnier now. His body looked lean, the way it had when they were in high school. The hard hat cast an indigo-sepia shadow over his face but she could see he hadn’t shaved that morning. He could usually get away with one day before he got his caveman look.
Kate drank him in for one wonderful second before she remembered she wasn’t allowed to. She gathered the anger—cold as always—around her like a wet sheet.
“Nolan.” She hadn’t even said his name out loud, not to anyone, not since the trial ended three years before. It sounded round in her mouth and tasted sweetly familiar.
“God. Kate.” He took off the hard hat, then took off his sunglasses so she could see his eyes. They were still beautiful, the color of dark honey, a deep, heated ocher.
No way in hell was she taking off her sunglasses yet.
“You—” He broke off for a second. “I know I told you I was out here, but I didn’t think you would actually find me.”
Kate said, “I looked but I didn’t see you on Thornhill. I gave up, but then . . . here you were.”
It was too simple, too easy. It should have been hard to find him—she should have been looking for months, in torrential downpours and icy frost, to find him. It shouldn’t have been in the sunshine, when she pulled off the goddamn freeway to go to the drugstore.
“I wonder how many times I’ve passed you,” she said.
Nolan shook his head. His hair was longer, shaggier than it had ever been when he was a lawyer. “Just once.”
“You see every car that drives by?”
“Pretty much.”
And maybe he had. “It’s an easy car to recognize,” she said, and then realized how it must sound to him. She’d thought about selling it, of course. But then, to that person, it would have been just a car. A mode of transport. To her, it was a small rolling shrine, made more special in that everyone else thought it was just a car.
“Ah,” he said. The sound was heavy and dropped between them like a stone thrown in a river.
Why, again, was Kate here? Yes, to tell him about Pree. To fix what she’d broken so many years ago. She’d thought she owed him nothing, not after he’d been responsible for losing Robin, but she owed him this truth. Finally.
“So,” he said. He looked down at the hard hat in his hands, and Kate noticed that even the tops of his knuckles looked rough now, scraped and used.
“We have to talk,” she said, and the look of hope that crossed his face, just for a second, made her want to sob, an ugly feeling that she bit back. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she went on. “It’s not good. Or at least, it’s not bad. It’s . . . oh, god.”
“Are you getting married?”
“No!”
“Are you pregnant?”
“
No.
” How could he ask her that?
“Then tell me.”
Kate opened her mouth. She could . . . she would do it. He would just have to understand where she was, how she felt back then. She’d been fifteen and stupid. He’d left and broken her heart. She hadn’t known anything about the world, and had thought there was no chance they’d ever get back together. People didn’t do that. Kate had known that, even as young as she’d been. She’d thought she’d been making the most intelligent choice.
“Nolan, you have to—”
But he wasn’t meeting her eyes. He was looking over her shoulder, at something behind her.
“This is important. I can’t do it here—is there someplace—? Will you
look
at me, please?” And just like that, she was thrown back to when he wasn’t listening to her, the days when she could talk until her breath ran out about blood counts and compatible marrow donation, and he’d never hear her, lost in his own grief. “Nolan?”
He was careening past her before she knew what he was doing, shoving her out of his way, running faster than he ever could have five or even ten years earlier.
Behind her, at the open door of his patrol vehicle, the officer lay on the gravel. Nolan was almost to him by the time Kate realized the cop’s face wasn’t red anymore, but blue.