Empty Arms: A Novel (8 page)

“Have you seen a doctor? A fertility doctor? They have tests for these things, you know.”

“Of course I’ve seen a fertility doctor. We’ve been to the best fertility specialist in upstate New York, and he did every test imaginable.”

“What’s your diagnosis?”

I slowly pull at one of the hard crusts on my arm. “Unexplained infertility.” Hearing those words in my own voice makes them sound unreal.

She nods, her years as a nurse allowing her to grasp the concept more easily than I have. “How’s Paul handling this?”

“He’s upset, but he thinks adoption will solve everything.”

“And you?”

“I don’t know.” I sigh, my fingernail scavenging beneath my sleeve.

“Don’t pick,” she scolds, as if I’m sixteen.

My hand retreats from my sleeve and my fingers twitch with impulse. “The truth is, after what I went through, I can’t stomach the thought of taking someone else’s child.”

Her lips tighten. “That’s ridiculous. Adoption isn’t
taking
someone else’s child; it’s giving a good life to a child whose biological parents can’t.”

Is that what she told herself when she made me give up Emily? “But what if the biological mother doesn’t want to give up her baby?”

“Nobody forces a mother to put her baby up for adoption. She does it because she knows that’s what’s best for her child.”

I stare at her in disbelief. It’s as if she’s forgotten that
I
was forced to give my baby up for adoption and that she helped the nurses and aides hold me down and take my child away from me; that she was the one who squeezed the pen into my hand and forced my signature across the bottom of the adoption papers. Her expression is blank, and it’s as if none of it happened the way I remember. I rub my eyes as my hangover collides with dizzying memories and makes me feel crazy. “I don’t want someone else’s baby. I want my own.”

“That’s natural,” she reassures me.

“No, you don’t understand. I want
my
baby. I want Emily.”

Her expression sours. “You want my advice? Leave the past alone and focus on the future.” She stands up, pushes in her chair and disappears down the hall.

I’m so irritated by her reaction that I can’t even finish my oatmeal. I dump my breakfast in the trash and storm upstairs to my bedroom, like an angry teenager. Coming here was a mistake. Like her outdated kitchen and her old-fashioned hairstyle, Mom will never change. I straighten my comforter and pillows and decide to leave right after I shower. But the steamy water eases some of my anger and reminds me that she didn’t know that the child she forced me to give away would be my only one. She thought I’d have more when I got married. She thought I’d be able to forget about Emily. She had no way of knowing she was wrong about it all.

I towel off and get dressed. Outside my bedroom window is a scraping sound. I peer out the blinds. On the front walk below, Mom digs her shovel into the snow, struggling to lift it and teetering as she dumps it aside. I’m half tempted to leave her to fend for herself, like she’d forced me to do. But her weak muscles and the sad steely curls peering out from the bottom of her hat remind me that even though she’s never changed, I have. I dry my hair, pull on a coat, hat, and pair of gloves. “Need some help?”

She turns and pushes her bangs out of her eyes with her oversized mitten. “Yes.”

“Do you have an extra shovel?”

“There might be one in the attic.”

The attic is where all of Daddy’s belongings went after he died—his clothes, his gun collection, and the portrait of him and Mom on their snowy February wedding day. Even his shovel. She couldn’t live with constant reminders of him everywhere she looked, but she couldn’t throw them away either. “How am I supposed to find it with all that junk?” The last time I climbed up there, a pile of old
Time
magazines fell over and nearly crushed me.

She scowls. “First of all, it’s not junk. Second of all, it should be back by the Christmas decorations and the box of orphaned Tupperware.”

“I’m pretty sure a box of orphaned Tupperware is the very definition of junk.”

She waves me off and turns back to her shoveling.

T
HE ATTIC IS COLD
and the air smells of dust and mothballs. Towers of boxes teeter haphazardly, and an entire fleet of retired furniture forms odd shapes underneath old bed sheets. I spot the top of the Christmas tree in the far corner, but there’s no easy way to get to it. I duck under an empty clothing rack and straddle a leather steamer trunk. My right foot snags on a tangle of old telephone cords and I bump into a wooden hat stand. It wobbles and as I turn to grab it, my elbow sends a glass table lamp crashing to the floor, where it shatters into a million green pieces.

Just great. I scan the room for a broom or dustpan but there aren’t any. Instead, I’m surrounded by a rack of old winter coats, rusty patio furniture, garden gnomes, a Victorian dollhouse, filing cabinets, hat boxes, old telephones, mountains of books with yellowing pages, stacks of board games in flattened boxes, Halloween costumes, and a gazillion other things that make my head spin. I should’ve left her to shovel the damn walk herself.

Beyond a wall of boxes I spot a punchbowl perfect for collecting lamp shards. I step forward and twist to reach around the boxes. My fingers graze the punchbowl as I stretch for it, but before I can grab it I lose my balance and flail forward into the boxes, knocking them over and landing on top of them with a thud. Glass shatters, metal crunches and several boxes spill open, creating an avalanche of papers.

I moan and sit up just in time for the punch bowl to miss my head and crash to pieces on the floor. “God damn it!” I lob the closest thing I can find—an old calculator—across the attic.

I dust myself off and take stock. My ribs are sore and my knee is throbbing, but as far as I can tell, nothing is broken; not on me, anyway. I can’t say as much for the punch bowl.

I heave myself up off the boxes. One by one I set them upright and scoop up piles of decades-old tax returns, paystubs, bills and receipts, and stuff them inside. I’m about to shove a stack of envelopes into the box when the handwriting catches my eye. It’s mine. I scan the address and my mouth falls open. “No.” I flip through the stack but they’re all there; every single letter I sent to James. I wrote to him at night when my parents thought I was doing my homework and slipped them into the mailbox in the morning on my way to school. But not one has a postmark. How did they end up here?

I kneel in the avalanche of old papers and tear open the first envelope. My perfect Catholic school penmanship fills the page.

September 4, 1972

Dear James,

Today was my last day of summer vacation. I spent it at Angel Falls, thinking of you and remembering our summer together. I’ve never felt this way about anyone and I can’t bear the thought of not seeing you every day. I hope your parents let you come back over Christmas break. I’m already counting down the days. Write soon.

Love always,

Cate

The words may be two decades old but they remind me how much I loved him. I wasn’t the slut everyone whispered about or the sinner my mother made me out to be; I was in love. And when James went back to Texas, I was sick about it for weeks.

On the first day of school, my stomach flipped like a pancake when I drove past Mr. Buckley’s farm. My skin turned cold and a bead of perspiration formed along my hairline. My tongue felt like sandpaper and my stomach dropped, as if I were on a roller coaster speeding toward the ground. I jerked the car onto the shoulder, not far from where I first met James, and I ran toward the wildflowers where he was crouching that day. I grabbed onto the fence and my stomach erupted with such force that a raisin shot out of my nose. I tried to spit the acidic taste from my tongue, but my mouth was dry as a desert and my saliva formed a long, sticky string that caught the breeze and draped itself across the front of my blouse. The wildflowers bent forward in what felt like laughter as I knelt among them, crying and wiping at the dribble.

The same thing happened the next morning and the one after that. The idea that I could be pregnant never even crossed my mind; I just figured I was lovesick.

I open the next envelope and unfold the letter.

September 10, 1972

Dear James,

I see you everywhere. I can’t drive by your uncle’s farm or go to the falls without thinking of you. I can’t believe you’ve been gone two weeks already. I miss you so much. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Love,

Cate

Every day after school I sifted through the pile of mail on the kitchen table, but all I ever found was bills and envelopes addressed to my parents. I waited patiently for James’s letter but the silence was torturous, and it didn’t take long for the self-doubt to set in. Had he really loved me or did he just use me to get what he wanted? Did he have a new girlfriend in Texas? I considered calling him, but Mom would’ve seen the long distance charges on our phone bill, and it would’ve blown our cover. So I did the only thing I could: I waited.

September 23, 1972

Dear James,

I can’t believe you’ve been gone almost a month. To be honest, I’m hurt that I haven’t heard from you yet. Have you forgotten about me? Did you meet someone else? Please just let me know what’s going on. The silence is killing me.

Miss you,

Cate

My heart sinks as I remember how helpless I felt. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t concentrate on school and my grades began to slip. My stomach ached from the stress of not knowing what was going on, and I was throwing up every day. Then one morning in the school parking lot, while I was trying to iron things out with Angela, it all made sense.

“Has anyone seen Marcy Wagner?” Jonathan Hess, Marcy’s longtime boyfriend, shouted, interrupting a dozen conversations, including mine and Angela’s. I looked around the parking lot, and suddenly the notoriously perky redhead’s absence was glaringly apparent. That was when I realized I hadn’t seen her in homeroom or heard her giggling in the back row of Trigonometry since the first week of school.

“My mom said she went to help her sick aunt in Florida,” Creighton spoke up.

Jonathan’s face fell like a lost puppy. I’d never known him very well, but my heart went out to him because it was painfully clear that Marcy left without telling him, and he was lovesick too.

Angela snickered, followed by a couple of others.

Jonathan spun to face her. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh come on, Jonathan, don’t be a sucker.”

His cheeks blazed. “What are you talking about?”

“A sick aunt in Florida?” Her grin grew wider. “That’s totally code for maternity home.”

Her words knocked the wind out of both of us, but no one noticed my reaction. Everyone was staring at poor Jonathan. His jaw fell open, as did mine, and we both stood there, frozen like statues. Suddenly it all made sense, the nausea, the tiredness, and the crying spells—I was pregnant
.

“Fuck you, Angela,” Jonathan said, his voice trembling with fear. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He turned and ran toward the school and Angela just laughed.

I did the math in my head as we walked across the parking lot and into the auditorium. I followed her toward two empty seats in the last row. While Angela talked about the first big bash she was going to throw, which meant she was over the whole James thing, I half-listened and sifted through dates in my mind, counting how much time had passed since July 28. It had been almost seven weeks since my last period. And about five since I’d had sex with James.

“Good morning, ladies and gentleman.” Father Thomas’s voice boomed through the speakers. He raised his hand to quiet us. “May the Lord be with you.”

How had August come and gone without it?

“And also with you,” everyone but me responded.

Worse yet, how had I not noticed?

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Sister Josephine’s big, round face and stern brown eyes glowered at me. “Pay attention,” she warned, pointing her finger at me. When she moved on to the next offender, Angela looked at me and I rolled my eyes. “Bitch,” she muttered and we both grinned. The problem was, Sister Josephine was right; I hadn’t been paying attention—to anything. I’d been so wrapped up in losing James that I hadn’t noticed my absent period. But pregnant? It seemed impossible. So impossible, in fact, that as Father Thomas droned through his sermon, I decided that I was just late
.
Very late.

I started wearing a panty liner every day, anticipating its arrival. I was certain it would sneak up on me and ruin a pair of pants or embarrass me when I went to write on the chalkboard. But every time I went to the bathroom the panty liner was as spotless as a blank canvas. It will come, I told myself.

But it didn’t.

And instead, my pit stops at Mr. Buckley’s farm became a daily ritual.