Girls in Trouble (12 page)

He’ll come back
, she told herself.

She waited one more week, and then another. She didn’t care that it was freezing out. Every day she walked home from school, taking the long way, so she could go by Danny’s house, but it was always quiet, and empty, not even a flutter behind the curtains. Every day, she half-expected Danny to show up at school, to have an explanation for her, and every day, that chance seemed less and less likely. She spent forty dollars taking out an ad in the back of
The Village Voice
, a paper she knew Danny read.
“Danny, call Sara. Important”
The ad ran two weeks but he never called.

He’ll come back
, she told herself.
He won’t leave me
. Sara began to wear baggy sweaters as long as dresses, to layer things and joke about eating everything in sight even though she barely could manage crackers. Under her sweaters, she held her skirts together with safety pins, and by then the morning sickness became afternoon sickness.

She was at the cafeteria, eating alone, when she heard someone say his name. “Slade,” a boy said, and Sara got up and walked over. The boy grinned at her.

“Where’s Danny?” Sara asked.

He leaned back in his chair, his whole body at an angle. “Last I heard, California,” he smirked. His eyes rolled up and down her body. “But baby, I’m right
here
,” he said.

A wave of nausea roiled through Sara, and she barely made it to the girls’ room, throwing up in the toilet.

She tried not to watch the calendar, not to keep track of all the time passing by her. Not until she was outside one day, so warm she took off her jacket, did she notice the day was cloudless and cool, hinting of spring. And only a fool, Sara realized, would think there was any reason to hang on to hope any longer. That day, when she got home from school, because there was nothing else to do now, she called Planned Parenthood asking about abortions. She’d beg her friends’ forgiveness and borrow money; she’d plead for one of them to come with her, swearing secrecy. She would even ask Danny’s mother if she had to. That was how desperate she had become. “How far along are you?” the clinic asked.

Sara wet her lips. “Almost five months,” she said, and her voice sounded so far away to her, like a little girl’s.

“You should have come to see us sooner,” the woman said. Her voice was soft, sympathetic. “You should still come in, but we can’t talk about abortions. It’s too late.”

Panicking, Sara hung up the phone. She grabbed it up again, but there was just a dial tone. The sympathetic woman was gone, and even if she called back, who knew who would answer the phone, and what did it matter if the information was going to be the same? What was she going to do now? What would happen to her? She paced the living room, and then another wave of nausea hit her and she ran to the bathroom to throw up. She was still in there when she heard Abby’s key in the door. “Honey, are you home?” Abby called. Her mother’s voice was bright, full of bells, and Sara couldn’t help it. She began crying and crying, hunched over the toilet, her head in her hands so she wouldn’t have to face her mother. Her nose ran, her eyes pooled. She wanted to turn herself inside out. She wanted to grab the baby and fling it from her. She wanted to be anyone but herself, anywhere but here in this bathroom waiting for her mother to find her.

Abby knocked on the door. “Honey, what’s going on?” Abby said, and
opened the door Sara had forgotten to lock, and as soon as she saw Sara, the swelling belly Sara had been hiding under big clothes, Abby’s hands darted up. “Oh Jesus,” Abby said.

“Mommy,” Sara said, a name she hadn’t called her mother since she was ten, and then she looked up and saw that Abby was crying, and it made her so ashamed, so terrified of what might come next, that she hid her head, she curled herself up into a ball.

There were days of terrible fights, of accusations. How could Sara be so stupid? How could she have waited so long? Did she want to ruin her life? “What do you think is going to happen now?” Abby demanded. “What kind of a future are you going to have?”

She thought her father would shout more, but instead he sat sorrowfully on the couch, shaking his head, looking as if he had aged a thousand years in just the time it took her to tell him. He kept repeating, “I could kill that boy,” but Sara knew what he meant was:
I could kill you
. “And he better not ever come back around here again if he knows what’s what,” Jack said. Sara put her hands over her ears, afraid that if her father kept saying that, it would come true, Danny would never come back, not to the house, not to her.

“He’s gone,” Sara said, bursting into tears. She sat down, too, crying, and then she felt her mother beside her, her mother’s hand stroking her back, soothing her hair. “Good,” Abby said vehemently. “I’m glad he’s gone. We’ll handle this without him.”

“We’ll figure this out,” her father said, and when Sara dared to look at him, he was looking out the window, and not at her.

They sat at the dinner table in silence, no one really eating. After dinner, she went to her room and shut the door. She lay in bed with her eyes wide open, her hands clasped across her chest as if she were praying, and listened to her parents talking late into the night. “Why didn’t we know?” Abby asked Jack. “How could we be so blind?”

“Don’t you remember that girl who gave birth in the stall at her prom?” Jack said. “It was in all the papers. A good student. From a good family. Her parents didn’t know.”

“Oh God, our poor baby,” Abby said. “When I think of that young unspoiled body getting all blown out of shape—she’s too young! She’s just
too young! She’s a baby having a baby! No one should even think of having a child until they’re thirty, until they’ve got everything already in place!”

“Abby. Don’t do this.”

“Pregnancy should be beautiful, like some badge of honor, but every time I look at her all I see is everyone’s failure. Was it mv fault? Was it yours? Her school’s?”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Maybe it’s no one’s fault, maybe it’s God’s. It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

Their voices rose and fell and then were still. Sara’s eyes stayed open.

The next day, while Sara stayed around the house, unsure what to do, Abby went out by herself and came back that afternoon with a huge bag of books. Sara was used to her mother’s stash—books on business management or medicine or sometimes the classics, anything that Abby thought might help her better herself. “It’s to keep up with you,” Abby said.

Abby set the bag down, but her usual delight in a book purchase was gone. “Take a look at some of these,” she said, lifting books out, handing a few to Sara.
Adoption: The Right Choice. The Adoption Sourcebook. The Birth Mother’s Handbook
.

Stung, Sara put the book down. “It’s always better to educate yourself,” Abby said quietly. She pulled out a notebook and some Post-its and held them up. “We’re all in this together,” Abby said, handing them to Sara.

All that afternoon, Abby sat reading. Her forehead creased, her focus strained. The pages were littered with yellow Post-its sticking out of the pages. When Jack came home, he leafed through one of the books rapidly. “Gently!” Abby said, and Jack looked down.

“I ripped a page,” he said, astonished, putting the book down.

The books found their way all over the house. In the bathroom with a page turned back. In the kitchen by the bread box, Post-its crowding the pages. Sara avoided them, too paralyzed to touch even a cover, too afraid if she did, she might help to set something in motion she could never stop.

It was Abby who found the adoption agency, who took Sara over there with her. It was Abby who got Sara a good doctor and drove her to all her appointments.

Sara went to school and kept to herself. Never had she felt so lonely or so scared. She ate lunch in one of the empty classrooms, she avoided the halls, and when everyone else took gym, she used her doctor’s note to stay in the library. “What’s with you?” some of the kids asked, and when Sara was silent, they shrugged and turned away.

Business as usual, Abby kept saying. One day, Abby and Jack took off work to drive Sara to Harvard for her college interview, just as if there weren’t a single thing to keep her from going. They sat outside during her interview while Sara tried to remember to keep the boxy jacket she had borrowed from Abby buttoned, to lean forward so you couldn’t tell she was pregnant. “Well, you certainly are impressive,” the interviewer said, and Sara curled her fingers into her palm.
He should only know how impressive
, she thought,
because really, how many knocked-up kids did Harvard interview?

Afterward, her parents walked with her on the tour, though she already knew the campus. Two other girls and four boys. And two of the boys kept looking at her, smiling, flirting. “If we both get in, I’m taking you to Schrafts,” one boy said.

She couldn’t imagine having ice cream with any other boy, couldn’t imagine wanting to, but that was her old life, and as everyone kept urging her, she had to move on. “Only if it’s chocolate,” she said, and the boy’s smile grew.

“I live just in Newton,” he said, and then suddenly, Sara felt that edgy sensation that Danny was just behind a building, just around a bend, that he was whispering something to her, and all she had to do was find the right place to stand and then she’d hear him. She tried to shake it off. She knew it was just another one of her Danny mirages, that she could think she saw him all she wanted, her mouth could form his name a million times, and it wouldn’t change anything. She looked to her left quickly: someone’s father.

She forced herself to turn to the boy, to smile. “Newton’s cool,” she told him.

One day Abby came home with big drawstring pants and oversized shirts because Sara needed something to wear. “Try it on so I’ll know what fits,”
Abby said, and when Sara came out with the pants pulling against her swelling belly, Abby looked stricken.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” Sara said, and Abby waved her hand.

“Anything you don’t want, I’ll take back myself,” Abby said slowly.

One night, when Sara was sleeping, she heard a noise at the window, and for a moment, she thought Danny was back. She sat up, so happy and relieved she could have cried, and then she saw her father’s back, his arms moving behind her shades. He was checking the locks on the window. Then he turned, and she half shut her eyes. He was moving in the dark toward her. He placed one hand on her hair, just for a moment, and then she heard the creak of her rocking chair, she heard him crying and she opened her eyes. Then he got up and left the room, quietly closing the door, and she wept a little, too.

Now, in the shower, that day seemed like lifetimes ago. Now Sara didn’t hear anything at her window anymore except the wind or the rain or an occasional cat. If she was awake nights, it was because she was doing the reading for school this fall. Every time she finished a book, she crossed it off the list.

The water in the shower was turning cold. Sara stood, shutting off the spigots, getting out. The house was noisy. She heard a strange voice. She dressed quickly, in the same baggy clothes she had worn through her pregnancy, and then she went downstairs, and there was Jack and a man Sara had never seen before, but all Sara had to do was see the desperate look in the man’s eyes, and the two big brown paper bags overstuffed with receipts to know this was a client. Usually Jack saw them at the office, but the desperate ones, the ones who did their taxes last minute, the ones who got audited, always came to the house, laden with bags of paperwork and ledgers, and sometimes a gift for Jack. A bottle of wine. Packaged candies. Once, a bolt of silk from a man who owned a fabric store. “It’s the mom-and-pop stores that are truly appreciative,” Jack always said. “I’d rather deal with them than the big corporations anytime. Them I take good care of.”

“You got to help me with this,” the man said, “I know I should have kept better records, I know, but this audit—”

“We’ll pull it together in time, Donald,” Jack soothed. He led the man to a couch and had him sit. He took the bags and gently put them on the side of the couch, where the client couldn’t focus on them.

Donald looked up and suddenly saw Sara. “Oh, hello,” he said, smiling.

“My daughter, Sara,” Jack said. “Sara, Donald Weston.”

“Your dad’s saving my skin,” Donald said to Sara. He gave Jack a look of real devotion. “Best accountant in the world. He can make sense of anything.” He lifted up the paper bags. “Even these. You’re a lucky girl to have such a smart dad.”

Sara was sure her father was going to make some remark, that yes, she was lucky, or yes, he was indeed the smartest accountant in all of Boston, or what he usually always said, yes, but my daughter’s much smarter than I am. Instead, he gave Donald a funny smile, and then looked at his hands for a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “we’d better get back to work.”

Sara excused herself and went into the kitchen.

Abby was sitting at the table, a book open in front of her, a mug of chocolate in her hand. Her hair was shored back with one of the tortoise-shell barrettes Danny had given Sara. “Where’d you get that?” Sara asked, her voice chipping.

Abby’s hand touched the barrette. “Oh, I found it in the bathroom—what, you don’t want me borrowing it?”

“It’s mine”.

Abby started to say something and then shrugged, and took the barrette out of her hair and handed it to Sara. Sara couldn’t bear to put the barrette in her own hair, but she tucked it into her pocket.

“Interesting book,” Abby said, thumping a finger onto a page. When she looked down at the page, she saw one of her summer reading books. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
.

“Mom,” Sara said, tapping her mother on the shoulder. “Mom,” she said louder.

Abby looked up, her eyes bright.

“It’s amazing, this book,” Abby said. “Would you believe I never read it?”

Sara looked down at the book. Of all her reading, that had been the
hardest to get through. She had felt so sorry for Gatsby, for all he couldn’t let go of.