Girls in Trouble (40 page)

“Is something wrong?” Anne asked. Her eyes flew to her own shirt, to her loose cotton pants.

“You’re Anne,” Sara said. She held on to the edge of the end table so she wouldn’t spring across the room and embrace her daughter. Anne looked at her curiously, and then she looked from one parent to another before she glanced at Sara again.

“Last time I looked,” Anne said. She walked over and stuck out her hand for Sara to shake. “How do you do?” she said politely, and Sara glanced down and saw the raw, bitten nails. Sara took Anne’s hand and held it, and as soon as she did, she wanted to wrap her arms about her daughter and never let go.

“Why is everyone looking at me like that?” Anne said.

“This is an old friend of ours,” Eva blurted. “Sara Rothman.”

Interest faded in Anne’s eyes, and it was more than Sara could bear.
“More than a friend,” Sara said, and Anne’s glance darted her way again. Sara ached to move closer, to touch her daughter’s skin, to smell her hair. She had to force herself to look away. She dug in her purse and found a receipt for aspirin and started scribbling her hotel address on the back, her hand shaking so badly she could barely form the letters. Then she thrust the paper out to Anne. “This is where I’m staying.” Anne started to hand the paper to Eva, but Sara reached over and folded Anne’s hands over it. “You keep it,” she said.

As soon as Sara stood outside, she wanted to rush back inside. She wanted to grab Anne and tell her who she was, what she had been through. Instead, she couldn’t move. Mosquitoes whined past her ears. The cab was gone. She didn’t have a cell phone to call another. There was nothing to do but start to walk and hope that it was toward something.

“Why’d she give me this?” Anne said, slouching on the couch. She put the paper on the table next to her. “Aren’t we going out to eat?” She glanced up. “Why are you both looking like someone died?”

“Anne,” Eva said, pacing. “Honey. This is very hard.”

“What is?” Anne grabbed for a peanut from the bowl on the table.

“Remember how you always asked where you got your hair?”

“My great-aunt Ada’s to blame.”

“No, honey. That’s not who you got it from.”

Anne took another nut, a fat salted Brazil, and bit into it. She waited for her parents to argue with her that she was spoiling her appetite, but they were staring at her so hard, it suddenly made her anxious. The nut, sweet and salty both, split in her mouth. And then George leaned toward her and began to talk, and as soon as he did, Anne couldn’t move. He must have been speaking in a foreign language because none of the words made sense.
Adopted. Birth mother. Losing touch.
The nut felt lodged in her throat.

“We should have told you years ago,” George said finally.

“We love you,” Eva said. “We thought it wouldn’t make a difference.”

Anne bolted to her feet. “Of course it makes a difference!” Anne cried.

“No, no, honey—” Eva said.

“Shut up, shut up, I don’t believe you!” She grabbed for a napkin and spit the nut out into it. “Why didn’t Sara keep me?”

“Sara was a baby, herself. How could she have kept you?”

“What about my real father?” She glared at George, who stepped closer to Eva.

“He wasn’t around—” Eva said. “And even if he was, he was sixteen. What kind of life would you have had?”

“I don’t know! My life?” Anne cried, mouth trembling. “Why is she here now, after all this time? Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“She just wants to know you—”

“I don’t want to know her! I don’t want anything to do with any of you!” Anne reached for the front door and Eva grabbed to close it, and then the glass shattered into thousands of little mirrors sparkling on the floor, and Anne leaped over them out onto the walk.

Anne ran along the streets, panting. The wind was sharp, a razor skimming her skin. Her sneakers slapped on the pavement.
Liars,
she thought.
Liars.
She was furious. All those stupid made-for-TV movies about kids finding their birth mothers, about birth mothers finding them, everyone dissolving into tears of happiness as if they had finally been completed.
“I didn’t grow under your heart, I grew in it.”
What a bunch of treacly shit. All she knew was that she didn’t want her life with her parents, and she didn’t want a life with this woman, either. And she certainly didn’t want to meet some guy who said he was her father and expected her to love him.

She ran harder and then she was crying, folding down onto her knees. Sara was her real mother and she didn’t know anything about her, whether to hate or love her or feel anything at all.

Anne felt like one of those orphans in the stories she used to write, one of those lost girls, and the only difference was that the girls she wote about had money to travel, had freedom to do what they wanted, and here she was stuck in Florida.

She got up, not bothering to brush her knees, and walked slowly back to the house. George and Eva were standing by the door, the glass still sprinkled around them, and as soon as her parents saw her, they straightened. “Don’t say anything to me,” Anne warned and George closed his lips. Anne averted her face so she wouldn’t have to see either one of them. Still, she felt them watching her, even after she entered the house.

She went into her room and shut the door, and when she heard her parents talking, she clapped her hands over her ears. She grabbed up her journal and a pen and then dashed
liar
onto the page, flinging her pen and then her notebook to the floor.

She stayed in her room, coming out only to use the bathroom. She heard a truck outside, trying to park. The voice of a workman putting in new glass. The TV turning on. She wouldn’t open the door when her parents knocked, wanting to tell her dinner was ready, that they were going to bed, and please would she come out and talk? “Honey?” George’s voice was smooth and slow as syrup.

“Anne, please,” Eva said. “Honey, we need to talk about this.”

She stayed silent. The knocking went away.

She didn’t sleep. At three in the morning, she crept to the living room, but the piece of paper that had Sara’s address and number on it was gone. There was sparkling new glass in the front door. She went to the kitchen and took a chunk of cheddar cheese from the refrigerator and broke off some Italian bread and ate standing up by the door, the blue light spread over her like a blanket. She went back to her room and sat up, thinking. Her parents were two strangers and everything she had thought she knew about them was wrong. Who were they, then? And more importantly, if she didn’t know who they were anymore, then who was she?

At five, she dressed in the quiet house and made her own lunch, and even though school wouldn’t start for another three hours, she went out the door. Let them wonder where she was. Let them wonder what she was going to do.

At school, she moved in a daze. She couldn’t dare open her mouth to speak for fear of what might fly out. She was stumbling down the hall to her third-period math class when hands grabbed at the back of her shirt, making her jump.

“Hey, hey, it’s me! What’s gotten into you?” Flor stood in front of her, frowning. “I was just trying to help. I mean, did you want your buttons all open like that?” Flor asked. “Let me fix you up before you give everyone a free show.” In gym class, she stood in the outfield while everyone around her played softball. She didn’t hear people shouting her name, until the ball flew out from center field and struck her in the face. “Are you all right?” A few girls crowded around her, but Anne brushed them away.

And though she meant to go to her last-period history class, she found herself standing outside the front of the school, a strange new roaring in her ears, and then she started walking along the road.

She had another mother. There was a whole other side to her she knew nothing about. The thought bounced around in her head. Another person who was somehow like her, who might instinctively understand.

She came home, and as soon as she saw her mother, Anne walked toward her. Eva smiled hesitantly, acting as if nothing had happened, as if this were the most normal day in the world. “What a day today,” Eva said. “Three different kids threw up.”

“I want Sara’s number. I want to go see her.”

Eva’s smile faded. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t find the paper she gave me.” Anne’s mouth tightened. “Did you throw it out?”

She saw her mother swallow hard, and then Eva went to the other room and came back with a piece of paper and slowly handed it to Anne. “You know,” she said slowly, “everyone has different versions of the past, of why they needed to do what they did—”

Anne slipped the paper into her jeans. Abruptly, Eva stopped talking.

“Do you want me to drive you?” Eva said finally. “I could go with you, if you want.”

Anne shook her head. She didn’t want her parents having any part of this. She’d go see her mother and find out what she felt for herself.

“You know how much we love you,” Eva said, but Anne was gone.

Anne had to change buses twice to get to Sara’s hotel, a Howard Johnson’s, which was not in the greatest part of town.
VACANCY
, the red neon
sign flashed. The desk clerk, a young, bored-looking guy with bad skin, was reading a racing form when Anne walked in. He didn’t look up, didn’t even blink when she went right to the elevator. /
could be anyone,
Anne thought, amazed.

Sara’s room was on the second floor, down the hall to her right. Anne put her hand up to the door. She could still turn around, go back into the heat of the day. She could go home and walk in the house and have her mother’s eyes boring into her wondering what had happened and the only person who would know would be Anne.

She raised her hand to knock on the door. She had an ink scribble on one hand and she quickly spit on one finger and rubbed at it until it was gone. She sucked in a breath and knocked and the door opened and there was Sara and this time Anne looked at her as if she were trying to find out something. There was Anne’s same red hair, but while Anne had clipped her hair short to control the curl, Sara’s length flaunted it. While Anne tried to tan, Sara’s pale skin was so striking Anne couldn’t stop looking at it. And then Sara smiled, the first time Anne had seen it, and the right corner of Sara’s mouth tilted up higher than the left, the same way Anne’s had ever since she was little. “Like a broken parentheses,” Flor used to tease her. Anne’s hand flew to her own mouth and she took a step back.

“Anne,” Sara said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

There was no place to sit except the bed, which seemed far too intimate. There was an old wooden chair orphaned in the corner that looked as if it would crash to the floor if you dared to sit on it. “This is strange, isn’t it?” Sara said quietly. “But I’m glad you came.”

Anne’s tongue lay thick and heavy in her mouth. Her breath came in pinches. Outside, a car spit gravel in the parking lot. “Get some ice,” she heard a guy shout.

“I don’t know what to say,” Anne said. She kept standing, folding her arms about her chest, holding on to herself, as if any moment she might fly away in all directions.

“You don’t have to say anything yet if you don’t want to,” Sara said.

Anne shook her head. “Want to sit?” Sara motioned to the bed, but Anne backed away, leaning against the far wall. She felt as if she were under a hot light. The way Sara was looking at her made Anne feel as if
everything about her was wrong: her hair, her clothes, her face. “You’re staring at me,” Anne finally said.

“I can’t help it.”

Anne tried to smooth her shirt, pasted along her back.

“Did your parents tell you anything more about me?” Sara asked.

“No.” Anne couldn’t bring herself to look back at Sara, to meet that gaze, as intense and pointed as a laser beam. Instead she shifted her weight, staring at the far wall, at a pastel picture of mallard ducks, all in flight, and for a moment, she wished she could join them. “You can ask me anything,” Sara offered.

“How old are you?” Anne blurted.

“Thirty-two.”

Thirty-two! Younger than anybody else’s mother. Anne did a quick subtraction in her head. Thirty-two meant that Sara had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen, only a little younger than Anne was now. Anne couldn’t imagine herself pregnant, couldn’t begin to think what she’d do if the same thing happened to her, though it wasn’t likely since she had never even really kissed a boy, let alone slept with one. She didn’t know any girls her age who had gotten pregnant, though she had heard vague rumors, followed by even vaguer rumors of abortions. Everyone had to take sex education class, everyone knew about condoms and pills. “There’s no excuse for an unwanted pregnancy,” the sex ed teacher had told them, and now, thinking about it, Anne reflected:
There’s no excuse for me.
Fler hand rested on her belly, and abruptly she took it off.

“You don’t know how long I’ve imagined this,” Sara said.

“Why? You gave me up.”

“Don’t say that,” said Sara, “I didn’t give you up, not the way you think. I loved you. I loved your house. I even loved your parents.”

“You loved my parents?” Anne said, astonished.

“I was family.” Sara leaned forward, as if she were going to tell Anne a great secret. She started to tell Sara how she and George and Eva had done all these things together, how they had gone miniature-golfing and to plays, how Eva had taught her how to make creme brulee, how George had taught her to drive, and Anne flinched, because all she could remember
was how Eva had whisked her out of the kitchen when Anne asked if she could cook something, how George had given her one lesson and then, when she had banged up the car, wouldn’t teach her again. “You came back to see them,” she said.

“I came to see you.”

Anne was quiet for a moment. “Who’s my father? Does he know about me?”

“It’s complicated. He’s married. He has a whole other life. But you have me.”

Anne stared down at the floor and then back at Sara. “Do I have grandparents?”

Sara nodded and looked weary. “What?” said Anne. “Why do you look that way?”

“Because it’s hard. It’s always been hard for everyone. I was only fifteen when I got pregnant, sixteen when I had you, and my parents wanted none of it to have happened.”