Girls in Trouble (48 page)

“I wish you had never found that girl,” Scott said bitterly.

“I wish I had found her years earlier.”

“I don’t understand it. Or you, Sara. I don’t understand you.”

“I know,” she said.

“I guess there’s nothing else to talk about, then,” Scott said, his voice miserable.

“I guess not,” she said.

“Goodbye then, Sara,” he said, and gently hung up.

Sara kept the receiver to her ear. Around her, people swirled. She’d go home now. Maybe she’d call a friend when she got in. Or maybe she’d just be with herself tonight. See what it felt like to her, see how she might be able to get used to it.

She called her parents the next week. “Please, can both of you get on the line?” she asked. She told them about Anne and the whole time she was talking both her parents were so silent she wasn’t sure they hadn’t hung up. “Mom? Dad?” she said, and then she heard Abby sigh.

“Sara—” Jack said and then stopped.

“You don’t need to fix this,” Sara told him.

“I don’t even know what to say about this,” Abby said.

“Neither do I,” Sara said. “But I just wanted you to know. I wanted to tell you.”

When she hung up, she got juice from the fridge and drank as if she were parched. She sat on her couch and put her feet up, thinking about the conversation. It was the first time one or both of her parents hadn’t told her that things would work out for the best, that she should focus on her future. She stretched out and shut her eyes. All she wanted to do now was sleep.

* * *

At home, Anne stayed in her room. The whole plane ride, she hadn’t said two words to either Eva or George, keeping the headphones clamped on, going to and from the bathroom, and each time she reseated her eyes were red. “Give her time,” George said. George came home from work an hour early, just to be with Anne, even though she clearly wasn’t interested in either one of them. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” he’d call to her. Or he’d knock on her door and say, “Who wants to go to the beach?” but Anne never did. She always had some excuse.

Sara began calling, but Anne refused to speak to her. As soon as she heard Sara’s name, she shook her head. “I have nothing to say to her,” Anne said, and went to her room and closed the door tight.

“I’m sorry,” Eva said to Sara.

“Is she okay?” Sara asked.

“Are you?” Eva asked. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, of Sara crying in the backseat of their car.
What have we done?
Eva had thought.

“Sure. I’m just fine.” Sara’s voice sounded shakv.

“Anne will be, too,” Eva said, and tried to believe it for all of them.

Sara called every few days, and although Anne would never get on the phone with her, Eva and Sara always talked. Sara stopped asking if she could speak to Anne, and at first Eva thought it was in deference to her, and then Eva realized it was in deference to Anne, and somehow that touched Eva more. Instead, Sara directed all her questions to Eva. “Is she eating?” Sara asked. “Is she going to school? Does she sleep okay?”

Eva gave a small laugh.

“Is something funny?” Sara said.

“You never asked questions like that when you were sixteen,” Eva said. “You wanted to know if she had been waiting for you. If she had said your name yet.”

“I want to make sure Anne’s okay.”

“I know. And you’re asking just the kinds of questions any mother would ask.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Sara said. “Thank you.”

There was silence on the wires again. “Well, I won’t keep you—” Sara
said, and her voice was so soft that Eva felt a pang. She felt the way she used to when she had first met Sara and all she wanted to do was take care of her.

“Tell me how you’re managing,” Eva said. “Talk to me a little about yourself now.”

“Really? You want to talk about me?”

“Tell me about your job. About New York.”

Sara told her about Madame, she told her she had broken up with Scott. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Eva said, but Sara interrupted.

“No, don’t be,” Sara said. “Maybe I could have been happy with him, but never happy enough. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Eva said. “It does.”

They talked for only a little longer. Their voices wound down, and then finally Sara said she had to go. “Can I call again?” she asked.

“I’d like that,” Eva said, and she meant it. Even after Eva hung up, she sat by the phone, and then she got up and went to Anne’s room, and knocked on the closed door.

“Honey? Do you want to talk?” she asked. “Can I come in?” She opened the door. Anne was on her bed, writing, papers around her. “Do you want to talk?” she repeated, and Anne shook her head.

“You lied to me,” Anne said. “How can I believe anything you say to me now?”

Eva felt her life was out of balance. Sara wouldn’t see a lawyer now, but things still hadn’t turned out right, because now neither one of them really had Anne. Eva didn’t try to push Anne into talking to her; instead she began to leave her little notes, the way she used to, tucked in her lunch bag, on the refrigerator, simple things.
“Hope your day is great!” “Made your favorite lunch.” “I love you.”
She glanced into the wastebaskets, but the notes were never there, and fool that she was, she told herself Anne had read them, that maybe Anne had even saved them.
Like I would,
Eva thought.

One day at school, the parent of a little boy had come to the school furious and, instead of talking to Eva first, had gone right to the principal to complain that Eva hadn’t let his son do his special job of door holder that day. “Because he kicked another boy,” Eva explained, “he has to learn there are consequences.” But even though the principal had mollified the
parent, she lectured Eva about being more on top of things.

“He kicked a boy!” Eva repeated.

“Perhaps you should have called his parents and told them of the incident, rather than letting them be surprised,” the principal said. “Perhaps you should have been prepared.”

Perhaps you should ride to town on a broomstick,
Eva thought, but she stayed pleasant. “Oh absolutely,” Eva agreed.

She drove home, irritated, upset that she had lied to the principal, that she had pretended to go along with her. She stopped at the bank to get money.
“You lied to me,”
Anne had told her. Oh yes, another thing she hadn’t been prepared for.

Eva made a decision. She went to the safe-deposit box and got out all the letters and photographs she had saved when she and George had first contacted Sara. She hadn’t looked at them since the day she brought them here, not knowing what else to do with them, and she couldn’t look at them now. She stuffed them into her school book bag, wedged between her lesson plans and her appointment book. She didn’t know what had possessed her to save all of them, and a few times she had even considered throwing them out, but she had never been able to. They didn’t feel like hers anymore, and they didn’t need to be under lock and key anymore, either. What did she have left to hide?

As soon as she was home, she went to Anne.

“Anne,” Eva said, knocking on her daughter’s door. She could hear music. “Anne!” she called louder.
“This is my house.”
The thought flew in her mind. It was a thing her mother used to say to her when Eva was an adolescent acting up, disturbing the equilibrium.
“This is my house and as long as you live in it, you live by my rules.” Well,
she thought,
who said rules were right?

Eva, book bag in hand, opened Anne’s door. Anne was on her bed, headphones on, books around her. A storm of paper was on the floor. She sat up and blinked at Eva.

Eva began taking the letters and photographs out of her bag and placing them on Anne’s bed. “These are for you. I should have given them to you years ago.”

Anne looked at her quizzically. “What’s all this?”

“Go look,” Eva said.

There were the first letters from Sara, written to George and Eva. There were copies of all the letters George and Eva had written to Sara. “Dear birth mother,” it said, and Anne stared at Eva. Eva rubbed her arms as if they were cold. “What can I say, I’m a pack rat. I never could throw anything out,” Eva said.

Anne lifted up a photo. Eva and George, when they were young, standing next to Sara who was round and as big as a beach ball. She picked up another photo, a faded one. Danny, swaggering in blue jeans, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. And then there was a photo of Sara holding Anne up, the two of them staring at each other. “Oh my God,” Anne said, and then Eva sat on the edge of Anne’s bed.

“We were our own odd little family,” Eva said. “We did everything together at first. Went to the doctors, went to dinner, sat around sipping lemonade in the backyard.” Eva fingered one of the photos. Sara, young and startled looking, Eva with one arm around her, the baby on a picnic blanket, twisting her head, looking toward Sara. “I loved her,” Eva said simply. “And not just because of the baby. I really did love her and want her in our lives.” Eva traced a finger over the photo. “But not as much as you did. Whenever you saw her, you just about went crazy. You cried when she left the room, lit up when she reentered. She used to make up these little songs for you and all she had to do was hum a few notes when you were cranky and you would calm. I’d try and you’d get restless. It made me jealous sometimes.”

“It did? You got jealous?”

“Of course I did.” Eva nodded. “Sometimes I picked you up and you would scream and I’d take it personally.” Eva put the photo down and studied Anne. “I spent so much time reading child care books, talking to other mothers, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I always thought maybe because I was an older mother, my instincts were rustier. Or sometimes I thought it was because I didn’t give birth to you, maybe I had to study harder at raising you. It’s taken me all this time to realize maybe I was so busy trying to force connections between us that I just didn’t let you be yourself. That just because we were so different didn’t mean we couldn’t have a bond. I just felt I never had you, so how could I let myself risk losing you to Sara, or to anyone? How could I let you go?”

Anne looked at her so hard, Eva faltered. “What do you tell her about me?” Anne finally said. “When she calls?”

Eva shrugged. “I tell her that you’re here, or you’re at school.”

Anne fiddled with a photo. “And what does she say?”

“She says she wants to talk with you,” Eva said.

“You’re friendly again all of a sudden?”

“We have a common bond,” Eva said quietly. “You.”

“She’s not really interested in me. She wouldn’t take me with her,” Anne said.

“I wouldn’t have let her,” Eva said. “It wasn’t her choice to make.”

Anne pushed the photographs away from her. “It wasn’t my choice to make, either.”

“You can throw them away if you want to,” Eva said, going to the door to leave. “They’re yours now. And anything you want to ask me, anything you want to know, you can ask me that now, too. No one’s going to lie to you now about anything.” Then she stepped out into the hall, closing Anne’s door, leaving her alone with the letters, which Anne promptly kicked to the floor.

At four in the morning Anne bolted awake. She had fallen asleep in her clothes, waking and drifting again, and now she was really up. She leaned over the bed and clicked on her table lamp, surveying the mess of papers.

She had been so furious since she had come home. She had waited for Danny to call her, to check and see if she had gotten home all right, the way any father would, the way George certainly did. When she was half an hour late, George was on the front porch, his car keys in his hands. “I was ready to call out the search party,” he said, and he was only half joking. But Danny hadn’t called. The phone had stayed silent. She had waited for Sara to show up, in a car, the motor running, bags packed, ready to take her, just the two of them, off someplace, but the only cars that came up her street were the neighbors’ cars, old and familiar and going nowhere more exciting than to work or the supermarket. The phone rang and rang, but it was never for her, it was always for her mother. Mail came, bills and advertisements and magazines. Everyone was living another life.

She swung her legs over the bed, the floor cool against the soles of her feet, making her toes flex. The house was so hushed, it was a little spooky. She switched on another light and her gaze darted around the corners of her room, the way it had when she was a little girl and so scared of ghosts she couldn’t speak. There were the letters, still scattered on the floor where she had left them. She’d throw them out. She’d burn them. She’d rip them into confetti. Lies. All of it lies. She crouched, gathering the letters up, and then she saw a small red heart drawn in the corner of a page. She saw Sara’s name, surrounded by exclamation points. Her legs wobbled and she hinged down onto the floor. She glanced at the paper.
It’s the middle of the night,
it said,
and I don’t know what to do.
Well, it was the middle of the night here, too, and suddenly, she didn’t know what to do, either. She didn’t feel angry anymore, but confused and sad, and so lonely she couldn’t bear it. Maybe she could read a few letters before she decided what to do with them. She picked up one of the sheets, pale blue parchment, and slowly unfolded it.

“Dear birth mother,” it began. Anne couldn’t stop reading. She settled back against the bed, and picked up another letter. It was like reading a novel about herself in letters. Real and immediate, a whole other missing life unfolding before her, a drama centering around her that she couldn’t even remember. Sara’s letters were so desperate it made Anne feel scared to read them. Eva’s letters were so effusive, so full of longing and need that for a moment, Anne didn’t recognize the letters as her mother’s. There was her father’s scribble, and a little drawing he made of the house so Sara would know what it looked like. Anne traced a finger over the drawing. It was as if everyone suddenly had identities she knew nothing about. She sifted through the photos and then her hand stopped. It was just a snapshot of her and Sara lying together on a blanket in the grass, facing each other. She must have been nearly newborn in this photo because she was so impossibly small, curled in a tiny blue dress, a pacifier taking up most of her lower face. But the thing that struck her was the way she was looking at Sara, eyes locked onto Sara’s eyes, her face alert, full of wonder, and Sara—Sara was radiant.
We look like we’re in love,
Anne thought. She stood up, studying the picture.