Somewhere Out There (3 page)

“I know you do,” Gina said, gently. “But love isn’t enough to be a good parent. There’s so much more to it than that.”

It was the kindness in her voice that broke me—I realized she wasn’t judging me, she was only pointing out the situation for what it was. I let loose a low, keening cry from somewhere deep in my belly. The same two sentences from the previous night played on a constant track inside my head:
I can’t do this anymore . . . I don’t want to be here.

“It’s so hard!” I sputtered. “I love them, but it’s so hard.”

I leaned forward, face in my hands, and began to rock back and forth in tiny, measured movements. I thought about my mother, the look on her face when I told her I was pregnant with Brooke and I refused to do as she said and get an abortion. I thought about how her face held that same look when I informed her I was not only keeping my baby but dropping out of school and moving in with Michael, my eighteen-year-old boyfriend, who had his own apartment and a job at Radio Shack.

“You will not,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You moved in with Dad when you were seventeen,” I said, thinking this fact more than justified my decision. My parents had met their senior year of high school, and when my mom discovered she was pregnant with me, they got married. He’d left us twelve years later, becoming someone I heard from maybe once or twice a year, then eventually, not at all, but I was certain that Michael and I loved each other too much to share that same fate.

“And look how well that worked out,” she said. Her eyes, the same color as mine, flashed. “I want something better for you, Jenny. Something more than I had.”

“I will have something better,” I assured her. “I’m just going to have it with Michael. We’re not getting married right away. We’re going to take it slow.”

“Moving in with him and having a baby is not taking it slow.” She shook her head and pressed her lips together before speaking again. “What kind of job do you think you can get without a diploma?”

“I don’t have to work,” I said. “Michael will take care of me.”

“Like your father took care of us?” she shot back. “Trust me, you’ll regret this. Even under the best of circumstances, being a mother is harder than it looks.”

I hadn’t cried then, the moment she told me if I left, I wouldn’t be welcome back. I was so sure of myself, positive I was making the best choice for me and my baby. But now, sitting in the police station in a small room with Gina, I cried harder than I had in years. I cried because I’d been alone for so long. I cried because Michael had kicked us out when Brooke was only nine months old, telling me he never wanted to see either of us again. I cried because even knowing how hard it was raising Brooke on my own, I let myself get pregnant with Natalie. I cried because no matter how much I adored my babies, I was doing a shitty job taking care of them.

Mostly, though, I cried because my mother had been right.

“I know it’s hard, honey,” Gina said. She stood up and came around the table to put an arm around my shoulders. “It’s the hardest job in the world.”

I let her hug me and smooth my hair and rub circles on my back. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had held me like that. It was always me, holding Brooke or Natalie. Or both of them at once. They were constantly on me, clinging to me, using my body for food or comfort, as though it was their property and not mine. And even though I was worried about them, even though I knew Brooke must be in full-on panic mode by now, surrounded by strangers, wondering why her mommy never came back like she’d promised she would, part of me was grateful to have a few hours where I wasn’t responsible for feeding, washing, clothing, and entertaining them. I felt—right along with my guilt, terror, and shame—a tiny sliver of relief.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, sniffling as I pulled away from Gina’s touch. I looked up at her, distressed. “I just want what’s best for them.”

Gina squatted down next to me, staring me straight in the eye. “I believe you, Jennifer. I really do. I can hear how much you love them in your voice.”

“Thank you,” I whispered as I wiped both my cheeks with the bend of my wrist.

When Gina spoke again, it was with such tenderness, such compassion, it made me want to cry all over again. “I might be wrong,” she began, “but it sounds like you might be saying that you’re not sure if you can raise the girls on your own. That you’re thinking of relinquishing custody.” She paused, giving me a moment to digest what she’d said. “Is that right?”

“I don’t know . . .” I said, the words stuttering out of me. Could I do that? Just hand my babies over to Gina and let her find them a good home? I remembered the vehemence with which I’d fought my mother against having an abortion or giving Brooke up for adoption. I remember believing in my bones that no one could do a better job of mothering my baby than me.

But that was before Michael kicked us out. Before I begged for money on a street corner; before I left Brooke alone in the car while I let a motel manager bend me over his dirty desk and use my body in exchange for two weeks’ free rent in a dingy room. Before I threw up right after he finished; before the moment four months later when I finally realized I’d missed my period and was pregnant again. Before I stumbled into an ER, about to give birth to Natalie, already imagining what lies I’d have to tell her about who her father had been.

If I gave my girls up, could I forget all of this ever happened? Could I forget that that wasn’t the last man I’d let use me so I could give my girls a warm room for the night? During the cold winter months, when I ran out of money, having sex with a stranger was often the only way I could find us a place to stay. Could I erase everything, move on, and start a brand-new kind of life? Was signing away my rights the best thing for the girls, or just the easiest thing for me?

I looked at Gina through glassy, swollen eyes. “I don’t know,” I said again, with an edge of desperation. There was nothing easy about any of this. A battle raged inside of me, an agonizing tug-of-war between what I wanted and what I knew was right.

And then it dawned on me—this wasn’t about me. It was about my babies. About giving them a good home, the kind of life I just couldn’t provide. I’d done my best, and it wasn’t good enough.

“I love them so much.” I kept repeating these words as though they might somehow erase the damage I’d already done. As though they might make everything okay.

Gina was silent, waiting for me to say something different. Something more.

I sighed and glanced at my reflection in the window of the room. I had lost so much weight, I’d had to punch two extra holes in my worn leather belt so my jeans wouldn’t fall down. My dark hair was thin, greasy, and matted; my face was puffy and red. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt pretty, the last time I’d looked in the mirror and actually liked what I saw. Instead, I saw a failure—a stupid girl who kept making one bad choice after another. I saw a girl who could never do anything right.

Looking at Gina, I took in a deep breath and held it a moment before finally exhaling, then uttered the single most difficult sentence I’d ever said. “Maybe they’d be better off without me.”

And the real tears came—hard, body-racking sobs that should have released my sorrow, but instead made me feel like I had only just begun to fall apart.

Natalie Clark was running late.

She sat inside her car in the pickup line at Pine Wood Elementary on a Tuesday, waiting for Hailey to emerge from her second-grade classroom. Natalie drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, staring at the sign over the entrance that proclaimed in bright red letters:
2015 IS GOING TO BE OUR BEST YEAR YET!
as she mentally tallied the number of red velvet cupcakes she had in the back of her car. The order had been for six dozen, but as always, on the off chance some of them didn’t turn out flawless, she’d baked extra, and now was worried she’d spent so much time obsessing over getting the swirls of cream cheese frosting just so before filling the boxes, she might have set one on the counter at home.

“Damn it,” she muttered as she unbuckled her seat belt, opened her car door, and jogged around to open the trunk. It was a gray and drizzly late-September afternoon, but instead of thinking about the damage the rain would do to her recent blowout, she counted the signature pale lavender boxes in which she delivered all of her company’s, Just Desserts, products, and confirmed that yes, the entire order was there. Thank god. Natalie had wanted to pick up Hailey after she’d delivered the cupcakes to her client’s house, then grab Henry from preschool on their way home, but now she would have to take her daughter along to drop off the order. It wouldn’t be the first time her best-laid organizational plans were a victim of her culinary perfectionism.

The car behind her gave a quick honk, snapping her out of her thoughts, and Natalie looked up to see that all of the vehicles in front of her had already loaded their children and pulled away. Causing a backup was a major offense for parents who picked up their kids at the school; some people had been known to purposely rear-end a person not paying attention to the flow of the line.

“Unbelievable,” her husband, Kyle, had said when Natalie told him about the deliberate fender bender she’d witnessed a couple of weeks ago. “The victim should threaten to sue for vehicular assault.” Kyle was a defense attorney, and tended to notice potential legal threats the same way an electrician might point out bad wiring in another person’s house.

Natalie was a lawyer, too, but after passing the bar and an unhappy three years at her father’s firm, Bender & Beck, telling him that she wasn’t going to return to work when Hailey was born had been one of the hardest conversations she’d ever had. But the truth was she wasn’t passionate about the law—she’d only studied it to make her father happy—and something about becoming a mother had prioritized things for Natalie. It made her realize the days were too short, too precious, to waste spending them in a career that required insanely long hours and in general made her miserable. She and Kyle agreed that she would stay home until Hailey started school, and Natalie could use that time to figure out exactly what kind of work she wanted to do. Their son, Henry, came along two years after his big sister, and it wasn’t until he started preschool that Natalie’s favorite hobby began to morph into a job. She’d loved baking since she was seven years old, when a family friend gave her a hardcover cookbook filled with glossy, colorful pictures of perfectly round chocolate chip cookies and smoothly frosted cakes. She used to sit on the couch for hours, turning the book’s pages, reading through each recipe as though it were a story, the ingredients its characters, dreaming of the bakery she might one day own.

She lost sight of that dream somewhere along the way and instead, ended up doing what her parents expected of her. She went to law school. Which in some ways was good for Natalie, who at her core was a little shy. It forced her to push through her insecurities and interact—to argue case law with her classmates and become, at least on the surface, a well-spoken professional. But it wasn’t until she worked up the courage to leave her father’s firm that Natalie started to follow her true passion. She became known among the other mothers in her mommy and me classes as the baker of the best cookies and other sweet treats, and was often called upon to provide the dessert for any group function. For Natalie, baking offered a way to connect. She lived for the looks on people’s faces when they bit into one of her lemon drop cupcakes or caramel honey-pot pecan bars. Expressing their love of a sugary treat was a language everyone knew how to speak.

Soon, she started receiving offers to be paid for her talent. Encouraged by her customers’ overwhelming positive response, she took several classes at the local community college to hone her skills and started Just Desserts catering company last year, when Hailey began first grade and Henry started a full-day preschool program, which, because of his later birthday and the fact that he didn’t seem quite ready to make the transition into kindergarten, Natalie and Kyle had decided to keep him in for one more year. She relied mostly on word of mouth to gather new clientele, and wasn’t making a fortune, but she loved the flexibility running her own business allowed. “You went from torts to tarts,” Kyle liked to say, which always made Natalie roll her eyes.

Now, Natalie waved and smiled at the man in the blue Honda Accord behind her, hoping he wasn’t about to ram her for her lapse in attention, which would undoubtedly ruin the cupcakes. “Sorry!” she said as she shut the trunk and rushed back behind the wheel. Throwing the car into gear, she pulled forward as far as she could, then glanced at the clock. Two forty-five, and she had to have the order delivered by three. “Where are you, munchkin?” she murmured, and then, as though Hailey had somehow heard her question, Natalie heard her daughter’s voice.

“Mommy!” Hailey yelled. Natalie turned to her right and smiled at her little girl, who at seven, was not so little anymore. Her long curls bounced as she ran toward the car; Natalie couldn’t bring herself to cut them more than an inch or two, so they looked like a mass of slender, brown Slinkys coiled down Hailey’s back. Her hair color she got from Kyle—Natalie was blond—but Hailey was petite, like Natalie, with delicate features and startling violet-blue eyes that weren’t a gift from either of her parents. Both Kyle’s and Natalie’s eyes were brown. At five, Henry’s previously light mop of hair was beginning to darken to match his eyes, as well. He was looking more and more like his father.

“Mommy!” Hailey said again as she jerked open the car door and swung like a monkey into the backseat, dropping her backpack beside her. She quickly fastened her belt. “Guess what!”

“What?” Natalie asked, still smiling as she pulled away from the curb and onto the street. “Guess what” had recently become the preface to everything Hailey told her. “Guess what, Mom? I saw a bug!” and “Guess what? My socks don’t even match!” Kyle found it a little annoying, but it amused Natalie, especially when Hailey and Henry got going on the “Guess what” game together. “Guess what?” Henry would ask his big sister. “My feet smell like farts!” Hailey would giggle, then reply, “Guess what? Your
face
smells like farts!” Basically, any mention of farts sent her children into hysterics, but regardless, it filled Natalie’s heart with unspeakable joy when the two of them laughed and played. As an only child who tended to keep to herself, Natalie had always wished for a sibling; she’d promised herself that if she ever had babies, she would have more than one.