Somewhere Out There (6 page)

“See you out there,” Tanya said.

Brooke watched as Tanya spun around and headed back out the door, then a moment later followed her. As she worked the rest of her shift that night, Brooke tried to forget what Tanya had suggested. But after the bar closed and she sat at a table, tallying up her tips, she couldn’t help but count backward to the last time she’d had her period—five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight weeks. She was late. Panic flooded her body in a cold rush, causing her skin to sprout goose bumps.

Calm down,
she told herself. It could be anything. It could be stress. It could just be her, being irregular.

But even so, after she said good-bye to Tanya and Fred, the bartender, she drove toward her studio apartment on Capitol Hill, a voice inside her head reminding her that she was never irregular. She was on the Pill, but there were a few times this summer when she’d forgotten to take it and had to double up the next morning. If she was carrying Ryan’s baby, she had to know. And so, on her way home from the bar, she stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walgreens and bought two early-detection pregnancy tests, along with a box of saltine crackers and a six-pack of ginger ale, in case she started to feel queasy again.

As she made her way back to her car, Brooke thought about the night Ryan first came into the bar and sat down at one of her tables with a group of his employees. Brooke had found herself doing a double take when she saw him, appreciating the strong angles of his jaw—the ruddy, lined map of his face. He had light brown hair, brown eyes, and a mischievous smile that hinted at a good sense of humor. She was attracted to him immediately.

“Can I get you another drink?” she asked him after he’d already had two. She lifted her eyebrows and put one of her hands on her jutted-out hip.

“No, thanks,” Ryan said. “But when can I buy one for you?” The line could have come off as cheesy, but he spoke the words with such confidence, she found herself laughing and giving him her number.

They went out the next night she had off from work. From the beginning, he was up front about the fact that he and Michelle were still married, but only in name. “Before I finally left, we hadn’t slept in the same bed for five years,” he told her on their first date. He took her to the Metropolitan Grill, a landmark restaurant where the steaks were legendary, and the bottle of wine Ryan ordered cost more than Brooke’s monthly grocery budget.

“That’s awful,” Brooke said, wondering why people bothered to get married at all, if fifty percent of those couples ended up hating each other, fighting over who got to keep their CD collection.

“She wants everything,” he continued. “Half of our retirement and half the business, plus child support and spousal maintenance. I’d have to pay her seven figures to buy her out, then close to ten thousand a month. I’ve worked too hard for too long to just hand it all over to her.”

“I don’t blame you.” Brooke knew that other women might be bothered by Ryan discussing his almost-ex on their first date, feeling like it was in bad taste, but Brooke didn’t mind. In fact, she appreciated knowing exactly where Ryan was coming from. It made her certain he wouldn’t ask more of her than she was able to give.

As their dinner progressed, Brooke learned that Ryan was forty-five, and the owner of one of the largest contracting firms in Seattle, running multiple crews on various important construction projects around the city. She admired the fact that he was self-made—that he hadn’t been handed his company, he’d built it on his own, from the ground up. He was driven and passionate. She told herself her attraction to him didn’t have anything to do with his money—though as they began to spend more time together, she had to admit that she enjoyed the luxuries it afforded them. They never drank anything less than a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne, and he hired an Uber to drive her back to her apartment at the end of the night if she didn’t have her own car there. She liked the way that he laughed; she liked his handsome face and strong body—musculature chiseled by long hours of physical labor. He told her he was mesmerized by the combination of her black hair and violet eyes; he said her pale skin felt like silk. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he always whispered when he slowly stripped her clothes from her body, and Brooke let herself believe him. The way he kissed her felt like a form of worship, and the intensity of their lovemaking—the escape it gave her—surpassed anything she’d ever experienced before. She couldn’t get enough.

Still, he was married, and his very expensive divorce lawyer advised him to keep their relationship on the down-low, and not to introduce Brooke to his sons, for fear that Michelle would find a way to use Brooke against him in court. All of this was fine with Brooke. She never planned anything for more than a few weeks ahead.

A pregnancy would change all of that. A baby would change everything.

Brooke found a parking spot on the street near her building and quickly made her way into the old brick house that had been converted into six small studios. Once inside, she headed down the dimly lit stairwell and unlocked the door to her basement unit. Clutching the Walgreens white plastic bag, she flicked on a lamp and kicked off her shoes, looking around the place she had lived in for the past five years. The room was a perfect square, painted the palest shade of yellow Brooke could find to help brighten it. Her bed, which was really just a queen-size mattress and box spring on the floor, rested against the wall opposite the door, and her tiny kitchenette was to her left. All her clothes were in an old dresser she’d found at Goodwill for ten bucks; she’d painted it periwinkle blue to match the blankets and fluffy pillows on her bed. Over in the corner was the bathroom, a space barely big enough to fit a stall shower, toilet, and sink, which was where Brooke immediately headed, taking one of the pregnancy tests with her.

She opened the box, carefully reading the instructions, which told her she should perform the test first thing in the morning. It was almost three a.m.
Does that count?
she wondered, and then decided she didn’t care. She needed to know if she was pregnant, and she needed to know now.

She took the test, washed her hands, and left the bathroom, only to pace in the other room.
Please, please, please,
she begged God, or the Universe, or whatever powers were out there.
Let it be negative.
Brooke had promised herself that if she ever did get pregnant, it would be only when she was completely secure in her decision to bring a child into the world. Her baby would never think she wasn’t wanted, which was the only conclusion Brooke had ever come to about herself. Why else, after four years spent raising her, would her mother have given her up?

Her gut clenched, as it always did when she allowed herself to think about the woman who brought her into the world. She remembered the musty scent in her mother’s car, the pitch-black nights, and the cold, hungry mornings. She remembered crying. She remembered being scared and alone.

And there it was—her mother’s voice inside her head, playing like a record with a needle stuck in a groove:
I’ll be right back. You wait here.
Cloudy images of her mother’s silhouette, walking away. Brooke, wanting to be good, but being scared enough that her teeth ached. Her heart thudded so hard inside her chest that she worried it might explode.

“Damn it,” Brooke muttered, angrily wiping her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. She had more important things to worry about than some stupid girl who left her daughter alone in a car, then left her altogether. A person like that didn’t deserve her tears. Where had her father been all of that time? Why hadn’t he taken better care of them? Was he someone her mother had loved, or was getting pregnant with Brooke an accident with a stranger, just the first of her many mistakes?

She told herself that none of that mattered now. There was no changing any of it. She returned to the bathroom and grabbed the test from where she’d left it on the edge of the sink.
Negative, negative, negative,
she chanted inside her head, as though she could somehow manifest her desired result. But when she looked down, all she saw was the bright blue plus sign in the middle of the white plastic stick.

Shit.
Brooke’s shoulders slumped as she fell back against the wall. After a moment, she straightened, then tossed the test into the garbage. She decided to take the other one, too, just to be sure the results were the same. That there hadn’t been some kind of mistake.

Three minutes later, Brooke had her answer. There was no doubt about it. She was pregnant. And she had no idea what to do.

I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

I knew the girls would be there any minute, the first time I would see them since the night of my arrest the previous month. I’d never been that long without them, but there I was, about to say good-bye. I was giving them up, making them wards of the state. With Gina’s help, I had made the decision quickly, the way you pull off a sticky bandage, reasoning that it might be less painful than if I dragged the process out, hemming and hawing about whether or not it was the right thing to do. I already knew it was the right thing. For Brooke’s and Natalie’s futures, there was no better choice to make.

As Gina had predicted, I was convicted of both the petty theft and child endangerment and neglect, then sentenced to fifteen months in a minimum-security facility. After that hearing, Gina told me that Brooke and Natalie had been placed in a home with a couple who had been foster parents for years. Knowing they were safe and together was the only thing that sustained me as I lay in my narrow, uncomfortable bunk at King County jail, listening to the thick, rough snores of my cellmates, unable to fall asleep. I felt hollow, as though my insides had all been scraped out. In signing away my parental rights, I was effectively saying that the state knew better what to do with my children than I did. I was admitting failure as a mother. I was saying that if I raised my own babies it would be a mistake.

“Are you sure your mother wouldn’t take care of them until you get out?” Gina had asked me. Even after I told her no, she said that in situations like this, the state required her to call next of kin.

When I saw her the next day, I asked how it had gone. “Not well,” she answered, not looking at me.

“What did she say?”

“That her husband doesn’t like kids.”

“Her husband?” I said, feeling stunned. I had no idea that she had gotten married again. My mother was only twenty-nine when my father left us, unaccustomed to being a sole provider and living alone, and she had been anxious to find another husband. “I miss having someone to curl up with at night,” she said.

“You can curl up with me,” I replied, and she shook her head, looking out the window.

“It’s not the same thing.”

For the next few years, until I got pregnant with Brooke, my mother was always dating someone. But none of her boyfriends stuck around for more than a couple of months. I wondered about the man who’d finally stayed with her, a man I’d never met. I wondered what she would have said if I had reached out to her earlier, before she’d married him, to ask for her help. If I’d admitted how wrong I’d been to move in with Michael; if I’d begged for her forgiveness. I’d thought about doing this a hundred times, but pride kept me from picking up the phone. Pride, and an intense, quiet fear that she’d want nothing to do with me or my daughters. Now, even though I’d been expecting it, I felt my mother’s rejection of her grandchildren—her rejection of me—like a stab in the heart.

“How much longer?” I asked Gina now. She sat with me in the family visiting room at the jail, ready to supervise my last visit with my daughters. None of this seemed real to me yet. I’d signed the papers, answered the judge when he asked me if I understood what I was agreeing to do, and the entire time, I felt removed from my own body, as though I were floating toward the ceiling, watching someone who looked like me go through the appropriate motions and play my part.

“Any minute,” Gina said, reaching over to squeeze my hand. Her fingers warmed my dry, icy skin. The orange industrial soap in the jail’s shower was like sandpaper. “You okay?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I finally said, my voice barely a whisper.

“The judge already signed off on the order.”

“No,” I said. The tension in my chest was unbearable, my muscles braided themselves into excruciating knots. “I meant I don’t know if I can see them.” I leaned forward, pressing my upper body against my skinny thighs, and grabbed my ankles. Gina placed her hand on my back.

“If you don’t,” she said, “you’ll regret it. Trust me. You need closure.”

Closure,
I thought,
is impossible.
I was convinced giving them up was the right thing, the best thing for them, but the agony I’d felt after making the decision had shattered into sharp metal shavings lodged under my skin. Every move I made, every breath I took hurt more than the last.

Righting myself, I glanced around the room, a small, square space with brick walls painted gray, the table at which we sat, and a sad pile of dirty-looking toys in a basket in the corner. A crooked poster of
Sesame Street
characters hung by the door; some asshole had drawn a pair of blue breasts on Big Bird.

“Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?” I asked Gina, who paused and gave me a long, thoughtful look before responding.

“I think you’re giving them the very best chance you can.”

As though on cue, the door swung open, and a woman with long silver hair entered, carrying Natalie in a car seat and holding Brooke’s small hand. “Mama!” my older daughter shrilled, racing toward me. “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

“Oh, honey,” I said, opening my arms as she threw herself full force into them, clambering up into my lap. Tears blurred my vision and I buried my face in her dark curls. She was warm and smelled like green apple shampoo; she wore a green-and-blue plaid dress, brown saddle shoes, and clean, white tights.
I can’t do it,
I thought as I hugged her, kissing her sweet face.
I can’t. What the hell was I thinking, that I could give this up?
It felt as though I’d agreed to have two perfectly healthy and functional limbs lopped off. From that point on, I’d be an emotional amputee.