Where the Truth Lies (14 page)

Everyone looks at me when I come into the room, my face streaked with tears. I started crying hard as soon as I left my dad’s office, and all I could think about, besides Del, was getting to Renee and telling her what happened.

But she already knows. In true Stonybrook form, everybody already knows. Apparently, Dr. Exley’s first period Chem II spent the whole class staring out the window at Winchester Hall, watching Del and his parents pack his belongings into their car. And Ethan, since he’s a prefect at Winchester, spoke briefly with my dad this morning about the situation. It makes sense now; he was especially nice to me during chorus.

After school, Renee and I go into my room together. We’re alone for the moment. When I tell her about the kerosene smell, she looks just as shocked as I was. “Emily. You didn’t know that about him?”

“What do you mean? Of course I didn’t know. I never would have—wait, you
knew
?”

“Well, my mother
has
been in rehab like six times. I know what someone looks like when they’ve been snorting powder up their nose. And the way he smelled was a dead giveaway. He was probably going into the pier at Groton on the weekends or something. You know, the kerosene smell is a sign of something really low quality, something that’s been cut too many times.”

I stare at her. “How do you know that?”

She shrugs. “I just do. I’m sorry. I assumed you were okay with it.” She lowers her voice. “Emily, did you tell him?”

I nod.

“What did he say?”

I whisper in her ear.

“Wow,” she says. “You’re lucky he didn’t tell your dad this morning.”

“I know.”

“Well, what are you going to do now?”

I shake my head. I’m trying so hard to calm down and stop crying that my breathing is labored. But I can’t stop. All I want is to go back to the first night I ever met Del Sugar and change everything. I’ve been so stupid.

“I’m going to come home with you this summer.”

“And?” She winds a strand of hair around her finger. Her hair is still damp.

I hug her. I close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say. “Can you help me?”

Renee nods. Her hair smells like strawberries and cigarette smoke. “Of course.”

“Tell me it will be okay.”

She pulls away. She sighs. “Everything will be okay,” she says.

But we both know that things won’t be okay. Not this summer, and maybe not ever again.

What is there to do? Once Renee is gone, I put my head down on my pillow and cry. Nobody blames me for what has happened to Del; everybody feels sorry for me. Poor Emily Meckler and her broken heart.

If they had any idea what I was really crying about, none of them would even want to look at me. I can barely look at myself anymore. There were so many signs that something was not right with Del, from my father’s warnings, to the precalc answers he sent me, to the constant smell of kerosene. How could it have taken me so long to see it? And why was he so careless about his drug habit? He’s too smart to have done something so stupid. It almost seems like he wanted to get kicked out. To leave me, alone.

chapter thirteen

It’s called a closed adoption, and Bruce Graham tells me—cocktail in hand, as we stand in his penthouse apartment in Greenwich Village at the beginning of the summer—that he thinks it’s my best option.

Bruce Graham is the kind of guy who’s always very well dressed and holding a drink more often than not. He smokes constantly, outside on the balcony, and spends more time on the phone with his agent and publicist and assistant—and surprisingly, Renee’s mom, although their conversations are more like screaming matches—than you could possibly imagine. I mean, this man is on the phone, drink in hand, at least seven to eight hours a day. I don’t know how he has time to do anything else.

Bruce is middle-aged, but he’s still pretty movie-star handsome. He’s tall and muscled with just the slightest bit of a gut. He has a full head of brown hair and chestnut eyes. On the train to New York City, Renee explained to me that Bruce has legal custody of her, even though he isn’t married to her mother anymore.

“How did that happen?” I asked.

We were sitting way in the back of the train. Renee wore an oversized sun hat and glasses so that nobody would recognize her.

“My mother has never been willing to say who my real father is. Probably some producer she had an affair with to get one of her early acting jobs. Anyway, she’s a mess, you know?”

I shake my head. “I only know what I’ve read in magazines.”

“Well, what you’ve read is mostly true. She’s been in and out of rehab since I was a little girl. I can remember walking into the living room and seeing Mark Parsons, her first husband, snorting lines of coke off of her naked belly. I was, like, five years old. So my mom straightened out for a while after her split from Mark, and then she met Bruce and they got married. He legally adopted me while they were together, and once they broke up she fought for custody, but it was just for her image. I’m glad I get to live with Bruce.”

The apartment is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Coming from a place like Stonybrook, where everyone’s parents are loaded, that’s saying something. I mean, there are
stairs
in this place; it takes up the top three floors of the building. The first story of the apartment is a huge studio space, with an open kitchen and living room, and an inexplicable teepee in the corner. Renee tells me later that the teepee is for Bruce’s dog, an enormous German shepherd named Wags, to sleep in.

The second floor is all bedrooms and bathrooms. And the third floor is—I actually gasp when I see it—an indoor swimming pool, hot tub, and exercise room.

I get my own bedroom, bathroom, closet, and
sitting room
. After I’ve got my stuff unpacked, when Renee and Bruce and I are sitting around talking, he tells me about closed adoptions.

It’s basically like this: I’ll go to an adoption agency, and they’ll find a prescreened couple to adopt my baby. Without ever meeting me, the couple will take care of all my medical expenses. When I have the baby, I can see it if I want, but that’s about it; after it’s born, I sign away all my parental rights. Seventeen-year-olds aren’t supposed to be able to make decisions like this without parental consent, but thanks to some fudged paperwork courtesy of Bruce, I’m supposedly eighteen.

And then it’s like the whole thing never happened. At least on paper.

“The agency that I’m going to recommend you use has a reputation for finding wonderful families,” Bruce says to me. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I happen to know several high-profile women who have fabricated their pregnancies, and adopted instead.”

I gape at him. “What do you mean, fabricated? Like, they faked them?”

Bruce nods. “That’s right. It’s very common in this industry. Women will do anything to avoid gaining weight.” He grins. “Since we’re all keeping secrets here, would you like to know some people who have done it?” And he tells me a few names that I can hardly believe. I mean, hiding a pregnancy is one thing, but
faking
a pregnancy and then adopting a baby?

“Why would they do that? Why not just adopt a baby?”

He takes a sip of his drink. “Because pregnancy is very popular right now, Emily. There’s nothing better for a woman’s career than being able to have a baby, work full time, and be back in a size zero within weeks of giving birth.”

“And it’s all a fake?”

He shrugs. “Isn’t almost everything?”

You’d be surprised how easy it is to hide a pregnancy. At school, I got ahold of some uniforms that were a few sizes too large, wore the shirts loosely tucked, and kept my blazer buttoned. The only tough part was making sure my roommates never saw me without clothes. I took showers early in the morning, before everyone else was up. I wore loose pj’s. And I got lucky; some women get really big when they’re pregnant, but by the time school let out for the summer, I’d only gained about thirteen pounds. Because of the baggy clothes I was wearing, there were actually a few people who asked if I was losing weight.

But as the summer wears on, I become visibly with child. Bruce, Renee, and I went to the adoption agency first thing at the beginning of June, and by July there’s a couple out there waiting to take custody of my baby after it’s born. I don’t know anything about them, not their names or where they live, or even what they do for a living. And I’m never going to know. I will deliver my baby. I will sign a sheet of paper. And this will all be over. Even if my child wants to find me someday, he or she will have a difficult time; the records are kept permanently sealed.

I’ve never been so scared. I don’t admit it to anyone, not even Renee. But this is my
baby
. I can feel it kicking inside me every day, doing somersaults in my belly. I feel an undeniable connection to it. And, in less than a few months, I will give it to strangers. I tell myself over and over again that he or she will have a better life without me, and that I’m making the right choice. But when I’m in bed at night, lying on my side because the baby has become too heavy to bear on my back, I often hold my belly and cry. Not because I don’t think I’m making the right decision, but because it doesn’t seem like there’s any decision that will be good enough to make everyone happy. I’m seventeen, and I’m deciding the future for another, helpless life. I don’t feel like I have the right, but I certainly don’t have a choice anymore.

Then there are the nightmares. Without any of Dr. Miller’s pills, they’re in full swing. But they’re a little bit different now: I hear lullabies sometimes—one in particular. It’s the oddest thing. It’s the lullaby that I sang to Del, on that first night outside my dorm.
Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer, do …

The song doesn’t bring me any comfort; it only makes the nightmares worse. Because I’ll never sing to my own child. I’ll never lay eyes on him or her; I’ll never know what my child ends up doing with his or her life or even if he or she is okay. I don’t know why, but I’m certain this is how things have to be. I want things to be
over.
I want my life back. More than anything, though, the more I think about it, I feel certain that I want to forget about Del, to rid myself of every reminder of him and all his lies. And this is one big reminder.

Sometimes it feels vulgar. I’m only seventeen years old, and my body has been surrendered to forces that only grown women should deal with.

So that’s how I spend the summer in between my junior and senior year of high school: hanging out with Renee and Bruce Graham, going to doctors’ appointments, and watching myself grow, surprisingly slowly.

When Renee is home, we talk about what school will be like in the fall. We talk about how surreal it is that we’re managing to pull this off together; how sometimes it feels like we were meant to become friends, how we were drawn to each other despite our differences. And of course, we talk about Del.

“I just feel so betrayed,” I tell her one afternoon in the apartment. I’m sitting on the sofa, hands on my eight-and-a-half-month full belly. Renee is in the teepee with Wags, trying to force-feed him a pill for canine arthritis.

“Because of the cocaine?” she asks. “Wags,
sit
. Oh, you stupid dog. Sorry, Emily. Bruce has never given me chores, so I really feel like I should do this a hundred percent.” Wags spits out the pill, walks in a tight circle around the inside of the teepee, and gives Renee a smug dog-look.

“
Yes
, because of the cocaine. But it’s other things, too. It’s, like, once I saw how he reacted to my being pregnant, and after everything fell apart and he got kicked out, I felt so
furious
with him.”

“For leaving you behind,” she says. “Wags,
come
.”

“Yes. He gave me such a convincing argument about how he wanted to be a family and stand by me, and then he goes and gets himself expelled … Renee?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you ever think—you know, he almost led my dad straight to his stash—did you ever think that maybe—”

“He got kicked out on purpose?” she asks. “Well,
yeah.
It kind of makes sense, don’t you think? He probably freaked out. He’s run away from places before, hasn’t he?” I’ve told her all about his life preadoption.

“Yes,” I admit. “I just can’t believe he’d do something like that to me. He’s supposed to love me.”

She looks at me. “Obviously, he’s got some major issues of his own going on.”

Of course, Renee is right. The person who Del seems to care about most, I realize, is himself.

“So you never want to see him again,” she finishes. “Wags, you dumb dog, come
here
!”

“Yes.” I nod. “I never want to see him again.”

But this is a lie. In fact, I think it’s the only lie I’ve ever told Renee. It isn’t that I think she’d be upset; I’m actually pretty sure she’d understand my feelings. It’s more like I’m trying to convince
myself
that I never want to see him again, and I feel like, if that’s what I tell Renee, then it will become the truth.

And then, near the end of July, it happens. I go into labor. Renee and Bruce (is he
ever
actually working?—he even has a drink in the limo) drive me to the hospital, where I’m rushed to a private room and met almost immediately by the adoption agent I’ve been working with all summer.

They give me a Pitocin IV drip, which is a medicine to speed the labor along. The adoption agent, whose name is Claire, tells me she’s notified the family who will adopt my baby. She tells me they’re here, in the hospital, already. Every time I see someone passing in the hall, I wonder if it’s them. But I’ll never know.

When I start to feel serious pain, an anesthesiologist puts a very thin needle in my spine—it’s called an epidural—that makes me numb from the chest down.

I don’t want to talk much about what happens next. There is pain despite every effort to avoid pain. There is a mess unlike anything I could have anticipated. And there’s that cry—the first sound I hear after what feels like an eternity of pushing—the scream that makes me squeeze my eyes shut before I have a chance to see him or her, the odd sensation of the doctor cutting the umbilical cord that connects me to my child. And, of course, once they’ve ushered the baby from the room to clean it off, I open my eyes a crack, roll my head to the right, and see Bruce Graham sitting in a crisp suit,
drink in hand
, hair perfectly styled.

“Well, well,” he says, grinning at me. “That certainly was an adventure like I’ve never seen before.”

I’m so exhausted that I can barely keep my eyes open. The only thing I can think to say is, “You obviously own a blow-dryer, don’t you?”

They send me home a day later. From the nursery down the hall, I could hear the babies crying sometimes, and once in a while I’d wonder which one was mine before I’d realize that none of them belonged to me. All it took was a signature.

And then things are back to normal. Sort of. Almost. There’s a hollow feeling inside me, the feeling like I’ve lost a part of myself. I find myself thinking more and more of Del, wondering where he is and if he’s okay, thinking that maybe I can steal his file when I get back to campus, if my dad even bothered to keep it. He probably burned it the moment Del left.

Two days before we’re supposed to go back to school, Renee drops her bombshell.