They were pretty sure Mom would get onto the news on all three local stations, but they could only watch one while recording another, over a soundtrack of Mirela’s screams from the backyard, where Nana Dee was trying to play with her.
“I still don’t understand how you could have lost her,” Dad was saying, “when at any moment you can hear her in six counties.”
“Shh, it’s starting,” PJ and Sean said.
“Jane Brennan of Williamsville never thought of herself as an activist,” the reporter began.
“You know, I’ve got four kids; they keep me pretty busy.”
Lauren still startled by four.
“It’s Mom!” PJ and Sean announced. “Mom’s on TV!”
“You look pretty, Mom,” Lauren said. On the screen, Mom’s cheeks were flushed with the wet spring cold, and her hair swept across her brow in a curtain.
“But when Operation Rescue came to town to protest abortions in the area, gaining nationwide attention for what they are calling the Spring of Life, Jane just knew she had to be part of it,” the reporter continued. “You see, her youngest child, Mirela, is adopted.” Slo-mo shot of Mirela spinning on the sidewalk beside Mom, doing the electrocuted smile. “For Mirela to join the family, Jane had to launch her own kind of rescue operation, saving the girl from an overcrowded orphanage in Communist Romania. To see Mirela now, you’d never guess the horrors she escaped, thanks to this Williamsville family.”
“She is adopted,” Mom was saying as the camera cut back to her, then to a scene of chanting crowds, then back to Mirela. “And so, you know, you just want to show people there’s another way, you—you can choose life.”
“Wait, I just saw—was that Dr. Rosen’s picture?” Lauren said.
“But what began as a protest on behalf of lost little lives . . . almost ended with a little girl lost.”
“Ooooohh,” Sean and PJ said in unison, Sean clutching his stomach in mock-pain and PJ slapping his forehead with his palm. “That’s a little straaaiiinnned,” Sean ululated in his opera voice, clutching at PJ’s arm. PJ elbowed him in the gut, and Sean keened with gladness.
“The irony is not lost on me,” Mom was saying on TV. “I’m just glad she’s okay.”
“Mom, you were protesting Dr. Rosen?” Lauren asked. “What was that sign with Dr. Rosen’s picture on it?”
“The protesters had a big reveal in store—one we can’t show you on TV.”
“It was pretty dramatic, yes,” Mom was saying into the microphone.
The news cut to a slow-mo of Mom, her jaw dropping open.
“Mom?” Lauren asked again. “That’s Stitch’s dad. Stitch is my friend.” Mom, on the couch, shook her head and closed her eyes.
“Didn’t that Rosen kid call here the other night?” Dad asked.
“Mom, you promised that you wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me,” Lauren said as the phone started ringing.
“Hi, Glenis,” Dad said. “You’ve got Channel 4? We’re watching Channel 7, and we’re taping Channel 2. Talk to you in a bit.”
“In all the hubbub,” the reporter said, “Mirela slipped away. And Jane Brennan the activist. Had to rediscover. Jane Brennan. The mom.”
“I mean, she was fine,” Mom was saying to the reporter, “but I had quite a fright for a moment there.”
“Good Samaritans found Mirela at the nearby Pancake Palace restaurant, where the little social butterfly had already made acquaintances with diners as well as hostess Joanie Schmertz.”
“Joanie from bowling league?” Dad asked.
“She’s a very happy, very, very friendly little girl,” Joanie was telling the reporter.
Cut to Joanie on a ladder propped against the side of the Pancake Palace, inching the dr. rosen kills children banner off the roof with a broom.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Dad said.
“Today, Operation Rescue is back out on our streets, on day four of the Spring of Life protests that have already resulted in two hundred arrests. But Jane Brennan, activist and mom, is on the sidelines for now. She is back home with her kids, including little Mirela, who has now been the happy beneficiary of not one. But two. Rescue. Operations. Deena Sobel, WGRZ News, Buffalo.”
“Who writes this shit?” Pat asked.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” PJ and Sean chanted.
“Mom, why were you even talking to a reporter?” Lauren asked.
“We’re supposed to take any opportunity to put a face to our cause,” Mom said. “I had Father Steve’s blessing.”
“He wasn’t even there!” Dad said. “Your hero stood you up!”
“Why did you have that awful sign about Stitch’s dad?” Lauren asked.
“I had nothing to do with that!” Mom said.
“Oh, sure you didn’t,” Dad spluttered.
Lauren felt a crystalline desire, a longing she could feel calcifying under her brow and the nape of her neck, for Dad to stop talking, stop being there. She did not want to have to share her anger with Dad’s anger.
“And why were you talking to them about Mirela?” Lauren asked. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”
“She shouldn’t have been there!” Dad’s voice had climbed to a yell.
If Lauren had to halve her anger to make room for Dad’s, then her pity would see its chance to sidle in and smother her resolution. She did not want to pity her mother, so small and helpless on the couch, so reasonable and remorseful.
“Mirela is nobody’s business but ours,” Lauren said.
“I didn’t volunteer that Mirela was adopted,” Mom said. “The reporter asked me, and I said yes. And then the reporter said, ‘Could you answer in a complete sentence, so it’s easier for us to edit together later?’ so I said, ‘She is adopted.’ Or whatever I said. Then there was an awkward silence, like they wanted me to say more, and I didn’t know if it was just going to be dead air on TV. I guess I forgot it wasn’t live. I was trying to be polite. Notice how they keep cutting away to Mirela or to the other protesters? You can see there that they edit it together to twist the meaning. They manipulate the conversation like that. They manufacture it.”
Dad was talking over her. “They wouldn’t have had any footage to manipulate if you had just shut up! Just shut the hell up! What the hell were you thinking, Jane?”
“Don’t tell Mom to shut up!” Lauren yelled, and Dad stamped out of the room.
Jane slumped deeper into the sofa. “Dad is right. Father Steve stood us up,” she told Lauren. “And as far as I know, the reverend is still in jail.”
“What for?” Lauren asked.
“Or not in jail, in the rec center.”
Mom had gone to all that trouble, and she hadn’t even made it to real jail.
“Why’s he in the rec center?”
“For disorderly conduct and for creating a physically offensive condition,” Jane said.
Dad by the door again. Shifting from foot to foot, snorting, shuffling. Nobody ever accused Dad of wanting attention.
“What does ‘creating a physically offensive condition’ mean?” Dad asked, gripping either side of the door frame like he could tear down the walls if he received the wrong answer.
“It’s when Sean lays a log and forgets to flush,” PJ said from his spot inches away from the TV. PJ said this tentatively, like a peace offering.
“The reverend pulled a bit of a stunt,” Mom said.
“He threw a dead baby into the crowd!” Sean said.
“No—wait, how did you hear that?” Mom asked.
“Everyone heard that,” Sean said.
“Who is everyone?” Dad asked.
“I heard a bunch of lesbians started playing Hacky Sack with the dead baby,” PJ said. He paused and looked around, still concerned that he was interpreting the mood of the room correctly. “That was a joke.”
Sean laughed, trying to reassure PJ. “Right, I get it, because Mom thinks all the baby killers are lesbians!”
“No, I do not—it’s not—it was a doll,” Mom said. Her throat audibly constricted on the word doll. Lauren wondered if her dad or brothers had heard it—that was the tell.
“You don’t know it was a doll,” Lauren said.
“A very realistic doll,” Mom said. “People assumed it was real, and he was shoving it in everyone’s face.”
“I shove my balls in your face,” yelped Sean, and PJ clamped his hand over Sean’s mouth, and Sean slurped at his brother’s palm.
“How do you know for sure it was a doll?” Lauren asked.
“A cop threw up,” Mom blurted out.
“So, right—why would a cop throw up if it was just a doll?” Lauren asked.
PJ made retching noises, opening his mouth wide enough for Sean to hock a loogie into it.
“When you were born, Lauren, Dad said you looked like a doll,” Mom said.
“I did?” Dad asked.
“I don’t remember that,” Lauren said.
“Of course you don’t—you were just born,” Mom said.
Mom only told stories about the three of them that they were too young to remember, stories they couldn’t tell themselves; they couldn’t quibble over details. Maybe that was when Mom loved them best, before they could make memories that she couldn’t have all to herself.
“Did it have a smell?” Lauren asked. “The baby?”
“Lauren, that’s kind of an awful question,” Mom said.
“Lauren, that’s kind of an awful smelly ass you have,” Sean said.
“It doesn’t even matter whether or not it was real,” Mom said. “They made their point.”
“Did you make your point, Jane?” Dad asked. “Did you get your point across?”
“Leave her alone!” Lauren screamed at Dad, standing up as Mom caught her arm, and he punched the door frame with his fist and walked out of the house.
“Hey, Lauren,” Andy said. The tone of a swiveling head. Andy, Stitch, and Rajiv were walking out of Tedquarters. She was late for rehearsal. “Seems like your mom is so busy saving babies that she can’t keep track of her own kid.”
“The irony is not lost on her,” Lauren said.
“Sucks for you to have to kiss her,” Andy said to Stitch, “seeing as she thinks your dad’s a baby killer.”
“I do not think that,” Lauren said. Andy knocked into her opposite hip as he and Rajiv walked past. “Whoops, sorry!” he sang over Rajiv’s screeching cackle.
Stitch hung behind. “I’m sorry he said that,” Lauren told him.
“We’re expected to go to the auditorium now to practice ‘We Go Together,’” Stitch said, looking past her down the hall.
The big closing number, entire ensemble, the fastest choreography, lyrics full of junk and nonsense, mortifying wompa lompa lompas and dippety doo bee dahs. Lauren had skipped the previous run-through of the song, and she hadn’t practiced on her own at all.
Lauren followed Stitch to the auditorium. “Stitch, honestly, I’m sorry about everything that happened with the protest and all that junk.”
“Thanks,” Stitch said, stopping outside the entrance to the wings. “I think they’re set to go. Everyone’s up there but us.”
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He peered nervously into the wings. Lauren had never seen him nervous before. They could hear Mr. Smith’s voice, sounding tired and frustrated. “The city gave us a round-the-clock guard,” Stitch said. Hands in pockets, head down, pushing the toes of his Converse into the carpet. “Two cops all the time, all night. If you cut through our yard going home tonight, you’ll probably see them.” He shrugged. “Or you could cut through somebody else’s yard, for a change. You know, it’s up to you.”
“I’m sorry you have to have guards,” Lauren said. “That’s terrible.”
“No, it’s not—they’re nice guys.” He was almost stabbing the carpet with his Converse now, like he was trying to crush a cockroach.
“Oh, I’m sure, but—it sucks that you need that.”
“It’s not the first time this stuff has happened. They used to picket us every year on Hanukkah. Right on our front lawn. Screaming ‘baby killer’ through the dining room window while we played dreidel and lit the menorah. My dad used to get so mad.”
“Stitch, I am so sorry.”
“My little brother on my mom’s lap, watching them bang on the window. I remember that.” He tapped his foot three times on the carpet and looked up at her, mouth a thin line, eyes not rheumy but gleaming, appraising. It astonished Lauren to realize that Stitch could cry. He wasn’t going to cry in front of her right now, but he had cried before, and he would again; he was capable of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“I also want you to know that I don’t agree with my mom about this stuff.”
“I get it.” He was looking down again, grinding his toe. “You are not your mom.”
“I think what she’s doing is messed up.”
“It’s messed up to bad-mouth your mom, though.”
“I’m not bad-mouthing her. I’m just saying we disagree.”
“Okay. Congratulations.”
Stitch turned his face and took a deep breath. Lauren stared at his profile as he exhaled. “You know,” he said, “my grandmother died a couple of weeks ago, and—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry—”
“I don’t need all that—”
“—on top of everything else your family has been through—”
“No, I don’t need all that. But it reminded me. There’s this old rule about sitting shiva. You probably don’t know it. You’re Catholic, right? So you wouldn’t know about this. People don’t follow this rule all that often anymore. But the old rule was if you came to the house of the bereaved, you weren’t supposed to speak unless they spoke to you. You were supposed to bear witness to their pain in silence. If the suffering person wanted to talk, then they could make that decision themselves. It wasn’t up to you.” He looked up at her again. “Do you get it? It’s not up to you.”
“Lauren, Stitch—what the hell?” Christo, the accompanist, was beckoning them from the door to the backstage. “We’re all waiting for you.”
Stitch slipped past Christo in the doorway and into the wings. Because it appeared to Lauren to be the least impossible option—because it seemed just barely plausible that she could follow familiar instructions as an interchangeable component of a large coordinated group, as opposed to being left alone and unassimilated in the silence of an empty hallway, where she would be immediately swarmed by the full volume and velocity of her current predicament—Lauren followed Stitch and Christo through the wings and onto the stage, where she took her place in the back row, pulling in her shoulders in hopes of bringing down her height by an inch or two, keeping her eyes on Deepa directly in front of her, following as closely as she could, the two-step, the turn, the pat-a-cake clapping choreography. If she could move as Deepa’s shadow, maybe Mr. Smith wouldn’t call her out for falling just behind the pace. She moved her lips. Deepa had told her that, if you forgot the words, you could lip-synch “watermelon cantaloupe” on repeat and probably get away with it.
Halfway through the second rendition of “We Go Together,” Mr. Smith out in the seats called out for Christo to stop.
“Lauren,” he said. “Come up here.”
“Bus-ted,” whispered Brendan Dougherty beside her. He was only in the back because he was so tall.
Lauren walked to the front of the stage.
“Now sing it,” Mr. Smith said. “All on your own.”
Christo played a few prompting notes. “No,” Mr. Smith called to Christo. “A cappella.”
Lauren cleared her throat. “We go together, like rama-lama-lama, ka-ding-ety-dinga-dong.”
The laughter behind her like fingers flicking her ears.
“Keep going,” Mr. Smith said.
She pressed two fingers just below the waistband of her jeans, as if to check that her diaphragm was in flattened singing position, but actually to make sure her zipper was up. She was in the dream where you’re onstage in your underwear—everyone had the same stupid dreams. Now everyone standing behind her would have a new dream, that they were her.
“Um—uh—” Lauren started.
“Remembered forever . . .” sang Claire, just behind Lauren, trying to find a volume at which Lauren could hear but Mr. Smith could not.
“Claire, I did not ask you to sing, I asked Lauren to sing.”
His glasses caught the light, hiding his eyes in opaque whiteness.
“Remembered forever,” Lauren sang, “like doo-wop-sha-diddy-diddy-bing-ety-bingy-bong.”
The howling behind her, a dying moan, lions tearing open an antelope’s belly, the organs piling out, steaming, fogging Mr. Smith’s glasses.
Mr. Smith started applauding. All the boys except Stitch and a few of the girls behind Lauren applauded, too. Claire stepped closer to her, not clapping, close enough to take her hand, although she didn’t. Abby wasn’t clapping; Lauren could almost feel Abby’s breath on her neck. The applause died down, and then it was just Mr. Smith applauding, hard, like he was trying to hurt himself.
“Lauren, I’ll cut a deal with you,” he said, hitting his palms together three last times. “You learn the words to this song, you show up to rehearsal on time, and you can have your ‘busted typewriter’ line, okay?”
“What?” she said.
“What?” whispered Claire and Abby.
“That was a joke,” he said, his white mask glinting. “The terms of that deal will not be upheld. Let’s take a break.”
All the worst things Lauren had done had always been held with herself alone. Mirela was too young and Danielle too estranged to understand what happened at Lauren’s birthday party. And when Lauren told everyone at school that Danielle gave her a black eye, she was the only person who knew it wasn’t true—not even Danielle knew. Right this second, Danielle could be alone in her bedroom on Wellington Lane, sitting on the edge of her canopy bed with its Laura Ashley floral bedspread and eyelet dust ruffle tabbing out the chords to “Lithium” on her acoustic guitar and trying to remember if and when and how her head had made bruising contact with Lauren Brennan’s eye socket on ski bus two winters ago.
But this new secret was different, because someone else had seen the whole thing. Was seeing it. Had known from the start.
She had to keep the story straight. She had to remember what it was she told Mom about where she’d be late that evening. Had she said Paula’s house or Abby’s? Or rehearsal? Would Mom remember, had she been listening? What if she’d said Paula’s house, and then Paula called and Lauren wasn’t home? She could dissolve into these questions in the middle of any class, leaving the husk of her body behind. Words slid into page gutters, x and y axes switching places. Her outward attention idling on a patch of dried gum on the carpet, catching his anger. “Pay. Attention. Lauren. Thank you,” he said, almost like a hiss, like the sound Dad made when he wanted to yell and couldn’t.
“But she was paying attention,” Stitch murmured, from his desk directly behind her. She would have looked like a model student from behind—sitting up straight, head facing forward, hand holding pencil poised over her notebook. But Stitch couldn’t see all of her. She didn’t want him to, and she hadn’t asked him to. Even now, Stitch tried to be nice, but he was making assumptions.
She had to keep the characters straight, their motivations. The people at school and the people in the wood-paneled living room. There was a trench between the two spaces, an energy constantly traded between them, matter changing states: ardor then anger, anger then ardor. His anger a substitute for his ardor. His anger a waste product of concealing his ardor. She was ennobled, inert; she sympathized with his predicament, and her sympathy exalted her. She saw her body lying along the trench, or her body as a single match dragged along its seam, her hand engulfed in flame as she tried the knob on the front door of his house at night, as she tried to write on his classroom blackboard, neat, calm, everybody watching and no pain.
She made him mad, he said. She drove him crazy, he said.
The trench opened up and he pulled her down, her arms tight around his neck to break her fall.
How strange and funny that everyone else thought they could see her, that all eyes were on her from every side, that Stitch presumed to know where her attention lay—that he could see her face through the back of her head. There she was, fumbling questions in English class, flailing around onstage, off-key, off-step, pissing off Mr. Smith again. That guy was always up her ass. How did she get cast in the first place? Oh, she couldn’t do anything right. There was her crazy mother and crazier sister all over the news. It’s just one thing after another with that family.
But no one could see what was really happening. What she was making happen. She could decide when she wanted to slip through the gap in the chain-link fence through the yards into a parallel world, behind one-way glass. She could look back through the glass and smile, and know it was real where she was, elemental, irradiated, irrefutable. A living world of soil and salt and blood. She could smile through the glass at everyone icebound, eyes midblink, mouths open and dumb, and she could laugh at them, because they would never know, and they couldn’t know, they weren’t capable of knowing, because even if she told them, even if she were telling them right now, she could not prove it, and they would never believe her.