| |
“I’ve got something I want to talk about,” a voice says after Janice has opened the meeting up to all of us. I glance from under my lashes at the girl who has spoken. She’s somewhere in her last trimester, from the looks of it, and her long, blond hair curls around her face and down her back. She’s not beautiful, I think, but there is something about her that is striking, in the long chin or the wide brow.
“All right,” Janice says, and the girl shifts in her seat, straightening her back.
“I’m Nadia,” she says, and everybody calls out, “Hi, Nadia.” She smiles, a straight line across thin lips, because of course we all know who she is. “I got a letter from my mother today.” There are groans from the girls around the room. “Yeah. So when I found out I was pregnant, she took me to family planning and told me I needed to get an abortion. She didn’t ask me who the father was . . . well, she knew.” There are a smattering of “uh-huh” sounds, and I suspect that everybody knows the story already, even though I do not. “Well, I wasn’t doing it, so she brought me here and told me not to come home again until I came to my senses. Well . . . you all know.” There are nods, and the girl next to her reaches out and touches her shoulder. “So I get this letter telling me that Darren has left her because of this whole mess.” She indicates her stomach. “What I don’t understand is how she could let him stay after this mess.” It dawns on me then that he is the father of her baby, probably a stepdad or a boyfriend. It is a lightning bolt hitting home. I push my hair out of my face while Nadia keeps talking, and I realize that every single one of these girls have lived some version of my life. Everybody listens while she vents, and when she finally turns it back over, Janice nods her head, her lips pursed tightly.
“I’m so sorry that she said those things to you, Nadia. How do you want to address it?”
“Well, I want to scream at her, because seriously how fucked is that? I’m sorry, I mean how screwed up is that? She knew what he was doing, and she didn’t do anything to stop it. She just went on with her life. She chose him over me.”
Do they always choose them over us?
One girl says, “That’s right. My mom is the same way. She chose her friends over me. She said I was an embarrassment.”
“I was hopeless,” somebody else says.
“She blamed me,” Nadia says again, and I realize that she can’t be more than fourteen. She still has the gangly, long-limbed look that tall adolescent girls get when they just come into puberty. I clench my jaw, and all the muscles in my throat tighten, making it hard to swallow.
“Did it happen to her?” I ask, thinking of my own mother, of the story I heard from Will on Thanksgiving. I didn’t know I was going to ask the question—I didn’t expect to say anything at all—but it’s out now, and the room has dropped to silence, and I feel my face burning.
“What?” Nadia asks, looking annoyed at me, like I’m siding with her mom.
“Did somebody do to her what he did to you?”
“No,” she says, looking aghast, flabbergasted at the suggestion. “I don’t think so.”
“What made you wonder that?” Janice asks me.
“I don’t know. I mean . . . somebody once said to me that we repeat what we know. I didn’t understand it really then, and I was pissed because they were saying that I was going to be like my mom.” I laugh a little choked sound. “Turns out they were a little right.”
“It’s an interesting point that Alison has brought up,” Janice says. “We all think of our parents like they should have all the answers, like they shouldn’t make mistakes, but they’re really just people, and life is hard. I know that many of us have a lot of anger toward our parents. It might be something to consider, what their lives have been.” There is uproar at this. None of the girls want to think about that; they want to be able to blame someone else for their problems. I’d probably feel just like them, except my mother is dead and being angry at her doesn’t do anybody any good.
“I don’t care,” says a girl with long, black braids. She leans back in her seat, her legs stretching out for half a mile into the middle of the circle. Her tummy rises in a mound, and her arms are crossed protectively over her breasts. “My mother never did a thing for me.”
“Was it always like that?” I ask and could kick myself for not keeping my mouth shut.
“Yeah. It was always like that.” She smirks.
I nod. “That sucks.”
“What, Bitch, it wasn’t always like that for you?” I recognize her voice from the first day I got here, coming up the stairs when she had said “Bitch, I told you to stay out of my room.”
“No. Not always.” I let my voice disappear behind the curtain of my hair.
“Lucky you, Princess.” There is anger and disgust tangled in her voice.
“That’s enough, Debbie.” Janice’s voice slices the air. “We don’t attack each other in group. We are a team within these walls. Alison brought up a good perspective, one that I think we could all spend a little time thinking about. Who else would like to share today?”
“I’d like to say something.”
“Okay, Brandi.”
“My older brother came to visit today.” There is so much nervous tension in her voice that she sounds like she could break apart into tiny shards. “They have been trying to get pregnant for a long time. So me coming up pregnant has been kinda a sore spot in the family. You can imagine.” There are murmurs around the group, the comrades coming together. “They want to adopt my baby.” The words tumble like a flood from her mouth, like she just had to say it or she wasn’t going to get it out. The murmuring from the girls in the circle breaks along a line, with some seeming to think this is a good thing, a blessing, and the rest thinking that it’s bad.
“How do you feel about that, Brandi?”
“I don’t know.” Her agony is real, palpable. “I know I was planning on giving it up, but I thought it would be strangers, you know . . . people I don’t know.”
“Do you have concerns about your brother or his wife’s ability to parent?” Janice asks, peeling away the layers.
A pause, then, “No. They’re both good. She’d be a really good mom.” I glance at her, catching the moment she feels like a shit for even hesitating.
“You don’t want to see your kid every day and not be able to be its mama.” That’s Debbie, cutting through all the layers and filleting the heart on a spike.
Brandi shudders, drawing her hands up to cover her face. “I feel like such a bitch.”
“I get it,” Debbie says. Sitting up, reaching over and touching Brandi’s knee. “I don’t think I could do that either. That’d be too much.” I bite my tongue to keep my mouth closed because I would much rather be able to see my baby and know that she is safe than not. I had even thought about asking Steven if he and his wife would be interested, but then I found out they were separated and waiting for divorce papers to come through. There is no way I’m saying anything else that might make Debbie want to slash my tires, or my throat.