Janice picked Cici up from the hospital and brought her back to Life House the day after Baby Boy Dean was born. She had not been allowed to see the baby again. When she walks, she moves carefully, because she tore during delivery and has several stitches in her nether regions. She looks like a deflating balloon where the skin over her belly is soft and shapeless.
When I first see her, she gives me a smile, and I wonder for a second if she is still medicated, but when I look in her eyes, I just see a harrowing sadness living there, nothing vacant, nothing absent. Her soul is splayed wide for all the world to see. I tuck my hand into the crook of her elbow and we make our way up the stairs and to our room.
I had spent all morning trying to think of something nice I could do for her, finally settling on buying her a plant. But when I open the door and see it sitting there, I know it is wrong, stupid. “Here, you’ve lost your soul, so I bought you a plant.” I wish I had realized sooner. She sees it, sitting on the head of her bed, and she does a half grin.
“That from you?”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to get you,” I stammer, embarrassed. I can never seem to do the right thing. I never know the right thing.
“No, it’s sweet.” She squeezes my hand and settles on her bed.
“Do you need anything?” I ask, anxious to make her feel better. She shakes her head, and I understand now why they offer the single rooms to the girls closest to their date. It’s for this, these three or four days when they come back and are no longer pregnant but they are not quite mothers and they have to figure out how to go back into the world from Life House. It’s awkward standing here, with my big belly pushing out and Little Miss pushing her fist across my rib cage like she’s playing spoons, while Cici’s drooping skin still hasn’t chosen a shape. I am a reminder of what she has lost.
“No.” She says lowering herself to lie down as gingerly as she can. “I’m just tired.” She kicks her shoes off, grimacing at a twinge, pushing down on the covers.
“Okay,” I say. I’m hurt—that I can’t do more, that maybe she wants to just be left alone—but I try not to make it worse. “I’m here for you,” I say, and there is a flash in her eyes when she looks at me, but she puts it away just as fast.
Was that anger? Anger that I wouldn’t agree to help her to keep her son? Anger that I wouldn’t agree to raise our babies together so she could have kept him?
“I’m just tired,” she says again, adjusting herself under the blankets. I draw them over her. She rolls, turning her back to me, and I stand for a full minute, looking down at her, lost in my own thoughts. She has nothing else to say, and when she pretends to snore, I go to the door and leave her alone in the room.
***
When I first came to Life House, they had me fill out a form called Medical and Social History of the Natural Birth Mother. It had felt unreal, because I didn’t feel anything as I wrote down my height and before-pregnancy weight, that I have no religious affiliation, that I have no learning disabilities, that I did not finish high school, but, yes, I have a GED. For Occupation, I drew a line through it. I have no occupation. I’m building a baby—that’s my occupation. I had been agitated and annoyed when I went through the section asking about my parents and put a large black line through the section about my father. My mother’s info I filled out as best I could. She hadn’t completed high school, but I never knew if she had a GED. I just wrote that her last year finished was freshman. “People like that repeat what they know.” Certainly fits me, doesn’t it? I guess Vaude and Jake knew what they were talking about after all.
I’m sitting in the common room, trying to give Cici the space she needs, and my mind is just whirling. It’s just all so fucked up. How is Cici going to go on from this? Those empty eyes are haunting me, as well as her misshapen skin, evidence of what is missing. How can any of us go on? I’m building up some anger and am about three seconds from getting up, grabbing my bag from upstairs, and leaving. I haven’t matched yet. I don’t have a pretty little mommy and a handsome little daddy waiting for my baby yet. She isn’t somebody’s chosen child. She is mine. My heart thrums, and I am up off of my seat and going up the stairs two at a time, agile for my six-months-pregnant belly. I slip into our room, and I grab my bag and fish out the keys to Little Red. I’m not supposed to leave without letting them know where I’m going, but I don’t care. I slip out the back door and take my car down the drive and go. I don’t look back. I may not come back.
My father lives down somewhere on the Illinois side of Kentucky, but I’m not ready for that search yet. I don’t want anybody to know about the baby. I don’t want anybody to know that I’m giving her up. The only person who knows is Lola, so that is where I go. My tires hum on the pavement, and the semis that pass me make my car shift in its lane. I don’t have the radio on, just the thrumming of the engine, the hum of the tires to play alongside my misery, my anger.
I park the car in one of the spots that are reserved for the tenants of the upstairs apartment and shove myself up and out, my bladder near to bursting. I hope she is still here. I pound on the back door, which she keeps locked. “Lola!” I call out, crossing my legs, hoping I don’t wet myself. I’m going to step over behind the trash bin if she doesn’t open the door in just a minute . . . thirty seconds . . . fifteen. Oh shit! The door swings open, and I dash past her. “Have to pee!” I squeal and hear Lola’s low chuckle as the back door clicks closed again and the lock goes home.
She waits for me outside the bathroom door, and when I come out, she folds me into a giant hug, my belly pressing against her belly. I breathe in the smell of her warm, skin, the traces of the dry-cleaning solution forever embedded there. When she lets me go, she smiles her broad, beautiful smile and says, “Honey child. How are you?”
“Fat!” I say, and we laugh as she wraps her hands around the mound of my belly and closes her eyes, feeling the life within.
“You’re growing, you’re creating. You are not fat.” She cocks her head. “You haven’t left Life House, have you?”
“No.” I shake my head and let a breath out. It is long and shuddering, shaking at the end.
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t know. I just needed somebody to talk to.”
She laughs and says, “You have mail.”
“Oh,” I say, expecting to be handed some bill that I failed to take care of, but instead she goes into her office and when she comes back, there is a small stack of envelopes, and Little Miss does a flip because the writing on those envelopes is her daddy’s, and somehow even she knows it. I swallow hard and take the stack, not ready to think about Warren and our last phone call.
“You get about one a week,” she says, and the bell tinkles as the front door opens. She goes away, leaving me with my stack of envelopes and memories. I’m not ready to read his words. I can’t make myself look at his writing, I can’t make myself open the first letter, or the last. I just can’t. I put them in my bag. I’ll deal with that tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe never at all.
Minutes pass, and I wait, listening to the rhythm of her conversation with the customer up front. There is something comforting in being here, in the darkened corner of her back hall, like I could just disappear if I stay here long enough and nothing else would matter.