Toronto
November 1994
As soon as I walked through the front door, a vicious, fire-breathing dragon swooped in to attack.
I’m sorry, did I say fire-breathing dragon?
I meant my mother.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. More than twenty years since she got off the boat from Florence, and she still refused to speak English. Especially when she was angry.
“School,” I said in English. Just to annoy her.
“Do not lie to me, Isabella Maria Roberta Cappelli! The school called this morning to say you snuck out, again!”
Well, there wasn’t much I could say to that. “Oops?” I shrugged, ducking past her and into the kitchen. There was a bowl of fruit on the Formica table. I grabbed an apple and tried to get back to my room, but Mama was blocking the door.
“You irresponsible child! We have talked about this before. You go to school. Do you understand what your father and I gave up, so you and your siblings could have a good life?”
I rolled my eyes. “I was just having fun.” I’d heard that lecture so many times; I had it memorized. I took a bite of my apple and tried to use it to get the bitter taste of angry parent out of my mouth.
Mama seemed to know I already had the echo of her lecture running through my head, so she skipped to the second act: “I do not understand you. Your brothers and sisters were never this difficult. You want to get married, like Maria and Anna? That is fine! We will find you a fine husband after you graduate. You want a good job, like Paolo? You need to finish your education! Just look it Michael. Straight As, and he is on the hockey team…”
“Sorry, but I don’t play well with others,” I snapped, cutting her lecture short. I pushed past her and took the stairs two at a time to my room, slamming and locking the door.
Apple juice dripped down my arm as I dumped my bag on my bed. At some point, Mama had come in and made it, depositing a basket full of clean laundry at the foot. She straightened the unread books on my desk and dusted the headboard, even though I asked her a hundred times not to.
I wiped the juice off on my comforter. Like the rest of my room it was pink and white and frilly, and matched the canopy.
I had done what I could with the place—covering the walls with posters of Van Halen, Queen, Def Leppard, and Poison. I’d hung black scarves from the curtain rods to obscure the white lace Mama had hung there, and tried to do the same with swaths of purple and black fabric over the canopy. Mama and Papi nearly had a cow when I decoupaged magazine cutouts all over the top of my spindly white desk, just so it would be a little less white.
The few remaining blank spaces on the wall had been filled with playbills and pictures of Broadway musicals and movie posters. Some of the pictures had been taken in my school auditorium, of the costumes I helped the theater department put together. I was particularly proud of the ball gown I’d made for our production of Cinderella the year before.
Finishing my apple, I retrieved my cigarettes and lighter from my schoolbag and sat perched on the windowsill to read the last few pages Le Trois Musketeers. I was supposed to be reading it for French class, which would normally mean it would remain in the bottom of my bag until the end of term, but it was actually a really good book despite being a school assignment. Madam Bouchard lamented my accent every day, but I was better at reading French; the rest of the class wouldn’t be done with it until Christmas break, another month away.
At some point, Mama interrupted by knocking on my door and reminding me that we had a family dinner that night.
I shouted something noncommittal back and went back to my book, not looking up until d’Artagnan reaped his rewards and the kingdom was safe once again. By then the November sun was setting over Toronto, and cars were beginning to accumulate in front of the house. I spotted Paul’s BMW, the slick black sedan Ann’s husband drove, and Mary—Maria’s—minivan.
Standing in front of my closet, I considered the eternal debate: should I wear something I liked, and piss off everyone at the table, or should I wear something my mother would approve of and spend the entire meal in extreme discomfort?
Well, I was likely to spend it in extreme discomfort anyway, so I might as well wear what I wanted.
My black dress was a halfway decent compromise, at least, even if it was shorter than Mama liked—she didn’t need to know I’d raised the hem a good five inches during home ec. I added a black cardigan, making a face when I realized the only one that was clean was the one with the pearl buttons. To compensate, I wore my fishnets and black ankle boots.
The effect in the mirror still wasn’t quite right. I added eyeliner and my favorite dark red lipstick, then teased my black bob just a little. My best friend Rachel said my hair and that lipstick always made me look older than sixteen.
“Good,” I’d told her just two nights ago. “I’ll be seventeen next month.”
By the time I got downstairs, everyone else was already gathering in the dining room. The smell of mushrooms, tomatoes, and homemade pasta made my stomach clench with hunger.
“Isabella, there you—What are you wearing?” Mama demanded, hands on hips.
“Clothes.” I breezed into the dining room and took a seat as far from her as I could manage. That put me between Margaret, Paul’s wife, and Mike.
Mary waddled in, leading her two oldest to the little card table set up in a corner. Robert and Louis were four and five, able to eat on their own at least, but her husband, Enzo, had to put the baby in the high chair next to her seat. Flora wasn’t even two yet, but Mary was already weeks away from delivering baby number four. Minutes, if the size of her was any indication.
“Nobody let Mary get too close to any lit candles. She might pop,” I whispered to Mike. He snorted and choked on his Coke. I tried not to laugh as I patted his back.
Mike and I had to stick together. He was only two years older than me, rather than fifteen like our oldest brother, Paul. I don’t think I could have sat through our family dinners without someone close to my age.
Anne came in next, helping Mama with the last of the serving dishes. They were rapidly discussing recipes and the best way to roast tomatoes in Italian.
Anne’s husband was already at the table with their daughter, Rose, who was three. Bruno was trying to convince her to eat at the children’s table with her cousins, but she was more interested in mooching some of the appetizers they had been enjoying in the living room off my dad, who was seated at the head of the table.
“Come on, Rosie. If you sit on your own then you’ll get desert,” Bruno cooed unsuccessfully.
“Oh, let her have her desert anyway,” Papi replied, smiling benevolently on his granddaughter and offering her a slice of bruschetta.
At last, everyone made it to the table. We joined hands and Papi said grace. It was the last moment of civility before chaos broke out as lids were removed from serving dishes and the battle to feed eleven people began.
“Before we all get started, I do have an announcement,” Anne said, getting to her feet and beaming.
Oh, boy. Not another one, I thought, remembering the sickly shade of green she had turned as Mary passed the bowl of mushrooms under her nose.
“We’re pregnant!” She said this like it was something new and exciting. Like there weren’t half a dozen rug rats (or rug rats in progress) in the room at that very moment.
Still, everyone clapped and there was a celebratory cheer.
“Congratulations, Anne!” Mike said with a grin.
I smiled halfheartedly and dumped pasta Florentine onto my plate. Well, at least this meant no one would be discussing my truancy at dinner.
Unfortunately, that meant it was Margaret’s turn in the hot seat.
The pasta Florentine hadn’t even made a full circuit around the table before Mama turned to her and asked, “So when are the two of you going to have children?”
Margaret’s smile turned brittle and I felt her stiffen beside me. Poor thing. She already had one strike against her for being Irish, but Mama consoled herself with the fact that at least she was still a “good, Catholic girl.” It didn’t really matter that neither Margaret nor her parents had ever set foot outside Ontario; they still weren’t Italian.
“Well, whenever the good lord chooses to bless us,” she said awkwardly.
Mama waved her hands dismissively. “Well, hurry up! You want your eggs to dry up?” She turned to Anne and switched back to Italian, so Margaret couldn’t understand her. “This one, she’s a hopeless case. I knew we shouldn’t have mixed with an—”
“Mama,” Paul said firmly.
“I know, I know, Paulo. I’m sorry. It’s just that you would have a family by now if you had married a nice Italian girl. Remember Imelda, Franco’s girl? She married Luca D’Angelo. They have six children now. And she’s a fantastic cook.”
Margaret stabbed viciously at her lamb. I had a feeling her Italian had been improving of late. Under the table, I saw Paul squeeze her thigh briefly in a rare sign of affection.
“If you don’t hurry up, then our little Isabella will be having children before you,” Dad teased. Everyone at the table laughed except Margaret and me.
“I think there are enough grandkids running around here,” I muttered, a little too loudly. Across the table, Mary and Anne both paused with their forks halfway to their mouths.
“You are not in a position to be judging anyone,” Mama said sharply.
“What did she do now?” Anna asked, too eagerly. I think she must have been the happiest when Mike and I showed up unexpectedly, since we saved her from being the screw up youngest child. She’d only had to deal with that title for thirteen years; I’d been living up to it for sixteen with no relief in sight.
On the bright side, it was one thing I was way better at than her.
“Little Isabella has decided she has no use for St. Matthew’s. The school called me today to say this is third day she’s missed this month.” Mama pinned me in place with her eyes. “We save for months to bring you here, to have a better life, and sacrifice and work to provide best education we can. We send her to the best school, and she throws it away. For what? Is it a boy?”
At first I thought it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, until the table remained quiet a few seconds too long.
“No, Mama. It isn’t a boy.” As if.
“Then what is it? What is so important that you would throw away your future?”
“You know, I don’t know why you’re so worried about it anyway, since according to you all I’m supposed to do is get married and have a bunch of Italian babies,” I snapped, throwing my napkin down on my plate. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
I stalked out of the dining room to Mama’s continued protests. Even in the hall I could hear her listing my faults for everyone. “Paulo, Maria, you never did this. Such a reckless, ungrateful child! And look at our Mikey! He gets such good grades, and his team is doing so well…”
The rest of her lecture was drowned out as I walked past the powder room, took the stairs two at a time, and slammed the door to my room shut. Without stopping I grabbed my purse, threw up the window sash, and climbed down the maple tree into the garden.
I was halfway to the bus stop before I remembered it was November in Canada, and I really should have grabbed a coat. Shivering, but too angry to admit defeat, I took the bus downtown, disembarking at a random street filled with neon.
There was a bar at the corner, one I hadn’t been to before. I claimed a stool and bought a beer with my fake ID.
Normally when I was out with my girlfriends, we would claim a corner table, one with a sightline to the door, near other patrons, but away from the bartender and anyone who might decide we looked a little too young to be drinking.
That night, though, I was feeling reckless.
A group of young men came in, loud and raucous and clearly celebrating something. They looked to be college age, maybe eighteen or twenty. I eyed the one at the center of the group: head and shoulders taller than the rest, he had red hair, green eyes, and an infectious grin.
I swigged the last of my beer. I am going to climb that like a tree, I thought.
I waited until they were on their second round. Tall, broad, and gorgeous and I exchanged a few looks from across the room, but he seemed to be lacking a little in nerves.
Well, never mind. I was taking chances, right?
Sliding off my stool, I let my dress ride up another inch or two, just to make sure I had his attention, and I definitely did.
“Hey,” I said, leaning against the bar.
“Hi.” He smiled. He had a baby face and both freckles and dimples. Mary, mother of God, I was going to despoil an oversized choirboy.
His friends all looked me up and down. It was a short trip; no one in my family except maybe Mike could claim to be tall. Including my teased and slightly windblown hair, I came up to the fifth button on his shirt. Maybe the fourth.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, grinning broadly.
I returned the grin. “For starters.”
***
He kisses way too well for a choirboy, I thought, two hours later as I raked my fingers through his hair. His lips were hot and strong, just like his hands. His fingers dug into my thighs, hoisting me up around his waist.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered in my ear, warm breath caressing my neck and sending shivers down my spine.
Pressed against a graffitied alley wall, and half wrapped inside his peacoat with him, I didn’t think twice when I felt him fumble for his belt.
My tongue battled against his, until I drew back just slightly, teasing his lower lip with my teeth. I jumped down just long enough to take off my boots and wriggle out of my panties and tights.
“Are you… sure?” he asked, belt halfway unbuckled.
“Why, you having second thoughts? I know it ain’t the Ritz, but—”
The belt was off in a flash.
I found myself hesitating. “Do you have…”
But he had already pulled out his wallet, and produced a little packet from inside. I gave a relieved sigh, and then relieved him of his pants. I braced my palms against his shoulders. He took the hint, picking me up again and balancing me right back where I belonged.
***
“You’re shaking,” he whispered against my neck.
I laughed. “It’s fucking cold!”
For the first time, he seemed to realize my outfit was not seasonably appropriate.
Without missing a beat, he lowered me back to the ground and shrugged out of the peacoat. He draped it tentlike over my shoulders. I started to object, but he shook his head. “Don’t worry about it… I never got your name.”
“It’s Izzy.”
“Connor. Connor Adder.” He was looking around for his belt. I found it on top of a dumpster and handed it to him. He took it, holding my hand in his for a moment, and kissing the inside of my wrist.
I found my tights balled up in a puddle and decided to write them off as a loss. I wrapped the coat a little tighter and retrieved my shoes. “Where you from, Connor?” I asked as he walked me back into the bar.
“Chicago.”
“Chicago? What are you doing all the way up here?”
His reply was cut off by his friends. They waved him back to their table with catcalls, only a few of which were actually directed at him.
“Come on, man! Flight’s at five thirty! Gotta get moving,” said one, already putting on his coat. Two of the others helped a fourth to stand; he was clearly three sheets to the wind and would not be moving under his own steam for a while.
“I-I should go. We’re leaving…” His choirboy face was back on, like he wanted to say he’d call me in the morning, even though we both knew there was no way it would happen.
“Yeah, I heard.” I gave him a smile and pulled him down for a parting kiss. “Don’t worry about it. I had a great time.”
***
Maybe I should have paid more attention. Did it break? Or was it just one of those things? Something that was meant to be?
I climbed back through my bedroom window around two in the morning. The coat reached my ankles and made it hard to scale the maple tree, but I managed. It wasn’t until I got inside that I found his wallet hastily stuffed in the coat pocket along with the condom wrapper.
I lay on my bed, still wearing a glow and the coat that smelled like him, and opened it.
Inside was a shiny silver badge. Chicago Police Department.
Mary, mother of God.
I’d fucked a cop.
I felt a little of my color drain away as I stared at it. It reflected the light from my bedside lamp in a warm glow, distorting my reflection on the metal. For an instant, I thought I saw something—someone—else reflected there, but then it was gone.
I found twenty dollars American, and another ten plus change Canadian. His driver’s license said he was six foot six, two hundred forty pounds, and twenty-two years old.
There were a pair of credit cards, a library card, and a gym membership. A set of plastic sleeves in the middle displayed pictures of a family that was easily as big as mine, but full of tall, Nordic looking people, all with red or blond hair, and most with that cherubic look that my choirboy had had.
***
By Christmas Eve, I was decidedly late. I skipped out on a family gathering so I could go to a party with Rachel and Emma. Scott Wilson’s parents were spending Christmas in Europe, and he had the house to himself… and a hundred or so of his closest friends. I knew something was wrong when the smell of that mushroom pizza hit me and I puked my guts out into an umbrella stand. A bunch of guys from Mike’s hockey team were standing nearby. They cheered as vomit splattered all over the welcome mat.
“Jeez, how many have you had? We just got here!” Rachel said, pulling my hair back from my face.
“Um, six,” I gasped.
I left the party early and stopped by the drugstore on the way home.
That night, I lay in bed clutching the stick with the two pink lines, too numb to move.
It’s wrong, I told myself. These things are wrong all the time. Just wait a few weeks. It’s nothing.
So I waited.
Dinner became an agonizing ritual as I tried to find excuses as to why I wasn’t eating. I couldn’t tell if I was sick because I was scared, or scared because I was sick. By the time the Valentine’s Dance came around, I was two dress sizes smaller because I could barely keep food down. I’d almost convinced myself it was normal, but by March the nausea had subsided and I found myself making up for lost time. When the Easter holidays finally came around, it was all I could do to squeeze myself into my school uniform.
It was getting harder and harder to pretend nothing was wrong, but I was terrified of saying something out loud, of making it real. My brain kept telling me that if I just ignored it, it would go away. It would all be fine. Meanwhile, the smell of Mama’s mushroom lasagna sent me running for the bathroom every time she made it. Apparently, the fungus growing in my belly objected to me actually eating fungus.
Safety pinning my skirt closed the day we came back to class after break, I wanted to climb out of my skin the way I climbed out of my bedroom window, but I couldn’t. And even if I did, there was nowhere to run to.
“What is wrong with you?” Rachel asked as I switched out my French book for my History text at my locker on Friday.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
I was bursting—I wanted to tell someone. Even though I wanted to crawl under a rock and never be seen again, I was also sick of hiding. For the last three months, my entire world had been nothing but confusion and contradiction.
“You promise not to tell anyone?” I asked, leaning in.
She bent down to hear my whisper, her face hungry for gossip.
“I think… I think I’m pregnant,” I whispered.
“Oh my god!” Rachel squealed. Several people turned to look at us. I shot her a glare that would have done my mother proud.
“Keep it down, would you? Not one word. To anyone. Especially Emma and Tiffany. You know neither of them can keep a secret longer than it takes to get to class.”
“Oh, cross my heart!” Rachel said, eyes gleaming. “So who was it?”
“You don’t know him,” I replied, slamming my locker shut.
Scott Wilson passed us in the hall, nodding acknowledgement to us. The vomit incident had been forgiven after Jason Finch decided to swing from the dining room chandelier at New Year’s and managed to rip it from the ceiling.
“It was Scott, wasn’t it?” she asked in a high-pitched stage whisper. “After the party! That’s where you disappeared to—”
“Will you shut the hell up? It wasn’t Scott,” I said.
“Well then who—”
“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.” It was only half a lie. I knew perfectly well who the father was. But there was no way I was telling her.
***
After school, I went to the rink to watch Mike and his friends practice for their last game of the season. If anything, talking to Rachel only made me feel worse. I’d realized as soon as I opened my mouth that it was a mistake to tell her anything. I should have told her I had the flu, or something.
Coach Leiber blew his whistle, and the boys filed off the ice.
“What are you doing here?” Mike asked, spotting me in the stands.
I jammed my hands in my coat pockets, rubbing the silver badge I had taken to carrying with one thumb like a good luck charm. “Can I talk to you?”
***
Mike blew out a cloud of air, like a balloon that had suddenly been deflated. It formed a white cloud in front of his face that seemed to glow in the streetlights along Bloor as we walked to the bus station.
We’d been walking for hours, ever since his practice ended.
“How… how far along are you?” he asked, like he was afraid to know the answer.
“About four months.” Four months, two weeks, six days, and nineteen hours. Give or take.
He let out a low whistle. “You have to tell Mama and Papi.”
“No. No way. I can’t.” Ever since Christmas Eve, I’d been hiding from everything. I didn’t go out with Rachel or the other girls when they went to parties or cut class to drink beer in the parking lot and smoke. There’d been nothing else to do, so I’d been home by curfew, spending most of my time doing homework for the first time in ages. My barely passing grades of the previous term had shot up to nearly perfect scores. Mama and Papi made a special dinner after the midterm reports came out to celebrate my improvement.
For the first time I could remember, Mama said she was proud of me.
He looked down at me, and the way my school blazer was already having trouble disguising the evidence. I ducked my chin into my scarf like a wooly turtle, as if I could hide from that, too.
“No offence, Izzy, but you aren’t going to be able to hide it for much longer.”
***
It turned out I didn’t have to. By gym class on Tuesday, word had gotten around. When Sister Catherine called me into the office, I shot daggers at Rachel with my eyes, but she avoided my glare.
They called my parents. After a lot of yelling, and a long sermon, and then more yelling, I was sent to wait by the secretary’s desk. I felt like a butterfly pinned to a display board the way she glared at me, her lips pressed into a thin white line.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I asked, trying to look meek and penitent.
The white line got even thinner, but she wrote me a pass. I went to the ladies—hey, I had to pee every five minutes anyway—and then went to my locker and cleaned out all of my things. By the time my parents emerged ten minutes later with my expulsion paperwork—apparently I was a “bad influence”—all of my things were ready to go. I followed them to the car without looking back. Mama started crying on the ride home, as though I had done something unforgivable to her. As though I’d gotten the stupid fungus just to hurt her. She seemed to be taking it as a personal insult that her daughter was a failure.
“Who is he? Who is the boy?” she demanded.
I didn’t answer at first. “No one you know.”
“Tell me! We need to speak to his parents. We need to get all of this straightened out,” Papi said, banging his fist on the wheel. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him so angry.
I looked down at the straining fabric of my blouse. Connor Aiden Michael Adder, born November 18, 1973. Eyes, green. Height, six feet six inches…
“I don’t know,” I said at last.
***
There was more yelling and more lectures over the next few days. Mama and Papi put on their best clothes and took me to see Father Roberto, and then I got it all again from him, too, but with more Bible verses and way more Latin than I thought belonged in polite conversation. I was assigned so many Hail Mary’s I was pretty sure I’d be on my knees until the baby came.
“I don’t know how we will show our faces at church,” Mama fumed when we got home. “To have a daughter who defiles herself so shamefully, and then to not even know who the father is! How will we explain it to the rest of the family? To the congregation?”
No one listened when I suggested it was none of their goddamn business.
It continued like that for two weeks. Mama made an appointment for me with her doctor, who stared at me disapprovingly above my expanding belly as he stuck his face and his hands between my legs.
Lie back and think of England. Or Canada. Or whatever, I thought as Mama asked him very pointed questions while he poked and prodded, clearly trying to goad him into yet another lecture on how stupid I’d been. When he informed her my due date was in August and I was already a full five months gone, I thought she would faint. By the time the ordeal was over, even the doctor looked like he felt sorry for me.
The second time I saw him, in May, wasn’t as bad. After the initial greetings, he sent Mama to wait in the hall. Jaw hanging open, he finally led her out by the elbow, all the while explaining that it would only take a minute. He left her fuming in the corridor. I was grinning when he came back.
He returned the smile through his bushy brown beard and pushed his glasses a little higher up his nose. “Well, now that that is taken care of, let’s get down to business, shall we?”
He pulled out a clipboard and started asking all of the questions he had tried to ask at my last appointment, but hadn’t been able to because of Mama.
“And you’ve had no pains, no discomfort?”
I looked down at my belly. My entire wardrobe had been reduced to leggings and baggy sweaters. “My back hurts all the time, and my ankles. I can’t get comfortable at night. Are you sure I’m not having twins?”
He laughed. “That’s all perfectly normal. You were actually a little on the small side the last time I saw you, so I’m glad to see you are taking better care of yourself now. Remember, everything you do is going to influence the little one—possibly for the rest of their life. And no, you are not having twins.” His eyes twinkled as he reached for the blood pressure cuff.
“Hm. A little high, I think. You need to work on reducing your stress,” he diagnosed.
I looked pointedly at the door. In the tiny gap underneath, the shadow of my mother pacing back and forth could be seen, pausing every so often as a piece of our conversation filtered out to her.
“Well, do you your best,” he shrugged. “Remember, everything—”
“—I do will affect the baby, maybe for the rest of its life.”
“Exactly.”
***
“I suppose public school is an option,” Mama sighed. I’d been home for a month, and they still hadn’t decided what to do with me. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without supervision, not that I went anywhere except church, which had become mandatory. Unfortunately, I couldn’t run fast enough anymore to get out of it. Once a week I was paraded out for the whole neighborhood to gawk at and whisper. Half of the kids in my Sunday school class treated me like I was a leper, while the other half seemed to think I was a circus side show escapee.
School, however, was apparently a tricky subject. I noticed I was left out of all conversations involving my future, even as Mama and Papi had long conversations with Mike about what he would do after he graduated in June, and where he would go to University.
“Is that really the best, though?”
“It’s only until the end of the school year. Next year, we can enroll her at St. Martin’s.”
“Will they even take her?”
“You know they take on a lot of… troubled girls. The Rosetti’s send their Clarissa there.”
“I am not troubled, and I can hear you,” I hollered down from the landing where I was listening. I picked my way down the stairs and stood in the doorway of the living room, hands braced on my aching back.
“I asked Mike to pick up some home school information from the library three weeks ago,” I said, tossing one of the pamphlets on the coffee table. “I can study on my own. Or did you not notice that my grades went up after Christmas?” After the pregnancy test. After I stopped going out, because I was afraid of being around anyone who was drinking or smoking, without taking part. Because I was scared to party, and scared to be left out.
It turned out I spent a lot more time partying and hanging out than I’d previously thought.
“I took a placement test and they said I can take the graduation test at the end of the summer. Problem solved.”
For once, Mama’s jaw snapped shut.
I turned and stalked out before she could reopen it.
***
June brought the first breath of warm weather we’d seen in months, but I stayed hidden in my room, buried in my books. Any kind of distraction. Dr. Zaborski continued to warn me about my blood pressure, and said if it didn’t get under control soon I would spend my last trimester on bedrest. He let me listen to the baby’s heartbeat through his stethoscope. I sat there on the cold table with the ear plugs jammed into my ears, listening to the steady thud-thump, thud thump of the little fungus’s heart, and it suddenly became real. It wasn’t just a nightmare I was living through. It was really happening. I was going to have a kid, someone who was going to depend on me for everything.
I thought of my own parents, about the way I thought about them and what things were like at home, where I was effectively under house arrest, where I was little more than furniture in my own living room. I tried to imagine bringing this tiny thing, this little mushroom home to that. Would they treat him or her the same way they treated me?
Everything you do is going to influence the little one—possibly for the rest of their life.
I felt tears stinging my eyes. Dr. Zaborski took back his stethoscope and offered me a tissue.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said gently. I nodded. For a moment, I thought he was going to hug me, but he pulled away. He could stick his hand up my hoo-ha, but some things are just too intimate for a doctor-patient relationship.
“We need a crib. And blankets. And clothes. Oh, and diapers and bottles…” I tried to compile a list in my head as Mama drove me home.
“Oh, you have finally started to think about what you will need in the future?” she asked waspishly.
I looked over at her, not sure what to say. “I just… I want things to be ready.”
She pursed her lips and looked back at the road. “And where will the money for these things come from? Do you plan on working?”
“I… I don’t know. I’m trying to be more responsible about this…”
“Pft. Responsible. Maybe you should have thought of that six months ago.”
I looked down at my hands, pressing them softly against my abdomen. The baby twitched a little, rolling over and then settling back into sleep or whatever it did in there all day.
Mama’s tone quieted. “Don’t worry, patatina. It is all taken care of. My grandbaby will not have to worry about a thing.”
***
On Dr. Z’s advice, I spent a lot of time laying in bed with my feet up, working on homework over the next few weeks. It was fine; I wanted to get as much schoolwork done before the baby came as possible. He’d given me a due date of 23 August, two days before I was scheduled to take the graduation exam for my home school course. I had a little over ten weeks to cram in two semesters.
On the rare occasions I wasn’t working, I’d taken up crochet, slowly producing clothes and toys and stacking them on the edge of my desk.
I lay on top of the comforter with the window open, eating a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips and red vines, my French book propped open beside me and using my belly as a desk as I scrawled out my essay on Alexandre Dumas, en francais, on a pad of paper.
As the pressure from my pen moved from one side of the page to the other, I could feel the baby tracking the movement with an elbow or a knee, mirroring me.
I pulled up my shirt to look at my stomach, which had continued to mushroom even more since I’d put myself on partial bed rest. “Would you knock it off, you little fungus? I’m trying to work, and that is really distracting.”
Of course, the baby didn’t respond. “Il mio piccolo fungo,” I said softly, running a hand over the place where I’d last felt her knobby limb. Then, for good measure I added “Mon petit champignon. My little mushroom.”
Mary, mother of God. This kid is going to kill me when she gets out.
There was a gentle tap at my door. I hurriedly pulled my shirt down. “Who is it?” I asked, even though I knew. Papi never came to my door. Not anymore. Mama barged in without knocking.
“It’s me,” Mike said.
“Come in.” I tried to haul myself into a more upright position as he came in and pulled my desk chair.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I… I just wanted to check on you. You’ve barely left your room in weeks.”
“Hey, I get out.”
“Yeah, for food, bathroom breaks, and to go to the doctor.”
“Exactly. I get out.”
He gave me a level stare, and I looked away. It was the kind of stare I usually associated with my mother, the kind that looked straight through you.
“Nobody wants me out there,” I said quietly, addressing my textbook. The more of me there was, the more invisible I became. None of my friends had called since I’d left school. Mary started hosting the family dinners, to “take the strain” off Mama. Somehow, dealing with four kids, one of them barely six months old, was less stressful than my mother having to deal with her invisible, errant daughter, even though of the two I was the one able to feed myself.
“That’s not true,” Mike said forcefully.
I looked up at him, a little sadly. What was I going to do when he went away to school?
As if reading my mind, he held up a letter. It wasn’t one of the big envelopes University acceptance packets came in. It was normal sized, but had clearly been tightly packed.
“What’s that?”
He offered it to me. Ontario Provincial Police Academy was stamped in block letters over the return address next to an outline of a shield.
“Will you open it? Please?” He looked a little pale, just asking.
“The police academy?”
He nodded. “I know Mama and Papi want me to be a lawyer or something, like Paul, but I think I could do a lot of good.”
I remembered the night I’d been with Connor, when I’d found his wallet and badge in the pocket of his coat. I remembered the image I had seen.
“You got in.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Mike, they don’t send letters this thick just to say no.” I handed it back to him. “You’re going to be a great detective someday.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I think I do.”
***
June was wearing away fast. The warmer it got, the stronger my sense of urgency became. I was racing against the clock, not just to graduate, but to come up with a plan to get the fungo and I out of my parent’s house. Not an easy task when you are only seventeen.
I was so hot I couldn’t sleep at night, instead laying awake and trying to come up with a plan. I would need money; that was the biggest obstacle. But I couldn’t work, not in my current state. When Dr. Z saw me the second week of June, he started using words like “total bed rest,” “inducement,” “potential toxemia,” and “high risk.”
“Just to be completely clear, this young lady needs complete rest and care to ensure she and the baby stay healthy,” Dr. Z told my mother firmly. Mama looked from me to him, as though she wasn’t sure if I was putting her on by making my doctor tell her I was in trouble, or if she was genuinely worried.
“I know we set your due date for the end of August,” he continued, “But I don’t think forty weeks is going to be possible now. Of course, the longer we can delay delivery, the better.” He pulled the calendar from the wall over his desk, flipping pages and counting. “If we can make it to the beginning of August, then I think that will be good enough. There will be risks, of course, but there might be more if we wait. You’ve got a small build, which complicates things, but the baby is growing at a good pace.” I snorted. At seven months, I was nearly as wide as I was tall. Of course, when you are only one and a half meters tall to begin with, that isn’t hard.
“Remember, absolutely no stress. If you notice any swelling in your hands and feet, then you need to get to the emergency room and call me right away, understand?”
I nodded numbly, staring down at the little fungo. Dr. Z wrote down his pager number on a prescription pad and handed it to Mama.
“Si, we take care of her,” Mama said in her broken English. “We take care of everything.”
That was exactly what I was afraid of.
***
As news of the complications with my pregnancy got out through the family, a tense hush fell over the house. I could feel it in the air as I lay on my bed, feet propped up, nibbling on the extra-healthy snacks Dr. Z recommended to help control my blood pressure, and wishing I had a bag of red vines. Mike had brought up the portable television set, which was ancient and black and white, and could only pick up one channel at a time. Since every station required an adjustment to the rabbit ears, and I was completely forbidden from getting up, that meant I watched a lot of daytime television. Mike also took away my schoolbooks, insisting I didn’t need anything else to worry about.
“You can always take the test again in December,” he reasoned.
He didn’t have the steady tattoo of hurry, hurry, rush, rush pounding through his ears with every heartbeat.
With every moment I lay on that horrible pink and white comforter, I grew more sure of four things:
I was having a girl.
She was going to come early. Earlier than even Dr. Z had suggested. I was laying bets on the first week of July, but no one else needed to know that.
I was terrified she would come when I thought, and be too weak to survive.
I needed to get out of my parent’s house, for her sake.
Paul’s wife came to stay with us two days after Dr. Z’s ruling of bed rest. Margaret was a nurse, so she took charge of my care, checking my blood pressure twice a day and making sure all of my vitals were good.
“You’re doing really well,” she said on her third day with us. “Just keep it up.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said blankly.
She smiled. “Exactly.”
Even though I’d never really gotten along with her in the past, I found Margaret was decent company when my brother wasn’t around. I felt a kind of kinship with her, since we were both regarded as outsiders, or people not to be trusted.
No one mentioned Papi’s prediction that I would have children before Margaret. But then, Margaret was the only one who mentioned she wasn’t the one who couldn’t have kids. She only said it once, when she thought no one could hear, but I caught the words as Mama walked away, spewing her usual litany of veiled insults as she carried a basket of laundry down the hall.
When she realized that I’d heard, Margaret and I exchanged conspiratorial looks before she quickly turned away.
Tell no one what you heard, her eyes commanded.
During the few hours a night I managed to sleep, I had dreams. Intense, crazy dreams. I saw a little girl with black hair, but someone else was holding her, taking her away from me. No matter how much I screamed, she just got further and further away.
Some nights, I dreamed about spiders. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Sometimes I was a spider. Sometimes they were trying to kill me.
And sometimes I dreamed about an impossibly tall redheaded man, with a cherubic smile and a mouth like the devil. I dreamed about wrapping my legs around his waist, unbuttoning his shirt, and running my fingers through his hair. I dreamed about his breath in my ear and his lips on my neck, his hands on my flat stomach and running over my breasts. I always woke up just before climax, sweating, dissatisfied, and frustrated, feeling slightly larger and twice as awkward as a beached whale.
Four or five times a day, I pulled out my notepad and started to write Connor a letter. He had a right to know that he was about to be a father. But would he want to know that the mother of his child wasn’t even out of high school? I held the badge to my chest in the dark like it could guide me somehow. Sometimes I saw flickering images in the silver I thought were snatches of red hair or a stunning pair of green eyes, but they were too fleeting for me to be sure.
I examined the family photo. Connor, in his dress uniform, with another man that looked like an older version of him, also in a dress uniform, posing for his graduation from the police academy with a teenaged boy and girl, and a woman that must have been his mother.
No. That ship has sailed, I decided every time, and then I tucked the wallet back into the pocket of the coat and stuffed it under the bed again. I couldn’t ruin their happy, smiling faces.
On the rare occasion I cooled off enough to sleep, I pulled the coat over me like a blanket, comforted by his smell. I had an irrational hope he would come back for me, that he would make everything okay. But how could he? He didn’t even know my last name. He didn’t even know I was pregnant.
I rolled over onto my side and tried to get comfortable, to go to sleep, but the tears that wouldn’t come on Christmas Eve were coming thick and fast now. I hated myself for giving in to temptation in the alley, for everything I’d done before or since. Every Sunday at confession, Father Roberto reminded me what a sinful creature I was, and that my baby was surely damned because of my transgressions.
Everything you do is going to influence the little one—possibly for the rest of their life.
It felt like I’d been standing on the edge of a cliff for the last six months, waiting to jump, to fall—I wasn’t sure. It was the eve of a new beginning, the longest night I had ever faced, and I was terrified of what the dawn would bring when it finally arrived.
“I know I’m just a screw up,” I whispered to the little fungo. “But I won’t let the same thing happen to you. You’re going to be perfect, just wait and see!” I may have been tempted. I may have done something I shouldn’t have, but I would fix it. I would take this mess and I would make it better.
My voice cracked as I continued, “We’re going to start fresh, I promise. We’re going to go away, and we’ll make it work. This is going to be a new beginning for us.”
But things didn’t work out that way. Not even close.
It was 23 June. I remember, because the seven o’clock news was on the old black and white television, and they were talking about the preparations in Quebec for their provincial holiday, St. John the Baptist Day, which was the following day.
The cadence of hurry, hurry, rush had been in my head all day, and the fungo was agitated, I assumed because of the heat. I felt like I was going to melt and sink straight down into my mattress. The booties I had made were sitting on my desk, next a pile of other crocheted things: a blanket, two caps, a sweater, and a bunny. I’d asked Mama for purple or blue yarn, but instead she brought home a dozen skeins of a hideous white speckled yarn that I think was supposed to be gender neutral, but looked more like the sad leftovers from a clown party.
“I promise I will get better yarn as soon as I can get out of bed,” I told the fungo, and rubbed my side when she dug a limb into one of my organs as if to say, “You’d better!”
There came a knock on the door. I knew Mike was out with some of his hockey friends, but Margaret poked her head in, instead.
“Hey, sweetie. Can we talk to you for a second?”
We?
She pushed open the door. Mama, Papi, and Paul all crowded into my little bedroom.
“What’s going on?” I asked, suddenly worried. I propped myself up on my elbows for a better view.
“Lay down, lay down. Don’t exert yourself!” Mama chided, waving me back down. Dr. Z had finally impressed upon her the danger of the situation, and she made it her duty to see that I did not get out of bed for anything.
Mama and Papi each took a seat on my bed. Paul stayed standing by the door, as if the mere sight of the room made him uncomfortable. He looked everywhere but at the bed where I lay. Margaret wasn’t much better. She sat on my desk chair and picked up one of the baby booties, turning it this way and that in her hands.
“We need to talk to you,” Mama said slowly, in English.
“What’s going on?” I demanded again.
“We… We think… Well, it might be best if…” But Margaret’s words trailed off.
“We worry about you, patatina,” Papi said. “You are so young. You have your whole life ahead of you for making babies. Now is the time when you should be having fun.”
A horrible feeling began to grow in the pit of my stomach. And considering just how large my stomach was at the moment, it was a very big feeling with a lot of room to grow. Seven months ago, they’d been raving about how irresponsible I was, and now they wanted me to go out and have fun?
“We want only best for our grandchild,” Mama added.
“Only the best for you,” Papi said.
I looked at Paul and Margaret, and suddenly something clicked. The reason behind the hurry, hurry, rush.
Because something was horribly, horribly wrong.
My room was just as it had been for the last seven months. Sure, it was a little more… lived in at the moment, but it was still all my stuff. My books on the shelves. My posters on the wall. Aside from the piccolo fungo and the stack of baby clothes I’d been making, there was no sign at all that a baby was on the way, was in fact imminently expected.
I tried to think back. After the doctor’s appointment, the one when I heard her heartbeat for the first time. I’d tried to talk to Mama in the car. I’d asked about a crib, and clothes. She said it was all taken care of. I’d assumed she meant that some of our old baby things must still be in the attic or something.
I remembered the way that Mike had looked away when I tried to talk about the baby. I’d asked him to be her godfather, but his response had been uncharacteristically vague.
“You aren’t turning Anna and Maria’s old room into a nursery, are you?” I asked, suddenly cold despite the heat.
Margaret’s head shot up. “Is that what you told her?” she demanded of Mama.
“The doctor said she should not worry. I make her not worry,” Mama said simply.
My breath came in fast, short gasps. I hoisted myself into a sitting position. When Papi and Margaret tried to stop me, I slapped their hands away. “Don’t touch me!” I screamed. Angry, betrayed tears blurred my vision as I turned on my parents. “When were you planning on telling me that you were giving away my baby? Were you just going to wait until I was in labor? Until it was too late for me to stop you?”
“Patatina, please—”
I wheeled on my brother. “And you! You think that just because I didn’t ask for this, that you can just take her from me? Just because your dick’s too small to make your own?” I was on my feet now, fists clenched at my sides, threatening to tear the flimsy fabric of my oversized tee shirt.
Paul’s eyes flashed dangerously. His wife tried to intervene, but I pushed her back into the chair so hard that it rocked. She grabbed wildly for the desk to keep it from flipping over. “And don’t even get me started on you. You disgust me. I trusted you, and this whole time you’ve just been trying to make sure that I don’t hurt your precious. Stolen. CHILD!”
Enraged, I tried to storm out of the room. Paul, his face purple with anger, stepped in my way. Everyone was shouting now. Papi was apologizing, Margaret was trying to get me back in bed. I couldn’t even tell what Mama was saying with Paul’s angry face so close to mine.
“Irresponsible—ungrateful! We are trying to help you—!”
“Help? You call this help? Go to hell! Take your help and shove it up your ass with the rest of the fucks you don’t give about anyone but yourself!”
Paul’s meaty hands reached for me. I dug my nails into his wrists, leaving long bloody gashes. He gave a howl of pain, and I stumbled back against the bedroom door.
Panting, I ran for the stairs, clinging awkwardly to the railing after so much time in bed. Sweat broke out on my forehead.
My back spasmed, a vest of pain wrapping itself around my torso so suddenly that I stumbled halfway to the bottom.
The front door opened and Mike came in, mouth open in a broad grin, about to announced his presence. But then his eyes landed on me and the family chasing me down the stairs.
The pain came again, different this time. The world started to tilt sideways as Mike rushed forward. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the puddle of bloody water dripping down the stairs.
***
I woke up, and I knew something was wrong.
The sounds were wrong. The lights were too bright, even through my closed lids.
My eyes were heavy; I couldn’t open them for the longest time.
I was numb, but there was a vague kind of pain. I couldn’t place the source, making it everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
I was heavy and light, exhausted but panicked.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly, horribly, wrong, and I didn’t think I could fix it.
When my eyes finally opened, it was to the bright lights of a hospital. My room was a horrible shade of peach, lit with fluorescent bulbs that buzzed at the most obnoxious frequency known to man.
My limbs felt strange. I tried to wiggle my toes and saw the white blanket twitch, but something still felt wrong.
There were voices nearby. My left hand hurt. So did my stomach. So did pretty much everything from the waist down, but it was a dull kind of ache that said the worst was over.
There was something clipped to my index finger, and an IV in the back of my hand. I squinted at the plastic hospital bracelet. Toronto General Hospital. Isabella M. Cappelli. B. 06/12/79. High Risk Maternity Ward. Blood type…
I looked down again and wiggled my toes.
I hadn’t seen my toes since April.
My room was empty. Just like my room at home, there was no bassinet. No rattles, no baby toys.
The voices outside were more distinct. I could hear Paul, my mother.
I threw back the covers and tried to sit up, and then nearly vomited all over the heart monitor. Clutching my midsection, I slowly raised my hospital gown to see the staples left behind by the cesarean I didn’t remember having.
Panic began to overflow. Where is she? What have they done with her?
I tried to stay calm as I disentangled myself from wires and tubes and groped my way to the door. The alarm started going off, but I couldn’t stop, couldn’t—
I made it to the hall. A little ways down I saw my family, but they didn’t see me. They were staring through a huge window at rows and rows of incubators, and the tiny, deformed bodies inside.
“…all set,” Paul was saying to my parents in Italian. “The doctors say that Genevra will be fine to go home in a week or two.”
“Her name… is Eve,” I growled. The indistinct pain I had felt when I woke up was becoming much clearer now, much harder to ignore.
The three of them jumped, turning around like I’d returned from the grave to call out their sins. In a way, it felt like I had.
On the other side of the window, dressed in a white suit to keep the germs at bay, Margaret was holding a little bundle of pink blanket.
Down the hall, nurses and doctors were shouting at each other from the doorway of my empty room. I looked from the oblivious Margaret to my idiot brother, my misguided parents.
“That is my daughter. And you will give her back to me.”
Paul straightened. He reached into his suit jacket and produced a sheaf of papers. “Actually, she’s my daughter,” he said coolly, with only a hint of fear showing around his eyes. “Her name is Genevra Lucretia Maria Sophia Cappelli. She was born yesterday, 24 June, at twelve sixteen in the morning, weighing just under two point three kilos, and forty centimeters long.”
“She’s a very lucky girl, that her mother took such good care of herself. Most babies born that early are closer to one and a half kilos, if that.” Margaret had appeared at the door of the incubator room. She stripped off her gown without looking at me. I knew it was supposed to be a compliment; something I had done had ensured that my baby was big enough, strong enough, that she would be okay. But all I heard was tiny little Margaret calling me a pig, a fat cow who had laid in bed for a month with nothing but her chips and red vines for company.
The nurses finally spotted me, and I felt hands on my arms, strange voices in my ears.
“Let go of me!” I demanded. The startled nurse backed away. I looked from one member of my family to the other. “I need to see her. I am not going anywhere until I see my Evie.”
It felt like forever, but I was finally lowered into a wheelchair and taken into the room Margaret had just left.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t take her out right now,” the nurse on duty explained gently. “She can only be outside for a little while each day. But that time will get longer the stronger she gets.”
She showed me the holes where I could reach through to hold her hand. She was so small. How could she be so small when I had been so big?
Her head was covered in a fine layer of black hair. Her face was blotchy and wrinkled, like she could burst into tears at any moment. She felt like the most delicate thing I’d ever laid eyes on, like touching her too hard would shatter her. I ran my finger down her arm, afraid to touch her anywhere else.
My throat burned with the realization that they were right. I was seventeen. I hadn’t even finished high school yet. I’d slept with some foreign stranger in an alley behind a bar I wasn’t even supposed to be in, and the end result was the tiny, fragile human I would probably break in half the first time I tried to hold her.
“Take me back to my room,” I croaked, curling my fingers into fists, as though I could hide the way her skin felt in my palm and keep it there, where they wouldn’t be able to take it away.
They wheeled me back to my bed in the horrible peach room. “Turn off the lights when you go,” I ordered, regal as a queen. They pulled the door closed behind them so only a sliver of light from the hall came through.
I pulled the thin blankets up to my chin and cried myself to sleep.
***
When I woke up again, the only things that had changed were that the ugly vinyl seat next to my bed was now occupied, and a little bouquet of daisies with a foil CONGRATULATIONS! balloon was on the bedside table.
Mike looked up at me with shadowed eyes. “Hey, kiddo. How are you?” His voice sounded weak and tired.
“I just went through labor and I don’t even remember it. So why do you look like the one who’s been hit by a bus?”
His smile was more of a grimace. “I’m really, really sorry, Iz. I didn’t know they were going to go that far.”
I wanted to be angry with him, just as much as the rest. He’d known. He’d kept it from me. He’d helped them.
I reached for his hand. He took mine gratefully and gave it a squeeze. “You’re a dumbass, big brother. But I know you weren’t trying to be.”
“I’ll help. Whatever you need—”
“Oh, good. You’re awake,” an overly chipper nurse said, pushing her way in with a cart.
Mike dropped my hand. The nurse bustled around, checking charts and vitals and scooping out pills into a little plastic cup.
“Now, as soon as you are feeling up to it, you do have more visitors outside. And we can give you a sponge bath whenever you’re ready.”
“Oh. Goodie.” I wasn’t sure which sounded more thrilling.
Next to me, I heard Mike snort. The nurse gave a tiny smile as she swapped out the IV bag dripping overhead.
My brother followed her out, offering a little wave of support over his shoulder as he passed the others in the doorway. Paul turned the lights on without asking and marched in like my hospital room was his office, full of underlings to bully.
I kept my face carefully neutral as they gathered around.
“I think you understand now the importance of what we are doing,” he said condescendingly. I glared up at him and tried to sit a little straighter against my pillows, even though my belly still ached where it had been cut open.
My gaze flicked to my parents and Margaret. At least the three of them looked a little remorseful. But then Mama straightened up and gestured to Paul.
He took the papers out of his jacket pocket again, the same ones I’d seen before, and laid them out on the table. He swung it around so they were directly in front of me.
Eve’s birth certificate, but they had replaced Eve Cora—the closest I could find to a feminine of Connor—with that train wreck he had used in the hall. There were tiny prints of her hands and feet, and blank spaces. Mama had already filled in my name with her loopy script.
Papi handed me a pen.
Father’s name. Connor Aiden Michael Adder. Born November 18, 1973. Height, six feet six inches. Weight, two hundred forty pounds. Eyes, green.
Father’s name. I scribbled in a mostly illegible “unknown.”
I signed the certificate at the bottom, and Paul slid the next stack of papers toward me. Release of parental rights was written at the top.
Feeling numb, I signed and initialed all of the indicated lines. On the last page there was one that said Acknowledgement and acceptance of appendix A.
“What is appendix A?” I asked, my pen hovering above the line.
Paul produced another stack of papers and smoothed them out on the table. Through legal jargon thicker than three-day old grease, I deciphered the basics: I would not tell Eve who her biological parents were. I would not interfere with Paul and Margaret’s parenting. I would not visit her unsupervised until they deemed it. I would make no effort to contact her without their permission. I would not remove her from their custody. I would make no effort to regain custody, and would not challenge their parental rights in any way, shape or form.
I would give them my daughter and pretend I was just her aunt.
I would have no contact with her whatsoever until she was one year old.
“We still want her to know you; we just want things to get settled, first.” Margaret’s voice trailed off, as weak as her reasoning.
I could barely feel my hand as I scratched my name onto the line.
Paul snapped the papers away and cheerfully vanished them into his coat. He looked like he might start whistling, until I turned my stony gaze on him. His hands dropped to his sides immediately. “I’ll… see that you get your copies,” he said lamely.
“I just want you all to know that I understand that you were right.” I looked each one of them in the eye as I said it. “I know this is what will be best for Evie—for Genevra.” I nearly choked on the word.
“But I want you to know I will never, ever forgive any of you for this.”
Slowly, the four of them filed out. I watched them leave, unsure if the hard thing in my chest was grief, anger, or indifference.
It wasn’t until after they were gone that I saw the tall, red-haired man waiting in the hallway. At first, I thought it was Connor—but no. This man was more slender, not quite so tall, though he still would have done damage on a basketball team.
But his eyes were green, and while I’d never describe him as a cherub or a choirboy, he did have the look of one—one that had been carved in stone and brought to life. There was something harder about his eyes, something I couldn’t define.
I suppose he would have been intimidating, had I been able to feel anything at all. But it was like I’d taken an epidural straight to the heart. I couldn’t tell if I was feeling everything, or nothing.
“That was tough,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
His voice softened slightly. “Just so you know, I understand what it’s like to make a choice like that. To cut your heart open for the greater good.”
“Do you?” I challenged. I looked away quickly. When I looked into his eyes, I saw Connor, and the hard thing became more closely akin to grief, devastation, and despair.
“Yes.” He put his hands in his pockets, and just stood there for several moments of silence.
“You’re related to him.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want? If you’re here, then why isn’t he?” It came out as an accusation, and I didn’t try to pull it back.
He raised an eyebrow. “Because he doesn’t know.”
“But you do.”
“It’s my job to know.”
From the pocket of his pinstriped suit he produced a business card. Thick, textured. There were only two lines of embossed text: Ian Mulhaney followed by a phone number.
“This isn’t a real phone number,” I said, confusion breaking through the wall. There was no area code, and there weren’t enough digits.
“It is. If you dial it, I’ll come. I just wanted you to know that if you ever need help, we’ll come. We’ll be looking out for her, too.”
“Is that so.” I clenched the card in my fist, balling it like so much garbage.
“Evie, and you, are both Adders now, whether you take the name or not. That means something.”
“What are you, the mob?”
“Not as such,” he said with a little grin. He tipped his hat to me and strode out the door before I could ask who the mysterious “we” was.
***
I went home a few days later. I tried to study. I packed, but slowly. I sifted through the detritus of seventeen years of wasted time.
I pulled Connor’s coat from the back of my closet and tried to pull the last fragments of his scent from the collar, but it had been covered up with Mama’s laundry detergent and my shampoo. I put it in the charity box with my old plush toys, but I put the wallet in a box with the crocheted rabbit and shoved it under my bed to be retrieved later. The rest of the things I had made from the ugly clown-barf yarn I put in the garbage, just like the promise I had made to Eve.
My diploma arrived in the mail at the end of September. I’d barely passed, but I’d barely studied at all in July and August. It didn’t matter; I had the certificate.
Mama and Papi went to see Evie every weekend, to “help her get settled,” they said. Mama tried to show me pictures one night, but it only took one look of the sight of my daughter in my traitor brother’s arms to bring back all of the rage I had felt at the hospital. I tore his face out of a picture and put what was left in the box with the rabbit and the wallet.
On 11 November, exactly one year after it all began, I finally took the badge I had held like a talisman and put it into the box, too.
6 December was a cold, windy, and miserable birthday. Mike came back from his apartment near the academy, and helped me load what was left of my life into the back of his Toyota. Mama and Papi stood inside the screen door and watched us drive away. They didn’t wave, and neither did I.
My first apartment in Montreal was an absolute shithole. I shared it with three other girls and a whole colony of roaches. I unpacked the boxes, hung my clothes in the closet, and spread out university pamphlets and applications on my desk.
I only put two things on my corkboard: A torn photograph, and a crumpled business card.
Everything you do is going to influence the little one—possibly for the rest of their life.
Whatever I had to do, I’d make sure she had the best one possible.