Another Piece of My Heart (22 page)

“Yeah. I forgot you’re a secret genius.”

“Not anymore.” I shrug. Which is true.

“So what are you thinking? English?” he continues.

“Ha. No. I mean, sometimes, but I’m really interested in art school.”

Michael nods, thinking. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I could see that. You were always really creative.”

There is another silence.

“So. That … Jenna. Is she your girlfriend?” There is a sneer in my voice that I hadn’t intended. “Is she nice?” I add quickly, in more of a normal voice, just so he doesn’t think I’m jealous or anything.

“We’re just … friends.”

“With benefits?”

He shrugs. “Is there any other kind of female friendship?”

“Uh, yeah.” I roll my eyes. “Actually there is.”

His face grows serious. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You know what, Em?”

My heart does a tiny sentimental flip when he calls me Em. It is so thoughtless, so natural, that I forget we haven’t spoken in years, and that we are supposed to ignore each other when we pass in the hallways.

“I fucking miss you.”

My heart turns over.

“But you’re just so fucking weird. I mean, you’re not, okay? I know you’re not
really
weird, but you don’t do yourself any favors by wearing all this black and these piercings and stuff. This whole emo goth thing just makes everyone want to avoid you, so no one knows the cool person you are.”

A million things run through my head, the first being to tell him to go screw himself, but as I open my mouth to shoot something back, something mean, something that will take the hurt of what he just said and give it right back to him, a lump rises, and from nowhere a sob comes out, and suddenly I am sobbing, and I am so embarrassed I want to die.

And I can’t stop.

Twenty-three

“Oh, Jesus, Em.” Michael sits up and comes to sit next to me. He doesn’t put his arm around me or anything, but he takes hold of my little finger, and he sits, just holding my finger as I cry, and after a while he stretches out his T-shirt and holds it out, and I look down at it confused, hiccuping, and he tells me to blow my nose, which I do.

Which, by the way, is really gross, but he just lets it fall and we sit there as my hiccuping becomes slower and the jagged intakes of breath become less, then I am just slumped, exhausted.

“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I did not mean to upset you like that. I never should have said you’re weird. You’re not weird, okay? I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s fine. I mean, that’s not why I was crying.”

“Oh. Okay.”

And I want him to ask me why I’m crying so I can tell him, even though I don’t really know, other than I am overwhelmed, and scared, and as much as I want Bean, I know my life is never going to be the same again, and honestly, I can’t even think about school right now because my future has never looked so uncertain or terrifying.

I shake my head in disbelief. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I was crying?”

“Do you want me to?” he says carefully, dipping his head and looking up at me nervously.

“Jeez, Michael. You’re still weird, too. You may be this big handsome jock with muscles and golden skin, but I know better. You’re still the weird geeky kid. I bet you still have all those
Star Trek
pins you bought on eBay.”

“Totally!” He feigns shock. “They are my most prized possessions.” And then he grins. “You said I was handsome!”

“Oh, shut up. I bet Jenna doesn’t know about your secret Trekiness.”

“She wouldn’t understand. So why were you crying?”

*   *   *

I think about making this some big dramatic moment, but it doesn’t feel dramatic as I pull my cardigan tightly over my stomach to show off my bump, Michael takes a sharp intake of breath, and when I look up, I see he knows.

“That stinks,” he says. “And it’s kind of awesome, too.”

“I know!” I breathe. “That’s exactly it, right? It stinks, and it terrifies me, and I can’t believe I’m having a baby, and then I can’t believe I have a life growing inside me, and I’m going to be a mom!”

Michael is staring at my stomach.

“You want to touch it?” I ask tentatively.

“Can I?”

I take his hand and lay it on my belly, keeping my hand on top of his, and wouldn’t you know it, at that moment, the Bean takes a lazy tumble, like a slow somersault, and both of us not only feel it, but you can see my stomach move, a big wave of movement from left to right.

“She’s rocking,” I say.

“And rolling,” he says, and he is as awed and overcome as I am, and the moment is swiftly broken as his phone starts buzzing. He picks it up, frowning, then turns it off, chucking it to the other side of the tree house.

“Jenna?”

“Yeah. Wondering where I am.”

“Do you have to go?” I look away, so he doesn’t see how very much I want him to stay, how very much I need him to stay.

“No. I don’t,” he says, and this time when he lies back and fires questions at me, I don’t ask him to pull his T-shirt down, and I answer everything, and we move through all the questions about the pregnancy, and what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to tell my parents that no, actually, I’m not going to be putting my child up for adoption as they believe they can convince me to do but am going to raise her myself.

“Thank God.” Michael exhales loudly. “You can’t give your baby away. No fucking way. That kid will grow up knowing he wasn’t wanted from the get-go, and you never get over rejection like that.”

“It’s a ‘she,’” I say quietly, knowing Michael is talking about himself.

“She. He. Whatever. The point being you are totally doing the right thing, keeping this baby, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”

I nod once, to show that I understand, I get it, I know where this is coming from, then we move on to school, friends, life, and what the hell we are all going to grow up to be.

And the reason I don’t ask Michael to pull his T-shirt down after it has ridden up yet again is not because I am ogling his stomach, but because it’s no longer relevant. For while he may now be this big bronzed god at the high school, his handsome features morph during the time I am there, and when I look at him, all I see is my gawky, geeky, former best friend.

“We should do this more often,” I say after dusk has fallen, and we both climb down from the tree house, a good four hours having passed. “This was just like the old days.”

“I’m off to school in a couple of days,” he says. “And I probably won’t be back until Thanksgiving.”

“Right.” The disappointment floods my voice. Of course he’s going away. I was so caught up in my pleasure at rediscovering our friendship, I had forgotten. Everyone’s going away. Except me.

“I’ll write, Em,” he says. “Swear.”

“Thumb swear?” which was this stupid thing we did as kids when we decided pinkie swears were just too girly.

“Thumb swear.” He grins, holding out his thumb and pressing it hard against mine.

I don’t know how to say good-bye. We stand there, and he wishes me luck, and then he pulls me in for a tight hug, except it isn’t that tight because my stomach is in the way, and he says, “You better call it Michael if it’s a boy.”

“It’s not a boy,” I say.

“Michaela then,” he says, and the next thing you know, he’s let me go and run off to the house with just a final wave, and I walk back home feeling something I haven’t felt in years.

Happy.

Twenty-four

Andi is the one trying to be upbeat, trying to pretend that there is something fun about this process: meeting the couple she had picked out online, a couple who lives six hours away, who have flown in to try to persuade Emily that she should pick them; that they, above all others, would be the perfect people to give her baby a home she cannot give it.

It has been the hardest thing she has yet had to do, but Ethan has left her with little choice. Each time she looks at a prospective adoptive mother, she sees herself. Each time she reads about them, she is reading about herself.

Adeline and Greg Blackman have been married for seven years. He is a real estate developer, she is a professional musician—a violinist—which is, she writes, the perfect job for a mother because she can accept or decline engagements at will.

They have many pictures on the adoption agency’s website. Adeline is Asian, pretty, and petite, and Greg tall, with kind eyes. They look like they would be good parents. They have spent too many years and too much money doing IVF treatments before making the final decision to adopt.

Adeline has an older brother, and Greg is from a family of seven children. They had always dreamed of a large family but have now realized that they would be equally blessed to have even one child.

They like reading, and animals—a chocolate Lab called Mudston features in several of the pictures—and are both avid cooks. They are blessed to have a large house, with two acres, in a neighborhood where there are lots of children. The inference, Andi couldn’t help but feel, is that they can give this poor, blue-collar, possibly child of an alcoholic a home and a life that it would not otherwise have had.

Well, Andi thought. They were perhaps right about only one thing, although Emily seems to have stayed away from the alcohol.

People like us, Andi kept thinking, do not give babies away. People like us, like Adeline, forty-one, and Greg, forty-six, and Andi, forty-two, and Ethan, forty-six, give gorgeous homes to babies that need them.

We feed them organic gourmet baby food that we steam and purée ourselves, scooping it into ice-cube trays for easy access later. We clothe them in the
cutest outfits ever
from Baby Gap, and enroll them in Gymboree classes before they can even walk.

We decorate their nurseries with the finest furnishings money can buy, the plushest toys, the heaviest curtains to ensure not a crack of light filters through the windows when our beloved darlings go down for a nap in the middle of a sunlit day.

We are the people who raise the babies that no one wants. We are the people who, if we are unlucky enough to have a seventeen-year-old daughter who becomes pregnant, step in as the grandparents du jour and raise the child as our own.

*   *   *

Adeline and Greg; Andi and Ethan. They are almost interchangeable. And the pain of getting to know them, realizing how alike they are, is almost unbearable for Andi.

This should be Ethan and her, raising this child. In years past, it
could
have been Ethan and her, looking for a baby. If Ethan had agreed to adoption, this
would
have been Ethan and her.

She thought she was okay with his decision, had talked herself into believing she can see things from his point of view: they already have two healthy children; he doesn’t want to be in his sixties with a child graduating from high school; think of how they treasure their “kidless” weekends, how awful it would be to give them up; that was why he was so against the idea of more kids.

Andi thought she had bought it, despite her heart’s sinking every time a period arrives, but since Emily’s pregnancy, since Ethan refused to back down on giving away the baby, she has found herself simmering with a resentment so strong, it is the reason she pretends to be asleep in the mornings, the reason she has found herself struggling even to look at the man who was once the center of her world.

Twenty-five

So Andi picked a diner on the outskirts of Oakland, which is pretty funny. This couple probably thinks they’re rescuing some crack baby from the rough badlands of Oakland rather than the suburban glory—and yes, I am being sarcastic here—of Mill Valley.

No one talks on the ride over. I’m used to not talking, but I am so not used to my dad and Andi sitting in silence. Usually they’re yammering away about something, but these days they’re barely speaking. It was pretty awkward.

My dad asked me if I felt okay, and I just shrugged. What am I supposed to say? I am so not interested although, for once, Andi didn’t push it. A few days ago, when she decided we should meet this couple, she asked me once if I wanted to see their profile on the computer, and I said no, thinking she’d start trying to persuade me, but she just shrugged and turned away.

Which was fine. It’s not like there’s any point in me seeing who these people are. They have no idea I’m keeping Bean, and I’m not telling them until the last minute. I know that if I say anything before, they’ll do everything they can to take her away, so if I have to, if it comes down to it, I’ll just refuse to sign the papers in the hospital.

Let them try to stop me bringing Bean home then.

Hey, I’ve watched Lifetime, I’ve seen those movies; I know how it’s all going to go down. The only bit I haven’t figured out yet is what we’re going to do after Bean is born, but it’s going to be fine. My dad will definitely take care of us until I find a job, even if Andi bitches and moans.

What’s he going to do, throw his daughter and granddaughter out on the street? I don’t think so.

Besides, Andi’s not really bitching and moaning anymore. She’s barely speaking to my dad, but she’s pretty nice to me, and the one thing I’m sure of is that she’ll back me in keeping the baby.

Oh, my God, do you think I don’t see Andi’s eyes every time she sees a baby? If someone pushes a stroller past us on the street, Andi has to stop them and coo over the baby and ask all kinds of questions. I used to think it was ridiculous, except the other day I was in town and I swear, I wanted to look in every stroller that passed me.

Andi loves babies, and I know she always wanted one. This may not be hers, but she can babysit her anytime I’m busy. Seriously. Anytime.

*   *   *

My dad puts on his big fake smile as we push open the door of the diner, and I spot them as soon as we walk in. They look really nice. They have nervous smiles, and they do a half wave, and Mary, this mousy woman from the adoption agency, is with them, and suddenly I feel really bad that they think they’re about to get a baby when they’re not, and I really wish I could turn around and walk away, quickly, before this goes any further.