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  “Will it hurt?” the high school girl asks.

  “No,” the twenty-year-old says.

  Why not, Addie thinks. Don’t we deserve at least a little pain?

  In the procedure room, she lies on a table with her feet in stirrups and stares at the chipped polish on her toenails. Mystic Mauve, the color she wore to California to tell Roland.

  “Don’t move,” the doctor says. “I can’t do this if you move.”

  She’s shivering; she can’t help it. She’s cold. Her gown is so thin. She twists her head to find the nurse. “Can I please have a blanket?” she asks. “A sheet, anything?”

  “Right back,” the nurse says, and disappears out of the room in her silent white shoes, leaving Addie alone with the doctor. Addie tries not to look at him, at his red-rimmed eyes constantly blinking, or the acne scars on his face. She pictures him as a teenager—unpopular, afraid of girls, the shy boy at the dance. Even now, he doesn’t make small talk, no “What kind of work do you do?” or “Have you always lived in North Carolina?” or “How about this weather?” Nothing to take her mind off what he’s doing. His white coat has a dark fleck on the pocket. Addie tries not to look.

  She tries not to look at the tube he is holding.

  The sun was brighter that day than she had ever seen it. Everything shone. They sat on Roland’s roof and Roland put his arm around her and he was warm, he made her warm, and she wanted to believe, she almost did, that warm could be enough.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and rubbed his hand up and down her back. “It’ll be okay.”

  He was kind. He didn’t say anything wrong. The problem wasn’t what he said, but what he left out. Things Addie thought he might say, even if they weren’t true, he didn’t. He didn’t say love. He didn’t say stay. Or keep.

  “Keep your feet in the stirrups,” the doctor says, blinking. “Keep your knees apart. Relax, please.”

  Finally the nurse comes back with a flannel sheet. She drapes it over Addie, tucks it around her bare arms as if she were the child. “There,” she says. “Better?”

  Mistake

  So much they didn’t tell her.

  They told her to expect spotting, wear pads, call if the bleeding got heavy. They told her to expect cramping. Take ibuprofen, not aspirin. Use a hot water bottle.

  They didn’t tell her her breasts would continue to swell and ache and leak.

  They didn’t tell her about the insatiable hunger, the strange cravings. Sharp cheddar cheese. Egg salad sandwiches—plain, no lettuce—on untoasted white bread. Peanut M&Ms. She eats them by the jumbo bag until she is sick.

  She keeps gaining weight. More than can be explained by the M&Ms.

  They didn’t tell her she would cry over everything, every song on the radio, every line in every book, every movie. She goes to matinees, romantic comedies—Say Anything, See You in the Morning—and comes out of the dark theater with her face puffy and wet, her eyes red. People waiting to buy tickets stare at her, puzzled—are we in the right line?

  It’s hormones, she thinks. Hormones and grief. Yes, grief—she has had a loss. That she chose it makes it no less a loss.

  They didn’t warn her about the nightmares. Every night, a vivid, lifelike dream in which it falls to her to rescue some helpless creature from sure death. A kitten stalked by lions. A nest of robin’s eggs invaded by a snake. A child on a banana-seat bicycle pedaling into the path of an oncoming train. Impossible situations, beyond her; even in her sleep she knows it. Somehow she always wakes up a split second before the catastrophe, always in a cold sweat.

  This, she has always imagined, is how it must feel to be a mother. Terrifying. Numbingly exhausting. She is so tired her whole body hurts but she is afraid to sleep, afraid of what may happen to the next poor dream-creature entrusted to her.

  Finally she makes an appointment with her doctor.

  “Sounds like you’re pregnant,” says the nurse who takes her blood pressure and charts her symptoms. The nurse has round brown perpetually stunned eyes.

  “Impossible,” Addie says. She had not intended to confess her abortion to anyone, even her doctor. Certainly not to this Bambi-eyed nurse.

  “Have you had a period since?” the nurse asks.

  “No, but—” Even as she protests, she knows the nurse is right. Her body knows.

  The test confirms it. The doctor doesn’t try to explain how this could have happened. She refers Addie to an obstetrician; Addie insists on a woman. No more men, not after the pockmarked clinic doctor who botched her abortion. She would like to sue him, but for what? Unnecessary pregnancy? Wrongful life?

  The obstetrician is tall and grandmotherly—gray hair, a big rosy face, blue eyes so pale they seem full of light. There are hand-knit booties on the stirrups of her examining table.

  “You have an unusual uterus,” she tells Addie. She has a hint of a foreign accent—Scottish? “It tips at an odd angle. You have a blind spot where a baby can hide.”

  Which, she says, explains how the baby survived. It wasn’t the clinic doctor’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Sometimes abortions (“a-bar-shins”) fail. Just like sometimes birth control fails. Sometimes, against all odds, babies happen.

  “Your baby is perfectly fine. See?” On the sonogram screen, the baby lies in profile. The doctor traces the hands, heart, head, facial features.

  “It’s smiling,” Addie says.

  “Would you like to know the sex?”

  “The sex,” Addie says. Somehow this seems unfair—she didn’t know the sex before; why should she get to know now?

  “Some do, some don’t,” the doctor says. “There’s no right or wrong.”

  Still, she’s tired of surprises. “I guess so,” she says. “Sure.”

  The doctor smiles; her teeth are crooked but bright. She points out the baby’s privates in the shape of a small turtle (“tairtle”)—the shell of testicles, the tiny peeking-out penis-head. “A boy,” she says. “A healthy boy.”

  “Healthy.”

  “Yes. He wasn’t harmed, if that’s your worry. All it did, the procedure, was make a nice clean place for him to settle into. A perfect little nest. You have nothing to fret about.”

  Nothing, Addie thinks, except what do I do now?

  She tries telling Roland about the baby. Twice. Once in June, but his phone has been disconnected. She calls again in July and a woman answers.

  “Hello?” The woman’s voice is guarded, timid, like she’s been waiting for bad news. “Hello?”

  “Is Roland there?”

  “Can I say who’s calling?”

  Addie doesn’t ask the woman’s name; she doesn’t have to. Elle. Elle who forgot her blouse in Roland’s closet. Elle who has come to his rescue—again—with rent money. Elle: betrayed, humiliated, but still hanging on, wondering if she’s done the right thing moving back in.

  “Never mind,” Addie says. “Wrong number. My mistake.”

  Notice by Publication

  The Guilford County Department of Social Services is in an ugly brick building. The social worker assigned to Addie, a woman named Janet, has plain brown hair, washed-out skin, and tired eyes. They are starting the paperwork for the adoption. Addie is sitting in a wooden chair with wide flat arms, like a witness chair.

  “Your full name,” Janet says.

  “Adela Claire Lockwood.”

  On a file cabinet under Janet’s window is an African violet full of blue blossoms and fat, furry leaves, and next to it, a picture of two children—a boy and a girl—in a white frame. The children are plain like Janet. Obedient-looking, sitting still for the camera. They’ll be home from school by now, Addie imagines—it’s late afternoon. Waiting for their mother to finish up with her last client and come make them dinner. By the time Janet gets home they will have the table set.

  “Father’s name?”

  “My father?”

  “The child’s.”

  “Roland.” Addie stops. Is it really necessary to inv
olve him?

  “Last name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember or you never knew?”

  Roland would sign the papers, of course. But does she want to ask him? He will tell people. He’ll tell his friends. Golita. Elle. What if Elle says to him, “No, Roland, let me raise him?” Unlikely. But what if he tells his mother and his mother says, “No, let me raise him?”

  Maybe if he’d sent the money for the abortion himself. Or offered to come and be with her, even if he couldn’t afford to. Or called her afterwards, even though she told him not to.

  Maybe if there were no Elle.

  Maybe if his chart contained any Earth.

  “Never knew,” Addie says.

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Janet follows procedure. Using the bits and pieces Addie claims to remember (some of them true), she puts together a legal notice and publishes it in a small, cheap Los Angeles County newspaper. The notice says that a child was conceived on or about December 31, 1988 in Venice Beach. That “Roland, no last name given” is the child’s putative father. That the child is to be relinquished for adoption in North Carolina and that “the aforesaid Roland” has the right to claim paternity, which will entitle him to notice of any hearings involving the child. Otherwise his rights will be terminated.

  Maybe there are people who sit around drinking coffee and checking the local papers to make sure nobody’s having their baby. Addie doubts it. Anyway, she’s sure Roland is not one of them.

  Summer 1989

  Dear—

  What to call you? Almost-child? One who has taken root in me and won’t let go? One who might have been mine? Could still be, if I were brave enough?

  But I’m not. I can’t be the mother you deserve. I know this in the way other women know they’re meant to be mothers. I know from everything I have ever been or dreamed or wanted.

  You will not read this letter, which is the only reason I’m brave enough to write it. You will not know what you went through to get here. Already you are braver than I will ever be.

  I promise to take better care of us from now on. No more red M&Ms, even if the government says they’re safe. No more coffee or pink wine. No more coke, even if I knew where to get it (I suppose I could ask one of the late-night talkers in the bookstore where I work, but I don’t want that kind of intimacy with any of those people; I don’t want that kind of intimacy with anyone else ever again). No more cigarettes.

  You are resilient. (I would call you lucky but that would go too far.) My doctor says you are healthy, all your parts intact and in the right place.

  You are a secret I share only with my doctor. And with my boss, who wants to know why I’m getting so big and private and morose, why I can’t be around people.

  Dear creature who has taken up residence in me,

  If I were going to keep you I would be thinking of names. I would be shopping for hats and blankets and sleepers and onesies and tiny pull-on pants in the softest eggshell blue. I’d pick out a bassinet, a stroller, a changing table, a swing. I would be learning to install a car seat and administer CPR.

  This is what I do instead:

  During the day, when the store is closed to customers, when it’s just you and me, I read to you. Lately I’ve been reading from the new catalog I’m working on, Books About Books. No matter how much you’ve been kicking—you are a ferocious kicker—my voice settles you. “Entry number thirty. Aldis, Henry G. The Printed Book. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, nineteen forty-one, second edition, yellow cloth, one hundred forty-two pages. Slightly soiled and sunned, short tear at spine head, binding good, text very good. Douglas C. McMurtrie’s copy with his signature. Twenty-five dollars.”

  My boss, I’ll call him J.D., taught me about books. He taught me vocabulary, like “foxing” for the brown spots old books get, the same as old-age spots on people. He showed me worm trails—when a worm eats through a book it leaves a little path from one page to the next. He says you can sometimes find the body of the worm, but I never have.

  J.D. goes around in lumberjack shirts and has an odd, ripe smell, like turmeric. He’s always humming old songs, the Doors, Moody Blues. A refrigerator of a man, he hums without knowing he’s humming.

  All summer he has been taking care of me in his big, easy, pretend-not-to way. He’s going to the grocery store, it’s no trouble to pick up a few extra things, what do I need? He has to run errands, he can drive me to my appointments. I love riding in his van—an Econoline like the one your father drives, but silver, not blue. I love sitting up high, looking down on people in cars. I love FM radio, the thick lull of sleepy voices, like they’re speaking through water. The way my voice sounds to you, maybe.

  Sometimes on Sundays J.D. and I drive out to the country to a lake with a sandy beach. We don’t know anyone there. We go wading together, like a little family. I let J.D. touch my belly and you do your stunts. He says you feel fluttery, like a trapped bird. Not just any bird, I say. One with strong wings. A crow or a raven.

  Sometimes I wish I loved J.D. I wish I could ever love the right person.

  Dear creature who gives me heartburn and presses on my bladder and won’t let me sleep on my side,

  Why do I write you letters you will never read? Because I want a record of this time with you. Because soon I will have nothing else to show for it. Once upon a time, I was pregnant. A baby grew in me. I read to him. Once upon a time, I was a mother.

  Dear baby,

  You love the Talking Heads song about staying up late. I dance and you dance inside me. What a change of pace, you must be thinking, from the slow, sad songs I usually make myself miserable with. Judee Sill, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. You like them too, by the way, especially Carole King.

  I wonder how much music you absorb. Years from now, when you hear “So Far Away,” will it spark some memory of this time? It’s a memorable song, mostly because of the bass line, which has in it every bit of unrootedness and longing there ever was.

  Dear baby,

  The doctor who will deliver you is tall and confident, with strong hands that never sweat. Her hands make me feel safe. I noticed them when we first met, when she took out her magic paper disk and spun it to tell me when you would arrive—September 23. She has practical fingernails, trimmed short and polished with clear lacquer. She wears a simple silver wedding band on her left hand and a mother’s ring on her right, with five different-colored stones. I want to ask about her children. Where are they? I want to ask. Do you miss them?

  I’m thinking of my own mother, sitting at home, lonesome for her children (I haven’t visited all summer; I can’t, not in the shape I’m in), uselessly dreaming of grandchildren. I sometimes think the hardest part of giving you up will be knowing that I am taking you away from her.

  Dear baby,

  There are days when the thought of bringing you into the world so that you can be someone else’s child is almost too much. I’m like some soul-flattened character in a Kafka story or one of those absurdist plays I used to love.

  People talk about the kind of commitment it takes to be a mother. No one talks about how hard it is to hold onto the decision not to be a mother when there’s a baby growing in you.

  My doctor has been careful not to weigh in on my decision. She only tests and measures and prescribes vitamins and tries to keep us healthy.

  J.D. tells me I’m doing a beautiful thing and that I should not lose sight of that. I wish I could believe him. Then I could write you letters filled with platitudes about how everything will work out for the best, instead of letters I can never let you read.

  II.

  Born

  The Infant Survivor

  September 14, 1989. Parkertown on a Friday evening. Rows of wooden houses, windows squinting like drunks in the late sun. Women in dresses propped in open doorways. Men inside laughing, glass jars clanking. Every now and then a whiff of reefer. Children and dogs running circles
in dirt yards. Tonight the children will stay up late while the grownups get high, because it’s the weekend, no school tomorrow.

  This is the rundown, furniture-mill part of Carswell, home to bootleggers and drug dealers. It has its own history: the part of town that burned in the Fourth of July fire of 1910. The mill had let out early for the holiday, and in the excitement somebody forgot the oily rags in the finish room. That night, after the barbecue and watermelon and sack races, after the gospel band and the fireworks, everybody went to bed so full and tired and happy and slept so hard that no one heard the explosion, or if they did, they thought it was just more fireworks. Flames shot out the roof of the finish room, fanned across the mill, and rolled through Parkertown—all the little wood shacks, the yards full of trash, the sleeping families. Twenty-five houses burned to the ground and everyone in them died except one child, a boy, Bobo Hairston, who was flung out a window and into a neighbor’s yard, where he landed in a patch of soft dirt the neighbor had shoveled up for a garden that never got planted.

  A miracle, the firemen called him. The miraculous infant survivor.

  Bobo was sent away to the colored orphanage, grew up, married a girl from the home, and brought her back to Carswell to start a family. He got a job at the Fifty-Fifty on Cotton Grove Road where he bagged and delivered groceries until the store closed in 1972.

  Bobo’s wife is dead now, and he is nearly blind, but whenever anyone asks, “How you doing, Bobo,” he still says what he’s always said. “Lucky to be here.” People ask just to hear him say it, like putting quarters in a jukebox.

  The spot where Bobo landed is now covered with a house—small, weather-beaten, rough as a scab. There are houses where all the old houses burned. They look like the old ones used to. Like kindling.

  Music wafts out of open doorways. Sultry voices—Luther Vandross, Anita Baker. In one doorway a crusty-faced boy huddles against his mother and stares wide-eyed at the street, where a white woman is passing by—a thin, tight-lipped, very white woman. She keeps to the middle of the street, but the street is narrow and the yard so shallow the boy could count the woman’s eyelashes if he could count. She walks like somebody in a parade, stiff, stamping her feet. She’s carrying a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken in both hands. Her hair is twisted in a bun, black hair with a thick spiral of silver. She is such a surprise the dogs forget to bark; the dogs don’t even go after the smell of chicken. The little boy yanks on his mother’s skirt. “What you want,” his mother says, smacking his hand. He points at the white woman’s hair. “Swirly,” he says.