Girls in Trouble: A Novel Read online

  Eva spoke first. “How nice to see you again,” Eva said politely. George put his hand out and Jack shook it stiffly. “Sara’s fast asleep,” George said quietly.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Eva said. Abby lifted an arm toward the baby, then lowered it.

  “Doesn’t Sara look wonderful?” Eva prompted.

  “She’s a lovely young girl who’s been through a lot,” Abby said quietly.

  “This never should have happened,” Jack said.

  “But it did,” Eva said quietly. “And now we’re making something good from it.”

  Sara felt as if she were outside her body, suspended above all of them. She felt exhausted, her lids began to droop. All she wanted to do was sleep again. Her eyes shut.

  “She’s still sleeping,” Jack said, astonished, as if he couldn’t fathom how Sara could sleep at a time like this. Sara, though, knew better. Put all of them in a room, and the smartest thing to do was remove herself from the scene, to keep her eyes shut and slow her breathing. She breathed. In and out. Deep as a trance. And then she couldn’t have moved even if she had wanted, which she didn’t.

  “Well, delivery isn’t easy,” Eva said.

  “Nothing’s easy when you’re sixteen,” Abby said. The baby started to cry. As if she knows something is up, Sara thought, and then the baby abruptly stopped.

  “Well,” Eva said. There was silence. “Here. Would you like to hold her, Abby?”

  Sara tried to open her eyes and failed. Her heart hammered. Was Abby holding Anne?

  “We know we don’t have to tell you that you and Jack are, of course, welcome to visit the baby, too. Anytime you like,” Eva said. The silence thickened.

  “Yes, we all share—” George started to say.

  “Share what? This tragedy?” Abby interrupted. “Why do you have to get so close? How can that be good for any of you, especially for a child?”

  “This way’s more beneficial for everyone involved. No secrets. Everything out in the open just the way it should be,” George said. “It’s better for the baby.”

  “Which baby? Sara or Anne?” Jack said.

  “Sara’s a sixteen-year-old girl who should be allowed to forget,” Abby said. Sara heard rustling. Abby must be pacing, the way she always did when she was annoyed. And if she was pacing, then she wasn’t holding the baby, and if she wasn’t, who was?

  “Oh, Abby,” Eva said. “How could she forget? And why would you want her to?”

  There was a strange, edgy quiet. And then Jack said, “Maybe we should just let Sara sleep, instead of talking in here.”

  “Here, I’ll take her, Jack,” Eva said. “I’ll bring Anne back to the nursery.

  Her father had held the baby, Sara thought, amazed. He never even talked about it, not the whole time Sara was pregnant. Sara heard footsteps, the dull whine of the bassinet wheels on the floor. It all grew fainter. The room grew completely silent. Everyone had left, she thought. And then she started to open her eyes, and she saw her parents holding each other in the center of the room, pressed together like a seam. Neither one of them saw her wake. And then she heard Abby snuffling, and when her parents broke apart, she saw they both were crying.

  “Come on,” Jack said, putting his arm about Abby. He dug out a handkerchief and daubed Abby’s eyes with it, and then his own.

  “I shouldn’t have held her,” Abby whispered. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Come on. I’ll get you some tea, you’ll feel better.”

  And then the two of them were gone.

  Sara half-dreamed on her bed. Imagine. Her parents had held Anne. They had held the baby and they were determined not to do it again. Fresh start, Abby had said. That was Abby’s favorite set of words, Sara thought. Like a cooking recipe. Life as a cake mix you hoped might be delicious and to ensure it you just had to be extra careful about the ingredients you chose. As soon as Abby had known Sara was pregnant, that it was too late to abort, Abby had told Sara that it was, of course, impossible for her to keep the baby. Impossible for them to adopt and raise it as their own because how could Sara get a clean start then? Instead, she found Sara the adoption agency in Newton, the adoption lawyer who insisted Sara call her Margaret. “Thank God we live in modern times,” Abby had told her. She sat down beside Sara. “When I was growing up, there was a home for wayward girls right in my town,” Abby said. “The Girls in Trouble House we called it, even though its name was just St. Luke’s. It was terrible. Just terrible. The stories we heard! There was such a stigma! You went to a place like that and your life was over and everyone knew it. The girls couldn’t even keep their real names when they were there, just first names, because they didn’t want to encourage friendships. They couldn’t go outside the grounds. It was a relief when they closed the place down, put a Star Market there instead.”

  “Did you ever see the girls?” Sara asked.

  Abby sighed. “I saw them standing at the gates sometimes, like they were prisoners. Asking for cigarettes. Asking us to call their boyfriends for them.”

  “Did you?”

  Abby straightened up. “Of course I didn’t.” She rubbed at her temples and then studied Sara. “You’re lucky you don’t show. I didn’t either until nearly my eighth month. And if, God forbid, you do start to pop, the school can’t make you leave. Not the way they used to.”

  “Leave—I can’t leave—” Sara tightened. What if Danny came back? How would he find her if she was at another school?

  “Look,” Abby said. “This is a private matter. No one’s business but ours. With baggy clothes, you can finish the school year. You can stay inside this summer until the baby’s due. Then, fall comes, you’ll be back in school with no one the wiser.”

  Abby and Jack didn’t even want Sara to know who was taking the baby, but how could she do that? As terrifying as it was to contemplate having a baby, giving it away was like giving away a part of Danny. She had to have some contact, some connection, or she’d be undone. “Closed adoption,” Abby suggested, and then, to Abby’s annoyance, Margaret had presented open adoption. “As much contact as both you and the adoptive parents want,” Margaret said. Sara felt the air-conditioning cooling her skin, and she sat up straighter. “Yes. That,” she said.

  Margaret warned them open adoption was enforceable only in Oregon. “You’ll want an agreement with everything spelled out,” she said, but Sara kept thinking of that corny Joni Mitchell song her mother sometimes sang about not needing any piece of paper.

  “We’ll all talk about it,” Jack said, but once they got outside the office, all he said was that he thought it was a bad idea. “It’s what I want,” Sara said, stubborn. Her father shook his head. “You don’t know what you want. You’re too young to know,” he said.

  Late at night, while she lay in bed, Sara heard them talking, their voices rising and falling like crashing waves. “They said it’s not really that open,” Abby said. “Contact almost always diminishes. People get on with their lives. They make new lives.”

  “Are we doing the right thing?” Jack asked, and then there was silence again.

  Abby had gone to the agency with Sara and looked through the photo albums of couples wanting her baby, read the ridiculous letters that all seemed the same. “Dear birth mother, we know how brave a sacrifice you are making.”The handwriting spiked and curlicued, the paper always soft blue or yellow. “We want you to know we will love your baby the same way you would.” The words were insinuating. As though they knew something about her. The photographs were worse. Bland-faced couples staring out at her. “Here we are at the beach, but we love the city, too!” One couple posed with two big dogs on their bed. “Every child needs a dog or two! This is Scruffy! He loves kids!” All those 800 numbers so you couldn’t know where they were calling from, or how they might lie to you, like a childhood taunt: Nyah nyah, I can see you but you can’t see me.

  She wouldn’t let her parents be around her when she called the 800 numbers, though they offered. “We can help y
ou,” Abby said. “I know just the questions you should ask.” But Sara shook her head. If she were going to give something up, if she were going to ruin her life, then she wanted to ruin it all on her own. She sat upstairs, her heart racing, the door firmly closed. She spoke to the women, who cracked bad jokes, who were eager to please, who said her name in every sentence, over and over like an incantation.

  And then one day, Sara was having a conversation with a woman in Maine, when the woman blurted, “Do you knowT who the father is, Sara? Do you realize why it’s important to know?” And then Sara heard her sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t really want to denigrate you—” The woman cleared her throat. “I mean I don’t intend that remark in a bad way.”

  “In a pejorative way, do you mean?” Sara asked.

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Whoops.”

  “I know what denigrate means. I’m an honor student.”

  “Of course you are!” The woman laughed politely.

  “And I know who the father is.”

  “All I wanted to know!” The woman sighed, relieved, but Sara never called her back.

  The adoptive couples skirted around her, acting like she was white trash or stupid, their voices fake and bright as tinsel. Chatting, they told her they were having fried chicken or McDonald’s, that it was Shake ‘n Bake night again, even as she heard a male voice in the background whisper, “Where’s the creme fraiche?” They lied outright, trying to turn themselves into what they thought she wanted. “Are you religious?” Sara asked. Not that she cared, but she just wanted to know. “We’re . . . spiritual,” said one woman.

  “They’re lying to me,” Sara said to the agency, amazed, but Margaret waved her away. “Well, you have to realize, some of these people are yearning so hard for a baby, they let their common sense fly out the window. You can’t hold it against them. You let us find out the truth,” Margaret told her. “You concentrate on connecting to someone.”

  “Please call back anytime,” the callers all said, and Sara never did.

  “No one yet?” the agency asked Sara.

  “When are you going to make a decision?” Abby prodded. She wanted Sara to choose a family who lived in Texas, who had a big dog and who said they’d be happy to send pictures, but just for a few years. “What’s wrong with these people?” Jack said, pointing to an album from a family who were moving to Spain.

  And then, like an afterthought, the agency had sent over George and Eva’s scrapbook. “I don’t know if this is right for you—” Margaret said. “But it’s worth a shot, right?” Abby hadn’t liked George and Eva the moment she saw their scrapbook. “They look like aging hippies,” she said, pointing to Eva’s filmy long dress, George’s cowboy boots. She shook her head at the picture of Eva with her preschool class, all of them, especially Eva, covered in poster paints. Abby said they were too old—in their forties, for God’s sake. Forty-three! Abby was forty-three and you didn’t see her talking about having a baby! Plus, they were too close, just twenty minutes away. “This isn’t a good idea,” Jack said.

  But Sara liked the way they looked. Real. Natural. Like they wouldn’t snow her. She liked the letter, which was the only one that didn’t start out “Dear birth mother,” but instead just said, “Hello,” as if it were going to be the start of a conversation instead of an advertising pitch. She dialed Eva and George’s number, and as soon as she said her name, Eva said, “Oh, sweetie,” in a voice so rich with feeling, that Sara couldn’t have hung up even if she wanted to. Sara spoke to Eva for twenty minutes and the whole time Eva didn’t ask her about the doctor, about the father, or about anything other than what movies and books Sara liked, and then Eva had gotten quiet. “This is so hard for both of us, isn’t it?” Eva said. “How can either one of us know what the right thing to do is?”

  “You can ask me anything,” Sara said. “But only if I can do the same.”

  “Deal,” said Eva.

  Oh, how she had loved talking to Eva. She called her the next day to see if she still felt as relaxed talking to her, and she had. She called her the day after.

  And she wrote her, too. Spilling out how she felt about being pregnant, how she felt about her parents, how she worried about the future. I hope this is okay I’m telling you all this, she said. I’m just a little scared. It helps to write, like getting it in print gives it less power. Almost immediately after she sent her letters off, she got a response, always from both Eva and George, always soothing and happy, and always with a photograph of the two of them, or the yard, or the special room in the house that might be the baby’s.

  Sara was walking home from school one day when she saw a young mother trying to hoist up a bag of groceries in one arm and her baby in the other. The woman looked at Sara helplessly. “Please, can you help me?” she said. As soon as Sara lifted up the baby, something sharp nudged against her ribs, from inside, and she tightened her grip.

  “Thank you, thank you,” the woman said profusely. By the time Sara got home, she was in tears. She walked into the house, her face streaming, and there was Abby. “Honey, what happened!” Abby cried, alarmed. She sat Sara down, she put one arm about her.

  “A baby,” Sara choked. “I held a baby.”

  Abby stiffened. “That’s just your hormones talking,” she said, rubbing Sara’s back. “When you’re pregnant, things upset you more. You should have seen me when I was carrying you. Detergent commercials made me weep. Another month, you’ll feel better.”

  “What if I don’t?” Sara whispered, but Abby shook her head.

  “Come on now. Go wash your face and I promise things will look brighter. Maybe after dinner we can all go out to a movie. A comedy. How about that?”

  But Sara hadn’t gone to the bathroom. She heard the noisy drone of the vacuum. She went to her room, bringing the phone in with her, shutting the door, and she called Eva, bursting into tears as soon as she heard Eva’s voice. It horrified her. She hadn’t even met Eva in person and here she was crying! “I held a baby today,” she said.

  “Oh, how hard for you!” Eva said. “I’m so sorry!” Eva’s voice was a soft blanket.

  “Am I doing the right thing?”

  As soon as she said that, she thought, oh God, how could she ask such a thing of Eva? Of course Eva would tell her she was, because as her parents kept telling her, what they wanted most was Sara’s baby, that that was the only reason they were being nice to her.

  “What do you think?” Eva said gently. “What feels right for you and for your baby?”

  Your baby. Her parents never called it “your baby.” Never called it anything at all.

  “I don’t know,” Sara cried.

  Eva sat listening to Sara, and then Sara heard George’s voice, low and grave and full of concern. “Tell her I’m here for her, too,” he said, and Sara felt a new flush of warmth.

  Eva didn’t sugarcoat, she didn’t make her situation out to be perfect. “The baby won’t have a lot of relatives, and George’s father is pretty old and set in his ways and not in the best of health,” she admitted. “But we have good friends, and they love children.”

  “Well, I can tell you’ll be doting,” Sara said, and as soon as she said it, she felt calmer, as if all her tears had been wrung out of her. “I feel better now,” she said.

  “I think it’s time we all met,” Eva said.

  “You really want to meet them?” Abby had asked Sara. “You think that’s wise?”

  “I have to meet them.”

  “Well, you can’t go over there alone,” Jack had insisted. “We’ll all go.”

  They had all trooped over, Abby in her best black dress, Jack in a suit and tie, Sara in her blue pregnancy dress. As soon as Sara had seen the house, warm and friendly, and as soon as she’d seen George and Eva, holding hands, Eva in bare feet, George in a worn denim shirt and jeans, something slowly had begun to uncurl inside of her. “Oh Lord,” Abby said under her breath.

  Abby was stiff and silent, and Jack kept looking down at his
shoes, but Eva was so excited, her face shone. She kept laughing, kept grabbing for George’s hand. “I’ll make herbal tea,” George offered, jumping up.

  “Coffee?” Jack said. “With plenty of caffeine and sugar? We don’t really drink tea.”

  But what had really turned her parents against George and Eva was when they talked about making the adoption completely open. “There’s no reason Sara can’t be over here as much as she likes,” Eva said. “Even every day if she wants.”

  After that, things didn’t go too well. The more Eva and George talked about how Sara should truly be a part of their family, the more interest Sara showed, the more Abby frowned, the more Jack cleared his throat. “Sara already has a family,” Jack said.

  “Yes, of course she does, but there are all kinds of different families—” George said.

  “We want her to go on with her life,” Abby said. “To have what’s best for her.”

  “So do we,” Eva said quietly. “We’ve been doing so much reading, talking to other adoptive parents. It’s really a whole brave new world.”

  “Our daughter’s not an experiment.”

  “I like the idea,” Sara interrupted, and everyone turned to her, as if they had just noticed she was in the room. “Well, I do,” she said.

  “Well,” Abby said. She stood up. She held out a hand to shake Eva’s, and then George’s. “We should get going. Thank you for the coffee.”

  As soon as they were outside, Abby’s shoulders unsquared. “Choose anyone else,” Jack told Sara when they got to the car, but it was too late, because in her mind, Sara already had chosen, and the more her parents objected, the more certain she became.

  Eva and George began calling the house, just to talk. They called because they were on their way to a new Van Gogh exhibit at the museum and thought, hey, would Sara like to come? They were going miniature-golfing or to the park. “Come over, I’m making bread from scratch,” Eva said one day, and Sara had, taking a cab Eva paid for. Eva’s kitchen was bright and sunny, and the two of them wore big red aprons, their hair pinned up with Eva’s barrettes, and they kneaded dough. “Like putty!” Sara giggled. She held up her sticky hands and then pushed her elbows into the floury dough to knead it more.