Girls in Trouble: A Novel Read online

  “Now that’s an unusual method,” Eva said.

  “Whatever works, right?” Sara said, and the two of them laughed.

  Afterward, while the bread baked, they sat on blue chaises in the leafy backyard. George came out to join them, carrying a camera. “You just glow,” Eva told Sara. “I could look at you forever.” She turned to George. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she demanded and George pointed the camera at Sara. “Say Gruyere,” he ordered. “Say smoked Gouda!” When the next-door neighbor opened her back door to let her collie out, Eva waved happily. “This is the Sara!” Eva called. “Isn’t she fabulous?”

  “You told her about me?” Sara asked, surprised.

  “Of course I did,” Eva said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  They fit her into their future. When Eva started talking about going to Maine to a lake, she turned to Sara and asked, “You like lakes, right?” When Eva and George talked about fixing up the spare room, George mused, “We could fit an extra bed in there,” and Sara knew they meant it for her. The one Saturday she couldn’t make it, Eva and George surprised her the next day with a green paper cone of jonquils, with a ring with a tiny yellow stone. “What can I say? We missed you,” Eva said. “And we wanted to show it.”

  “They’re trying to buy you,” Abby said, when she saw the gifts, but Sara knew different. “There’s nothing to buy,” she said.

  Eva and George wanted her there as much as Jack and Abby didn’t, and as soon as school was out, Sara was there all the time. Sara knew her parents wouldn’t stop her from going there, knew they were more afraid that at this late date she’d change her mind about Eva and George, and they’d have to start finding an adoptive couple all over again, or worse, that she’d suddenly refuse to consider adoption at all.

  One day, Sara woke up to find Abby in her room. Already she could feel the shiny heat pouring in from the window. The mowers from next door were going, a loud, angry buzz, and when she sat up, for the first time, her stomach seemed to be in her way. Astonished, she put her hands on her belly. Abby was bustling about the room, drawing Sara’s curtains open, plucking up Sara’s laundry. “It’s such a gorgeous day, why don’t you and I do something fun together?” Abby said.

  Sara had planned on spending the whole day in Eva and George’s backyard. “Mom—” she said, and then Abby sat on the edge of the bed and Sara saw the look on her mother’s face, the way her mouth had gone all soft, like she was waiting to be disappointed, and Sara suddenly knew that if she left, she’d see that look all day and she didn’t think she could bear it.

  “Could we go to the Van Gogh exhibit at the museum?” Sara asked.

  The two of them went. The museum was empty and cool, and Sara was transfixed by the paintings. They took their time, Abby because she had to study every nuance of the paintings, Sara because it was harder to walk now that she was bigger. They were rounding the corner of one room, wandering into another, when Abby suddenly took Sara’s arm. “Let’s go this way,” Abby said firmly, guiding her in the other direction.

  “But we haven’t seen that way,” Sara protested, and Abby’s grip tightened.

  “Abby? Is that you?”

  Abby turned, smiling, and there was a woman Sara didn’t know. “It is you!” the woman said, and then her gaze flew down to Sara’s dress, to the swell of her belly. “Is this your daughter?” Her eyes glittered.

  “Sara, this is Margie Meuller, one of my patients.”

  Sara held out her hand and Margie shook it vigorously. “I’ve heard so much about you!” she said. “I was just on my way to the cafe. Would you like to join me?”

  “We’d love to but we’re running so late—” Abby said.

  “Ah—another time then.”

  They stood in place, watching Margie leave. “Don’t worry,” Abby said quietly to Sara. “I’ll think of something to tell her.”

  The day felt spoiled and they went home, and as soon as Sara walked into the house, Abby looked at the dress Sara had tossed on a chair that morning, picked it up, and smoothed it. “It takes so little to hang up your clothes,” Abby said. Everything in this house reminded Sara of all the wrongs she had ever done. She wanted to go to George and Eva’s, where everything reminded her of all the rights, where Eva made a point to introduce Sara, where there was happiness in every corner and she was the cause of it.

  “I think I may go out for a bit—” she started to say.

  Abby blinked at her. “Just like that? You don’t even call them first anymore?

  “They said I didn’t have to.”

  “You act like their house is yours. I can’t imagine they really like that.”

  “Yes, they do,” she insisted.

  “You act like you’re in love with them.”

  “Maybe they’re in love with me, too,” Sara said.

  Abby straightened. “We’re having an early dinner tonight,” she said lightly. “I could use some help making it, if you want.”

  She didn’t want, but she felt as if she should. So she stood side by side at the counter, thinking about how she and Eva had giggled making the bread, and here she was, working in silence with her mother, rolling out dough for pizza, cutting up green peppers and onions and shredding cheese. At dinner later, she sat at the table, dreaming she was at George and Eva’s, where everyone talked at once, and here, the major sound was the clinking of forks, which made her so crazy she couldn’t think of anything to say, either. “Mom?” she blurted, but Abby jumped up to get more soda from the kitchen. “Daddy—” she said, and Jack gave her that long, sad look that made her deflate.

  Her father was the one she always used to count on to fix things. When she was little, she came to him for everything: a doll with a missing shoe, an insect that had gotten loose in the house, a question about why the sky wasn’t green. If someone looked at her the wrong way or scolded her, he was the one she ran to. Delighted, he bought her a T-shirt that said, “That’s it! I’m calling my daddy!” and she wore it everywhere. When she was eight, and had broken a tooth playing submarine in the bathtub, Abby had immediately, purposefully, scooped the tooth from the bathwater and dunked it in milk. She had called the dentist she worked for and made him agree to come to the office and put the tooth back in. “Right away,” she urged. “We can’t waste a second.” Abby was all business but Jack was the one who had held Sara and comforted her.

  “So what, it’s a broken tooth,” Jack had said. “At least it’s not a broken heart, right?” Well, she knew all about broken hearts, because she seemed to have broken his. When she had told Jack about the baby, he hadn’t said a word, and when she was finished, he quietly stood up. He looked at her as if he didn’t quite know her anymore, and he stumbled out the back door, letting it slap behind him, and when she dared to look outside, she saw her father crouched in the garden, pulling up the jonquils he loved.

  * * *

  By nine, the hospital began to quiet. Visitors were gone, doctors left. Sara shifted in bed, plucking at the sheets, trying to get comfortable, and then she drifted into sleep.

  She was dreaming. She was standing in Boston Garden watching the swan boats floating across the river. And then, she smelled her mother’s perfume. Lily of the valley. She couldn’t seem to open her eyes, and she waited, wondering what would happen next. She heard the soft pad of her mother’s shoes tiptoeing into the room. She felt Abby standing over her, and then Abby touched Sara’s face, quietly left, and as soon as she did, Sara’s eyes opened. She yearned to have her mother back in the room. She wanted the hand back against her skin, like the brush of a curtain against a breeze.

  And then, with a jolt, Sara woke completely and sat up in bed. Her roommate was sleeping, but her friends and her baby were gone. Sara’s baby was gone, too.

  Sara drew the sheets around her. If you asked Sara, she couldn’t tell you how she felt about this baby now. She was all confused, maybe even more than she had ever been. It had been different when she was pregnant. Then, she had focused on the ext
ernals, on the way her body kept betraying her. She had been so used to being flat-chested, slim as a swizzle straw. Pregnant, Sara’s breasts were full and lush, her stomach so swollen her belly button jutted out. The only big thing about her was her belly, and from the back, no one could even tell she was pregnant, which was how she was able to hide it so well in school for so long. But she knew, under her baggy clothes, she was all baby. She first felt the baby kick when she was in precalculus class and it had terrified her so much, she had clapped one hand over her mouth. And in honors history, she had a sudden bout of morning sickness. She had to get up and leave, gagging, barely making it to the girls’ room where she threw up into the toilet, and when she got back, slinking into her seat, everyone bored holes through her with their staring. The girl behind her had tapped her on the shoulder and handed her a small white pill. “For stress,” the girl said conspiratorially. “I got it out of my father’s medicine chest. I couldn’t do this class without them.” She winked at Sara. “Everybody’s on them. You want more, I’ll give you the standard deal.”

  The larger Sara got, the more confused she became. Sometimes she actually agreed with Abby. She thought the baby was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, that she had been so stupid not to have had better birth control, not to have taken care of it the first week she had found out she was pregnant, not to have been so dumb she thought things might work themselves out. “Be thankful you don’t have to go to a home,” Abby said, and then she told Sara another Girls in Trouble story with an unsettling ending. A girl who wasn’t given any pain medication because the nuns felt she should suffer for her sins. A girl who came back to her parents’ home to find the locks changed. “How do you know this?” Sara whispered. “How do you know this is true?”

  “I know,” said Abby. “I just know.”

  Sometimes, though, Sara had loved the baby inside of her, had watched it in wonder when it rippled across her belly, when parts of it bumped and stretched up against her skin. “Elbow,” she thought, touching a curve. “Knee.” If the baby was on the left side of her, and she tapped her right side, the baby would surf its way toward her hands. As if it knew her. As if it wanted her comfort. Or maybe it wanted to comfort her.

  She lifted up the sheet and looked at her stomach. How could she feel so empty?

  She stared at her roommate. Her roommate’s friends would probably be back. Her husband. Probably handsome and doting, the kind of man Abby would refer to as “darling,” a man who would sleep on a mat by her bed if the hospital would only let him. Sara stared at the phone. Even if she dared to call them, she knew her friends wouldn’t be home. Her friends were in labs or libraries or at their computers, studying even though it was summer. Especially because it was summer. They were with tutors, pushing to get their As into A pluses. Sara had been like that, too, right up until she met Danny.

  She knew her friends’ phone numbers by heart. Judy Potter, her study partner, a slim, funny girl with a fizz of sandy hair. They had spent hours quizzing each other, thinking up the most challenging questions. Judy believed in creating your own reality. “If we can dream it, we can be it,” she said, and what Judy dreamed was for the two of them to go to Harvard. All Sara’s friends had been smart girls. Smart girls who protected themselves. They were on the pill or had diaphragms or they had themselves fitted with IUDs. They wouldn’t dream of sex without protection because too much was at stake—scholarships and college and all the future they wanted for themselves. And if they were foolish and unlucky enough to miss a period, they didn’t wait around the way Sara had, hoping things might change, refusing to believe the truth, because really, how could such a thing happen to Sara, the one everyone said was a shoo-in to be the valedictorian? No, they took care of the problem, the same way they would an experiment gone wrong. They had safe, clean abortions done by good doctors and some of them went out dancing that same night, as if nothing had happened. They didn’t look back. They got smarter and stronger and zoomed right ahead even as Sara got bigger, clumsier, and her mind and her future seemed to turn to mush.

  Sara’s roommate snored and then stopped. Abruptly, Sara reached for the phone and dialed. Three fours, a six, a nine. Robin Opaline. Robin used to be her best friend and lived less than three blocks away. They used to see each other all the time, used to tell each other everything, but Sara couldn’t tell Robin she was pregnant, not until she was too big to hide it. She had run into Robin a month ago, just walking down the street, and Robin had looked at her as if Sara were a complete stranger. “Why didn’t you trust me?” Robin asked, but all Sara could think about was whether she could trust Robin now, whether Robin would tell. And whether that would matter to her anymore.

  The line rang three times and then caught. “Hello?” Robin said, but Sara couldn’t make her mouth move.

  “Paul? Is that you?” Robin said, and her voice took on a strange new quality Sara couldn’t help but recognize. Love. “Bunny rabbit,” Robin whispered. “Honey.”

  Sara hung up the phone. She pleated the sheet in her hands and told herself she wouldn’t cry, then she turned away and looked out the window. From this floor, all you could see was another building across the way, a twinkling of lights.

  In one more day, she could go home. Eva and George would take Anne home. Jack and Abby would take her. She would leave this room forever. And then, as soon as Sara was settled back home, she could get up and take the train from Brookline to Waltham, where George and Eva lived, just a half hour away. She could spend every day with them, and two weeks later, when George went back to work as a dentist, she could spend every day with Eva and Anne, helping out, being a part of their lives. Abby and Jack could try and stop her all they wanted. They could try and convince Sara that she was on the wrong course, but already, in her mind, Sara knew where she was going.

  In her mind, she was on the subway. She was on the bus at Waverley Square riding into Waltham. She was getting off at Trapelo Road and walking three blocks to Warwick Avenue, heading up the flagstone path to George and Eva’s light-filled home with a big grassy backyard. The neighbors had seen her there so many times, they knew her by name. A few might even wave and say hello. She could go into their house and know where everything was without even looking. She could make herself at home. As soon as she walked through the front door, Eva would smile. All Sara would have to do was look at Eva and she could feel loved and needed and appreciated. She could feel she had made the right choice. Eva was telling her the truth. No matter what anyone said.

  Already, she was there.

  chapter

  three

  The week Eva and George brought Anne home, they threw a welcome-home party. They hired the best caterer in town, a bulldoggish woman the Boston Globe had praised for the miraculous things she could do with a piece of salmon. There was a parade of people, Eva’s best friend Christine, friends from work, neighbors and relatives. George’s father, Harry, came up from Arizona, tan as a walnut, laden with presents, planning on staying only a few days because he was having the kitchen redone in his condo.

  “Look at this one,” Harry said. He rubbed two fingers in front of the baby’s face, making a noise like someone calling a pet. “Chi-chi-chi,” he said.

  “Dad,” George said. “She’s a baby, not a bird.” His father gave a goofy grin, raised his hands, and then turned and headed for the Thai marinated chicken wings.

  “My father’s going to be a help,” said George dryly, watching his father pile his plate.

  “Well, thank goodness for friends,” Eva said. Watching George’s father made her miss her own parents, dead ten years now. She smoothed down the yellow dress Anne wore. How her parents would have loved all this. Well, she thought, they say you either want to give or protect your child from the kind of childhood you yourself had had, and Eva wanted to give Anne a childhood like her own. Happy. Filled with love.

  “Eva! You look beautiful!” Nora, their next-door neighbor touched Eva’s arm. “Eva!” someon
e else called and Eva turned to show off Anne.

  They had planned to just have the party for a few hours, had even printed the times out on the invitations, but two hours passed and then three, and by six, Eva’s eyes weren’t focusing. Her house was noisy and confused, and her back and feet hurt. She was sure that since she hadn’t carried the baby herself, she wouldn’t need rest, wouldn’t feel as overwhelmed, but to her surprise she found herself scheming about how fast she could politely shoo everyone away, thinking how much she wanted to get back into her nightgown and just be alone with the baby and with George.

  The doorbell rang. Who would be coming this late? “Ai-yi-yi,” Eva said.

  “I’ll get it,” George said, his smile broadening. He stepped outside to welcome people in, the pink balloons he had tied to the railing dancing around him.

  People crowded around Anne, which worried Eva. She watched for runny noses, for coughs, for people getting too close. The baby didn’t seem to mind. Anne was placid and quiet, lying in a bassinet in the living room. She moved her fingers, like baby Braille.

  “I have to hold this dumpling!” a neighbor said, reaching for Anne.

  “Wash your hands,” Eva ordered. The neighbor rolled her eyes, but Eva didn’t care.

  Eva lifted Anne up and felt the baby’s wet diaper against her arm, looked up at her friend Christine and laughed. “Changing time. Again. Like a little leaky faucet.”

  “Let me take care of that diaper,” Christine said.

  “You already did two,” Eva said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for diapers.” She carried Anne away with a flourish. She made her smile bright.

  But as soon as she brought Anne into the other room and set her on the white changing table, her confidence faded. The baby kicked and flailed her arms and moved so much Eva was afraid she might fall off the table. “Stop, stop,” Eva tried to soothe, grabbing a diaper, keeping one hand on Anne who gazed solemnly up at her. Babies were supposed to have blue eyes, like chips of sky, but Anne’s eyes were this eerie grey. Her hair was this rusty color. Sara’s hair. Looking away, Eva got busy searching for the wipes.