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 involve 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.