27: Gavin
Even if Rosa had put the boy up to it, I knew this moment had changed me. I had this taste, this very small understanding, of what it was like to be a father.
No matter what happened with the test, I would have to help them. For all I knew, Rosa would be out on the streets after taking her son back. The image of the woman sitting on the curb with the child clutching her was still very much on my mind. Tijuana was not kind to its poor.
Rosa seemed to be in some sort of a trance, and I figured it was what Mario had said — she had some sort of attachment to me I would have to deal with. That didn’t matter. I had Corabelle and that was that. But I could help them. I had to do that much.
I turned to Corabelle, who looked even more frail and sick than she had coming down. “We have to get her back to the room,” I said.
Tina stepped up, missing nothing. “I’m going to take her up. You still have to do your swab.”
She shook Corabelle’s arm. “Let’s get you back up.” Corabelle just sort of obeyed, not really looking at anyone directly.
I didn’t want to leave her, but Tina squeezed by me, and I stepped out of her way. As Corabelle came through, I pulled her to me, her head against my chest. “I’ll be right there,” I said. “I promise.”
She nodded against my shirt, and I let her go. Something wasn’t right with her, but I’d be there in just a minute, away from all this drama. We’d fix whatever it was. This meeting couldn’t have been easy for her.
Rosa looked at me uncertainly. “Gavin? We come here tomorrow? For answer?”
“Yes, back here. I think we have to wait for afternoon.”
“So, three? Three o’clock?”
The door behind us whooshed open. “Gavin?” It was the lab woman, Kelly. “You need to come back for your swab.”
Rosa moved away. “See you tomorrow, Gavin.”
I turned back to the lab. I needed to get this swab done and be back upstairs. Corabelle was more important. Rosa had already proven she could handle herself.
I turned back to get my first, and surely my only, paternity test.
28: Corabelle
The elevator trundled up, but when the doors opened to my floor, I didn’t want to go. “Can we go to the art room instead? Don’t you have class?”
“Not right now. I arranged all this around my schedule.” Tina held the doors. “I really think you should rest a bit. That wasn’t an easy scene.”
I backed farther into the corner. “I’ll go to the cafeteria then. I don’t want to see my parents.” I hesitated. “Or Gavin right now.”
Tina pulled her hand in and let the doors close. “All right.” She pressed another button.
“I like what you said to Albert yesterday, about the light in the window.”
Tina tucked a loose bit of hair into her pigtail. “I was blowing smoke, mainly.”
“No, it was exactly right. No matter how hard things get, we have to find some tiny space for happiness. We have to light a lamp.”
Tina leaned against the rail, holding on to the bar. “Well, that’s the only way it worked for me. The one time I let it all get snuffed, I wound up in the hospital with Frankenstein arms.”
“That woman is in love with Gavin.”
“I saw that.”
“So clearly whatever’s been going on has been going on for a long time.”
The doors opened again, and Tina led us out into the hall. “Let me tell you what I saw. A woman in a very dire situation, desperately hoping that she can be saved. Maybe she loves him. Maybe it’s just that he’s the only thing in her life that gives her hope.”
This stopped me cold. “So Gavin is her light.”
I could tell Tina hadn’t intended that conclusion. Her tiny pale eyebrows shot up her forehead. “No, no. The boy is that. She just has to find a way to keep him. Gavin is her way.”
“What if it’s his?”
“Then she’ll get help.”
I kept walking. Tina opened her classroom, and I breathed in the lingering scent of clay, paint, and cleaners. I had gotten so accustomed to the antiseptic medicinal smell of my room that only when I went somewhere else did I remember that the rest of the world was still out there with its variety of sights, sounds, and smells.
I sat in a small chair, bracing my elbows on the table. I felt fine, actually, no cough, just the lingering heaviness in my chest and the pressure in my head. Nothing I couldn’t manage. I should probably go back to the room just to make sure I wasn’t being told to go home.
Maybe in a minute. I needed to figure this out.
“Tina, what was your worst moment? Rock bottom? I keep thinking that it was when Finn died, or when Gavin left, or when I got kicked out of school, but then these things keep happening. And I think there is still something worse. I don’t want things to keep getting worse.”
She unlocked a drawer and began pulling out boxes of markers. “Peanut dying actually wasn’t the worst. That was peaceful. And the hospital after I cut my wrists was bad, but the crap was all spread out then. No one part stood out. I had some bad times going back to the high school.” She held the boxes against her chest. “I got called ‘Baby Killer’ because no one knew what had happened.”
“Oh my God, Tina!”
She spread the boxes across the surface of the table. “Not a fab time of my life, for sure.” She sat in the chair opposite me. “I guess if I had to pick a moment, it was when I got home from the hospital, after they stitched me up, and I realized I had no one. My boyfriend had ditched me. My parents were totally freaked and couldn’t even look at me. I’d had to leave the school for pregnant teens since, you know, my baby was dead.”
She drew lazy circles across the table with her fingers. “So yeah, it was walking into my place and realizing I was completely on my own.”
“I’ve had that moment,” I said. “Twice.” My head felt heavy and I rested it in my palm. “After the funeral, when I realized Gavin was gone. Then when I had to pack up my dorm room and get in my car with no idea where I’d settle down again. When I got to San Diego, I didn’t even have a reservation at a hotel.”
“Starting over is hard. But it’s sort of freeing too, isn’t it? No ties. No history. You can be whoever you want to be.”
“But you’re still the same old you, underneath.”
“True.” Tina reached to one end of the table for a stack of construction-paper packages. She dragged the top one in front of her and tore open the plastic wrap. “I never could manage to get away from myself.”
“Whatever happened to that boy, the baby’s father?”
“Beats me. He got some other girlfriend before I had the bandages off.”
“So you didn’t feel any connection to him?”
Tina laid out pieces of paper in front of each chair. “Sure. I actually tried to get him back. Didn’t realize he was poking some other hole.”
“And now?”
“None. It’s like Peanut was an immaculate conception. Mine and only mine.”
“Maybe that would be easier.”
“Maybe. It’s hard to let go of that feeling that you were the only two who ever really knew the baby. I guess when it comes right down to it, maybe only the mother really gets it. We carried them all that time, after all.”
I idly turned the page in front of me in circles. “Gavin was connected. He was always very into the pregnancy, and feeling Finn kick, and decorating the room. I took it for granted.”
“You were lucky then.”
“Really? Because when he left, it all felt like a lie.”
“I think the people who feel the most also blow the hardest.”
“Well, he feels something toward that boy.”
Tina reached across the table to still my paper. “Let’s see how tomorrow goes. If he’s not the father, I really think Rosa is going to disappear completely, looking for another way out.”