“I think she’d be glad, in the end, that you could confide in her,” Grace said, though truthfully, Annie’s characterization of her mother seemed accurate. The girl might have been high-strung and deluded about her own failings, but she had a pretty good grasp of her parents’.
“You’re crazy,” Annie said, the tears falling again, “if you think she wants to hear about this.”
“What about your father?”
This question made Annie cry even harder. “Oh, God,” she said.
As bad as Grace felt for her, her pulse was quickening. This was the first time Annie had reached out to ask for help, or ask for anything at all. It was a major crisis that could push her over the edge, but, properly handled, it could also bring her back.
Grace let her cry for a moment, her shoulder shuddering with sobs before finally slowing. Annie blew her nose loudly once, twice, then sat fidgeting with the tissue in her lap. After a while, Grace said, “Tell me about the boy.”
The girl shook her head.
“He’s part of this too, you know,” Grace went on. She needed Annie to say if she knew him well or just a little, whether she loved him, anything that might lead to a real discussion.
But Annie only shook her head again and smiled wryly. “He’s nobody,” she said, her tone weary, suddenly wise. She was a chameleon: in her school uniform, crying and begging for help, she’d seemed a child; now, crossing her legs and smiling mysteriously, she could have been five years older. Grace could feel her receding, the mask of her face closing. So for the next few minutes she gave a rote explanation of the options, of Annie’s future, urging her to seriously consider all the possibilities, to talk to her doctor, to think, and to remember that no matter what happened, her life would not be over.
Annie nodded, acting as though she were listening, but when Grace paused, she said, “I can’t trust the doctor. She’s friends with my mom and I know she’d tell her even if she promised she wouldn’t. I can’t trust my friends, they’re such total gossips I know they’d have to tell somebody and soon it’ll be all over school. You’re the only person I can tell.”
“I’m glad you feel you can talk to me.”
The girl saw an advantage and pressed it, leaning forward and locking her wide eyes on Grace’s — the same posture she probably used at home when asking for some special present. “Will you promise not to tell my parents?”
Grace sat back. For the second time in as many days she felt herself being enlisted in a pretense, a story in which she ought to play no part. And again she felt that same need to take a risk, to earn the trust of someone in need, because nobody else in the world seemed to have it. But this was a child. “I can’t do that,” she told her.
“I should’ve known,” Annie said. “This is such a waste of time.” She stood up and stuffed her things into her bag, the zipper of her fleece singing as she pulled it up.
“Wait,” Grace said, wanting to give the girl something to carry with her out of the office. “Just remember that you have options.”
When Annie turned, her face was as blank as snow; anything she’d just revealed of herself was now hidden behind a gate of disbelief. Only the tinges of pink at her eyes and nose hinted at the explosions of the past hour. “Sure,” she said, “options.”
Grace had the sharp, sudden feeling that the girl would never come back again, or share anything of herself if she did. This wasn’t the first time that she’d seen a teenage girl in trouble, but Annie had gotten under her skin — her quicksilver changes between adult and child, how hard she came down on herself, the shy glitter of her braces-thick smile. Grace wished it were permissible to tell her the simple truth: that the same thing had happened to her in high school, and that while she would never wish it on anyone else, everything had turned out fine. This was hardly appropriate therapeutic practice, and she never once had been tempted to confess it before. Something about Annie was different from other patients, and it made her want to prick the bubble of the girl’s unhappiness. And the way she talked about the baby’s father, her air of shielding secrecy, had touched Grace’s heart, and her memory.
She bit her lip. “Okay, Annie,” she said, “I won’t tell.”
When she closed the office at five thirty and stepped outside, it was her own life, not Annie’s, that she was thinking of. Back in high school, she had been a champion downhill skier, gifted on the slopes. She had spent her weekends drowsing on overheated buses to and from Blue Mountain. Her parents’ house had a wall filled with her trophies and medals and blurry photographs showing her swooping across the finish line in an aerodynamic crouch. There had been talk of recruitment, of Olympic possibilities. Her coach said he’d never seen a skier so confident, so fearless. Her connection to the sport was part instinct and part habit: she skied because she always had and because her body knew how to do it without being instructed. Even the muscle aches that sometimes woke her up at night felt like part of her, as natural as breathing. Then, the year of her sixteenth birthday, her boyfriend Kevin blew out his knee on a sharp turn in a semifinal heat.
Kevin’s was the first body Grace knew as well as her own. Sinewy, olive hued, it had revealed itself to hers in the backs of buses, cars, a room at their friend Cheri’s house during a parents-out-of-town party. His chest was almost hairless, his muscular calves ropy with veins. The fact that she at first had been frightened by its contours and smells, its unexpected explosions of hair, its capacity for sexual performance, made her eventual familiarity with it seem all the more important, more earned. Seeing him in the hospital bed with his right side bandaged and cast in plaster, she felt the throb and pulse of pain in her own body.
Two weeks after his accident, Grace said she just didn’t feel like skiing anymore, that she was quitting. This was understood as an act of dramatic renunciation by her teammates, parents, and coaches. Taking it as a testament of her great love, Kevin burst into tears, though this might have had something to do with all the drugs he was on. Her parents encouraged her to confront her fears and get back on the horse. Grace explained calmly and maturely that she had simply decided it wasn’t worth it, that there were other things in life she wanted to pursue. But she was lying. The truth was that just before Kevin’s accident she had discovered she was pregnant. She knew exactly what to do, and she shot toward it as if on skis: she had an abortion. She didn’t tell Kevin, or her parents, or her friends. It was all very straightforward.
Afterward, to her surprise, she in fact didn’t feel like skiing, and Kevin’s accident provided the perfect cover story. Originally she’d thought she might take a couple of days to recover, as if from a flu, and then, to the rousing cheers of her parents and teammates, return to the sport. But she soon discovered that the urge to race, to compete, to win, had been bled from her on the same morning. It had all been too ridiculously and awfully easy. She had a baby inside her, just like that, and she got rid of it, also just like that. Two equally momentous, symmetrical events.
Not one soul knew what she’d done, and the air of corrupt superiority this secret engendered in her changed her more than either the accidental pregnancy or its termination had. She told herself that she ought to give up something she loved — skiing — in reparation for her carelessness and ruthlessness. But even this sacrifice proved easy and false. Once she quit skiing, she was surprised to discover how little she missed it.
Kevin endured months of rehab and within a year was back on the team. Grace had no idea what had become of him, this boy whose body had once been so familiar, whose child she’d had inside her. During his recuperation she’d tended his skin with vitamin E lotion to minimize the scars. She’d thought about the thin, olive-skinned children they’d have someday, when they were ready, when it was time. As his knee healed, they swore they’d always be together. Yet when she got into U of T, she accepted without even really discussing it with him, knowing he’d already started eyeing a girl on the swim team with chlorine-bleached hair. Life carried them so fast down the slope and far away from where they’d started that they hardly noticed it happening. They broke the promises they’d made to each other so quickly and easily that they didn’t even have time to feel betrayed.