I'll Be You(101)

Elli spoke in a whisper. “Mom, you have to say goodbye to Charlotte now.”

Our mother leaned over and kissed Charlotte’s forehead, pruned lips yearning against soft flesh. “Maybe you could bring her over next weekend? I’m happy to watch her.”

“I can’t.” Elli’s voice was cracking. It was hard to hear. “I don’t get to keep her anymore, Mom. She’s not mine to keep. I’m so sorry.”

“She was a foster this whole time?” My mom blinked, reading confirmation in my sister’s silence. “Elli. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have been prepared. I wouldn’t have…I would have…” My mom closed her eyes. Her voice was phlegmy and thick. “Oh God. I don’t know if I can do this.” She placed a palm on the top of Charlotte’s head, gazed intently at the child for a long minute, and then abruptly turned away. Her arthritic hip wobbled, threatening to send her tumbling down the steps to the living room, but then she righted herself, and was gone.

My sister turned to me, her broken face sticky with tears and hot with shame. “Let’s go,” she said.



* * *



—

I was the one who carried Charlotte back to the house on Joshua Tree Drive. At the last minute, Elli just couldn’t make herself do it.

She sat in the front seat of my car, her feet half buried in the fast-food wrappers that I’d accumulated over the last week. We’d parked a few blocks over, as far from the streetlights as possible, but it wasn’t well lit out here anyway. The desert spread out to our left, a dark ocean of invisible danger under a crescent moon and a sky shot with stars. It was 4:30 a.m., not a single light on in the houses that were scattered along the street.

“You’re stronger than me,” she said.

“She’s not that heavy,” I said. “It’s only two blocks.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I knew that wasn’t what she meant, but I liked hearing it from her anyway.

I climbed out of the car and then lifted Charlotte out of her car seat and rested her against my shoulder. She rustled once and then settled there, boneless and limp in my arms. Elli got out of the passenger seat and stood beside me, stroking Charlotte’s cheek with the back of a finger, careful not to wake her. I’d changed into jeans and a black hoodie but Elli was still in the thin linen shift, and she shivered in the cold night air.

“I’m so sorry, Emma,” she murmured into the little girl’s ear, and then she kissed her, as soft as a whisper, and climbed back into the car. As I walked off into the desert, moving slowly so as not to disturb the child, I could hear my sister sobbing.

I moved silently through the dark landscape, hunting for an open path, tracing the edge of civilization. On my left, through the cacti and the desert scrub, I could see swimming pools and formal gardens, outdoor kitchens and patio furniture upholstered in all-weather fabric. To the right stretched miles of wilderness.

I could hear mice skittering away from my feet as I walked. Somewhere out in the dark, alarmingly close, a band of coyotes erupted in a chorus of yips and growls. On my shoulder, the little girl stirred, but she didn’t wake up. I kept moving steadily through the desert, one step at a time, for what felt like hours, until the pink adobe house loomed up before me, and we were there.



* * *



—

I left her on a blanket on the grass of the Gonzalez home. Elli had suggested the front doorstep: “Don’t you think it would be safer?” But I argued that it was more likely that we’d be caught by a neighbor’s surveillance system if I approached from the front.

“You got insanely lucky the first time around,” I pointed out. “What if they had cameras installed?”

And so I slipped out of the desert and across the backyard, praying that in my black jeans, with my hood pulled up, I was invisible. With each step, I expected a security system to trip—for floodlights to blink on and an alarm to blare the presence of an intruder—but nothing happened. There was just a pitch-black garden, and a house with curtains closed, and the chill that crept in off the desert with me.

She rustled once, when I placed her on the blanket, but she didn’t wake up. I stood staring down at her, memorizing the way her face looked as she slept: my almost-child, my not-my-child child, this human to which I was permanently bound by the powerful thread of DNA but to whom I still had no claim at all.

I wondered if Emma Gonzalez would ever wonder about me, her biological mom. I wondered if she would ask to see the BioCal file when she turned eighteen, in order to learn more about me. Sixteen or twenty or thirty years from now, would she show up at my doorstep, never knowing that we’d met before, never knowing that I’d once changed her poopy diapers and kissed her sweaty head?

I hoped she would.

And so I left her there, but not before I banged on the back door of the house—pounded so loud that it felt like I would wake the entire neighborhood up. Then I darted back out into the desert until I was a safe distance away, concealed by a stand of cacti, and watched.

The lights in the house came on almost immediately, just seconds after Emma woke up and began to wail. I waited until I saw the figures silhouetted against the open doorway, and heard the mother’s shriek of disbelief and the father’s cry—“Oh Lord oh Lord, thank you Lord!”—before slipping out into the dark. I traced my way back, blinded by tears, weaving a perilous path between the saguaro and the prickly pear until I finally saw my car in the distance, and my sister standing there, her face pale with worry as she waited for me to come back to her.