I'll Be You(87)

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Looking back now, it would be easy for me to pin the blame on Iona. It was her encouragement—her idea really—that had me climbing into a car with another woman’s child in my arms. Would I have done it if she hadn’t suggested it? Hadn’t grabbed my arm and steered me across the road? Hadn’t pressed me into the back seat of the car? I doubt it.

And yet, I can’t absolve myself. Of course I can’t. Because if I am going to be honest—truly honest with myself—wasn’t it exactly what I wanted, too? To climb into the safety of those deep leather seats and clutch the sleeping child against my chest, to hold her there forever and ever, to make her mine?

Iona just saw what my darkest longing was and pushed me to make it a reality.

As we drove away from the house that day, I didn’t realize that I’d just made a decision that would change my life. Dazed and overwhelmed, I wouldn’t come to this awareness until five minutes later, ten minutes, twenty; not until we’d pulled onto the highway and were already driving back west; not until my heart stopped beating so fast and the adrenaline cloud began to dissipate and logic reinserted itself into the haze of madness. Not until the child in my arms finally stirred and looked up at me and didn’t murmur “Mama,” but instead started to cry.

Only then would I understand that I had somehow made a choice, and that the choice I’d made was so utterly, irrevocably wrong.





30




AND JUST LIKE THAT, I had a daughter, one that was technically half mine. I called her Charlotte, a name that had topped my list for years, and when I called her by this it was like a memory made manifest. I purchased the contents of an entire Pottery Barn Kids catalog and converted the guest bedroom to a nursery. I bought books with names like The Happiest Toddler on the Block and studied them for parenting tips. I wooed my new daughter with ice cream and cookies, I took her to the beach and the playground and strapped her on my back for hikes up to Inspiration Point.

In response, Charlotte cried. She sobbed because the sand was too hot. She threw herself out of my arms when I picked her up. She refused the food that I set in front of her. She wailed when I belted her into her brand-new car seat and she screamed when I took her out of it. She pushed her hands against my face and said NO, one of the few words she could clearly articulate. I knew, of course, that her tears had nothing to do with anything that I was doing wrong; her malaise was something much bigger, and it was all my fault.

Of course it was—I’d selfishly taken her away from everything she’d ever known.

But eventually, a few weeks in, she stopped crying so much. It was as if she’d accepted some inevitability, realized that her new reality was perhaps not so bad after all. She’d decided I was safe. Perhaps the memory of her life before was already fading away, paved over by the eternal new of existence as a fledgling human.

I studied her for signs of long-term trauma, for some evidence that wrenching her away from her parents had caused permanent damage. In retrospect, I’m sure it did; how could it not? But at the time I was reassured when, so quickly, she started eating like a normal child, she played with the toy kitchen that I set up in her bedroom, she made eye contact with me and laughed when I read her Sandra Boynton board books. She started snuggling into my side when I picked her up, and burrowed her head in my neck when a neighbor’s dog barked at her, just like I was her real mother.

I discovered that she had more words: Kitty. Hungry. More.

And yet sometimes, I would look over and see her watching me with measuring eyes, a worm of worry furrowing her brow. As if she was trying to fully comprehend this new reality she’d found herself in.

Then, a month in, she called me Mama. We were at the park, and she’d gotten herself turned around under the play structure. She wandered out into the sun on the wrong side of the sandpit, looked around, saw only strange nannies and unfamiliar diaper bags. She cried out in a tremulous voice, “Mama?”

“I’m right here, honey,” I called as I crawled out from underneath the swinging bridge, sand pebbling my shins. The wobble in her lip firmed up, turned into a smile. She lifted her arms out to me and said it again, a command: “Mama, uppie.” And I swung her up onto my hip and pressed my lips into her hair, like it was a completely normal thing to do, not a fantasy that just a few weeks earlier felt completely unattainable. I realized that I was crying.

Because I should have been happy, but I wasn’t.



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—

Of course I wasn’t. I’d stolen someone else’s child, and all the self-justification in the world couldn’t erase that fact. I was a terrible, terrible person. The guilt flooded through me every time I looked at Charlotte, a poison that consumed me from the inside out, seeped out through every pore, a toxic miasma of misery.

I loved Charlotte so much that it hurt, but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy at all.

I needed to do something to fix the situation. But what?



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—

I had confessed everything to Dr. Cindy just a few days after returning to Santa Barbara with Charlotte. We met in the empty GenFem center on a cold afternoon, and went through a Reenactment. I walked Dr. Cindy through the visit to BioCal and my impersonation of my sister, the stakeouts of the three houses, the snatching of Charlotte from her parents’ garden. I waited for the stinging slap on my cheek, for the redirection that would point me toward the correct choice—the path I should have taken, the one it was perhaps not too late to take—but this didn’t come. Instead, Dr. Cindy smiled indulgently and took my hands in hers.