Perfect Little World(2)
She was in the dining hall, the big room empty and echoing. They had been instructed not to bring gifts, no pictures or candy or anything that might distract the children from the moment. But she wished she had something in her hands, something to occupy her nerves.
Of course she had seen him almost every day, had hugged him, had rocked him to sleep, but it would be different now. It would forever be different and yet, hopefully, the same as ever. She wished, not for the first time, that she had someone with her, a partner. Then, immediately, she shook off that hope; she wanted this moment just for herself, as it had always been, no one but her.
The door opened and Roberto looked in, flashed a thumbs-up sign, and Izzy nodded in response. Roberto disappeared from view and, suddenly, there he was. A little boy stood in the doorway. Her little boy. Her son.
He walked into the room, already waving, already smiling, but then stopped short when he saw her.
“Izzy?” he said, his face curious and open.
“Hi, Cap,” she said, the shock of seeing him standing before her, just the two of them, almost too much to process.
“You’re my mom?” he asked, tentative, afraid to come too close to her, which broke her heart in the places it had always been broken.
“I am, sweetie,” she said, smiling.
“You made me?” he asked, moving a little closer to her.
“We all made you,” she said, a mantra of the group, but she then added, “but I made you the most.”
“Mom,” he said, a statement of fact. He waved to her again and she waved back.
“I’m your mom,” Izzy said, another statement of fact, holding her breath.
“Good,” he finally said, smiling, and he stepped into her arms and let her hug him for what felt like the first time.
“It is good,” she said, this boy in her arms, the son she had given up and yet managed to keep, the child she had not wanted and yet could not love more than she did.
“We are a family,” he said, and she knew that he meant everyone, the other children, the other parents, Dr. Grind, but she pretended that he meant only the two of them.
“We are a family,” she responded, still hugging him so tightly, “we are the best family in the whole wide world.”
chapter one
Three hours after she had graduated from high school, Izzy sat on a park bench next to her art teacher, Mr. Jackson, and told him that she was pregnant. Despite the awkwardness of the confession, she felt a buzzing excitement that kept pushing against her dread. She had graduated from high school, had hated almost every minute of it; now she was on the other side and free, those four years simply a scar that would add character in the long run. She was wearing the best dress she owned, a thin summer dress from the Target in Murfreesboro, green and white, like the flag for some exotic African nation. It went well with her deep, crowded freckles; her light brown hair cut short for the ceremony; and her round, bright face. She looked better than she felt, and this gave her some kind of invincibility that she worried would crumble the minute it was put to the test.
She was holding the cap from graduation in her hands, playing with the tassel to help calm her nerves. When all the other students had thrown their caps into the air, she’d held on to hers for reasons she couldn’t understand other than her inability to ever fully celebrate around other people. Happiness, she believed, was small and quiet and you expressed it when no one else was around. She had not, in fact, experienced enough of the emotion to support this firm belief that she held as fact.
Mr. Jackson had been her favorite teacher; he was in his thirties, had not yet entered into that phase of teaching when every other sentence was sarcastic and without genuine emotion. Before he’d come to Coalfield High School two years before, he’d been an actual artist, with an exhibition in Europe, and had the slightest degree of fame. He came from one of the richest families in the state. And, yet, here he was teaching dumbass kids at a nowhere high school, which made Izzy confused as to whether he was noble or stupid or, perhaps most important, damaged goods.
On the first day of Advanced Art, her senior year, he put an empty vase on a stepladder and asked the class if this vase was art. Most people said no. Then he put some flowers in it. “How about now?” he asked. Fewer people said no. He removed the flowers and then said, “What about if I urinated into the vase?” Nobody, including Izzy, said a word, but they certainly paid more attention to their teacher, who was wearing paint-spattered khakis and a worn, faded-blue chambray shirt, a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket. His face looked like an old-time movie star cowboy, lean and rugged but not from actual hard living. His close-cut hair was prematurely gray and made him seem even wiser. “The answer,” he said to them, smiling, “is that everything is a work of art, kids.” He then let the students offer examples to see if it passed his test. “What if you smashed it to pieces?” someone asked, and Mr. Jackson said that this was art. “What if you fucked it?” one of the stoner kids said, his friends making that awful “huh-huh-huh” sound that passed as laughter. “Especially then,” Mr. Jackson replied.
Izzy, before she could even think about it, asked, “What if you didn’t want it to be a work of art?”
He turned to her, his face open and inviting. “What do you mean?” he asked her, and she felt the embarrassment of having the entire class waiting for her to respond.