Never Coming Back(51)

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

“But abortion was legal by then. You didn’t even consider doing something?”

“I didn’t know.”

—–—–

—–—–

—–—–

My mind, skipping beats, circling around what she had just said. I hadn’t ever thought of that possibility.

“Wait. You didn’t know you were pregnant? But how could you not know?”

She gave me one of her looks. A Tamar look. My hands bore down on the couch cushion, gripping its edges so hard that my fingers hurt. She was there. She was right there with me in that moment. But for how long? Long enough to answer?

“I was eighteen.”

She lifted her shoulders. A tiny movement, bird bones against invisible air, but it was enough. Because with that movement an image of an eighteen-year-old girl came floating into my head, a feather of an image that landed there and would be there forever. A motherless girl wearing a lumber jacket, standing in the chill of an upstate New York fall, two babies growing inside her.

“You were too far along by the time you realized?”

She nodded. My question, asked and answered. Except not really.

“But if you had known? Would you??—”

She clamped her hands on the cushion and pushed herself up from the couch. Away from the dipshit and back to walking. Back to the strolling of the hallway, the endless journey to choir practice. Maybe it was a moot point to her. She was a girl who had lost her mother the year before, she had only her nontalking dad. The beginning of me was the end of all her plans: Florida, adventure, a new life. I picked up the book of the week, Harriet the Spy, and followed her down the hall and added it to the pile by her bed.





* * *





Tamar got Dog for me when I was twelve years old. The school counselor had called her to express his concern.

“He said you didn’t seem to be yourself,” she told me. “He said you were hardly talking in class anymore and you were always sneaking off to the library. He said it was a ‘marked change’ from sixth grade.”

She only told me this years after the fact, when I was eighteen and heading to the college in New Hampshire into which she and Annabelle Lee had strong-armed me, the college where they didn’t allow dogs in dorms. Where I would be without Dog, my constant companion, for the first time in six years, a fact that tormented me. Be sure to take him on a walk every day, one hour minimum, I kept instructing my mother. Be sure to give him a pig ear every other day. Be sure not to let him jump on anyone when they come to court. Be sure to rub his belly every night when he jumps up on your bed. IF he jumps up on your bed. Do you think he’ll jump up on your bed when I’m gone? Because he never had. It had always been my bed he jumped up on.

This conversation happened as she was driving and I was riding shotgun. We were past Hogback Mountain and closing in on Brattleboro, where we would head north, the backseat of the pickup crammed full with us and Dog and my belongings, but what I was really doing was asking her if Dog would be sad without me, if it would be too hard on him.

“Clara.”

That was her Calm down voice.

Life changed when I was eleven and twelve. First when the old man, the one I used to visit every Wednesday night when my mother was at choir practice, died. And then when I entered seventh grade, the first year that Sterns Middle School included not just seventh and eighth grade but also ninth. A whole new territory of clanging lockers and stern teachers and a group of ninth grade boys who lined up on either side of the bus entrance and rated the girls as we walked into school on a scale of 1 to 10. A few girls were 10’s. A few were 1’s. Most were 4 or 5. The boys sometimes called out bonus points or demerits for certain physical attributes. One girl, who grew up north of Sterns and was the first one on the bus in the morning and the last one off in the afternoon and lived in a trailer with a rusted door that hung partway off its hinges, was a –3. Day in and day out: –3, until eventually her nickname was Minus.

Me? I was a nothing, because after the first two weeks I got off the bus and headed straight to the loading dock at the back of the school, where the custodian always had the big double doors propped open, and I threaded my way through the bowels of the furnace room into the back hallway and from there to my locker.

“And the counselor was right,” Tamar said, on that long drive from Sterns to New Hampshire. “You weren’t yourself.”

“But what does that even mean?” I said. By then I had trained myself to make everything a reason to argue. “When you think about it, no one’s ever really herself. In an existential sense, I mean.” I listened to my own words and tried to convince myself that in some existential way they made sense.

“Bullshit,” Tamar said. “Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.”

I remembered looking at her from my vantage point in the passenger seat, observing her unblinking eyes on the road, the set of her mouth. She did not know what the word existential meant, nor did she pretend to. She must not have cared what it meant either, because if she did, she would have asked me. And she would not have felt bad or dumb or ignorant when she asked, because that was the kind of person she was: always and only her real self.

Dog was present for that conversation, sandwiched between a sleeping bag—which Tamar thought might come in handy for extra warmth at college—and the heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags filled with clothes and towels and my winter jacket and a lamp and books and notebooks and laundry detergent and shampoo. The drive to the White Mountains was nearly six hours. He occasionally muscled his head up from between the overflowing garbage bags, which acted as a kind of restraining device, and pushed his nose into my shoulder. I kept reaching back to stroke his head and scratch him under the chin. I worried about Dog on that drive. What if a bigger truck came barreling up behind us and rear-ended us? Tamar and I were belted in, but all Dog had for protection were the garbage bags. Would he go catapulting through the windshield? He wasn’t a huge dog. He was lean and long-legged, lacking bulk and mass.