Somewhere Out There(14)

Shit. Brooke’s shoulders slumped as she fell back against the wall. After a moment, she straightened, then tossed the test into the garbage. She decided to take the other one, too, just to be sure the results were the same. That there hadn’t been some kind of mistake.

Three minutes later, Brooke had her answer. There was no doubt about it. She was pregnant. And she had no idea what to do.





Jennifer


I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

I knew the girls would be there any minute, the first time I would see them since the night of my arrest the previous month. I’d never been that long without them, but there I was, about to say good-bye. I was giving them up, making them wards of the state. With Gina’s help, I had made the decision quickly, the way you pull off a sticky bandage, reasoning that it might be less painful than if I dragged the process out, hemming and hawing about whether or not it was the right thing to do. I already knew it was the right thing. For Brooke’s and Natalie’s futures, there was no better choice to make.

As Gina had predicted, I was convicted of both the petty theft and child endangerment and neglect, then sentenced to fifteen months in a minimum-security facility. After that hearing, Gina told me that Brooke and Natalie had been placed in a home with a couple who had been foster parents for years. Knowing they were safe and together was the only thing that sustained me as I lay in my narrow, uncomfortable bunk at King County jail, listening to the thick, rough snores of my cellmates, unable to fall asleep. I felt hollow, as though my insides had all been scraped out. In signing away my parental rights, I was effectively saying that the state knew better what to do with my children than I did. I was admitting failure as a mother. I was saying that if I raised my own babies it would be a mistake.

“Are you sure your mother wouldn’t take care of them until you get out?” Gina had asked me. Even after I told her no, she said that in situations like this, the state required her to call next of kin.

When I saw her the next day, I asked how it had gone. “Not well,” she answered, not looking at me.

“What did she say?”

“That her husband doesn’t like kids.”

“Her husband?” I said, feeling stunned. I had no idea that she had gotten married again. My mother was only twenty-nine when my father left us, unaccustomed to being a sole provider and living alone, and she had been anxious to find another husband. “I miss having someone to curl up with at night,” she said.

“You can curl up with me,” I replied, and she shook her head, looking out the window.

“It’s not the same thing.”

For the next few years, until I got pregnant with Brooke, my mother was always dating someone. But none of her boyfriends stuck around for more than a couple of months. I wondered about the man who’d finally stayed with her, a man I’d never met. I wondered what she would have said if I had reached out to her earlier, before she’d married him, to ask for her help. If I’d admitted how wrong I’d been to move in with Michael; if I’d begged for her forgiveness. I’d thought about doing this a hundred times, but pride kept me from picking up the phone. Pride, and an intense, quiet fear that she’d want nothing to do with me or my daughters. Now, even though I’d been expecting it, I felt my mother’s rejection of her grandchildren—her rejection of me—like a stab in the heart.

“How much longer?” I asked Gina now. She sat with me in the family visiting room at the jail, ready to supervise my last visit with my daughters. None of this seemed real to me yet. I’d signed the papers, answered the judge when he asked me if I understood what I was agreeing to do, and the entire time, I felt removed from my own body, as though I were floating toward the ceiling, watching someone who looked like me go through the appropriate motions and play my part.

“Any minute,” Gina said, reaching over to squeeze my hand. Her fingers warmed my dry, icy skin. The orange industrial soap in the jail’s shower was like sandpaper. “You okay?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I finally said, my voice barely a whisper.

“The judge already signed off on the order.”

“No,” I said. The tension in my chest was unbearable, my muscles braided themselves into excruciating knots. “I meant I don’t know if I can see them.” I leaned forward, pressing my upper body against my skinny thighs, and grabbed my ankles. Gina placed her hand on my back.

“If you don’t,” she said, “you’ll regret it. Trust me. You need closure.”

Closure, I thought, is impossible. I was convinced giving them up was the right thing, the best thing for them, but the agony I’d felt after making the decision had shattered into sharp metal shavings lodged under my skin. Every move I made, every breath I took hurt more than the last.

Righting myself, I glanced around the room, a small, square space with brick walls painted gray, the table at which we sat, and a sad pile of dirty-looking toys in a basket in the corner. A crooked poster of Sesame Street characters hung by the door; some * had drawn a pair of blue breasts on Big Bird.

“Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?” I asked Gina, who paused and gave me a long, thoughtful look before responding.

“I think you’re giving them the very best chance you can.”