The Accidentals Page 10

  He looked down at his feet. “Maybe I could walk home.”

  Daniel joined us then. “Everybody ready?”

  I nodded, and so did George.

  On the way home, Daniel glanced over at me. I was sandwiched between the two of them on the front seat, George having refused to sit in the back. “I’m going to take you home first,” Daniel said. “I need to stop at the house and give George a book.”

  The next morning when I stopped over to get Daniel to walk to school. I was wearing my favorite outfit, a powder blue skirt and blouse. My heart beat faster, the way it always did in anticipation of seeing my Daniel. I went through the screen door and up onto the Bakers’ porch, then knocked our special knock. The door opened, and George poked out his head.

  “It’s just me today,” he said. “Daniel’s got a stomachache.”

  I took a step back. “I didn’t know you were spending the night.”

  Then he stepped out on the porch and the morning sun hit him full on. His eyes were heavy lidded and had a smudged look. There was a half-smile on his face. He gazed down at me with a look I could only interpret as pitying. He felt sorry for me, the bastard.

  I turned and hurried across the Bakers’ lawn, stumbling over old Lion, who wagged his tail weakly.

  By the time I hit the sidewalk, George had caught up. I stopped short, causing him to stumble. “George,” I said sternly, “I’d like to spend more time alone with Daniel. You know what I mean.”

  Beside me, George stood still, his fingers fast-tapping his thick science book, as if he were bored by what I was saying.

  “Well?” I said.

  He cocked his head and eyed me. He appeared, oddly, to be surveying me from a long distance, as if I were a piece of roadside scenery he was passing. “I expect Daniel can decide.”

  I pulled Daniel’s class ring out from under my blouse and dangled it in front of George’s nose. “I’m his girlfriend.”

  “There are other ways to be friends.” He muttered this last under his breath, his tone so measured that it sounded a little sinister. Then he shifted the book to his other arm and walked off, leaving me standing there on the sidewalk.

  I looked down at the ring; I was by this time not nearly as innocent as I’d been that Sunday afternoon I had walked across the street to pluck Daniel like a prized apple. Unsettled by George’s unstated but insistent claim on Daniel, I decided then and there that if ever there were a time for action, it was now.

  It was by then April again and mild even during the early morning hours. That night, I climbed out of my window and landed on the ground between my father’s two prize camellia bushes. I wore baby-doll pajamas, an older, worn pair you could almost see through. Across the street, the draping arms of a forsythia in the Bakers’ yard, Easter-chick yellow bleached to white in the moonlight, swayed slightly as if to signal some indecipherable message. Overhead, a swath of stars. I tiptoed across the street (how easy it all was!), went around to the back of the Bakers’ house, and peeked in Daniel’s bedroom window. I’d imagined how thrilled he’d be to see me, the sudden stirring of passion my unexpected appearance in the middle of the night would evoke. I was about to tap on the pane when I looked more closely and saw the two forms in Daniel’s bed. The boys were deeply asleep, the dark head next to the blond on the same pillow, Daniel’s arm flung over the other boy’s chest. Daniel’s hair a shock of white. They looked totally at peace. They were naked.

  I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed my face against the windowpane. The moon was shining on them and it was hard to say which of them appeared more glorious. The curve of George’s shoulder, the splotches of dark between their legs. Together they were more beautiful, and strangely exotic, than either of them could ever have been separately.

  How can I explain what happened next? Something (a bolt?) slid out of place, a hinge creaked in my mind. In that moment, I loved them both.

  I made a fist and knocked.

  The boys scrambled, George jumping sky high, his eyes rolled back in his head, Daniel sitting straight up and wildly eyeing the door to his room. I had to tap again to make them understand where the sound was coming from, and this I did, quietly, persistently, until Daniel came over and raised the sash.

  I held out my arms. “Pull me up,” I commanded.

  They didn’t want me there, but looking at me like that was another thing. They were boys who appreciated beauty, and in the starlight, arms outstretched, hair wild, I could see in their eyes that I shone.

  There was also the matter of what I might do if they didn’t take me to bed with them. Who I might tell. In that moment, fear of discovery must have buzzed, wasp-like, at the edge of their minds.

  Now I know all this. In the moment, though, it didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t want me.

  It was George who understood and made the first move, taking my outstretched hand, Daniel who grasped my shoulder.

  Throughout that spring, the three of us were inseparable. Some afternoons we spent at Daniel’s house, some at George’s mansion of a place, the only nice house on the mill side of town. Because of June, who, being June, had begun to ask questions, we steered clear of my house.

  For the first time since I’d known him, Daniel seemed happy. There was something about me that held the two boys in a kind of fragile suspension. I walked between them to and from school. I sat between them on the front seat of the Bakers’ Chrysler. The three of us danced together at school events, startling the chaperones. I was the book to their bookends, the hinge they swung on. For my part, I felt radioactive, fired by the way their hands grazed me as they reached for each other, fired by beauty and destruction, not then understanding the difference between the two, not knowing they weren’t one thing. I changed my hairdo to a flip, plucked my eyebrows, lined my eyes so they looked catlike.

  HOW COULD I have thought this could go on? Mama’s douche bag was still hanging in the bathroom, and I used it religiously. It didn’t occur to me that if it didn’t work for her it might not work for me.

  SUMMER FLEW BY and school started up again. One morning I got out of the tub and my breasts caught my eye in the medicine cabinet mirror. In the morning light, they appeared much larger than I’d remembered them. The tips had turned from pink to a dappled brown. They seemed to have taken on secret lives. Then I looked down at my belly, also darker, as though a shadow had fallen over it. I began to count.

  I’d heard laxatives would get rid of it. I chewed Ex-Lax, drank a bottle of castor oil, and became horribly ill. I sat shivering for hours in a tub of Epsom salts and vinegar. One quiet afternoon, while the boys were playing gin rummy out on Daniel’s porch, I went to the top of the stairs in his house and made myself jump, but I landed on my shoulder rather than my stomach. The boys came running: What was I doing on the stairs? Good grief, what was wrong with me these days? That night, I sat on the toilet for hours and beat on my stomach, cursing and crying. Finally, I stopped, hiccupping and dripping with sweat. It was only then that I considered doing what my mother had done, hoping for a better outcome; but I didn’t want to die, I wanted to live. So I gave up.

  I told only the boys and limited myself to one meal a day. The three of us decided to run away together and raise the child, our child, whose in particular none of us knew but we all three agreed it was better that way. New Orleans was the farthest and most foreign place we could imagine ourselves getting to. The boys took on odd jobs, saved their allowances, and made plans contingent on my ability to elude discovery. We plotted and planned. Mr. Baker flushed with pride when Daniel started mowing lawns up and down the block. George stole money from his father and cashed out the savings bonds his grandparents had given him every Christmas since he was born. We packed suitcases and hid them under our beds to make a quick getaway when the time came. If the boys considered jumping ship, they never let on. They were troopers, rallying around me. I was by that time feeling like Deborah Kerr in a picture show.

  Meanwhile, as fall came on
, June spent more and more time staring out the kitchen window as the flocks of finches and a couple of cardinals waited their turns at the dozen or so of our mother’s feeders she kept filled. After school, she settled herself at the kitchen table to watch the birds, as if they were children at play, always on the brink of peril. Once or twice I sat down with my sister at her post, wanting to lay my burden at her feet; but when she turned to look at me, something in the intentness of that look, a kind of surveillance, as if I were a bird too, put me off.

  One September morning I came up behind her. There was a slight breeze rattling the pods on the mimosa out back. The sun was streaming into the room, showing up the veil of dust and cobwebs over everything.

  “Which ones are you looking at?” I asked my sister. It was not the question I wanted to ask.

  June quickly lowered the binoculars, as if she’d been caught doing something illicit. “The finches. There’s got to be twenty of them out there.” She handed me the binoculars.

  I put them to my eyes. There seemed to be a film over everything; I could make out only shapes and colors, flashes of yellow. I wondered if this partial blindness were a symptom of pregnancy. I handed the binoculars back to my sister and turned away, not wanting her to see my eyes.

  This was the moment June might have looked up and seen that I was crying and asked what was wrong. But she didn’t. Instead she said she was sick and tired of me and my shenanigans. Chasing after not one boy but two, leaving her to do all the cooking and cleaning. No wonder the house was a mess, the laundry piled to the sky. No wonder I couldn’t see what was right in front of my eyes. She took back the binoculars and put them to her own eyes.

  That night she came into my room to borrow an extra pillow, at least so she later said. I was dead asleep on my back, allowing her to make out my little pouch of a belly up against the streetlight outside the window. I woke up when I felt her touch my midsection and press down hard, as if I were a melon she was testing.

  “You haven’t had a period in three months,” she said.

  I just looked at her like a dumb animal.

  She fumbled for the light, which blinded me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Thought you’d tell Dad.”

  “You thought right,” she said.

  THE BOYS WERE dispatched to boarding schools. Daniel went to McCallie’s Academy at the top of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. George went to a place in northern Virginia, a military school that shipped its students off to West Point or VMI, clipped and empty-eyed, when they graduated.

  I was the bigger problem. I wouldn’t say who of the two was the father. Shockingly, I said I didn’t know. Dad wept at this disclosure; he’d spent his whole life making a reputation in this town and Big Holly before him. How was he ever going to hold up his head again? His shame blew over me like a cold wind. Intent on my plots and plans, I hadn’t thought about shame; I hadn’t thought about the whispers and sneers, I hadn’t thought about my father or sister, especially my sister, what she would have to endure at school.

  Dad called Frances, who said, he informed me, that she wasn’t the least bit surprised I’d ended up in this fix, but she knew of a place for unwed mothers run by nuns. It was all a matter of money; surely Dad had his pension to draw on. Frances said I could stay with her if I wanted, but Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows might be a better place for me once I got further along.

  So I became one of the girls who went away. The previous year it had been Mary Love Bryan. It was October; she’d just been selected homecoming queen and was scheduled to ride in the Azalea Festival the following spring. Unlike me, Mary Love was popular and astonishingly beautiful; she had a father and a mother, her life was nothing but golden. It was said she went to live with relatives, but the next fall she was back at Opelika High, her pretty face now etched by the bone underneath, eyes more deeply hinged in their sockets, wisps of shadow underneath. The girls steered clear of Mary Love, the boys tried to date her on the premise she was easy. Teachers approached her with caution. After a while, she stopped washing her hair. One day she disappeared for good. It was a week before anyone noticed.

  I GAVE BIRTH at Charity Hospital, on Tulane Street. I was alone except for the doctor and a nurse who smelled of fried onions. When my baby finally emerged after a day and night of hard labor, after hours of my begging for mercy (Get it out, get the damn thing out!), somebody slapped a gas mask over my face, but not before I had the sensation, in that instant, that I was expelling an enormous fish, and with it some unnamed but vital organ. It was then that I was forever lost to the girl I once was, the moment my baby girl landed hard on that cold metal operating table, kicking and squalling, slick with her mother’s sin.

  When I woke up, the doctor was peering at his watch. He yawned. “February 14, 10:43 A.M.”

  “Valentine’s Day,” the nurse said and wrote it down.

  Outside, there was a single clap of thunder, then an abrupt downpour, and my baby and I were rinsed in the sweet smell of rain.

  10

  Frances

  AFTER HOLLY CALLED, I SAT DOWN AT MY KITCHEN TABLE and worked it all out in my head: Grace could go back home like nothing had happened and I would get to keep it. It would take the place of the lost one, except that I would be its mother; it would be mine.

  I would tell everyone that it was from far away, Florida maybe. I would say I wasn’t getting any younger and there being no husband on the horizon (nor would there ever be, they’d be thinking), I’d decided to give a sweet orphan baby a good and decent home, a child to take care of me in my old age. No one would have to know it was my own flesh and blood, the child of my unfortunate niece.

  For her time, I would send Grace to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows down on Napoleon, which, despite the inescapable fact that it was a home for unwed mothers, was a good school too, well, not really good, but decent, considering it was for delinquent girls. Holly would have to help out, but we would manage.

  And what if Grace didn’t want to go stay with the nuns, what if she were embarrassed? I’d thought of that too. If she felt that way (as well she should; her behavior was beyond the pale), she could just stay home with me. I could help her keep up her lessons. And why not? I’m a teacher of high school English and social studies. I know my semicolons and branches of government. I can quote you William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott from now until doomsday, not to speak of being able to recite in my sleep the number one agricultural export of each and every country in the western hemisphere. For the arithmetic, I can get her tutored and, together, we’ll just have to do our best with the science. How hard can tenth-grade science be? Photosynthesis isn’t exactly rocket science. She can do her homework during the day while I’m at school; then I’ll teach her at night and on the weekends. Nobody drops by anymore but Jehovah’s Witnesses or some children looking for spare change for a snowball, but if someone should, I’ll just shut her up in the bedroom and nobody will be the wiser.

  And yes, of course she’ll have her own bedroom, even if I have to move out my school things and out-of-season clothing. She’ll have a decent time of it; I wouldn’t think of shaming her, though I don’t condone what she did for one single minute, and I’m sure I don’t know the half of it, Holly being so tight-lipped and all and my poor sister six feet under.

  Make no mistake. My niece will have the best of everything. No expense will be spared. I’ll take her to the doctor for checkups and make sure she takes her vitamins. I’ll cook her my good chicken and dumplings and make her eat her collards for the iron and carrots for the eyes, drink plenty of milk for the bones. She’ll be healthy as a horse, and the baby will come out fat, with those scrumptious leg rolls you want to pinch hard, too hard, which I’ll of course never ever do.

  Afterward, Grace and I will have a special bond. In the summers she can come to visit it, maybe take care of it while I go on vacation to some faraway place. (After all, the world is getting smaller by the day, and I’m not getting any younger.) Maybe
one day, after she gets a good job thanks to me, she’ll be so grateful she’ll want to treat me to a really nice getaway. I’ll finally get to go to Greece, the way I’ve always wanted, and island-hop.

  I ask you, what could be more perfect?

  11

  Grace

  YOU SEE, IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME I’D HAVE TO GIVE UP my own child, leave it behind the way people leave a puppy at the side of the road. That came later, after Frances explained to me and Dad how she was going to take it, how I could see it whenever I wanted. How I could babysit it during holidays and summers so she could travel. She spoke like a schoolteacher giving out a lesson, explaining her plan down to the most particular detail. She showed us the room it would sleep in, where she was going to place the crib. The rocking chair would go in the corner next to the window so that she could look out on her bougainvillea while she rocked it to sleep. She’d bought a Dr. Spock book, which she waved in my face.

  She told it like you’d tell a good mystery story, scary in the middle but with a happy ending, with her, Frances the Sainted Aunt, coming to the rescue in the nick of time, saving my Future by swooping up my baby and carrying it off.

  I wondered what my mother would think of the plan Dad and Frances had hatched, what my mother would have done. Would she have taken me to that backwoods butcher? Or would she have figured out another way, not wanting to be as careless with my life as she’d been with her own? What a relief it would have been for me to hand her my body’s betrayal and say, Here, take this. I liked to think she would have taken my part, made things right somehow. I liked to think she wouldn’t have looked at me the way the rest of them did.

  Dad’s eyes lit up. “If it’s a boy, I’ll teach it to catch.”

  “Yes, it will need a male presence in its life,” Frances said quietly. “It will need you in its life.”

  So all was decided. I would give away my baby and keep it too. After all was said and done, I’d go back home to Opelika and have a regular life, go back to being a regular girl, despite the obvious fact I had never been one to begin with. Meanwhile, I would stay with Frances, or, if I’d rather, go lock myself up in a nunnery.