She had a name now. Olivia.
But Olivia’s mother was fully immersed in a conversation with the ladies, listening to one of the other mothers complain about her husband’s long hours and relentless travel schedule. He was in Tampa Bay this week on business, and that new admin assistant from the office had gone along too, the one her husband talked about at the dinner table, so that she couldn’t help but be concerned.
“You don’t think?” asked one of the other ladies, and Olivia’s mother piped in with “Oh, you poor thing.”
And it was decided then. This woman’s husband was having an affair.
Through all this, no one paid attention to Olivia, who had fallen even farther behind.
I had no intent of rising from the park bench as she passed by. None at all. The thought didn’t cross my mind until a single bobby pin fell from her hair, a silver sprung hairpin that dropped to the ground at such a frequency only I could hear. Little Olivia kept walking, leaving the hairpin behind. Her mother kept walking, now nearly twenty or thirty paces ahead. Only I paused to retrieve the hairpin, falling in line behind Olivia and the rest of her troupe, six steps behind and struck dumb.
I couldn’t speak.
I could have called her by name; I could have tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the bobby pin. But I didn’t. Instead I shadowed her by a mere three feet, eyes gaping at the lavender leotard and tutu, the sheer white tights, the hair done up in a bun, starting to lose its hold as strands of brown and yellow drifted through the springlike air. Beside our feet, the snow had melted, leaving puddles that returning birds paused to drink from. On the trees there were buds, tiny shamrock-green buds about to burst forth with leaves.
I never once thought about taking her, about grabbing a hold of her with my hand pressed to her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream. I didn’t think of luring her away, bewitching her with the promise of a puppy or ice cream. I only wanted to watch for a while, to walk a breath behind and pretend for just this one moment in time that she was mine.
As I followed Olivia down the sidewalk, a conversation played out in my mind.
Slow down, baby girl, I thought to myself, whispering the words in my head. Come hold Mama’s hand, I urged, and in my imaginings I held out my hand as little Olivia slackened a bit, slowing down, turning to me so I could see the color of her eyes, the wealth of freckles she’d no doubt one day either outgrow or grow to hate. She slipped her hand inside mine and I squeezed tight, careful not to let go as we passed through an intersection while the traffic on either side paused to let us through. Olivia’s hand was easy to hold. Her steps fell into sync with mine.
It was the raucous laughter of the other girls that broke my trance, bringing me back to the earth, back to my physical existence. To reality. They had all turned at once, calling Olivia a snail, a slowpoke, waiting for her to catch up so they could go get ice-cream cones, and even though I knew it was all in jest—Olivia’s piping laughter was proof of this, no?—my heart ached for her for being called names, for being the poky little puppy, always lagging behind.
And then my heart ached for me when she skipped off with her friends, leaving me behind, standing alone on the sidewalk with her bobby pin in my hand.
I hoped that just once she would turn and see me and know that I was there.
I kept Olivia’s bobby pin as a token of luck.
Ten days later, my period arrived.
And now another month has come and gone without a baby.
jessie
My nighttime thoughts can be grouped into four categories. They follow the same pattern, the same predictable rotation each night. Wash, rinse, dry, repeat.
It all begins with the morbid thoughts where I obsess over death and dying, of being dead, trapped inside an urn, unable to breathe. They settle in around twilight, when the sun sinks beneath the horizon, slipping away to play with kids on the other side of the world. It’s then that I start to wonder how much time I have left on earth. I think about how and when I will die. Will it hurt when I die? Did it hurt when Mom died?
These morbid thoughts soon mutate into grieving, sinking ones where I miss Mom so much it hurts. By this point in the night, the world has turned black and I lie on my mattress in a black room, confined by blackness. A prisoner of the night. In all my life, it was always Mom and me, like Batman and Robin, Lucy and Ethel. Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. We were a team. Without her I don’t know what to do. I spend half the night pleading for her back. Because I don’t know who I am without her. Because, without her, I am nothing.
I don’t cry about it because my eyes are done crying. They’ve dried up. And so instead I think things like, if Mom isn’t here, then I don’t want to be here either. It’s grim, and yet it’s true.
My thoughts go on like this for what feels like hours because it probably is. Eventually they turn into a guilt trip, where I loathe myself for sleeping through Mom’s death. For getting testy with her when she puked for the sixth time in a row, missing the toilet by a mile. For not speaking to her for weeks when she wouldn’t come clean to me about my dad. For not holding her hand the time she chaperoned my fifth grade field trip to the planetarium, or bothering to thank her for the embroidery thread she got me in middle school—a half dozen colors to make friendship bracelets with. I’d only huffed and stomped off to another room, thinking how stupid could she be. Didn’t she know I didn’t have any friends? These memories haunt me now.
In truth, Mom and I hardly fought. The only arguments she and I ever had were mostly over my father. Mom never wanted to talk about him—she refused to talk about him—and so I snuck around her back to try and learn more.
I was six years old when I first realized I didn’t have a father. Until then I was too oblivious to see that other kids did and I didn’t. Mom and I lived alone. We kept to ourselves much of the time. I didn’t go to preschool and I didn’t have friends. I didn’t know much of anything outside of my world with Mom, not until school began, and then my world grew exponentially larger, though still, in comparison to everyone else’s, it was small.
It was my first day of kindergarten when I realized that all of the kids in the class, aside from me, had both a mom and a dad. I remember that day, organizing our belongings inside the bulky metal cubbyholes, while our moms hovered in the classroom, talking to the teacher, talking to other moms. Everyone except for my mom, because she stood there alone, talking to no one. This confused me. Why didn’t Mom talk to the other women?
But what confused me even more was the huddle of men in the classroom. A whole busload of them. Not just moms, but moms and men. Who were these men, and what were they doing here?
I asked one little girl. I pointed at the giant of a man standing by her side. Who is that? I asked, eyes wide, looking skyward. She said it was her dad, and though I’d heard that word before, it wasn’t one that was readily in my vocabulary.
I tallied up the men in the room, realizing that every single child had one but me.
The mention of my father didn’t come up again until later in the school year, when some kid asked where he was. We’d had a music performance and, while everyone else had a mom and dad in tow—grandma and grandpa too—I only had Mom. And things like that, when you’re six, are big news. How Jessie Sloane doesn’t have a dad.
Where’s your dad? the kid asked, all dressed up in a sweater-vest and pants.
I don’t have one, I said, thinking that was the end of it. But he came back with some comment about how everyone has a dad, and others started to laugh.