“But no,” I say decisively, rising to my feet again and beginning to pace. Why would Mom do that? Why in the world would Mom steal the identity of a girl who had died and give it to me? “Why?” I ask out loud, though the answer slowly dawns on me, that if Mom went around passing me off as a dead girl, then no one would know she had stolen another child’s identity. Because that child was dead.
I watch as Liam grabs for a laptop on the coffee table and types quick, harried words into it. He moves from his chair and comes to me and together we stare at the words on the screen. There’s a whole word for it, he tells me. “Ghosting. Thieves open bank accounts and credit cards using a dead person’s social security number,” he says. “They pore over obituaries to see who’s died, and then rack up thousands of dollars of debt in some stiff’s name.”
“But why?” I ask dumbly, though I’m not that dumb. I just can’t wrap my head around it. People do this kind of thing for financial gain, but Mom and I were never rich. We weren’t living a life of riches. We lived paycheck to paycheck.
Besides, Mom would never do anything to harm someone; she would never steal.
There has to be more to it than that.
If—and that’s a big if—she took the identity of a dead child and gave it to me, then it was for some other reason than financial gain. But what? I can’t even begin to guess.
I swallow the last of my Coke. It’s like rubbing salt in an open wound. The pain in my chest gets worse so that I cough and, as I do, all I can think of is corroded pipes, the lining of my esophagus plugged up and rusty.
I let an idea dwell for a short time, and then quickly expunge it from my mind.
Find yourself, Mom told me. One of two wishes she had for me before she died.
Maybe she didn’t mean for me to apply to college. Maybe it was far less esoteric than that. Maybe it was quite literal.
Find yourself, she said, because Jessie Sloane isn’t you.
eden
May 28, 1997 Egg Harbor
As spring ripens into summer, tourists reappear. The town comes to life with a certain vivacity that was missing during the dismal days of winter. Trees burgeon, flowers bloom.
Miranda and her three boys appear like magic at my front door each day that I’m not working—and often, I’d venture to guess, when I am—toting blueberry loaves and apple pies.
As the boys play in the tree swing (that by now was meant to hold my own child, the two of us nestled snugly together, he or she on the seat of my lap, weightless and grinning as we lift off from the ground and take flight), Miranda and I sip lemonade. As always she sells short the joys of marriage and motherhood, while little Carter crawls on the lawn before us on all fours, eating dirt. She complains about everything from what a jerk her husband, Joe, can be—coming home late from work, missing dinner, not helping with the boys’ bedtime routine—to the monotony of her days, to the amount of food three growing boys consume. She can never keep the cabinets fully stocked, she tells me, because the minute she buys it they eat it all, which leads into an onslaught on the difficulties of grocery shopping with three boys, and she describes it for me: the poking and the prodding of each other, the name-calling—birdbrain, imbecile, idiot—the running off headlong down the market’s aisles, bumping into strangers, begging and crying for things that Miranda has already said no to, trying to sneak it past her and into the basket, screaming and calling her names when she snatches it out of their dirty hands and returns it to the store shelf.
“That must be so difficult,” I say, trying my hardest to sound empathetic, but when Miranda replies with “You have no idea, Eden. Can you even grasp how lucky you are, getting to grocery shop alone?” it’s all I can do not to scream.
I would give life and limb to grocery shop with a child.
Miranda doesn’t bother asking how the fertility treatments are going, though just last night Aaron and I made the decision to give in vitro fertilization a try. Or rather, I should say, I made the decision to give in vitro a try. The cost of it is extortionate, thousands of dollars for a single cycle, for Dr. Landry to go inside one time and pluck an egg or two from my ovaries to combine with Aaron’s sperm, making an embryo, a baby, in a culture dish. As one grows bacteria. It seems scientific, synthetic, and yet there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for a child.
I know this now.
But Aaron isn’t so sure. As we stood in the kitchen last night, both of us speaking in acerbic tones, he calculated the costs we’ve paid over the year, all the pelvic ultrasounds and semen analyses, the Clomid cycles, the trigger shots, intrauterine insemination. The grand total tallied up to some ten thousand dollars already spent trying to create a child, an expenditure that will nearly double with one single cycle of IVF. Aaron and I don’t have this kind of money. He reminds me of this relentlessly, as he reminds me how happy we used to be before we ever made the decision to start a family, and I have this vague recollection of a couple, a man and a woman—as if in another life—sitting on a dock, holding hands, watching sailboats float by on a bay.
“I think we should stop, Eden,” he said, trying hard to reach out to me but I pulled away. “I think we should be happy with what we have.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, up in arms. What did we possibly have without a baby?
“Us,” he said, looking sad. “You and me. That’s what we have.”
I wouldn’t be deterred.
“We will do this,” I told him of the in vitro fertilization. Hands on hips, my expression flat. An imperial fiat.
I left the room so it couldn’t be further discussed.
I’ve taken out three credit cards in my own name, and charge each appointment with Dr. Landry to them in sequence. Never are we able to pay more than the minimum payment for each. The interest fees soar monthly as the cottage degenerates bit by bit. The furnace went out; we need to replace the plumbing throughout the entire home before the decades-old steel pipes wear out for good. The windows are drafty; they too need to be replaced before another winter comes or we’ll spend an arm and a leg to heat the home, watching our money quite literally go out the window.
But each of these plays second fiddle to making a baby.
Aaron and I argue daily about money. The cost of groceries, the cost of clothes.
What concessions can we make so that we can save more for a baby?
Do we really need two cars, cable TV, a new pair of shoes?
“This is ridiculous,” Aaron says as he holds up a shoe, the outsole flapping loose like a hangnail. “I can’t go to work like this.” And yet I argue with him, claiming he’s being extravagant by not making do with the shoe. “Surely you can get another month out of those shoes,” I say, suggesting he use some glue, though it isn’t about the shoe, but rather what the hundred dollars for another pair of shoes will buy. An appointment with Dr. Landry, a hormone shot, a month’s worth of Clomid.
But Aaron swears he needs the shoe, which inside makes me fume.
How selfish can he be? Where are his priorities?
At each unwelcome visit, when Miranda and her boys appear at my door without invitation, her belly continues to swell, another baby on the way, “Hopefully a girl this time,” she says, fingers laced together in the air.
If Aaron and I hurry up, she reminds me for the umpteenth time, joining me in the backyard for another glass of lemonade, her baby and my baby can one day go to school together. They can be friends.
I smile.
And though I don’t say it aloud, I think to myself that I’d rather die than have my baby and Miranda’s baby be friends.
June 13, 1997 Egg Harbor
The hollyhocks are in bloom. Just the sight of them lined up defiantly against the weathered picket fence stabs me in the chest. They stand high above the rest of the flowers in the garden, six feet tall or more. Their bold bell-shaped flowers burn red against the greenery.
It’s been a year then since Aaron and I planted the seedlings in the lawn against the fence where they’d be sheltered from the rain and the wind. And now here they are, exhibitionists in my flower bed, outshining the roses and lilies.