I tried not to let the desperation get the best of me, too afraid of what I might do if it did. I tried hard to keep busy, taking on extra shifts at the hospital, working overtime because being at home, alone, threw me easily off balance and I didn’t like the feeling of being off balance, of being desperate, of feeling like I was losing control.
My home, Aaron’s and my utopian cottage, quickly became a dystopia to me, a place where everything was undesirable and sad, and where I was in a constant state of dysphoria; I couldn’t stand to be there and so I took to keeping myself out of the home all day, every day, doing everything imaginable to avoid the pine floors and whitewashed walls, the glorious tree swing that had once deceived me into believing this place was home.
I spent ten hours a day reading through patient files, trying to decipher what they were to be billed for and entering it into the hospital’s system. It was meaningless and mundane, and yet a wonderful way to waste time. I took odd jobs on occasion, answering ads for a temporary cleaning lady or a dog walker or a driver to take a sweet elderly woman for dialysis treatments, keeping her company for the four hours it took to eliminate waste from her blood three times each week. It kept me busy and more than anything, I needed to be busy.
Time passed.
Last week I came home to find a separation agreement in a manila envelope, set beside the front door. In it, Aaron left me the house and all of our assets, taking from me only the debt, as much as he could anyway, the credit cards that were in both of our names.
Even in divorce he was protecting me.
I signed the paperwork post-haste, knowing that the sooner I did, the sooner the divorce was complete, I could ask for donor sperm without Aaron’s consent.
In the meantime, I did everything I could to keep busy, knowing it would take months, nearly six of them, until the divorce was finalized.
Could I wait that long for a baby?
Oh, how I would try.
But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Because the minute the well ran dry and I found myself with nothing better to do, I drove by the quaint dance studio on Church Street and sat on the park bench, watching the little ballerinas come and go, and it was different now because I hadn’t been there in months, since springtime, but everything was still the same. The bigger girls scurried out of the studio first, followed by their mothers, who carried coffee and talked.
And then, just when I’d begun to think that was it, the end of the procession, there came little Olivia with her short legs lagging behind, waylaid by things like heavy doors and sidewalk cracks, struggling to keep up. Her hair had been cut short, no longer in a bun but pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes. She was still easily distracted, that I’d come to learn, sidetracked by things like birds and bugs and today a leaf, bright red on the white concrete, the first indication of fall.
She paused to poke and prod at it as if it were alive, examining the redness of the leaf, the shape of its lobes, while the others gravitated away at their own pace so that the distance between them grew exponentially, and this time, Olivia’s mother was too caught up in her conversation that she didn’t see her daughter on her haunches, examining the leaf with the concentration and single-mindedness of a microbiologist. The woman’s feet hit the street and she crossed the intersection, unaware of the fact that she and her child were now separated by a highway, the very same highway that once took a little girl’s life when her mother was also not watching.
Some women were not meant to be mothers.
And some who were, some who would make the very best mothers, were refused the right.
It didn’t seem fair.
Oh, what a good mother I would be, if only the universe would let me.
Suddenly Olivia’s eyes peered up from the fallen leaf and, at seeing that she was alone, she began to cry. It was a process that went by degrees, a feeling of excitement first at finding the leaf, followed by frustration that there was no one around to show the leaf to, before sadness crept in, a great heartache that the others had left without her, leading to panic. Sheer panic. Olivia gasped first, choking unexpectedly on her own saliva, and then she began to cry, quiet tears, choked-up tears, while her little knees shook beneath their shiny white tights.
I’d be remiss to say that a series of thoughts didn’t move swiftly through my mind.
How would I hide her?
Where would we go?
What would I call her? Because surely if she was a missing child, she couldn’t parade around town as Olivia still. She’d have to be something else.
I leaned forward from the bench to lift the leaf from the concrete and asked if she ever collected leaves and pressed them between the pages of a heavy book. The sound of my voice, the sight of her leaf in my hand, gave her pause. Her eyes rose from the earth and landed on my smile, and for a moment there was a cessation of tears as I extended the leaf toward her and she took it from me with a shaky hand.
I rationalized in my mind that it would be Aaron’s fault if I took the child—not mine, no, not ever mine—because that was the name of the game these days: blame.
If only he had shown up at the fertility clinic...
If only he hadn’t walked out of my life...
He and I still would have a chance at our own child.
I wouldn’t have had to take one that wasn’t mine.
“Why are you crying?” I asked, though of course I knew the reason why. I remained seated, not wanting to scare her by standing tall and towering over her small frame. Outside, the temperatures were dropping again, fall drawing near. Soon the tourists would leave. On her arms there were goose bumps as loose strands of dishwater hair clung to the puddles of tears.
“Where’s Mommy?” she asked, eyes searching the street. But only I heard it in the distance: the sound of girls’ laughter over the sound of the wind. Olivia didn’t hear.
Through the trees I could barely make out the red sleeve of a cardigan, the pink of a tutu, a length of brown hair.
“You lost your mommy?” I asked and, extending my own hand to hers, said, “Would you like for me to help you find her? Would you like for me to help you find your mother?
“It’s okay,” I said when she hesitated. “I won’t hurt you.”
It would be a lie to say she took my hand with ease, that she didn’t stare at it for a minute, overthinking, some disquisition about not talking to strangers coursing through her mind.
But then she did take my hand, slipping it inside. It was a great shock to my system to feel this small, soft hand within mine, and it was all I could do not to squeeze tight with instinct, knowing that might make her scream. I didn’t want Olivia to scream. I didn’t want to scare her, but more so, I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. For all intents and purposes, this was how it should be. I was hers and she was mine.
And then I began to lead her in the opposite direction of where her mother had disappeared. The direction of my car.
Olivia stopped, peering the other way over her shoulder—even a young girl could remember which way her mother had last been walking—but I said to her not to worry, that if we took the car we might find her mother more quickly than if we walked.
I pointed to my car in the distance. “It’s right there,” I said.
She thought about this a moment, standing frozen on the pavement, hemming and hawing, eyes moving back and forth from me to the car. A band of clouds had rolled in, blocking the earth from the sun, and as it did, the wind picked up its speed, chasing the warm day away. Outside, the temperature dropped by as many as five degrees and the day turned gray.
Fall was coming; fall was here.
“Well, that’s okay,” I said then, letting go of her hand. “If you don’t want to find your mother, we don’t need to,” and it was reverse psychology, of course, making her believe that if she didn’t get in the car with me, I might just leave her behind.
I didn’t want to scare her, and yet there was no other way.