“I didn’t realize you’re—”
“Definitely gay,” Alice says. “But that’s not the point. The point is, that guy didn’t want to be a dad, and I didn’t want to have him in my life forever, and I was in the middle of undergrad at Stanford, and . . . all signs pointed to abortion. Except that I really wanted to have the baby. I was a lesbian, feminist scientist, but deep down, I knew I’d also always wanted kids. Anyway, I ended up convincing myself I wasn’t ready but by then I was pretty far along. I lined up a family to adopt the baby, and I made excuses not to go home on breaks. When my son was born, I handed him over, and I never told my family he existed.”
I shake my head. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the reason I kept it from everyone wasn’t that I thought they’d be disappointed in me. It was because my heart was broken. I know now I was suffering from postpartum depression, but that wasn’t all. I regretted my decision. And I can tell myself that my baby was better off with parents who were adults, who had steady income—he probably was—but there’s no way for me to ever know that for sure.”
Alice takes a shuddering breath, and her voice tightens. “I’ve regretted my decision for thirteen years now. Nothing has ever hurt me like the fear that I’d made the wrong choice for my kid. And sometimes, we don’t talk about things because we don’t want to be comforted. We don’t want anyone to tell us it wasn’t our fault, or that they forgive us, or that we did the best we could. We want to hold on to that pain because we think that’s what we deserve. We worry that if we let it go, we’re dishonoring it. And, when I look at you . . .” She presses her fingertips over her mouth, bobbing her head as she fights back tears.
I don’t want to comfort her. I want her to cry. I want her to cry like I’ve cried, like I want my birth mother to cry. It scares me how I feel, now that the anxiety has faded: furious, boiling, explosive.
“You have to understand her,” Alice whispers.
“She could’ve helped me,” I say. “She could’ve helped me, and she didn’t.”
“Hey, honey!” Mom’s voice comes over the phone bubbly and excited, which only upsets me more. “We were just missing you!”
It takes me a second to steady myself as I pace along the patio behind Megan’s room. “I know,” I choke out.
“What?”
“I know about the accident.”
A long exhale follows the silence. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I’m so frustrated that all I can do is laugh. “You’ve known the whole time. Why I was having the nightmares, why I was afraid of the dark, why I was having panic attacks. At any point in the last fifteen years you could’ve helped me, but you were so worried I’d find out it was your fault that you just let me suffer. You could’ve taken the suffering away, and you didn’t.”
“You don’t understand,” she pleads. “I was trying to protect you from unnecessary pain—”
“Protect me?” I shriek. “Why even bother sticking me in counseling if you weren’t going to tell me what was causing my problems?”
“I didn’t know if the accident had anything to do with it!” she says, voice shaking. “Your counselors were all so sure it was about—”
“God, I’m the only person who’s not entitled to know anything about my life, aren’t I?”
“Natalie, that’s not fair. I’m your mother. It’s my job to—”
“To lie to me? Admit it, Mom, you were protecting yourself. ”
“Baby, please,” she whispers. “You don’t understand. I thought about telling you, a million times, but I didn’t want to make you relive it if it wasn’t going to help you. The EMDR—it worked. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think you needed to know—”
“Stop trying to justify yourself.”
“Natalie, I’m your mother!”
“I don’t have a mother,” I scream.
I can’t do this, can’t finish this conversation. My mind is swimming. My breathing is spastic. The weight pushes down on my chest again. I hang up and throw my phone toward the woods. Almost immediately, it starts ringing from the brush where it lands.
Sheryl Crow’s and Stevie Nicks’s voices slow to a warbling as my mind spins, my lungs heave, and my vision splotches. The moment I realize I can’t feel my legs, the darkness surrounds me.
28
“There once was a man named Abraham, and God spoke to him freely,” Grandmother says.
“Like you talk to me,” I say.
“Sort of like that,” Grandmother says. “Maybe more like Megan and God talk, in quiet thoughts and deep, intense feelings. Anyway, they talked all the time, and Abraham knew God’s voice so well that when God spoke, he heard him precisely. And Abraham knew God’s heart so well that when God told him to do something, he trusted him implicitly, like a child trusts a parent before she realizes adults can fail.”
It hurts to think about.