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I let it slip just once, in one of those desperate moments when I saw my own fear mirrored in the eyes of one of my students. Charlotte Mason. I wonder where she is now. I wonder what decision she made back then.
It was just a hunch on my part. I mean, I would have bet the farm that she was pregnant when she showed up at my classroom that day, but I don’t have any solid proof to back that theory up. She started cutting class, her grades took a nosedive, she dropped her friends and she quit the dance club. The girl who was so conscientious and eager was morphing into a distracted mess right in front of my eyes. Having undergone that same transformation myself, I knew the signs all too well.
I never saw her again. She was gone, sent to live with family up in northern Michigan from what Mr. Vargas told me. She was a sweet kid and a great dancer, one of the best to walk into my tryouts. I don’t think I did right by her. I didn’t do enough. Northern Michigan—I shiver at the thought of it.
“It’s too damn cold here,” I tell him. “This is nothing like our spot.”
This river flows the same as the Eno, but even in the winter months that followed after Damien left, when I went out there just to think and to remember, it never seemed as icy and bleak and this place. It’s late spring, but I still can’t imagine a crappie or any other fish surviving in this frigid water.Crappies. Saying it still brings a smile to my face.
“Maybe I should move to a warmer climate. Frannie is still in North Carolina and she has a beach house out in Nags Head. Did I tell you I went there last summer to meet up with the girls? It was the first time I’d seen them in nearly a decade.”
He got along with Frannie and Reese, and they liked him too. I can still picture him blushing when Reese would let out with some lewd joke. She was, and still is, a badass. I bet we all would have stayed close if things had turned out differently. It’s kind of amazing to me that we’re still in touch at all. I pretty much morphed into a zombie junior year. I made a slow recovery senior year but was nowhere back to my old self.
The girls knew Damien died overseas. Frannie actually found out before I did. But they didn’t know the rest. They didn’t know I spent the following summer in our off-campus apartment alone, riding out the last trimester of my pregnancy. I never told them that I was scared out of my mind when my water broke, or that I called a cab to take me to the hospital. They don’t know that I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, or that I handed her over to two strangers the next day.
I lied to them every time they asked me if I wanted to talk in those days and weeks right after Damien shipped out, lied to them every morning when I was sick, and then lied when I wore loose shirts and flowy sundresses towards the end of the spring semester. They knew something was very wrong, but they chalked it up to the loss of Damien.
I heard Reese comment to Frannie once, something about the two of us only being together for a few weeks and how my reaction was, in her opinion,beyond.But I couldn’t even get angry because she didn’t know the half of what I’d lost.
What I gave away.
“Reese has four kids now, can you believe that? I always pictured Frannie as the mother figure...Reese, not so much. Four boys and they look like hell raisers.” I smile my same heavy smile when I think of Damien. “You would have been a great father.”
There’s no doubt in my mind about that, and it hits like an arrow to the heart whenever I let my mind go there.
I picture my little girl at around age four of five, like Skylar and Leo’s Olivia. Ink black hair that’s grown halfway down her back, following her dad around and askingWhy?every time Damien pauses to do some part of his elaborate campsite set-up routine.
He’d explain every step with patience, and with an intensity that tells her that survival skills are something his little girl should learn, no different from a little boy. I picture her standing beside him on the bank of the river as Damien teaches her to cast off the way he taught me. I picture her sitting on his lap near the campfire as I tackle the one task where my skills exceed her father’s: making s’mores. And then I picture myself leaning over, my daughter laughing as I kiss a wayward bit of melted chocolate that’s landed on her cheek.
I’ve pictured her at every age, on every single one of her birthdays and on the days in between. I’ve spent countless hours daydreaming of holding her in my arms as an infant. That tuft of black hair on her little head, her rosy puckered lips, the eyes so much like her father’s that I wept whenever she opened them that day.
What is she like now? It’s a question I ask myself so often.
She turned fourteen in August. I try not to think of myself at that age, but it’s hard. I was a hot mess at fourteen. Reeling from my parents’ divorce, I doubted everything I did, said, wore, and even thought. Older and wiser, with years to observe that same kind of emotional turmoil in the students I serve, now I can cut myself a break, tell myself I did the best I could whenever I get stuck in the memories of that time in my life.
You’re too hard on yourself, Grace.
“And you’re too easy on me, Damien.”
He always built me up, reworked my past so I’d think of myself as a resilient person who came through a tough time on top. A fighter. I wonder sometimes, does he hate me for not fighting when it came to her?
To ease the ache in my heart, I picture her smiling, surrounded by friends and making her way through high school with her head held high.
God, I hope she’s faring better than I did. I hope she’s confident, outspoken, and that she stands up for herself. I pray that she’s been well cared for. The couple I only met through pictures and a bio that was written like a sales pitch, I pray every single day that they’re good to her.
Chapter Nineteen
Grace
“We’re having a party next Saturday and you have to come. Jack too, of course.”
I haven’t told anyone about the break-up. It’s only been a few days so I’m not about to go beating myself up over my lack of transparency. This lie of omission is nothing like the others.
“What’s the occasion?” I ask Skylar.
“Well, I just finished my first year as a gainfully employed, bona fide kindergarten teacher and I survived. I’d say that’s reason enough to celebrate.”
“It definitely is. I’m thinking you more than just survived it, though.”
