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Complicated. What a totally unsatisfying word. It was a politician’s word.
“There were your exams, your senior paper. Then graduation crept up on us,” Christina continued, holding up her hands plaintively. “I didn’t want any of your special things to get overshadowed by this news.”
“Were you going to tell me before it was born?”
Reasonably, Christina looked hurt. “I was going to tell you this weekend.”
“Do you know what kind it is?”
“You mean a boy or a girl?”
Carmen nodded.
“No. We want to wait to find out when the baby is born.”
Carmen nodded again, knowing as she did that this baby would be a girl. It just had to be.
“So I guess it’s due around…” Carmen had already calculated the baby would have to be born near her own birthday, but she left the space open for her mother to fill.
“Around the end of September,” Christina supplied slowly, the look of dread intensifying.
Carmen knew, intellectually, that this was happy news on a lot of levels. Christina had a whole new life ahead of her. From about seventh grade onward, Carmen had feared the day she’d leave for college. She imagined she’d be leaving her single mother alone to defrost food and eat by herself night after night. Instead, this September, she’d be leaving a happy couple bursting with a new baby.
And besides, Carmen was finally getting the sibling she had always professed to want. If she were a big and good person, she would be able to feel and appreciate this happiness. She would be able to congratulate and even hug her mother. But she wasn’t a big or good person. She’d dashed too many such opportunities not to know the truth about herself.
“It’s kind of convenient, in a way,” Carmen stated, sounding robotic, like she didn’t much care. “Because you can just use my room for the nursery, right? I’ll be going just before the baby comes. Good planning.”
The corners of Christina’s mouth quivered. “It wasn’t good planning. It wasn’t planned like this.”
“And you can even combine birthday parties. What a funny coincidence.”
“Carmen, I don’t think it’s funny.” Christina’s gaze was earnest and unwavering. “I think it’s serious, and I know you must have a lot of complicated feelings about it.”
Carmen looked away. She knew she was being spooky. She could tell by the worry in her mother’s eyes. Carmen was well known to whine and complain and lash out destructively. Christina’s posture, much like that of a person girded for the arrival of a hurricane, indicated that she was ready for just such a lashing.
Carmen didn’t want to give her mother anything, not even that.
Yes, Carmen did have feelings, and they were damming up behind her face, generating a mammoth pressure somewhere around the back of her eyes. Carmen was afraid her face might explode if she had too many more of those feelings just now.
Silently she handed her mother her vitamins and stood to leave. Earlier she’d debated telling her mother that they’d fallen in the toilet, but as she strode out of the room she figured she would just let her mother go ahead and eat them.
Carmen hated herself right now, but she hated her mother a little bit more.
Oh, Carma,
I, of all people, won’t dare congratulate you or anything. I swear I won’t remind you how you always said you wanted a brother or sister, like all those *%&#$-all people did to me. I feel your pain. I mean, couldn’t they have just gotten a dog?
I hope the Oreos provide comfort for at least an hour—just eat the box and think later. I got the kind with extra stuff in the middle, because I love you extra.
Tibby
The air in the dining hall of the Prynne Valley Soccer Academy was charged in a peculiar way. Bridget felt goose-bumpy and alert. She had an idea, but she didn’t want to have that idea—to give it words or a picture. Or maybe she did want to have that idea but didn’t want to want the idea. Maybe that was it.
The room was knotty pine from floor to ceiling. Wide planks for the walls, medium for the floor, skinny for the ceiling. It was filling up slowly with coaches, trainers, administrators, and blah blah blah. The campers wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. Every stranger looked like someone she knew. Her intensity made her invisible; she was seeing so hard she forgot about being seen.
“Bee?”
Diana’s voice was behind her, but she didn’t turn. Diana was a real friend, but she wasn’t telling Bee what she needed to know. So Bee would find it out for herself.
There was a long table to one side. On it were sodas and an industrial-sized coffeemaker and a few plates of store-bought cookies. Oatmeal with bits of raisin.
Was it dread or hope that made her chest pound? Her toes clutched so hard inside her clogs they were falling asleep.
She sensed the presence of a significant body just off her left shoulder. She wasn’t sure with which sense she sensed it. He was too far away to touch him or to feel his body heat. He was too far behind her for her to see him. Until she turned, that is.
Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus. Was it him? Of course it was him! Was it him?
“Bridget?”
It was unquestionably him. His eyes were dark under dark, arching eyebrows. He was older and taller and different and also the same. Was he surprised? Was he happy? Was he sorry?
Her hand went protectively to her face.
He made a gesture as if to hug her, but he couldn’t seem to bridge the strange air between them.
The time came for her to say something, and then it passed. She stared at him in silence. Socially, she never cared much about covering her tracks.
“How are you?” he asked her. She remembered that he was earnest. It was something she’d liked about him.
“I’m—I’m surprised,” she said honestly. “I didn’t realize you would be here.”
“I knew you would be.” He cleared his throat. “Here, I mean.”
“You did?”
“They mailed out the staff list a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh.” Bridget cursed herself for not reading her mail more thoroughly. She hated forms (Mother’s maiden name…Mother’s profession…), and between this camp and Brown, she’d had far too many of them.
So he’d known. She hadn’t. What if she had known? Would she have willingly tossed herself into a summer full of Eric Richman, breaker of hearts and minds?
It was amazing, in a way, that he occupied space like a regular human being. He was so monumental to her. For these two years he’d represented not only himself but all the complicated things she’d felt about herself.
He was looking at her carefully. He smiled when her eyes caught his. “So, from what I hear, you haven’t gotten any worse.”
She looked at his mouth moving, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She did not disguise this.
“At soccer,” he clarified.
She’d forgotten they were at soccer camp. She’d forgotten she played soccer.
“I’m all right,” she said. She wasn’t even sure what she was talking about. But she said it again, because she liked the ring of it. “I’m all right.”
Your chances of getting hit by lightning go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say “Storms suck!”
—Johnny carson
The only adult person in Carmen’s life who hadn’t smilingly congratulated her about her upcoming baby sibling was Valia Kaligaris, Lena’s grandmother. Now, as Carmen sat at the counter in Lena’s family’s glossy kitchen and Valia sat at the breakfast table, Carmen felt grateful for that.
Granted, Valia wasn’t up for chatting these days. As Carmen waited for Lena to come back from the restaurant, Valia glowered at the Cheerios box and then trudged, still in her purple bathrobe, to the darkened den, where she turned on the TV so loud Carmen could hear every word even though it was two rooms away. It was a soap opera. Apparently Dirk had abandoned Raven at the altar the very day before her
identical twin sister, Robin, went missing. Hmmmm.
