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“Do you think he would have been as successful if he’d stayed here and been a teen dad?”
“At least he would have been here. Now that Bob is dead and Irv moved off-island, I’m all alone,” Mrs. Kull says bitterly. “And my grandchild is out there somewhere in the world, I assume, unless you…” Her face takes on a horror-stricken expression, as if the thought just occurred to her, forty years after the fact, that Sunday might have chosennotto give birth and put the baby up for adoption.
Sunday doesn’t leave her in suspense. “Mrs. Kull, your grandson is out there in the world—at least as far as I know. I was able to have him and choose a family myself, and I picked the very best people I could.” Mavis Kull looks unimpressed, but she’s listening. “I chose a couple who were both scientists with degrees from Johns Hopkins, and they couldn’t have kids themselves.” Her eyes tear up at the memory—she hasn’t cried as much as she’s cried in the past couple of days in years. “When I said goodbye to the baby at the hospital, they let me know that they were naming him Benjamin, and I’ve held that close to my heart all these years.” She puts a hand to her chest and lets the tears fall. “Benjamin is out there somewhere, and while I may never meet him, I do think I gave him the life he was supposed to have, and it wasn’t here on Tangier.”
“Huh.” Mrs. Kull closes her mouth tightly and her jaw clenches. “You still didn’t give any of us a say in what happened to him, but I guess I appreciate the apology after all these years.”
“Mrs. Kull,” Sunday says, scooting forward on the couch and making eye contact with the old woman. “The apology is for leaving without telling you all what my decision was, but it wasmydecision to make, and I’m not sorry that I didn’t let you all make the choice for me. I’ve had a wonderful and interesting life—one I never could have had here on this island—and I have to believe that Benjamin has as well.”
Mrs. Kull drops the handle on her chair and her feet swing back to the floor, letting Sunday know that she’s worn out her welcome. She stands, and Olive and Cameron quickly follow suit.
“Thank you for letting us come in to talk, and if you think it’s a wise choice, I hope you’ll give Irvin my best. I think he’d agree with me that we both ended up having the lives that we were supposed to have, and I don’t think you’d trade in the three grandchildren he’s given you, even if they do live in Maine.”
Sunday walks to the door and then turns around to see Mrs. Kull still sitting in her chair. “We’ll show ourselves out, and again, thank you for letting me say my piece.”
Without waiting for Mavis Kull to respond, Sunday and her daughters walk back out into the October afternoon, closing the door to the old house and letting the screen door slam shut behind them.
* * *
“So you were pregnant at seventeen?” Olive is sitting on one side of Sunday at the edge of an old, unused dock, and Cameron is sitting on the other. Their legs dangle over the water, and they watch as boats drift past, coming and going from the newer dock down the island.
Sunday nods and squints out at the horizon. The morning is bright and slightly overcast, and there is the distinct smell of autumn in the air: bonfires and fallen leaves, with tang of colder air in her nostrils. Sunday breathes it all in, then releases it.
“I was. And I didn’t want to make the same mistakes my own mother did. She couldn’t have known she’d end up married to a man who was drunk and abusive—certainly it didn’t start out that way—but to stay on an island with a baby and no chance of leaving to get an education couldn’t have ever ended up the way I wanted my life to go.”
“Will you tell us what happened when you left here?” Cameron asks, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, Sunday doesn’t hear judgment or acrimony in her older daughter’s tone.
“I didn’t tell my parents I was pregnant. I told Minnie and I told Irvin, but telling two teenagers is as good as telling the world, so I knew that as soon as I left, word would get out. But I didn’t care, because by then I knew I’d be on the mainland and on my way to wherever I was going.”
“Where did you go?” Olive asks, lacing her fingers through Sunday’s and holding her hand supportively. She looks appalled at the thought of a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl let loose in the world.
“I went straight to Washington D.C. because in my mind, that was the center of the universe, and that was where I’d have the best chance of getting lost and finding my own way. But first, I had to have the baby. So I found a place—we used to call them ‘homes for unwed mothers’—and they agreed to let me live there until my baby was born, with the understanding that I’d give him up for adoption at birth.”
The girls both look confused at the idea of a dormitory for girls with big, round bellies and no man to stand by their side as they gestated and birthed their babies. In their relatively short lifetimes, women have always had the right to choose their own paths: women can have their babies or not, keep them or give them up, raise them alone or rely on family who accepts the new addition to the family without the shame that used to be attached to teenage pregnancies. Things were different when Sunday was young.
“What was it like?” Olive asks.
Sunday thinks back to her time there. It was a two-story house in the suburbs, run by a group of nuns from a local church who didn’t wear habits, but instead dressed in cardigans and button-up blouses. They kept their hair and nails short, and their adornment minimal. If they wore jewelry at all, it was a simple cross around the neck or a band around the ring finger. The decor was as sparse as the nuns’ appearances: simple dining table and chairs; plain beige couches; two single beds to a room with nothing but a nightstand and lamp between them. You worked a job in the small town while pregnant, gave a portion of your paycheck to the church to help pay the bills of the house and buy the communal food, and then you gave birth and moved out with the money in the bank from the job you’d been working. It was a well-honed system, and a peaceful time in Sunday’s life. She’d loved being pregnant, and the other girls in the house were quiet and obedient, just as she was.
“It was nice,” she says now to her girls. “We had rules and chores and bedtimes, and there was no upheaval. I made friends with a few of the girls, and we’d sit outside in the summer, playing cards after dinner. There was a small library two blocks from the house, and I think I read everySweet Valley Highbook they had.”
“What’sSweet Valley High?” Cameron frowns.
Sunday pats her daughter’s thigh with the hand that’s not holding Olive’s. “It's the sign of a generation gap, babe.” She laughs softly. “Anyhow, I read books and worked in an ice cream shop, and when Benjamin was born, I had about two thousand dollars in the bank. The nuns let me stay in the house for a few more nights after I gave birth just to get my strength back, and then I took my two thousand dollars and found an apartment in D.C. with Rennie, another girl who’d lived in the house with me and had just had her baby. I got a job in a coffee shop, signed up for classes at the College of Southern Maryland, and got my two-year degree. Then I just got on with it. By the time I was twenty-two, I was married to your father.”
Cameron is rubbing her belly absentmindedly, though there’s no visible bump there yet. “But…do you ever really ‘get on with it’? Like, how does a person give away their child and then just wake up the next day and keep living?”
Sunday thinks about how to answer this. “I think that everyone probably has their own ways of coping. For me, I knew I was doing the right thing for myself, for Irvin, and for the baby. It would have never worked for us to stay on Tangier. Or rather, it would have, but it wouldn’t have been the best situation for any of us. So I did what I knew I needed to do.”
“Did you ever regret it?” Olive asks, still holding her mother’s hand.
“Sure. Of course. I regretted it in the sense that I never got to know my son, but I didn’t regret it in the sense that I wish I’d done things differently. I accepted that I wanted him to have a better life, and then I had nine months to mentally prepare myself for letting him go.”
“How was it the day you had him?” Cameron asks. “When you had to hand him over to strangers knowing you’d never see him again?”
“Hard,” Sunday says honestly. “The hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life before or since. I think about him everyday—even all these years later. But I knew I’d chosen well and that he’d be loved, and that’s really all anyone can ask for in that situation.” Sunday pauses. “I would imagine that your parents felt the same way,” she says, looking in turn at each of her girls, and wondering for the millionth time what might have possessed their own parents to put them both up for adoption.
“I don’t think my parents wanted me,” Cameron says as she stares at the water. Sunday looks at her profile and watches the way Cameron holds her shoulders straight and tries to be tough. “I bet their families didn’t want me, either.” She turns to look at Sunday, then lifts her chin vaguely in the direction of Mavis Kull’s house. “But you both had family who would have taken Benjamin or helped you to raise him. Do you feel bad knowing that he might be out there thinking the same things I think? That no one loved or wanted him?” Her words sound harsh, but her tone is searching, and Sunday knows that Cameron isn’t trying to hurt her.
