“Well—” his dimple was so cute when he smiled “—I like that description.” He leaned back and sighed. “Whew,” he said. “I’ve wanted to have this conversation with you for weeks. I wasn’t afraid of what you’d say. I knew you felt the same way I did. But it changes things, and I don’t know what to do next. You’re just starting your senior year. Maybe we should try to keep it…you know, platonic, until you’re out of high school.”
I’d pictured lying in bed with him a thousand times. One of my arms would be across his chest, and one of his would circle my shoulders protectively. I didn’t really care about having sex with him. I wanted something more than that. Something deeper that would last the rest of my life.
“I don’t want to wait,” I said. “The age of consent in North Carolina is sixteen. I’m seventeen and five months. You have my consent.”
“We can’t be out in the open,” he said. “Your mother…God, your uncle. They’d kill me.”
“I know.” He was right about that. I was certain Mom had been a virgin on her wedding night, and Uncle Marcus was always giving me that “guys are out for one thing” lecture. Maybe guys my age were. Ben was totally different.
“And there’s really no place we can be together,” Ben said.
It was my turn to smile.
“Yes,” I said, “there is.”
Later, when I realized I could tell him anything at all—almost, anyway—I told him how I felt in the beginning. How I didn’t think I wanted him sexually. He laughed and said, “Well, that’s certainly changed.” I guess it did, but my favorite part of being with Ben was still lying in his arms in the bedroom of The Sea Tender, telling him everything I thought and felt. I even told him two of my biggest secrets.
The first was that I threw the most important swim meet of the season when I was fourteen because I felt sorry for my competitor. That girl was so gangly, dorky and uncoordinated that her teammates groaned when it was her turn to swim. I couldn’t make myself beat her. I pretended to get a cramp on my third lap.
Ben said I was sweet, but insane.
Second, I told him about feeling Daddy’s spirit on the deck of The Sea Tender. That’s when I found out I’d been wrong about one thing: Ben was religious after all. First, he just teased me about it, saying he hoped Daddy didn’t show up when we were in bed together. When he realized I was serious, though, he got serious himself. He said the devil was playing tricks on me and I should be careful. I was disappointed that he believed in the devil. I wanted him to be my mirror image, with my thoughts and beliefs. I wanted him to be everything I needed—my confidant and best friend and lover. I realized then that no one person could be all those things to another. I was a little more careful about what I told him after that.
I would never even consider telling him my third secret.
After we made love, Ben got the marijuana from the kitchen while I crawled naked under the covers, breathing in jasmine and fabric softener. Ben got back in bed and I snuggled close to him while he lit a joint.
He took a hit, then passed it to me.
“God, this feels good, being here with you,” he said. “It’s been such a shitty week.”
“I know.”
“I have these…not nightmares, exactly. But when I go to bed, I start picturing Serena at a lock-in when she’s a few years older. She gets scared a lot. Thunderstorms. Strangers. Dogs. You name it. She might have panicked if she’d been there. She could’ve been one of the kids who didn’t make it.”
“Don’t think about that, Ben.” I didn’t want to think about it. I slipped the joint between his lips. “Think about that girl you saved. Uncle Marcus said she’d be dead if it hadn’t been for you.”
“I do think about her, believe me,” he said. “She’s still at New Hanover and I’ve visited her a couple times. She’s going to be okay. Then I think about how close I came to leaving her there because my air was getting low and I was…” He shuddered. “I’ll tell you, Maggie, I was sweatin’ bullets.”
“It must have been awful.” I knew all about his claustrophobia, how he’d start to panic the moment he’d put the face piece on. I hated the rude things the other firefighters said about him right to his face, like he had no feelings. Once, I overheard one of them say to Uncle Marcus, “I don’t know why you even bother to give him a pager. He’s useless.” It made me furious. He told me he was even thinking of leaving, going back to Charlotte, because he couldn’t take it anymore. I freaked out when he said that. What would I do without him?
“How did you stand wearing the face piece?” I asked.
“I turned the emergency bypass valve on, just for a second,” he said. “It gave me a little rush of air. A beautiful sound. It wasn’t the air so much as just reminding myself that I had the bypass valve if I needed it.”
“But when you got that low-air warning, you must’ve freaked.”
“Yes, ma’am, I was as freaked as you can get. But I could also see that girl in the camera. I had to get her.”
“I’m really proud of you. Have the other guys stopped giving you a hard time?”
He nodded. “I think they’ve finally accepted me,” he said, letting the smoke pour from his lungs. “Even got a couple of apologies from some of the worst offenders. So that’s my silver lining. The cost was too high, though.”
Those big photographs from the memorial service popped into my mind, past the wall I’d built inside my head to try to keep them out. At the service, I felt sick to my stomach as Reverend Bill talked about each of them. I’d wanted to run out of the Assembly Building but was afraid of making a scene.
“Do you see why I have to believe there’s an afterlife?” I asked Ben now. “Why I’m so sure Daddy visits me out here? I have to believe those three people—Jordy and Henderson and Mr. Eggles—that they’re someplace better.”
“I believe that,” Ben said. “I just don’t believe dead people can contact us.”
He hadn’t experienced what I had with Daddy, so he didn’t understand.
We’d reached the end of the joint and Ben stubbed it out in a clamshell we kept on the floor next to the bed. I remembered that night in the E.R., how scared I was to see him there and how invisible I felt when Dawn practically knocked me over to get to him. People always thought he and Dawn were an item and although he never came right out and agreed with them, he also never bothered to set them straight. She was our cover, he said, which only bothered me when I saw her staring at him the way she did Saturday at the swim meet. I could see how much she loved him. It was all over her face. I felt sorry for her the way I’d felt sorry for the gangly fourteen-year-old girl I let beat me years ago. But I wasn’t letting her have Ben.
“Dawn loves you so much,” I said. “When she saw you at the E.R., she looked so relieved to see you were all right. It was like when I saw that Andy was okay. I feel like I’m hurting her by being with you.”
“I haven’t misled her. You know that.”
“But she thinks you’re unattached. That gives her hope.”
“What can I do about it, Maggie?” He sounded a little pissed off. “I can’t very well tell her about us.”
“I know,” I said quickly. I had never heard him sound annoyed with me before and it shook me up. “I feel sorry for her, that’s all.” What did I want him to do? I didn’t know.
A breeze suddenly blew into the room from the living room, putting out all but two of the candles. I stood up and walked to the corner to relight them. When I turned to come back to bed, the candlelight must have landed on my hip.
Ben rose up on his elbows. “What’s that on your hip?” he asked.
“A tattoo,” I said.
“You’re kidding.” He sat up. “Is it new?”
“No. You just never noticed it before.” I’d had it for over a year, placed low enough that my mother would never see it.
“I can’t tell what it is from here,” Ben said.
“Just a word.” I stepped close enough for hi
m to read it.
“Empathy.” He ran his fingers over the small calligraphied print. “Why?”
“To remind me to walk in other people’s shoes,” I said.
Ben laughed, pulling me down on the bed so that I straddled him. “You don’t need any reminders of that, angel,” he said, his superheated hands on my hips. “You wrote the book.”
Chapter Thirteen
Andy
THEY PUT US ON A LITTLE COUCH THING. There were big cameras on stands and lots of men and ladies all over. One lady sat in a chair looking at us. I looked at the camera and smiled like you’re supposed to do when you get your picture taken.
The lady in the chair said, “Andy, when we start talking, just look at me. Don’t look at the camera. We’ll pretend we’re having a normal conversation, okay?”
“Okay.” She was nice to look at. Pretty, with shiny hair like Mom’s only blacker, and Chinesey eyes. Her voice was soft and reminded me of how Maggie talked sometimes.
Mom smiled at me and squeezed my hand like she always did. Her hand was cold as a Popsicle.
A man attached a teeny black microphone to my shirt and said not to worry about it. A lady wearing a headset held up three fingers, then two fingers, then one finger.
Then the lady started talking to us, and I looked right at her, like she said to do. I told myself, don’t look anywhere else except at the lady. I didn’t want to screw up.
“Tell us about the fire, Andy,” she said to me. Her eyes had sparkles in them.
“I was at the lock-in with my friend Emily and all of a sudden there was fire everywhere,” I said. “Some boys got on fire and I told them to stop, drop and roll!”
“You did?” the lady asked. “Where did you learn that?”
I couldn’t remember exactly where. I wanted to look at Mom to ask her, but remembered I was only supposed to look at the lady. “I think school, but I’m not sure,” I said.
“That’s right,” Mom said.
My knee was bouncing like it does sometimes and I thought Mom would put her hand on it to make it stop, but she didn’t.
“And what happened then, Andy? People were trying to get out of the church, right? But they couldn’t?”
“Because of the fire.”
“I understand the front doors were blocked by the flames.”
“And the back door, too.”
“That must have been very scary.”
“Emily was scared. She had her shirt on inside out.”
The lady looked confused and turned to Mom.
“His friend Emily is a special-needs child who doesn’t like to have the seam of her clothing touch her skin,” Mom said.
“Ah, I see,” the lady said. “So how did you get out of the fire, Andy?”
“I went to the boys’ room and outside the window was the metal…the air-conditioner box thing and I climbed out onto it and helped Emily out. Then I went back in and got people to follow me out.”
“Amazing,” the lady said. When she turned her head a little, the sparkles in her eyes moved. “You saved a lot of lives.”
I nodded. “I was a…” I remembered I wasn’t supposed to talk about being a hero.
“He was a hero,” Mom said, “but I’ve told him not to brag about it.”
I accidentally looked at Mom for a minute. She had the sparkles in her eyes, too! Freaky.
“How do you feel about what you did, Andy?” the lady asked.
“Good,” I said. “But some people died. I guess they didn’t all hear me call to them. Your eyes are really pretty. They have sparkles in them.”
The lady and Mom both laughed. “It’s from the lights,” the lady said. “But thank you for that compliment, Andy.” She turned to Mom again. “Laurel, can you tell us a little about Andy and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder?”
“I can tell you about it,” I said.
Mom did put her hand on my knee then, which meant shut up.
“Let’s give your mother a chance to talk, Andy.”
“Okay,” I said, even though I’ve heard Mom talk about FASD so many times I could say it all myself. She talked about how she had a drinking problem when she was pregnant with me and that made me different than other kids. She went into rehab and hasn’t had a drink since then. I was in a foster home and she got me back when I was one year old. She threw herself into making sure I got the best care and education possible. See? I could say it all myself.
“I’m on a swim team,” I said. “And I always win.”
Mom and the lady laughed again. Mom said I’m an excellent competitioner because of my startling reflex. And that I have an average IQ, which I know means I’m intelligent and can do things a lot better than I actually do if I’d just try harder.
“I’m as smart as most people,” I said. “But my brain works different.”
Mom said about the lighter and how we missed the plane, which I still don’t really understand ’cause if you have a lighter in your sock you’re not actually carrying it.
“There’s a fund that’s been created for the medical expenses of the children injured in the fire,” the lady said to the camera. “If you’d like to help, the Internet site is on your screen.”
“Many of the children who were hurt at the lock-in are from families with limited funds,” Mom said.
“She means they’re poor,” I said, proud that I understood.
“You have another child, too,” the lady said to Mom. “Does she also have FASD?”
“Does she mean Maggie?” I asked Mom, though I kept my eyes on the lady.
“Yes, Maggie is my older daughter. I wasn’t drinking when I was pregnant with her and she’s fine.”
“Maggie’s the best sister,” I said.
“She is?” the lady asked.
“She’d put my oxygen mask on first, too,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
Laurel
1989
“LOOK AT HER HAIR!” MISS EMMA SAID as Jamie settled the baby in her arms. “Your hair was exactly like this when you were born,” she said to her son. “A thick head of beautiful black curls.”
“Isn’t she something?” Jamie sat down next to his mother on our sofa. He hadn’t stopped grinning in the three days since we’d come home with the baby. “You have to see when she opens her eyes,” he said. “She looks right at you.”
“Are they brown like yours and Laurel’s?” She ran a fingertip over the nearly translucent skin of the baby’s forehead.
“They’re kind of gray right now,” Jamie said, “but the pediatrician said they’ll most likely be brown.”
Miss Emma looked at me where I sat in the rocker. “You must be in seventh heaven, darlin’,” she said.
I was too tired to speak, so I smiled the same smile I’d been wearing for the past three days. I’d pasted it to my face shortly after the baby was born, and it was still in place. There was something wrong with me, and so far I’d managed to hide it from everyone else. I watched Jamie and Miss Emma sitting with the baby on the sofa and it was as if I was watching them in a dream. I felt apart from them, a strange sense of distance between us. If I tried to walk from the rocker to the sofa, it could take me days.
My pregnancy had been far easier than I’d anticipated. Except for some nausea early on and some puffy ankles toward the end, I’d felt very well. The baby was two weeks early, and although labor was harder than I’d anticipated, I made it through ten hours of agony without an epidural. I was nearly as concerned about Jamie as I was with myself. With his “gift,” he looked as if he felt every single contraction. The baby was eight pounds, eight ounces and I was grateful she hadn’t waited the two extra weeks to make her entrance.
I knew the moment when I changed from a woman in love with the baby she’d carried to a woman who no longer knew what love felt like. In the delivery room, I heard the baby cry for the first time, and I reached down toward my spread-apart legs, anxious to touch her. A nurse placed her on my chest. Jamie kissed my forehe
ad as I lifted my head to look at her, but I felt like I was looking down a long, spiral rabbit hole. My world started to spin, faster, faster, and then it went black.
When I woke up, I was in the recovery room, Jamie at my side. I’d hemorrhaged, he’d said, but I was going to be fine. Maggie was perfect, and I’d be able to have more children.
I barely heard him. I was stuck on the word Maggie. Who was Maggie? I had a cramping pain low in my belly and thought I was still in labor. I was frightened by my confusion. It took Jamie several minutes to set me straight.
I didn’t get to hold the baby until thirty-six hours after she was born. When she was placed in my arms, I felt absolutely nothing. No maternal tug of recognition that this was the familiar little presence I’d been carrying inside me for nine months. No longing to explore her body. Nothing.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Jamie stood next to the bed, beaming, and that’s when I pasted the smile on my face. Now at home, everyone seemed to think I’d returned from that rabbit hole. I was the only person who knew I was still stuck somewhere between the black abyss and the real world.
“Is she eating well?” Miss Emma asked.
Jamie looked to me to answer, which meant I was going to have to somehow force words out of my mouth.
“I’m—” I cleared my throat “—I’m having some trouble,” I admitted. “She doesn’t latch on well.”
How I’d longed to nurse an infant! Working in the pediatrician’s office, I’d watch with envy and anticipation as mothers slipped their babies inside their shirts for that secret, sacred bond. But my nipples were too flat for the baby to latch on easily. In the hospital, nurse after nurse tried to help me. A counselor from the La Leche League showed up in my room in the hours before I was discharged. Sometimes I was able to get the baby to suck, but more often she wailed in frustration. The woman from the La Leche League swore the baby was getting enough nourishment, but I was worried.
“Oh, switch to formula,” Miss Emma said now, as though it was no big deal. “I bottle-fed both my boys and they turned out all right.”