In Search of Eden, page 8
She paused and her heart felt too heavy in her chest. Everything in her wanted to lie.
“No,” she said, the truth landing like a rock on her heart. “I came to tell you good-bye. I have to go home and help my mother.” She wondered if that was the only reason she’d been able to come today. Because she had a real reason for leaving instead of just her usual whim.
“Will you come back again, teacher?”
“I hope so,” she said. “Maybe.” A lie. A bald lie, but she had to tell it, as much for herself as for him. She would, she promised herself, but knew she would not. She knew it because of the fierce pain she felt right now. It was as persistent as an ache, as sharp as a knife thrust.
Roger frowned and looked desolate. He glanced over his shoulder toward the new substitute with an expression that would have made Dorrie laugh if she’d been able to feel beyond her own emptiness. He is not my child, she told herself. He is not my child.
Roger’s mother came then, in her usual whirlwind of jacket and cell phone and purse sliding off her shoulder. Today she was wearing tight jeans and a blouse that didn’t quite span the distance between midriff and hips. Roger greeted her, his face lit up again, and Dorrie was stranded somewhere between relief and disappointment.
“Let’s go, honey,” his mother said. “Carl’s waiting for us.”
Who was Carl? Dorrie wondered with a twist of concern that Roger didn’t appear to share. He put his hand into his mother’s and followed her out the door, then turned and faced Dorrie again.
“Good-bye, teacher,” he said solemnly.
Dorrie held up a hand and waved. She couldn’t answer.
This, she reminded herself, sniffing back hot tears, is why you should never say good-bye.
chapter 9
*
Dorrie had been home for a month now. She had found Nashville still the same and Mama still—well, Mama was still Mama.
She glanced up now and saw her mother coming out from the doctor’s office. Dorrie set aside the book she’d been reading— an old Perry Mason novel she’d found in the glove compartment. She should bring something of her own to read when she chauffeured, but Mama was always in a hurry to go and impatient over any delays but her own.
Mama opened the door, harrumphed as she flumped down on the seat beside her, and pointed forward—Mamaspeak that Dorrie should start the car and leave. Dorrie obliged, driving a mile or so before she had the nerve to ask the results of the latest scan.
“What did the doctor say?”
“It’s spread to my lungs and liver.” Mama delivered the news in a tone of outraged irritation more than shock or grief, as if the paperboy had skipped their delivery or she’d been overcharged at the grocery store. She seemed personally irritated at the doctor, the clinic, and now especially at her. Mama glared at her with those sharp granite eyes piercing her own, as if daring her to express any emotion. Dorrie half expected to again hear her say, “Don’t you dare cry, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” So she stifled whatever jumble of emotion she was feeling and drove her mother to the supermarket, the pharmacy, and then home. And Dorrie did not cry.
Things seemed to be progressing fast. Mama had taken to lying down every afternoon and actually using on occasion the portable oxygen they gave her—an indication of how her equilibrium had been upset, a fact she would rather die over than admit. Dorrie shook her head at the wry irony of the thought. For die she would and probably soon. Mama’s cancer had metastasized, and there was nothing they could do now but wait for the end. Mama was not dying particularly well but with the same demanding energy she’d lived.
Dorrie helped her mother out of the car, into the house, and upstairs to rest. She then checked her watch. She had taken the whole day off to take Mama to the doctor, and it was already one o’clock. There was no point in going into the Sip and Bite, since her shift would end in an hour. She had applied for a job as a teacher’s aide at a local school, but Mama had discouraged the idea. Her mother hadn’t approved of the idea of her going to college to begin with and had been triumphantly vindicated when Dorrie’s half-finished teaching degree fell victim to her impermanence.
“You should have just gone to work at the Sip and Bite,” she had reproved. She knew Myra Jean needed help at the diner and thought it was ridiculous that her daughter would think herself qualified to teach. If Dorrie pursued any higher education, Mama wanted it to be at Françoise’s School of Beauty, her own unfulfilled dream. One of many. She heard her mother’s voice scolding her. “Surely you don’t think you’re qualified to see to children, Dorrie? They have their teachers. They have their mothers.” They don’t need the likes of you, she might as well have added. Dorrie shook her head. Not only was she talking to herself, she was answering back. She wondered if Mama’s voice inside her head would outlive Mama’s life on this earth, and suddenly she felt a desperate fear that it would.
She looked around at the house. It was immaculate, as usual. Nothing had changed for as long as she could remember. Off-white carpet, shampooed on schedule every six months for the last thirty years, gold-and-green sofa and chair set, with matching pillows artistically scattered about. Well, Mama was consistent. You knew what to expect from her, and Dorrie supposed that was worth something.
Dorrie sat down in the recliner, feeling a little rebellious for usurping her mother’s chair. She looked around. There was the clear plastic placemat protecting the Formica end table. Her mother’s nail file, pencils, and pens were handy in the small vase she set beside the remote control for the television set, and a new addition—a little cluster of pill bottles on the polished tabletop with Noreen Gibson’s name on each one. Take as needed for pain. There was her crossword puzzle book, neatly folded back and held in place with a rubber band, beside the novel she was reading. Dorrie knew without looking that it would be a lurid romance with a pink and scarlet cover and a bare-chested gorgeous man bending back a nearly bare-chested gorgeous woman in a passionate embrace. She smiled a little at her mother’s taste in literature, out of character as it was. But who really knew who lived behind Mama’s stern façade? Dorrie certainly did not, and she wondered again who her mother might have been if her life had gone a little differently.
She hadn’t had it easy, that was for sure. Dorrie knew that much, even though Mama never talked about her early life. She thought back to when the recorded history of Noreen Gibson began and tried to remember what her mother had looked like on her wedding day. She vaguely remembered the photograph that used to sit right there on the brick mantel beside the china figurines. She’d worn a simple white dress, and her red hair fell in lush waves. She was tiny, curvy, and beautiful with her gorgeous dark blue eyes, her pretty mouth curved into a smile beside her husband, who was dark and handsome in his roughshod way. His people were Basque, he bragged, proud and mysterious, and even his name was flashy and vaguely dangerous. Thomas Orlando DeSpain. And he had bestowed an equally dashing name upon her. “We’ll call her Miranda,” he’d told her in one of his endless repetitions of the story. “Miranda Isadora DeSpain. A name fit for a princess.” Apparently Mama had balked, but Daddy had been one person she hadn’t been able to push around.
But she had been able to push him away.
After he’d gone, Mama had cleansed the house of any of his footprints, including Dorrie’s name. “You can use your middle name,” Mama had declared. “And my last.” So she had become Dora Mae Gibson, the only Dorrie in a flock of Lindsays and Hayleys and Jennifers. And so Daddy’s last gift to her had been taken away along with his presence. He was gone. Long gone, and though Dorrie had longed for him often, sending her thoughts to him as if by sheer force of will she could make him appear, he had not. She had gone looking for him two times and had found him on the second try. She stared at the far wall, at the framed poster she’d given Mama for Christmas the year it had happened. She stared at the picture of the dancing girls in the pastel gauzy dresses and saw herself. Fifteen, riding the Greyhound to El Paso, the place where her father’s sister said he was living.
Mama had gone to work the evening shift and left her at home a few days after they had given away her baby. She had been half sick, her breasts sore, hard lumps leaking milk. She could go back to school in a week or two, the doctor said, depending on how she felt. A different school, though. Mama had seen to that.
“Why?” she had wailed. “They already know.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama had snapped. “It’s not about saving face. I’ve got no face left to save, thanks to you and your father.”
“Then why?”
“You don’t need to be around that boy anymore. He’s got you into trouble once. You need to tend to your business and let him tend to his. Besides, I don’t want any complications,” Mama had said, giving her a threatening look before going out the door.
Mama didn’t know the half of it. Dorrie had been sneaking out to see Danny throughout her pregnancy. They were going to get married. As soon as he graduated. She’d also been saving her money from the job at the Sip and Bite. She had gone to the telephone book and called a lawyer as soon as Mama left. The same lawyer who had done the adoption. He wasn’t in, but his secretary was really nice, and she had listened to Dorrie sniffle and cry and told her, “Honey, don’t worry, no matter what your mama made you do, you can revoke an adoption if you speak up within twenty-five days.” That had cheered her up. Once she told Danny, he would help her. She hadn’t done a thing after that phone call to the lawyer but get dressed and go to Danny’s house to tell him.
“He’s not at home.” His mother was a little cool but not unkind. “Honey, you need to go on home now.”
She hadn’t gone home, though. She had walked to his school, and there she’d found out what everyone else had probably known. He was there, just leaving football practice, his arm around some girl wearing a cheerleading uniform.
He had been shocked to see her, had murmured something to the girl, who had given her a look that was both smug and pitying before she’d walked away.
“What is this, Danny?” She’d been simply confused, the obvious explanation being unthinkable.
His ducked head and shamed tone answered her question even before his words confirmed things. “I’m sorry, Dorrie,” he had said. “I don’t want the baby. I’m only seventeen. I’m a senior. I’m sorry. I never meant . . .”
She had begun walking away before she even heard the rest of what he had to say. She remembered, oddly, how cold she had been on the long bus ride home. She’d been wearing a warm coat, but she had been so cold her teeth had chattered.
She had gone home and, almost in a panic, called everyone she had known to borrow money to get her baby back. She called Aunt Bobbie, who told her to mind her mama and after that didn’t answer the phone. She called Daddy’s sister, Aunt Weezy. She wasn’t home, but her cousin Robert said she was at work and would be home at nine.
Finally Aunt Weezy called back. She had said she couldn’t pay for a lawyer, but she gave Miranda her daddy’s address and phone number in El Paso. So Miranda had taken her two hundred dollars of savings out of her dresser drawer and gotten on the bus. She had prayed all the way. It had taken seventeen hours, and after she got to El Paso she had to take a cab to Daddy’s house, and she had been flat broke then.
Her breasts hurt. The incision hurt. Her head hurt. She felt nauseated and sick. She felt hot, as if she had a fever. The cab pulled up to the curb in front of Daddy’s house. Please let it be his house, she prayed. Please let him be home. It was dingy and small and looked just like all the other houses they’d lived in when Daddy had lived with them. There was a dog in the front yard, short and muscular looking, and he barked as if he’d like to eat her alive. A little boy and girl had come out and seen her standing at the gate, swaying slightly, and they’d run back inside. Then Daddy had stepped out onto the porch, with them hanging on to his legs.
He looked about like she remembered. Kind in spite of the hard lines etched onto his face. He had dark hair and eyes. Long and lean, he was wearing cowboy boots and jeans, just as she remembered his always doing. He stood on the porch for a minute and looked down at her.
“Mirandy?” he asked.
She was too relieved to do anything but cry.
And he might not have wanted her, but he brought her inside, and within an hour she was in bed, and some woman named Rita with big hair and red fingernails had come in and seen to her. Rita had a baby, too, her daddy’s baby, she supposed, and she remembered lying there listening to Rita’s baby cry, her own breasts leaking milk.
“You’re sick,” Rita had said, bringing her a 7-Up and a bowl of Top Ramen. Daddy had driven her to the hospital emergency room, and the doctor said she had a breast infection and was dehydrated and gave her some medicine and an IV and some more medicine to dry up her milk, since the first dose hadn’t worked so well. Then the doctor and Daddy and Rita and Rita’s baby had gone into the other room, and Dorrie had gone to sleep. She supposed she had known then how it would end, so she hadn’t been surprised when Daddy never showed up again.
“He had to go to work,” Rita said, the baby on her shoulder. “And you’ve got to go home.” Not unkindly, just stating a fact. Rita had put her back on the bus with her medicine and a sack lunch and ten dollars, and when she got back to Nashville, Mama was there to meet her.
She had said things to Dorrie all the way home. Dorrie had tried to hold her ears shut, but every word Mama said met with one inside her that agreed. She said that Dorrie was irresponsible and this just proved it. That she would have been a no-account mother, that she should stop being so hardheaded and accept the facts: “That boy doesn’t want you, and that baby is gone. Your daddy doesn’t want you, and you ought to be grateful I’ll still take you home. I’m so disappointed in you, but I knew it. I knew it from the beginning, because you’re just like him.” Somewhere during the barrage of words, Dorrie let go. She just let go and realized how foolish she had been to even think things would turn out any other way.
She had felt something in her break loose then. It pulled loose like an unraveling knot that was keeping her moored, and she felt herself break away and drift. She felt herself float out into the middle of the ocean, so far she couldn’t even see the land anymore.
“Listen up,” Mama had said. “Here’s what you’re going to do just in case you’re considering your options. You’re going to get yourself on the bus and go to the school every day and get your high school diploma. And then you’re going to get a good job. And you’re going to forget about Danny Loomis, and you’re going to forget about that baby. I won’t have you throwing your life away. I came after you once, Dorrie. If you run off again, I won’t be coming after you, and don’t expect to come home.”
She supposed that’s when she had been pulled into Mama’s orbit, for she had just caved in after that. Whatever spit and vinegar she’d had left after the ordeal of the baby had been drained right out of her when she’d seen Danny and his new girlfriend and then Papa and his new family. She had realized then that whether she wanted it or not, this was her lot in life and her place. Here with Mama. No. The preposition was wrong. Under Mama. Under her care and control, and she accepted the truth then, that she wasn’t capable of making good decisions. She realized that whether she’d meant to or not, she’d brought someone into the world for the sole purpose of hurting his or her little soul, and she would not do that again. She, of all people, understood that mistakes had consequences and nerve endings, and they cried and hungered.
All she’d ever wanted was a family. Someone to love her that she could love back. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, but neither had she avoided it. She had no plan, no ideas about the future. She didn’t think God had made her for anything special. Having the baby was the most special thing she’d ever done.
She’d read one time that there were times when you could be shown a partial picture or told a series of words with some left out and you saw things as whole because your brain wanted to. Your brain filled in the blanks. She could see now that that’s what she’d done in her life. About everything.
She remembered watching her newlywed cousin Claudia in her tiny apartment, putting away groceries in the tiny open shelves, making dinner on the tiny stove, washing dishes in a tiny sink. The apartment had been like a playhouse. Dorrie’s imagination had filled in the details of love and peace and joy. That’s what she’d always done, she could see now. Someone would give her a little piece of a story, and she would fill in the blanks. She’d been doing it with Daddy for years. He would show up and say, “I love you,” and she would fill in the blanks. She took a sketchy life, a little bit of love from Daddy and Mama and filled in the blanks. That’s how she had believed Danny Loomis when he had said he loved her. She gave a rueful shake of her head now as she thought of what had finally happened to him. He’d gotten the cheerleader pregnant, and his parents had shipped him off to military school where there weren’t any girls.
Hope had bobbed up once or twice in the ensuing years. She had gotten up every morning and done just what Mama had said, but every day of her life she had wondered who her baby was and where he or she was. She’d made up stories. Fantasies about the baby’s home. About their future reunion. She got a job and started saving her money to go to the lawyer. She got up to five thousand ninety dollars before Mama found out. She had been furious.
“You’re nothing,” Mama had finally said. “You don’t have what it takes to raise a child. Who do you think you are? Look at you. You’re trash.”
Now she thought that Mama had been talking to herself more than to Dorrie.
She had wanted to keep that baby, she thought now, with a strange lack of passion. Well, she had finally healed up from it. But even as she thought about that, she had the idea that rather than healing, something had been buried alive. And she thought of the nightmares she had every so often. Of hearing a baby crying, and the cry was coming from down there, under the earth. She supposed she would go to her own grave and never know what happened to that baby.
