Getting Somewhere (37 page)

Sarah frowns, not understanding the reference, and Donna looks a bit embarrassed. “Just a lot of coming and going, I mean. Lauren out, Grace in.”

Sarah nods her understanding. “Ah, yes. Is Grace . . . staying?”

Donna shrugs, glances at the door into the dining room. “Far as I know. I haven't even talked with her. She just came in this morning, talked to Ellie for a while in her room and now, I guess she's ready for breakfast.”

Sarah notices that Donna isn't doing a very good job hiding a hint of rancor, or maybe she's not even trying to hide it. “Do you mind telling Ellie that breakfast is ready? Cassie went to get some raspberries for yogurt but she should be right back.”

“Okay.”

But when Sarah goes back out to the dining room, Ellie is already sitting at the table, and she hears her say to Grace, “And you think the girls aren't traumatized by all this, that we can just go on and pretend like none of it ever happened?”

Sarah retreats into the kitchen again just as Cassie comes through the back door. “Maybe we should eat in here.”

Sarah and Cassie meet eyes, Cassie's wide and anxious. Donna looks from one to the other but doesn't say anything, just lets out a deep sigh and carries the casserole doggedly through the door into the dining room. Sarah and Cassie follow more tentatively, Sarah grabbing the yogurt bowl that Donna has left on the counter and Cassie carrying the container of raspberries she has just picked.

A new configuration. Two girls, three women. Ellie and Grace have fallen silent. Sarah thinks to herself that this is the first time they've been outnumbered. The girls. A tickle has formed in her throat, and she is no longer hungry, her stomach clenched into a tight ball like a fist. She sits staring at her empty plate, wondering who will be the first to speak, what they could possibly say. She's placing wagers in her head but she loses, betting on Ellie. It's Grace.

“So, have the melons started up yet? Those extra early ones we started under plastic? What were those called, like, ‘Harvest Gold' or something?”

No one responds.

Grace laughs a little uncomfortably, says, “C'mon guys. I'm a little out of the loop here. Fill me in. Ellie?”

Ellie looks up briefly from the piece of toast she is carefully buttering but doesn't say anything.

“I don't think it's going to work for you to pretend like you've just been on vacation,” Donna says mildly.

“Actually, I think a vacation is a pretty good way to describe it. Do you know that I haven't been camping on the Leelanau Peninsula since I was a little girl? A much-needed vacation, seems to me. One I think anyone could use under the circumstances.”

“Maybe so, but you're the only one who took one.”

Grace carefully lays down her fork, wipes her mouth with her napkin. “Look, Donna, I don't know what's got you so bent out of shape, but I can't see how you have any business questioning my actions. I had my reasons, good reasons. It wasn't you being accused, and it wasn't you waking up one morning and feeling like the worst part of your life was happening all over again, knowing exactly how these things go. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but I did what I needed to do. I knew I had to get away for a bit if I was going to be able to continue functioning here, offer any kind of support to anyone at all.”

“Support? When have you ever provided support?”

“Okay, Donna,” Ellie says quietly.

“Okay what?” Donna sounds like an engine warming for take-off. “There is no way I'm going to sit here and act like everything is okay now, that we're all back to normal because Grace has had her little vacation and now she's home. Give me a break. While you were off pitching your tent on some beach somewhere, Grace, what did you think was going on here?”

“I know exactly what was going on here,” Grace says quietly.

“And the worst of it, in large part, because of you.”

“Donna.”

“No, Ellie. You won't say it so I'm going to. There wasn't one of us who
didn't
want to take off, dump the responsibility on someone else. But none of us did that. Or only one of us besides you, a vulnerable girl who saw your example and followed it.”

She has turned to Grace bodily, her palms flat on the table beside her plate as if they will propel her forward, enlarge her, her rage nearly lifting her from her seat.

“
She
didn't have the maturity to choose otherwise, and she sure as hell didn't have the option of just coming back from
her
so-called ‘vacation.' I don't need you to explain to me why you left. I'm capable of understanding what you believe were ‘good reasons,' whether I condone them or not. What I can't understand is what you're doing back.”

“I live here, Donna. This is my home, the place I grew up, the farm my grandpa entrusted to me. I'm pretty sure I have the right to come back to my own farm, to continue the work my family started here—”

“Oh for godsakes, Grace! How many times do we have to hear about what your grandpa wanted, his sacrifices, your obligations? I'd think that story would be getting old, even to you. This place is about a lot more now than you still trying to get your grandpa's acceptance, can't you see that?”

“All right.” Ellie's voice is low but firm. She glances at her own hand, which has formed a fist beside her tea cup and opens it slowly, fingers the cup's handle but doesn't pick it up.

“That's enough. I don't think this is getting us anywhere. Maybe this discussion needs to happen in some form but not right now, and not in this way.”

“We're adults, Ellie. . . .”

“I beg your pardon, Grace, but not everyone here is, as you regularly fail to notice. No question, they're getting there faster than anyone might have hoped. We're angry with you, Grace. We're hurt by your actions, all of us, if I may be so bold as to speak for the group. We were forced to cover for your . . . decision. We had an agreement, a commitment, to create something meaningful, and it might have even been working, even
with
Lauren, could have kept working, but now. . . . we've lost something we cared about, Grace, and you played a part in the loss. At the very least, you could acknowledge that, stop trying to make everybody feel bad for
you
, maybe just say you're fucking sorry!”

This last comes out as a screech, and Ellie has her hands over her face. Sarah wishes now she had taken some food, not because she's hungry, but because it would just be nice to have something to do with her hands. Or her mouth. Because she knows she's about to speak.

“Can I say something?”

Ellie lowers her hands, tries to muster a smile. “Of course.”

“I mean, you said maybe there's a better time. I don't want to . . .”

“No, go ahead.”

“Well, it's just that I think everybody is right. And everybody is wrong.”

Sarah glances at Ellie first, then Donna, then back at her lap. She realizes that, up until this moment, it has always been Grace that she's been afraid of—her temper, her obvious ambivalence toward the program, her high standards. But now, Grace doesn't seem all that frightening. Maybe more pathetic, like this half-crippled dog that Sarah used to see on the street, growling whenever anybody passed but pretending to be incapable of getting up if anyone offered him food.

No, now it's Ellie she's most worried about. And Donna, too. While she has needed Grace's approval, she wants Ellie and Donna to
like
her, is afraid they won't anymore if she disagrees with them. Yes, it's true that she is angry at Grace. But that is only a small part of what she is feeling. She's a little mad at Ellie, too, and is struggling to line up her thoughts so she can talk about them when she hears Cassie beside her, nearly whispering, “I think we
are
all adults.”

Sarah realizes that's it. She sits up a little straighter in her chair and looks directly at Ellie.

“Cassie's right. I mean, I don't know the dictionary definition of an adult, whether it goes by age or something, but there's got to be some part about experience, too. This has all happened to us, too, me and Cassie. And we've been a part of this farm, too, growing stuff and learning how to take care of the plants and even making food out of them. I'm sure we've made a lot of mistakes but that was kind of the point, wasn't it? It seems to me like your plan actually worked. I mean, what better way to become an adult than to have somebody try to take everything you've worked really hard for away from you?

“I don't know, I guess I just think that maybe the program, like, with a capital
P
being over isn't such a bad thing. If it's gone—like, gone in the way you thought it was supposed to be—and we're still here, it seems like that sort of means that we don't need it to be that way anymore. I'm not saying I want to leave here or anything or that . . . I don't know. Maybe I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just wondering if maybe it doesn't do any good to try to force us, any of us, to try to be here in the same way when it's so obvious that everything has changed.”

Sarah's not sure what she's said, but both Ellie and Donna are crying, not bawling or anything, just quiet tears running down their faces. Sarah hasn't even looked at Grace yet this morning, not really faced her and the things she knows, the things they know together—but now she does. Grace is looking at her with an expression that Sarah is pretty sure she's only seen on her face one other time—when she was telling them her story, looking across the fields at the barn, the place where her grandfather found her mother dead, and seeing in her memory that moment she's carried with her ever since, when she became aware of the life—and the child—her mother was willing to sacrifice. And then Grace is nodding, and Sarah sees her hand reaching out and Sarah takes it.

“Maybe,” Grace says, seemingly talking just to Sarah but with her eyes on Ellie, “if I'd had this when I was becoming an adult”—and she waves her arm to include the table, and everyone at it, and the whole farm—“I'd have figured that out a long time ago.”

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13

JENNA IS ALREADY SITTING AT THEIR FAVORITE TABLE
by the window when Cassie arrives. She is writing in the journal Ellie gave her, but she turns as Cassie steps into the room, hurries over to relieve Cassie of her diaper bag. Janie hides her face in Cassie's shoulder, but Jenna scurries around behind and, with a goofy face and a tickle, has no trouble getting Janie to smile.

Cassie and Jenna each collapse into a molded plastic chair, as if worn out from a long journey, and trade a smile. “How were the roads?” Jenna asks. She knows this is Cassie's first trip alone, even held Cassie's brand-new driver's license in her hand throughout the last visit.

Cassie shrugs. “Okay.” She doesn't want Jenna to know how worried she was about driving in this weather, how she gave herself so much extra time that she and Janie ended up sitting in the parking lot looking at books until it got too cold to stay in the truck any longer. Cassie was looking forward to this time alone with Jenna so much that she probably would have come in a blizzard.

Well, they aren't
exactly
alone together today either. Cassie can't help but smile at the little body in her lap, dwarfed by the impossibly small coat and hat and boots that are still too big for Janie and that the little girl despises taking off as much as putting on. Jenna has already gotten the drawing pad out of Cassie's bag, and Janie is excited enough that she doesn't protest as Cassie slips her arms out of the coat, stuffs the hat in her pocket, helps as Janie attempts to crawl from her own lap into Jenna's.

This has become their ritual. Janie is happy at the detention center as long as she is sitting on Jenna's lap. Cassie brings crayons and a tablet of drawing paper, and Jenna clutches the crayon in her fist and moves it slowly around the paper with Janie's tiny hand riding on top like a swimmer perched on the back of a dolphin. Around and around the paper they go. When Jenna stops, Janie picks up a different crayon with her free hand, they exchange it for the one they've been using and go around and around again. They all work hard to keep the conversation going but are mesmerized, sometimes silenced, by the colored paths building on the page. When they are ready to go, Cassie closes the tablet and packs it up for the next time but often, before she does, Jenna will tear off the sheet and hold it in her hand, to carry back to her room when they are gone. Though they've never seen it, always meet in the large day room, Cassie imagines the pictures hanging in a neat row above Jenna's bed, carefully taped to the concrete block wall, covering the green.

And everything is green. Not the green of the outdoors but a hospital green, the green of queasiness and mold and disease, a green so bleached and polluted as to be the antithesis of life. No wonder, as Jenna says, the only thing to be in love with here is your own pain.

“What are you writing?” Cassie asks, gesturing toward the journal.

Jenna smiles shyly, places her free hand over the cover of the journal. “Oh, just stuff about this place, mostly.” Her drawing hand pauses, and Janie turns to look at her, then reaches for another crayon. “I'm kind of telling the story of being here as if it's happening to someone else,” Jenna says. “Helps me keep my perspective.”

Cassie thinks she might have some idea what kinds of things are in the journal. Jenna has told them about the horrible meals, the boring classroom time, her constant efforts to wrangle any hours she can get in the art room, though she hasn't yet shown them any of her pictures. She tries to make light of how she is always watching her back, avoiding fights with girls who have targeted her for one reason or another. Worst of all, of course, is the lack of privacy, which is something Jenna has come to covet beyond all other physical sustenance. And maybe she writes in there about being depressed, something Cassie can see, even though Jenna always tries to act upbeat when they are there.

Mostly, though, Jenna doesn't like talking about herself. She wants to hear, instead, about them, about the farm and the decision Sarah and Cassie both made to stay on when their sentences were up, about Donna's weekend job at a new white tablecloth restaurant in town, the workshops Ellie just started teaching at the community college on identifying troubled teens in the classroom, Sarah and Cassie's studies, and, of course, about Janie. Cassie feels glad that Jenna does have a way to talk about her own experiences, notices now as Jenna flips through the book that it is almost filled.

“Do you need another journal?”

Jenna bites her lip. “Actually, yeah. Will you tell Ellie? It could just be a regular notebook or something. It wouldn't have to be this nice.”

Cassie nods, though she thinks it would be better if Jenna told Ellie herself. The relationship between Ellie and Jenna is healing, Ellie never missing a single week of visits until today, but there is still a long way to go. Sarah has only come to visit once, clearly afraid that Jenna holds her responsible for what happened. And Jenna has been equally afraid to ask, no less sure that Sarah might be thinking the same of her. Jenna knows a bit about how hard things have been for Sarah, how, right after Lauren and Jenna's departure, she kind of withdrew—helped little in the garden, ate almost nothing at meals, and spent long hours alone. For a while, Ellie even urged Sarah to reenter a drug treatment program, but Sarah insisted that she could make it on her own. Cassie imagines that Jenna probably understands what Sarah is going through, but that doesn't necessarily make her failure to visit hurt any less.

And, of course, the biggest obstacle for Jenna, and for Cassie's dream that Jenna will return to the farm when her time at detention is over, is Grace. Jenna has never asked about her but, if she did, Cassie would tell her that Grace is back in body if not in soul. She did just what she had to do to finish up the season but spent more and more time on her own in her cabin, even eating meals there, or off somewhere away from the farm. Since frost, she has been spending her weeks working on an organic bedding plant research project up in Lansing run by someone she knew in college, and though she usually comes home on the weekends, it is clear that her relationship with everyone—Ellie, in particular—is tense and in need of the sweeping reevaluation Grace seems determined to avoid. Even so, Ellie assures Cassie and Sarah that Grace is glad they've stayed on the farm, tells them it is, in part, their presence that allows her to stretch out a bit and still stay connected. Cassie is not sure that Jenna would be convinced.

Cassie knows that, above all, the thing that has kept her and Jenna connected has been the process of getting Janie back. Though it sometimes makes Cassie feel selfish to realize how much time has been spent talking about it, she also knows that the conversations about Janie have served to distract Jenna from her own situation and made her feel useful in her unwavering support of Cassie.

Sometimes, Cassie has trouble believing that she has her daughter back, that no one will try to take her away, that she doesn't have to pay anymore for her terrible mistake. With only an inkling of how complex the legal system actually is, Cassie still marvels at how much of her (and Ellie's) successful navigation through it was a result of sheer luck, oversights, assumptions, a quirky sense of fairness, and the pure unpredictability of human nature.

It wasn't even the legal part that was all that hard. A few phone calls from Ellie's friend at the public defender's office, Stephen Hastings, established early on that Cassie's parental rights had never been terminated. In fact, though the case had been rather highly publicized for its proverbial fifteen minutes, no viable potential adoptive parents had ever come forward, partially due to the fact that no background information had been collected from Cassie—no medical records, family background, exact date of birth, possible pregnancy complications—because they thought Cassie was mentally disabled. Thus, when Cassie came forward and proved her competence with statements from Ellie and Donna, both Social Services and the court seemed almost anxious to honor her request, whether to rectify their own blundering or just because of the institutional preference for children to be with their own parents.

No, the legal part wasn't Cassie's biggest hurdle. It was, in a way, Ellie herself. She had made it clear from the beginning that she wasn't one hundred percent behind the idea, and as the legal barriers fell away, she became more and more closemouthed on the subject, less and less enthusiastic about responding to phone calls, filling out forms, meeting with attorneys and social workers. When the time finally came to produce a recommendation to present to the judge, she spent an entire day in her office and, when she came out, held a blank sheet of paper in front of Cassie and said, “We need to talk.”

Cassie had followed Ellie back into the office, close to tears, certain that they had finally hit the brick wall Cassie had always suspected would eventually appear. Cassie tried, in that moment, to imagine what it would be like to wake up each morning knowing that her daughter would never again be a part of her life.

“I'm having trouble telling the judge why I think this is a good idea.”

Cassie shook her head as if her brain was experiencing static. “Oh. Is that what they want you to do?”

Ellie smiled a little at that, shook her own head. “No. Not exactly. But I can't seem to write anything about you until I resolve that issue in my own mind. Cassie?”

“Yes?”

“What . . . feels different to you? I mean, now. Different from how you felt when you were living with your grandmother, taking care of her?”

Cassie cocked her head, trying to focus on Ellie's question, trying to understand what this had to do with anything. “Um, I guess now I'm free. Freer, anyway. I get to decide what I do with my time. And I'm around people who can talk to me, who
see
me.”

“Exactly. And what do you think it's going to be like when you have a baby to take care of?”

Then Cassie understood. Ellie wasn't so much worried that Cassie wouldn't be a good mother. She was wondering if being a mother was a good thing for Cassie.

Cassie sat forward in her chair. “It will be different again. I know that. But I also know that it's not the same as going backward.”

“How do you know? All you've ever done is care for other people. Don't you think it would be nice to stay free of that for a while?”

“Do you want to be free of caring for other people?”

“Well, no. Of course not. But I'm not . . . I'm not you.”

“Okay. I know. I know I'm still a teenager. And maybe it would have been better if this had never happened, if there was no baby. The best thing would be if no one became a mother who didn't want to or wasn't ready for it. But that's not what happened. There
is
a baby and she's out there somewhere and I want to be the one who takes care of her.”

“Because you think you have to, because you won't be a good person if you don't?”

“No! No, nothing like that. In fact I think there might even be other people who would have more to offer her, like experience or maturity or something. But I'm pretty sure there isn't anybody who can love her as much as I do. I thought you might be right, what you said about the grief. But it doesn't go away. In fact, it might even get worse the more time goes by. I love her just as much now as I did the day she was born, maybe more. And I know I'd never be able to forget her, to just go on and pretend like this never happened.”

“Like your mother did to you?”

Cassie's head dropped down, and she was staring at her lap. It wasn't like she hadn't thought of this herself.

She took a deep breath and looked directly into Ellie's eyes. “The thing I know now is how you have to tell the truth. My truth is I want to be my child's mother. I know it won't be easy, and I know that my own—freedom—will be compromised. But doesn't my freedom also depend on making my own choices?”

Ellie opened her mouth, but Cassie raised her hand to stop her.

“I know you want us to grow up first before we become adults, have a chance to be young and everything. And probably most teenagers are better off without kids. And I know you wish that could be different for me now. I understand that and can't believe I have someone in my life who cares about me as much as you do. But that's one of the reasons I can do this, right? Now I do have people in my life who care about me. If I can stay here a little while, my baby and I will
both
have just what we need to grow and . . . flourish.” Cassie had smiled a little shyly then. “Maybe you can tell the judge that—that my baby is going to be a part of a family of strong women, a whole . . . tribe . . . of women who will teach her to be strong, too.”

Ellie had nodded, her arms folded across her chest but her eyes warm, her smile satisfied. “Maybe that's just what I'll tell him.”

It has not been all smooth since. None of them has ever lived with a baby before. And, no matter that Janie is now with her own mother, the change has been a serious disruption for her. She cried a lot the first few days, refused to eat, and slept very little. She is still fairly fussy. Ellie tells Cassie this is a good thing, that Janie has already learned to speak for herself, and that they'd have a lot more to worry about if she was passive and stoic. Cassie has, of course, read everything the library offers about parenting and feeding and infant health and stages of growth. All that, though often contradictory and confusing, along with Ellie's encouragement, has been a kind of bulwark against any concerns she might have had about responding to her baby's cries. As Ellie is prone to say, laughing at herself along with the rest of them about her love of aphorism, you can't spoil a baby with love.

And still, sometimes all Cassie can feel is terror, sees in that same innocent face a reflection of her own deepest fears. At those times, when anxiety threatens to overtake her, when she is the little girl herself and her skin feels too tight and the walls are too close, there are three women who are just ready and waiting to prove her wrong. They are a labyrinth of nurturing roots, weaving and embracing with no intention of loosening their grip. And however odd it may be, Cassie sees her grandmother in Janie. Caring for the little girl brings the old woman back to Cassie in a way that nothing else could, allows her to heal.