If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (3 page)

“‘I got rhythm, I got music,’” she started singing.

“Liz, man—”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she whispered, closing her eyes again. “When I felt him come inside me. It’s like this—this total rush, when you make a guy come.” She started rocking, gently, against the wall behind the sink, that smile playing on her lips. “That was the best part of the whole thing. It’s like—it’s so intense, man, it’s like you’re living and dying, all at once.” A slight shudder went through her body, and then she opened her eyes wide and looked around the bathroom as though she’d never seen it before.

“But Liz,” I said. “I mean, shit—”

“And he said the most romantic thing,” she said, her eyes shining.
“After, he said, ‘Baby, if I knew it was going to be your first time, I would have taken out the Cadillac Sedan instead of the Dodge.’”

“Liz—”

Liz leaned over and patted my thigh. “That’s okay,” she said. “You just don’t understand the way passion works. Anyway, it’s safe, my period’s due in a couple days, I can feel it. My tits are killing me, man, it’s like they’re gonna pop off and hit the fucking ceiling any minute.”

Nanny snorted. “That’s what my cousin Maggie thought and look what happened,” she said. “That’s what everyone thinks. I mean, look at Ginger, man. If you’re going to see him again, you should—”

“What do you mean, if I’m going to see him again?” Liz said, staring hard at Nanny. “Guy just took my virginity and I’m not going to see him again?”

“If you’re going to see him again,” Nanny said patiently, “you should think about going on the Pill.”

Liz shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. She cupped her breasts in her hands. “No way. I don’t want these babies getting any bigger.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” Nanny asked, exasperated. “You gotta do something.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Liz said, smiling. “I don’t have to do a fucking thing.”

Nanny and I stayed silent. When Liz got this way over a guy, it was like she was high on angel dust or something, her brain riffing bullshit. “Delusional” didn’t even begin to cover it.

“So when are you going to see him again?” I asked, finally.

“Tonight,” she said, smiling her new smile. “I’ll see him tonight at work.”

“I mean,” I said, “I mean, are you going to—did he say anything, like—”

“Oh, grow up,” Liz snapped. “The whole thing just happened, what’s he going to say? I mean, he had to get the car cleaned after, he probably
paid for it out of his own pocket. He put his job in jeopardy for me, what more does he have to say?”

I looked at Nanny and shrugged:
I give up.

“And besides,” Liz said, sounding suddenly aggrieved, “you guys, you’re like freaking me out, man, all these questions, I mean, you should be happy for me, being with Cory, knowing how I feel about him, after all this time—” She jumped off the sink, started walking toward the door.

“It’s not like we’re not happy for you,” Nanny said.

“It’s just, we don’t want you to get hurt, is all,” I finished lamely.

But Liz wasn’t listening. She had stopped in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection.

“Do I look different?” she asked. “I feel different.” She ran her hands down her breasts, over her stomach. “What if I’m pregnant?” she whispered.

Nanny’s eyes grew huge with alarm. She looked at me. Suddenly I felt depressed and I didn’t know why.

“Is that what you want?” I asked.

Liz just smiled her new smile, her eyes staring at us backward through the mirror. “Wouldn’t that be a trip, man? Walking down the aisle at graduation with Cory’s baby inside me?” She turned sideways, her hands clasped over her womb. “Wouldn’t that just be something else?”

•   •   •

I
t seemed as though the car was flying, but we were only doing around sixty, and that was safe on the Meadowbrook Parkway.

“Ginger called me,” Nanny said from the backseat. “I wanted to go with her, but she said the cab was already honking in the street and she had to run.”

“She took a
cab
? To the
hospital
? Where was her mother?” I asked.

“Oh, Mrs. Shea, mother of the year?” Nanny said. “She wasn’t around, surprise, surprise. You got that lighter, or should I start rubbing two sticks together?”

Liz cruised into the right lane, cutting off a white Mustang. The driver began honking frantically. “Your horn blows good, how about your mother?” Liz yelled back at him.

“God, it’s so lonely even thinking about taking a cab to have your baby,” I said, passing the lighter back to Nanny. And it must have cost a fortune, since Ginger was going to County instead of Elephant Beach Hospital. She had to have the baby there because she didn’t have any money or health insurance and she was only seventeen years old.

Liz patted my thigh. “That’s why we’re here, sweetie,” she said. “For moral support. It’s too bad we couldn’t have taken her there ourselves, but—” Liz shrugged. She’d been just getting off work when Nanny called, and she was the only one of us with a car.

“Jesus, what if she had the baby in the cab?” Nanny said. “You think that could have happened? I saw a movie once, the woman was stuck in traffic, right, and her water broke—”

“This isn’t a fucking movie,” Liz said, racing a blue Volkswagen bug to get into the exit lane. “Things like that don’t happen in real life. She’s probably still in labor, won’t have the baby for hours.”

But Ginger’s baby had already been born, so quickly it was like he was sliding down the water chute at Coney Island, out and about in less than an hour after she arrived at the hospital. “That’s the way it always is with your kind,” the nurse told her, before she scooped the baby up and took him away. Now Ginger was sitting up in bed, her breasts hanging over her belly inside the thin cotton smock, looking wiped out. A strange woman was sitting at her bedside, talking in low, serious tones and trying to push some papers into her hand.

“Anyone got a cigarette?” Ginger greeted us. We all started shoving packs at her, and the strange woman said, “You really shouldn’t be smoking so soon afterward.”

“The baby’s born,” Ginger said, her voice weary. “And this cigarette isn’t going to do anything to me the last six thousand haven’t done.”

“If you’d only see your child, I’m sure you’d—”

“Who is she?” Liz asked.

“Who are you again?” Ginger asked the woman.

“My organization represents young girls like yourself, who get in the family way and can’t care for their children,” the woman said, facing Ginger. “We help them to—”

“How long since you gave birth, Ginger?” Liz asked.

Ginger shrugged tiredly. “About an hour. Doc said it was like dropping kittens, and I told you what the nurse said, the bitch.”

“So the labor took about an hour, and now you’re here—let’s make it two hours,” Liz said, checking her watch.

“Yeah, about that,” Ginger said, sinking back against the pillows, her eyes closed.

“And you come around, bugging her about mistakes?” Liz asked the woman. “What were you, waiting outside the delivery room?”

The woman flushed over her stiff mouth up to her veiled eyes, but she still didn’t move off the bed. “My organization wants to help girls like—er—what did you say your name was?” She riffled through the papers she was holding, frowning, impatient.

“You want to help her so much, you don’t even know her name?” Nanny asked. “I think it’s time for you to hit the road, Jackie.”

“I don’t think—” the woman started, but we moved in on her, practically crushing her off the bed as we sat down.

“Right. Don’t think,” Liz said. “Just make like an egg and beat it. Before we beat you.”

In a flash, the woman was off the bed and out the door.

“Thanks,” Ginger said, opening her eyes. “I thought she’d never leave. I mean, I told her I was giving the kid up, what more does she want?”

“Screw her,” Liz said, lighting a cigarette. She handed it to Ginger. “How you feeling?”

“You want anything, Ginge?” Nanny asked gently. “Something to eat? A Tab, maybe?”

“Here’s some water,” I said, pouring from the pitcher on the side table into a plastic cup. I held it close to Ginger’s lips while she sipped, and put my other arm around her. She leaned against me. “Thanks,” she whispered, and closed her eyes again.

On the way out of the hospital, we stopped to see the baby. He was in a glass cubicle, a big baby boy, fast asleep, like his mother had been when we left her.

“He’s a bruiser,” Nanny said, peering through the glass. “You think he looks like anyone we know?”

“He was just born, for chrissake,” Liz said. “They don’t look like anybody then, and the eyes change color after a few weeks.”

Rumor had it that Allie D’Amore was the father; he and Ginger had been together on and off since eighth grade. But after they’d broken up the last time, she started hanging out with a lot of guys, and Allie wouldn’t even look at her when she came around Comanche Street, barefoot, wearing a man’s oversized white tee shirt that strained against her belly. Then he flipped out after doing some beat acid and now he was in a psych ward somewhere out on the Island and no one had seen him for weeks.

“I’m glad she didn’t see him,” Nanny said. “The baby, I mean. She might have changed her mind and kept him.”

“That might not have been such a bad thing,” Liz said. “Maybe then Miss Ginger would have to do something else besides get high and fuck the world.”

“Don’t talk about her that way,” Nanny said, her hazel eyes huge with tears. She and Ginger had grown up together, when their families only came down to Elephant Beach for the summer and they used to buy cough syrup at Coffey’s Drugs and drink it to get high behind the old umbrella factory. Liz shrugged and lit a cigarette directly beneath the “No Smoking” sign in the hallway.

Ginger told me she’d thought about keeping it, one night when we were going to the bathroom behind the dunes on the beach. That’s where all the girls had to go, since the public restrooms closed after six o’clock. We called it the Elephant Hole. She said she was afraid she’d be like her mother and her sisters, who’d all had babies out of wedlock. “It’s in the blood, Kate,” she said, zipping her jeans only halfway over her ballooning belly. “You can’t escape what’s in the blood.” I wondered if that was true. I thought of my own mother, the one who’d given me up for adoption. Did she decide one night, while zipping up her jeans at an Elephant Hole of her own? Had she been like Ginger, who never stopped getting high, or smoking, or any of the things you hear expectant mothers shouldn’t do? Though she did drink a lot of chocolate malteds at the counter at Eddy’s. “Good for the baby,” she’d say, patting her stomach, while Desi shook his head, ringing up the cash register.

The ride home was quieter. I was sitting in the backseat, smoking, listening to Rod Stewart belt out “Maggie May” on the radio, thinking about Luke. Conor said he was still hanging out in his bedroom, taking walks late at night, sitting up smoking when he should have been sleeping. Conor said he was quiet, still, more quiet than before he went away. Even when Ray Mackey, his best friend, came over to see him. “It was way weird, man,” Conor said. “I mean, Luke and Ray were like brothers, tighter than him and me, being the same age and all. I could tell Ray was, like, hurt, man. He pulled me aside after, asked me if Luke was like this with everyone since he got back.”

I thought about Luke sitting by his window, staring out at the ocean, as if he was seeing new worlds across the water. I wanted him in this world. I wanted him in Elephant Beach, living with me in one of the bungalows that lined Comanche Street. I thought about standing in front of our bungalow, waiting for him to come home at night, rocking our daughter in the misty twilight until she slept. She would have eyes like mine and Luke’s, and honey-colored hair as silky fine as beach grass when it first starts growing, slender stalks that bend slightly in the wind.
She would look like the best of us and grow up laughing. Her laugh would sound like silver bells when we lifted her in and out of the shallow waves at the shoreline.

•   •   •

M
aggie Mayhew was having her baby at last. There would be no interference of relatives or hospitals where everything was white and sterile. Beth Fagan, Maggie’s best friend, was the midwife; she’d just completed her first year of nursing school. If the baby was a girl, they were naming it Joni; if it was a boy, Donovan.

We were all crowded in front of the bungalow, inside the chain-link fence, where we could see the glow of white candles through the windows. It was after supper but still light out and everyone was milling around. It was what we did every night, but now there was a purpose. I searched the crowd of faces for Luke’s, but he wasn’t there.

Inside the bungalow, Maggie let out a scream. “What are they, beating her with chains in there?” Mr. Connelly called over the fence. He was sitting on his front steps, drinking a Budweiser. You couldn’t hide anything on Comanche Street; the houses were so close together, the neighbors could hear every cough, every moan during the night. They often ended up in one another’s dreams by mistake.

“Really, man,” Mitch said. “I mean, giving birth’s a trip all right, but it’s not like she’s in a fucking rice paddy in the middle of the Mekong Delta, for chrissake.”

“Yeah, like you’d know what giving birth is like,” Liz said.

Nanny banged out of the bungalow, slamming the screen door behind her. “Fuck it, I’m calling Aunt Francie,” she said, heading to the pay phone by the entrance to the beach.

“I feel like we should go to church, light a candle,” Liz said.

“Fuck that,” Billy Mackey said. He lit a match and held it high. “Here’s our church, man. Right here. It’s the church of life, man! Light
your matches. Lift your matches to the sky for the baby.” He was so stoned his eyes looked like they were about to fall out of his face.

Everyone took it up. It was a clear night, no wind coming off the ocean. The sunset fell in ribbons across the sky. Soon the air was filled with matchsticks and lighters; when the matches went out, we lit others to take their place. People held cigarettes to the sky until they glowed down to stubs.