Pretending to Dance (6 page)

She took a few envelopes from the mailbox, then shut it and stood there waiting for us, so we really had no choice but to stop.

I pressed my brakes. “Hi, Dani,” I said, coming to a stop. Stacy straddled her bike next to me.

“Who's this?” Dani asked, her smudged eyes on Stacy.

“My friend Stacy. She's staying overnight.” I wouldn't tell her about our plan to sleep in the springhouse. I knew Danielle. She'd get some of her weird friends together and try to scare us in the middle of the night. Dani was seventeen and she'd been a thorn in my side my entire life. Two years ago, Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim pulled her out of the local high school and shipped her off to Virginia Dare boarding school in High Point. I'd been happy to see her go. Of course, she was home now for the summer. I didn't feel like I really knew her any longer, but that was okay with me. “I gave Stacy a tour of Morrison Ridge and now we're headed home,” I said, for something to say.

“Radical hair,” Dani said to Stacy. I could see how Stacy's thick, straight shimmery black hair would appeal to Dani. Still, I was surprised that she said something nice to one of my friends. She'd never liked me any more than I liked her.

“Thanks,” Stacy said.

“Come on,” I said, starting to pedal again. “See you, Dani.”

“Wow,” Stacy said when we were out of earshot. “She's intense.”

“She's weird, is what she is,” I said. “And she's my only cousin left in Morrison Ridge.”

“So you have all this family living here but you two are the only kids?”

“Right.”

Stacy sighed. “Sounds like paradise to me,” she said, and I once again had the sense that my life was at least a little bit better than hers.

 

7

San Diego

“How long do they predict the wait to be?” Aidan's mother asks from the sofa in the James's living room. She still holds a photograph album on her lap, although we're finished looking through it.

“The average wait is fourteen months,” Aidan says. Our nephew Oliver is on his lap, doing his best to unbuckle the strap of Aidan's watch.

“That's a long time.” Aidan's father sounds disappointed.

“But worth it if you have a baby at the end of it,” Laurie says. Her gaze is on her son in Aidan's lap and I can tell she's debating whether or not to stop him from playing with the watch. I know Aidan could care less.

We've had dinner and sorted through about a hundred photographs, looking for—and finding—good ones of Aidan and myself with Kai and Oliver that we can use in the portfolio. Now we're relaxing over coffee and chatter in the living room. Kai is on my lap and I bend over to kiss the top of his head. I'm not sure if the boys gravitate to us or we gravitate to them, but Aidan and I always seem to end up holding them. I don't look forward to the day the little boys no longer want to cuddle. By then, though, with any luck, we will have our own child to hold.

Kai is nearly asleep. I love the heavy weight of him in my lap. His head rests against my breast and he still has a baby scent about him that I'm drinking in. There were moments early on when I could barely look at Kai and Oliver, much less hold them. They were born three months after I lost Sara and I had to fake much of my enthusiasm for the first few months of their lives. During that terrible time, it seemed every one of my friends was having a baby. Every magazine facing me in the grocery store checkout line had a cover article about pregnancy. And everywhere I went, women were pushing strollers or rubbing their hands over their swollen bellies. For a long time, I was filled with resentment and envy and anger. When it came to Laurie, though, I did my best to mask it. She was my sister-in-law and one of my favorite people in the world. She didn't deserve my wrath, and with a husband who traveled constantly for his job, she needed Aidan's and my help more than our grief and anger. Every time I saw her with those babies, though, I felt physically ill. Then, suddenly, something shifted in me and I couldn't get enough of the twins. It was as though my hormones snapped back into balance and I was able to love again. I grew to adore those little boys and now I can't wait to give them a cousin.

“Is there any”—my mother-in-law hesitates, then chuckles—“quality control?” she asks.

“Well, there wouldn't be much quality control if it was our natural child,” Aidan says with a smirk.

“They gave us a form to fill out, Mom,” I say. I'd never had a problem calling Aidan's mother “Mom.” Calling his father “Dad” had been more of a struggle. Only one man in my life had earned that title. “The form asks very specifically what sort of child we'd accept. Would we take a biracial child or a child with a cleft palate, for example, or with cerebral palsy or whose mother was an addict. You get the idea.” The form had been both overwhelming and sobering. It made us look at ourselves and our biases. And our limitations. Our fantasy was of a healthy beautiful Caucasian child. The form woke us up: reality could be much different. We spent days talking about the options. Aidan pointed out that, most likely, I would be the person giving the greatest physical care to our child and I needed to think our choice through carefully. We could handle a deformity, we thought. Could we handle cerebral palsy? We decided we could not, and yet something kept us from putting that in writing on the form. That night I had a dream about my father. He was in his wheelchair perched on a cliff and the look on his face was more forlorn than I'd ever seen it. I would have happily taken care of him for the rest of his life. I wish I'd had that chance. I know a grown man and a child are hardly the same thing, but nevertheless, when I woke up, I knew what I wanted to do with the form. Over breakfast that morning, I told Aidan I thought we could handle anything. “I agree,” he said, as though he'd only been waiting for me to come to the same conclusion. We signed the form and sent it in. And now we wait.

“So is it like on one of those dating sites where they match you up, only this time it's with a woman who's having a baby?” his mother asks.

“Sort of,” I say. “They make an initial match by sending the girl—the young woman—several portfolios of families that the agency thinks will be a good fit for her. Then she picks one or more to get in touch with. And then she decides.”

“You'll meet in person at that point?” Laurie asks.

“Hard to say,” Aidan says, rescuing his now loose watch from Oliver's grasp. “Contact can take a lot of different forms,” he says. “It might be e-mail first or a phone call and then an in-person meeting. We'll have to wait and see.”

“Nerve-racking,” says his mother. “Will you let us know every step of the way?”

I smile. When I was pregnant, she called me nearly every day to ask how I was feeling, what did the doctor say, did I need any help. When Aidan called to tell her I'd lost the baby, I could hear her sobbing through the phone even though I was on the other side of the room, sobbing myself.

“You know we'll love that baby just as much as we love Kai and Oliver,” Aidan's father said. “You'll never have to worry about that.”

I hadn't been worried about it, but I'm touched by his desire to reassure us. There are moments I need to reassure myself that I will feel the same way.

“Thank you, Dad,” I say. “I know you will.”

“Any baby that lands with you two will be the luckiest child on earth,” his mother says, and now my eyes fill.

When I'm with Aidan's family, I want a baby with all my heart and soul and body. I feel certain I'll be a good mother. Maybe even a great mother. Life is so normal in this house, the house Aidan and Laurie grew up in. In this house with this family, I feel none of the ambivalence that dogs me late at night when I can't fall asleep.

I press my lips to the silky hair on Kai's head. He is sound asleep now. He and Oliver are not biologically mine and yet I couldn't love them any more than I do. I am sure I'll feel the same way about our child.

*   *   *

When we get home, Aidan and I sit in our office to check e-mail. We have two large identical desks that face each other and he begins typing at a rapid clip while I pull my mail up on my screen. There is only one message and it's from DanielleK422. My cousin Dani. I stare at the link without moving my cursor over it. I haven't spoken to Dani in several years, although I received the usual card from her at Christmas. It had been a photograph of Dani and her husband, Sean, their two dogs, and their eighteen-year-old son, Evan, whom they'd somehow roped into posing with them. Evan's hair hung down to his shoulders and he sported a barbed-wire tattoo around his neck. Dani, who looked like a straitlaced woman approaching middle age in the photograph, is getting the same run for her money that she gave her own parents. I feel for her. At least her eye makeup washed off.

Although Aidan and I also send out picture cards at Christmas, I never send one to my cousin. I'm afraid she'll share it with my relatives, and the less they know about my life, the better. I usually get a birthday card from Nora. Although Nora doesn't have my address, she sends the card to Dani, who sends it on to me. Letters always accompany those cards, but I haven't read a single one. Straight into the trash. I've never relented. I haven't seen or spoken with anyone from Morrison Ridge other than Dani since I was eighteen.

I click on the message.

Hi Molly. Thought I should let you know Amalia broke her leg and has to have a bunch of surgeries to repair it. Mom doesn't know how she did it—you know they don't talk. She just knows Amalia is going to be in the hospital for a while afterward and then go into rehab. Thought you might want to know. Xoxo Dani.

“You're frowning,” Aidan says from his side of our double desks. “Is there something from Hope Springs?”

I shake my head and try to smile. “No,” I say. I'm staring at the e-mail. Staring without seeing. I can't remember Dani ever mentioning Amalia in an e-mail to me before. “Just an e-mail from my cousin Dani about a family friend who broke her leg.”

“Someone you were close to?” he asks.

I hesitate before shaking my head again. I imagine the scent of honeysuckle in the room. “No,” I say. “It's no big deal.” I lift my fingers to the keyboard and type.

Thanks for letting me know, Dani.

I don't sign it. No little
X
s or
O
s. Nothing that happened at Morrison Ridge was Dani's responsibility, and yet the chill I feel for my family extends easily to her.

“I love you, babe,” Aidan says, out of the blue from across the sea of our desks.

I smile at him. “Love you, too,” I say, and I return my attention to my computer screen, although I don't really see it.

Aidan is the last person I want to hide things from. Once a friend asked us what our secret is, since our marriage seems so strong, and we both answered, almost at the same moment, “Honesty.” When that word left my mouth, I didn't feel hypocritical. I believe Aidan and I do have an honest relationship. I told him my relatives were caustic and crazy and I needed to cut ties with them to have a healthy future. That was the truth. Yes, I embellished as needed: my mother was dead, for example. But most of my dishonesty is due simply to omission. Sometimes he jokes about my family, calling them “inbred Southern mountain people.” I never bother to correct him. What does it matter?

He knows I'd loved my father, though. And he knows that once my father was gone I'd found living at Morrison Ridge intolerable. That had certainly been the truth.

I used to wish I could tell Aidan everything, but I've moved past that now. It's too dangerous. I trust him more than I trust anyone I know, and yet, I am a lawyer. I've seen too many good marriages go sour, and when they do, all bets are off. Confidences shared over the years become fair game. I will never tell him what happened on Morrison Ridge. I will never tell him why I left my family. It no longer has any bearing on my life. At least, that's what I tell myself. But this e-mail from Dani coupled with the prospect of adoption leaves me shaken. I suddenly feel as though I'm walking a tightrope and gravity is nipping at my heels.

Most days I think I'm over it. I've moved way beyond my adolescence and replaced the pain and anger with my degrees, my career, my volunteer work, my fabulous friends, my loving husband. But it doesn't take much to bring it back to me. It might take an article in the newspaper about someone with MS, or something on the news about North Carolina. Or, I see now, a short e-mail from Dani.
Yes,
I think as I stare blindly at my screen. That's enough to bring it all back.

 

8

Morrison Ridge

Two flights of steps bordered either side of the Hill from Hell. I didn't know who constructed them or when, but it was sometime before I was born. Maybe even before Daddy was born. In one stretch, the steps were made of large semiflat stones. In another, wood. In a third, slate. All of them were in terrible disrepair, but it was still easier to climb them than to try to walk up the dirt road itself, especially since Stacy and I were weighed down with our backpacks, slices of pie in Tupperware containers, bottles of Pepsi, and a bunch of cassette tapes. We stopped halfway up to catch our breath. I really didn't need to, but I could tell Stacy was not used to trudging up hills.

By the time we reached the turnoff to the springhouse, it was getting seriously dark and the buzz of the cicadas was so loud we could hardly hear each other speak.

“How do you know we're on the path?” she asked after we'd been walking for a few minutes. “Everything looks the same out here.”

“We're fine,” I said. “Trust me.” If it had been daylight, we'd be able to see the fieldstone walls of the springhouse by now, but all I could see ahead of us was the muted greenish gray of the trees.