Raising Hope (26 page)
Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little. She’s really actually barfed only about three times. But she looks barfy all the time, heaving with nothing coming out. And the heaving’s only after a couple of hours of looking miserable, like she’s eaten something bad for her.
“You’re not doing yourself or us any favors by not going to the doctor,” Sara Lynn keeps telling her.
“Nothing to see a doctor about,” Ruth replies, practically gagging. “Just a little stomach bug.”
She still goes to work and everything. It’s just that when she’s home, she sort of lies around looking “green about the gills,” as Mamie would say.
She’s half sitting, half lying on the couch in the den right now, watching TV. I squeeze in beside her. “Hey,” I say. “What’re you doing?”
“Watching the news,” she says with a groan. She reaches for the TV remote on the floor and aims it at the screen, clicking the set off. “Goddamn depressing,” she says. “Take it from me—there’s never a good reason to watch the news. If the world’s ending, we’ll all find out about it soon enough without Mr. Anchorman’s help.” She leans back on the sofa with a hand on her stomach.
“How’re you feeling?” I ask.
“Lousy,” she says. “My stomach’s flipping like a fish. How’re you?”
“Me?” I shrug. “Okay, I guess.”
“Anything new? How’s tennis?”
I perk up. “Awesome! I’m doing so great. Sam says I’m really making a lot of progress. And he . . . he’s just nice. He talks to me like I’m a real person, not a kid.”
“Well, you are a real person.” Ruth tries to smile and pulls one of my curls.
I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean. We talk about stuff. Stuff like life and, you know, falling in love.”
“Falling in love, huh?” She manages a little laugh.
“Have you ever?” I ask. “Been in love, I mean?”
“Oh yeah,” she answers right away, nodding.
“Who with? I mean, with whom?”
“Father Flanagan,” she says, all serious, and I groan and hit her arm. He’s been the priest at the Catholic church for about a hundred years, which would put him at about a hundred and twenty-five years old.
“Be serious,” I tell her.
“I am,” she says, trying not to laugh. “He’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. I’ve longed for him for years. From afar, of course.”
I shake my head and put it in my hands. “Everyone in this house is crazy,” I say.
“Ha!” Ruth chortles. “You don’t even know the half of it.”
After Ruth goes up to bed—at, like, seven-thirty, for crying out loud—I decide to take a walk around the neighborhood. Not for any reason or anything; not because I’m hoping to run into someone or anything. I just feel like walking.
So here I am just minding my own business when who do you suppose rides his bike up behind me? Yup—Dumb Dan. Mr. Happy. Mr. “I’m so positive and you’re so negative.” I keep my eyes straight ahead, like I don’t see him, but he’s so clueless that he doesn’t even get that I’m trying to ignore him.
“Hey, Hope,” he says.
“Hi.” I keep walking.
“What’s going on?”
“Not much.” Walk, walk, walk.
“Any luck on the you-know-what front?”
“Nope.”
“You still trying?”
“I guess.”
He sighs. “Well, see you around,” he says, and he rides his bike around me.
I shout after him, “I am not a negative person!”
He brakes and turns around. “Huh?”
“You said I was a negative person!” I stop walking and cross my arms over my chest. “When we were up at Lakewood School and you were shooting baskets.”
“I didn’t say that,” he says. He’s looking at me like I’m nuts.
“You did so! When I didn’t jump up and down all excited about your brainiac idea to call Information to find my father.”
“I didn’t say you were a negative person. I said you were being negative about finding your father.”
“Same difference.”
“No, it’s not. You”—he points to me—“aren’t negative. You have negative feelings about finding your father probably because you’re conflicted about it.”
Now it’s my turn to look at him like he’s crazy. “What are you talking about?”
He hops off his bike and walks it over to me. “Look. You want to find your father, right?” I nod. “Sure you do,” he says. “That makes sense. But you’re also probably pretty scared about it. Wondering about what he’ll be like, what he’ll say after all this time, whether he’ll even like you. You know, things like that.”
I blink a few times. Dan’s not so dumb after all. “How do you know all this stuff?” I ask.
He shrugs and grins, his braces shining. “My mom. She’s a psychologist.”
“She is?” My eyes get wide. “Like she helps crazy people?”
“Who’s not crazy?” he asks. “That’s what my mom says. She says we all have our issues.”
I narrow my eyes. “So did you tell your mom about me? About me trying to find my father?”
He puts his hands up and says, “No way! I told you I wouldn’t tell, and I haven’t.”
“Hmm,” I say.
We walk the rest of the way around the block until we get back to my house, and it’s getting dark. The outdoor lights have clicked on, and my house looks like it’s waiting for me, like it’s saying,
I’m here, Hope, and I’m not going anywhere.
“I better go in,” I say. “I’ll see you.”
“Okay,” he says. I walk briskly up the driveway, and he calls, “Hope?”
“Yeah?” I turn around.
“You’re not a negative person.”
“I know I’m not,” I call back. I take a few more steps and then turn around again. Dan’s still at the bottom of my driveway. “Hey,” I call, “thanks for saying that.”
He smiles and hollers back, “No problem.”
“Bye,” I call.
“Good night, Hope.”
As I walk up the front steps to let myself into the house, I can still hear my name ringing in the twilight.
I
paper-clip the lunch receipts and put them in the far right compartment of the cash register drawer. It’s two-thirty, and I walk back to the kitchen and poke my head in. “Bye, Chet,” I say. “I’m through for the day.”
He grunts at me. Hasn’t said anything about me making a habit of leaving early. Probably knows I’d bite his head off. I just can’t risk seeing Jack again. I can’t face him. I haven’t really thought about how he’ll react when my belly gives the game away, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. That’s the upside of not being a planner. Unlike some people whose names I won’t mention, I don’t stew over things that haven’t happened. I’ve got a little bit of time yet before anyone knows a baby’s coming.
I don’t know when I decided I’d have this kid; it just sort of came to me gradually. Every day without making a decision was a day closer to one being made for me. And now I’m headed to the doctor’s over in Holliston to confirm what I know to be true.
When I step into the doctor’s office, I feel like a duck out of water. Three women with big bellies smile at me as I join them in the waiting room, two of them with small children climbing all over them.
“Why is that lady here, Mom?” a little boy says, pointing to me. “She doesn’t have a baby growing in her tummy.”
“Hush, Tommy.” The woman smiles at me apologetically. “Mind your own business.”
“But this is the baby doctor. You have to have a baby in your tummy to come here.”
“Shh,” she says, frowning as she bends down to him.
“It’s all right,” I say, and wave my hand to let her know I’m not at all sensitive. I tell the little boy, “I do have a baby in my tummy. You just can’t see it yet.”
I think about what I just said, and I shake my head, not quite believing it. A baby! God, it’s been twelve years since I’ve taken care of a baby. Twelve years since Bobby came home with Hope.
Two weeks after Ma was dead and buried, Bobby called with his news, and it was then that my anger at all these losses rose beyond what I could bear, like a poison corroding my insides.
“Ruth,” he said, his voice sounding dull to me.
“Did the baby come?” I asked. Bobby and Sandra hadn’t been able to make it down for Ma’s funeral because Sandra was so close to her due date. I could tell that Ma’s friends had thought Bobby was disrespectful for staying away, but I knew Ma would have wanted him to be with Sandra while she gave birth. Ma had always resented the fact that while she was doing the laboring, my father had been out getting a jump on the celebrating. She would have been glad to know that Bobby was different.
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “She came.”
“A girl!” I said, feeling the first glimmer of happiness I had felt in a long time. It took me by surprise; I had forgotten how to feel anything except sorrow or nothing at all.
“Ruth,” Bobby said again, almost like he was warning me about something.
“Aren’t you thrilled?” I asked. “How’s Sandra feeling?”
“Ruth, she died.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. My legs gave way and I sank to the floor, panting hard to catch my breath. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Your little baby girl.”
“No, it’s Sandra. Not the baby.”
“Sandra?” I moaned. I pressed the phone to my ear, hoping I hadn’t heard right. “Sandra died?”
“Yeah,” he said in a flat voice that sounded too far away from me. “She died having the baby. Bled to death.”
“Bled to death?” I yelled. “What do you mean? That doesn’t happen anymore.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, and I forced myself to stop carrying on. “I’ll come up today,” I told Bobby. “Just let me make a few calls and throw my things together.”
“No,” he said. “I’m coming home. I buried her already, and I’ll be home with the baby.”
“What do you mean, you’ve buried her already?” The tears wouldn’t stop coming.
He paused. “How can I make it any clearer to you?”
“I would’ve come,” I cried into the phone. “I would’ve come to say good-bye.”
Bobby had married Sandra right around the time Ma got sick. She was a quiet girl from Maine who worked at the bank. She told us she had come to Ridley Falls because she’d wanted a taste of urban life. I recall thinking life in Maine must have been intolerable if Sandra believed that Ridley Falls had something to offer. She was pregnant when they married, and they moved up to Maine. It wasn’t that Sandra had family up there—she had been in foster homes during her growing up—it was that she missed it after all. She missed the quiet, she said. She wanted to raise her baby where she could hear herself think.
I knew Bobby had wanted to leave town, too, mostly because of Sara Lynn. He had loved that girl like crazy, and she broke his heart into a million pieces before he’d had enough sense to move on and find Sandra, a girl more like him who loved him back. I knew he hadn’t wanted to be in the same town as Sara Lynn, and I also knew he hadn’t wanted to watch my mother die. So they’d moved to Maine.
“Dead!” I said after I hung up the phone. I stood up and walked around my dead mother’s house and said, “She’s dead!” Then I got out all our cleaning supplies and cleaned the whole house, top to bottom. I feared I would kill someone or choke myself with my own rage if I didn’t make myself do something. “Keep moving, Ruth,” I advised myself as I scrubbed and rinsed and polished and dusted and cried. “Whatever you do, don’t stop moving.”
Bobby came with the baby, and I fell in love right away. I hugged him first, though, before I even looked at her. He was my brother, after all, and I loved him.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, crying yet again when I reached out and felt him move his big-brother arms around me. “I am just so sorry.”
“Yeah,” he said, “me too.” He looked dazed, as if he were an actor in his own life, just barely learning the lines.
“Let me see her,” I said through my tears, and I took Bobby’s daughter from her little car seat carrier and held her. “My Lord,” I whispered. “She’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah,” he said again. He started pacing up and down Ma’s little kitchen.
“Can I fix you something to eat?” I asked him. “Sit down.”
“No, no,” he protested, but he sat at the kitchen table as he said it, and I placed his baby into his arms.
“Grilled cheese okay?” I asked, looking into the refrigerator. He didn’t answer, but I made it anyway, served it to him, and poured him a glass of milk.
“Sorry there’s no chips to go with it,” I said, shrugging. “I’m losing my mind lately. I go into the grocery store and stand there scratching my head. ‘Why am I here?’ I say as I look around. ‘What did I come here to get?’ And then I end up getting things I already have or don’t need or don’t even like.”
He smiled. He must have seen I was trying to make him laugh, like I’d always done. He was kind to smile. He probably felt like telling me to shut my mouth and give him some peace and quiet.
“When I was at the store the other day, I bought a pint of strawberries, and I don’t even like them. Never have. Those little raised bumps on them are creepy—look and feel like a nasty skin disease.”
He didn’t smile this time, just gave me the baby, picked up his sandwich, and started eating. I figured I’d keep quiet and let him eat. I had no idea what on earth to say that would make him feel better.
“Got to go out and do an errand,” he said when he had finished his sandwich.
“Drink the rest of your milk.” I motioned to the half-full glass. “Good for your bones.”
He smiled then, a real smile, and shook his head. He left quietly. I didn’t even hear the door shut because his baby girl was cooing in my arms.
When he came home a few hours later, he went right back to his old bedroom.
“What’s the baby’s name?” I called to him from outside his closed door.
“Doesn’t have one,” he said.
“Doesn’t have one?” I asked, shocked that this child in my arms didn’t even have a name to call her own. “Do you have a name in mind?”
“Nope,” he replied.
“What about Sandra, or Mary, after Ma?”
“No,” he said, and I could tell he was in there crying. It was all I could do to stay at that door without running away and crying myself.
“Okay,” I said. “What about Hope?” I didn’t know why that name popped into my head. It just struck me as a pretty name, a promise that we could put our troubles behind us and find some bit of happiness in this world.