These Things Hidden (23 page)

C
laire walks us over to the reading area and somehow, very politely, offers us seats. Despite everything, I’m reminded of how much I admire her. Always so calm and collected. Always so poised. “Girls, I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but I need you to try and tell me. I’m more than a little confused.”

Charm and I sit side by side on the sofa. I wish Brynn were here, sitting next to me. I can’t believe I told Claire that I was Joshua’s mother. I can’t bear to look at her. Claire sits on the coffee table, facing Charm and me. Reanne and Binks are standing close by, lurking like turkey vultures. Charm begins to cry again. “Allison, please tell me what’s going on. Are you Joshua’s birth mother?” I can hear in Claire’s voice how scared she is.
This is one thing we have in common—we are both terrified, but for completely different reasons. She’s afraid I’m here to take Joshua away from her and I’m afraid that the only person in the past five years who hasn’t treated me like I was a monster is about to realize that’s just what I am.

I nod and Claire’s face crumples with grief.

“I’m so sorry,” I say in a rush, wanting to explain, but not knowing where to begin. “I left the baby with Christopher.”

“Who’s Christopher?” Claire asks.

“My brother,” Charm says softly, the tears starting all over again. Her eyes feel swollen from crying and her face still stings from her mother’s slap. “And Joshua’s father,” she says bitterly, directing the words at her mother.

“Bullshit,” Reanne says in disbelief. She looks me up and down. “Christopher would never get involved with her.”

“Well, he did,” I snap. I turn back to Claire. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

A loud snort of disbelief erupts from Reanne. Claire turns to her and says through her tears, “I really think you should leave now.”

Reanne works her mouth as if trying to hold back another discharge of profanity. Instead, a soft expulsion of air rushes out and a cranberry-red flush rises from her
neckline and spreads to her cheeks. “Well, excuse me for wanting to check on my daughter.” Her voice rises to a shout. “Excuse me for wanting to warn her about some psycho, murdering bitch! Do you know who that girl is?” Reanne sputters. “That’s Allison Glenn. She threw her newborn daughter in the Druid River five years ago. You should have rotted in jail!”

My stomach twists. I didn’t think there could be anything more horrible than Claire finding out about Joshua, but this is so much worse.

“How do you know that?” Claire demands. “How do you know she’s the girl? The paper never said who she was.” Her eyes settle on me, not wanting to believe what Reanne is saying, but I hear the doubt beginning in her voice. “You can’t be that girl.”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out. I knew I heard her name before and then it came to me. I know someone who works at Cravenville. She told me all about her.” Reanne turns toward me again and says harshly, “You had a baby girl and you didn’t want it, so you dumped her in the river!”

“Shut up, Mom!” Charm pleads.

“Allison?” Claire asks me incredulously. “Is that what happened? Was that you?”

“I can explain.” I start to cry.

I
’m sitting in the bathroom, on the edge of the bathtub. Joshua is on the couch, still fast asleep. I can hear them downstairs, yelling and shouting, and I put my hands over my ears so I don’t have hear, but still the noise creeps through so I turn on the tap. Water rushes out of the faucet and the shouts are drowned out.

Now the running water becomes the sound of the pouring rain that fell that night years ago, pounding, slapping against the window.

When I came back upstairs I looked down on Joshua’s little sister. So quiet and still. “No,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Allison murmured with exhaustion, trying to lift her head to see.

“Oh, Allison,” I said sadly. “You don’t have to worry
anymore.” And even as I spoke, I knew that Allison would be relieved with this outcome. Not happy, mind you, but relieved. I stood there for a long time, not knowing what to do. Finally, I spoke, though I don’t know if she even heard me. “I’ll take care of it,” I told her as I tucked another blanket tightly around her and tilted a water bottle to her lips. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Crying, I bent down to pick up the motionless infant, my tears beading and rolling off her bare skin like rain on parched earth, too little, too late. Unsteadily, I made my way down the stairs, trying to focus my eyes on anything but the child in my arms. I moved through the living room where our family pictures told the story of our childhoods. Allison and I were evenly represented in the number of pictures on the “Wall of Lame,” as Allison called it—until Allison was thirteen. By this time, Allison was an accomplished swimmer, soccer player, gymnast, speller. The wall was lined with pictures of Allison holding various ribbons and trophies. In each of them she was smiling humbly, an “aw, shucks” look on her face.

But the pictures didn’t tell the backstory, though. They didn’t show that minutes before the snapshot was taken Allison had elbowed her soccer opponent so hard in the ribs that they both ended up with bruises, or that she stared at her nine-year-old classmate so intently
that he got flustered and misspelled
leucoplast,
a word he could spell in his sleep. Not that Allison ever cheated—she never did that, she didn’t need to—but she was intimidating in a way that people liked, encouraged even. Her teachers thought of her as the student that only came around once in a lifetime. The girls were jealous but felt bad about it; the boys thought she was beautiful, unattainable. My parents thought she was perfect.

I never thought that Allison was perfect, although I admired her determination and her drive. But I knew something that everyone else seemed to overlook—that my sister was human. That she threw up before every single big test she had to take. That she would make herself do one hundred and fifty sit-ups every night before bed. That she had nightmares that scared her so badly she would creep into my room at night and crawl into bed with me. At the time, I had thought that the bad dreams had finally stopped haunting her, because she hadn’t come to my room for months. But now I knew why. She didn’t want me to know that she was pregnant.

In the months before she gave birth, I saw something else about my sister that no one else did. She was in love. The girl that everyone said was so smart not to have a serious boyfriend, the girl who was focused so much on her sports and school, was desperately in love with someone. This poor baby’s father. She never told
me anything about him, but I knew something was up. When she thought that no one was looking, I could see it. Her shoulders would relax. A small smile would play at the corners of her mouth and a dreamy, unfocused look would come into her eyes. For once in her life my sister looked happy. I also knew that sometimes she snuck out of the house at night. One time I watched from my bedroom window and saw her climb into a car, its headlights off, a lone figure in the driver’s seat. In the shadows I saw them embrace and kiss desperately, passionately.

But then something had happened. The hazy, dreamy light in her eyes had been once again replaced with a ferocious single-mindedness and she was studying even harder, working out even more. Even though I held the results of her pregnancy in my arms, it was nearly impossible for me to imagine that this little life had been inside her while she was working so hard.

I made my way through the kitchen and out the back door. A cool summer wind smoothed the hair from my forehead. After the stifling air of Allison’s bedroom, I lifted my face to the sky to welcome the rain that fell. I rearranged the towel around the baby as if to shield it from the elements. The darkening night sky was indecisive. It didn’t know what it was going to do next. In the south the moon was high and bright, peeking through marbled clouds that moved swiftly. There was
just enough light for me to be able to see where I was going, but it was dark enough for me to conceal the sweet package I held in my arms.

Allison and I had rarely ventured into the small woods behind our home. Our mother had warned us away from the Druid River that ran alongside our woods. “A river is a living, moving thing,” she told us. “You stick one toe in that water and it will snatch you in and pull you under. You’ll never get out once you fall in.” I used to think that Allison’s nightmares were about drowning in that river. She would cry out and wake up gasping for air and rubbing her eyes, as if trying to rub the water away.

The weak light from the moon was extinguished once I entered the Grimm’s fairy-tale woods of my childhood. Our mother had terrified us with tales of lyme disease and small feral animals carrying rabies. Clutching the baby, I imagined ticks attaching their diseased-filled barbs to my skin and settling in to drink my blood and foam-mouthed animals hiding behind trees, ready to pounce. Sliding my feet carefully along the muddy, rocky earth, I felt my way toward the river. I ducked under low-hanging sharp branches covered with new leaves. In daylight, they would be tender and green, but here the darkness gave the appearance of glowering hairy arms. As I approached, I could hear the rushing of the Druid River, loud and wild-sounding. My
tennis shoes squelched deeply into the mud. We’d had record rains that spring and all the creeks and rivers were stealthily widening, ingesting the land.

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I pass my hand underneath the running water, its steam filling the room. I reach into the hot water and fish around for the rubber stopper to plug the drain. Oh, how good it would feel to climb into the tub and feel the warm water against my skin, to submerge myself completely so there is nothing but dark and quiet. Why did I come here? I’m not sure anymore.

From the other room I hear Joshua calling for his mother. I wipe away the tears I’ve found on my face and go to him.

C
laire looks at Allison in disbelief. Allison was the girl who had drowned her newborn baby girl? She knew something bad had happened for Allison to have gone to prison. But she didn’t think it was cold-blooded murder. Claire remembers hearing about the baby on the news.
Baby drowned … A sixteen-year-old girl … arrested …

“What happened?” Claire remembers asking.

Her husband hesitated. “A sixteen-year-old girl drowned her newborn baby,” Jonathan said as he brushed the hair from his wife’s forehead.

Claire felt the bubbling of bile rise in her throat.

“Are you okay, Claire?” Jonathan asked, looking down on her with concern.

Claire shook her head soundlessly. How could she
put it into words? “It’s not fair,” Claire finally said. “It’s not fair!” she repeated, knowing that she sounded like a querulous child who didn’t get her way. Jonathan moved closer and reached a tentative hand toward her, and Claire pulled away from him, knowing that she would scream if anyone touched her just then. “How could she just throw a baby away when we want one so much?” Claire cried. Jonathan didn’t answer her. What could be said?

Five years ago, she would have done anything to be able to have a child. And that girl—that
monster,
she had thought—would do anything so she wouldn’t have to.

Claire looks at Allison and shakes her head. She can’t fathom how a woman—a girl, she amends, because she looks so young, even five years later—could have done something so evil. How God could have given this girl a baby, two babies, had given her body the power to knit together all the wondrous elements that go into creating a baby, and for her, nothing.

Jonathan rushes through the front door of Bookends and Claire runs to meet him. “Jonathan, thank God you’re here.”

“What’s going on?” He scans the room, taking in Allison’s and Charm’s stricken faces, Reanne’s angry
scowl and Binks’s embarrassed confusion. Silently, Claire hands Jonathan the photograph.

“He’s ours,” Claire says to no one in particular. “We adopted him. Joshua’s our son.”

J
oshua sleepily calls for his mother and I quickly go to him. “Joshua,” I whisper. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m right here.”

“Where’s my mommy?” he asks, trying to keep his eyes open.

“Shhh,” I soothe. “Shhh.” I sit down next to him and pull him onto my lap. He tries to squirm away, but I hold him tightly. Finally, he relaxes; his head rests on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Joshua. Just close your eyes. See, just like me.” I close my eyes to show him what I mean.

I had nearly tumbled into the river, just as my mother had prophesized, but with one hand grabbed the trunk of a thin, scraggly tree. Instead, I fell to my knees into the thick mud that edged the stream. I repositioned the
dead baby in her blanket and for a moment thought about burying her there, at the river’s edge. But I dismissed the idea; I’d have to return to the garage for a shovel, and time was passing too quickly as it was. The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees and I shivered with each gust of wind. The clouds broke above me, revealing the bitter, yellow moon that gave off enough light to see the river before me. It rushed ruthlessly past, frothing over rocks, carrying logs and branches. I kissed my niece’s cold cheek and told her I loved her and that if I had my way she would be with me forever. I even considered, just for a second, that I could have been the one to raise her. Allison wasn’t exactly mothering material. In my own misguided way, I performed a little funeral. I said a prayer over her and carefully rearranged the towel around her.

Just I released her gently into the swift-moving water, I heard the cry. A weak, mournful squawk, as if the feel of the cold, rushing water had shocked her back to life.

I leaped into the water, not feeling the cold. The river was up to my knees and I slogged with the current for a few yards when she went under for the first time. Quickly, she bobbed up. Trying to plant my feet on the rocky river bottom, I leaped forward until I was just behind her. The towel had been swept away and her pitiful naked form rolled out of my reach. With a grunt of fury I managed to surge forward and grab hold of
something—a finger, a toe, I couldn’t tell—but the river was too strong, pulsing and roiling forward, and I lost my balance and went under. Water filled my eyes, my ears, my mouth, and she slipped away from me. I had lost her.

I tried to kill myself that night. That was the first time I actually made a real effort at it, even though I’d imagined the many different ways I could end my life over the years. Pills, the gun my father had hidden underneath his socks in his dresser, climbing to the roof of our ridiculously big house to swan dive onto our decorative concrete driveway. I remember wondering if bloodstains came out of cement and getting a twisted satisfaction of my mother having to walk past that blot, the remainder of me, the reminder of me. She’d probably tear out the concrete and start all over again.

After I realized the baby was alive—
breathing
—and that I had lost her, I tried to drown myself. I held my breath and waited for the warm calm that was supposed to come after the initial panic of drowning passes. I could feel the pressure build in my head, behind my eyes, in my lungs. I tried to stay beneath the surface of the water, tried to grab on to something that would hold me down, but the river had other ideas. It pushed and shoved and spit me out onto the bank as if it couldn’t stand the thought of swallowing me, as if I would leave a bad taste in its mouth. Couldn’t blame it, really.

I curled up in a little ball at the side of the Druid. The rain beat down on me until my skin was numb. I thought about what was going to happen when people found out what I had done and I willed myself to disappear into the mud that squelched beneath me. No such luck. Finally, I got up. Allison would know what to do, my sister would know.

When I came upon her at the edge of the woods, I barely noticed she was bent over in pain. “Where’s the baby?” she managed to grunt.

“The river.” The word felt obscene to my ears.

“What do you mean?” Allison asked. There was fear in her voice and she knew, she knew.

“She was pretty,” I said, knowing that wasn’t the thing to say just then, but not knowing how to explain it. Allison misunderstood and I saw her eyes widen with horror.

“You drowned her because she was pretty?” she said angrily, and then grabbed me by the arm. I flinched, thinking she was going to hit me, but she just held on to me as if trying to steady herself so she wouldn’t fall over.

I shook my head back and forth, back and forth. “No,” I moaned. “No, I didn’t.”

“Brynn, what happened?” Allison asked.

“It was like it ate her,” I cried, trying to explain. “It gobbled her up and it didn’t want me.”

“Jesus, Brynn,” Allison said. Now that she had recovered from her spasm of pain, she began to shake me. “You’re not making sense! I know where we can take her. Christopher will take care of everything. He has to. Please tell me you didn’t throw her in the river.”

“I thought she was dead,” I whispered, not able to look my sister in the eye. Not wanting to see her disgust and disappointment. “I did it for you. I was trying to help you.”

“How does killing her help?” Allison hissed, and then doubled over in pain again.

I shook her hand away from my arm and she dropped to her knees.

“You’re mad?” I said in disbelief. “You didn’t want her—you pretty much told me to get rid of it. That’s what you called her, an
it!
I didn’t mean to hurt her, I thought she was already dead!” I turned and began to run back toward the house. Ungrateful bitch, I thought.

“Wait!” I heard from behind me. “Please, Brynn, I need you. Don’t leave!”

I ignored her and ran away, covering my ears, trying to block out her voice.

The weight of the little boy on my lap is both comforting and suffocating. “Joshua,” I say, and his eyes flutter open. “Did you know you have a sister?” His mouth opens and closes as if he is trying to speak, then his eyes
close again. “Yes, a sister. A pretty, pretty sister. Do you want to meet her?”

I struggle to my feet, Joshua’s limp body heavy in my arms, and move toward the sound of the running water. “Oh, you are so much heavier than she was,” I whisper in his ear. I can almost hear the crickets chirping, hear the rush of the river, feel the summer breeze against my neck. “Finally, finally,” I tell him, “you can be together.” And I lay him in the water, gently, lovingly, offering Joshua to his sister.