Please be bloody. Please be a gush of dark mucus, black-strung red.
Pulls down her underwear.
White as cake.
“Where’s the goddamn table leaf?” shouts her dad, stomping downstairs.
The Salem cousins come for dinner in an hour.
She fishes under the sink for the box of tampons and tugs out what’s hidden under the Regulars and Super Pluses.
“Shut up,” she tells the shiny blond infant on the box.
Thighs planted on the toilet, she tears the plastic sheath off the pee stick.
There is a loving home out there for every baby who comes into the world.
She doesn’t weep or hyperventilate or text Ash a photo of the plus sign blazing on the stick. She wraps the test box and its contents in a brown paper bag, which she tucks into a rain boot at the back of her closet. She gets dressed.
The witch has a treatment, if it’s early enough. And she doesn’t charge money. Ash’s sister’s friend, who got an abortion from the witch last year, said it only works before a certain week in the pregnancy. The witch uses wild herbs that won’t incriminate you if you’re caught with them, because the police can’t tell what they are. And the daughter doesn’t plan to be caught.
Yasmine could have gone to Canada for an abortion, because the Pink Wall didn’t exist yet. Or she could have given the baby to someone else.
Yasmine asked what it felt like to be adopted.
The daughter said, “Normal.”
Which was true and not true.
Yasmine knew the daughter was curious about her bio mother.
Maybe she
Was too young.
Was too old—didn’t have the energy.
Already had six kids.
Knew she was about to die of cancer.
Was a tweaker.
Just didn’t feel like dealing.
It was a closed adoption. There is no way to find her, aside from a private detective the daughter can’t afford yet.
So she dreams.
About her bio mother getting famous for developing a cure for paralysis and being on the cover of a magazine in the checkout line, where the daughter instantly recognizes her face.
About her bio mother finding her. The daughter comes down the school steps, the three o’clock bell is ringing, and a woman in sunglasses rushes up, shouting, “Are you mine?”
About her bio grandmother, who maybe loved to bake. She sees the ramekins her bio grandmother used for custard. A set of six, white-rimmed blue, one chipped. Her bio mother maybe always chose to eat from the chipped one.
The ramekins are smashed at the bottom of a well in the yard of the house where they all died, grandmother and grandfather and cousins and her bio mother, who was still weak from giving birth, overwhelmed with sadness, resolved to go the next day to the agency and get her baby back—she had a forty-eight-hour window; it had only been thirty hours; she would go the next day; now she just needed a little rest, but what was that smell? It was smoke, because fire, because malfunctioning space heater, but nobody was paying attention because drunk, and her bio mother, though not drunk, was too exhausted from the pain of labor to call out a warning; so they died.
An aunt, arriving later to pick through the rubble, threw all non-valuables into the well. If this well existed—if the daughter could find it—she’d climb down a rope and save the pieces of white ramekin, the spoons and knives, tin canisters of love notes, steel lockets packed with hair. That hair would have the DNA of her bio mother, sealed safe from fire and from damp.
Sixteen years ago abortion was legal in every state.
Why did she spend nine months growing the daughter if she was just going to give her up?
The Salem cousins yammer in the hall. Upon seeing the daughter, Aunt Bernadette goes, “What is it about these teenagers dressing so unemployably?” and Dad laughs. Mom, not laughing, tells Aunt Bernadette: “Mattie can wear whatever she wants. Last time I checked, this was America.”
Mom and daughter escape to the kitchen.
“Would you wash the potatoes?”
The daughter dumps them into a colander, starts scrubbing under the faucet.
“By the way …” There’s a forced-cheerful note in her voice. “I got a call from Susan Korsmo.”
“Yeah?” says the daughter, scrubbing harder.
“It was an odd conversation, frankly.”
“Oh really?”
“She expressed some concerns.”
“About what?” Thank God for you, potato dirt. So much scrubbing you require.
“Well, I told her it was ridiculous, but she sounded—I don’t know, adamant. Although she tends to sound adamant most of the time.”
There is no way Mrs. K. could know. No way.
“Matilda, look at me.”
She turns off the faucet, wipes her hands on her jeans. “So what was she adamant about?”
Mom’s face is papery, punched in. “She says you were vomiting at her house. When you babysat last week. She heard you in the bathroom.”
No.
“And she thinks you have an eating disorder.”
Yes!
“This is funny to you?” says Mom.
“It’s—no—because she’s so wrong.”
“Is she?”
The daughter reaches her arms around Mom’s neck, presses a cheek into her shoulder. “I ate a bad burrito at school and threw up. Mrs. K. has too much time on her hands, so she—”
“Creates a crisis where there is none,” whispers Mom. Then she draws back, cups the daughter’s chin in her fingers. “You’re sure, pigeon? You’d tell me if something was up?”
“I swear to you, I do not have an eating disorder.”
“Thank Christ.” Tears in her eyes.
The daughter is lucky to have this mother, even if she’s already sixty, even if she makes jokes about pulling a mussel at a seafood disco. A young mom like Ephraim’s might have said “Bulimia? I’ve taught you well!”
For reasons she can’t figure out, the daughter almost never dreams of her bio father.
She takes an extra-big spoonful of mashed potatoes. Looks at Mom, points to the plate, winks, hates how hard Mom is smiling. She breathes through her mouth when passed the bowl of brussels sprouts, the vegetable whose odor, when cooked, most closely resembles human wind.
The Salem cousins blather and blither. “Well, what do the illegals expect, a red carpet?” Blahblahblahblah. “And then they refuse to learn English—” Blahblahblahblah. “So then why should I have to take three years of Spanish?” Blahblahblahblahblah. The invaders all look like xeroxes of each other, their beefiness repeating itself, reheating itself. Whereas the daughter is tall, and Dad is short. The daughter is pale, and Mom is sallow.
This clump of cells would have turned out tall, though maybe not pale. Ephraim tans brown in the summer.
Gravy has dried on the daughter’s sleeve. She hates this shirt anyway. Maybe she’ll give it to Aunt Bernadette, who hates it even more.
Mom and Dad can never know.
What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?
“Matilda, your turn.”
“Pass,” says the daughter.
Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist!
Never, ever know.
“Oh, you!”
“Don’t be a poop at the party.”
“I can’t think of any jokes,” she says.
“Very funny!”
“What is it with these kids pretending to be so miserable?”
Yasmine said she’d die before telling her parents.