Girls in Trouble (34 page)

“I never would have done that! I must not have been there that night!” Sara said. She tried to think where she had been all those nights that she didn’t see Danny outside her window, didn’t sense him the way she always had. Had he come for her the nights her mother had talked her into going out for a Dairy Queen? Was it when she was sprawled on her bed with the headphones on, trying to tune her life out?

“My father must have slammed the window shut,” she said finally, but Danny shook his head.

“Your father said you did. He came out. He said he was calling the cops. He said you were home and wouldn’t see me, that you hated me and that if I cared about you, I’d leave you alone.” He looked at her, pained. “He said you deserved better than me.”

“Danny!”

“My mother was treating me like I was the gum on the bottom of her
shoe. All she said was how it would never work anyway, a smart irl from a good family and a shit like me. How I could never give you any of the things you’d need, how I’d never be rich or smart enough for you.”

“That’s so ridiculous! I never thought that! I looked for you everywhere! Why didn’t you come back to school? You could have seen me, you could have talked to me!”

“I
did
go to school, Sara. I tried to find you. I looked everywhere and finally some girl told me you were taking the day off, going to a college interview at Harvard. Sara, I hitched into Cambridge, I showed up on the campus and walked around looking for you. I was ready to just grab you and take off!”

“I didn’t see you—” she started to say, and then she stopped. She remembered that
one
day when she had felt him nearby, the way she always did, like a current in the air, and she had turned and it was only someone’s father.

“I saw you. Standing in a group of kids, all of them so—so—privileged looking. So—so well fed. Well dressed. And one of them flirting with you, making you smile. All I could think about was everyone telling me you deserved better, my own family telling me how it could never work—you so smart and me barely passing. And then your group went into a building, and I came after them, and this security guard came over to me, and asked what I was doing there. Like he knew I didn’t belong on that campus. And he was right.”

“Danny—”

“It was like every door slamming shut on me. I just took off. This time for good. I drifted from place to place, taking on jobs just to have enough money to survive. Every once in a while I’d think, fuck it, who cares if you’re in college and I’m not, and I’d send a letter to your house, or I’d call you, just to hear your voice, but I never got you. You never wrote back. Finally, I just tried to put it all out of my mind. And I couldn’t. Not for a long, long time.”

Sara stared. “I did come to your house once, Danny, months after you had left. Frances still didn’t know where you were.”

“What are you talking about? She knew,” Danny said, startled. “Of course she knew. She was sending me money when she could.”

“I don’t understand. But then you came home again—you still didn’t try to see me.”

“I didn’t come home.”

“Danny. You were home. I know you were home. You signed the papers.”

He frowned. “What papers?”

“The papers. The agency served you with papers to sign. You had to say you knew the baby was being put up for adoption, that you knew there would be a hearing. Not showing up for the hearing meant you didn’t want the baby, that you wouldn’t fight the adoption.”

Danny looked suddenly dazed. He stepped back from Sara. “What are you talking about? What adoption? What papers? You had an abortion. My mother told me. That day you came to the house furious with me, blaming me, all upset because you had had one.”

“I never had an abortion. It was too late. And I never blamed you.”

A door slapped open at the house next door and a taffy-colored dog bounded out.

“We had a baby?”

“A girl.”

“What?” He stepped back from her, stunned. “What are you telling me? We have a little girl?” He stood back from her, looking at her as if he didn’t know her.

Sara swiped at her nose, at her eyes. “I would have gone anywhere with you,” Sara said. “I would have done anything,” she said, and then she remembered. Danny’s mother standing outside, telling her she knew what it was like to lose a child, what you had to do to protect the ones you loved, and suddenly she felt sick.

“Oh God, Sara. You let someone else have our kid?”

She swallowed, feeling suddenly dizzy. “What was I supposed to do? You were gone! I was only sixteen!”

“A kid! I wouldn’t have let anyone else have my kid—never, never. I wouldn’t have deserted my child like my old man did with me and my brother. I wouldn’t have deserted you if I had known you still loved me, if I had known you had the kid. Never, no matter what. How could you not have known that?”

There it was, the pulse in his face, the one he used to get when he was angry. His eyes were so black she couldn’t see the pupils. He was so furious at her, she drew back.

“The papers were signed!” she said. “They told me the papers were signed.”

“I never signed any papers. I never knew about any hearing.”

“But someone did! The server has to ask for ID, go by a picture. Something, anything. And the server had to sign his name, too, right by yours.”

“So maybe the server screwed up. Maybe he signed them himself. Who knows? All I know is I didn’t sign any papers. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know anything about this, Sara.” He stared past her. “I can’t believe it. A baby.”

“Maybe you didn’t sign your rights away.” She looked toward the house. “Ask your mother about this. Maybe she knows something. She was here, wasn’t she? I’ll ask her.”

His eyes narrowed. His shoulders grew straight. He suddenly looked different to her, as if he were traveling far away from her and nothing she could ever do would let her catch up. “This isn’t the time—it isn’t the place—”

“Someone signed! Maybe your brother signed—”

“My brother was living in Texas—”

“Well, maybe he came to visit—maybe he thought he was helping—couldn’t you ask him?”

“My brother was killed five years ago in a car accident in Alaska. It just about destroyed my mother.”

“It destroyed your mother?” Sara said faintly. She looked toward the house, and he grabbed her arm. “My wife’s in there!” Danny cried. “I told you this wasn’t the time!”

“Your wife! You never told her?”

“Of course I never told her. I was a mess when she met me, but I didn’t want her to have to worry about this. I couldn’t let myself think about it anymore, either. It hurt too much. It almost destroyed me, Sara.” He looked toward the house and then back at Sara. He looked suddenly older to her.

She freed her arm from his hands. “Danny, the baby was so beautiful,
so perfect. You would have been so amazed to see her. She had these full lips. She had these slate-colored eyes and red hair, Danny, and this rippling laugh—”

“Sara, stop—” Danny said, pained.

“Her name’s Anne, Danny. She’d be sixteen now. Can you imagine?”

“Sara, stop! It was a long time ago. What difference can it make now?”

“Because I could have gotten my daughter back! Because it’s fraud!”

“So what! So it’s another bum rap! There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“We could go find her.”

Danny started to walk away and then whipped back around. “Find her? What are you talking about? Find her and do what? I have Charlotte, I have a job. Charlotte’s pregnant, Sara. I’ve finally done something right. My mother adores her, and because of that, she adores me, too. They go to church together when we’re in town! And Sara, you know what, sometimes I even go, too. Charlotte knows I’m not a believer, but she likes having me there. It’s a little thing, it makes her happy, what does it cost me?”

“It costs,” said Sara, pained. “Look at you pacing. Why can’t you admit you’re angry about this, too? You’re angry! I know you are!”

“And where’s anger going to get me?” Danny asked. “I have a
wife.
I’m a good man and for the first time I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to be anything different. I have a place in the community, can you believe it? Me, the rebel? I like feeling that people are proud of me, that they look up to me. Why would I want to ever stop feeling like that? Please. I can’t tell Charlotte I lied. I can’t make her feel she can’t trust me.”

“It’s not just in the past—”

“Our kid is what sixteen? If she’s got any of my genes, she’s already thinking about hitting the road, making her own trouble, hating her parents’ guts because they’re trying to keep her down. Why would I want a share of that?”

“Because she’s your kid—” Sara said. “You know there was never anybody but you,” Sara repeated. Never had she felt more desperate. “And you know we could find her. Even if you didn’t want to be her father, you
could do it for me—” she said. “We made this child together. You could help me—”

“No—”

The front door slapped open and Sara looked up to see Danny’s wife, Charlotte, slowly making her way back to them, and now that Sara could see her from the front, she saw how pregnant Charlotte was, and she saw, too, the way Charlotte looked at Danny, how her smile brightened, her eyes sparkled. “Hello, there,” called Charlotte, and her voice was like a spell breaking over Danny. He turned toward Charlotte and then he turned back to Sara, as if he had remembered her, like an afterthought.

“No, Sara,” he said firmly, his voice still low and hard. “It’s the past. Drop it.”

And then Charlotte was there beside them, in a cloud of perfume, all pineapple blond and pink, flushed skin, freckles sprigging her nose. She draped one arm about Danny and gave him a kiss on the side of his face, then she waved her pretty hands like a fan. “Woo, it’s a hot one, isn’t it?” she said. He grinned at her and then gave Sara a quick, warning glance. Charlotte put one hand on her belly. “Are you one of Danny’s old friends?” Charlotte laughed, nodding her head at Sara, studying her. “We’ve been averaging one an hour since we got here.”

One an hour. Which friends were those? When Sara had known Danny, he really hadn’t had any friends. It had been just the two of them. “Us against the world,” Danny had said, but now he grabbed for his wife’s hand, now he refused to take his eyes off her.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Charlotte said. “We’ve got enough food to feed the whole state.”

Danny interrupted. “Sara has to go,” he said, not meeting Sara’s eyes.

“Oh, now, that’s a shame,” Charlotte said. “Another time, then.”

“Sure, another time,” Danny repeated, as if she were no more important to him than the person who tossed the newspaper onto the front porch.

“Well, it was good to see you,” Danny said. He clapped her on the shoulder, friendly, the way he might any buddy, but she felt the push in his hand. Her face was frozen, but she struggled to smile, to show he hadn’t
hurt her, and then she shook Charlotte’s hand, and got back on her bike, and as she turned around to look at him, one more time, the last thing she saw was Danny kissing his wife, the way he used to kiss her, blatantly, right out in public so the whole world could see it, as if he were proving that neither she nor Anne nor anybody else had any claim on him but Charlotte. He put his hand on Charlotte’s blossoming belly. He swayed her in a kind of dance. And Sara saw his knuckles were white, that he was holding on to Charlotte for dear life.

As she pedaled faster and faster, her breath came in puffs. Huh-huh-huh. How could he not want to help her? There was a spurt of speed and then she rode over a rock, she heard something pop, and then she was falling, crashing from the bike down onto the pavement, skinning her knees. She cried out in pain.
“All that stuff is in the past,
” Danny had said, and then she was crying more heavily, but not about her bruises, not about her bike, which she could see had a flat tire.
I miss you. All these years and I still miss you.

She thought of a client she had had when she was studying to be a therapist. He was nearly fifty and recently divorced. He had tracked down his high school sweetheart, a girl he hadn’t seen in thirty years, a girl everyone had told him was nothing more than puppy love, and within two months, they were married. “It was always meant to be,” he said, and then he had gone on to talk about his anxiety at his job.

There was a woman who came to her, too. She was married to a wonderful man, but she still dreamed about her fiance who had been killed in a car crash. “It’s been ten years,” the woman kept saying to Sara. “Why can’t I get over it?”

Unfinished business. All of it. Why wouldn’t she miss Danny?—because what she was really missing was all that possibility that had been between them, all that time cut short before they had a chance to see what might have happened if they had been allowed to be together. Maybe they would have been happy. Maybe she would have tired of him and moved on. Maybe he would have found he wasn’t ready to be a father, let alone a husband, and they would have started fighting and not getting along. He might
have not come home nights and then, when they had split, it would have been something they both would have welcomed. A sigh of relief. But they neither one of them got the chance to find out.

She walked the bike home. A few cars slowed as they passed her, a few voices catcalled. “Hey, you got some fries with that shake, honey?” And she kept crying. As soon as she got inside the house, she found her father at home, gathering up his briefcase.

“I thought I’d come home for lunch and surprise you, but you were gone,” he said. “Now I have to get back to the office.”

“Dad—” she said, her voice cracking.

“Honey, what’s the matter? You look so terrible,” he said.

“Danny never signed the papers. Someone forged his name.”

“Danny? What are you talking about? What papers?”

“I was riding around past his neighborhood. He was there.” She couldn’t bear to tell the rest of it, to mention the wife he loved so much he’d tamp down his own anger just so he’d never risk her happiness, certainly not the way he had with Sara’s. “He lives in Pittsburgh now. Did you know where he was?”