Impossible (11 page)

CHAPTER 27

Dear Lucinda,

How strange it is to be writing to you when you're not even born. But it feels wonderful too, to talk to you, even though I'm scared, scared for you and for me. But I can feel you right now, beneath my heart. You're awake and alert. Nowadays, so often, you kick and you fight inside me. There isn't enough room in there anymore, but you're still good-humored. You play these little physical jokes on me that make me laugh.

I like you already. I've read so many books about pregnancy, and had so many talks with Soledad (I hope and pray you know Soledad) but nobody has said that. They talk about love and tenderness and protectiveness, but also when you're pregnant, at least this far along, you can put your hands on your belly and feel the baby and her personality, and just plain like her.

You are due to come into this world any day now. I need to make sure you learn everything that I know. I believe that this letter and my journal are my only hope for transferring to you the knowledge that I have about our family history. I want you to have more than the song, you see. The song was all that I had. It's all that HE permits us to have, in the little game he's playing with our family.

But those are his rules, and not mine. Maybe he won't find this letter or the pages from my diary I've ripped out for you.

So, this is what I've figured out: We are women who have baby daughters at eighteen and then go insane. My mother did I will too. It is not our fault. We're a long chain of women who are cursed. But there might be a way to break the curse.

I have failed to do that. I look in the mirror now and see my mother and I am so afraid you will end like us: doomed, cursed… all sorts of melodramatic, ridiculous, but true things.

But when you are my age and pregnant like me, you need not fail your own daughter, so long as I let you know what is going on soon enough for you to act. I learned about the curse too late myself. All I had was the song, and my little bit of knowledge of my mother.

I don't have much time left, not enough to write it all out properly, logically. So I'm just going to rip out the important pages from my diary that describe the ballad and how I discovered it and how I tried to do what it asked, and how I failed. Perform the tasks in the ballad and you'll be saved. It's as simple and as hard as that. I believe there must be a way, even though the tasks seem impossible to me right now.

I'll put these pages in a hiding place in my room, here in Soledad and Leo's house. I will pray that you find them, or that Soledad and Leo find them for you.

I'm also praying that you'll be living with Soledad and Leo. I told Soledad that if anything happens to me, I want her to have you. She didn't understand how serious I was, and I didn't want to have her think me crazy now, so I didn't say more, but she'll remember. She wants a child, but can't have one of her own. They're already talking about adoption. Why shouldn't it be you? They'll love you. You'll have the safe childhood and loving parents I didn't. I want that for you.

Lucinda, it's the miracle of my having met Soledad and Leo, just when I needed them, that gives me the most hope. It is the one thing that has gone right for me in my life.

Soledad. Leo. If you read this: Know that I love you. Thank you for caring for me, and for caring for my daughter, as I know you will. Believe me that this is real. Support and help Lucinda to do what she must to save herself and her baby.

Lucinda, please believe me too. Don't think I'm crazy. I am not crazy as I write, I promise.

I picked out your name already. Lucinda means light, and it's a name that sounds a little like mine, which I am vain enough to want.

Lucinda, be smart. Be fierce. Be brave. And do what I say. Ha! Doesn't that sound maternal?

Perform the tasks in the ballad. Do this.

With all my love and liking, always.

Your mother,

Miranda

By the time they finished reading the letter, Lucy was shaking. Zach put his arm around her shoulders and held her tightly. He didn't know what he thought, except that he was fascinated and wanted to go on reading, to turn from Miranda's letter to the pages she had torn out of her diary.

But Lucy was still holding the letter and she clearly wasn't ready to go on. Her head was down, and her hair had fallen over the side of her face so that he couldn't see anything except the tip of her nose.

"Luce?" he said.

Her voice came out husky and desperate and needy. "What do you think?"

An answer came to him. "I think she loved you very much. I think she would have raised you and been with you all your life if she could have."

"Yes," said Lucy. And he heard in her voice that grateful amazement that you feel when someone tells you something you instantly know is true, even though you might not have had the ability to see it by yourself.

Lucy asked in a low voice, "But do you think she was already crazy, when she wrote this?"

Zach realized again that only the truth would do. "I don't know. She expresses herself very well in this letter. She's logical. She has a sense of humor. We'll see what's in the rest of it." He frowned. "But I wonder why she just didn't leave the whole diary here. Why'd she rip out pages?"

"Maybe she wanted to keep her diary," Lucy said. "Maybe she thought she'd write more in it. There were lots of blank pages at the end."

"Or maybe she wasn't thinking clearly," Zach said.

Lucy bit her lip. "Yes."

There was a little silence. Then Lucy said, "Zach? She says that when I'm her age, I'll be pregnant with a daughter. And here I am, pregnant. What do you think of that?"

"We don't know the sex of your baby."

"My doctor knows. I didn't want to. But I can find out anytime."

"Even if it's a girl, it's a fifty-fifty chance that it would be anyway. It won't mean anything. Just coincidence."

"But the pregnancy?" Lucy insisted. "She knows I'll be pregnant at eighteen, and she knows it before I'm even born?"

“That's freaky," Zach admitted.

After another few moments of silence, Lucy said grimly, “All right. Let's read the rest.”

She turned to the first of the pages that had been tom out of Miranda's diary. She held it out so that Zach could read beside her.

CHAPTER 28

As I get ready to be a mother myself I keep remembering my own mother, though of course I barely knew her. I'd rather not think about her, but it's like she haunts me.

My mother was insane. She was completely cracked. That scares me and it always has.

I first learned about her from the people I lived with when I was a kid. Every time I did something wrong, they would whisper that it was because I was “weak-minded."

"Like her mother. Might end up going down the same road too. Loose and easy. You have to expect it. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. There's only so much we can do. Nobody can expect more."

They never said more than this and I never asked. I didn't want to understand more. I knew they didn't like me and that it was something to do with my mother. And then of course when I got older, I figured out what they meant by "loose and easy." First, it turns out that my mother got pregnant with me when she was very young, a teenager, and of course she wasn't married. Also, nobody ever knew who my father was because she wouldn't say when she was pregnant and then she went nuts after. People figured maybe she didn’t know.

Her name was Deirdre. She was a bag lady, and you saw her a lot at the supermarket and the pharmacy. She'd wander the aisles until the police took her outside. In the winter, sometimes you'd see her sleeping in doorways on Main Street. Sometimes she went to shelters, but she never stayed there long. And then nobody would see her for months or even years at a time, and then she'd be back again. Nobody knew where she went when she disappeared. Some other town, I guess.

I didn't know Deirdre was my mother until I was ten. Some kids at school told me. They were not kind. These days, now that I m pregnant too, I keep remembering the laughter and the jeers. They hurt so much, and I had to pretend not to care.

Deirdre used to follow me sometimes when I was coming home from school. I'd see her lurking. She always looked like she wanted me to talk to her, but I'd run really fast to get away. Once she called after me to stop, but I didn't.

But then one time, a year ago, when I was sixteen, I waited for her. She looked both happy and sad to see me, when she turned the corner and there I was. It breaks my heart to think of it. I held out my hand and she took it and we walked a few blocks together.

That was the very last time I saw her. I wonder where she went, and what happened to her.

I wonder if she's dead.

She didn't speak much that day, but she gripped my hand hard and sang to me. It was like being sung a lullaby. The song had our name in it, Scarborough. She sang it to me several times, and she made me sing it with her, so I wouldn't forget. She told me I must never forget. She said that her mother sang it to her, and that we Scarborough girls needed to always keep trying to do the tasks in the song, and that it was her job to teach me the song.

That always stuck with me. Her job?

Leo sang a similar song the other day and that's why I in thinking about it again now. I realized as I heard him that his lyrics were different from the ones Deirdre sang. He told me that he was singing a Simon and Garfunkel song called "Scarborough Fair.” He said that it was a "Child ballad." He said that there are many different versions of it, some of which were written down by a man called Francis Child over a hundred years ago. When I asked, he said yes, there were probably many other versions that were not written down. He assumed I was interested only because of my last name, and I didn't mention Deirdre.

Here is the version that Deirdre sang to me. she called it "The Elfin Knight."

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Remember me to one who lives there

She must be a true love of mine

Tell her she'll sleep in a goose-feather bed

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Tell her I swear she'll have nothing to dread

She must be a true love of mine

Tell her tomorrow her answer make known

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

What e'er she may say I'll not leave her alone

She must be a true love of mine

Her answer it came in a week and a day

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

I'm sorry, good sir, I must answer thee nay

I'll not be a true love of thine

From the sting of my curse she can never be free

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Unless she unravels my riddlings three

She will be a true love of mine

Tell her to make me a magical shirt

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Without any seam or needlework

Else she'll be a true love of mine

Tell her to find me an acre of land

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Between the salt water and the sea strand

Else she'll be a true love of mine

Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

And sow it all over with one grain of corn

Else she'll be a true love of mine

And her daughters forever possessions of mine

Here is what I remember about the night I got pregnant.

It was a Friday night, last May, and Jimmy Delacroix's parents were away, so he was throwing a big party at his house. Kia said that even though we weren't invited personally by Jimmy, it didn't matter because everybody was invited, it was that kind of party. She begged me to go. She had a crush on—well, it doesn't matter who—and she said if I wouldn't go with her, she couldn't go either. Basically, she guilt-tripped me into it.

But I also wanted to go. I don't know why. Just to see if I could belong, I guess. I never went to parties. Nobody ever asked me. And it was exciting to think about a party. I didn't know what I would wear at first, but then Kia said if I would come, she'd loan me this shirt she had, a really pretty teal blue shirt. It looked great on me. It didn't even matter that my jeans were so old and the wrong style. Even they looked right when I was wearing that shirt with them.

I had to sneak out of the house because THEY wouldn't have let me go. Kia had her car and we went to Jimmy's, and it seemed like everybody from school was there, plus lots of kids I'd never seen before in my life.

The music was so loud that the whole house sort of pulsed. There were kegs of beer outside in the backyard, and in the bathtub inside the house too. There was no furniture at all in the living room and people were dancing there, and it was crowded and hot. Then Kia saw the guy she had the crush on, and I was alone.

I drank a beer because it was something to do. I thought about dancing by myself—there were a few girls doing that but they were also sort of dancing together, like a group, and they were friends with each other, and so I couldn't. I started wondering if I could walk home. I felt like people were looking at me and thinking, what's SHE doing here? We don't want HER.

Then I felt someone come up next to me.

I knew immediately that he was important. I can't explain it. He didn't feel like just anybody. I could feel him next to me, and I knew he was looking at me, and that he liked what he saw. And my heart just raced.

I knew I looked good in Kia's shirt. Before I ever turned and saw his face, I was so glad about that. So glad to look pretty and sexy.

Especially once I dared look at him. He wasn't a boy. He was a man, a young man. He was the most beautiful person I had ever seen or even dreamed.

I couldn't speak, looking at him. But he smiled at me and I knew he understood and it was all right.

He cupped his hand around my elbow. He leaned down. He whispered in my ear—his breath was so warm, so sweet, and he had a wonderful accent, Irish, I guess. He said, "Come outside with me."

He squeezed my elbow, tight, but not too tight. He began to thread his way through the people on the dance floor, heading toward the front door of Jimmy's house, and I went with him.

His hand was so warm. I remember that. And I remember how his shoulders looked So broad, so straight, so strong. He was tall. The top of my head came up to his shoulders. His hair was thick and dark.

I was aware that some of the girls were looking at him, as he took me away. Looking at him, and admiring him, and then looking at me. Me, Miranda Scarborough, the town joke. Me.

He picked me, I thought. HE picked ME.

I wasn't drunk. I had had only one beer. But I felt drunk.

Then we were outside in the moonlight, and I looked up into his face again.

He was not just handsome. He was beautiful. And he had the most gorgeous eyes.

And he was looking at me like I was beautiful too. And suddenly I was. I could feel it. I was.