The Comfort of Lies (2 page)

Picking adoptive parents, she was faced with impossible choices. She sorted through hundreds of letters from men and women desperate for the baby growing inside her. Potential mothers and fathers swam before her until she could barely remember who was the librarian from Fall River and which was the couple reminiscent of her scariest Sunday school teachers. They all promised nurturing love, backyards the size of Minnesota, and Ivy League schools.

After three cups of sugary mint tea, missing coffee more with each sip, Tia narrowed the choices to the three most likely couples. She sifted through their pictures and letters, and then laid them out like tarot cards. Then, with the fear of continuing to face this task hastening her decision, she picked the man and woman she deemed most likely to be good parents. She balanced their photos on her big belly and then moved them around like paper dolls, acting out everything they’d said during the phone conversation she’d had with them, both of them sounding so sure of themselves, so smart and together.

“Hello, Tia,” she imagined Paper Caroline’s voice squeaking. “I want your baby. I’m a pathologist researching children’s cancer. My husband has a very large family, and he’s always been drawn to children.”

“Tell her about being a counselor at Paul Newman’s camp. What’s the name? You know. The one for kids with cancer?” Paper Peter laid a gentle hand on saintly Paper Caroline’s arm.

“The Hole in the Wall Gang.” Paper Caroline bowed her head so as not to appear boastful.

 • • • 

A month later, when Caroline and Peter learned it was a girl, they told Tia they were naming the baby Savannah. An idiotic name. Tia called the baby inside her Honor, her mother’s middle name—also an idiotic name, but it wasn’t meant to be used out of utero, and besides, idiotic or not, it certainly beat Savannah. Why not simply call her Britney and be done with it? If she wasn’t so busy caring for her ailing mother, she’d choose new parents for her daughter.

Tia stumbled as she fumed over the choice, bumping into a food
cart in the hall of the hospice that had become her mother’s home. Clumsiness was Tia’s companion. Clumsiness, the constant need to pee, and a life of seclusion. She’d gone from existing for Nathan’s visits, to carrying a relentless reminder of him. Each time she stroked her stomach, she felt as though she were caressing him. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t replace sadness with hate.

Her mother was the only person with whom she spent time. Every other friend from her past—except for Robin, in California, too far away to visit—thought she’d gone to Arizona for a year to work on a master’s in gerontology, based on her work with the elderly. In reality, she moved to Jamaica Plain, an entirely different sort of neighborhood from Southie.

Unlike her old neighborhood, where she’d see people she knew on every street, Jamaica Plain was always in flux—a mix not just of ethnicity and race, but of class, culture, and age. Her only acquaintance was the librarian, with whom she had a nodding
hi, how are you,
relationship. JP was an easy place to remain anonymous.

She’d wanted to be where nobody knew her name. Being the object of gossip or pity wasn’t in her plans. Her mother’s savings supported both of them—Tia rarely left the house. Life became mainlining novels, watching TV, and caring for her mother, who’d moved in with Tia until her pain overcame Tia’s nursing ability.

She crept into her mother’s room on angel feet. That’s what her mother had called it when Tia the child tried to sneak into the kitchen for extra cookies. “Sweet one, mothers can hear their children, even when they use their angel feet.”

Though Tia tried to pretend otherwise, her mother lay dying as Tia’s baby grew.

“Mom?” she whispered.

The room remained silent. Tia dug her nails into her palms and bent over the bed, watching until she saw the slight rise and fall of her mother’s chest. Her mother was only forty-nine. Liver cancer had overtaken her in a matter of months, although Tia suspected her mother had hidden the truth for some time.

Her mother had been in hospice for twenty-three days. Maybe
the younger you were when you became sick, the longer you held on, or maybe twenty-three days was average, normal—whatever you’d call the amount of time from entering a hospice until you died. She couldn’t bring herself to find out. Perhaps if she had a sister or brother who’d team up with her, she’d have the courage to ask such a vulgar question, but it had always been just the two of them, Tia and her mother.

Dying could be such a long process, which surprised Tia. You’d think that working with the elderly would have taught her more about death and dying, but she’d provided senior recreation, not counseling. Word games were her specialty. In her work world, a client didn’t show up for Scrabble, and the next thing you knew, he or she was dead.

You didn’t see the person die.

Losing her mother seemed impossible, as though someone planned to cut the string that held Tia to earth. She’d be floating without ballast. Tia had none of the usual family: no aunts, no uncles, no cousins—her mother filled all those roles.

Tia settled into the chair next to her mother’s bed. She wondered why, when they so stressed comfort, the hospice didn’t provide chairs where a pregnant woman could sit pain free. She slipped a paperback from her tote: a mystery so simple that even if she retained only a quarter of what she read, she could still track the plot. Her mother’s copy of
Jane Eyre
, complete with the magical happy ending, was in her bag, but she saved that to read aloud to her mother after supper.

Her mother opened her eyes. “Been here long, sweetheart?” She reached for Tia’s hand. “Tired?”

Tia ran a hand over her large belly. “Always.”

“You don’t have to come here every night, you know.”

Her mother repeated this daily. It was her version of “I’m worried about you.”

“Tired isn’t life threatening.”

“When you’re pregnant—”

“When you’re pregnant, it’s what you are. Remember?” Tia asked.
“Was it like that for you? Did I drive you crazy even before I was born?”

Her mother struggled to sit up. Tia offered a hand for leverage and then tucked pillows behind her mother’s back. Her mother’s skin, once such a pretty, pink-tinged white—pale Irish skin that burned with one wink from the sun; that was how her mother described herself—now looked mean yellow against the sheets.

“I remember everything about being pregnant,” her mother said. “Are you going to be able to forget?”

“Mom, please don’t,” Tia said.

“I have to, honey.” Her mother retrieved her glasses from the metal tray attached to the bed. Once the wire rims were firmly in place, she looked healthier. Glasses, jewelry, and other accoutrements seemed like totems against death. Tia constantly bought bright trinkets to cheer her mother. Electric blue beads threaded onto silver cord clanked around her mother’s wrist. “They match your eyes,” Tia had said, after buying them the previous week.

“Why don’t I get you some ice water?” Tia said.

“Don’t run away. Listen to me. You need to face how sorry you’ll be if you go through with this.”

This
was the word her mother used to describe Tia’s plan to give up her baby for adoption.

“I’d be a horrible mother,” Tia said.

“You think that now. Wait until you hold your baby.”

Each skirmish in her mother’s battle to stop the adoption made Tia feel worse. Every reason Tia laid out sounded lamer than the last.

“I’ll be a bad mother.”

“I don’t have enough money.”

“I’m too ashamed of not knowing who the father is.”

Rather than telling her mother the truth, Tia pretended to be a woman who’d slept with too many men and, thus, didn’t know the identity of her baby’s father. The horror of that lie was still better than the truth. She couldn’t bear telling her mother she’d been sleeping with a married man—and had tried to steal him.

Everything she said sounded ridiculous. Maybe she’d be a bad
mother, God knows she had no money, and immature should be her middle name, but if that were all it took to give up a baby, the world would be filled with orphans.

Tia caressed her belly.
Sweet little baby, I’m sorry.

Tia had grown up in the wake of her father’s vanishing. In a vacuum of knowledge, her mother assumed he’d chosen a life with another woman—living a life with more fun and liquor than Tia’s puritanical mother would accept. In her mother’s estimation, sleeping with a married man was a sin only exceeded by abortion.

Without the truth, Tia could offer no reasoning that would make sense. How could she admit that she was giving up a child whose existence would remind her of a man she loved, but could never have? How could Tia say this to her mother when Tia had no idea if she was being the most selfish she’d ever been, or the most selfless?

“The baby will have a better life than I’ll ever be able to give her,” Tia said. “Really, Mom. You saw their letter, the pictures. The baby will have good parents.”

Her mother’s eyes watered. Tia’s mother never cried. Not when Tia broke her leg so badly that the bone stuck out. Not when she found out about the cancer. And not when Tia’s father left—at least, not in front of Tia.

“I’m sorry.” Her mother blinked, and the tears disappeared.

“Sorry? God, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

Her mother folded her arms and clutched her elbows. “I must have done something awful to have you believe your baby will do better without you. Do you think your life at this moment is as well as you’ll ever do? Don’t you see that your future lies in front of you?”

Tia shrugged as though she were a child shutting down against shame, aching at the thought that she might let her mother die thinking she’d failed in raising her.

“Mom, it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“I just don’t think it’s my path.” Tia covered her belly with both hands. Every lie she told felt as though she were pushing her mother
further away, now when they needed closeness more than ever. “I don’t think she’s meant to be mine.”

“Please don’t make your decision yet. Something’s tormenting you, and I know it’s not what you’re telling me. That’s okay. But believe me, if you pick giving in to your pain over choosing your baby, you’ll never recover from either.”

CHAPTER 2

Juliette

Juliette usually listened to music while she worked, but not today. She was stealing from Sunday family time—and a sunny Sunday at that—while the boys watched a video downstairs. Silence ensured she could hear her sons.

Guilt kept her company, even though she and Nathan had devoted every second of the morning and early afternoon to the boys. They’d taken a short hike at Beaver Brook Reservation, and then eaten a picnic lunch prepared by Juliette, complete with the Rice Krispies Treats she’d stirred up at six that morning, and then played an hour of goofy softball. Afterward, Nathan left for an afternoon of correcting papers, and she snuck up to get in a few hours of paperwork.

It wasn’t as though they weren’t having togetherness; tomorrow night they’d drive into Boston and watch the fireworks. Still, she worried. Bright light poured in the windows, and her boys were in the living room staring at the television.

Terrific. Juliette hoped her kids appreciated all the unlined women on the street, knowing that their mother had traded their brains, health, and security for furrow serums.

Furrow serums.

Wrinkle serums.

Furrow.

Wrinkle.

Furrow.

Wrinkle.

Furrow
had tested better as a problem to be solved than
wrinkle.
Maybe
furrow
sounded like a woman crinkling from thoughts rather than age.

Perhaps they should call it crinkle serum.
Crinkle
sounded kind of happy, right?

Sure. She pictured her business partner Gwynne hooting when Juliette shared that the next time they had one of their creative meetings. Juliette and Gwynne had met in Mommy and Me swim classes, drawn to each other through a shared mutual head-exploding boredom with the minutiae of motherhood, coupled with tendencies to overworship their children. They’d fallen in love with one sardonic glance, the way that best friends sometimes do, recognizing a kinship of lonely childhoods.

Juliette listened for disaster. When she worked, she worried about Max and Lucas. When she devoted herself to them, she worried about business. Nathan tried to solve the problem by telling her to r-e-l-a-x. “Concentrate on where you are,” he’d say, as though she could will herself out of worrying. Perhaps a male genetic pattern similar to male pattern baldness allowed Nathan to go to work and be at work. He couldn’t imagine life any other way.

She knew Nathan wanted to help. He tried to solve every problem that came his way; he always had. Taking care of people pleased him, so much so that she sensed it disappointed him that she asked for so little when it came to her work, but how could he help with a business built on balm for women’s skin? Nathan taught sociology at Brandeis University and researched the plight of the elderly, which, in his mind, she was certain, did not include their crinkles or furrows.

This was the year that her balancing act would pay off. She just knew it. Years of investing every free moment in work—even as she
pretended her preoccupation with cosmetics and skin care barely broke from being a hobby; concocting potions until three in the morning and then making breakfast for everyone at seven—would be worth it.

The kids came first. Nathan’s schedule, second. Then came cooking, cleaning, birthdays, Halloween, Passover, Chanukah, and Christmas—anchoring her family. That’s how she thought of it. Juliette loved her work to an unholy degree, but she worked equally hard to hide her obsession, always a bit ashamed of how much passion she felt about her business.

Creating organic skincare and makeup couldn’t be compared with saving lives. juliette&gwynne was even potentially an unkind business, building on women’s fear, though she and Gwynne kept it clean and honest. No promises of unborn-sperm-cell-laden cream guaranteed to eliminate wrinkles or furrows were offered, just assurances that their products would make the best of what nature had given. They didn’t tout faces frozen in time, but faces and bodies smoothed gracefully. Nothing depressed Juliette more than seeing older women with wind-tunneled faces wearing the Juicy Couture label emblazoned on their behinds.