The Crooked Branch (19 page)

“I only meant . . .” She had no idea what kind of uncultivated lie was about to come out of her, but Roisin put a hand up to excuse her from the effort.

“Calm yourself, woman,” Roisin said. “I’ve known for weeks.”

Ginny eased herself back to the pillows. “How?”

“You think I don’t know when food starts disappearing from the larder beneath my very nose?” Roisin said. “Besides, you’re far too old to be having your first child. What are you, twenty-six, twenty-eight years of age?”

“Thirty.” Ginny stared at her.

Roisin nodded. “I knew there must be other children. What harm?” Ginny heaved a deep prayer of relief. “Mrs. Spring likes you, you’re a great worker, and you’re good company for me. God knows we have enough to spare.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide them,” Ginny said, but Roisin looked at her skeptically. “Well, I suppose I was. I just, I needed this job so badly, and I didn’t want you to have to share the burden of my secret. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you. I just . . .”

“It’s fine, dear,” Roisin said. “It’s exactly what I would’ve done.”

Ginny relaxed into the conversation then, and started to feel glad for the accidental confidence. It was a blessed relief to speak about her children after so many watchful weeks of hiding them, in her mind. Roisin stayed and kept them company for another hour, and after she left, Ginny got up from the bed and threw another sod of turf on the fire. She never bothered with the lantern that first night with baby Raymond. She drew back the gold drapes, and watched the sky deepen to a purple bruise through the tall glass windowpanes. Her room faced the side of the house, and down below she could see light blazing out in the stables. She placed her palms flat against the cold glass, and then watched while the ghosts of her handprints glowed and then faded.

Her new baby shuddered and sighed in his blanket on the bed. Ginny curled herself around his little body, and sang all their life to him, their real life, away from Springhill House. She sang him his father, and his brother and sisters. She sang them all home again, in their little cottage. Together.

NEW YORK, NOW

S
alamander’s is always pretty crowded on Friday afternoons, and by the time we arrive, all the good, stroller-friendly couches are already taken. The only seats left are a couple of the tiny café tables, barely big enough to hold two mugs of coffee. Jade’s double-wide really is enormous. She bumps every single seat on our way to the counter. We stand in line, and she looks around nervously.

“This isn’t gonna work,” she says, biting a nail while she surveys the layout. “I only ever sit outside when I come here. The stroller won’t fit. Is it too cold out?”

“No,” I say, “we can sit outside—I don’t mind.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, and I wonder if she was actually just looking for an excuse to jet.

She orders two espressos and a vegan cookie. I ask for a decaf, and then we find a table on the sidewalk where it’s easy to park the strollers.

“Hey, could you keep an eye on them while I run to the ladies’ room?” she asks.

“Sure!” I answer without even thinking, and then, an instant later, I am alone at a sidewalk café with three babies.

Please stay asleep please stay asleep please stay asleep,
and they all do. Emma stirs but does not open her eyes. I pull back the hood on Jade’s stroller, and watch her babies sleep for a few minutes. Then I become worried that she’ll return to find me gazing at her babies and think I’m creepy, so I push the hood across, and sip at my decaf.

And that’s when I begin to worry that Jade is never coming back. I mean, what kind of mother leaves her two babies alone on the streets of Queens with some woman she just met? I’ll tell you what kind of mother: a mother who does not want those babies anymore. A mother who has probably skipped out the back kitchen door, and is catching the Q55 bus down Myrtle Avenue at this very moment, from where she will hop on the L train with all the Williamsburg hipsters, never to be seen again. Does she even remember my name? My God, I would
never
leave Emma with a stranger!

Oh, here she comes. Never mind.

“Sorry I took so long.”

“It’s cool,” I lie.

She is scraping her heavy metal chair back from the table. She doesn’t even glance into the stroller, to make sure her twins are still safe inside. The waiter has delivered her espressos, and she knocks one of them back like it’s a shot of Jack Daniel’s.

“I need all the caffeine I can get,” she says, biting into her vegan cookie. I
almost
say,
Oh, are you not breast-feeding?
but catch myself in the nick of time, and settle on “I hear ya,” instead.

Salamander’s is on one corner of a pinwheel intersection on Myrtle Avenue, across from a McDonald’s, a great old-timey Queens bakery that’s been owned by the same Italian family for eighty-six years, and a famous German restaurant with a Tudor-style facade that is often featured on television shows on the Food Network. (They have an obscenely delicious pork shank that you have to just ask for, because it’s not listed on the menu.) Outside the front door of that restaurant, two young Ecuadorian men in lederhosen are ashing their cigarettes into the window boxes. At the bus stop next to Salamander’s, every single person is engrossed in his or her smartphone, except for one little kid who is staring up, astonished, at the two mounted NYPD who are clopping their horses slowly along the avenue in front of him. Jade and I watch the uninteresting late-Friday traffic stacking up at the intersection, in order to avoid looking at each other. It’s all incredibly awkward, like a bad first date. I so want to like her.

“So what brought you to New York?” I ask.

“The usual thing,” she says cryptically.

“A job?”

“Nah, a boy.”

“Oh.” This is good. Boy talk! Good. “So who’s the daddy, what does he do?”

Jade downs her second espresso. “His name is Paul, and hmm, what does he do? Yeah, he mostly impregnates his girlfriend with twins, and then fucks off to L.A. to go
find himself
.” She twists her face into an approximation of a smile, and I am at a complete loss as to how to respond.

“Wow,” I say.

“Yep.”

“Shit.”

“Yep.”

“So do you have any family here or anything?”

“Nope.”

I manage to refrain from saying
wow
again, but just barely. “So you’re totally on your own with these two?” Jade shrugs, and I lean down and peek into the stroller, where one of the babies is stretching and yawning. He blinks his black eyes, and rubs a hand across his sticking-up hair.

“I guess so,” she says.

And before I can stop myself, I say, “I would die.”

Jade laughs, crosses her arms in front of her, and looks into the stroller for the first time since she sat down.

“Look who’s up,” she says. “Hiya, Max!”

The baby looks up at her and smiles with his whole face, his whole body. His mouth curves open, and his cheeks bunch, and his black eyes glimmer, and his chest puffs up, and his fists thrash, all in response to his mother’s simple, rather uninspired greeting. Please God, let Emma do this one day. I peek into her stroller, where she is still sleeping—not even half the size of Jade’s stalwart little people. Next to her, Max is reaching out for his mother. She pops his buckles with one hand and hoists him onto her lap. He immediately tries to grab her empty espresso cup, and she instinctively swivels her knee away from the table so he can’t reach. She has the quick and quiet grace of a ninja. What kind of man would leave this woman?

“So what do you do?” I ask.

Because how the hell does she pay for two babies, and possibly child care, on her own? Does Paul send money? Does he help? Does she stay home with them? Is she on welfare?
How does this work?
Jade spins her espresso cup like it’s a top, and Max is mesmerized. I am intrigued by her, but it’s all so personal, so dicey. I suddenly realize that there is no safe topic of conversation among new mothers. There is no question that doesn’t sound prying and potentially critical.

“I’m a receptionist at a law firm in the city.”

I nod. “Sounds fun.”

She looks up at me. “It’s awful. The lawyers are a bunch of self-important pricks. But the pay’s good, and they have half-day Fridays and free on-site child care, which is crucial.”

I nod some more.

“How ’bout you, you work?”

“Yeah, I’m a writer,” I say, and then I remember the
Food & Wine
magazine
in my bag, my pears article, and I wonder how the hell I ever thought that was going to work. Was I just going to whip it out and start bragging to all the other moms about my awesome, exciting, successful, defunct career? I’m so lame. But Jade seems to perk up, slightly. I can almost detect a hint of interest.

“What kinda writing, like, are you a journalist?”

Why do people think all writers are journalists?

“A food writer,” I say.

“Huh,” she answers, signaling the death of her fleeting curiosity.

In my experience, most people don’t understand what a food writer is, so I decide to explain it to her, even though she didn’t ask and no longer seems the least bit interested. “I started out doing restaurant reviews, but now I mostly write articles for foodie magazines and Web sites. And I’ve consulted on a few cookbooks.”

“Cool,” Jade says, by which I gather she means, “That could not be more boring.”

“Yeah, it’s fun,” I say.

“I’m not much into food,” she answers. “I’m one of those people who forgets to eat.”

I have never understood those people, and frankly, I believe that they are all liars, people who say this. But hey, there are worse things you can be than a liar.

“I
wish
I could forget to eat,” I say. “I spend all of my time between meals thinking about what I’m going to eat next. I’m obsessed with food. My husband is, too. He’s a chef.”

Max is getting squirmy on Jade’s lap, and she hands him a sugar packet to play with. He immediately balls it up in his fist and begins slobbering on it.

“Yeah, maybe I’d like food more, too, if I had a chef in my life,” Jade says. “My mom wasn’t much of a cook, so I never had real food growing up. A lot of garbage. I probably became vegan just out of self-defense, so I wouldn’t have to eat the crap she fed me anymore.”

“Oh, so you’re all-the-way vegan?” I ask. “Like, no dairy, nothing?”

“All-the-way vegan,” she says.

“That is impressive,” I say, though I don’t really mean
impressive
. What I really mean is something like
tragic
or
dire
. “I could probably give up meat if I had to, but I would die without cheese. Or eggs. And I really love shellfish. And meat, really, if I’m being honest. I couldn’t survive without meat.”

Jade laughs, and her face is beautiful when she allows herself that lightness. Her bottom teeth are crooked. Her second baby is waking up—I can hear squeaking coming from the stroller, and the smile flees from Jade’s face at once. She begins to juggle Max on her knee, even though he’s still quiet, content with his wet sugar packet. She reaches in, and pops the buckles on the baby girl’s harness, but how will she lift her, with one hand? Should I offer to take Max? He is grunting now, his face turning red with effort. I’m moderately sure he is pooping. Jade fails to hide the defeat in her shoulders, a tiny sigh that escapes her slightly caved-in chest. She places Max back into the buggy, and he immediately begins to wail.

“I know, I know,” Jade says, and now she is so focused on those babies, it’s like everything around her has disappeared. The baby girl begins to cry, too, and Jade shushes them desperately. She swivels the stroller, and her arm disappears underneath, then reappears with a small bag. She places two bottles on the café table in front of her, and the babies lock their eyes onto the bottles. The babies are both reaching and squirming and whimpering. That whimper. I know that whimper. Jade dumps powdered formula into the two bottles and shakes them up while the babies watch, transfixed. Max is bouncing a little, in his seat, and his sister swings her arm around in big arcs, thwacking him in the head beside her. He doesn’t mind.

“What’s the baby girl’s name?” I ask, but Jade is so centered on the bottles that I don’t think she hears me. Max begins yelling loudly.

“Okay! Okay, it’s coming,” Jade tells him, and she gives him the bottle, even though the liquid is still slightly clumpy inside.

Max takes it, drops it, and it rolls off his lap and onto the sidewalk. There is chewed-up gum down there, hard black splotches of it, ground into the pavement beneath our table. I wince at the wasted bottle, but Jade doesn’t even blink. She leans down and hands the bottle right back to him, holds it in his mouth for a minute. She reclines his seat a little, and then helps him wrap his fingers more firmly around the bottle. Max sucks noisily.

“Now, Madeline,” she says, scooping the baby girl out of her seat. The baby arches her back and kicks angrily at the second bottle, but Jade catches it with one hand just as it rolls off the edge of the table. She is like a circus performer. I can feel prickles of sweat in my armpits, just watching this shitshow. Jade holds Madeline sitting up, with one arm laced beneath the baby’s armpits, and pops the nipple into her waiting mouth. Madeline immediately slumps back against her mother and stops wriggling. Jade slumps back, too, in her chair, and the collective relief at our table is palpable. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath.

By the time the babies have finished their bottles, Max’s diaper is so ripe that I feel like there is a green fog hanging above our little table, even though we’re outside. The stink has not dissipated, but rather has hunkered down around us in a very determined manner. A young hipster couple, with their hands tucked cloyingly into the back pockets of each other’s skinny jeans, emerges from the café with their to-go cups. They sit down at the table beside ours, but only for a moment, because then they smell the crazy funk that is Max’s poop, and quickly dart to another table. Jade doesn’t seem to notice.

“Maybe we should go,” I say. “Emma’s gonna need a feed soon, too, and I still haven’t mastered the whole breast-feeding-in-public thing.”

“Yeah, cool,” Jade says, and she plops Madeline back into the stroller, straps her in. Max is still gumming the bottle, even though it’s empty now.

“Which way do you go, from here?” I ask.

Jade points back up the road. “I live on Seventy-fifth Street, by the library.”

“Me, too!” I say. “Small world.”

And now my heart is racing, because how many sets of twins can there be on Seventy-fifth Street, by the library? Jade is
definitely
channel C, there’s no doubt about it. I can hardly wait to tell Leo.

When we get to my house, I stop the stroller and put the brake on while I fish into my bag for my keys.

“No way, this is your house?” Jade says.

“Yeah, why?” I say. “Which one is yours?”

She points next door to the six-family, and I feign enormous surprise.

“That is
crazy
,” I say. “We really are neighbors!”

Jade nods, and then yawns. “I should’ve gone for a third espresso,” she says.

“You can never have too much caffeine!” I hear myself say, and then, “Hey, why don’t I give you my number? Maybe we can get together sometime, have a playdate?”

“Yeah, cool,” Jade says, taking her cell phone out of her back pocket. She programs in my number, and I wait for her to offer hers in return, or maybe even to press
send
on her phone, so that her number will pop up on my screen, too. But instead, she just pockets the phone, whips out her keys, and heads for her front door. I feel like I’ve just gone in for a kiss and gotten the cheek.

“See you round,” I say, in an attempt at a cheerful voice.

“See ya,” Jade says. There is only one step up, into the apartment building, but it might as well be an entire flight for Jade with her double-wide stroller. She tries to hold the heavy door with one hand, while she bumps the stroller up the single step with the other. It’s painful to watch.

“Need a hand?” I ask her, from where I’m standing now, with Emma’s car seat looped over my elbow, halfway up my own front steps.