Then She Found Me (22 page)

“Thanks,” I said.

“She can interrogate you until you drop, you know.”

I said yes, I knew.

“Not a word,” Sonia promised.

We met the following Sunday morning over bagels and coffee in Brookline. I was distracted by Sonia’s deep magenta lipstick, how it bled onto her cream cheese wherever her lips touched the bagel.

“How long have you known her?” I asked first.

“Since the late sixties; we both worked for Kevin White in his first mayoral race, and then we both got PR jobs in his administration.”

I did the arithmetic: Sonia had known Bernice when she was in her early thirties. Younger than I was now. Not a celebrity.

“Was she ever just a regular person?” I asked.

“No,” said Sonia, a long “nooo,” her lips remaining in a pout for emphasis.

“Ever?”

“I’m not saying it’s bad. But she’s always been full of herself.”

“Why would you be friends with someone like that?” I asked.

Sonia plunked her right elbow on the table and studied the bagel half in her hand at eye level. “Because,” she said with finality.

It was a quiz: you define it for me, April. You tell me
what it is about Bernice that makes a person be her friend. We both have felt it. You say it. I’ve proved myself with twenty years of friendship; you tell me the secret ingredient.

“You feel disloyal to her, don’t you?” I asked. “Dissecting her personality?”

“No. I’m not that nice,” said Sonia.

“Do you feel sorry for Bernice in a way?”

Sonia barely nodded.

“Like she needs friends, even though she’d be the last person on earth to admit it?”

“Is that what you feel?” Sonia asked.

“There’s something about her that does get to you.”

“Despite all the crap you have to put up with.”

“Despite her wanting you to think you’re incredibly lucky to be close to a famous celebrity such as herself?”

We nodded cynically, smiled indulgently. We both drank from our coffee cups. I motioned the waitress for refills. When she had left, after depositing a handful of plastic creamers from her apron pocket, I said, “She lies, you know.”

“I know,” said Sonia.

“She seems constitutionally incapable of giving straight answers.”

“She’s a poser,” said Sonia, as if that should satisfy us both.

“Did you know she’s never given me a straight answer about the man who impregnated her?”

I was watching Sonia closely. I had always thought she had a bit of the Bernice in her, in a paler shade, but this conversation was surprising me. Her reactions seemed almost normal.

“I can’t help you there,” she said. “Not really.”

“Do you know anything at all?”

“Don’t forget this part is relatively new—long-lost daughter, unwed mother. That only came out since that show.”

“The
show,” I repeated. “The today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life episode?”

Sonia put her cup down and leaned closer. “Sometimes I think she was carried away by the moment.”

“That’s for sure. The cathartic moment.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I shook my head: What? Tell me.

“That she made it up, right there, with everyone watching.”

I processed this slowly, rejecting each of the implications in linear order: made … it … up. No baby? No illegitimate baby? No baby at all? No Bernice and April? Good television? Finally I said, “I don’t think so. Her mother met me. She wouldn’t have gone along with a huge lie like that. Besides, look at me. Everyone says I’m hers,
You
said I’m hers.”

Sonia put her hand over mine—today’s ring was a golf ball of an opal—and squeezed it. I hadn’t realized it was in need of steadying. “No, not about her having had you at all,” she said.

“What?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t, April. It’s only a hypothesis.”

I released a muted squeal of impatience.

She said quickly, soothingly, “Okay, okay.”

“Please—”

“Okay: I think Bernie was married once, when she was really young,” said Sonia.

“You
think
or you know?”

“She told me once.”

“She was probably lying.”

“I don’t think so. This was when she didn’t lie so much.”

“So you think she was married when she got pregnant and he abandoned her?”

Sonia shook her head.

“No?”

“No. She said other things, bits and pieces, that added up to something else.”

I stared. Yes. Go on.

“She had a baby. She couldn’t take the pressure. She left the baby with him and went off somewhere.”

“You know this?”

“She once said so, a long, long time ago. I don’t think she even remembers telling me the truth. It all got rewritten with her new identity as a celebrity unwed mother. I think it’s hard to keep straight what you’ve told people when you lie a lot.”

I repeated, “She left me with him? And what happened to me?”

“I think he must have turned you over to the authorities. He was just a kid.”

“The authorities?”

“He probably couldn’t take care of you himself,” Sonia said soothingly. “He probably thought he was doing the best thing for you.”

“Don’t give me that shit. Where did she go? Wouldn’t he need her permission before he gave her baby away?”

Sonia winced, hesitated.

“What?” I said.

“He did have her permission,” she said softly.

I excused myself, found the ladies’ room downstairs, and threw up. I returned to Sonia, thinking I felt calmer. The table had been cleared and Sonia’s lipstick was fresh. “How old was I?” I asked.

“Six months? Seven?”

“Not a newborn,” I said.

Sonia nodded.

“You must know this for sure. You wouldn’t speculate on something this …”

“Devastating?”

I nodded.

“She had you for a while; then she gave you up. I know that much. She doesn’t think it looks very good. ‘Unwed mother’ is more … sympathetic.”

“Six months,” I repeated. “Neither one wanted me after that?”

“They were teenagers! They didn’t know what else to do.”

“Was it Jack Flynn?”

“I think so. I remember her saying ‘Jack.’”

I covered my face with my hands and pressed my fingers against my eye sockets to block her out and to think more clearly.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Sonia was saying, “but I have divided loyalties. On one hand I say, ‘She’s my oldest friend.’ On the other, ‘What kind of person gives her flesh and blood away?’ What are my obligations to tell the truth if I know it? And don’t I have obligations to you now, too?”

I said through my hands, “She’ll kill you.”

“What kind of person gives her baby away? I’ve been asking myself the question for twenty-some-odd years. Wondering. Assuming she had suffered for it, never really allowing myself to blame her … but feeling real anger”—Sonia hit her chest with a clenched fist—“especially when the baby appeared and the history got rewritten….”

I shook my head. Took my hands away.

“I’m willing to accept the consequences,” said Sonia.

It’s all right, I said. I’m fine. It’s important to know these things. But I’m all right; I never suffered from being given away, did I? It was better. I’m better. I’ll be all right.

The waitress collected her tip, looking annoyed, wondering, I thought, why customers couldn’t just leave when they were done.

I
called in sick Monday morning and came close to telling Anne-Marie the truth: I found things out yesterday. About Bernice. About my adoption.

“What things?”

“Sickening things.”

“I’ll tell them it’s stomach virus,” said Anne-Marie. “That’ll give you another day. Don’t wear any blusher on Wednesday. Have tea and toast for lunch your first day back.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s not about Dwight, is it?”

“No.”

“Have you told him what’s wrong?”

“No. I don’t know if I can talk about it.”

“April,” she said sharply, “if you blow this with Dwight I’ll kill you. Don’t fuck this up with your brave-soldier routine.”

“Don’t start with me,” I said, my voice catching and me letting it. “I haven’t slept.”

“He loves you,” she said.

I asked if anyone was in the office.

“No one is in the office. When was the last time you talked to him?”

“Saturday.”

“Jesus Christ. So I’m your big confidante? How do you think he’ll feel when he finds out you’re a mess over something and you didn’t go to him with it?”

“I know.”

“How?”

“Lousy.”

“Right. So don’t be a jerk.”

“I’m afraid to keep the phone plugged in. Bernice might call.”

“So? Give him a time to call and plug it in.”

“Could you do that for me?” I asked.

“When?”

“Beginning of fourth period?”

“You got it. Eleven twenty-five. If you don’t answer, I send him over.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Really.”

“You bet,” said Anne-Marie.

Dwight whistled softly into the receiver and said, “No wonder she’s nuts.”

I said, “What kind of people give their baby away?”

“Desperate people. Teenagers who weren’t supposed to have babies in the first place.”

“How many teenagers give their babies away when they’ve had them for six months?”

Dwight said quietly, “I don’t know.”

“They couldn’t have loved me. You don’t give a baby that you love away.”

“You don’t know that, April.”

“Must be a pretty unlovable baby,” I said. “Pretty fucking ugly and unlovable.”

“I’m corning over.” said Dwight.

He held me and let me cry into his neck for what felt like hours. He produced a bubble bath somehow when I didn’t even own the stuff. He found a tray and a bud vase and the makings of cinnamon toast. I told him I loved him, and not because I was vulnerable and hysterical and orphaned or because he was acting like a paid companion from the Visiting Nurses Association, but because he left school for me and never mentioned the leaving or the getting back.

“You’d do it for me,” he said.

“I hope so.”

“You already have.” He put his arms around me and rested his cheek on the top of my head.

I have? I asked. I’ve done something like this for you?

I could feel his shrug. A self-conscious shrug. He’d said more than he’d meant to say.

“Something specific?” I asked.

He kissed the top of my head and put his cheek back down.

“You don’t want to say?”

“It’s no one big thing.”

I knew what he meant: just that we had this now, that he loved me.

There was Bernice to consider. And Saguna. And Jack Flynn, said Dwight, picking up his old refrain. It wasn’t really so bad. He said I should give her a chance to tell the truth. Say, “Bernice. I want you to tell me the facts, unembellished. No lies. I found everything out, but I want to hear it from your lips.”

“‘I want to hear it from your lips,’” I repeated, savoring the phrase.

“Try to keep her on course. Guide her toward the truth so she won’t get herself in deeper.”

“Why should I? Let her hang herself. Let her get hoisted with her own petard.”

“What’s the
point
of that?” Dwight asked.

What’s the
point?
I asked. The point is to let her know that crime doesn’t pay.

“No, it’s not,” said Dwight. “The point is to understand what she did and why. And to salvage this relationship, whatever it is.”

“Yuck,” I said.

“You want to pay her back, right? Fuck you, Bernice. Fuck you to hell.”

“I hate her,” I said.

“Now, there’s a lie,” said Dwight. He took my hand and kissed it front and back.

“You
are
on her side.”

“She thinks I’m fascinating.”

I laughed the way you do when the doctor setting your broken bones makes a joke—a sob of a pitiful laugh.

“You know you have to talk to her,” said Dwight.

We went to Provincetown for the night, first calling Anne-Marie at home and saying, “Think up something that sounds plausible. We’ll be in on Wednesday.”

“Whose idea was this?” she asked.

“Dwight’s.”

“Bless his heart,” said Anne-Marie.

I tried to say, “He’s been so wonderful,” but the very formation of the words in my head choked me up so I couldn’t talk. Dwight took the phone and promised we’d bring Anne-Marie a tacky souvenir from a stand on Route 6.

“Aren’t we spontaneous?” he asked repeatedly as we drove south and then east. “Aren’t we the craziest kids?”

“I’m feeling better,” I’d answer.

In two hours we were in Provincetown. I had never seen it in winter, never imagined it could look like a New England village instead of carnival grounds when the streets were cleared of tourists. Over dinner at a Portuguese bar I told Dwight that this was the high point of my romantic life so far.

“Eating kale soup is the high point of your romantic life?” He took a spoonful from my bowl and shrugged as if agreeing up to a point.

“Coming here, playing hooky. It’s a grand gesture. No one’s ever made a gesture on this scale for me.”

Dwight frowned at his fried squid appetizer, then at the unlit candle halfway between us. It was set in an ugly red glass ball with plastic netting. He motioned for the waitress to bring a match. She swapped ours for a green ball flickering at a vacant table.