A Big Dose of Lucky Page 17

  Pink floods Eve’s cheeks.

  “Escaping to university was the last time I took charge of anything.” Her thumb pins a mosquito to the table. “I’d only been in Toronto a week or two when I realized…In the busyness of moving and missing Andy, I hadn’t noticed that my…monthly visitor had not arrived. One morning I began to throw up before I’d even brushed my teeth. My roommate, Shelley, made a joke about having a bun in the oven. Suddenly, I knew what was happening.”

  “Me,” I say.

  “You.”

  She recites the next bit quickly, eyes on the table, where her fingers rub the wood over and over in the same spot. She did not go to see a doctor, because what could he tell her beyond what she had figured out for herself? And hadn’t a doctor got her into this trouble? Why hadn’t Andy done something to prevent this from happening?

  “Those were bleak days,” says Eve. “There were dozens of girls on my floor, but I was miserably alone, missing Andy and scared as hell.”

  And then her mother arrived for a visit. Mrs. Delaney may have ignored her daughter’s dreams and belittled her opinions, but she certainly knew when Eve’s appearance had changed. She could see the shadowed eyes and the swollen breasts, the inability to eat anything other than soda crackers for breakfast.

  “She had me packed up and withdrawn from school before I knew what hit me. She threatened to sue the college for allowing such an outrage to occur under what she assumed was their watch.”

  Mrs. Delaney had driven the five hours north, white-lipped and unspeaking.

  “I wouldn’t tell her who the daddy was. She was furious. She gave me the silent treatment for days. Which was a relief. But I should have known she was off managing things behind my back, deciding what would happen next.”

  One thing they agreed on was that Eve’s father should not be told. They were conspirators in hiding the terrible truth.

  “He died not knowing,” says Eve. “Bad enough now for a young girl to find herself in the family way, but then? Oh my goodness…the shame!” Her voice trails off as she closes her eyes for a moment. She explains how she bound her belly each morning and tried to be at the breakfast table before her father appeared so that she’d be sitting down already. Her reasons for leaving school remained unspecified, and he didn’t much care, after all. She was pretty enough to find a husband. As long as she didn’t wait too long.

  “But what about—didn’t you tell Andy Bannerman?” My mind fills with pictures of a tall dark knight on horseback, galloping past the Georgian Bay Creamery, scooping up the gold-blond Eve Delaney (with one brown, muscled arm encircling her round tummy) and hauling her onto the saddle behind him.

  “I never told him either,” says Eve. “I thought it would sound hysterical. Or that he’d think I was lying, trying to trap him somehow. I just stopped writing letters. That was the saddest of all, deciding to lose him on purpose.”

  CONSIDERING ANDY BANNERMAN

  His secret is like a lively puppy that I’m hanging on to by the collar with all my might. I don’t want to tell Eve that he’d had—how many?—kids already by the time I came along. And how many since? Does he even know?

  Since he has no idea that I existed, he has never spent a minute considering me. But what about my brothers and sisters? Did he realize back then which, um, deposits were successful? Jimmy and Abby and the twins and how many others that I haven’t met yet?

  Judy and Preesha and Eve all say that he was kind and handsome and funny. But…but…is it kind to have a bunch of babies and not even know their names?

  Is he sitting beside some window in Baltimore? I don't even know where that is. (My mind hops to the green leather atlas in the library at the Benevolent Home. I wish I could turn the pages to find the dot on a map where my father lives.) Is he at his desk, looking out at the rooftops, wondering about his children?

  Did he keep a list for himself of the women he turned into mothers? Did he ever even know?

  Was it kindness, what he did for ladies who needed help? Or was it a brand of showing off, a contest with himself or with the other nearly-doctors to see how many children one man could make?

  “ARE YOU TELLING ME…?”

  I say it quietly, even though inside I’m at top volume. “Just to be absolutely clear…You had actual sex with Andy Bannerman?”

  That silky laugh. Of course she did, more than once or twice.

  “You are the incontestable proof.”

  I know I can’t tell her about Jimmy or Abby or the twins. Not now anyway. If she doesn’t know what Andy Bannerman and maybe the other interns were doing, how could I be the one to tell her?

  But I was different. I didn’t happen that way.

  “I was an accident,” I blurt out. “You didn’t want me.”

  “You were a surprise,” she says. “I maybe wouldn’t have chosen…I hardly knew, really, how it all worked. My mother certainly never discussed such things with me. Nobody talked about sex in those days. But once I realized? I wanted you more than anything. Please…never think otherwise.” She reaches a hand toward mine, but I pull away.

  “Too late for that,” I say. “I’ve been in an orphanage for sixteen years.”

  “That was my mother’s fault,” she says.

  My hands curl into fists. “If you supposedly wanted me—more than anything—why didn’t you come to find me? Why didn’t you holler till she told you where I was?”

  Silence.

  “You can’t even look me in the eye!” I shout. “You blame everything on her, but you’re the one who sat there for sixteen years, doing nothing to find a person you claim you were thinking about every day!” I stand up so fast that my knees whack the underside of the picnic table. I jerk back down with a jolt of pain. “How can I trust a single thing you’ve said if you never even tried to look for me?”

  IS SHE HURTING TOO?

  I hope so.

  It’s not kind, not poised or proper, but it’s the truth.

  I feel like my throat is clogged with the bitterest herb in the garden. Horseradish, maybe, hot and spicy and mean.

  I EXPECT HER TO CRY

  But she doesn’t. She gazes at me for an extra-long minute, as if her focus is sharpening the whole time. My chest hurts like I’ve had hiccups all day. No way is she going to love me now. I’m the one who’s going to cry.

  “You’re right,” she says. “I’ve spent my life believing that my mother ruined it.” She puts a hand up to stop me from saying anything. “And all along, I was ruining yours.”

  “I thought you were dead,” I say. “That’s what makes an orphan. I never was mad at you until now—until I realized that you were alive and having your own cozy life, not caring one bit about what happened to me. So I can’t honestly say you ruined my life. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you gave me a life without a mother in it.”

  I’m still brimming with fury, but I’m also remembering how many questions I have, how there are whole fat chunks of the story that I don’t know yet.

  Shut up, Malou, and listen.

  “It seems to me,” says Eve, “that you must be a pretty amazing girl. You managed to put this together better than I ever did.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened next?” I say.

  EVE’S PLAN WAS DIFFERENT FROM MRS. DELANEY’S PLAN

  Eve had intended to run away and have the baby—me—somewhere a million miles from Parry Sound and her mother. Or that was what she fantasized about. I don’t have the impression that she’d done much planning. She seems to be kind of a wimp, my mother.

  Meanwhile, my grandmother had done some research and found a place in Montreal, called the Friendly Home, where wayward girls went to have their babies in secret. Isn’t Friendly strangely related to Benevolent? Why not just say the real word out loud: House of Shame. Instead of pretending that girls are going to some kind of jolly picnic?

  Eve never ran away, and she never went to the Friendly Home either. A few days before she was meant to l
eave, she began to feel pains. Luckily, her father was in Hamilton at a conference, because the baby was coming sooner than expected.

  “I won’t tell you how much it hurt,” she says with a crooked smile. “You might want your own some day.”

  BROWN BABY

  “My mother begged for a private room. She was spitting mad when there wasn’t one. Very rude to the nurses. Especially because the woman in the next bed, she’d been rushed in from the reservation, you know? An Indian. Some kind of emergency. But her baby was healthy—a boy, a little brown imp. My mother was awful. Dark babies popping out all over the place, she said. Like mildew.”

  Eve shakes her head.

  “I only held you once,” she says. “I fell asleep with you”—she crooks her arm to show a baby-sized space at her side—“right here next to me. And when I woke up…my mother had already taken you. Before I could even say goodbye. The nurses were stony-faced, packing up the little clothes I’d brought to take you home in. Better that way, they said.”

  “Isn’t that kidnapping?” I say. “You could have gone to the police.”

  Eve just shakes her head. “I was an unmarried white teenager with a brown baby. They only would have told me that my mother had done the right thing.”

  The silence seems to grow thorns, all the things not said yet.

  I still have a dictionary-thick pile of questions. But she is sliding painted toes back into sandals. She opens her purse and pulls out a gold tube and a compact shaped like a seashell.

  “I must look a wreck,” she says. “All this crying.”

  I shake my head. She looks beautiful.

  “What happens now?” I say. Is she just going to roll berry-colored lipstick over her mouth and say goodbye?

  She slips her things back into the purse and looks at her watch. “My mother took the children for ice cream,” she says. “They think I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  That might be the worst thing that Eve has said yet. Confessing that her mother still runs the show.

  “I do want to meet you again,” she says. “I’d like to get to know who you are.”

  Rosemarie.

  I hear the but before she says it.

  “But,” she says, “my husband—”

  “Mr. Beckwith,” I say.

  “Doctor Beckwith,” says Eve.

  ANOTHER TWIST

  “Oh. So your mother got her wish after all.” I nearly add “since he’s white this time,” but Eve might figure out that I’ve been spying on her family.

  A minute of deadly quiet and then: “George was in the same class,” she says. “In Andy’s group of interns. He liked it here and came back to open a practice when the time came. I didn’t meet him until three or four years later. He knows I had a baby. That’s not an easy thing to keep hidden from a doctor.”

  She runs her fingers through her hair, mussing the smoothness of it. “It’s better to tell your husband the truth about most things,” she says.

  “Including your mistakes?”

  “Let’s say past relationships.” Her fingers pick at the strap of her purse. “So he knows I had a baby. My mother would be appalled that he knows that much. But he understands. He had one or two girlfriends before I came along.”

  And how many babies did George have, I wonder? How many little blond babies are on Pete’s hockey team or in Lucy’s band at school?

  “But…” says Eve. A long pause while she shapes what to say. “This is not nice to admit. I’m sorry; it’s awful. But what I told him was that the baby had died.”

  CONNECTING THE DOTS

  “And it’s not just that, is it?” I whisper. My being alive is bad enough. “You never told him it was Andy. Did you?”

  She shakes her head, staring at her hands. I watch the red flush creep up her pale neck.

  Forget the stupid husband for a second. The truth is clamped around my rib cage, making it hard to breathe. My skin is why. My being colored.

  The thing you notice first is the real reason for hiding the biggest secret.

  “How did I end up at the Home?”

  “I don’t even really know,” says Eve. “I can only guess. The instant my mother saw you, she knew who your father was. Obviously. She had a conniption—that’s what we called it. She was beyond reason.”

  Eve’s voice cracks on the last few words. “She stole you right out of my sleeping arms. She must have paid off the nurses and hired a driver—”

  “She did,” I say. “The driver anyway.” Mrs. Hazelton’s story makes complete sense now. “She hired a colored driver. That’s who carried me to the door. How about that?”

  Tears fill Eve’s eyes. “When she came back…she wouldn’t tell me where she’d taken you, just that we must never mention the baby again. And we haven’t. It was beyond imagining for her to be related to a Negro.”

  AND WHAT ABOUT YOU?

  I say.

  She takes a deep, trembly breath.

  “I never loved anyone the way I loved Andy Bannerman,” she says. “If you will give me a chance, I want to love you too.” Another breath. “I want Michael and Alexis to know their sister. And that means telling George.”

  I wait. I’m pretty sure there’s more.

  “Once George knows…” Eve smiles at me with a flash of mischief. “I think you’ve inspired me,” she says, “to tell my mother to go to hell.”

  WE AGREE TO MEET AGAIN NEXT FRIDAY

  We walk across the grass together. She offers me a lift, and I say no, thank you. She gets into her car and rolls down the window because it’s baking inside, she says. Hotter than the devil’s pajamas.

  And then we wave goodbye.

  SEVENTEEN

  FIVE OF US

  “So that’s everything.” I poke a log and send up a spray of sparks.

  We’re sitting around a fire pit in the clearing beside Jimmy’s trailer. Sherry is inside, gone to sleep by now, probably, because it’s nearly midnight. Did I ever see midnight before? Pete pitched two tents, one for girls and one for boys. But we’re not tired yet.

  “Hate to break the news,” says Lucy, “but your grandmother is a bitch.”

  We all laugh, because it’s hardly news. She’s the villain in my story, as wicked as any witch or aunt or stepmother in any book.

  “It’ll be easy to find out where she lives,” says Jimmy.

  “What should we do to her?” Lucy leans forward, her face aglow in the firelight. “You deliver the groceries, Pete. We’ll put rat pellets in her Raisin Bran.”

  “Powdered bleach in the flour,” Pete says.

  “We’re not going to kill her!” says Abby.

  “Why not?” Lucy wants to know. “Look what she did to Malou!”

  “We’re not going to kill her,” I say. “She just has to suffer.”

  “True,” says Pete. “Suffer is better.”

  “We can’t break the law,” says Jimmy. “So extraction of toenails is out of the question.”

  We go into a whole laughing scenario of kidnapping old Mrs. Delaney and tying her up in Pete and Lucy’s basement, feeding her peanut butter with nothing to drink, pricking her bulgy white calves with thumbtacks and using Pete’s hockey socks to gag her.

  “Except now we’re back to murder,” says Lucy. “Pete stinks!”

  Pete pulls Lucy’s face into his armpit, and it takes a while for us to hush again.

  “All I really have to do,” I say, “if I want to torture her”—this is coming to me slowly—“is introduce myself.”

  A FEW SECONDS OF SILENCE

  And then they’re all hooting and cheering.

  “Yesss!”

  But a few seconds later, I know I’ll have to wait. If I barge brazenly into Eve’s mother’s life before Eve has a chance to tell her husband, it won’t be only Mrs. Delaney that I’m embarrassing. And if I mess things up for Eve, maybe she won’t forgive me. I just met her. I don’t want to make her mad already.

  So I tell the others to stop talking. I�
�m not going to knock on her door, and they’re not going to sit on the public sidewalk next to her tidy lawn, like a row of dark-skinned garden gnomes.

  Revenge will be a treasure that I hold in my pocket, waiting for the right day to show the world.

  WE LOOK AT THE LIST AGAIN

  So far, I’ve got two new brothers and two new sisters. Plus Eve’s other kids, Michael and Alexis. That’s six. Plus me makes seven. The new Seven.

  But there are still more names, kids we haven’t found yet.

  “And don’t forget,” says Abby, “this is just one hospital in just one town. If Andy Bannerman did this, uh, sharing thing everywhere he went, there could be way more. Think how many siblings we might have in Baltimore!”

  Who knows, right?

  NOBODY IN ANY BOOK ANYWHERE

  Got brothers and sisters this way.

  COUSINS TOO!

  Jimmy’s mom has a sister with two kids.

  Deb Munro’s brother has four!

  This family just keeps on growing.

  AND HOW ABOUT THIS?

  “I’ve known you,” says Jimmy, “since the day we were born.”

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  I’m going to stay with Judy and Preesha until the end of the summer. I have that much time to decide if I want to move with them to Toronto and go to school there with Abby for one more year. A real school! They tracked down Mrs. Hazelton and spoke to her on the telephone. She said that she would happily help with arrangements to have me placed officially in twelfth grade.