Admission (61 page)

It occurred to her that she didn’t know what the
B
stood for or if it represented his first name or his last, and then it occurred to her that that was something to add to
the blessedly long list of things she did not know and would not know, like her baby’s name, and what he—or she—would turn
out to be, and who would love him. She did not believe that she could love him. Susannah, whatever else was wrong with her,
had thrown herself into maternal love, and Portia felt, again, that she must be very unnatural, and it did pain her that she
did not already love her baby, did not believe she would eventually love her baby, would wish her baby away in a breath if
she could catch her breath, especially if the pain went, too. But she couldn’t do anything if she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t
be expected to produce the baby, or whatever raging thing had gotten itself trapped deep inside her, not if every time she
tried to gather her strength, the deep pain of it came soaring through her body, leaving no appendage unturned, making every
part of her crackle horribly. She remembered now that she had asked for the version of labor without pain, but when she tried
to bring this up, it came out sounding sort of vague, as if she were still in Europe and attempting to accomplish the task
at hand in some unfamiliar language, managing only to state the obvious: “Hurts, hurts, stop.”

“’Kay,” said Dr. B. “Third time’s the charm.”

Was he trying to be funny? Portia thought.

Then, in her acrid fog, she thought: I have to do this three times?

“You got anyone here, sweetheart?” said the nurse at her ear.

Portia turned vaguely in her direction. “What?”

“Your mama? Boyfriend?”

“No,” she panted.

“Well,” the woman said comfortingly, “that’s okay. One good parent’s one more than a lotta kids get.”

“No,” said Portia. “It’ll have two. It’s being adopted.”

Her hand, on Portia’s shoulder, seemed to turn instantly cool and even slightly clammy.

“You giving your baby away?” she said in a whisper.

Portia, in the grip of a contraction, with no breath to spare, only nodded.

“Why you wanna do that?” said the nurse. “It’s your baby.”

Astoundingly, no one in the room seemed to react to this. Perhaps they couldn’t hear it. Perhaps, thought Portia, it had not
actually been said aloud.

“I have to,” she said, or possibly said.

“’Kay,” said Dr. B. “This is it.”

A hand—that same hand?—patted her shoulder.

“I
have
to,” she possibly said again, but louder this time. She had to say it louder, over the din of the pain.

“You gonna see your baby now,” the nurse said matter-of-factly, and Portia waved her hand to say no, she didn’t want to see
the baby. Nobody had said anything about having to see the baby. Wasn’t that optional? They couldn’t make her, she thought,
and shut her eyes, idiotically, like a five-year-old.

But she could hear it, crying even louder than she was crying, bitter wailing that ricocheted against the bones and the walls
and the tiles. Portia pressed her hands against her ears. “Little boy,” said the most deafening voice in the world. The physical
pain was suddenly gone, lifted from her like a sodden tablecloth, and now there was only the other thing: the tearing, searing
agony that had irreversibly replaced it.

I don’t want to, thought Portia. She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, hands over ears. “Please,” she told the nurse, whose
hand had left her shoulder, giving way to a blast of frigid air.

They had taken him to the far corner of the room, where three nurses who had come from nowhere attended him, rubbing, cutting,
wrapping, lifting. The soreness was her legs, coming together. I don’t want to, she thought again.

“Would you like to hold your baby?” said a man, and it took Portia too long to realize that this was Dr. B., who could say
other things aside from “’kay” after all, and that he was standing close, just past the hands covering her ears, and already
holding the baby, who was also, as a result, close. Very close. She shook her head, bereft and also enraged, because hadn’t
she already said no? Hadn’t she said no? Had she said no?

“I don’t want to,” Portia said to the insides of her eyelids and the insides of her hands, because if they took him now, before
she truly looked and truly heard him, then she could still retain this delicate skein of not knowing. It was possible. People
did it. They did it for things even worse than this, far worse than this: affairs and diseases and men who fell out of love.
She remembered, quite suddenly, the man her mother had married, who had died a long and terrifying death from a disease no
one understood. The Chilean musician who might have been her father but wasn’t, she thought, curling up tight on the hospital
bed, kicking away the nurse at the foot of the bed who was trying to clean her and dry her. He had died childless in a hospital
bed like this one, surrounded by his friends and lovers, half of whom would die soon after of the same baffling thing. His
name had been Renaldo. Portia and Susannah had visited during his illness, Portia just old enough to recoil from the sores
in his mouth, the furious dark patches on his arms, legs, and chest. He was a very sick man, but not a mournful man. He had
swung her hand from his hospital bed. He had told her: “I wake up every morning and pretend I’m not dying.”

He could do it, and he was covered with stigmata—the world knew what he refused to acknowledge. Perhaps there was a life in
that, she thought. Perhaps it will be possible to wake up every morning and pretend there was never a baby.
I’ve never been here. I’m not here now. I never even opened my eyes
.

“’Kay,” the man said softly. He took a step back and turned to carry the baby away. She took her hands away from her ears,
and white noise came pouring in. She opened her eyes and saw white light. Of course she did not intend to look after him as
he left the room. She was so close to escaping, sight unseen, but some rigid claw turned her head and held her there, insisting
that she witness this tiny shock of the new: protruding from the striped hospital blanket, a head of darkest hair and a nose
momentarily flattened by birth. That hair took hold of something inside her and wrung it wildly. Portia tried to sit up and
made a sound she couldn’t really decipher. They had all finished with her. There was no one left in the room, even to vaguely
pat her shoulder, even to disapprove.

It was just—she would later think—that she had not been expecting what she saw. Tom’s hair was blond, like his parents’ and
brother’s hair. Her own hair was the same as Susannah’s: dark brown, stubbornly wavy. The meaning of this would not be immediately
clear, but in the years that followed—years and months and weeks and days—she would come to understand, and with devastating
impact, just what it signified. The black-haired child they took away was not only a child, but one of the very few people
in the world she knew for a fact was related to her. And the only chance she would ever have to see her father’s face.

DECISIONS

For as long as I can remember, my most important goal has been to make my way to a great university, where I could spread
my academic wings and engage in intellectual exchanges with my peers. I have been thinking about this, dreaming about this
and, yes, also worrying about this since I first discovered what the acronym SAT stood for. Now, all these years later, I
look at what I’ve accomplished and discover, to my great concern, that I am only one of thousands just like me, ambitious
and well-prepared for college, but not particularly outstanding in the context of your applicant pool. Of course, I wish that
I had written a novel or won a Grammy or modeled for Vogue, but to be totally honest, I just don’t understand the necessity
of completing or even beginning my life’s work by the age of seventeen. And the fact is, I was really busy with Honors Calculus.

F
or the first time in weeks (and thanks to John), there was heat in the house, but Portia still could not seem to get warm.
She lay beneath all available blankets, quilts, the duvet from her own bed and the one from the guest bed, clenched like a
fist and wild for relief. She was discovering, first, that she had somehow known this would happen, that the baby she had
once refused to see would one day materialize before her and force her to look at him. And also that the act of excising those
nine months from her memory, and the life she had after all saved by carrying to life, and the phantom child growing without
her in some unknown place with some unknown woman pretending to be her and some unknown man pretending to be Tom, was a fearful,
constant presence. It was the rasping monster resurrected by the monkey’s paw, drawing closer and closer to home. It was the
silent corpse of Eurydice, always a half step behind every step she had taken since Lawrence, Massachusetts. She did not remember
ever actually deciding to tell no one, but she had never told, never even considered telling. Instead, she had filled the
place her son might have occupied with shame. Shame: like poured cement, assuming exactly the dimensions of the missing child.

But shame about what, exactly? Portia refused, then as now, to feel disgrace at having become pregnant at the age of twenty.
She declined to apologize for not choosing to terminate, bizarrely old-fashioned as that was. Even now, she wasn’t completely
sure why she had done it. She hadn’t, after all, been shunned by her family, thrown out of school, church, community, dumped
in one of those terrible places for bad girls to be warehoused until she could produce an infant for some superior woman to
raise. Her mother would have embraced her, certainly would have enabled her to continue school. And Dartmouth, despite its
macho bluster, would not have blinked an eye—or not much of an eye—at a single mom finishing up her degree, commuting to campus
from Hartland.

But she had never thought of keeping him, and the shame of that had become the body within her body. She was suffused with
shame, drenched with it, riddled with it like something metastasized. Her bones kept it erect and her muscles made it move
and her skin contained it, and everything she had ever felt or thought or done since that morning seventeen years before,
when the baby had left her body and the room and—she believed—her life, had been felt in shame, thought in shame, and done
in shame.

Now it felt as if that shame were leaking from every pore of her, leaking and leaking as the first day passed, and then the
next, and then the next. The bed was soaked with it, and the blankets and duvets made a damp tent to huddle beneath. It was,
she would later think, a kind of an afterbirth, seventeen years in the making, and she wondered how long this was going to
take, how long until, finally, she was dry and done. Her body claimed not to understand the logic of this. There was, it seemed
to her, no end to the backlog of weeping.

It had never occurred to her to tell Tom. Not senior year, when she’d had to turn away her face at the sight of him. Not when
she read about his marriage to the very Winky or Stinky (
all right, all right,
in fact Binty, née Elizabeth) Caldwell Hemming, who had waltzed away with him that day in Paris, or the births of his other
children in the alumni magazine. She knew this was wrong. She knew that he had the right to know there was a child, to be
a father if he chose it, not that she believed for a minute that he would actually have chosen it. But it was still wrong,
even increasingly wrong, she supposed, after he’d had other children and perhaps understood the enormity of what had been
kept from him. He didn’t deserve that baby, was what she told herself, not after the way he had left her, not after failing
to know—magically, she supposed—that they had conceived a child. Coming and leaving, impervious and nonchalant, where she,
at least, had endured the variant pains of carrying the baby and giving birth to the baby and hardening herself against the
baby, an effort that had now lasted for many years and blasted every other part of her life out of its way, while he had married
and made a family and gone on to lead the life he was always going to lead. How must he remember her? The exotic Jewish girl
who had his mother so riled up, who seemed to understand that it couldn’t be a lasting thing, a
real
thing, they were too differently wired, and who had become, of all things, a Dartmouth admissions officer—I mean, who could
have seen that one coming?