“Early 1980s? Might have been slightly better. Not much,” Carol said. “Hell of a place to be a pregnant teenager on your own, that’s for sure. Then again, just being a teenage girl and pregnant is its own kind of hell.”
“No kidding,” Beth agreed. She tried to picture a young Lynne with her sketch pad and pastels, sitting Indian-style on the hill overlooking the steel mill, her red hair tied up in some crazy paisley bandana as she coaxed beauty from this bleak landscape. Her pregnant belly out to there.
Would they have been friends if they knew each other then? It was hard to imagine. Beth had been such a Goody Two-shoes, graduating at the top of her class, attending her mother’s proper women-only alma mater. She never even made out with a boy until freshman year. She’d gotten drunk on punch at an Amherst mixer (and puked into the bushes a half hour later). And yet, only a few states away, Lynne was pregnant by age eighteen, a runaway rebel.
No, Beth thought, chagrined by her own snobbery. She probably would have had nothing to do with her.
“Where do I go now?” Mary Kay asked when they paused at a traffic light.
“Take the next left.” Beth followed the GPS on Carol’s iPhone as they drove straight up and straight down roller-coaster roads through Mahoken’s working-class neighborhoods. “Then another right.”
Mary Kay clutched her rumbling gut, slightly carsick. “Whoever designed this traffic system must have been on crack.”
“Not crack,” Beth said. “Limited budgets. OK, so are we square on who’s going to do the talking? Because it’s not going to be me.”
“I will.” Carol raised her hand. “I am the lawyer, after all. Delivering bad news is my bread and butter.”
“How do you think she’ll take it?” Beth pointed left down another street of brick row houses. “Three strangers showing up on her doorstep with news that her niece died of cancer. . .”
“Angry. Sad. Confused. Whatever the case, I’m sure she’ll be extremely upset.” Mary Kay took another right, her stomach lurching.
“Here we are.” Beth pointed to a house across the street. “It’s that one with the Santa Claus.”
Mary Kay pulled over, stepped on the emergency brake, and studied Aunt Therese’s row house. Like its neighbors, it was built of brick with a concrete front porch covered in a fading green outdoor carpet. Two summer lawn chairs, their seats fraying, faced the street. Santa Claus graced the glass storm door, rosy-cheeked and merry, a contrast to the faded Halloween decorations one unit over.
“Guess there’s not much to look forward to around here, huh?” Beth asked. “If you’re putting up Santa before Thanksgiving.”
They sat there for a while refreshing their makeup and fixing their hair, removing every tiny piece of lint from their suits until they realized they were stalling. Finally they got out, took a deep collective breath, and crossed the street.
A TV screen flickered through a part in the lace curtains. Mary Kay straightened the collar of the white shirt peeking out from Beth’s wool coat. “We look like decked-out Jehovah’s Witnesses.” She checked Carol who, as always, was dressed impeccably.
“Either that, or we’re flight attendants on the lam,” Carol said, ringing the doorbell twice.
It opened on a chain. A small pink nose, the bridge of blue glasses, and a wisp of gray hair appeared in the crack. “If you’re here for my soul, I ain’t interested. And Avon called last week.”
The woman started to shut the door when Carol said, “Excuse me, Therese?” She repositioned herself in the doorway. “We’re friends of your niece, Lynne. . ..”
“What? Wait, hold on. Hold on.” Therese seemed to be fiddling with her hearing aid. “Did you say Lynne?”
“We’re her friends from Connecticut, and she asked that we stop by to meet you, ma’am.”
Therese said nothing. There was only the sound of her heavy breathing and the crackling of the television. “I don’t know . . .,” she murmured, hesitating, stepping back from the door.
“She’s frightened,” Carol whispered. “You guys have any bright ideas?”
Beth snapped open her purse and produced a photo of Lynne and two older women grouped together on that very same porch. Mary Kay was astonished—where the heck did Beth get that? “Here. Lynne gave this to me,” she said, sliding it through the opening.
Therese examined the photo, her hands shaking and palsied. She returned the photo to Beth, closed the door, and slipped off the chain. When she opened it again, they could see Therese was short, squat, gray-haired, and wearing a floral muumuu. “I miss Lynne,” she said. “How is she?”
Dear lord
, Mary Kay thought.
Give me strength.
“May we come inside?” Carol asked.
Therese directed them to a small living room with fern-patterned wallpaper, a brown couch covered in a crocheted blanket, a coffee table littered with magazines, and a padded rocker into which she settled herself comfortably. There was a disproportionately large flat-screen TV on mute showing an infomercial for some sort of exercise machine.
“For the love of God,” Beth murmured to Mary Kay, “give Lynne some dignity and turn that thing off.”
Mary Kay reached for the TV, but Therese made a clucking noise to back off. “I was just thinking of Lynne the other day,” she said.
Carol perched at the edge of the couch.
“It was the strangest thing. I happened to be going through the Halloween decorations and I came across a scarecrow she made when she was staying here. I swear I’ve had that box for years and I’ve never seen it before.” Therese rocked slightly. “She was always doing arts and crafts. I bought her a box of professional pencils and a sketch pad once. Had to go all the way to Allentown to get them. I hope she’s still drawing.”
“She’s an art teacher,” Beth said in a hushed tone, her voice choking up.
“Oh, I can see that. She used to run an after-school art class for the children next door. They’re all grown now. . .. But where is she?” Therese swiveled to check the door.
“She’s not here,” Carol said, extending her hand to touch Therese’s knee and then reconsidering. “That’s why we’ve come.”
“That’s too bad. I’d love to see her again. I don’t know if she told you, but we grew rather close the two of us. She was such a frightened young thing when she got here. Eunice was too hard on the child, if you ask me. Like I told my sister, we all make mistakes and deep down Lynne was a good girl. She just needed loving.”
“Yes,” Carol said, searching for an opening and finding it difficult and strange the way Therese wouldn’t look them in the eye. “The thing is, the reason why we’re here, Therese, is that your niece has been ill for quite some time with cancer.”
Therese went silent and kept her attention on the muted television for what felt like an eternity.
“Therese?” Beth whispered.
Therese scowled, the fat below her mouth molding into deep rivulets. “She called me, you know, around last Christmas,” she said. “I had a feeling something bad had happened to her. When I found that scarecrow, it was like a premonition.”
Beth leaned against the window and folded her arms. “Near the beginning of December?”
“That’s right. It might have been the anniversary of the . . .” Therese stopped and cleared her throat. “Anyway, I picked up the phone and a woman said, ‘Aunt Therese?’ She was hoarse, like she might have had a cold. I wasn’t sure. But since I have no other nieces, I said, ‘Lynne, is that you?’ She said, ‘I just want you to know I’m OK and I want to say thanks and that no matter what happens, I love you. Merry Christmas.’ And she hung up.” Therese rocked, slowly. “I sat by the phone all night, hoping it would ring again but it never did. Finally, when the sun came up, I went to bed.”
Alone, Carol thought. On Christmas.
Mary Kay said, “Sounds like something Lynne would do.”
“We had a bond.” Therese leaned over and pulled out a limp handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. “So, you’re here to tell me she’s gone, is that it?”
Carol nodded, wishing there were some way to ease this woman’s loneliness. “I’m so sorry.”
“I assume there’s going to be a funeral. I’d like to go to that, if you don’t mind.”
Beth winced. “I’m afraid the funeral was yesterday.”
Therese quit rocking. “Yesterday?”
This, they hadn’t anticipated. “We would have called you, except we didn’t find out you existed until we were cleaning out Lynne’s things,” Mary Kay said, realizing as soon as the words left her mouth that she’d only made matters worse.
“You mean Lynne never spoke about me?” Therese asked, distressed. “After all I did for her, taking her in when no one else would? I was there when she . . . She held my hand all through it.”
For some reason, Therese would not talk about the baby. Either she was protecting Lynne’s reputation, even now, even after Lynne had run away, or she was ashamed.
Carol scratched a spot behind her ear, wondering if it was possible to feel any more awkward. “That doesn’t mean Lynne didn’t love you. Remember her Christmas phone call?”
“We didn’t know her mother was alive, either,” Beth offered.
Therese’s eyes grew wide in shock and she picked up the remote, punching the off button. “So Eunice didn’t go to the funeral either?”
Carol sighed, her shoulders suddenly aching as if they’d been hauling burdens all morning. “No. Eunice doesn’t know about Lynne.”
“You people show up and tell me my niece is dead. You tell me her mother don’t know. That the funeral’s over. That everyone
forgot
about us, her family.”
Her
family
, Beth wanted to clarify, retraining herself, was Sean and the boys. Her
family
would not have disowned her or forced her to give up her own baby.
“As soon as we learned about you and Eunice, we got on the road to tell you in person,” Carol said. “Since you’re closest, we stopped at your house first. Tomorrow, we hope to contact Lynne’s mother. We didn’t want to tell her over the phone, not after all these years.”
“It was her daughter’s funeral, for heaven’s sake. What did people think when Lynne’s own mother didn’t bother to show for her own daughter’s funeral?” Therese looked to each of them. “It’s a scandal.”
“
Scandal?
It was no scandal. People in Marshfield aren’t like that,” Beth asserted defensively. “The only scandal as far as I can tell is that Lynne’s mother shipped her across the state to live with you and birth a baby that she wasn’t allowed to hold. That’s a scandal.”
Carol and Mary Kay went bug-eyed.
“So that’s why you came.” Therese’s powdery pink complexion turned almost purple. “You’re here nosing around about that baby.”
“We’re not nosing around,” Beth said. “It’s Lynne’s baby. She asked us to find her. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
“It was your niece’s dying wish,” Mary Kay said gently. “She was searching for Julia before she died and never found her. In the letter, she suggested you might be able to help, that you might remember the name of the doctor or lawyer involved.”
Therese resumed her rocking, chewing her lower lip. “She should have come to me on her own.”
“I agree,” Carol said, in an effort to show Therese that they were on her side. “I’m sure she would have come to you if she could.”
Beth said, “She was awfully weak. And she was worried what would happen if her husband and sons found out about the baby, about you. They have no idea. Still.”
This caught Therese’s attention. “So she’s married?”
“To a man named Sean,” Beth said, sitting on the coffee table. “They had twin boys, Kyle and Kevin, now in college.”
“And they don’t know about me or the baby.”
Mary Kay said, “They don’t even know about Lynne’s mother. The boys think their grandmother died when Lynne was a teenager. They’d already been through so much with her sickness that Lynne thought it would have been too hard on Sean and the boys to tell them the truth.”
Therese rocked in her chair, shaking her head every once in a while as if she were carrying on a conversation in her head. The room was warm and dusty and cluttered with antiques and junk from assorted yard sales, porcelain figures of dogs and a shepherdess looking for sheep long lost. Beth felt like she was slowly suffocating.
“Well.” Therese pulled herself out of the rocker with a grunt. “I don’t remember much except what I got here.” She waddled over to a dresser by the stairs, bent down to pull out a lower drawer, and rifled through loose papers. “Hmph. I thought I saved it, but I guess I didn’t.”
“Saved what?” Carol asked, hoping for a document, something official that could get the ball rolling.
“The bill from the hospital. I never paid it ’cause the doctor waived his fee, but it had his name. I thought Lynne might come around looking for it someday and I put it aside in my important files.”
“Can you possibly remember?” Carol pressed.
“I can’t remember exactly, but I think it started with a D. Whatever his name was, I didn’t like the way he treated Lynne. She’d complain about this or that or ask what was going to happen to her baby and he’d pat her on her head and tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. Her rubbed me wrong.”
“Did you do anything about it?” Mary Kay asked, quickly adding, “Not that it was your responsibility.”
“I brought it up with Eunice, but she said I should mind my own business, that he came highly recommended by her doctor out in Calais. My sister’s the type that when she takes control, the rest of us say ‘yes ma’am’. That’s what happens when you’re the oldest.”
Don’t I know it,
Beth thought, feeling some sympathy for what Therese went through, especially in light of her own struggles with Maddy. “I have an older sister like that who thinks she knows best. She means well, though.”
“They often do.” Therese nodded but made no move to return to her chair and Carol got the distinct impression that their visit had come to an end.