Wonder

Years ago, I gave up a baby for adoption. It was August 1997, and I was seventeen. The baby, a girl, was less than an hour old when she was taken from the hospital room. I don’t remember saying goodbye. I don’t remember saying, when I was pregnant with her, that I just wanted her out of my body—though my best friend from high school later reminded me that I often did say that. I don’t remember crying out when I was in labor that I would do anything if she’d hurry up—that I wouldn’t abandon her, that I’d take care of her for the rest of my life.

A few hours afterward, one of the nurses asked me about it. She was Guinean, and spoke in a singsong tone, which made my desperate and forgotten promise sound like a story she’d heard about someone else. My room in the hospital was on a different floor, a quiet one, so that I could recover away from the pleading cries of newborns and the earnest questions of new parents. The nurse said, “You know, it’s not too late. She will always be your baby. Something could be arranged.” She said this as she was adjusting my catheter, so her head was eye level with my vagina, which I knew must be bruised and swollen, though I couldn’t feel a thing yet. I’d had a C-section after thirty hours of labor, and was still numb from the epidural.

I stared at the tiles on the ceiling. It embarrassed me that the nurse was seeing me in this state, though I knew that it was her job. When I didn’t reply, she changed the subject. She began to repeat what I’d already heard—that a shift change was happening, and other nurses would be coming in overnight to take my blood pressure and temperature, and that in the morning they’d take off my leg compresses. Maybe she felt she’d overstepped a boundary, or maybe she’d simply needed to tell me what I’d said to fulfill a sense of purpose, and she was satisfied with having done just that.

~

In the weeks after I gave birth, each morning begged the question: Now what. I had dropped out of my private high school, and that fall I began working frantically to get my GED. Every night I ate dinner with my parents, whose worry over me had manifested in tense silence. They were both lawyers, and they didn’t know how to argue their way out of this one. I cried often before I went to sleep, though I wasn’t thinking much about the baby. I was thinking about how I’d doomed myself by dropping out of school, and about how anxious I was to go to college, to get away.

The father of the baby was already at college—he was a year older—and this I found especially agitating. He left town two weeks before the baby was due. We had decided, supposedly together, that he shouldn’t disrupt the beginning of his freshman year to attend the birth of a child we were giving up anyway. He called me once after I returned home from the hospital—I got the sense his mother put him up to it—and sent me two letters in the mail that fall. My C-section scar, which looked like a demonic smile hovering above my pubic hair, was still tender and healing, and walking up stairs presented a challenge. I spent a good deal of time on the living room couch, stewing over the first letter. He’d written about a party where he’d done a keg stand for over forty seconds, which was basically, beyond a doubt, an all-time record, according to a sophomore in the fraternity he wanted to rush. He was pretty sure he’d get into that fraternity, but you know, he said, you could never be too sure about anything.

When I finished—I read all the way to the end, to where he’d signed “Your friend, Ben”—I crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it into a planter in the corner of the living room. A few minutes later, I limped over to get it, smoothed the pages, and rearranged them in the envelope.

The second letter arrived three weeks later. I read it in my bedroom, where I was spending more and more time, either studying or pretending to study. Despite myself, a flutter of excitement coursed through me when I saw his name and return address on the envelope. I opened it with some degree of ceremony: I brushed my teeth and hair for the first time that day, so that I could feel less disheveled when I heard his voice in my head.

He said he’d met a girl, at yet another keg party. This time he’d spent the entire night dancing with the girl. Her name was Cindy. They had chemistry. They had basically been hooking up every night since then. He wanted me to know, because he thought it was the right thing to tell me, and he hoped we’d always be friends, and you shouldn’t lie to your friends.

I called my friend Lana. She was who I called before and during my pregnancy whenever I needed to vent and scheme. Together, we had egged the houses of our enemies, set off their parents’ car alarms in the middle of the night, and once, walked around her neighborhood with a universal remote control, crouching below windows and changing the channels on the televisions of unsuspecting and bewildered neighbors. Lana’s highest ambition in high school was to wreak havoc on the world around her. I could hear her ferocity crackling over the phone that night as I told her how badly I’d been wronged.

~

My parents had given up asking me where I was going years before, which is perhaps, in hindsight, partly to blame for me winding up pregnant at seventeen. When Lana picked me up that morning, they were at work, so I slapped a note on the kitchen counter. “Going to Bloomington with Lana to visit her brother. Be home tomorrow.”

Lana drove—she always did. She loved to fly down the highway at eighty and ninety miles an hour, and slam on the brakes at the last minute whenever she approached traffic. Usually, she blasted hip-hop. Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. were her favorites, and she loved that they had been rivals. But we hadn’t talked—really talked—since the day before I’d gone to the hospital, and I was touched when I got into her car and she turned off the CD player.

As soon as we were on the highway she said, “Do you want to talk about it, or not.”

“What?” I said.

“You know,” she said. “Everything. What was it like? And are you doing okay?”

Now that I’m older and I’ve heard the labor stories of countless friends, I know that it’s not uncommon to share every last detail, from where the water broke to what the ride to the hospital was like, and everything beyond. The first glimpse of a crowning head. The first cry, like no other living thing you’ve ever heard. The smell of meconium, the smell of the baby powder diapers hospitals use, the smell of a newborn scalp. The unrelenting ache the first time you hold your child. The overwhelming instinct to protect, to love.

But I told Lana none of the details of labor, and nothing about the baby. The trajectory of our friendship had been altered from the moment I peed on a pregnancy test in a mall bathroom while she waited outside the stall. And yet, I fought against the split in our path. So instead I told her how my mother had shut herself in her bedroom for two days after I returned from the hospital, and how I could hear her crying throughout the day—though, to her credit, she had tried to muffle the sound with a Puccini opera. I told her how bad it sucked to have a C-section, and how I worried that my vagina would never be the same again.

“Ew, gross, Jane!” she said. Then she cupped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. That’s not gross. I would be worried about that too. I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, the baby came out of your stomach, so how bad can it be?”

Pretty bad, I assured her. I’d had thirty hours of labor before the surgery. The baby’s arm was twisted over her head while I pushed for five of those hours. And, I added, my abs would never be the same. She gasped. Her horror thrilled me, and validated the damage done to my body.

“That fucker,” she said. “We’re gonna get him.”

~

I’d been to Bloomington once before, when Ben was getting ready to apply to the university. One of its selling points was that it was only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from St. Louis—we’d be able to see each other on the weekends whenever we wanted. And though it was a good school, you didn’t have to be a genius to get in. I had better grades than he did, but still, he’d most likely be accepted and the following fall I could join him. We walked through the quad hand in hand, his parents far behind us, out of earshot. “The things I’ll do to you in college,” he said. Of course, we were already doing those things. But my heart did leaps and spins inside my chest. I pulled my body closer to his and squeezed his hand.

Lana and I had made good time. She used a payphone in town to call her brother—she’d neglected to inform him of our last-minute visit. While she waited for one of his roommates to track him down, I stood on the sidewalk next to her, examining my reflection in the mirror of a shop window. It was difficult to assess my body, since it hadn’t really been my body for months and months. I wasn’t exactly fat—I’d always been skinny, and multiple doctors had assured me that in time, I’d go back to my normal size—but I didn’t look like myself. I turned away and looked at Lana. She was wearing jean shorts that were too short for the brisk fall weather, and she had tied two red bandanas together to make a belt. Somehow, she could pull off anything she wore. Her hair was a pile of red-brown curls, and I knew it had probably been days since she washed it—the dirtier it was, the better it looked.

She hung up the phone and said, “That nerd. He’s in class. Let’s get lunch.”

Our intention had been to make a plan on our drive up, but after my incomplete tell-all, we spent the second half of it blasting “Me Against the World” and singing the lyrics we knew at the top of our lungs. I’d been surprised at how normal I felt, but then remembered that nothing was normal about my life anymore.

We found an empty diner, ordered lunch, and began to scheme. Lana had a fake ID, so we sipped a beer together, the first I’d had in nearly a year. She asked me what I’d brought with me in my backpack, and I started to unload its contents. Both the letters, plus love letters Ben had written me before I’d found out I was pregnant. His family’s photo Christmas card, into which he’d drawn a stick-figure version of me with a silver Sharpie. The first ultrasound photo of the baby, from a visit he’d come along for. The second ultrasound photo of the baby, from a visit he’d skipped. The third ultrasound photo of the baby, her skeletal knees bent in the black swirl of my womb, her skull and face fully formed, her thumb in her mouth. At that point, we’d broken up. My mom had accompanied me, but I asked her to remain in the waiting room.

I’d also brought a card that Ben’s mother had written to me. I’d never told him about it—not out of any courtesy to him or to his mother, but because the very sight of it brought heat to my face. In it, she praised my decision to keep the baby. “You will not regret this,” she wrote, “and God will take pity on you and on this child and will show you both the way, even as you go your separate ways.” She had signed it, “Blessings.”

Lana snatched the card, and as she read it, her nose scrunched up and her eyes narrowed in disgust. “That bible-thumping, Jesus-loving, hypocritical bitch,” she said, throwing the card on the table. Then: “I know what we’ve got to do.”

“Just don’t embarrass me.”

“We’re going to embarrass him, not you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“You think you can find Cindy?”

“I don’t know that I want to,” I said. Lana stopped chewing her burger and gave me a hard look across the table. “But yeah, I mean, I’m sure if we can figure out where he is, we’ll find her.”

“We’re going to have to be stealth,” she said. “You ready, soldier?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be. Give me my marching orders.”

“I love it,” she said. “You’re back. I’ve got to tell you—I’ve missed you.”

~

The afternoon I found out I was pregnant, Lana and I sat in the mall food court for three hours, until we’d seen the beginning and end of the dinner rush. It took me an hour to stop shaking. We picked at a chicken lo mien with a shared pair of chopsticks, which neither of us was adept at using. I didn’t want to leave the mall. Once I left, I’d have to figure out how to tell Ben, and then my parents, and then after I told them, I’d have to figure out what to do. Lana kept saying, “You don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want to. You can just take care of it, and it’ll be like it never happened.”

There were two things that made Lana an ideal friend for me: she was fiercely loyal, and she was endlessly fun. What she lacked was genuine empathy. When she got angry on my behalf, the emotions she expressed were not for me—they were a way to channel her own rage at the world. She saw things in black and white, and she wanted me to get an abortion.

I have never questioned my decision, but as I’ve gotten older, I have wondered: why didn’t I end the pregnancy? As an adult, I have marched in the streets in support of women having the right to choose what to do with their bodies. If it had been the other way around—if Lana had been the one to get pregnant—I would have supported her choice to abort the baby. And if I hadn’t had the choice, I would have felt trapped by my circumstances.

Lana thought I went through with the pregnancy and adoption process because Ben was Christian, and his family was really, really Christian. It is hard to sort through a decision I made so many years ago, but I still don’t think that had anything to do with it. Even before I called him that night, when I was sitting at that food court table, stabbing at cold lo mien and playing with the straw from my Diet Coke, I knew I would have the baby.

Lana’s plan to get back at Ben wasn’t a good one, but I couldn’t think of anything better—and though I didn’t admit it to her, I was there because I wanted to see him. While we waited for our check at the diner, she took the card from Ben’s mom and a pen from her purse and crossed out my name with an “X” on the back of the envelope and wrote Cindy’s name above it. Then she wrote, “Just thought you should know” on the envelope flap. She took the ultrasound photos and tucked them into the card. Then she sealed the card back up and put it in the front pocket of her purse.

“Hey,” I said. “That’s mine. Give it to me.”

“All right,” she said. “But I didn’t come all this way for you to chicken out.”

“I’m going to give it to her,” I said. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give it to you to give to her.”

“I’m going to put on some eyeliner. You want some?”

“Why not,” I said, and she scooted next to me in the booth. I closed my eyes and let her apply delicate black lines to my lashes, pretending that nothing had ever come between us, that we were getting ready for a night out like any other.

~

The fraternity house was not hard to find. At seven in the evening, a loud group of boys in khaki cargo shorts and polo shirts was on the lawn, playing beer pong and blaring the Rolling Stones from a speaker leaning out an upstairs window. Ben was not there, but I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him. Lana insisted we wait around for a turn at the beer pong table, and soon enough we were playing against a ruddy-faced guy with egg-shaped shoulders and his skinny friend. They sunk every shot, and Lana and I chugged one cup after the next. I absently wondered if this was how I’d have been spending my weekends that fall, with Ben by my side at a beer pong table, had my life not collapsed all around me. I could feel that life running underneath this one like a current.

After our tremendous loss we abandoned the beer pong table and elbowed our way into the fraternity house. Lana grabbed my hand and dragged me upstairs where the music was loudest. We wandered into a room full of people dancing. The speaker kept popping. She nudged her way into the center of the room. I didn’t follow. A group made a circle around her, clapping and hooting as she shimmied down to the floor and up again. I glanced back once before turning down the hall. Her hair covered her face, and she didn’t see me go.

In the bathroom, the toilet seat was splattered with urine and red punch, and the sink was clogged with a wet mass of paper towels. Still, with the door closed behind me, it became a sanctuary. Right away I got it into my mind that I would leave the party. I had Lana’s brother’s address written on my hand. I leaned down and took a sip of water directly from the tap, and splashed a bit on my cheeks. I wiped below my eyes, where the eyeliner had smudged. Then I heard a girl outside the door. “Cindy?” She tapped three times. “Hey, Cindy, you in there?”

When I opened the door, the girl was still standing before me. She said, “Oh, sorry. I thought my friend was in there.” She had a streak of electric blue in her hair and her nose was pierced with a diamond stud too large for her face, and in a flash of meanness I measured that no one had ever been in love with her.

“Do you mean Cindy, Ben’s girlfriend?” I said.

“Yeah, have you seen them?”

I shook my head. My palms began to sweat, and I had a passing thought that somehow I’d already given myself away.

“Damn. They just got here,” she said. “Maybe they already left.” She looked around me and into the bathroom. “Excuse me. Do you mind?”

“Oh,” I said. “Go ahead. Sorry.”

I steadied myself against the wall in the hallway, then made my way down the stairs, camping out at the base. More people had arrived, and for a moment, I wondered about Lana, and then I let the thought go. We’d find each other later.

The girl from the bathroom came downstairs soon after me. I watched her wend through the crowd. She threw her arms up and hugged someone. I stood on my tiptoes to locate her and then pushed my way through bodies, the heat and sweat of strangers rubbing against me. She caught my eye and I saw her standing with a girl I knew without question must be Cindy. As I got closer, a shove from a bulky guy in a basketball jersey pushed me right into them.

“Watch it,” the girl from the bathroom yelled at him. “Fucking frat boys. Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Found her,” she said.

Cindy looked at me, then looked at her friend. She was wearing too much glittery pink lip-gloss on a mouth that pouted with cartoonish intention. Her eyes were spaced unusually far apart. They were pretty, and slightly alien. Her posture suggested confidence, like nothing bad had ever happened to her and she had never considered that her life would be anything but charmed.

“Who is this?” she said.

“You don’t know her?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Hey, do you know where Ben is?”

“I’m sorry, do we know you?” Cindy said.

I put my hand into my back pocket and fingered the edges of the folded envelope. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m Jane. I’m a friend of Ben’s from home. He told me he’d be here.”

“There he is,” she said, and she glided past me. I was left standing with her friend, who told me her name, though I wasn’t paying attention because I was watching Ben and Cindy. He leaned down to kiss her. He looked the same, though his face was somehow wider and less kind than I remembered. I was still staring at him when he saw me. He said something into her ear, practically biting her earlobe, and then he approached.

“Whoa,” he said. “What’s up? What’re you doing here?”

“I’m with Lana. We’re staying with her brother.”

“You guys came up for a visit or something?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Wow. Well. What are the chances?” He laughed and touched his hair, a nervous habit I’d nearly forgotten.

“Can we talk?” I said. “Somewhere away from here, I mean.”

I sensed his hesitance, but I locked eyes with him and he said, “Uh, sure.” He kissed Cindy before we left, a prolonged kiss that I knew was meant to tell her that I wasn’t a threat. I followed him out to the lawn, where the duo at the beer pong table was still taking shots. The skinny one yelled at Ben, threatening lethal force if he didn’t get back soon. Ben called back, “All right, man, I’ll see you back here in ten, I’m up next with Cindy.”

It had gotten cooler, and I crossed my arms to keep warm. It was a relief to be away from the party. I thought: I used to like parties.

No words passed between us and by the time we got to the sidewalk I was self-conscious about the fact that we hadn’t hugged when we first saw each other. I kept waiting for Ben to say something, and then I remembered that this had always been a fatal strategy when we were dating, so I said, “Well, to be perfectly honest, Lana and I came up here together to try and ruin your life but I don’t really feel like doing that anymore. You seem very happy, which is great.”

“And you seem kind of bitter, which I don’t get. I thought we were cool.”

“I said it was great that you seem happy. How does that in any way convey bitterness?”

“You came up here to ruin my life?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that was the plan, and then the moment I saw you, I decided I had absolutely no interest in going through with it.”

“How did you find Cindy? How did you find me?”

“By coincidence. Well, and you told me the name of the fraternity you’re rushing. Cool guys back there. Wow.”

“All right, now you know you’re being sarcastic. I never liked it when you were mean.”

“Ha,” I said, and I couldn’t think of anything more to say.

We walked along a street lined with fraternity houses. Each one boasted tall white columns, dozens of windows, and expansive lawns. A few others were hosting parties, though none as large as the party we’d left. We passed a group of drunk freshman, inexplicably shouting the names of the continents. Three students hurried along the sidewalk with full backpacks, their eyes cast down. That would be me once I made it to college, I thought. I’d study and avoid eye contact.

“Look, I want to get back to the party before it ends, so if there’s, like, anything more you want to talk about, or something you came up here to say…”

“Do parties end early around here?” I said. “I think it’s going on nine o’clock, so you’re right, we better head back.”

“Right,” he said. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at me for the first time. When our eyes met I felt the first threat of tears. I looked away and took a step back. He got closer to me and I winced.

“Jane,” he said. “Wait a second. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Has it been really rough for you?”

“How can you ask that?” I said. My voice was harsh and accusing, but my eyes filled with tears. “Has it been rough at all for you?”

We were standing next to a tall bush, and Ben looked like he might let his whole body sink into it. He folded his arms over his chest and glanced up at a streetlight.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’s been different for me. I’ve been distracted.”

“Yeah, with Cindy, I know, you told me all about her in your letter.”

“I thought you’d want to know. I thought honesty was the best policy.”

“It was a girl,” I said. “They let me hold her. She was so tiny, and so pink, like she’d been rubbed raw. And she had a head full of dark hair. She grabbed my thumb with her tiny fist and wouldn’t let go. She wouldn’t stop screaming until they put her on my chest. Then she was quiet, staring at me, like she recognized me. She didn’t look like either of us, not really, or not yet. But I kept thinking that it didn’t matter what she looked like, she was ours, and no matter who takes care of her and raises her and loves her, she’ll always be ours.”

Though my voice was steady a tear rolled down my cheek, and then another. They seemed to be escaping from some wild and loose part of myself. Ben put his arm around me. He patted my shoulder with two heavy thumps, a gesture I had always hated—on multiple occasions I told him I found it paternalistic. But I thought: of course that’s how he comforts me in this moment. Exactly how I don’t want to be comforted.

Eventually we started walking back to the party. I supposed there wasn’t much else to say, so I stayed quiet. He didn’t have any questions, which in the past would have annoyed me, but we weren’t together anymore and I didn’t have the same reservoir of built-up resentments. I knew he was worrying about Cindy, and I was starting to worry about Lana. Before we turned to the lawn of the house, he hesitated and stopped again.

“What you were saying about her being ours,” he said. “That’s not how it works with adoption. She’ll never be ours.”

I started to get angry all over again. But before I opened my mouth to speak, I realized that what I’d heard in his voice was sadness. I wiped away another leaky tear and said something about how stupid it was that I couldn’t stop crying. Ben mumbled, “No, it seems pretty much like a normal response,” and he gave me another pat on the shoulder. I slid my hand into my pocket and pulled out the envelope with the card and the sonogram photos.

He stuffed it into his front pocket without looking at it. Perhaps, I thought, it would fall onto Cindy’s floor later that night, and she’d stumble upon the truth after all. Or perhaps she already knew—perhaps he had confided in her from the beginning.

When we went back into the party, Ben gave a half-hearted wave, but then he turned back and pulled me in for a brief and unsatisfying hug. “See you around,” he said, though we’d only run into each other twice in the coming years. I found Lana, falling down drunk and dancing and so happy to see me. She wrapped her arms around my neck and said, “Where have you been all my life?” and I never wanted her to let go.

~

A few days after I returned from Bloomington, I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan as it spun above me, when my mom knocked on my bedroom door. I sat up halfway, at once embarrassed and unapologetic for my idleness. She sat beside me and then we both sank onto the mattress, our shoulders touching ever so slightly.

“I don’t know how you can stand the clicking of that fan,” she said.

“Is that all you came in here to say?”

She took my hand in hers. “No.”

I knew she was there because she was sorry. I’d been moping around the house since I returned from Bloomington. She was sorry because she knew I hadn’t gotten what I wanted. And she was sorry that I was a mother now—a mother who would never lie on a bed with her daughter, watching the whirl of a ceiling fan while so much went unsaid.

I turned onto my side. I loved to look at my mother’s profile. She had a Roman nose and deep-set, serious eyes. The late afternoon light softened the angles of her face.

“Do you think she’ll wonder about me when she’s older?” I said. “Do you think she’ll know that I love her?” My throat had ached with the question for weeks, but instead of subsiding when I spoke it aloud, the ache quickened and rose.

I could tell my mother wanted to find the right way to respond. Her lips parted but no words came out. There was the truth, which was that there would be no way to know, unless one day, as an adult, my birth daughter sought me out and found me. And there was the practical reality, which was that I shouldn’t torture myself with such troubling and unanswerable questions.

But she was my mother, after all, and that’s not how she replied. “You gave birth to her,” she said. “She’ll always take you with her.”

She squeezed my hand and she didn’t get up to leave. We lay like that until the room darkened as the sun set and the fan’s breeze became too cool and we rose to go downstairs for dinner.