There was a time in my life that I wouldn’t have lied about something so big, but there were things that were bigger than a single lie. Your father, and this baby growing inside of me, and our whole future together. Our family.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. I looked at myself in the mirror, straight into my own eyes, and then went to meet your father in the bedroom with the pregnancy test in hand.
I told him it was a miracle and thrust the plastic stick in front of the book he was reading. I told him we were pregnant. I tried to keep my voice from quivering. I paused and then swallowed to clear the lump that had formed in my throat.
Without hesitation, your father looked up from his book and flung his arms around me.
He agreed that it was a miracle in a soft and earnest voice.
He squeezed me even tighter and then pressed his lips into my neck.
It was everything I envisioned this moment to be.
With your father’s arms around me and his voice in my ear, I was quick to let the tension of the lie dissolve. I relaxed into your father’s arms and then hugged him back. I was surprised how simple it was for everything that happened with Silas to burrow its way even further from reality. For me to rewrite the story of my family. But I did.
I could tell by the weight of your father’s body around me, the delicate way in which he kissed me, that he was so relieved, so ready, for this to be the truth, too.
And so, to me and your father and to everyone else, it was our truth.
After all these years of trying, we were having our baby. That was what we stuck to for so many years.
I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,
Mom.
* * *
And with that, Jane felt compelled to write her story.
Letter 2
Learning I was pregnant
Jane
Dear Hazel,
When the pregnancy test revealed that there was a baby inside of me, I had a moment of clarity in my life. A moment of honesty with myself. I wanted more from Silas. And with this baby, I would want even more and more and more. My wants would be exponential. After learning about you, I would keep finding my hands cradled around the bottom of my still-flat belly. I had been waiting for days to tell Silas what was inside, but I felt guilty. Guilty of wanting real, engulfing romance. Guilty of wanting to expand our love into more. Into parenthood. I thought of Torrey and Ruby. What they meant to Silas. I knew in my heart that I, that we—you and I—could never fill Silas up like they had.
I woke up one night just as Silas was making his way into our bedroom. It was four o’clock in the morning, much later than normal, and he curled his body around me. He reeked of beer and whiskey and cigarettes and someone else’s perfume. I now know that someone else was Eve’s mother.
He told me that he didn’t think we should do this anymore. He told me he was in pieces and couldn’t be put back together. He told me he wasn’t a good man and then his words trailed off into mumbles and he fell asleep.
I reached down and held my belly. Despite the heat, I felt a chill up my spine. I realized that we had exposed each other’s deepest vulnerabilities. Me wanting to be a mother. Him wanting to be alone. I knew that we had arrived at the painful but relieving place where all relationships end.
I rolled over in bed and faced Silas. He was lying on his back with his mouth open, snoring from the back of his throat. A lock of hair was plastered to his forehead, sticky from sweat and heat and probably sex.
It, of course, bothered me that he had been with another woman, but what really stung was the unequivocal knowledge that I would be raising you myself. I felt you inside me even though I had read that you were only the size of a lentil then.
I lurched over Silas and put my mouth close to his ear.
I told him I was leaving. It was the only thing I could do.
Without opening his eyes, Silas rolled onto his side and wrapped his tanned muscular arm around my hips and squeezed the flesh of my butt between his fingers.
It was hard to do it, but I peeled his fingers from my body.
And then I said that it was for good. I’m not sure he understood in his drunken, sleepy haze, but it didn’t matter much. I was leaving for me.
He opened one green eye. The other one was pressed into the pillow.
I held his gaze for only a moment, but time stretched and stretched and stretched. There was an impermeable silence between us. I had thought we would be drenched with sadness or regret. Instead we seemed to be blooming with understanding and respect. With the acknowledgment of balance and rightness and possibility and relief.
I felt a tear emerge on the precipice of my bottom eyelid. I didn’t want to cry, so I pressed my finger against it to prevent it from falling. I looked down at my finger and was happy to see that it was not as wet as I expected it to be. And then, I got up from the bed and walked out of the room without further ceremony or explanation.
If falling for Silas was the start of your life, this moment was the start of our life. From that moment on, it was you and me, baby.
I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,
Mom.
16
Jane was walking down the hallway one afternoon while the boys were napping just a few days after Hazel left, when she spotted Hazel’s school backpack slouched in the corner of her bedroom through the crack in the doorway. It felt like a violation to go into Hazel’s room when she wasn’t there, but Jane couldn’t help it. She ached for any connection to her daughter. Jane slipped furtively into the bedroom and pulled the backpack up from the floor. She held it up in front of her face as the zippers jingled at the sides. It smelled of pencil lead and spearmint gum and a sweet candy-like perfume. Precious smells of a teenage girl.
She pulled the backpack into her chest and hugged it as if it were Hazel. She pulled the straps over her shoulders and let the weight of contents of the bag tug down on her shoulders. As she embraced the backpack in her arms the notebooks and binders moved under the canvas like bones under skin. She thought of Hazel with that backpack on her own shoulders, spraying herself with that perfume, chewing that spearmint gum, scribbling notes in class. The rest of the room looked like it could belong to any girl, really. Clothes were piled in little stacks in corners, and on the carpet, and on the desk, and on the chair. Notebooks and textbooks and papers and pens and highlighters were strewn across the desk. A pile of different-flavored ChapSticks lay crisscross like pick-up sticks. There were a few posters on the wall featuring movies with actors Jane didn’t recognize.
But then, there was the sign of the daughter she knew. On the bedside table, there was a picture of herself and Hazel at the park holding eaten watermelon slices in front of their mouths to form big green watermelon rind smiles. Hazel’s two front teeth were missing but the rest were shining out from behind as she smiled. Jane remembered when this was taken, a few weeks before Hazel’s seventh birthday. Hazel was wearing a white T-shirt with a big pink dinosaur on the front and Jane was wearing a blue tie-dyed T-shirt with vibrant, swirling circles. Her hair looked careless but free in a loose braid that slung in front of her shoulder. There was so much light in both their eyes. So much youth in their cheeks. And next to that photo was a picture of Hazel at fourteen years old, holding the twins right after they were born. Griffin and Trevor were each wrapped in a little blue blanket, barely discernible. Hazel was looking up at the camera from her seat and her mouth was closed and her lips curled up to form a calmer smile. Her hair was messy in front of her face, and her shirt was drooping off one shoulder. Hazel looked simultaneously so old and so young holding the boys like that. It was the first day of Hazel’s new life.