Chapter 10
Holland
The form for Lina’s summer camp is an absolute nightmare. It asks for signatures, a photocopy of her insurance card, and the date of her last pediatrician checkup.
I let it ring a couple more times, less to think about what I want to say to her than to decide whether I’m going to answer. My daughter’s in the shower; from here I can hear her singing something I don’t know. In a little while I’ll face a bathroom half-flooded with water and towels on the floor.
“Hi, Holland,” she says.
She talks for almost a minute without my saying anything, and right away I realize she’s got it all rehearsed. I don’t see it in the words she chooses, more in the order of the arguments, in how she links one idea to the next without leaving a gap where I can jump in and protest.
She feeds me a bunch of nonsense about how she’s made mistakes and she knows it, but she’s had time to reflect.
She swears she wants to be the mother Lina deserves, this time for real.
And Grant supports her, because he always wanted kids, and they have a house with a yard and a pool and a very good school ten minutes away.
Where was that wish to be a good mother four years ago?
“She’d live in a traditional family and she wouldn’t go without anything.
She could spend a month every summer at your place, no problem,” she adds, like she’s doing me a favor.
“No offense, but I worry about the environment, I’ve heard she’s being coached now by a very troublesome Brazilian player.
Who puts someone like that with kids? Grant says they already did the same thing last year with another one, some Iris Vance.
Apparently they do it as community service or something, but nobody stopped to think about the bad example they set for those girls.
I don’t know if that’s what a seven-year-old needs.
As a mother, I have to ask myself,” she finishes, almost without stopping to breathe.
Hearing her talk about Natalia that way turns my stomach.
“Lina is perfectly fine,” I cut in, maybe a lot sharper than I meant to.
“Look, I have to hang up now, I’m making dinner,” I lie.
“If you want to talk about visits, custody, and all that crap, talk to my lawyer. You had your chance and you decided to leave your daughter high and dry; I don’t know what all this wanting to be a good mother is about now. ”
I hang up before she can answer and press the phone to my chest, with the summer camp form half finished, while inside the house my daughter sings a song I don’t know.
***
David Moreno, my new lawyer, calls me back Wednesday morning, between two classes, with the high school yard as background noise.
Tessa recommended him; she seems to know everyone worth knowing.
I jot down what he tells me on the back of a test I’m putting together, because it’s the only thing I have on hand.
“The good news is that her case is weak,” he assures me. “She left the family home, she didn’t ask for visits for four years, there isn’t a single change in the kid that would justify modifying custody. Her current husband is a very well-known lawyer, but to me, this case doesn’t hold up.”
“And the bad news?” I press, though I don’t know if I want to hear the answer.
“The bad news is that if it goes to trial, you never know how the thing will end. I’m telling you from experience,” he admits with a sigh.
“Well, great,” I murmur. “So what do we do?”
“We fill your story with what you have and she doesn’t, which is the kid’s real life.
Not houses with yards and pools, or private schools; a happy life,” he says, and I hear him turning pages.
“I want letters. Statements from the families in the program you coach, from Lina’s teachers, from the pediatrician, from anyone who knows her and can say something nice, with details that show what kind of mother you are. ”
While he talks, I make a mental note of the families on the soccer team I coach, forty girls, some of them sisters, of the teachers and the pediatrician. Maybe Tessa.
“And there’s a second reason for those letters,” the lawyer adds, and by his tone I can tell he’s smiling.
“Your youth program is going through a delicate moment image-wise. Those same letters help the club prove the pilot works. Two birds with one stone, and Drummond would be very happy about that. I don’t have to remind you she’s someone who can pull a lot of strings. ”
I don’t get what he means until Thursday’s practice.
When I get to the field half an hour early, like always, there’s already a group of moms in the bleachers. And today they’re not looking at their phones, today they’re looking at me.
Naia’s dad comes over with a determined stride.
“Holland, you got a minute?” A minute, out of this man’s mouth, is never a minute, but I nod anyway.
“See, some of us parents are a little uneasy. We don’t think it’s best for the girls to have someone here with a suspension hanging over her.
We’re talking about an assault on a reporter, something that says that player can be very difficult, even aggressive, you know what I mean. ”
Behind him, two moms nod. And I know, without anyone telling me, that this doesn’t stay in the bleachers, that from here it goes up to the coordinator and from the coordinator to management, and that in some air-conditioned office, Alex Drummond is not going to be pleased.
“Bernard, have you seen your daughter these last few weeks?” I ask, raising my eyebrows while his eyes go wide, not understanding a thing.
“Excuse me?”
“Naia wouldn’t even open her mouth when she got here.
Now she laughs with the others, she’s made friends, she even asked Natalia to teach her a stepover.
Yes, that player you say is difficult. The club’s management put Natalia here in a pilot program because they think she can help the girls, but if it were up to me, she’d stay helping forever. ”
Bernard opens his mouth, then closes it, says it was only a suggestion, and heads back up to the bleachers with the other two moms.
Natalia has heard the whole thing from the sideline, a ball stopped under her cleat, and while the girls warm up, she plants herself next to me.
“Hey. If this makes things complicated for you, I can talk to Drummond and ask to be moved to another group. Or leave the program. It’s fine, I don’t want to cause problems, really,” she assures me.
“No, I want you to stay,” I answer without hesitation.
“Holland…”
“This isn’t just about teaching the girls to play soccer, it’s also about preparing them for life, and I want them to learn that someone who matters to them doesn’t run when things get ugly.
I want them to know people will fight for them.
My daughter already went through that with my ex and I’m not willing to let it happen again. You’re staying.”
That night she has dinner at my place, and for the first time we don’t talk about her leaving before Lina wakes up the next day. I don’t mind my daughter seeing that we’ve spent the night together.
While we eat, Lina gives us a blow-by-blow of a fight in the schoolyard she had nothing to do with, and when she finally falls asleep, we stay in the kitchen drinking a glass of wine.
I tell her about Megan, that she called me and wants primary custody of the kid, even though my lawyer thinks they don’t have much chance of getting it.
“What hurts most is that she decided all on her own that she wants Lina again, in her house, in her yard and her damn pool. Without consulting anyone. She wants to decide my daughter’s life without me.”
Natalia just listens.
“Look, I don’t know if this thing of ours will go anywhere, but what has to be clear is that anything affecting Lina doesn’t get decided alone.
Not you, not me, not anyone. It gets decided between the two of us, even if it’s something silly, even if it’s hypothetical.
I need that to be clear from the start.”
“Done,” she says without thinking twice, nodding several times and reaching her hand out to me.