Chapter Forty-Five
Fat, wet flakes are falling as Mary Beth hurries along the sidewalk, crunching through dead leaves.
This isn’t the first snow of the season here. That came on Columbus Day, in a storm that toppled trees that were heavy with dazzling foliage.
Autumn was always her favorite time of year back in Mulberry Bay.
Autumn in Syracuse has been miserable. Not just the weather. When you’ve flunked out of college after only one semester, you’re surrounded by students living the life you were supposed to be living, unless you move away.
Mary Beth has nowhere else to go.
She had nowhere to go on Christmas night.
It was snowing then, too, beyond the glass door at Golden Bridge.
She remembers gazing out at the stormy dark, standing there with a suitcase of her belongings someone had packed for her, and a newborn screaming in her arms. She was raw and limp from the birth, still bleeding heavily.
She didn’t have a coat. The baby was wrapped in a thin receiving blanket.
The home provided nothing else. If her decision was to raise her baby on her own, then this was the beginning. There would be no tuition money—it turned out that was conditional, a gift provided by grateful adoptive parents, as the home explained it.
They weren’t selling babies, of course. That was illegal.
She longed to march out that door and never look back.
But where would they go?
It was a crime-ridden, drug-infested industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of a city she’d only seen from her window: broken glass and garbage. That night, the graffiti-covered, boarded-up buildings seemed deserted, as if even the junkies had better places to be on Christmas night.
Mary Beth and her baby did not. If they ventured out, she was pretty sure neither of them would survive until daybreak.
It was no longer a choice. She did what any mother would do: She saved her child’s life.
When she signed the papers, she was promised that it would be an open adoption with visitation rights.
Armed with tuition money and living expenses, she arrived here in January determined to pick up the pieces and make something of herself.
She intended to become worthy of a role in her child’s life.
She had contact information for the adoptive parents in Cleveland, but she’d agreed to give them a few months to settle in before reaching out.
She took on a demanding courseload and part-time waitressing job, stashing her tips away for the future—visits, toys, Disney World . . .
Yes, someday, she’ll be able to shower her child with gifts, attention, so much love.
Someday.
But exhaustion and depression caught up with her quickly last winter.
Rundown, she caught the flu in February, and it lingered into April.
She lost her job. Failed every one of her courses.
Her college life was over before her Mulberry Bay High School classmates donned caps and gowns and received their diplomas.
If things had been different . . .
But there’s no going back.
No moving ahead either.
Mary Beth remains in limbo.
Just before she was kicked out of her dorm, she was sitting on a stool in Joey Jay’s, a dive bar. It was nowhere near campus and hardly the kind of place where students went to mingle; it was a place where you went to numb the pain. There, she met some people who became . . .
Friends is a generous word. They’re fellow lost souls.
Swept into the fold, she moved in with them, in this neighborhood that reminds her of the one she left behind in the Midwest. Her share of the rent is dirt cheap, as it should be for a shared room in a dilapidated yellow brick duplex with plywood over the broken windows.
She quickens her pace as she passes a group of men loitering outside the OTB. They eye her and look away without even an obligatory wolf whistle.
She hacked off most of her hair one night in a stoned stupor, leaving lopsided tufts.
She’s emaciated, having lost all her pregnancy weight plus an extra twenty, maybe thirty, pounds she couldn’t spare.
She doesn’t have a mirror, much less a scale.
Glimpsing her reflection in a store window, she sees a Dickens orphan, enveloped in a moth-bitten men’s coat that’s much too big.
She rounds a corner. Up ahead, she sees her destination beneath a burned-out neon Joey Jay’s sign. It’s just past the twenty-four-hour diner with the sign that reads just 24-Hour Diner, as if the owner couldn’t be bothered to give it a name.
Somewhere, church bells are clanging.
It’s Sunday.
Sunday . . .
The twenty-fifth? Yes, it must be.
Her child is exactly ten months old today.
She wonders what babies do at this age. Walking? Maybe not yet, but probably crawling, and starting to talk.
Calling another woman Mama.
Every day, Mary Beth faces pain she can’t numb with any amount of booze, with anything stronger. Her heart, her empty arms, her entire being aches for the child who might as well be lost to her forever.
How can she reach out to the adoptive parents when she’s like this? She doesn’t trust herself to speak to them without breaking down or lashing out. And even if she managed to keep her composure, she can’t visit. She can’t send anything. She has nothing to offer.
She’s gone through the last of the tip money except for a bit of loose change in her pocket.
That’s why she needs to go back to Mulberry Bay—not to stay, or even to visit. She doesn’t want to see her family. Doesn’t want them to see her. She just needs to get the doll she stashed in the cubby.
If only she had a way there and back—a real friend, someone with a car, someone who would do her a favor, no questions asked.
There’s only one person in the world who might be willing to help.
Caroline.
Mary Beth has to call when her parents are guaranteed not to be home. That means a Sunday, when they spend mornings at church and afternoons teaching Bible study.
That means today.
She ducks into Joey Jay’s. It smells of morning after: stale cigarettes, fruit-scented cleaning solution, and vomit.
A few stools are occupied by regulars—not together, not speaking, just drinking, all eyes on the small television mounted above the bar, where the Buffalo Bills are beating the Carolina Panthers.
The owner, whose name is not Joey Jay, greets her with a “Hey, M. The usual?”
That’s what they call her around here. Just M. And “the usual” is well vodka, straight up.
“No, thanks, I just need to use the phone.”
It’s in the dim recesses, between the bathrooms, one of which is perpetually out of order, and the cigarette machine, which is always working.
So is the pay phone, which receives far more incoming calls than outgoing.
This is that kind of place in that kind of neighborhood, but few dealers are doing business at this hour on a Sunday.
Mary Beth fishes the loose change from her pocket. Mostly pennies, but there’s one quarter.
She drops it into the slot and dials.
It rings once . . . twice . . .
“Hello?”
Caroline.
She’d been expecting her sister to answer yet is somehow caught off guard by the lilting sound of her voice, even more girlish and sweet than she remembers. Her voice is trapped in her throat.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Wait, don’t hang up,” she manages to say. It was her only quarter. This is her only chance.
“Who is this?”
“Car’ . . . it’s me. Mary Beth.”
There’s a gasp. “Where . . . where are you?”
“How much do you know?”
“Only that you ran away.”
“That’s what they told you? That I ran away?”
“Yes. Isn’t that—”
“No.”
“That’s why,” Caroline says softly.
“Why what?”
“Your doll—it’s in the cubby. I figured you forgot it, but . . .”
“So it’s still there? The money? And nobody knows about it?”
“It’s still there. Nobody knows. What happened, Mary Beth? Where did you go?”
“You didn’t get my letters.”
“Letters? You wrote letters?” Caroline sounds like she’s crying. “I didn’t get them. I was so scared you might be . . . But you’re alive. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“You have to promise me you won’t tell them. Do you promise?”
She hears only sniffling.
“Caroline, if you can’t promise, then I’m going to hang up, and I swear to God you’ll never hear from me again.”
“Yes! Don’t hang up! I promise. I won’t tell.”
“Okay. I have to make this fast. I need you to write something down.”
“Hang on.”
She hears Caroline rummaging around and pictures her in the kitchen, where the phone is. Not cordless, unless things have changed since Mary Beth left.
Of course things have changed. Everything changes.
A lump rises in her throat. She isn’t homesick—she isn’t. Not for that somber house, or for her parents. It’s just . . . their lives have gone on without her. Even Caroline’s.
So will her son’s. The difference is that he can’t forget her, because he’s never known her at all.
Caroline is back on the line. “Okay, I found a pen and paper. What do you want me to write?”
Mary Beth rattles off the address. “Got it? Read it back to me.”
Caroline does. “Is this where you’re living?”
“It’s where you’re going to meet me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s a school day!”
“So play hooky.”
“I can’t! I have a test.”
“Then come after school.”
“But how am I supposed to get to Syracuse?”
“Don’t you have your driver’s license yet?”
“I do, but it’s not like I have a car.”
“Do your friends?”
“Yes, but I can’t just—”
“Yes, you can. For me, Caroline. I need you to do this for me. Please.”
“Why? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Mary Beth isn’t sure how to answer that. “You’re the only one I can trust. You won’t let me down. I have to go.”
“But—”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She hangs up quickly, before the tears fall.