Testimony from Your Perfect Girl Read online

  We seem to pass the same store over and over again. Stores filled with things you’d put on a shelf to die. On vacation, people will buy things they’d never buy in ordinary life. A nightgown with a moose on it? Sure! A box of fudge? Of course!

  And then we turn off Main Street and head up the mountain, close to the sun. At the lodge I get out, nodding good-bye to Mandy from Texas.

  * * *

  • • •

  Everyone greets me when I walk in, because that’s what they’re trained to do, I suppose. I’ll never get used to someone opening a door for me, no matter how many times it’s happened. At places with valets, I always rush to open my door before someone can open it for me, and now I rush past check-in just in case that goony guy is there, but then I slow down, look up, confident, feeling like I’m taken. Whether Brose wants me or not, I’m not available to anyone but him. I’m Annie from nowhere, Annie-maybe-Tripp, Annie-maybe-Town. Annie, the Tripp-Town kid. The anonymity, the duality, is empowering.

  “Hey,” I say to Nicole from the doorway. I walk in and put her clothes on the desk.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I’ll change after our massages. I booked us for”—she looks at her phone—“nine thirty. Sit for a second.”

  I sit on the brown leather chair, feeling like I’m at Take Your Daughter to Work Day. I look out the picture window at the mountain, scarred with ski runs. It’s like a huge hoopskirt.

  “So,” she says. “That was kind of a big deal last night.”

  The revelation about my mom, and now this morning, about Brose’s dad. Big deals all right.

  “Sure was,” I say.

  “Are you okay?”

  I realize I’m staring at her face and thinking of all the similarities we share—our tone, our humor, our special social needs. We’re so different, but there’s this core similarity that seems glaring right now.

  She’s fiddling with something, and I realize it’s one of those balls people use to help with stress. In middle school I had one, as well as a fidget cushion I could wiggle on and rubber bands around the legs of my chair I could kick. I supposedly had ADHD, and these were my “supports.” I think I was just anxious, dreading practice, then getting home late and falling behind on homework, feeling dumb, tired.

  “How are you doing with it all . . . I mean—” She blows on whatever’s in her mug.

  “Well,” I say, “you’re Jay’s mom, and he doesn’t know. My parents have lied to us our entire lives. I’m not doing too well. And to top that off, the guy I really like just so happens to have been screwed over by my dad. Which would normally be the biggest deal, but you being Jay’s mom kind of blows it out of the water to frickin’ . . . Siberia. I’m not well.”

  She nods, taking it all in. “Okay,” she says, and seems to be organizing, rating the problems in front of her from Ten to One, Ten being the top priority. “About Jay,” she says. “You can’t think of it that way. Of me being his mom.”

  I look longingly at her ball. “I can’t help it,” I say.

  “Sure you can,” she says. “Just don’t. I’m an egg donor, really. An anonymous donor. Your mom is Mom. It’s simple. Like lending a neighbor sugar so she can make a cake.”

  “But you didn’t just lend sugar. You lent her everything to bake the whole damn cake. And you’re not a neighbor. You’re not anonymous. You’re her sister.”

  “Well, but with the cake analogy, half of the ingredients were from your dad—”

  “And none were from my mom.”

  She looks at me over the rim of her mug. “Okay, let’s just drop the cake. The point is that I’m not Jay’s mother. It’s like if your mom needed a kidney and I gave her mine.”

  “And that you’re Jay’s biological mother,” I say, “who also gave my mom a kidney.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she sighs.

  I raise my eyebrows, like, Sorry, but facts are facts. And then I bring up something that’s been nagging me. It came to me late last night, on the cusp of sleep, and once it lodged into my head, I was upright and tormented. It drove me to the computer, where I researched people who donate their eggs. I learned they have to do these treatments to get their systems aligned or something, then get shot up with hormones, then it doesn’t work and they have to get more eggs. A donor can give the eggs, and the receiver can use some or preserve them, too, for the future. Because sometimes it doesn’t work. Or you want another baby.

  When I came across this idea of egg preservation, I felt pinned back, like I was in a race car. My thoughts got stuck on replay. For future, for future, I came so soon after, for future, for future use.

  I take a deep breath. “My mom used your eggs just for Jay?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” Nicole pulls on her earlobe. I don’t break eye contact.

  “She used your egg for Jay,” I say. “Then had me naturally, right?” I look down at my hands, then back up. “You said you gave her an egg, but don’t they take a bunch of eggs?”

  She blinks, looks away. It’s odd to think of us as these eggs, weird to think of the possibility of me frozen, lying in wait, not housed by anyone. I need to know. My leg shakes up and down as it often does when I take exams. Her stress ball is nearly flat, and then she releases it, and her shoulders move down, her face softens.

  “Yes, they do that,” she says. “They preserve the eggs. But your mom never told me she used any more.” Her jaw clenches.

  “And do you think that she didn’t? After I came so soon after, so easily?”

  Nicole sighs and blinks slowly as if I’m bringing something up that she herself had put to rest. “I choose to believe that, yes.”

  I don’t believe this at all. Nicole may have chosen to trust my mom, but she must have had doubts. How did she get rid of these doubts? How do you ever? I think about my father, about Brose and his preconceptions of me. Even if or when you’re cleared or forgiven, how do you abandon your misgivings? Is it just a matter of choice?

  “Do you still believe in your choice?” I ask. “Your choice to believe her?”

  We stare at one another, unblinking, as if in a duel.

  “We’ve never talked about it,” she says, which isn’t an answer.

  “That’s convenient,” I say. “That’s why she shut you out, isn’t it? She felt guilty or was afraid you’d want him back. Us back.”

  I look down, perplexed, lost, unhoused.

  “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you,” she says.

  “I don’t feel comfortable either,” I say, looking her in the eye until she looks away. “Too late. So did you?” I ask. “Did you want him back?” I need to say “him,” not “us.” I can’t bear to say “us.”

  “No,” she says, and looks up, places the ball on the desk. “No,” she says again. “During the whole donation process, there’s all this talk, this pep and prep talk—that I can’t bond too much with the baby, that I can’t feel entitled to him or judge the way your mom raises him. But I never felt those things. Ever. I looked at the eggs as something I wasn’t going to use anyway. I didn’t want him. Never even crossed my mind. He wasn’t mine.”

  She hesitates and swallows. “And I never questioned how she got pregnant with you because I was afraid of her answer.”

  “That I’m from you, too?”

  “Yes, but no.” She looks at me like I failed something so simple. “I was afraid of the possibility that she didn’t tell me.” Nicole absentmindedly rolls the ball on her desk. “It started out okay. I came over all the time, helped out. I helped even more with Jay after you were born. Jay got attached. He was attached to other people, too, like your maid, but it was me she couldn’t deal with.”

  “Sad,” I say, imagining their bond and my mom’s jealousy. She’s a jealous person. I’ve never thought about this before, but with friends she seems to need to make them uncomfortable with themse
lves. I remember going to her friend Tara’s house, how proud Tara was of her remodeled kitchen.

  “Dark cabinets,” my mom said. “Interesting.” I watched Tara’s face fall.

  “My mom likes light,” I said, and now I recall that I did this a lot that day, covered her unnecessarily mean tracks, not because I was some crazy nice kid, but because Tara’s face made me sad. Our house was way nicer than Tara Laughlin’s, so why make her feel bad about something she was so proud of?

  “It is sad,” Nicole says. “I was cut off. And I didn’t do anything wrong. Not that I was pining away to spend every minute with you guys,” she says, back to really squeezing that ball again. “I mean I had my own life, you know, smoking pot, but I didn’t get to know you, and what’s his name—Sammy—who is that kid? I don’t know him at all.”

  She smiles, but I can tell she’s doing it so I don’t feel sorry for her, which I do. I think about that crib and Skip sanding the wood, putting it together, then having the confidence to put his child inside of it. Then I think about Sammy, how long my mom spent trying for him, as long as I remember, and I wonder if her efforts, the drugs, the hormones, the rounds of IVF, if they were all done to have one of her own. A real one, untainted by Nicole. I’ve never been a real one. Is that it? Something I’ve always felt finally has a name, and I don’t know if it makes me sad or not. I kind of like the sadness, the idea of not belonging to my mom. Then the sadness does something strange. It turns into hope. Maybe I’m not hers, this person who has lied to me, this person who has tried to sculpt me into something stiff, this person who can be so cruel. What if Nicole is my mom? I could divorce my parents, hide out for life, never have to be associated with their mistakes, their selfish choices. Nicole can be my mom.

  “I want to take a test,” I say.

  “Oh god,” she says. “No.” She searches my face, and I stare into eyes that look a little like my own.

  “I didn’t need to know,” she says, and it takes me a moment to understand. She didn’t need to know if my mom used her eggs because she gave them to her in the first place. “Why do you?”

  Snow drifts across the window, and I can hear the sound of the wind in the trees.

  I keep my gaze on the window. Part of me feels the same as Nicole right now—I don’t want to know, not because I fear the answer, but I fear the lie.

  “Because I want to know,” I say. “It matters.” I feel like I already know. I know by looking at her. I know by knowing her.

  “Oh god,” she cries, and puts her head in her hands. “How did this even happen? I shouldn’t have children. I am so bad at this. I curse, I really do drink a lot. That’s how this happened. Your mom is right about everything. I’m a disaster.”

  I hesitate before reaching over and quickly touching her hand on the desk. “You’re not a disaster,” I say. “You’re learning. You’ve been really good with us,” I force myself to say, but then I think, She has been. I’ve shared more with her than I ever have with my mother. The realization strikes me like a hot slap.

  “Are you going to tell Jay?” she asks.

  This is what bothers me the most. I can adapt to the knowledge of her being his biological mother, our biological mother, but I won’t ever get used to him not knowing, of keeping something from him.

  “I want to,” I say, “but maybe you should.”

  “I can’t be the one to tell him.” She shakes her head, wipes her eyes. “Your mom should. If she could just come clean. About this . . . about everything.”

  “I had sex for the first time those two nights ago,” I say.

  I swear I hear her gulp.

  “We used a condom,” I add.

  “Shit,” she says, and looks down at her papers as if she made a clerical error. She sighs, then says words that don’t form a sentence: “I don’t . . .” and “You shouldn’t . . .” and “We need . . .” Finally she says, “Well, how was it?”

  I look outside, feel like I’m watching the beginning of a movie—the setup, the backdrop.

  “It was a little scary,” I say, “then strange, like this foreign object was filling me up . . . um . . . then it was okay . . . then good, and then Jay walked in.”

  She makes the most comical face, like she was eating a hamburger and it turned into a sundae mid-chew. Like, What just happened to my food? And, Oh well.

  “And now,” I say, “he won’t even talk to me. Once again, my parents—the cause of everything.”

  We both nod, dumbstruck at the varieties of topics before us and wanting to move on. I don’t know why I even said it. Why I said anything.

  “Hey,” she says. “Just be . . . be with it. Sorry, that doesn’t make sense.”

  It sort of does. Because I don’t really know anything about anything. My body seems to know some things, but my mind doesn’t have the words for them yet. May as well go with it. Be with it.

  “Please don’t tell my mom,” I say, feeling like a hypocrite—keeping secrets. But sometimes people have to earn your secrets, right? She most definitely has not. “I won’t fuck with you anymore,” I say.

  “Don’t swear,” she says, and rubs the inner corners of her eyes. “And don’t worry—not my story to tell.” She looks up. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “You too,” I say, and then she takes an inhalation, like she’s getting back to business.

  “I wouldn’t take a DNA test,” she says. “Do you really need to know?”

  Yes! I almost yell. What else is there to know?

  “Yes,” I say. “I really do.”

  “Then maybe you should just ask your mom,” she says, so softly, yet the words ring clear. It’s an easy solution that sounds so hard.

  24

  There’s a big dent in the middle of my forehead from the massage bed. On the bus—driven by CODY from UTAH—I try to massage it out. Oh, the irony—massaging the massage. I feel good, despite it all, simultaneously relaxed and energized. I have a nervous excitement to go to work, like I’m carrying a new, curious weight, not so much a burden but a reminder, a good pressure. Though I should dread seeing Brose, I feel up to the challenge of pleading my case.

  I get off of the shuttle a block early so I can walk a bit, get used to my rubbed-down body, and prepare my defense. I tiptoe through the mud in the parking lot, then enter through the kitchen. Brose is already here, taking the stems off of mushrooms. He looks up, not just surprised to see me but sickened by my presence. He snarls, it seems, shakes his head, disgusted and resigned—Of course she’s here, he seems to be thinking. She can do whatever she wants. My confidence in my justifications and arguments weakens. They get tossed like the stems of those mushrooms.

  I go to the sink to wash my hands, then walk over.

  “Hey,” I say, sidling up to him. I put on gloves, start to help.

  He’s got his legs far apart so he doesn’t have to hunch down to the table. He seems cleaner, like he just got out of the shower. His hair is brushed back, and he smells like laundry detergent.

  Despite his coldness, a part of me gets warm, stirred. We still had that moment. That can’t unhappen. It’s strange that I didn’t notice how handsome he was as soon as I saw him, how some things take time to announce themselves, how at first I only noticed Nat, the sleek-looking boy, the snake. The kind of boy my parents would like.

  “I thought you weren’t going to work here anymore,” he says.

  “I start school in a few days. I’ll be gone soon.”

  Saying this out loud stuns me. I can’t believe it has come so soon. When I first got here, I counted down the days, and now I’m dreading each passing one. I can’t imagine seeing everyone in my town, at my school. The shame I’ll feel if my dad’s found guilty. The Ice Queen returns as a pathetic puddle. And if he’s not guilty? I’ll still know he is. I’ll still carry the lies, the doubt, and what will our lives look like? How will I define
myself? Defend myself?

  “I’m dreading it,” I say, wanting to say more, to be able to talk to him fully.

  He stops working. “Yeah?” he says, his voice full of venom. “Tough life?”

  “Well, yeah, actually. It is.”

  He scoffs, gets back to work, and I do, too, matching his angry, quick rhythm. He doesn’t own tough times. I look around the kitchen, but no one else notices the tension. There are four others here, all nodding their heads to the music.

  We continue to work in silence, stuffing the crab into the mushroom caps, his rough big hands, my smooth small hands. I don’t know why, but I start to laugh, and when I look up, he has his lips tucked in, as if holding back a smile (or is that wishful thinking?), then he walks away, toward the stockroom.

  I pull myself together and follow, find him sitting on a crate with his head in his hands.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what got into me. Nothing’s funny.”

  “I disagree,” he says.

  “How so?”

  “No matter what, every day, there’s something. Something absurd. Something funny.”

  “True,” I say. I look over at him, zero in on a freckle on his neck. “A lot has happened in two days.”

  “Yeah?” he says. His voice is so deep. I think of a cave and want to crawl in.