B-Mother Hardback - 2007 - 1st Edition

1
Had you spotted me on the railroad tracks that autumn morning, you would have thought I was an ordinary teenage girl in thigh-tight jeans surrounded by the tassels of dried summer grass. But I wasn’t listening for the distant freight train whistle. I was waiting for Shell, my best friend, who suddenly pulled up alongside me in her old station wagon. She smiled her snaggle-tooth smile, one front tooth pressed over the other like the folded wing of an origami bird.
 “You’re not okay, are you.”
 “Not really,” I admitted.
 “Hop in, hon. We’re gonna find out for sure.”
 We drove out on Route 26 past the Oxford Plains Speedway as the sun poked through the bleachers. The cool air brought everything into sharp focus. The sugar maples were speckled with salmon leaves. Every fall Shell would usually ooh and ahh over the foliage. Instead she glanced at me more than the trees along the road. I cracked the window to drink in the wind, trying to calm myself from gagging. I had been moving through the hallways of my high school, wide-eyed and tender, clutching my junior year notebooks in front of my swollen, aching breasts. Between class bells, I rushed to the girls’ bathroom, checking my underwear in the haze of cigarette smoke. Each time the cotton crotch was white.
 “I could have been wearing white pants every day like the Man in White,” I joked sarcastically. The Man in White was an old lunatic who wandered all over the county in starched button-down shirts, white trousers, and white dress gloves.
 “Yeah, all you need is a steel plate in your head like his.” She glanced over at me. “You gonna puke?”
 “No. I’m okay,” I muttered. Relieved, Shell turned on the radio, tuning the dial to WOXO. “Brown-Eyed Girl” came on. Shell’s song. She hated when boys recited the lyrics to her, flirting. But with me, she sang loudly and off-key, each verse lifting her mood like a cold Coca-Cola. “Thank god I have brown eyes with hair this white,” she said.
 It was a joke with us. “I know, I know, otherwise you’d be an albino.”
 We passed over a river that frothed yellow foam from a paper mill. “The town of Gray. Such a lovely place to find out for sure if you’re knocked up.”
 “Did you tell Miles?” Shell asked.
 “He hasn’t written me in over a month. Maybe I was just a summer fling.”
 “Maybe not. Maybe you’ll end up together.”
 “Miles did cocaine. Didn’t you notice how he was always racing around, disappearing into the bathroom? There it is.” I pointed to the stucco building. “Gray Family Clinic.”
 The receptionist handed me some papers. Shell and I sat down on hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. Three other girls kept their eyes downcast and didn’t take off their jackets. A nurse with greasy hair slicked back under a headband opened a door from a back hallway. She called my name. The other girls shifted in their chairs. My face reddened.
 She led me to a bathroom that smelled of roach spray, glanced at my forms, and asked, “Last period?”
 I whispered, “Late July.” She instructed me to pee in a cup. Then Shell and I waited in an examining room. The nurse knocked and didn’t wait for an answer. She flipped over a paper. “Your urine has tested positive. You’re pregnant.”
 I knew. I had known each time I had checked my underwear.
 The nurse wrote on a clipboard and spoke as if I had been arrested and she were reading me my rights. “A counselor will speak with you before you leave. You have options. If you want an abortion, we can perform it here. You’re about three, three and a half weeks shy of the twelve-week mark. So you really need to decide soon. If you want to go full term, we provide prenatal care in a separate part of the clinic.”
 An hour later I found myself naked from the waist down, my bottom wrapped in a crinkly paper cover. I swung my legs and stared at the dark pink posters, urn-shaped drawings of the uterus, while Shell kept braiding and unbraiding her hair.
 The doctor was young and direct. “Is this your first pelvic exam?” she asked, snapping latex gloves over her hands.
 “Yes.”
 She guided my feet into stirrups that were wrapped in dingy terrycloth and rubber bands. A desk lamp shone between my legs. “Do me a favor and scooch your bottom down.” She checked me for sores and warts. After that she greased up my belly and skated a small black box over me. I heard static, and then, like the gusting of a helicopter landing, the room suddenly pulsed with a whirling, bright-yellow sound. “That’s the heartbeat,” she said.
 “Oh my god,” Shell burst out, “there’s someone in there.”
 Tears pooled in my eyes, making the room shiny.
 “You okay?” the doctor asked me. Then the room was silent. “Meet me in the office next door.”
 I dried my eyes with the paper cover and wiped off the cold jelly smeared on my stomach. My legs trembled. Shell helped me slip my underpants back on.
“I’m not telling my mother,” I said to the mountains on the way home.
 “Does she have to know? That woman said everything could be, you know, private.”
 “She won’t know a thing if I get an abortion. My brother dying was enough, now this?”
 “I feel sorry for your mom,” Shell sighed. “She used to be so pretty.”
 We bounced over the speed bumps of the school parking lot. The rows of buses, jocks wearing their numbered shirts to promote school spirit, cheerleaders in saddle shoes, all of it choreographed to the swish of the heartbeat. You really need to decide soon.
 “Shell, are you ashamed of me?”
 “Nope. Definitely not.”
 “Will you stick with me? No matter what?”
 “I double-pinkie swear,” she said, just like when we were in fourth grade.
 Pinkies linked.
My high school lay wedged between the dump and the Dead River Company gas station. Going east you passed a gold-leafed sign—WELCOME TO PARIS!—next to the graveyard that sprawled all the way to the McDonald’s, near the dark stink of the leather tannery.
 If you head west through the town of Norway, straight down Main Street, past the fire station’s Smokey Bear cutout, the empty Woolworth’s, and Woodman’s, where they sold night crawlers and rifles, then hung a left at the bog of Lake Pennesseewassee, you’d come up the steepest hill in town. On the left is Pike Hill Cemetery. That’s where my brother is buried.
 The cemetery is ringed with small hemlocks and a rugged stone wall. Maybe fifty people are buried there, most of them teenagers and children. Many of the names of the dead are rinsed away, their markers askew. That first winter Birdy was gone, I crawled on top of the fresh snowfall on his plot and swiped my arms and legs in perfect snow angels. My mother went, too—alone, during the day while I was in school. If she noticed my angels, she never mentioned them to me. She left boot marks all over them, and yellow rose petals.
 My brother died when I was twelve, the day before Thanksgiving. I spent that winter trudging in slippery, tangled shadows. I’d fall, ripping holes in my tights. The chimes of the town tower clock carried up through the woods as I’d hurry home, the scent of wood smoke hanging like a pork smell in the air, stirring my hunger. The beaded lampshades of our parlor radiated through the front windows, throwing a rosy glow onto the whiteness of the snowbanks. But inside, no afghan or fire in the fireplace could touch the chill of Bird’s absence. It soaked through us.
 I pushed open the back door those nights without saying hello or good night to my parents and headed upstairs to run a scalding bath and strip off my blood-crusted tights.
Birdy was supposed to come home that Wednesday.
 “Mr. Donnelly, is Hillary Birdsong in your class?” The receptionist’s voice crackled through the two-way speaker at the front of the science lab. Our seventh grade class was making homemade batteries. Mr. Donnelly was picking on the derelicts in the back— around town they were known as the Street Rats—because several wires were missing, stolen to be used as roach clips.
 “She is.”
 “Please have her report to the office immediately.”