Page 81 of Jar of Hearts
They agreed she would finish out the first semester, but Geo was so nauseated she was missing school, anyway. After Christmas break, she didn’t go back. She wrote her exams by proxy, then did the rest of her courses via correspondence and tutor. It wasn’t too difficult to conceal her changing body; she carried small, and spent most of her days in her dad’s old shirts and a pair of sweatpants that she rolled below her belly. If she did need to go out—to a doctor’s appointment, or to the library—she wore a bulky jacket or sweater.
It was ironic to her how she could spend those days with someone else all the time—her baby, growing inside her—and still feel utterly alone. It was almost like her pregnancy was the culmination of all her secrets, in physical form.
By her fifth month, she was working with an adoption agency, which passed along several “family profiles” so she could select theadoptive parents. She interviewed several couples, and while they were all very nice with different degrees of desperation, the couple she liked the most was Nori and Mark Kent.
They were twenty-eight and thirty, respectively, around five to ten years younger than most of the couples who were hoping to adopt. Nori Kent had something called polycystic ovarian syndrome, which Geo had only heard of because two other hopeful women she’d met with had it, too. She liked the couple instantly. They had been together since their freshman year of college, had been married for three years, and had been on the adoption list since then.
“We know we’re young,” Nori Kent said. She was Japanese, born in Tokyo, but had grown up in Oregon. Her skin was porcelain and unblemished, her hair long and straight and jet-black, falling over her shoulder in one silky sheath. Her eyes were almond shaped and hazel. “But I was diagnosed with PCOS at twenty-one, after I stopped menstruating. Went to several doctors who said it would be very difficult for me to get pregnant. Adoption has always felt right to us.”
“We got on the list because we were told it could be a while before someone picked us,” Mark Kent added. He was tall, with sandy curls that were beginning to thin a little at the front. He had a classic white Anglo-Saxon complexion, pale with rosy cheeks, and large hands that gestured when he spoke. “We understand there’s a lot of competition, that a lot of other couples are older, have bigger houses, have better jobs.”
Mark taught math at Puget Sound State, and Nori was a buyer for Nordstrom. Normal jobs for normal people. They had recently bought their first house, a small starter home a little north of Seattle. They had an English bulldog named Pepper and a Siamese cat named Kit Kat who bossed the dog around. They showed Geo pictures of the room that would be the nursery. It was at the back of the house, with a large window that looked out at the rose bushes in the yard. Nori drove a four-year-old Toyota Highlander, and Mark took the bus to work. They weren’t rich, but they were in love. There was a deep friendship and a fierce commitment between them. It was in the way he looked at her, the way he touched her hand when she wasnervous and speaking too fast. It was in the way she rested her head on his shoulder when she leaned against him, and the way she rolled her eyes at his cheesy jokes.
Being with them made Geo feel sad and happy at the same time.
“I pick you,” she said at the end of the two-hour meeting. They were sitting across from each other on matching red love seats in a comfortable room at the agency office. Between them was a coffee table and their family profile book. “I’m not supposed to tell you directly, I’m supposed to tell the lawyer who’ll then tell you, but I’ve made up my mind and I don’t want to make you guys wait.”
“I—” Nori began, and then she burst into tears.
“Are you sure?” Mark Kent said. He was staring at Geo in disbelief. “Because we understand if you need a couple of days—”
“I pick you,” Geo repeated. She stood up, struggling a little to get up out of the deep sofa. Mark reached out a hand, but she waved him off with a smile.
“Why?” Mark Kent asked, his eyes shocked and huge, and his wife turned to him with a look that said,Oh god, don’t ask her that; what if she changes her mind?
“Because you remind me of my parents when my mom was still alive,” Geo said. It was the best way she could explain it—to herself, anyway. She could see that it didn’t make a lot of sense to them. “Do you promise to love the baby?”
“Yes,” they said in unison.
“Do you promise to love each other?”
“Yes,” Mark said, squeezing his wife’s hand.
Nori nodded, her eyes and cheeks wet. “Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” Geo said, and she allowed them to step around the coffee table and embrace her. She could feel Nori shaking, the bones in her slender frame vibrating from her legs to her torso, and she squeezed the woman tighter.
She gave birth three months later, two weeks early, in a private room at her dad’s hospital. The contractions started early Saturday morning and grew increasingly painful until the point where she didn’t know if she could get through one more. Then the epiduralkicked in and she was able to sleep for a few hours until she was dilated enough to push. Her father stayed by her bedside, although it was Nori she wanted in the room with her in the middle of the night when she started pushing.
The spinal block killed all the pain up until the first push, and from there Geo could feel everything. It was the most unbearable agony, and even though the nurse kept telling her to push anyway, it seemed like an impossible thing to do when it felt like pushing meant splitting wide open. Nori squeezed one hand, her father the other, and Geo pushed and pushed, her hair sticking to her sweaty face in greasy strands, her teeth clenching so hard she thought her molars would crack. Two hours later, she heard the OB say, “One more big one,” and she bore down as hard as she could, screaming because the burning and pressure was unlike any other kind of pain she’d felt before. She heard Nori say, “I see the head!” and a few seconds later, after a rush of activity, the baby cried.
“It’s a boy,” she heard one of nurses say. “Six pounds, thirteen ounces.”
The nurse had the baby wrapped in a white blanket with a blue-and-pink stripe, and a pink-and-blue hospital hat. It was noted in Geo’s file that the baby was going to the Kents, but the nurse still looked at Geo to see if she wanted to hold him. Geo shook her head, lying back on her pillow as Mark came into the room and Nori took the baby in her arms for the first time. Her face crumpled with joy, and she looked over at Geo and mouthed, “Thank you.”
Exhausted, Geo fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke, it was late the next morning. Her father was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in the small chair in the corner of the room. She was incredibly sore. The epidural had worn off and she felt like she had been run over by a truck. Everything hurt. Her vagina felt like someone had punched it a thousand times. There was a glass vase filled with pink and white flowers near the bed, and a letter with her name on it.
“It’s a letter from the Kents,” her dad said. “Do you want to read it now, or later?”
“Later,” Geo said, looking down at herself.
She was surprised to see she still looked pregnant. She had naively assumed that once she gave birth, everything would snap back to normal, but apparently that wasn’t the way it worked. Her belly was still large, but it was deflated, empty. The baby she had carried inside her was gone. She had never seen his tiny face, never held his tiny hand, never got to say hello or good-bye, which was how she planned it, but the ache in her heart was deeper and more painful than the ache in her body. She touched her stomach, feeling the flesh—which only the day before had been stretched firm—yield to her touch.
She had a son, and he was gone. She had never known him, never seen him, never cradled him, but the loss of him was as great as if she had loved him and held him and breathed him in her whole life.
“Daddy,” she said, not recognizing her own voice. It was small and fearful, the voice of a child, the voice of a lost soul drifting away who could never be brought back. “Daddy, he’s gone.…”
The sobs started in her stomach, and her abdominal muscles, already bruised and tender, screamed out in pain as she cried, for the loss of her child, the loss of her mother, the loss of Angela, the loss of the person she thought she was, and the person she thought she would be. She had taken a life and had now given a life, but neither act made up for the other. It was a loss multiplied by infinity, the grief of it all feeling like a giant hole that would never, ever be filled.
