Sing You Home

“Maybe you’re not supposed to be invisible. Maybe you’re just supposed to be different.”

As I say the words, I think of Angela Moretti, and Vanessa, and those frozen embryos. I think of Wade Preston, with his Hong Kong tailored suit and slicked-back hair, looking at me as if I am a total aberration, a crime against the species.

If I remember correctly, those toys all jump into Santa’s sleigh and get redistributed beneath Christmas trees everywhere. I hope that, if this is true, I wind up under Wade Preston’s.

I turn to find Lucy staring at me. “The other time I feel things,” she confesses, “is when I’m here with you.”

Usually after Lucy’s therapy session, I go to Vanessa’s office and we have lunch in the cafeteria-Tater Tots, let me tell you, are vastly underrated-but today, she’s off at a college admissions fair in Boston, so I head to my car instead. On the way I check my phone messages. There’s one from Vanessa, telling me about an admissions officer from Emerson with an orange beehive hairdo who looks like she fell off a B-52’s album cover, and another just telling me she loves me. There’s one from my mother, asking me if I can help her move furniture this afternoon.

As I get closer to my yellow Jeep in the parking lot, I see Angela Moretti leaning against it. “Is something wrong?” I say immediately. It can’t be a good thing when your attorney travels an hour to tell you something.

“I was in the neighborhood. Well, Fall River, anyway. So I figured I’d swing by to tell you the latest.”

“That doesn’t sound very good…”

“I got another motion on my desk this morning, courtesy of Wade Preston,” Angela explains. “He wants to appoint a guardian ad litem to the case.”

“A what?”

“They’re common in custody cases. It’s someone whose job it is to determine the best interests of the child, and to communicate that to the court.” She shakes her head. “Preston wants one appointed for the pre-born children.”

“How could he…” My voice trails off.

“This is posturing,” Angela explains. “It’s his way of setting forth a political agenda, that’s all. It’s going to be knocked out of court before you even sit down in your chair.” She glances up at me. “There’s more. Preston was on Joe Hoffman last night.”

“Who’s Joe Hoffman?”

“A conservative who runs the Voice of Liberty Broadcasting. A mecca for the closed-minded, if you ask me.”

“What did he talk about?”

Angela looks at me squarely. “The destruction of family values. He specifically named you and Vanessa as being at the forefront of the homosexual movement to ruin America. Do you two receive mail at your house? Because I’d strongly recommend a post office box. And I assume you have an alarm system…”

“Are you saying we’re in danger?”

“I don’t know,” Angela says. “Better safe than sorry. Hoffman’s small potatoes, compared to where Preston’s headed. O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Limbaugh. He didn’t take this case because he cares so deeply for Max. He took it because it gives him a platform to stand on while he’s preaching, and because it’s a current hook that gets him booked on these shows. By the time we go to trial, Preston’s going to make sure you can’t turn on the TV without seeing his face.”

Angela had warned us that this would be an uphill battle, that we had to be prepared. I’d assumed that what was at stake was my chance to be a mother; I hadn’t realized that I’d also lose my privacy, my anonymity.

“When you think about the lengths he’s going to, it’s laughable,” Angela says.

But I don’t find it funny. When I start crying, Angela hugs me. “Is it all going to be like this?” I ask.

“Worse,” she promises. “But imagine the stories you’ll have to tell your baby one day.”

She waits until I’ve pulled myself together, and then tells me to be at court tomorrow to fight the motion. As I’m getting into my car again, my cell phone rings.

“Why aren’t you home yet?” Vanessa says.

I should tell her about Angela’s visit; I should tell her about Wade Preston. But when you love someone, you protect her. I may stand to lose my credibility, my reputation, my career, but then again, it’s my battle. This is my ex-husband, my former marriage’s embryos. The only reason Vanessa is even involved is because she had the misfortune of falling for me.

“I got tied up,” I say. “Tell me about the beehive lady.”

But Vanessa is having none of it. “What’s the matter? You sound like you’re crying.”

I close my eyes. “I’m getting a cold.”

It is the first time, I realize, I’ve ever lied to her.

It takes my mother and me two hours to swap all the furniture in my old bedroom and hers. She’s decided that she needs a new perspective, and what better way to start each day than to see something different when she opens her eyes?

“Plus,” she says, “your window opens to the west. I’m tired of waking up with the sun in my eyes.”

I glance around at the same bedding, the same bedroom set. “So basically you’re your own life coach?”

“How can I expect my clients to follow my advice if I don’t follow it myself?”

“And you really believe that relocating ten feet down the hall is going to revolutionize your life?”

“Beliefs are the roads we take to reach our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can’t-and you’ll be right every time.”

I roll my eyes at her. I am pretty sure there was a self-help movement not too long ago that followed that mantra. I remember seeing a high school student on a newsmagazine who subscribed to the philosophy and then didn’t study for her SATs because, after all, she could visualize that perfect 2400. Needless to say, she wound up going to a community college and complaining on television about how it was really all a load of BS.

I look around the room at my mother’s same old bedding, same furniture. “Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of starting over when you’re doing it with stuff you’ve had forever?”

“Honestly, Zoe, you are such a downer sometimes.” My mother sighs. “I’m more than happy to give you a little life coaching, free of charge.”

“I’ll take a rain check, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” She slides down, her back pressed to the wall, while I collapse across the mattress. When I look up, I see a freckling of glow-in-the-dark stars affixed to the ceiling.

“I’d forgotten about those,” I say.

After my father died, I became obsessed with ghosts. I desperately wanted my father to be one, in the hope that I might find him sitting on the edge of my bed when I woke up in the middle of the night, or feel him whisper a shiver across the nape of my neck. To this end, I borrowed books from the library on paranormal activity; I tried to conduct seances in my bedroom; I sneaked downstairs late at night and watched horror movies when I should have been sleeping. My teacher noticed, and told my mother I might need help. The psychiatrist I’d been seeing sporadically after my father’s death agreed it could be an issue to address.

My mother didn’t. She figured if I wanted my father to be a spirit, I must have had a valid reason.

One night at dinner she said, “I don’t think he’s a ghost. I think he’s a star, looking down on us.”

“That’s dumb. A star’s just a ball of gas,” I scoffed.

“And a ghost is…?” my mother pointed out. “Ask any scientist-they’ll tell you that new stars are born every minute.”

“People who die don’t become stars.”

“Some Native Americans would disagree with you, there.”

I considered this. “Where do stars go during the day?”

“That’s the thing,” my mother said, “they’re still there. They’re watching us, even when we’re too busy to be watching them.”

While I was at school the next day, my mother hot-glued little plastic stars on my ceiling. That night, we both lay down on the bed and covered ourselves with my blanket. I didn’t sneak out of bed to watch a scary movie. Instead, I fell asleep with my mother’s arms around me.

Now, I look at her. “Do you think I would have turned out differently if Dad had been around when I was growing up?”