Sing You Home

“Is this some Catholic thing?”

“You know I’m not Catholic,” Vanessa answers.

“But you used to be-”

“This isn’t about the damn abortion, Zoe. It’s about you.” She is facing me now, her hands still clutching the keys to the car. “That’s a pretty big bit of history to leave out of a relationship. It’s like forgetting to tell someone you have AIDS.”

“For God’s sake, Vanessa, you can’t catch an abortion like an STD-”

“Do you think that’s the only reason to disclose something incredibly personal to the people you love?”

“It was a horrible decision to have to make, even if I was lucky enough to be able to make it. I don’t particularly enjoy reliving it.”

“Then tell me this,” she argues. “How is it that Max knew, and I didn’t?”

“You’re jealous? You’re actually jealous that I told Max about something horrible in my past!”

“Yeah, I am,” Vanessa admits. “Okay? I’m a selfish bitch who wishes that my wife opened herself up to me as much as she opened herself up to the guy she used to be married to.”

“And maybe I’d like my wife to show a little compassion,” I say. “Considering I was just raked over the coals by Wade Preston and that I’m now Public Enemy Number One for the entire religious right.”

“There’s more than just a u in us,” Vanessa says. “Not that you seem to realize it.”

“Great!” I yell, tears springing to my eyes. “You want to know about my abortion? It was the worst day of my life. I cried the whole way there and the whole way home. I had to eat ramen noodles for two months because I didn’t want to ask my mother for money; and I didn’t tell her I’d done it until I was back home for the summer. I didn’t take the medicine they gave me for the cramps afterward because I felt like I deserved the pain. And the guy I was dating-the guy who decided with me that this was the right thing to do-broke up with me a month later. And in spite of the fact that every doctor I’ve ever seen tells me that my infertility has nothing to do with that procedure, I’ve never really been able to believe it. So how’s that? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”

By the time I finish, I am crying so hard I can barely understand my own words. My nose is running and my hair is in my face and I want her to touch me, to take me in her arms and tell me it’s all right, but instead she steps back. “What else don’t I know about you?” she asks, and she leaves me standing alone in the entryway of a house that no longer feels like home.

The actual procedure took only six minutes.

I know, I counted.

They had talked to me about all my options. They had given me lab tests and a physical. They had given me a sedative. They had opened my cervix with dilators. They had given me forms to sign.

This took a few hours.

I remember the nurse fitting my feet into the stirrups, telling me to scoot down. I remember the shine of the speculum as the doctor lifted it from its sterile napkin. I remember the wet-vac sound of the suction device.

The doctor never called it a baby. She never even called it a fetus. She referred to it as tissue. I remember closing my eyes and thinking of a Kleenex, balled up and tossed in the trash.

On the way back to campus, I put my hand on the stick shift of my boyfriend’s old Dodge Dart. I just wanted his palm to cover mine. Instead, he untangled my fingers. “Zoe,” he said. “Just let me drive.”

Although it was only two in the afternoon when I got back to my dorm room, I put on my pajamas. I watched General Hospital, honing my focus on the characters of Frisco and Felicia, as if I would have to pass a test on them later on. I ate an entire jar of Jif peanut butter.

I still felt empty.

I had nightmares for weeks, that I could hear the fetus crying. That I followed the sound to the courtyard outside my dorm window and crouched down in my pajama bottoms and torn tank to dig with my bare hands in the ragged ground. I pulled up hunks of sod, chipped my fingernails on stones, and finally uncovered it:

Sweet Cindy, the baby doll I’d buried the day my father died.

I can’t unwind that night. I hear Vanessa moving around above me, in the bedroom, and then when it gets quiet I assume she’s fallen asleep. So instead, I sit down at my digital keyboard and I start playing. I let the music bind me like a bandage. I sew myself together note by note.

I play for so long that my wrists begin to cramp. I sing until my voice frays, until I feel like I’m breathing through a straw. When I stop, I lean my forehead so that it rests on the keys. The silence in the room becomes a thick cotton batting.

Then I hear clapping.

I turn around to find Vanessa standing in the doorway. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.” She sits down beside me on the piano bench. “This is what he wants, you know.”

“Who?”

“Wade Preston. To break us apart.”

“I don’t want that,” I admit.

“Me neither.” She hesitates. “I’ve been upstairs doing math.”

“No wonder you’ve been gone so long,” I murmur. “You suck at math.”

“The way I figure it, you were with Max for nine years. I plan to be with you for the next forty-nine years.”

“Just forty-nine?”

“Stick with me, here. It’s a nice round number.” Vanessa looks at me. “So by the time you’re ninety, you’ll have spent over half your life with me, as opposed to ten percent of your life with Max. Don’t get me wrong-I’m still wicked jealous of those nine years, because I can’t ever have them with you, no matter what I do. But if you hadn’t lived them back then with Max, maybe you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

“I wasn’t trying to keep a secret from you,” I tell her.

“But you should be able to. I love you so much that there’s nothing you could possibly tell me that would change that.”

“I used to be a guy,” I say, straight-faced.

“Deal breaker.” Vanessa laughs, and she leans forward and kisses me. She puts her hands on either side of my face. “I know you’re strong enough to do this alone, but you don’t have to. I promise not to be an idiot anymore.”

I settle closer to her, rest my head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, too,” I say, an apology as wide as the night sky, with no limits.

15 VANESSA

My mother used to say that a woman without lipstick was like a cake without icing. I never knew her to go without her signature color, Forever After. Every time we went to a drugstore to get aspirin or tampons or asthma medication, she picked up a couple more tubes and stashed them in one of her dresser drawers-one that was completely filled with the small silver tubes. “I don’t think the company’s gonna run out,” I used to tell her, but she, of course, knew better. In 1982, they stopped making Forever After. Luckily my mother had stockpiled enough to carry her forward a decade. When she was in the hospital, so drugged for the pain that she couldn’t remember her own mantra, I made sure she was always made up. When she took her last breath, she was wearing Forever After.

She would have found it incredibly ironic that I had turned out to be her cosmetic guardian angel, since I had been running away from her mascara wand since I could walk. Whereas other little girls liked to sit on their mothers’ bathroom counters and watch them transform themselves into works of art, I couldn’t stand the feel of anything other than soap on my face. The one time I let my mother come near me with eyeliner, it was to pencil in