Secret Triplets(30)
The waiting room was empty now except for a woman in the corner who looked like me but couldn’t be. She couldn’t be because I was me, though not anymore, not really. I was a vessel for three other lives, and I was hopelessly alone.
Even finally making it to my car in the parking garage offered no relief; that which was chasing me was inside me. There would be no escaping this. With a strangled cry, I slammed my palm into the horn, enjoying the blaring as it mingled with my scream—my howl of rage and injustice and despair. There were now three sweet little heads to which I would have to explain how I had put their daddy away for good, had gotten him killed. Three little needy mouths to feed when I couldn’t even feed my own stupid one.
I beat the steering wheel over and over again until my fists were red and stinging.
My phone rang. It was Tiffany.
“Alex, hey. Are you okay?”
I pulled down the sun visor, looked in the mirror at the teary, red-faced wreck staring back at me, and gave the only answer I could: “No. No, Tiff, I’m really not.”
It took a minute before she answered. “Come home, Alex. Come home. I’ve got a burrito with your name on it from your favorite, Cotijas.”
My laugh ended in another series of tears, but nonetheless, I said okay.
I went back to Tiffany. I drove until I saw the familiar black garage door, until I was at the lion door-knockered house I knew so well. I got one foot in the door and Tiffany swept me into the Yellow Room. It was hard to cry when surrounded by canary yellow curtains, a pineapple rug, some decorative butter pillows, and a yellow china chickadee that stared insolently at me, but I managed.
I cried and cried and ate Mexican food when it was offered to me, and then I cried some more. At some point amid the crying and the burrito, I told her. Her eyes went grave and she nodded. She hugged me and said, “I know you know, but I have to say it. It’s your decision, and I’ll love you no matter what and all that, but, Alex, I’ve never regretted anything in my life, but that—that I will regret as long as I live.”
I nodded dully and took my biggest bite of burrito yet. I didn’t need to be reminded of Tiffany’s abortion. I had been there. It hadn’t mattered, somehow, that she was only in college with her whole life ahead of her, or that her on-again-off-again boyfriend, James, had skipped town. It hadn’t even mattered that it was the only practical thing she could’ve done. All that mattered was that, after it, she had lost a child.
She had lost a child and a year. It had been a year of black. Black clothes, black hair, black, dark, sobbing isolation. I had done for her what I could, even gotten a therapist to come to our apartment. But the loss had still nearly killed her.
No, I couldn’t undergo what she had. I couldn’t kill a part of him, a part of myself. I would just have to endure this, for better or worse.
Chapter Fourteen
So, I looked into adoption. I listened while Cherie, the adoption specialist, rhymed off the process in a bird-chirpy voice of how I would “get to meet the adoptive family, get to be updated about my children, and maybe even get to visit them after!” She mentioned how I was “doing a very generous thing for a family in need!” Then she handed me a bright, glossy pamphlet with the same sort of bright, cheery information and the same sort of smiling families on the front cover that I had imagined in my head.
The babies rustled angrily in my stomach, but I ignored it. They may have wanted a life with me, but they didn’t know any better. They didn’t know that Mommy had no idea where Daddy was, and had maybe even gotten him killed through her poor choices.
When I told Tiffany about my plans to give the triplets up for adoption, she was tentatively supportive, although she clearly didn’t agree with my choice.
“I don’t know,” I overheard her saying to Kyle one day. “I feel like things come into our lives at a certain time for a certain reason. I think this happened to Alex now because she can handle it, even by herself, because it would be good for her.”
After, I had walked out the door, spurned on by a sad sort of restlessness. I’d strode without stopping to the forest nearby and kept on walking through it, directing my furious glare at the uncaring tree limbs.
It was easy for Tiffany to say that this was meant to be. She wasn’t facing raising three children alone. And yeah, sure, she and Kyle would be there for me, but would they always be there? Would they be there for every outing, every vacation, every day when I’d have endured all I could? No. No, of course they wouldn’t be, couldn’t be. They had their own lives to live.