Page 68 of The Change
“Then feed it.” He walked past her. “You’re its mama.”
“Why are you like this?” she asked.
“What did you expect after you let yourself go?”
She made to stomp out, and he didn’t stop her. “Go on, then,” he said. “Run home to your daddy. But if you do, don’t bother coming back.”
Back then, a pregnant lady walking down the street at threea.m.was a murder waiting to happen. The Lord hadn’t paid Laverne much mind in a while, but he must have been smiling down on her that night. She made it to her aunt’s house just as the sun came up. Across the street at her parents’ house, the light in the kitchen was already on. Her father was getting ready for his shift at the hospital. But she didn’t dare knock. He’d made it perfectly clear how he felt about her coming home. Theirs was a good family, and she didn’t belong.
Her aunt tsked when she told her what had happened. “Bastard,” she said. There were moments when it was possible to see that she’d once been as beautiful as her niece. Those moments were now fewer and farther between.
“What happened to Auntie?” Laverne once asked her mother.
“She fell for the trap that snares pretty women,” her mother answered. The look on her plain face said there was a lesson to be learned. “She was sure her beauty would last forever. So she didn’t bother looking for other sources of strength. And when her beauty faded, as it always does, your auntie found out she had nothing left.”
Laverne had never believed her mother’s tale, until now.
Across the street, the light came on in her sister’s bedroom. Janelle was five years younger and went to Hunter College in Manhattan. The subway ride to the Upper East Side could take two full hours. Soon, she’d be heading out the door, wearing her mom jeans and basic sneakers.
Anthony thought Janelle was ugly. She wasn’t ugly. She just wasn’t a swan like Laverne. From the time she was five, Laverne’s beauty had had the power to stop people in their tracks. At nine, she was on her first catalog cover. At twelve, she was cast in her first commercial. By sixteen, she’d lost count of her suitors. Men of all ages found themselves tongue-tied in her presence. She was twenty-three when Anthony spent weeks wooing her with gifts and jewelry.
When Laverne got pregnant, they married. But instead of binding him to her, the baby had broken the spell.
“Maybe I’ll have an abortion,” she heard herself mutter as she watched Janelle leave for school. She’d come to hate the thing growing inside her.
“Too late for that, sweetie,” her aunt said. “But in a few months, you can get alimony and child support.”
Laverne didn’t go outside after that. She didn’t want anyone in the old neighborhood to see what had become of her. Her parents gave Laverne’s auntie enough money to feed her, but they never once knocked at the door.
Then one night, seven months in, she woke up in a pool of blood. By the time she got to the hospital, the baby had died inside her. The doctor gave her a lecture. Said she’d had preeclampsia, and it was a miracle she’d survived at all. The condition would have been detected if she’d sought care when she first felt sick.
“Next time,” she promised.
“You won’t be having any more babies,” he told her.
She thought she’d enjoy her freedom, but she was never the same after that. There were no more modeling jobs. When the doctors cut out the baby, they’d botched the incision. More than one man lost her number after seeing it. She still did a little acting here and there, but nowhere enough to pay the bills. She was working at Target when they offered her money to pretend to be the girl’s mama. She took it without a second thought. The way she saw it, it was the baby paying her back for everything it had stolen.
Faith
Sixteen people attended the service at the Mattauk funeral home. Jo’s family was there. Nessa’s girls, Breanna and Jordan, took the train in for the day. The rest of the attendees were ladies from Nessa’s Bible study group. Even with tears in their eyes, several of them had a hard time pulling their gaze away from Franklin as the pastor delivered the sermon. Only Harriett had skipped the service. There was work to do at the cemetery, she’d informed them.
Wearing the same black dress she’d worn when she’d buried her parents, Nessa sat in the first pew and stared numbly at the coffin. A closed casket had been the only option. One look at the corpse, and the mortician had informed her there would be no way to camouflage the discoloration. Still, Nessa had spent an entire day shopping for a new dress in the right shade of blue, and she’d requested the girl’s makeup be done, though no one at the service would see it. Then she fixed the girl’s hair herself. When she was finished, she’d looked up to see the girl’s ghost watching her from the end of the mortician’s table.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she’d told the girl. She didn’t know what else to say. The ghost was still standing there when she left. When Nessa got home later that night, her sofa was empty. The ghost had chosen to stay with her body.
For two days, Nessa had felt grief pressing at the dam she’d built to hold back the tears so she could get things done. As the pastor began the Lord’s Prayer, the walls gave way and Nessa weptopenly. The girl’s mother should have been there to see her off, but Nessa hadn’t been able to locate her. She’d failed her first test. Even her tears were proof that she didn’t deserve the gift she’d been granted.
“Mama.” Breanna slid her arm around Nessa and whispered in her ear. As always, she sensed the source of her mother’s pain. “That girl knows you did everything that you could. I’m sure she’s grateful.”
Nessa couldn’t find the breath to argue, so she shook her head. It didn’t feel true. She cried so hard that Franklin had to guide her out the door after the service. She kept crying in the passenger seat of Franklin’s car as they drove to the gravesite with her daughters sitting quietly in the back seat.
“Is it all right if I have a word with your mother?” Franklin asked the girls after he’d parked. “And if you don’t mind, ask the others to wait a few minutes till we get there.”
Blinded by tears, Nessa heard the doors open and shut. Then she felt Franklin take her hand. The fingers he wrapped around hers were warm.
“Hey,” he said. “This isn’t over.”
“It is,” Nessa sobbed. “Even her ghost is gone. She hasn’t come back since I did her hair. She’s given up on me, Franklin. She knows I can’t help her.”
