I raised my granddaughter on my own after my daughter died — 11 years later, when her father went to court to take her away, she said, “Your Honor, I know why he really wants custody.”
9:40 A.M. — THE BUS
I did not have the money for a cab.
I want to say that first, because it is the thing that I thought about on the bus, with my purse on my knee and my hands folded over it, and a girl of eleven in a clean blue dress sitting very straight beside me with a backpack on her lap. It was the six-forty from Orchard Street, and then a walk, and then the transfer at the depot, and then a long gray ride through the rain, with the windows steaming, to the county courthouse in Wrenfield. It cost three dollars and fifty cents each. I had counted the coins that morning, at the kitchen table, in the half-dark, and put them in a plastic bag.
My name is Agnes Whitcomb. I am seventy-five years old. I have a very old yellow house on Orchard Street with peeling paint and a porch that sags in the middle, and a granddaughter, and a winter coat that I have worn for eleven years.
The granddaughter’s name is Clementine. She is called Clem. She has her mother’s long solemn face and a great deal of straight brown hair, which I had braided at six that morning with a ribbon, and a way of looking at a thing, before she says anything about it, for about four seconds, as if she were deciding whether it was true.
“Gran,” said Clem.
“Mm?”
“You’re doing the thing with your hands.”
I looked down. I had my fingers laced together so tightly that the knuckles had gone white. I loosened them.
“Sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay.” She did not look at me. She looked out of the window, at the rain, with her chin tipped up. She had her hand on the zipper of the backpack, on her knee, and I noticed that she had not taken it off since we left the house. She had her thumb pressed against the zip pull as if it were a pulse.
“What have you got in that?”
“Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just stuff,” said Clem, with great calm. “You’ll see.”
I did not ask again. I was too frightened to ask anything at all.
ELEVEN YEARS AGO — THE FUNERAL
I buried my only child on a Thursday in March.
Her name was Laurel. She was twenty-three years old, a bright, quick, funny girl with a laugh like a handful of dropped silver, who had wanted to be a veterinarian and had ended up working at a bakery on Main Street because she was good with her hands and could not afford to be anything else. She had been ill for six days. It was a clot, they said. It was a thing that happens, to one woman in many thousands, in the weeks after a birth, and it had gone to her lungs while she was asleep.
I held the baby at the graveside.
I will tell you what I remember. It was cold, and bright, and windy. There was a priest with a very small voice, and a hole in the ground, and a great many people in dark coats standing very still. And in my arms there was something no heavier than a loaf of bread, wrapped in a yellow blanket that Laurel had crocheted, sound asleep, with a crease between her tiny brows.
She was four months old. I stood there, on the wet grass, with my daughter’s daughter against my chest, and I thought, with a kind of cold, quiet, dreadful clarity: how are we supposed to live without her now?
There was a man at the back of the crowd. I had been trying not to look at him.
He was twenty-two, a long, good-looking, restless boy in a borrowed tie, with a quick, nervous smile and hands that never quite stopped moving. His name was Colton Eddings. He had been Laurel’s boyfriend for fourteen months. He had come to the hospital on the day that the baby was born, with a stuffed giraffe, and a bunch of petrol-station carnations, and he had held her for about four minutes, with his arms stuck out in front of him, as if he were carrying something that might go off.
“Mrs. Whitcomb.” He had come up behind me, at the car, afterward, in the wind. His face was gray. “Can I talk to you?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m, I can’t do this.” He said it very fast. He did not look at the baby. He looked at the road. “I’m still too young for this. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I’m, I can’t be a dad. A baby would only be a burden.”
I did not say anything. I could not.
“I’m sorry,” said Colton. He thrust something into my free hand. It was a plastic bag, from a drugstore, with a few baby bottles in it and a small pack of diapers. “That’s, that’s what I’ve got. I’ll, I’ll send money, when I.”
He did not send money.
I stood in that cemetery for a very long time, with a bag of diapers in one hand and a sleeping baby in the other, and watched a tall boy in a borrowed tie get into a small dented car and drive out of the gates. He did not look back. I remember that. I looked for it, for the whole length of the road, until he turned the corner by the church.
He was gone.
So yes. At sixty-four, I became a mother again.
9:58 A.M. — THE COURTHOUSE
We sat. Clem sat with her backpack on her lap, bolt upright, as she sits at church. She looked at the ceiling, and the doors, and the clock.
I did not answer. A door had opened, at the end of the corridor.
10:05 A.M. — THE CORRIDOR
We sat on a hard bench in a long corridor that smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee, among people who had been told to wait. Clem sat with her backpack on her lap, bolt upright, as she sits at church, looking at the ceiling, and the doors, and the clock.
THREE WEEKS AGO — THE KNOCK
It was a Saturday morning.
I was making pancakes. It is a thing that I do on Saturdays, in a cast-iron pan that was my mother’s, with a cup of buttermilk and a whisk and a radio on low, and Clem at the table with a book. She likes them in the shape of a cat. I am not artistic. They come out, in general, as a sort of tadpole with ears.
Somebody knocked on the front door.
It was a loud knock, a confident one, three taps with a knuckle. We do not get many callers. I wiped my hands on my apron, and went through to the hall, and opened the door, and nearly fainted.
I should explain that I did not know him. I want to be quite clear about it. I looked at the man on my porch, for about three seconds, and I saw a stranger. He was tall, and tanned, and sleek, in a beautiful charcoal suit, with a silk tie and a watch the size of a biscuit, and his hair had been cut by somebody who charged for it. Behind him, at the curb, glinting in the thin morning sun, was a long silver car with tinted windows.
Then he smiled. It was a quick, nervous, charming, boyish smile, and the corner of his mouth went up higher on the left.
“Hello, Mrs. Whitcomb,” said Colton Eddings. “It’s been a while.”
I could not speak.
“I’ve done well,” he said. He said it with an easy, apologetic shrug, as if it were a minor embarrassment. “I’m married. Her name’s Camilla. Her family has, well, it’s a long story. We’re very comfortable.” He looked at the peeling paint of my porch, and the sagging step, and the mat that said WELCOME, which had lost the E. “I’m sorry. I should have called.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m taking Clementine to live with me.”
He said it quite pleasantly. He said it as a man says that he is going to move a chair.
“I’m her father,” said Colton. “I’ve got every right to.”
I stared at him.
I thought of a bag of diapers. I thought of eleven winters, and a small girl with the croup in the middle of the night, and a pot of boiled water under a towel. I thought of a pair of shoes that she had outgrown before they were worn out, and the bus, and the bakery where I cleaned the floors at five in the morning, and a winter coat. I thought of a car turning the corner by a church.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was perfectly steady. “But Clem isn’t a toy that you can throw away, and then come back for, whenever you feel like it. She doesn’t even know you.”
“Gran?”
She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She had a spatula in one hand. She had heard it all. She was looking at the man on the porch, with her head a little on one side, for about four seconds.
I had told her the truth, when she was old enough. I had told her gently, over a bowl of cereal, at about seven, that she had a father, and that he had not been able to stay. She had thought about it for a long time. She had asked whether he was dead. I had said no. She had said, oh, and gone on eating.
“Sweetheart!” said Colton.
He crossed the hall in two strides. He knelt on my worn rug, in his charcoal suit, and he put his arms round her and hugged her, hard, with a great, practiced warmth, and she stood there, quite still, with her arms at her sides and the spatula pointing at the ceiling.
“Sweetheart, I’m your dad,” said Colton Eddings. “I’m going to take you home with me, soon. And you’ll live in a much better house. Instead of this dump.”
I saw her face.
It was a thing that I will not forget. It did not crumple, or flush, or go white. It went, quite slowly, very still, the way a pond goes still when something drops into it. She looked past his shoulder. She looked at me. And she gave me a very small, very quick, very careful nod, as one nods to a person across a room to say I have it.
“I’d like some pancakes,” said Clem, into his lapel.
“Of course you would.” He laughed. “Of course. Let’s, ah, let’s sit.”
I did not know it, then, but it was the most important thing that anyone has said to me in my life. She was not agreeing. She was buying time.
THE SATURDAYS
He came again, the next week, and the next.
He did not once ask what she liked. He did not ask her what she was reading, or what she was afraid of, or what she wanted to be. I watched him. I watched his eyes, which went round the room, and the walls, and the stove, and came back to her, again and again, with a kind of bright, hungry, assessing look, as though she were a house that he was thinking of buying.
On the second Saturday, he said that he had something fun.
“It’s a science kit,” he said. He took a small white box out of his briefcase, with a green logo, and a sticker on the front. “It’s, it’s a DNA thing. It’s very popular. It tells you, you know, where your family’s from. We could do it together.”
Clem looked at it for four seconds.
“What do I have to do?”
“Just open your mouth.” He had a long cotton swab in a plastic tube. “It doesn’t hurt. You rub it on the inside of your cheek, like so. And then I send it away, and in a few weeks, we’ll know everything.”
“Everything?”
“All about you.”
She opened her mouth. I was at the sink. I had my back to them, with my hands in the dishwater, and I remember that I smiled. I thought, how nice. He’s trying. I thought that it was a very sweet, clumsy, hopeful sort of thing to do.
It was the only time that I have ever been wrong about her father in a way that I cannot forgive myself for.
On the third Saturday, his telephone rang.
He looked at the screen. His face changed. It was a very slight thing, a tightening at the jaw, and he said, quickly, excuse me, I need to take this, and went out through the screen door onto the porch, and shut it behind him.
I saw the name on the screen. I was not trying to. It was lit up, white on blue, in large letters, on the table, before he picked it up. WRENFIELD CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL.
I thought nothing of it. I thought that it was something to do with his work. I turned back to the stove.
Clem was at the table. She had a book open in front of her. She had, I noticed, not turned a page in about ten minutes. She was sitting perfectly still, with her head tilted a little toward the screen door, and her pencil in her fist.
She was writing.
THE SUMMONS
It came on a Tuesday.
It was a long white envelope in the mailbox, with a return address in the city, and the name of a law firm in small gray capitals. I opened it standing at the kitchen counter. I read it twice. I sat down.
***PETITION TO TERMINATE GUARDIANSHIP.* There was a case number. There was my name, Agnes M. Whitcomb, Guardian, and his, Colton J. Eddings, Petitioner, and a girl’s, Clementine L. Eddings, a minor. I had never seen it written that way. Eddings. It sat on the page like a stranger in a pew.**
It said that the petitioner, the natural father of the minor, having established a stable and prosperous household, requested that the court terminate the guardianship, in the best interests of the child. It said that a hearing had been set for the twentieth. It said that I might, if I wished, retain counsel.
Clem found me at the table. She read it over my shoulder. She is a very fast reader.
“He’s really doing it.”
“Yes.”
“Gran.” She said it very quietly. “I don’t want to go.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to live with him. I want to stay here. I want my room, and the, and you.” Her voice shook. “I’ll do anything. I’ll run away. I’ll hide.”
“No, you won’t.” I took her face in both hands. It was very hot. “You’ll do as I say. We’re going to go, and we’re going to tell the truth, and we’re going to see.”
But I noticed, afterward, when she had stopped, and washed her face, and gone up to her room, that she had left her backpack on the chair. I noticed that it was zipped. And I noticed that she came down, an hour later, in her pajamas, and took it up with her again, in both arms, as one carries something that might wake.
10:15 A.M. — THE OTHER SIDE
His lawyer was called Reginald Thorpe.
See more on the next page