Something tender this way comes

She is not yet half my age when she moves into the house behind mine. She is a wisp of a thing I don't pay attention to until she starts getting big. Then I notice that she's alone most of the time, with no way to get to the hospital if something goes wrong. I knock on her door and tell her not to hesitate to call on me if she needs help.

She needs company.

She comes into my kitchen on nice days when the door's open and blithely talks about her life. She was abused at home and finally kicked out. Now she's 17, pregnant as all get out, and living with the baby's father who is just putting her up until the child is born. She loves him. She wants to marry him. She wants to be a family. He is dating another girl.

The days go by and she grows large. Her eyes are perfectly clear and her skin glows. She wears an apron in the kitchen and fries chicken. I cannot imagine why this cannot be. I wish he could love her. He can't, he tells me. She lies too much. Lies to get her way. Lies to avoid trouble. Lies to get attention and lies to divert it.

That may be, but I don't care. I don't care if she lies the way I don't care if mendicants fake destitution. That kind of desperation goes far deeper than misplaced affection and genuine need. Lying begins with self-deception and self-deception derives from great pain. Somehow it makes me love her more.

She doesn't know I love her, not in the front of her mind anyway, and she doesn't know that she is the first person to walk into my life and remind me if I'd had kids when my brother did, they'd be her age. I would be struggling at my first newspaper job after college as a grandmother.

I am glad she is my neighbor and not my child, whom I would have surely failed as completely. Because my life once felt a lot like hers appears, I know from whence I speak. In fact, I know it so completely I begin to counsel her.

It is toward the end, when she has to decide whether or not to keep the baby. The fleeting delight of pretend family is gone. Anguish takes its place, but she keeps it nicely packaged while everyone around her tells her to give her baby away. Including me. I am adopted, I tell her. So is my neighbor. It's really for the best. How would you take care of a child? You have no job, no car, no home.

We are relentless, I'm sure, and she finally lets loose the floodgates. I find her behind the little house one day sitting on the ground. She is weeping like Mary over Jesus. How can I give my baby away? She implores me. How can I give away someone I already love? I have no answer for this. I have only a tug from someplace deep in my gut I never knew was there. Someone may have said this of me. I cannot with any conviction say that I am not troubled by that loss. I make a sudden transit from telling my neighbor to give up her baby to telling my mother to give up me.

A few weeks later we sit in my kitchen. She has pictures. He's two months now, she says. The couple from the city give him everything, she says.

We look out the window and sigh.

Monday, March 8, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.