Roseborough: A Novel

Chapter 4

70 Chapter Four 1 The days passed slowly Mary Lou did not return to class. Anne had not thought that she would. The following Monday she told the class about her encounter with Echo, although she did not mention the terror of her climb to the tree house. “I saw Echo,” she said, telling nothing of the girl’s wild beauty, of her animal grace. “And I talked to her,” she said, hiding the despair she had known when she could not find the words to help Echo, words that would have made her listen. “She’s safe. She seemed happy but she refused to come home. She ran away again,” she had finished, not allowing herself to see again the desolation of the empty path, to feel its emptiness. This evening she opens her book to begin a discussion of the assigned reading. But Ed—it would be Ed—will not have it. “Wait a minute!” he says, looking more puzzled than angry. “You gonna leave it at that? What about Mary Lou? That must ‘a just broke her heart.” Then, glaring at Tony, “Well, I’d like to call her. You got her number?” “She doesn’t have a phone,” Anne says, and forestalling his next question, “and it’s against our policy to give out addresses or phone numbers.” 71 Roseborough Frowning, slumped in his seat, Ed crosses his arms over his chest and allows Anne to begin the discussion. Turning into her driveway the next afternoon, Anne sees that Joan, her neighbor, is clipping a small hedge. Her eighteenmonth -old, Nikki, is swatting the hedge with a stick. In her straw hat and denim skirt, Joan is reassuring. Anne calls out a greeting to her. Joan stands, takes off her hat, and waves it. “Hello!” she calls. “Come on over if you’ve got time. We’ll have a glass of iced tea.” “Give me ten minutes.” Slipping into her sweats, tying her shoes, she tells herself, After that Alice-in-Wonderland adventure in the woods with a runaway girl, a glass of iced tea with a neighbor will be like stepping into the real world. This is what she needs. And the minute she steps into Joan’s yellow kitchen with its smell of freshly baked cookies, she understands that Echo’s world is more fantasy than real. “Have you thought any more about it?” Joan asks, watching Anne sweep the baby up into her arms. “May I give him a cookie?” she asks, ignoring the question. Anne knows what the it is. She and Joan have talked about adoption for three years, and now that Joan has adopted Nikki, she’s a proselytizing convert to motherhood. Holding Nikki in her lap, Anne watches him eat. He chews, swallows, drops whatever he’s eating with drunken abandon. Considering Joan’s question, Anne gives herself over to the mess of his runny nose, the wet cookie-crumb mouth he wipes on her tee shirt, the cheerful uh-ohs when crumbs fall to the floor. “Well, have you? Have you thought about it?” “Ithinkaboutit.Ofcourse,Ithinkaboutit.There’sanagency you can go through. Single, I could go to China and adopt a baby girl. They prefer boys in China. If I could find another Nikki, I’d do it in a minute,” she says, squeezing an oomph out of him. 72 Jane Roberts Wood But she’s not quite ready to begin the process of adoption. The Single Parenting class has made her aware of the difficulty of parenting a child alone. After a few weeks the class stops asking about Mary Lou, but without her presence, it seems as if the energy and the sense of possibility is gone from the class. Anne tries to recover some of the momentum of the discussions. Knowing that money is a problem for most single parents, she asks Jake Harrison from the business division to come in and help her students become better money managers. She feels a small gratification when the session helps Ed realize that it costs his ex-wife, who has custody of their daughter, four times as much to take care of their child as the amount of his child support payments. But when Ed asks Anne to help him determine the fair amount he should pay for child support, “Talk to Jake Harrison about that,” she says, carefully drawing back from involvement with her students. When she jogs she often meditates about the changes she...