The social worker comes in an unspecified amount of time later, once the twilight sleep's started to wear off. Sunlight's streaming in from the half-shuttered window and it was dark when she arrived, so it could've been twelve hours, or it could've been a week. Between her legs is an open wound and a hazy memory. She didn't know she could be stretched so far and still snap back into position.
Where's my kid, Sandy asks, tongue so dry it feels like a pinecone inside her mouth, too big to be contained. Idiotically, she wants her mother, like that would make a thing in the world better, like she isn't supposed to be the mother herself now. Ma called once, after she hit the second trimester, to say 'Uncle' Ted wanted to pass on that she was going to burn in hell for what she did; if she is, she'll be saving him a seat right beside her. Missy, Melissa, where is she.
In the nursery, the social worker says, sitting down in the plastic chair beside her bed and crossing her legs at the ankle. Sandy wouldn't know how to get every inch of her outfit so crisply pressed if she memorized an instruction manual. She's doing just fine… but that's not her name, her parents are calling her Paula. The social worker pulls a clipboard out from behind her back. I need you to sign this. Just one last little bit of paperwork, and then I can let you get some rest, okay?
And if I don't sign it? If I take my goddamn baby and walk right out of here?
She's sweating like a hooker in church, papery hospital gown clinging to her back— she could live here for another thousand years and never get used to how muggy a Florida summer is, how the sky can suddenly open up for the kind of rainstorm Noah sailed away on. Sandy wants a cold-cut sandwich and a drink of water isn't sucked out of an ice chip and she wants her baby. More than that, she wants to go back in time and keep her legs shut, but she's stuck with the reality in front of her and was never much of a dreamer. Maybe that's why she and Sodapop were doomed from the start.
Contempt in her voice unfurls, comes out perfectly flat. Sandra, sweetheart, we talked about this. It's normal to have second thoughts right now, with your hormones going haywire, but that doesn't mean you have toacton them. I need you to use your head right now so that Mr. and Mrs. Green can practice giving her a bottle, okay? They're waiting.
This was always the foregone conclusion, from the minute 'Uncle' Ted came home with a one-way Pan Am ticket to Miami. Go to Florida, 'help Grandma out with her sciatica,' calm and uneventful delivery, stitched up, baby handed away, back to Tulsa like it never happened. Nine months spent in another dimension. Too bad the Will Rogers student body's got the memory of an elephant— and if she dares show her face there again for senior year, she's pretty sure Slutty Sandy is going to seem like an affectionate nickname.
And too bad she's not taking an empty-handed step outside this hospital.
I have time to decide, she says with the kind of rasp you get from smoking a pack of Kools one after the other, the way she did when she skipped two months in a row and realized she was in deep, deep shit. That was the deal. Seventy-two hours.
You're just a kid, the social worker says, the same way Pastor Jack always talked about flighty young girls leading men into temptation while trying to peer down their high-buttoned blouses. Sixteen—
I'm seventeen now.
You think the world is a nice place, to seventeen-year-old girls with babies on their hips and no wedding ring? Where exactly do you expect to get hired, who's going to watch that child all day? She's got both good cop and bad cop living inside her like a split personality. I have plenty of other clients just like you on my caseload. Have you ever lived in subsidized housing? Stood in line for your welfare check? You will ruin your life and that little girl's— you will never have anything good again, if you do this. Just another single mother statistic.
I've got money, she says, even though she doesn't expect Grandma and Grandpa will toss her out on the street besides. A hundred dollars, free and clear, how about that?
A hundred dollars of Soda's kid sister's drug cash, a sentence she never thought she'd have to compose before Jasmine showed up on her doorstep. And as that little bitch had all but said, smug Mona Lisa smile on her face as she handed it over, fitting that dirty money go to a dirty whore— no, forget it, it's whatever. She can't exactly expect Jasmine to like her after she got knocked up behind her favorite brother's back, and last she checked, money was money. Scruples and pride are a luxury she's long since stopped being able to afford.
The social worker laughs, covering her mouth with a manicured hand. Sandy hates her. You figure you've got a real nest egg there, huh— that won't even last you long enough for a year's supply of diapers. Babies aren't cheap.
And for a second, that's enough to shut her up. It was a lot of money on the East side, the same way Sandy was considered a looker back home for having half-decent teeth, trailer park pretty. You're a believer, Sandra, aren't you? Baptist, is that right?
Pentecostal, actually. Yes, those ones, the real freaks. Long hair and longer skirts. Speaking in tongues. Laying hands to heal. The whole kit and caboodle. You'd shack up with Lee Harvey Oswald to get away from that shit.
Do you think God would want you to wreck that family's happiness right now?
The adoptive family swims in her mind, faces as plain and blank as baked potatoes, Daddy in the fedora he wears to his downtown accounting job and Mama in a pink-and-white gingham dress that's long since gone out of style. Five years of trying and still nothing took, while she asked the wrong guy to come inside me, please once and it was curtains. I think I'm infertile, she remembers telling Bonnie as they cruised down the Ribbon with the windows down, foot up on her dashboard, sipping from a bottle of cherry coke and vodka. Soda wanted them to have seven kids, or maybe even ten, and he already had the names picked out. I don't know, I just have a weird feeling about it.
They're nice people. Probably. But she's disappointed plenty of nice people by now, gotten a hell of a lot of practice.
Are you imagining the father is going to take you back? That you'll get to play happy families once you show up with your precious little blessing? Because when a man's gone— the social worker leans forward, a hawk swooping down on her prey— trust me, he tends to stay gone.
Grandma says her mistake was not just rolling the dice on passing it off as his. Dom's got dark hair, Gigi. Soda's a natural blond and I am too. Nobody would ever buy it.
They're Indian, aren't they, the family, there's Indian blood in there? You just didn't think creatively enough— I've seen crazier pulled off, trust me. Society would've fallen apart by now if every man knew exactly whose baby he was raising.
Sandy's own 'father' was not half as cavalier when he learned that her paternity was an open question, back in the day. He detached her mother's retina, in fact, before cranking the ignition on his Ford and cruising on down to Chihuahua. Four-year-old Sandy, the dummy, didn't understand that not getting the Donald Duck xylophone he promised her for Christmas was about to be the least of her problems.
And sure, she could've pulled it off if she'd really tried, she's always been a good actress even with far less riding on it. She could've spit in 'Uncle' Ted's eye and married Soda anyway— even learning the truth wasn't enough to deter his white picket fence fantasies— but more than her conscience stopped her, she didn't want to be married to Soda. (She'd already known better than to appeal to Dom. He was spending some time with his brother in Muskogee who installed gutters, and would be until all of this blew over.)
I didn't sign anything yet, Sandy says slowly, propelled back to the present by the social worker snapping her fingers in front of her face. She's still an East side girl and even freshly-birthed, reeking like blood and unwashed hair and defeat, she's not going to be told shit by this jumped-up paper pusher. You can threaten me all you want, you've got nothing on me. That is my motherfucking baby, and if she ain't back here in the next five minutes, you're going to need to tranquilize me like a zoo animal to keep me from rippin' apart that nursery and findin' her.
The social worker slams the door loud enough to rupture her eardrum. She'll raise Missy better than her mother raised her, Sandy thinks as she reclines against the flat pillow, the rallying cry of daughters everywhere, or maybe she'll fuck her up in a new and exciting way of her very own. Regardless, she hasn't been covering up her mistakes, and she won't start now.
Sorry to have a bibliography at the end of my fanfiction, but if you want to know more about coercive adoption practices in the midcentury, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler is a really good look. This is relatively tame.