CHAPTER 5

R aleigh stared at her computer screen. She used to love her job. Now, she couldn’t focus on anything other than her daughter. Eden would be four years old right now. Raleigh wondered what she’d be interested in these days. A year ago, she loved to color. Whenever they’d gone to the grocery store and strolled down the aisle with cards and books, Eden would always want a new coloring book. Raleigh would indulge her because Eden had colored in every other one she owned already, and she loved to color. Would she still love it? Had she moved on to something else, like most kids did? Was she on a bicycle with training wheels?

Raleigh closed her computer and looked at the photo on her desk. It was of the two of them and one of the last pictures she had of them together. It wasn’t fair. They’d gone through so much just to have her. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She had. She’d gone through so much to have her. Millie had gone through a lot, too, but that had been before this. That had been when they’d still been a couple.

Raleigh had been twenty-four when they met. Millie had been thirty and the much more experienced older woman. They’d fallen in love and moved in together a year later. They hadn’t planned on getting married, but neither of them had ruled it out. The one thing they’d both known they wanted had been a baby. After thinking about adoption versus in vitro, Millie had told her that she wanted to be pregnant. She wanted to be the one to give birth and hold the baby in her arms after. It had been important enough to her, and Raleigh had just wanted to be a mom, so they’d started the process. Three attempts later, they still hadn’t had a baby. Millie had blamed herself and lashed out at Raleigh. Raleigh had offered to have their baby, and Millie had gotten mad at that. Raleigh had suggested they could adopt. Millie hadn’t wanted that. Raleigh had done research about having the fertilized egg of one mom implanted in the other, but that would mean she’d be pregnant, and Millie wouldn’t be. No idea had seemed to work, so they’d tried a fourth round. When that hadn’t worked, either, the doctor had suggested they stop since the likelihood of it working on the next attempt hadn’t been high, and the costs had been getting astronomical.

Millie had gone into a deep depression after that. Raleigh had done what she could to help. She’d suggested they go to a couple’s counselor, that Millie explore therapy on her own, and that they consider adoption or Raleigh getting pregnant again, but nothing seemed to pull Millie out of her funk. Eventually, they’d watched their friends get married and become parents, causing Millie to retreat into herself even more. Raleigh had loved her, but she hadn’t known what else to do. Her girlfriend, the woman she’d thought she’d spend the rest of her life with, hadn’t wanted to look at her, let alone touch her. Millie had started sleeping in their guest room. Raleigh had started making excuses to work late in her office or to go out with friends. At that point, they weren’t a couple anymore and hadn’t been in a while.

Raleigh had still wanted to be a mom, though, and at age thirty, she thought maybe if she did this, maybe if she could get pregnant, Millie would see that they could still be parents together. She hadn’t thought it would take on the first try, so she hadn’t told Millie what she was doing. She hid this very important thing from her partner and still felt guilty about that. She hadn’t known it at the time, but the day she’d come home to find her girlfriend moving out of their house was the day she’d conceived. Eden came along months later, and Millie was already gone.

When Raleigh told her that she was pregnant, Millie looked at her for the first time in a long time then, and there was such an expression of disgust that Raleigh knew they were over. She’d made a mistake in thinking this would fix them, but she hadn’t made a mistake in getting pregnant because she’d ended up with her beautiful baby girl.

Raleigh would probably never know why it had been so important to Millie to have the baby herself that she’d been willing to ruin their relationship. Now, she wouldn’t know Eden, and Eden would’ve been her daughter, too. Millie lived about twenty minutes away from the house Raleigh had moved into after Eden was born. When she’d found out that Eden was missing, she’d rushed over, and she’d been there for Raleigh. Millie had been there for her through the hardest part of her life. She still called every few weeks to check in and offered to help however she could. She was married to a dentist now, and it hadn’t taken Millie long to find her, either. Six months after she’d left Raleigh, they’d met. Another year after that, they were engaged, and they’d married the following autumn. Millie’s wife also had a child from a previous marriage, and they were now a happy family, from what it seemed. That had hurt Raleigh maybe the most of all. She’d tried everything to make Millie happy. They could’ve adopted. Raleigh clearly hadn’t had any problems getting pregnant herself. But Millie had been insistent. Now, she was forty-one years old and had a stepdaughter. Millie was happy with someone else, and Raleigh was alone.

◆◆◆

“I’m still finding stuff out,” Hollis shared. “It’s like, every day, there’s something else that’s suddenly making sense to me when it never did before. We moved around so much. It seemed that just when we would get settled, we’d have to leave again. I learned to know when it was coming. It was usually when I’d get home from school. There would be a candy bar on the table. Dark chocolate with almonds; the fancy kind.” She chuckled a little as she looked at her shoes. “We didn’t have much money, so spending a few dollars on candy like that wasn’t like him. It signaled bad news. Later, it got to the point where he wouldn’t even say anything. The candy bar delivered the news to me: the next day or, sometimes, a couple of days later, we’d leave.” She laughed a little louder. “In fact, when I was thirteen, I saw the candy bar on the table, so I went into my room and packed my stuff. I didn’t have much, just a couple of bags, really. The next morning, I put the bags out in the living room, expecting the truck to be packed, too. He came out of his room and asked me what I was doing. I told him we were leaving, and he said we weren’t. I told him I saw the candy bar. He said it was from last time. He’d been putting food in the cabinets and moved it. I guess I stopped eating them before this. I just left them where they were. Instead of buying a new one, he’d been reusing the same one. He’d left it out by mistake. I unpacked, and three months later, there it was again. It was sitting there on the kitchen table, mocking me. I ate it that time. I wanted him to buy a new one. I was so angry. I couldn’t understand why we could never just stay in one place.” Hollis looked up and met Raleigh’s eyes. “I don’t know what to do about all of this. He’s my father. He’s sitting in a cell right now because he should be; he did something awful. But he’s still my dad… It’s silly because I can’t seem to stop thinking about that damn candy bar. He didn’t have to buy it. He could’ve just shoved our stuff in the truck and told me to get in. But he still bought it. He always tried to make it sound like a good move once we were on the road. He’d call it an adventure, like he always did, and he’d let me know what cool stuff we’d get to do when we got there.”

“He tried to make it fun for you,” Molly spoke.

“I guess. But he failed. Wherever we went, I couldn’t do anything there. I’d end up at the library alone because I couldn’t play sports or join clubs. He didn’t want me having sleepovers or going to friends’ houses. It’s stuff you don’t think about when you’re little. It’s just your dad telling you what you can and can’t do. But now that I’m here, I know he just didn’t want me to get close enough to anyone because he didn’t want them to figure it out. By the time I was a teenager, I’d all but stopped trying to make friends. I had a few in high school just because I happened to sit at the right lunch table one day, but then we moved again, and I lost them. I stopped trying altogether after that.”

“That’s a pretty natural defense mechanism, I’d imagine,” John noted.

“Yeah, I guess,” Hollis said. “I was so happy when I went to university because I thought now I was finally on my own. My dad didn’t want me to go to school; he wanted me to get a job somewhere near him. But I just needed to be out in the world for once without him telling me what to do or not to do, so I went to school and had a roommate. I thought we’d become friends, or she’d help me make friends.” Hollis shook her head. “She was hardly ever there. She had a boyfriend and spent most of her time with him, so I went to the library and studied. I never really left. I live alone, I have microwave dinners for one, and I have no real friends outside of the people from work who get together for a drink sometimes because I don’t know how to make friends anymore. I don’t know how to be around people and get to know them like that. He made me this way.” Tears welled up in Hollis’s eyes. “And he took me away from my mom, who bought me toys and told me I had friends in the neighborhood around my age whom I used to play with before he took me. I was in kindergarten and happy. I had playdates with kids from school and always had so much to tell her when I got home from school. He took me away from all of that.” Hollis wiped a tear rolling down her cheek. “But I still love him.”

“That’s okay,” Molly told her. “You’re allowed to love your father. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“How do you deal with having two opposing feelings at the same time?”

“Cognitive dissonance,” Raleigh said softly.

“Pardon?” Hollis asked.

“Oh, sorry. I just meant that it’s called cognitive dissonance when two beliefs kind of clash like that,” Raleigh said.

“Right,” Hollis replied with a shaky nod .

Hollis continued for a few more minutes before Molly suggested they take a break. Prior to that, John had started the meeting off by talking about how his son would be graduating high school this year and how he’d been so good at basketball that John wondered if he would’ve gotten a scholarship to college. Samantha talked about her mother, who went missing shortly after her thirteenth birthday. She was now twenty-five and about to get married. It nearly broke Raleigh whenever the woman talked about her mom missing out on the important moments of her life because Raleigh was missing out on the important moments Eden would have. Every day Eden was gone, there was another milestone she wouldn’t get to see the first time it happened, and that made Raleigh so angry, she wanted to kick the chair again.

“Hi,” she said, walking up to Hollis, who was pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“Oh. Am I in your way?” she asked.

Raleigh smiled and said, “No, I just wanted to say hi. I came in right when the meeting started, so I didn’t get a chance to say hi to everyone.”

“Do you usually do that? Say hi to everyone?” Hollis added the powdered creamer to her coffee.

“I try to, yeah.” Raleigh nodded.

“Should I be doing that? I got here a few minutes early, but I waited outside.”

Raleigh poured herself some coffee and said, “There are no rules, Hollis. We come here to share, to listen, and to support one another. You can say hi, if you want, or just sit down.”

“How long have you been coming here?”

“A few months,” Raleigh replied.

“Does it help?”

“Sometimes,” she said honestly. “And, sometimes, it hurts to listen to their stories because it makes me think of my own. Selfish, I know, but it’s unavoidable.”

“Your little girl, right? ”

“Yeah,” she said and looked down at the sugar.

“What’s her name?”

“Eden Marie,” she replied with a wide smile.

“That’s beautiful,” Hollis said, smiling back at her.

“Thank you,” Raleigh replied. “She’s beautiful. It’s been three hundred and seventy-two days since I’ve seen her smile.”

“I’m sorry,” Hollis said, stirring her coffee.

“So am I,” she replied, sighing. “Listen, I don’t know if you have any plans after this, but if you want, we could grab a cup of coffee down the street. It’s not much better than this, but they at least have pie.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“No problem,” Raleigh replied.

“No, it’s not… My mom–” Hollis stopped. “I already feel guilty about coming here and getting a job because it means I’m away from her.”

“You missed so much time.”

“That, and… she has stage-four cancer,” the woman revealed. “I don’t know how much time she has left. She insisted I come here, though. She said she’d only be sleeping anyway. But I don’t want to miss any time with her.”

“I understand,” Raleigh said. “I’m sorry, Hollis. I don’t really know what else to say.”

“It’s okay. Thank you,” she replied. Then, she looked down at her coffee in the Styrofoam cup and added, “Maybe one cup?”

“Coffee?”

“After this,” Hollis said. “I think I could use it, and she’s sleeping right now. I can get home right after.”

“Yeah, okay. One cup. And I’ll consider sharing my pie with you,” Raleigh teased.

Hollis smiled, and for the first time in a very long time, Raleigh thought of another woman as beautiful.