Anna grabbed her towel that had faded from its original white and started drying her body. Wrapping it around her hair, she stepped out of the shower to get dressed. She picked a Victorian style skirt, also faded to off-white. After putting in her contacts and applying mascara, she went to go find her sandals and headed out to the car to pick up her friend Johnny.
They got back to the cabin and Johnny rolled a joint while she turned on some funk music. After an hour of giggles and conspiracies, the conversation took a dark turn and he opened up about how his recent attempt at a relationship had ended.
“So I’m adopted,” he spilled abruptly, fingering his auburn beard. “And that’s really affected how vulnerable I allow myself to be. It made it especially rough this time because I’d actually gotten to a point where I’d let myself open up to her.”
“Really?” she asked, taken aback. “…So the adoption really affected you like that?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I remember the first feeling I had after I found out as a child was pure rejection. And honestly, that’s the foundation my emotional life has grown from, really.”
In a book she’d read eight years earlier, she’d learned about the pains adopted children go through, identity and self-worth being the foremost problems. Poor guy, she thought to herself.
“So it wasn’t an open adoption, huh?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “Closed. I don’t know them and I don’t know what the story was.”
She’d also read that open adoptions were the best alternative to traditional adoption. In one scenario she knew about, the birth parents had chosen the adoptive parents, met them, and agreed that the child would know about the adoption and would have the choice to meet them when he decided he was ready. Supposedly this new open system would alleviate a lot of the identity issues the children would have.
He continued. “But I don’t think that really would’ve made a difference. I mean, why would the people who I could’ve grown up with send me off to someone else? Why would they start my life for me like that? I don’t care what their reason was; that’s messed up to do to someone you’ve created from your own DNA. I don’t want to know them… Fuck that.”
“You know what, Anna? I’m so sorry, but I’m just not in the right place in my head to really chill right now. I’m still upset about Amy. Would you hate me if I asked you to take me back home?”
“No, that’s perfectly fine, hun… I’m not really feeling it tonight, either.” She didn’t have the heart to say anything more. She felt for him. She also felt herself shrinking back into herself faster than Alice could say ‘drink me’.
She couldn’t help it as her gaze wandered up to the painting above his head. The bearded, black-haired man in it was staring off into the distance to the right. She didn’t know what the young man had been staring at when she’d painted it, and she hadn’t seen him in years and it’d been longer since she’d seen that young, hopeful look. Some experiences just drain that from people.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
She’d woken up in a hospital bed, drugged, but could still feel the stitches. She looked down at her white gown, stained with blood she knew would only leave it off-white if she washed it later. She started moaning and heard someone get up from a chair. Looking over, she saw a black-bearded face come into focus.
“How long was I out?” she mumbled.
“A few hours. You doing okay?” he asked.
She paused. “…Do you think they’d mind if I held him for a little bit?”
“They’re feeding him now… hey… I know this is supposed to be better and all, but are you sure that’s a good idea anyway? You can just let this go and know he’ll understand when he’s older.”
She didn’t mean to glare, so she turned her head and pretended to go back to sleep.
………………………………………………………………………………………
On the silent drive back to Johnny’s house, she remembered the day eight years ago that she’d pissed on a stick and waited. After a couple minutes, the stick had grown two pink lines across it. She’d stared, frozen. She and her black-bearded man had then made the hardest decision of their lives, to hopefully give their child a better life than they thought they could do otherwise.
Those tests are cruel, she thought as she followed the headlights’ path. Those two pink lines. That’s all they give you. No answers. Nothing that wouldn’t end in pain. Just those two pink goddamn lines.
Fuck that.
June 2013
