Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [118]
“Does it bother you,” she asked him, “that you don’t look like your parents?”
Jude folded his hands in his lap, then cupped his elbows with them, then dropped them to his sides. His thighs were long and pale and unfreckled, and the hair on them was a different red, ginger.
“Have you seen how bald my dad is?”
“Well, that they don’t look like you, then.”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “It would be easier if they had my dashing good looks.”
The hair on her own legs, several days unshaved—she found it impossible to shave in the shower at seven months pregnant, not to mention while sharing a bathroom with six boys—was bristly and black. She pulled her nightgown over them as far as it would reach.
“Seriously, though. Did you ever think about looking for them? Your birth parents?”
Jude shook his head quickly. “Not really.”
“Really?”
“If they wanted to find me, they could.”
“Maybe they think you don’t want to be found.”
“Well, maybe I don’t.” He thought for a while. “I guess I don’t have high hopes for them wanting to be part of my life, seeing as the ones who adopted me don’t.”
“Oh, come on. Harriet and Les love you. They’re just as screwed up as any other parents.”
Jude was staring out at the parking lot again. He said, “You know who I’d like to find instead?”
“Who?”
“Teddy’s parents. Teddy’s mom and dad. I don’t even know if she knows he’s dead. And Teddy didn’t even know if his dad was dead. He never even met him.”
“What would you do if you found them?”
Jude rubbed his head. “I don’t know. I guess I’d just decide if they were good people or not. So I’d know.”
“Well, maybe the parents who gave you up were good people, but they had to give you up anyway.”
“Eliza.” Jude swung his gaze over to her. “You’re not giving up that baby.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not.” She wasn’t lying. But she’d be lying if she said she didn’t think about it every day.
“Look,” he said, “you’re going to be fine. The baby will be fine. Look at Johnny and Teddy—they’re brothers, and they don’t look anything alike. Look at Matthew—he’s Korean, and his parents are Jewish. What’s it matter who the kid looks like?”
He was making an admirable case, but Eliza could see him struggling. They had learned only days ago, over twenty-cent tacos at San Loco, that Matthew was adopted. He’d reported this fact with perfect indifference, Tabasco sauce dripping down his chin, the same way he reported that he had two sisters, that he was from Ontario, and that his father was an orthodontist. In fact, he’d administered Jude’s braces, and Jude hadn’t even known they’d been the same Stein. Eliza had watched Jude watch Matthew. Was it possible, Jude must have been thinking, not to care?
“But what am I supposed to say,” she went on, “when people ask about her father? What am I supposed to tell her when she asks?”
There would be no pretending that Johnny, blond and blue-eyed, was Annabel’s dad. The idea seemed suddenly absurd: why would they even want to? Why not tell the truth? Why had they allowed the facts of her pregnancy to become so thickly veiled in secrecy? Fathers died all the time. They died before their children were born, or when they were babies. Fathers died in wars and accidents; fathers died of the flu while sailing across the Arctic; of aneurysms while sitting in their offices, on conference calls to L.A. Why then would Eliza allow her child to be born into shame, a particular condition the three of them, it seemed to her now, had conspired to invent?
She was jogging her charms again. Locket, star, keys, the engagement ring she had taken off when her hands began to swell, Teddy’s lucky subway token. This last she pressed between her fingers, feeling the warmth of her skin through the perfect void in the center. Something to remember him by. She knew nearly nothing about Teddy. This was what was shameful. Should she tell her daughter that?
Jude was saying something sweet and useless,