Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [61]
But look: Eliza, too, had once seemed unknowable, and now he and Johnny knew something about her that no one else did.
“I wouldn’t have gotten him fucked up,” she’d said, “if I knew you were going to.”
Jude had countered: “Well, neither would I.”
The full weight of the news descended upon them slowly, over moments and weeks, a package from a heaven-sent stork circling lazily down to earth. In the window of a stationery store near Union Square, alongside wedding invitations and business cards, Jude saw a birth announcement tied with baby blue ribbon: We welcome with love our gift from above!
Their secret had disarmed them; it had safely placed them all on Teddy’s team. They spoke of it with giddiness and gravity, or with panic, or with a sense of duty, but always with breathless disbelief at their unexpected fortune. (Science was so messed up! The friction of two bodies could make something that wasn’t there before. You could rub together two sticks and start a fire.) The conversations took place at Johnny’s, or walking down the street, or across the table at Dojo’s, or on the phone; it was one conversation, without beginning or end; it adopted its own code; it repeated itself; it spun around them, binding them like the silky threads of a web or a cocoon, an amniotic sac.
JUDE: Shouldn’t we tell your mom?
ELIZA: She’ll just make me get an abortion.
JUDE: Why would she make you get an abortion?
ELIZA: Because. She told me, “If you ever get pregnant, you’re getting an abortion.”
JUDE: What about my dad?
ELIZA: He’d just tell my mom.
JOHNNY: It’s better if no one else knows. This way we can control it.
ELIZA: Well, I can’t keep it a secret forever. People at school will start to notice. Someday the baby’s going to, you know, get born.
JOHNNY: People will find out when they find out. But at least we can keep it under wraps for now. After a certain point, you can’t get an abortion.
JUDE: But where will the baby live? Are you going to raise it with your mom? Are you going to go to school?
JOHNNY: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
(Johnny was always saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”)
JUDE: What about going to the doctor? Have you been to the doctor yet?
ELIZA: I don’t know where to go. All I have is Dr. Betsy. She’s a pediatrician.
JOHNNY: What are they going to tell her? “Yes, you’re pregnant”?
ELIZA: And don’t I have to go with an adult? My ID sucks.
JUDE: Johnny’s an adult. He could say he’s your boyfriend.
ELIZA: Yeah, but he’s not my guardian. You need a guardian to sign forms.
JUDE: There are tests and things. You can find out if the baby’s okay. She did coke while she was pregnant. Isn’t that bad?
JOHNNY: Yes, it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. But what’s done is done. They put mothers in jail for that in some states. You want her to have the kid in jail?
JUDE: No.
ELIZA: No.
JOHNNY: We don’t need a doctor yet. We can live without a doctor.
You could live without most things most people depended on, according to Johnny: a family, a phone, a furnace, a taxable income, a high school diploma. And he was sort of right. Here they were, three teenagers, planning for a baby, and the sky was still high above them, winter blue; it hadn’t fallen.
Jude’s mother called every Sunday.
“Do you mean completely?”
“Completely.” He and Les had agreed not to tell her about the fire incident. There was no need to worry her.
“Even marijuana?”
“Completely.”
“Alcohol? Cigarettes?”
There was no sound for a few seconds. Then Harriet said evenly, “Good for you.”
He could picture her standing in the kitchen with the bone-colored phone to her ear, the kinky, too-long cord wrapped around her, dragging on the floor. Jude’s heart, which had been sort of holding its breath, deflated.
“Whatever. Don’t believe me.”
“Honey, I believe you. I’m surprised, is all. I hardly know what to expect