If there's one thing I've learned from spending time at St. Catherine's Clinc, it's that I lived a mostly selfish life before. It didn’t start off easy, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a selfish girl with dreams and desires all centered around myself.
My mother died in childbirth—her labor came on too fast, and I was born in the car—and after a month nursing bottles from my father, I wasn't gaining weight, so my Aunt Britta and Uncle Walter took me in. They had a one-year-old, my cousin Landon, but still, they made time and space for me. I saw my father on the weekends until I was four, when he was involved in a one-motorcycle wreck on a lonely Georgia highway outside Albany. Just before I started kindergarten, my aunt and uncle adopted me and made me Meredith Kinsey.
Aunt Britta always made sure I looked nice and knew the things a girl should know. Cross your legs when you're wearing a skirt and don't talk to strange men. Don't go close to big vans with dark windows. That kind of thing. I did okay, I guess, until I hit puberty, and by then I'd started feeling...left out. Maybe it's because Aunt Britta was dark-haired, with brown eyes, and I'm so fair, or maybe it was because she used to introduce herself at teacher conferences as my aunt. I wanted a mother and a father. My childhood was consumed by wanting to be normal. A normal child with a mom and a dad. Not an orphan.
When one of Landon's friends kissed me on a freshman/sophomore class trip to the aquarium, I felt so good...and it wasn't too long before kissing boys became my thing.
It made me feel brand new; alive and wanted. Usually I'd go to bed and hug my pillow and I'd dream of marrying whoever I was kissing at the time. I would marry my crush and we would have a baby, and when I got six or seven months pregnant I would just go to the hospital and stay until I had the baby. No dying in the car. After that, we'd be a family. I wouldn't be the left-out little girl. I would be the mother. I would have a daughter with strawberry-colored hair just like mine, and when I took her to the grocery store, our outfits would color coordinate.
I started writing stories in high school and it was around that time I met Sam, the band director. I learned how much I didn't know about what men and women did, and for a while, I relished the pleasant things he taught me. The world was worth being in, because someone wanted me.
I was upset after Sam left town. Devastated. I had this crazy idea that I would get a job in Alpharetta, where he had transferred, and I would marry him, but Aunt Britta (who had no idea why I wanted to move to Alpharetta), insisted I go to college. I got a scholarship to UGA and went for something I thought would be easy: journalism.
I was pretty much just like I was in high school, in college. I dated a few guys and we did more than kiss. I didn't sleep with all of them. My roomie, Carla, used to call me a kissy whore, and I guess I was. I was looking for the hugs and cuddling, and the kissing and other things—the hand-jobs and the blow-jobs and doggy style—were just a way to get there. To a place where I felt loved and cherished.
And then I found another rush, another passion, and strangely enough, it was the student newspaper. For about a year and a half, part of junior year and all of senior year, I stopped dating completely and just worked. I loved it.
I would go to the bar every once in a while, or smoke pot at a friend’s house. But the rest of the time I was working, chasing my buzz. It wasn't a bad life, and I never even thought about my lack of parents.
So, when I met Sean the weekend before graduation—when I finally met the infamous Sean Tacoma, the weed dealer I’d never met (because I was always left in the car while Alec ran in)—I couldn't help but be smitten.
Sean was cute, with bright green eyes and reddish blond hair, and all I could think about was what pretty babies we would have. They would be cuter than all the other kids in preschool. Better-dressed. And they would have the perfect family with a mother and a father.
Stupid, I know. Stupid, selfish Meredith.
I squeeze my eyes shut thinking about how stupid I was. I didn't know where my choices would take me, and if I had... I could have joined the Peace Corps. Been a missionary. Nowadays I think that I would like that. Volunteer work. Work that helps people. Now that I don't have any choices that don't suck.
Sometimes, since coming to the clinic, I think about the pretty kids that Sean and I would have had—if we hadn’t gotten into trouble in Atlanta. If I hadn’t fled to Vegas. Sometimes I think about the children I’ve met here who were born without arms and legs, children with cleft lips, children who can’t afford clothes, and I feel sick with my old self. I wish I could send a note back to my past.
“Señorita Merri, you look sleepy!”
I'm holding four-year-old Maria in my lap, and we're working on her hand coordination. She has a rare condition where she's missing a part of her brain—the corpus collosum—so she has trouble with fine motor skills.
I lean in and kiss her on the nose, then snap my teeth near her cheek. “Grrrr! I am a dragon! Dragons never sleep!”
Maria giggles and snaps her teeth at me, and in seconds we are rolling on the floor. She flops onto her back, still giggling, and points to my hair. “You have a barrette. It looks like a diamond. I like diamonds.”
It's not a real diamond. I found it on the ground one day and only kept it because I really needed something to keep my hair out of my face. Pretty soon, I won’t need it anymore.
“Can you get it out of my hair? If you can, you can have it.”
I feel her little fingers grip my neck as her other hand delves into my hair, and I can't resist tickling her underneath her arm.
“No fair!” she cries, but she's laughing.
I lean my head down and wait for her to free the barrette.
If only I had known how nice life is when you're focused on something besides yourself.
When Maria gets the barrette, I clap and kiss her cheek. I hold her close for just a second, telling her a silent goodbye. Tomorrow, I'm leaving. I hope she wears the barrette for a long time. I hope that she’s the prettiest girl at preschool.
CHAPTER TEN
The club is less than fifty yards ahead: a box-shaped, white and red building framed by a parking lot that’s surrounded by dirt. As I come up on it, I realize it’s not quite as small as I thought—maybe about the size of a roller skating rink back home. The parking lot isn’t empty but it isn’t full, either. I count maybe fifteen or so cars and one ragged out white Honda CB500F.
I notice, as I park beside an old Maxima, that on the wooden porch there’s a girl with long, bleached blonde hair wearing nothing but a sombrero and a black string bikini. I wonder how seedy a place has to be for Priscilla to call it that.