I might not be able to do that today. however. Today is one of the strangest, if not the strangest, day in my life: My mother is a psychologist who specializes in the problems of young people. She said she likes to get to someone before his or her emotional and psychological difficulties are not too comfortably seated. She has been in practice for more than ten years, and she is very well known and respected. All during that time she and my stepfather put off having a child of their own, and then they decided right after my sixteenth birthday to have one Just a little more than two months later at dinner. Mother announced she was pregnant. It was the most surprising thing I had heard my whole life. My mother. pregnant? It was so strange to realize she was actually going to give birth. There were girls my age giving birth!
"Your brother or sister might even be born on your birthday." she declared. "Wouldn't that be wonderful? We could have one big birthday party every year!"
I know Mommy was just trying to be excited for me because she never had a brother or sister in her home when she was growing up. But no I thought. It wouldn't be wonderful. Who wants to share your one special day with someone else? I used to feel sorry for Adrian and Cade because they had to do that, being twins. Adrian's solace is his gleeful bragging about being born a good two minutes before Cade. Cade counters by saying that was because he kicked Adrian out of their mother's womb first.
"I couldn't stand the smell," he bellows and laughs.
"That was exactly why I came out first. I couldn't stand your smell." Adrian throws back at him.
It's hard to believe they are brothers, even though they are mirror images of each other. They so enjoy belittling each other or defeating each other. It's as though they were put on same mysterious starting line and their births came after the report of a starting gun. Cade will always be in pursuit of Adrian, who had that two-minute advantage. However, at least when they are making fun of each other, they are not making fun of me. If I try to stop them from hurting each other. I know they will only turn on me.
Anyway, this morning I was waken by a great deal of commotion, shouting, doors slamming, footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway. My heart skipped a beat when I heard Miguel yell, "We're going to the hospital!"
When I went to the door. Miguel turned to me and cried. "Your mother's water has broken!"
I knew it was almost a month too soon. so I understood why she and Miguel were in a panic about it Mommy had always been nervous about being pregnant this late in life, so she had been very intense about her prenatal care, her vitamins, doctor's visits, diet, and exercise. Now, despite all that, she was being rushed to the hospital to give birth to what I already knew would be my baby brother. Claude, named for my maternal grandfather. Even before little Claude, as he would come to be known, opened his eyes and cried for the first time. I was already jealous of him, more jealous than Cade was of Adrian and Adrian was of Cade.
After all, my brother Claude would have my mother's last name. He would be a Fuentes, and he would belong in this family more than I did. He. would never have a nongrandma or nongrandpa.
Certainly, he would never feel like a stranger in his daddy's home. He had dozens of real relatives to call his family, not his stepfamily. He wouldn't need little silences to keep him from being too unhappy, nor would he have to worry about saying the wrong things to his father or his mother. He would never think he was on an island, cut off from the sea of society around him.
In short, he would never wonder who he really was.
Lying there and listening to the shouting and the footsteps dying out in the hallway as they left the house. I had one deep regret on this the most confusing of all days for me. Anyone who heard my regret might think it was probably the strangest thing of all, in fact.
Why was I born first? Why couldn't I be the one who was to be born today?
1
An Early Baby
.
I was too young to remember her before she
died, but my mother had a nanny, who, according to the way Mommy talks about her, was more of a mother to her than certainly her stepmother was. Sometimes I think how weird it is that Grandmother Grace. Mommy, and I have each had at least one stepparent in our lives. Are same people meant to be brought up that way? I asked Mommy about that, and she said so many marriages end in divorces these days that it is not at all uncommon for a child to have stepparents.
"People marry and remarry the way teenagers used to go steady and break up to go steady with someone else years ago," she says. She's very bitter about it, although she would be the last one to admit to that. Psychologists, bath she and Miguel remind me, are not supposed to be judgmental.
"We help our clients make those decisions on their own. We don't impose our values on them," she said.
However, I have heard her angrily remark many times that the marriage vows should be updated. "They should be rewritten to say, 'Do you take this woman to have and to hold-- for a while or until you get bored?'"
Sometimes she is so down on male-female relationships that I have to wonder if I will ever find anyone with whom I might be happy and spend the rest of my life. According to what he has told me and how he acts, my stepfather. Miguel, has no doubts about it. He seems to be very happy and very determined to spend the rest of his life with Mommy. I have never said anything to her about it. but I think he loves her more than she loves him. I know he makes her happy. He makes her laugh a lot, and I can see she enjoys her conversations with him, especially when they are discussing social and psychological topics. But sometimes, more often than ever. I think, she can be very distant. Her eyes take on a glazed look, and she stares at the sea or suddenly goes off to walk alone.
She steals away when Miguel or I least expect it, walking through the house on "pussy willow feet." I have watched her without her knowing, observed her on our beach, and have seen her moving slowly, as slowly as sand sifting through your fingers, idly watching time go by, her face sometimes taking on that dreamy far-off expression, her beautiful lips in a soft smile. It makes me think she hears voices no one else can hear, remembers a whisper, a touch. Or even a kiss she has lost. Something wonderful slipped through her fingers years and years ago, perhaps, and now all she can do is resurrect the memory.
"All our memories are like bubbles. Hannah," she once told me. "They drift by and burst, and all you can do is wait for another chance to blow them through your thoughts so they can drift by again. Reach out to touch them, and they will pop and be gone.
Sometimes I envy people who have suffered loss of memory and who are never tormented with their pasts. I even envy Linden, lost in some world of his own."
I hate it when she talks like that. It makes me think she would like to return to a time before I was born, as short as that happier period in her life might have been, and if she could, she would sell her soul to do so.
How can she be unhappy here? How could anyone? We live on an estate called Joya del Mar. We have an enormous main house with halls so long and rooms so large, you could bounce your echo along the walls. The property is vast. too. On it we have a beach house, our own private beach front, a magnificent pool, beautiful patios and walkways with enough flowers and bushes to fill a small public park. She doesn't have to do any household chores. We have a cook. Mrs. Haber, and a maid named Lila who has been with us nearly ten years. Twice a week a small army of grounds people manicure our property.
Professionally. Mommy is very successful. She has a psychotherapy practice with an office in West Palm Beach, not far from the magnet school I attend. Magnet schools provide a more specialized
curriculum. Mine emphasizes the arts, and since I like to sing, Mother arranged for me to attend the A. W. Drefoos School of Arts in West Palm Beach. We get up and go together most of the time, or my stepfather takes me.