Someone Else's Child: A Novel - Hardcover

Jennie

She had her lunch early that Friday, just after 11:30, the thick stack of envelopes she'd picked up from her post office box on the table next to her. She meant only to sort them while she ate, then take her requisite nap before sitting down at the computer. Daily updating, that was the key to her business. If she missed even a day she felt swamped, the work piling up so much that she would return to the computer at 3:00 A.M. when the baby's punches and thumps kept her awake.

Jennie ran a one-woman business organizing high school reunions. She called it My Old School, and she liked its orderliness, its neat stacks and growing lists, detective phone calls trying to track down lost alums. She even liked finding banquet halls and choosing menus -- planning it all and then sitting back to see how it turned out.

She had taken an interest survey back in high school. Would you: a) strongly like, b) somewhat like, c) somewhat dislike, or d) strongly dislike the following tasks: Sorting tobacco leaves by size and color. Separating nuts from bolts. Transporting boxes from one shelf to another. How she and her best friend Elizabeth had laughed then. Jennie had expected to be doing research in Africa or writing her way through Europe, undertaking some exciting, successful endeavor that would be hers for the asking. No one then would have predicted that Jennie Northrop, valedictorian of the Class of '83, Most Likely to Succeed, would have left college after a semester to come home and marry her high school sweetheart, have their baby, and sixteen years later, still be here.

Even her strange little business had come to her without planning. She'd done so much work on her own ten-year reunion that Sheldrake High had hired her to do the next year's, and now she was handling schools all over the area. Her income probably wasn't equal to the hours she spent fiddling with databases and envelopes and menus, but it was more than she'd made at any of the other jobs she'd held over the years to put herself through college and grad school.

Jennie took bites of her tomato and mozzarella sandwich and immediately felt hot. It was one of those early May days when it is warmer outside than in, the kind of day when ladies in their eighties would still wear turtlenecks and cardigans while college students at the end of their semester might put on shorts and polo shirts. Jennie, nine months pregnant, wearing only a tank top and huge cotton stretch shorts, couldn't get cool enough.

Her July reunion, little more than two months away, was a twentieth reunion from her own high school. It was her sister Stephanie's class, and though it was a big class -- 576 graduates -- Jennie recognized many of the names. Steph's friends, kids who had been seniors when Jennie was a freshman. Responses were lagging (1980 was an apathetic year, she kept hearing), so on the last mailing she'd started writing personal notes to anyone she even vaguely remembered. She had written one to her sister, though that hadn't produced a check yet. Steph didn't like to leave San Diego, not to come home anyway. She usually made it back once a year, a long weekend at Christmas squeezed between strategy sessions for her software company and spent smoking in their parents' garage, complaining about the Connecticut winter.

Jennie flipped through the return addresses. Most were still nearby: Connecticut, Westchester, a few in New Jersey or Long Island. There were three or four Manhattans, mostly Upper East Side, and one Brooklyn. Still single, she thought. Bankers, lawyers, people in advertising. The accountants and engineers stayed in the suburbs, even if they never married. Very few had left the East Coast, and if they had it was for California. At a ten-year reunion, those who were going to move away had usually done so; by the twentieth, most of them were back. "I know the demographics," she'd say to Chris in a mock-actuarial tone that parroted Mr. Shipley, the social studies teacher they'd both had in high school. "You got your wanderers but these New Englanders usually return to their roots to raise their kids the way they were raised."

She always noticed the ones who had moved away, curious about what path had taken them there. For that reason, the California address interested her. Stephanie finally? No. She couldn't believe it. Joel Tarn had actually replied. She had found his address within seconds by calling directory assistance in L.A., but that was months ago; it had taken a personal note on this third and final mailing to get him to respond.

She slit open the envelope and was surprised, almost disappointed to see the check. Joel was the kind who had left home. He seemed above these hometown dramas and reunion clichés, even more than Stephanie was. On the return form he had written a note: "OK, I fell for this. Knowing there's someone behind this (knowing it's you) made me sign my name, though it's been years since I've been back. What the hell."

It struck her as a flirty kind of note. Had hers been?

Probably. The thought of him still brought a teenager's queasy excitement.

Years, he'd said, years since he'd been home. Jennie herself hadn't seen him in eighteen years -- not since the summer before her senior year in high school, when he had returned home after a couple of years away at college. Even that summer she'd seen him only once, at a party her sister had thrown. At that party, Joel Tarn had the distinction of being the first boy Jennie had ever slept with. The only boy ever, other than Chris.

She looked at the note again. He had addressed it Jenny and she thought, Okay, so he was this major lust in my life and I'm so inconsequential in his that he can't even remember how to spell my name.

Joel. She had practically worshiped that l in his name. Joe rhymed with hoe, mow, schmo, blow; but Joel was droll, Joel had a soul. That l said,

"I'm worthy, I've earned it." He had worn black turtlenecks (in high school! in the seventies! in Connecticut! ) and spoke with a slight lisp that seemed to have something to do with the sexy space between his two front teeth. He was pale with hair so dark it was almost black, and everything about him was taut and angular, not at all like Chris, whom Jennie had first loved for his plump ass in jeans, the way his shirt opened at the collar, the curly blond head of hair that even now had not begun to thin. Joel had this mind -- well, they all seemed to think he did anyway. He gave that impression. He'd been Stephanie's boyfriend for a while -- who hadn't? -- and Jennie had always found him devastatingly sexy.

She lifted herself out of the chair after lunch, not able to bear a fold in her body after eating. She had to be vertical or horizontal, preferably horizontal, but first she had to pee. Even to get to the bathroom and back was an accomplishment these days, and when she finished she lay on the couch. It was essential that she sleep each day or she found herself so exhausted she could barely speak words to Tara when she came home from school or to Chris when he returned from work. As it was, she and Tara usually found something to "disconnect" about, as Tara called it. At times it was nearly impossible for Jennie to deal with Tara's teenage hormones and her own pregnancy ones at the same time. She felt guilty about how much she let things slide with her daughter sometimes, waiting for Chris to come home because he had always had an easier time handling her.

Joel Tarn. She enjoyed the private, foolish reverie his name conjured. A few years ago she would have already been on the phone with her best friend Elizabeth: You'll never believe who I heard from. But now she had no one to tell, really, no one to whom she could say Joel Tarn and have it mean something. Still, it was nice to have something else