Lucy couldn’t even wrap her mind around Christopher being adopted by someone other than her. Mrs. Costa gave her another tissue.
“Believe it or not, you’ll probably feel a little relieved in a few days. It’ll be a weight off your shoulders.”
Lucy met her eyes. She replied slowly and deliberately, “If Christopher were my son, it would not be a weight on my shoulders. If he were my son, my feet wouldn’t even touch the ground.”
Mrs. Costa’s face was a blank page. “Is there anything else I can do to help you?”
Lucy was being dismissed. And why not? There was nothing left to discuss.
“No, thank you,” Lucy said. “You’ve helped enough.”
Chapter Four
Lucy returned the car to Beckett. She would walk back to school. She needed to move, to breathe, to compose herself before going back to work.
A relief? A weight off her shoulders? Did Mrs. Costa think Christopher was some sort of project for Lucy? Some charity work that kept her from having a life? She’d had a life. She’d done everything she was supposed to do in college. She’d gone to parties, hooked up with sexy jerks, gone to Panama City on spring break, six girls to one crappy hotel room. She’d even gone above and beyond the call of duty in college and dated one of her former professors, who also happened to be one of the most famous writers in the country. A renowned award-winning writer who took her to cocktail parties on New York rooftops and dinners at mansions in the Hamptons and on tours through Europe. She’d lived her life. She’d been wild. She’d been young. She’d had fun.
And she would have traded every wild party, every fancy dinner, every famous face she’d met, and every night in a five-star hotel for one week as Christopher’s mother. Or one day. One single day.
But according to Mrs. Costa, none of that mattered.
Lucy kept her head down, hoping no one would see her red eyes and think she was wandering the streets drunk or stoned. It was a Friday afternoon. After school she could tell Christopher that she’d seen Mrs. Costa again, and the state had decided Lucy couldn’t be his foster mother. Maybe she would take him to the movies this weekend to cheer him up. She had more than two thousand dollars saved. Why not start spending it now on little things to make Christopher happy? Maybe if she spent the whole weekend spoiling him, by Monday he’d be okay with it all. Nothing would have changed, really. Lucy would always be his friend. She just wouldn’t ever get to be his mother.
Not so bad, right?
Then why did it feel so very, very bad?
While cutting through a parking lot, Lucy passed a boutique toy store, doubled back, and went inside. A parent was volunteering in the classroom today, so Theresa didn’t need Lucy in class just yet.
The moment she set foot inside The Purple Turtle, Lucy realized immediately she’d made a mistake. Nearly everything was insanely expensive. What would it be like to be one of those mothers who had enough money to buy imported wooden blocks from Germany and hand-painted dolls from England?
“Can I help you?” a young woman asked from behind the counter. Lucy turned and saw her staring at her phone, her brow furrowed.
“Do you have anything for a boy who likes sharks or boats? He’s seven.” She wanted to get Christopher something to soften the blow. Something that would remind him she would always love him and want to be in his life. “Something small?”
Something not expensive.
“There’s a LEGO pirate boat over there, but it’s pretty huge.” The girl pointed at the set, and Lucy saw that the price was almost two hundred dollars. That would wipe out nearly 10 percent of her savings.
“Anything else? Something smaller?”
“We also have the Schleich animals,” the girl said, “if you want something tiny. A couple of sharks, I think.”
Lucy followed the direction of the girl’s pointing finger. She went to a large wooden case full of animals of every genus and species—lions, birds, and wolves, of course, but also dinosaurs and unicorns and, yes, even sharks.
They were seven dollars each but three for fifteen. Lucy spent almost ten whole minutes debating whether she should buy three of them—the tiger shark, the great white, and the hammerhead—or only one. Finally, she picked up all three and carried them to the counter. What the hell, right? It was fifteen dollars, and deep down she knew she could blow all two thousand dollars out of her wish fund, and it still wouldn’t heal his broken heart or hers. Not like she was going apartment hunting or car shopping anytime soon.
No, she couldn’t justify a two-hundred-dollar LEGO set, but she could let herself buy him all three sharks.
“Do you have free gift wrap?” she asked.
The girl raised an eyebrow. “You want me to gift wrap three little sharks?”
“If you don’t mind. Please?”
“Sure thing,” the girl said. “These for your son?”
Lucy swallowed the knot in her throat again.
“It’s for a little boy in my school,” Lucy said. “He’s going through a hard time, and he doesn’t get a lot of presents.”
“You a teacher?” she asked as she put the sharks into a cardboard box. Lucy pointed at the blue dinosaur paper. Christopher would like that better than the paper with rainbows on it.
“Teacher’s aide at Redwood.”
“Do you know riddles and stuff?”
“Riddles? I guess,” Lucy said, confused by the question. “We do a unit on jokes, puns, and riddles with the kids every April.”
“Do you know this riddle—Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The girl wrapped the paper around the box.
“Yeah, of course,” Lucy said. “It’s from either Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass. I can’t remember which one.”
“You know the answer?”
Did she know the answer? Once, long ago, someone had asked her the same riddle as the setup to a joke. There wasn’t a solution, at least not according to Lewis Carroll.
“There isn’t a real answer,” Lucy said. “It’s a Wonderland riddle. Everyone’s mad in Wonderland.”
“Hmm,” the girl said. “Bummer.”
“Why do you ask?”
“People were talking about it online,” the girl said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out all day.”
“Good luck.”
The girl put the wrapped box into a brown bag with a handle and a purple turtle printed on the front. It was a nice gift for fifteen dollars plus sales tax.
But the pirate ship, she thought as she left the store, would have been a lot nicer.
* * *
—
By the time Lucy made it to school, they were singing the final songs—“De Colores” followed by “The Farmer in the Dell” in English and Spanish. When el queso was finally standing alone, the first bell rang, and it was the Rapture all over again. In seconds the classroom was empty but for Lucy and Theresa.
“How’d it go?” Theresa asked Lucy as they both started on cleanup duty.
“Don’t ask,” Lucy said, trying not to cry.
Theresa gave her a quick hug. “I was afraid of that.” She was a woman wise enough not to turn it into a long hug, or Lucy really would start crying again.