I started to reply, then froze. “Look.”
On the other side of the restaurant, a young woman came out of the bathroom. She slipped into the closest table, where a cup of soda pop was sitting. She took an anxious sip, then glanced outside nervously.
“You don’t think that’s—” I began.
The woman swept her gaze across the restaurant, and her eyes locked onto ours. They were wide and frozen for three long seconds.
Then she began to cry.
It’s her, I realized.That’s Anthony’s mom.
35
Clara
After letting out a choking sob, the woman shouldered her bag and rose from the table. She walked across the restaurant like someone approaching the gallows, pausing in front of our booth.
“Melanie?” Derek asked gently.
She nodded, then sat in the booth across from us. Now that I got a really good look at her, I realized she was younger than I expected. She had holes in her jeans, out of a punkish style rather than normal wear and tear. She was wearing a black Billie Eilish T-shirt. Her dark hair had purple highlights above the ears, and her eyebrows were sharp above young, inexperienced eyes.
She’s a teenager, I realized.
Derek cleared his throat. “I’m Captain Dahlkemper, but you can call me Derek. I just want to say up front that Billy Manning—”
Melanie held up a hand to stop him. “Can I just, like, explain myself first? Before you say anything?”
Her hand was trembling. My heart went out to her. She was terrified.
“Okay,” Derek said.
The girl—it was impossible to think of her as a grown woman—reached into her bag and pulled out a three-ring notebook, the kind I used to take notes in back in high school. She flipped to an earmarked page and then began to read.
“It started at the homecoming dance my senior year,” she said in a shaky voice. “My boyfriend and I, we, um…” She stopped and put the notebook down. “Can I just, like, talk to you guys?”
Derek reached across and put a hand on hers. “You can do whatever makes you comfortable.” His voice was gentle, and it seemed to reassure Melanie.
She nodded. “So, yeah. Homecoming. I know, we were stupid teenagers. We made a mistake. Anyway, a month later I was late. Like,latelate. I didn’t know what to do, so I told my parents. My parents flipped out, which I can’t blame them for. Once everything cooled off, they convinced me to keep it. I didn’t knowwhatI wanted, but they made some good points, so I did that. I kept the baby.”
Melanie cleared her throat and glanced between Derek and me, then went on. “The pregnancy wasn’t bad at first. Everyone at school wassupersupportive. But the third trimester really sucked. I started panicking about what to do. My mom said it was just the hormones making me freak out, but it was more than that. I didn’twanta baby. I wasn’t ready to be a mom yet, and I definitely didn’t want my life derailed.” She looked down at the table and shook her head. “I know that sounds shitty. I hate to think of a baby as a burden like that, but… Yeah. I knew I wasn’t ready to be a mom.”
“We’re not going to judge you,” I said softly. “That must have been really hard.”
She glanced at me, then back down at the table. “We were on vacation when I had the baby. Down in Texas, visiting my cousins. So of course, the baby decided to come three weeks early. But he was healthy and beautiful.”
That explains why he has a Texas birth certificate, I thought.
Her dark eyes lit up, and for a brief moment I could see Baby Anthony’s features in her. “He was so beautiful! I held him and held him and didn’t want to let go. I’ve never loved anything so much in my life. Oh, and we even shared a birthday! I turned eighteen on the day he was born.”
Eighteen, I thought. So young.
Melanie’s smile wavered and she slumped her shoulders a little more. “Everything got hard once we left the hospital and came back to California. I didn’t get any sleep. He criedso much,which I know is normal for a baby, but it was tough. My parents didn’t help as much as they said they would.” Her eyes shimmered. “I tried to take care of him. But I was such a bad mom. Nothing I did calmed him. My cousin Suzanne has a baby boy, and healwaysstops crying when she holds him. Anthony didn’t do that for me. And I knew it would only get harder when school started back up. My mom works, so we would have to pay for daycare, and that’s expensive. Like,so expensive, you have no idea. We didn’t have any way to pay for it. So…”
She closed her eyes, sending tears rolling down her cheeks.
“When I was in the hospital in Texas, I did research on what to do. And I learned how there are laws where you can surrender a baby up to sixty days after he’s born.”
Derek and I glanced at each other, but said nothing.