Forever Innocent
Page 70

We headed out of the parking lot. “What is your thing?”
“Well, on the art side, I create fantastical images, mainly of night-sky scenes with mythical creatures, like Pegasus. Sometimes angels, if I’m feeling sentimental.”
I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, wondering if the doctor’s office had told her to bring up the subject of our shared history.
“I could stick my work all over the web and sell a print here and there, but I was getting nowhere.”
“What do you want to do?”
Tina settled back in her seat. “I’d love to find a sugar daddy so I could live in a mansion with a huge room full of windows and every art supply in the world, with a high-end New York gallery waiting breathlessly for my newest work.”
I laughed. “I think there are dating sites to help with that.”
“Don’t think I haven’t looked. Those millionaire types want eye candy, and these puppies take up negative space.” She pointed at her chest. “Besides, I only had money for tuition or silicone. Couldn’t have both.”
We pulled onto the freeway and immediately got waylaid by Friday afternoon traffic. “When’s your flight?” I asked.
“Not for two hours. We’ll be fine. The airport’s not far, right?”
“No, right on the water. If the freeway stays too jacked up, I’ll take side streets.”
“You must love living by the ocean,” Tina said.
I swallowed hard, remembering the images Gavin and I used to draw of our school by the sea. “Growing up in New Mexico, I can definitely appreciate it.”
“When did you move to California?”
“Just last year. I had to wait to be eligible for in-state tuition benefits, then I started up again.”
“Ah, so this is your second college.”
“Yes, I did three years at New Mexico State.”
She turned to me, her pigtail smashing into the headrest. “That’s unusual, leaving with only a year to go.”
I shrugged. “School with a view.”
We sat in silence, the knot of traffic easing forward only a few yards at a time.
“I could live here,” Tina said. “This is my third time to come to UC San Diego. It’s a cool campus.”
“I’ve liked it.”
“What do you study?”
“Literature.”
Tina shuddered. “I’m not much for reading dead white guys.”
I laughed. “It gets more diversified after high school.”
“It was all so dramatic. Heathcliff. Romeo. Gatsby. Fools for love, the whole lot of them.”
“You’re not dating anyone then?”
“Ha!” Tina said in disgust. “My high school boyfriend ditched me in the hospital when I was in labor. By the time it was all over, premature birth, baby dying, hospital stay, go home, he’d moved out!”
My knuckles were white with my death grip on the leather wheel. “I imagine that would put you off men.”
“Not right away, actually. I tried my damnedest to find a man to knock me up again.”
I whipped my head around to look at her. “Really?”
“Hell yeah. I got kicked out of the pregnant-teen school and sent back to a horrid public one. Misery. They called me baby killer. When they weren’t calling me a slut.”
“Wow. I didn’t have it nearly that bad.”
“I kinda draw the foul,” she said. “I was always pretty out there.”
“Everyone was really nice to us. We got an apartment and everyone furnished it for us. Our whole town seemed to chip in.”
She hesitated and I realized I had brought up my own pregnancy.
“Big town, small town,” Tina said. “Houston wasn’t kind.”
The cars inched forward, and it looked like we might loosen up, but then the brake lights all lit up again. I leaned back in the seat. “I’ll bail at the next exit.”
“So what was your baby’s name?” Tina asked.
“Finn.”
“We called mine Peanut.” She flipped her purse around and showed me a picture on a key chain tied to the strap. “I guess I never gave him a proper name. He was always just Peanut.”
“They do sort of look like that in those early sonograms.”
“Exactly. He lived for three hours.”
My stomach turned. “Finn lived for seven days.”
“Seven days. I can’t imagine. They didn’t try to save Peanut. He was too early. We just waited for his heart to stop.”
My eyes burned. I was sitting right next to someone who had been through exactly what I’d been through. “We did too. We had to shut off the ventilators. He had a heart defect, and they wouldn’t fix it.”
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Tina said. “You think modern medicine knows everything but then these babies come, and they can’t save them.”
“I agree there.” I pictured the doctors in the conference room, telling me they wouldn’t operate. I’d never forget that scene, seared into my memory like a scar.
“Is that why you left school?” she asked. “The baby?”
“No. That was three years later.”
“But it’s related, isn’t it? I find that everything goes back to the baby. Do you?”
I had to swallow hard to reply. “Yes, it was related. I — I punched my professor.”