SPRING 2007 SHORT FICTION CONTEST

FIRST PLACE WINNER

Looking
by Monica Brand

The only thing Meg knows for sure: the girl is 12 now.

Meg jogs along the pebble-lined trail at the park thinking about her.

Maybe she has Meg's chestnut hair or perhaps the same angular nose. She could have dark eyes, think of a Hershey's chocolate bar, also like Meg.

You'll never find her that way, her mother would have said, but still Meg can't help looking, thinking she'll get lucky one day and find a similar face in an overwhelming sea of girls.

Meg slows her pace when she nears the group of preteen girls huddled near the soccer goal post. The girls don't notice Meg; they are content with their junior high gossip, getting in final comments before their Saturday morning game.

Five brunettes. Meg is too far to judge much else.

When Meg runs, she daydreams. The girl, Amanda, Paige and Julia are her favorites, is popular, hanging out with friends at the mall, invited to parties. She is an honor student, all A’s, even after wrestling with math homework each night. She loves books, absorbing the classics, wishing the story would never end. She is happy, satisfied with her life. She is an only child, perhaps a bit spoiled, but appreciative. She is wise. She understands her birth mother made the best choice she could at the time. She wants to meet her and looks forward to the day she will.

Meg bites her lip, lengthening her stride.

Meg follows the trail as it leads away from the soccer field. Dew coats the cropped green grass. Already the lot is full with minivans and SUV s. Children in uniforms that mimic the bright leaves on the trees swarm over the field like ants at a summer picnic.

The running path leads past the playground. A little boy in a baseball cap laughs as he goes down the slide into his mother's arms.  A teenage boy wearing a yellow jersey with “Wildcats” on the back pushes a little girl on a swing. The girl laughs, demanding to go higher. A blond woman watches. Meg runs faster like she is fleeing the scene of a crime.

She wanted to keep the baby for reasons she found difficult to explain to her frantic mother. A real baby was better than any doll Meg loved as a six-year-old. A baby to love and a baby for love. Meg secretly relieved her upperclassman boyfriend who was unwilling to help. She read two books on natural childbirth, went to every prenatal appointment, took all the right vitamins.

The baby fluttered, twirled and kicked when Meg read aloud to her expanding belly. And in the dark, while the house slept, and Meg knew she should try to sleep too, she shared secrets with the infant she couldn't yet see or touch, things no other person knew. But when her time came, Meg listened to the pleas of her mother, her mother whom she trusted, and wanted to please, because she raised Meg and her brother alone. Her mother shared what she knew too.

Meg never liked the word away, like, take it away, and go away, it was too negative. Up is different, a positive word. Give the baby up to a new life, a better, mature, more capable mother, a married woman, so the baby would have the father Meg never had. A nurse took a Polaroid that Meg hid under her hospital pillow. Meg knew it wouldn't please her mother.

Meg finished high school and then went to a state school for her B.A., a couple of boyfriends came and went. Her mother sent her a bottle of champagne when she got copy editor at the magazine in New York. Then the phone call on the cell from her mom on a Sunday afternoon. Cancer, inoperable. Meg's mother died at home four months later on a wet April day.

For awhile Meg did okay keeping busy with work, dating a bit, nothing serious, even buying her first home, a condo. Meg and a girlfriend were eating lunch at Napoli's when a couple came in with their baby. A pink barrette in silky blond hair, the sippy cup sloshing apple juice, the little hands reaching to grab a spoon. And the chatter: Mama, Dada, up, down, no, no, no. Meg ran to the ladies room where she locked herself in a stall. I'm fine, she lied to the friend who came to check on her, not understanding.

It was then that Meg started to look at girls around her, girls she never gave much notice to before. The giggly one leaning in close to a boy in the library, the cluster at a school bus stop, backpacks hanging low off shoulders and the alone pony-tail with glasses walking past Meg's apartment building in the rain.

Could she be the one? Meg thought to herself, trying not to stare.

The trail brings Meg to the soccer field again. Girls in orange jerseys on one side, red on the other. Women sip coffee on the sidelines. Some watch their daughters chase the ball, most chat like they have known each other for years. One father concentrates on the referees' calls.

A black and white ball escapes a cleat, darts out of play to bounce, one, twice, rolling toward the running trail, where it rests in the pebbles. Meg picks it up. The ball smells of wet leather and grass.

Orange jersey Number Five runs to Meg. The girl is tall, one of the taller ones compared to the others, with a thick caramel-colored French braid. The girl stops a few feet in front of Meg. Her eyes are dark like burnt wood.

Meg clutches the slippery sphere to her chest, remembering the only time she held her baby, so slick like the soccer ball now. She searches the face in front of her as if it's a mirror, hoping to see her own features or maybe a glimpse of her dead mother. Perhaps a trace of a boy she once knew. Nothing. Mom would call me crazy for this, Meg thinks.

The girl holds out her hands and in a moment of joy and confusion, Meg believes she wants to embrace, then feels the flush in her face when she realizes the mistake. Meg tosses the ball to her. The girl turns away.

Meg takes a breath.

“Wait!”

The girl looks at Meg. She wants to get back to her game.

“Are you happy?”

The girl laughs, a silly sort of girly laugh you hear in the school cafeteria, a laugh of getting the joke mixed with a touch of nervous energy. She runs away from Meg, kicking the soccer ball toward the field and the teams waiting.

Meg watches her go.

Monica Brand lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children. Her Web site is www.monicabrand.net.