by Nicole Baart
“I have every right to be mad at him! And Janice. I was right—I never should have trusted her. Him. Them. Whatever.”
Grandma reached out to touch my face but thought better of it and stopped. She clutched her hands in her lap, and my cheek ached where her fingers should have stroked it.
I felt so far from her. There should have been a chasm between us in the beginning, when my pregnancy was new and we had to learn how to deal with what I had done and the ensuing consequences. But Grandma had been gracious with me in ways I never imagined possible. We had been comfortable. We were dealing just fine with what had happened. It was now that things were starting to unravel; now nothing was as it should be. And the only difference was the arrival of Janice and Simon. They were the off frequency that filled our lives with static.
“I wanted to believe her. I wanted to see if there could be another chance for us, but it’s been one day and already I’ve been hurt again!”
“Julia, it was an accident. Simon didn’t mean—”
“They shouldn’t be here. They’re making a mess of everything,” I fumed. Angrily thrusting the blanket off me, I nearly jumped to my feet. There was resentment coursing through my veins, and when Grandma clutched my wrist, I almost shook her off. “I was right,” I repeated with venom in my voice.
“It’s not about being right,” Grandma said suddenly. Her voice was a cool chip of chiseled stone. I looked down at her, and her eyes were as black as coal in the dimness—intense and unreadable. Her fingers trembled against my skin, and though I had seen the vibrations from time to time when she wrote out a check or lifted a pan from the stove, tonight the stirring in her bones had nothing to do with age.
My breath stayed locked in my chest.
Her fingers tightened. “Who cares if you’re right, Julia Anne DeSmit? Maybe you shouldn’t have trusted Janice and Simon. Maybe you should have left them in their car at Crescent Lake. Maybe if you guarded yourself more carefully, Simon would never have come along with you today and your secret would still be safe.” Grandma caught my other wrist in her free hand and pulled me down until I had no choice but to kneel in front of her. “But maybe you’re wrong. Because this has nothing to do with being right. It’s about being free.”
Immediately my eyes stung with hot tears and I frantically blinked them away. My throat closed. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to have a place to unleash the hurt that was inside me. I didn’t want to cry. Twisting my arms, I made a little move to pull away.
Grandma hung on tight. “I didn’t know you were still so wounded.” She was resolute, but she searched my face tenderly, and her eyes were as wide and wet as my own. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault for not realizing how hard this would be for you. We’ll get through it together, okay? I’m here; I’ve always been here for you.”
I turned away from her.
“Do you want to be free, sweet girl? Do you want to let go of all this—” Grandma cast around for the right word—“all of these shadows inside you?”
Out of the blue, I felt her hands warm on my cheeks. She turned my face toward hers, and without my wrists shackled by her fingers, I was aware of how easy it would be to get up and walk out of the room, retreat somewhere that I could be alone to sob and sulk. I almost did. But I couldn’t leave her.
“You have to forgive Janice.”
I wasn’t ready for those words, and I recoiled from her expectations.
Grandma held me fast with her gaze. “You want to know why life has been so hard? It’s not that you lost your dad or that you lost Thomas or even the fact that you’re having a baby now. It’s hard because you have spent more than a decade of your life clinging to a bitter root. Janice is here because you have to let it go. I invited her into our home because you have to let it go.”
“I think I’ve earned the right to hate her,” I said through clenched teeth.
Grandma let her hands drop as though I had hit them away. We stared at each other for a moment, and it felt as though I was looking at a stranger.
“Sweetheart, don’t do this,” Grandma whispered. “Don’t wall yourself behind some unquenchable hate. Don’t you know that you’re only building a stronghold around yourself? Janice and Simon may not be able to get in, but don’t forget that when you build a fortress this impenetrable, you won’t be able to get out.”
My legs shook when I stood up. Grandma watched me with something akin to fear in her eyes, but I disregarded it. What did she know about the depth of my misery? Who could understand the burden of pain that I had to carry? Forgiveness was for those who deserved it.
I gathered the walls of my stronghold around me as I walked away. At least in there I was protected. I was safe. And I had no intention of coming out.
Part 2
Quicken
I FELT THE BABY move for the first time on an unseasonably warm morning in the middle of April.
At first I didn’t realize what was happening. There was a flutter in my abdomen, a feeling like falling from a great height. A dip and turn deep inside me that caused me to reach out and grab the porch railing as if Iowa had just experienced the tremors of some far-flung coastal earthquake and I needed to ground myself. I stayed there, splinters of peeling paint digging into the soft palms of my hands, and thought, We really need to put a new coat on the porch this summer.
And then it happened again. There was the faintest, cosmic beat of hummingbird wings at the very center of my being. This time, steadied by the thick cedar rail and quiet in my thoughts, I knew what it was.
I held my breath and waited to feel her once more. She didn’t disappoint, and a grin burst across my face to match the sunrise I had witnessed only moments earlier. I laughed out loud and pressed my hands to my stomach, hoping to feel her there, awed that she had finally made herself known to me.
I was twenty-two weeks along, give or take, and Dr. Morales had expressed only mild concern that it seemed to be taking so long for me to become aware of the child growing inside. However, I wasn’t worried. Grandma had bought me What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and it suggested that eighteen to twenty-four weeks was a perfectly acceptable timeframe in which to experience “the quickening.”
The quickening. I was dubious upon reading it, confused at first because I didn’t know what it meant and then downright skeptical because it seemed such a portentous title for something that was surely rather small and routine. But when she first twirled circles inside me, I understood that her inaugural movements were anything but small and decidedly not routine. She introduced herself to me with all the eloquence of a rehearsed speech, all the passion of a lover’s embrace. Surely the earth itself must have paused in its orbit to acknowledge the celestial movement at my core.
Suddenly, I very fully appreciated that there could not be a more perfect term for what I had just experienced than quickening. My breath quickened. My pulse quickened. My fingertips hummed with significance. Even the very life that coursed through me accelerated abruptly toward some distant goal and blurred forward with new meaning and purpose. It was indescribably exhilarating.
And it was the perfect morning for such a momentous event. The horizon was filled with the growing bands of a golden peach sunrise, like a slice of fresh nectarine with the honeyed sun a glistening pit at its center. The earth below was yielding and warm; a green tractor across the field from where I stood dug a silver disc across the fertile surface and made hillocks and furrows of the rich, soggy dirt. Best of all, the scent in the air was of spring and newness. Everything seemed crisp and clean, ready for renewal.
As I surveyed the landscape before me, there was an unexpected swelling beneath my collarbone, a full and happy ache that made me think of prayer. I fought to ignore the compulsion. In my mind, prayer was a habitual thing, a matter of necessity, not beauty. And the loveliness of this morning—the watercolor spring sky, the almost-warm southern breeze, the child dancing inside me—left no room for the tedium of “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
But I didn’t want to say, Our Father, who art in heaven. I wanted to say, thank You. For moments alone; for the dark, loamy scent of earth being tilled; for letting me feel her touch me inside. When I thought I would burst, when this thing that filled my chest to overflowing and threatened to pull me apart bone by bone became too much to bear, I said it out loud. “Thank You.”
It wasn’t that I had ceased trying to chase God and trap Him in some darkened corner where I could hold Him under a careful magnifying glass. I still sought Him. I still believed in Him. I probably always had. But I didn’t know how to translate that belief into more than a stoic acceptance of something greater than myself. How did that differ from anybody else? How did that connect me to a God who was as important, as dear, to my grandmother as every measure of breath she inhaled moment by moment?
For now, the irrepressible prayer was enough. The reality of my daughter quickly left room for nothing else in my heart and mind. I wanted to run into the house and throw my arms around Grandma and tell her what I had just experienced. But the thought of what waited inside dampened my spirits a bit, and instead I went to sit at the bottom of the steps.
As soon as the snow had melted and the weather turned, I had become an early riser. The house was too laden with unmet expectations, unresolved hurts. I felt isolated and alone, even though it was my own choice to be so. And, thankfully, things had been tenuously calm. No, not calm. Passive. As though we were all breathing shallowly, afraid that even the smallest exhalation could shatter whatever unspoken agreement we had come to. We were polite to each other, like solicitous but uncomfortable strangers, and though I knew I had the power to change everything, I did nothing.
The anger that had carried me for weeks after Simon’s impulsive—though I could now admit unintentional—disclosure had faded somewhat with time. I rolled that term around in my mind for many days before finally deciding that faded was actually a very good word to use in relation to how I felt about my mother and her son. They drained me, drew me out of myself, made me feel less of everything that I wanted to be. And though the coarse, viscous resentment that I felt toward Janice in particular had thinned and dulled with each day that I woke with her in my home, the color of my unforgiveness was still raw and red, maybe just a little less intense. Instead of fighting, I drew away. Instead of enduring the burden of our dissatisfying togetherness, I became an entity unto myself. The sole survivor in my own empty universe.
The porch became a retreat of sorts, a place where no one would bother me in the minutes before breakfast. We sat down together for meals, and though we went our separate ways the instant the last dish was tucked away in its proper cupboard, I found that I still needed time to prepare for the presence of Janice and Simon at my table. No one bothered me or tried to join me when I slipped out the door early every morning. Sometimes Grandma even wordlessly handed me a cup of coffee as I left the house.
I wished for one now, a celebratory cup of something as dark and black as the earth being turned.
Almost as if I had made the wish aloud, the door opened behind me. I didn’t turn around because I knew it was Grandma, and I smiled softly to myself, glad that she had come. In the last weeks, I had hoped often for some sort of compromise to be made. I wanted to reconcile with her after the trauma of the day my pregnancy became public knowledge. Though we had not outwardly fought, we had not resolved the argument of that afternoon when she had tried to talk me into forgiveness, and I longed to go back to the way we were. I missed the unity of our relationship when we were of one accord, two strings plucked in harmony. Quite simply, I missed my grandmother. But I also needed her to know where I stood. I was tolerating Janice and Simon because I had to, not because I wanted to. I was past the point of even contemplating forgiving my mother, and Grandma and I could not patch up the damage that had been done between us until she fully understood and accepted that fact.
I was in a generous mood on such a lovely morning, and when Grandma sat down next to me, I planned to put my arm around her and tell her that I loved her. It would be a start. A place we could move forward from.
But the footsteps on the porch were wrong.
Surprised, I whipped my head around and found Simon making his way across the knotty boards to me. He was wearing his pajama bottoms—rainbow-colored dinosaurs against a blue backdrop—and a slick, green coat with a drawstring hood, unzipped over his bare, narrow chest. The air was easily fifty degrees, even in the shade, and I had to prevent myself from telling him to zip up. That was Janice’s job, not mine. Simon clutched a mug filled to the brim with steaming coffee, and his eyes were so trained on it I was worried he would trip.
I scrambled up the steps to him. “Careful,” I warned. “You’re going to drop that.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said when I eased the mug out of his hands. He looked at me thankfully for a moment before his eyes glazed over with the guardedness that reminded me nothing had changed between us. However, instead of going back into the house as I expected, he started distractedly toward the steps and plopped himself down where I had just been sitting.
Grandma would have been welcome this morning, but I wasn’t much in the mood for Simon. Then again, he had brought me coffee, and I wasn’t yet willing to give up the morning and go inside. I sighed a little and plodded heavily down the steps to join him.
We sat in silence, me with my back propped against one banister and Simon as far away from me as he could get against the other. At first I considered my hands warming around the mug of coffee. Then I turned my attention to the sun slowly climbing the sky. When I had followed the path of the John Deere until it crowned a distant hill and continued out of sight, I ended up stealing a peek at Simon. He was watching me.
“Why do you get up so early?” Simon asked, looking quickly away. He picked at a sliver of white paint that was curling beside his knee.
“Why do you get up so early?” I replied. Though I was often awake by six and out the door in time for the light show around six thirty, Simon was usually on the couch by the time I made it downstairs. He never turned the TV on—even though I knew he had a fondness for early morning cartoons—but instead sat cross-legged with a pile of library books stacked in his lap. I watched him once when he didn’t know I was there, and I was astounded at how long he could study a single page. Simon’s eyes swept over every square inch of the paper, taking in the minutest detail of the illustrations and carefully examining the words, though I knew he couldn’t read.
When I turned the question around, Simon chewed his bottom lip and considered the rutted field on the horizon before looking at me. “Can you keep a secret?”
I didn’t really want to like him, to become attached to him so he could leave with Janice someday and break my heart, but his earnestness made me smile in spite of my efforts otherwise. “Yes, I can keep a secret.”
Simon glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one had slipped out of the house to hear his proclamation. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he leaned in close and whispered, “I’m learning how to read.”
“You are?” I said, trying not to sound amused.
“Yes, but you can’t tell my mom. I want to surprise her. When I go to kindergarten next year, I want to be the smartest kid in the class.”
“I’m sure you will be,” I assured him with all the condescension of a seasoned adult. I didn’t believe he could teach himself to read, but I was instantly embarrassed by my own disdain and his innocent acceptance of my phony approval. Simon was looking at me so sweetly—shy eyes behind long lashes and a small, tight-lipped smile—and I was being a jerk. He thought we were making friends. I was surviving his presence. It made me sick with myself, and all at once I was repentant. I blurted out without thinking, “I’ll teach you how to read. I think I remember that you were going to help me with my funny faces and I was going to help you with your reading.”
If it was possible for his eyes to get any bigger, they did. “Really
? Are you really going to teach me how to read?”
Trapped. What in the world was I thinking? “You bet,” I said benevolently, but in my mind I yelled, You idiot! I laughed nervously, and Simon mistook it for glee at our little conspiracy.
“It’s going to be so cool!” he cheered, warming to me as though nothing had happened between us. As though I hadn’t been distant and miserable for over a month. He put out his hand for me to slap and waited to see how I would respond.
I gave him a high five and then followed his small hand through a few more hits before he punched me excitedly on the shoulder.
I understood it to mean I was forgiven. If only everything were that easy.
“Do you even know your alphabet?” I wondered, a little nervous now about following through with my promise. Simon was someone I tried to avoid, not someone I sought out time with. How could I make it through private study sessions with him? Besides, I had never taught anyone anything before. What could he possibly learn from me?
But Simon didn’t pick up on my hesitance and frowned at me as though I had asked him the dumbest question ever. “Yes, I know my alphabet. I knew that when I was three.”
“Can you read letters?”
Simon tilted his head, slightly confused, before he figured out what I meant and exclaimed, “Oh yes! I know M looks like two mountains and S looks like a snake. And S is for Simon and M is for Mom. O is a circle. …” He put his finger in his mouth to think. “J is a hook, Z is a squiggly zigzag, and—”
“Good enough,” I interrupted him. “You know your letters.”
I turned away from him, but he wasn’t done with me. “When can we start, Julia? Will you help me today?”
Moaning inwardly, I managed, “We’ll start tomorrow, okay?”