Sitting across from each other in the dark restaurant, Paul reached for her hand and held it to his cheek, obviously too moved to go on. Candlelight played across his face, and she felt a tear slip down her cheek, thinking of what this might cost them as a couple.
“Let’s go home,” she mouthed, dabbing at her eyes with the linen napkin from her lap.
He nodded and placed several bills on the table, then took her hands and pulled her up. They left barely-touched dessert plates and brimming coffee cups and walked arm in arm to the parking lot. It was a bittersweet evening, but it held, at least, the gift of the knowledge of their deep love for each other, their commitment to walk through this storm together.
The days of summer passed languidly. Despite the extra hours the summer schedule gave Anna to think, a strange peace continued to pervade her being.
Still, there were difficult moments.
Paul’s mother had quietly asked Anna how she was recovering from her ordeal––meaning the rape. It was a thoughtful, innocent question, but so hard to evade truthfully.
She didn’t lie to Shirley. Her answer—“I’m doing fine, Mom. Some days are better than others, but I’m going to be okay.”—was the truth. But of course, it wasn’t the whole truth.
When Paul had called their friend John Vickers from Orlando on the night Anna was raped, John and Brenda, out of true concern, had called the prayer chain at their church. They’d been vague, only saying that Anna had been attacked, but still, an answer had to be given to mutual friends who’d heard about Anna’s brief disappearance and the assault. Anna was grateful that most of those calls of concern had come before she and Paul knew about the pregnancy. Later, in confidence, Paul had told John and Brenda about the rape. Others were left to draw their own conclusions.
Paul and Anna socialized with the Vickers as couples, but Anna and Brenda rarely spent time together without their husbands. It made things easier now, having Paul as a buffer on the occasions when they enjoyed social get-togethers. But Anna knew that she’d subtly withdrawn from all of her friendships.
Even with her friend Maggie Ryan and with her sister, Liz—usually her most intimate confidante—she’d put up an emotional fence, making excuses to avoid getting together. She heard the hurt in Maggie’s voice when, making feeble excuses, she refused one lunch invitation after another. She knew––hoped, even––that Maggie would eventually leave the ball in her court and quit calling.
Anna and her sister had always been very close, but until she knew how this would all end, she wouldn’t saddle Liz with the awful burden of their secret. So in all her relationships, she steered conversations gingerly away from any topic that hit too close to her experience, and she deftly avoided letting any conversation become too intimate.
Emma Green was the exception. Emma had become Anna’s confidante and counselor. And now that school was out, they were even more free in the friendship, no longer restrained by the conventions that discouraged teachers and students from becoming close friends.
With misplaced guilt, Anna felt almost as though she were being disloyal to Maggie and to Liz by confiding in Emma instead of them. And yet, she was so grateful the Lord had put Emma in her life at just the right time.
Emma called her several times a week to see how she was faring. They eased into a standing lunch date each Wednesday, and Anna guarded that time like a hard-to-obtain appointment.
One afternoon while they lingered over coffee and dessert in a nearly empty restaurant, Anna told Emma of the decision she and Paul had made to wait—to not make any decision for a while.
“I don’t know if I could be that patient,” Emma said, amazement in her voice. “But I do think it’s a wise decision. This isn’t something that can be hurried. I admire your patience.”
“Oh, Emma, three months ago, I couldn’t have been this patient. But the Lord has given me a measure of trust in His timing, in His sovereignty, that is truly supernatural.”
Emma nodded. “I can see the peace on your face. I don’t understand it, but I can see that the anxiety is gone and there is a quietness in your spirit. I know the Lord has His hand on you. I know He’s going through this with you, but I’m sorry… I’ll never understand how He could allow it to happen.” She clucked her tongue. “Why, oh why, did He allow you not only to go through the horror of being raped but also to become pregnant? And when there are so many couples in this world who would give anything to have a baby! My Tanya and her husband tried for nearly seven years to get pregnant. It just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t make sense!”
She stopped abruptly, then held her hands palms out in apology. “Oh, Anna, I’m sorry. Here I am questioning God, while you sit there in the worst of circumstances, filled with His joy and peace! I don’t understand it.”
Anna smiled. “I don’t understand it either. That’s what’s so wonderful about it.” Anna stirred her coffee and picked at the last bites of cheesecake on her plate. Then she broached a subject that had been going through her mind with regularity over the past weeks. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about…adoption.” She watched Emma’s face for a reaction, but her expression didn’t change.
Anna sighed and went on haltingly. “In some ways, I think it might be harder for me to put the baby up for adoption than it would be to raise it. But I want to do the right thing. And the truth is, if I take myself out of the picture and just lay the simple facts out on the table, I think—I’m almost afraid—that adoption may be more of an answer than either Paul or I have been willing to admit. Especially for this child’s sake.”
She felt her emotions close to the surface as she voiced these ideas aloud for the first time. She enumerated her reasons on slender fingers. “I’m forty-five years old, Emma. Paul is forty-seven. I know it’s not unheard of to have a baby at our ages, but I don’t really think it would be best for any child. This child will have so many other obstacles to deal with. Then there are the circumstances, of course. Somehow it seems that adoptive parents could avoid the details of conception, the…rape”—she still had trouble saying the word––“more easily than Paul and I would be able to. I don’t know if an adoption agency would require that fact to be revealed, but I don’t think Paul and I could hide it from a child—at least not after a certain age. And ironically, the age that one can make a child understand what rape is would be precisely the time he would probably begin to struggle with the adoption issue itself. At any rate…adoption has been on my mind a lot lately… a lot.”
Emma placed a warm hand over hers. “Could you give the baby up, honey? I mean, could you really give the child up and live with that decision for the rest of your life? Knowing you had a child out there somewhere? A child of your own body?” Emma shrugged. “I’m asking because I’m not sure I could.”
“I’m not sure.” She took a sip of cold coffee. “I hate the unknown. I hate having something to hide. You know that. But if I knew it was the right thing… if I knew for certain it was what the Lord wanted for us––and for the baby, then, yes. I think I could do it.”
The waiter came to clear their dishes, and pour more coffee. They were silent until he was out of hearing distance. Then Emma asked, “Have you considered open adoption?”
“You mean where we would know the couple who adopted the baby?”
“Yes. Not only know them, you could choose them. That’s how Tanya and Daniel adopted their little boy. Daniel was working for a man whose niece became pregnant out of wedlock. He knew about Tanya’s struggles with infertility and knew that his niece had decided to put her baby up for adoption. She was only sixteen, poor girl. The kids hadn’t really considered adoption at that point. They kept hoping for a miracle…Tanya so wanted to experience being pregnant. But adoption turned out to be their miracle. It was an answer to prayer. Oh yes, little Justin is definitely an answer to prayer.” ” She chuckled, obviously thinking of her grandson. “
“Oh, Emma, that’s wonderful. I’ve heard you talk about Justin, but I
never knew the story behind his birth.”
“Honestly, I sometimes forget he’s adopted. He’s only two and a half, but he’s part of our family now. He’s no different than my own flesh and blood.”
“I wish I knew more about the process. Where to even start.”
“You’d go through a private lawyer, I think, rather than an agency. At least the kids did. Open adoption seems like it might be easier, at least from your perspective. You wouldn’t always have to wonder what happened to the baby. You could keep in contact with the adoptive parents. Tanya sends Justin’s picture to his birth mother every year on his birthday and lets her know how he’s doing. They’ve agreed that when he’s older they will let him make the decision about whether to meet her or not. But they won’t have to track her down or always wonder what she’s like. They already know her.”
Emma folded her napkin into a triangle and laid it on the table. “It’s something to think about, Anna. It would be a way to be assured that the baby was in a good home. A Christian home. One you approved of. And they’d have the baby’s medical history and genetic information…well, yours at least. It’s just a thought. I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you.”
It was a thought that haunted Anna for days. And the more she thought about it, the more she felt that it might be the answer they had been praying and waiting for. She felt certain Paul would be open to the idea as well, but she didn’t want to rush him. She wanted him to have time to think things through, to pray about their decision, the way she’d been free to do since the night they’d agreed just to wait.
Just to wait. Over and over in the following days she opened her Bible to Isaiah 40:31. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” She let the promise seep into her spirit. And like the words of the song, she prayed, “Help me, Lord. Help me to wait.”
All through the hot month of July, Paul and Anna enjoyed a closeness that contradicted their circumstances. In the evenings, they walked together through their neighborhood and took impromptu picnics to the park on the weekends. With Kassi working in Urbana over summer vacation, this was the first year that one or the other of the girls hadn’t been living at home. In some ways, Anna felt like a newlywed.
She’d always felt healthy and energetic during her pregnancies, and this one was no exception. After the few short weeks of morning sickness in the beginning, she had begun to feel her old self again and many times wondered if she actually was carrying a child. It still seemed unfathomable to her. And her body was an accomplice to the deception. She simply didn’t feel pregnant. She had to force herself to acknowledge that she was going to give birth––and that this pregnancy wasn’t going to have the happy ending her others had.
She and Paul discussed her pregnancy only in elusive terms. He was especially protective of her, as he had been when she was carrying their daughters. He wouldn’t allow her to lift anything heavy, and he guarded carefully against her overexerting herself. But there were no joyful musings about what this child would be like, no arguing over names for the baby-to-be, no happy shopping trips choosing furniture and wallpaper for a nursery. Yet, most of the time, it wasn’t an uncomfortable evasion of the subject—merely a fulfillment of their agreement to wait on the Lord for an answer.
And so they waited. And one day early in August, they both knew the time had come to talk again. To take the next step.
As he always did, Paul had accompanied Anna to her monthly doctor’s appointment. After a twenty-minute wait in a waiting room full of pregnant young women, Dr. Blakeman’s nurse led them to the small examination room and handed Anna a gown and sheet and left the room. Anna slipped out of her dress and quickly tied the hospital gown behind her neck. She felt self-conscious in front of Paul. No longer could she deny the changes in her figure. Almost overnight, her belly had rounded and firmed, and her clothes now stretched tautly over her disappearing waist. For several weeks, embarrassed by her changing figure, she’d been changing clothes in the bathroom or hurriedly in their bedroom before Paul came into the room. She shared her body with him only in the darkness. Soon, she would have trouble hiding her condition beneath even her loosest fitting clothes.
She had begun to feel stirrings within her belly that she remembered vaguely from her previous pregnancies. She remembered the excitement these flutterings had brought before. Now they only brought home the reality of the pregnancy, of the child growing inside of her.
The nurse weighed Anna and took her blood pressure and other vitals, and they waited in silence until the doctor came into the room. Dr. Blakeman had seemed sympathetic and supportive of Paul and Anna’s choice to carry the pregnancy to term. Anna felt comfortable with him, trusted his expertise and discretion. Paul rose and shook hands with the doctor now.
“How is everything going?” Dr. Blakeman asked.
Anna was sharply aware of the sympathy in his voice. His question was asked with pity, as though her condition were terminal. Anna appreciated his compassion, yet for some reason, it annoyed her and made her feel defensive for the child she was carrying. “I’m feeling fine… No problems.”
“Good, good.” He skimmed her medical chart. “I’d like to do a sonogram today. You’re familiar with that procedure, I assume?”
“I’ve never had one before,” Anna said. “I guess that wasn’t something they routinely did when I was pregnant with the girls, but yes, I know what it is.”
Dr. Blakeman explained the procedure and told them that many potential abnormalities and other problems could be diagnosed and possibly averted using this diagnostic tool.
“Usually we can tell the sex of the baby by this point,” he told them. “No guarantees, of course, but I’m about ninety-five percent accurate so far this year,” he smiled.
The technician came in and set up the ultrasound machine on the cart beside them.
“I guess I should ask,” the woman said hesitantly as she began to roll the ultrasound device over Anna’s belly. “Do you want to see the images on the screen? Or would you rather not?”
Anna looked to Paul, who nodded with a shrug. He came to stand beside her at the head of the examination table, facing the small video screen. An unmistakable shape came into focus on the black-and-white screen. The technician pointed out the baby’s head, the clear outline of the body, arms and legs, tucked up close to the body. Even tiny fingers were barely visible on one extended hand. And then the little heart. The tiny organ pulsated rapidly on the screen. The tech silently positioned the stethoscope and searched until she found the heartbeat. A swift whooshing sound filled the room, magnified by technology that had been new and even experimental when Anna had been pregnant before.
She watched the screen, listening to the sound of new life with astonishment. She turned to Paul and saw in his eyes the same awe that she was feeling. There was no denying this life—this child. Indeed, the time for waiting was over.
Paul brought the car around to the clinic entrance, and Anna came out to the curb to meet him. He leaned across the seat and opened her door. She got in the car and fastened her seat belt low across her belly. She felt a new protectiveness for the little life she was carrying.
Paul drove to the far end of the parking lot, and then, without explanation, he backed into a shady parking space. He cut the engine and rolled the window down against the afternoon’s oppressive heat. He turned in his seat to face Anna. “I guess it’s time to make some decisions, isn’t it?”
She smiled wanly and nodded, understanding. She grasped for words. “Paul, seeing the baby on that screen today has made everything so terribly real. This might be even harder than I’ve imagined, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption. It seems that everywhere I turn, I’m hearing that word, hearing it in my mind like a message or something. I know… I know how hard it would be to hold a baby—my baby—in my arms, and then …” Her voice broke as the realit
y of what she was saying hit her.
Paul stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “Can you do that? Can you give this baby away?” His words were gentle, and the compassion in his voice, in his touch, soothed her. And yet, his very question let her know that he, too, had entertained the thought. And she suspected he’d merely been waiting for her to voice the idea.
“You’ve been thinking about it too, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I have, Anna. But I didn’t know if you could do it. I couldn’t ask you to do something you might regret for the rest of your life. I wanted it to be your idea.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, then reached out to grasp the steering wheel in front of him.
He hung his head, and a long moment passed before he spoke again. Finally he sighed. “I am still willing to keep this child and raise it as my own, if that’s what you want. I mean that. It won’t be easy, but I do mean it.” He looked at her now, questioning in his eyes.
“Oh, Paul. If I were twenty-five, or even thirty-five, if we could somehow take away the stigma of the rape for the child’s sake, if we didn’t have to tell anyone, I think I would want to raise this baby. I’m sure I would. But there are just so many hurdles that I don’t think we can get over.” She told Paul about her conversation with Emma, about the idea Emma had planted regarding open adoption.
“There’s just one huge problem, Paul.” She looked down at her burgeoning belly and smiled at her own unintended pun. “I’m not going to be able to hide this much longer. If we give the baby up, I don’t want people to know about it. At least not now. I’m not ready to make it public knowledge yet. I have too much to work through myself first.”
“But, how do you propose to hide something like this? For four more months? You can’t become a prisoner in our home for that long.”
“I don’t know. I guess…I’d have to go away somewhere.”
“Go away? What are you talking about? Where could you go?
Because of the Rain Page 10