Pon-Pon

by Cronk, LN

  I’d always had a feeling that was what was going on, but I’d never really been sure.

  “Did you know that I’m number three in my class?” she went on. “I was going to take AP Physics and AP Calculus this fall . . . those are weighted classes. If I did good enough in them I could have been valedictorian.”

  “You’re just pregnant, Charlotte . . . you’re not dying. There’s no reason you can’t still do all that.”

  “I’m not going back to school,” she said, shaking her head.

  “You don’t have to,” I told her. “My mom says the school has to provide you with a homebound teacher if you ask for one . . . and she said she’d be glad to help you and you know I will . . .”

  That made her cry harder for a moment, but I think it also made her feel better because soon she started calming down.

  “Have you been to see a doctor yet?”

  She nodded.

  “When are you due?”

  “December . . .”

  The same month Ashlyn was due. I could hardly believe she was that far along already. It seemed that Ashlyn was showing a lot more, but I guess Ashlyn hadn’t been trying to hide it.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked her, coming around to the real reason for my visit.

  She started to cry again.

  “Why didn’t you tell Jordan?”

  “When?” she asked, angrily. “At what point in our relationship was I supposed to bring that up?”

  “I . . . I don’t know, Charlotte, but how could you start something up with him and not tell him?”

  “I didn’t ‘start something up with him’!” she cried. “It just . . . it just happened!”

  “But you really knew? The whole time?”

  “I guess so,” she admitted, wiping her eyes. “I kept trying to convince myself it wasn’t true, but I knew . . .

  “Jordan hates me,” she finally mumbled.

  “Nobody hates you, Charlotte. We all hate that you’re going through this, and we hate to see you hurting, but nobody hates you.”

  “Jordan does.”

  “It’s different for Jordan,” I admitted. “Laci and I are hurting for you and you’re mom’s hurting for you. Jordan’s hurting for you too, but he’s also hurting for himself. He doesn’t hate you though.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t have to,” I said. “I can tell.”

  ~ ~ ~

  TANNER AND I went fishing the next week. I’d invited Jordan, but he was pretty much refusing to do anything besides pout, so it was just the two of us. We went to Makasoi Lake. I couldn’t figure out why Tanner never wanted to go to Cross Lake, but since we always used his boat which was on his trailer pulled by his truck, I couldn’t really argue much. He hardly talked for the entire trip up there. I figured he was just sore because three days earlier I’d finally beaten him at racquetball.

  We’d been out on the water for about ten minutes when Tanner cut the engine. He went to the front of the boat and dropped the trolling motor down; then he guided us into a cove and threw his line past a submerged log.

  I was still rigging a plastic worm on my line when he spoke.

  “Megan’s pregnant.”

  There was a loud “clunk” as my bullet sinker hit the bottom of the boat.

  “You’re kidding . . .”

  “Nope.” He shook his head.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I had a feeling congratulations weren’t in order and I decided that “How did this happen?” wasn’t going to sound too intelligent either.

  Ashlyn . . . Charlotte . . . Megan . . .

  Man . . . what was going on?

  “Wow . . .” I finally managed to say.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We haven’t decided yet.”

  “You’re . . . you’re not thinking about . . .”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head at me. “That’s not on the table.”

  I probably should have known that if they were thinking about having an abortion he never would have even let me know that she was pregnant. I don’t know why it wasn’t “on the table”, but I was glad it wasn’t.

  “So are you going to get married?”

  “No,” he said. “I already told you that I don’t want to do the family thing.”

  A little too late for that . . .

  If I’d felt like being mean I could have given him the Pon, Pon signal, and as it was I almost told him that it looked like the “family thing” was happening whether he wanted it to or not.

  Be supportive . . . be a good friend.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this isn’t what you wanted to have happen.”

  His lure reached the boat and he threw it out again.

  “You can say that again.”

  ~ ~ ~

  NO LONGER ANGRY at Charlotte I started getting mad at Jordan instead. I knew he was hurt and I knew he had every right to be, but at some point he was just going to have to suck it up and deal with it.

  Usually when I was working in my office I could hear the clanking of his weight set or the constant thwap of baseballs hitting the tarp in his back yard. Now there was nothing but silence and I never saw Jordan leave the house.

  Tanner even said that when a recruiter from the University of Minnesota came to talk with the family Jordan barely had two words to say. Tanner also told me that Jordan had turned down an interview with the recruiter from State.

  Everybody knew that Charlotte was planning on going to State, but still . . .

  The following Friday, Ashlyn, Brent, Laci and I took the combined youth group to Six Flags. Charlotte didn’t go, but neither did Jordan. True to his word, he hadn’t gone to a single youth group meeting all summer.

  When we walked past the pitching booth I stopped and watched. There were five or six high school boys there, each taking turns throwing the ball at a target and giving each other high fives whenever they threw one over seventy-five. Ashlyn, Brent and Laci asked me if I wanted some ice cream, but I didn’t so they left me there for a few minutes while they walked to a nearby vendor.

  No one was even close to being as good as Jordan. I watched them throw ball after ball and I got madder and madder at him.

  When they came back with their ice cream they asked me if I was ready to go.

  I was ready to do something . . . I just didn’t know what it was yet.

  The next day I opened Laci’s jewelry box and rifled around in it for a minute. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for . . . a crude star necklace made from a paperclip and string. A little girl who lived in the landfill in Mexico had given it to Laci when Greg’s dad had taken our youth group down there. Ashlyn and Natalie and Mike and Laci and Greg and I had all gone . . . we’d only been fourteen years old.

  “I called Aaron,” I told Laci when she found me lying on the bed holding the star necklace. Aaron was the coordinator of the Christian outreach program in Mexico. He’d been our group leader when we’d gone and Laci’s boss years later when she’d worked for them.

  “You did?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I think our youth group needs to go down there.”

  “Really?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  I nodded again.

  “When?”

  “They’ve got a slot open right before Christmas . . .”

  “We’d be gone over Christmas? That’s right when Ashlyn’s due.”

  And Charlotte . . .

  I nodded one more time.

  “I don’t think we’ve got enough time to raise all the money we’d need.” she said.

  “Most of these families could pay for whatever we don’t raise.”

  “What about the rest?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Gonna sell your hot tub?” she asked, smiling.

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that.�
�

  “Are you sure you want to be away from home over Christmas?”

  “I really think we need to do this . . .”

  “Are we taking the kids?”

  “I thought maybe we’d take Dorito and leave Lily here with your mom. I think he’d really like to go see everybody at the orphanage again.”

  “We wouldn’t be with Lily on Christmas Day?”

  I said it one more time.

  “I really think we need to do this.”

  The next day I walked over to Jordan’s house. He was out in the driveway, changing the oil in his mom’s car.

  “I want you to come to youth group tonight.”

  “No,” he said, not looking up from under the hood. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I do think so. You need to be there tonight. I’ll pick you up at five-thirty.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t worry,” I went on. “Charlotte’s not going to be there.”

  “Why not?” he asked, finally looking at me. I could tell that for the briefest moment he was worried something had happened to her.

  “Because . . . it’s an organizational meeting for a mission trip we’re taking and she’s not going to be able to go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Mexico.”

  “We are?”

  “Yeah.”

  He thought about it for a moment and then nodded.

  “Okay.”

  I nodded back at him. “See you at five-thirty.”

  ~ ~ ~

  LILY’S SURGERY WAS three days later. We went up the night before and stayed with Mike and Danica in their new house. I wasn’t nervous about her surgery at all . . . I just knew somehow that everything was going to be alright.

  I was more worried instead, about Ashlyn’s baby. Ashlyn and Charlotte had both had AFP tests done. The test had checked for abnormal levels of proteins that could indicate a problem. Charlotte’s tests had come back fine, but Ashlyn’s . . .

  “It showed there’s a chance her baby’s going to have Down’s syndrome,” Laci had told me.

  “A chance?”

  “A ten percent chance.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Nothing. They could have an amniocentesis if they wanted to find out for sure ahead of time, but there’s like a one or two percent chance that could make her lose the baby, and since they’re going to have him no matter what, they’re just going to wait.”

  “That’s going to be a long, hard wait,” I said.

  “It is,” Laci agreed.

  Lily’s surgery went off without a hitch – just like I knew it would. The doctors shaved off a bit of hair behind her ears (which freaked Laci out just a little bit) and made an incision. Then they attached electrodes to her auditory nerves and implanted a little receiver and a magnet the size of a pea. After she was stitched up they brought her out from under the anesthesia and they took us back to see her. She didn’t seem to be in any pain at all, but she kept signing to us over and over that she was thirsty.

  Two nights later we took the kids to the city park to watch fireworks. Lily’s incision had to heal for about three weeks and then would come her “activation day”. That would be the day she would get the external parts to her implants (the tiny microphones and the transmitters) and the day we would begin the long process of helping her to hear as a well as possible.

  Right now though, she sat on my lap, watching the lights burst in the sky. I knew she could feel the explosions, but I hoped that by this time next year she would be hearing them loud and clear.

  ~ ~ ~

  THREE WEEKS AFTER Tanner told me that Megan was pregnant we went fishing again. Jordan didn’t go with us this time either . . . he was still feeling too sorry for himself to go out and enjoy anything. That was fine. I figured that if nothing else, a trip to the landfill in Mexico around Christmas time was going to fix that.

  Tanner picked me up at my house and this time he didn’t wait until we were on the lake to tell me what he had to say.

  “Megan moved out,” he said after we’d barely pulled out of the driveway.

  “Why?”

  “We’re through,” he shrugged.

  “What about the baby?”

  “She says she lost it.”

  “She says she lost it?”

  “I don’t think she was ever pregnant,” he said. “I think she was lying about it so I’d marry her and when that didn’t work she conveniently ‘lost it.’”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Well, what would she have done if you had married her?”

  “I think she would have ‘lost it’ after we got married.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  We rode along quietly for a few minutes.

  “Jordan says you guys are going to Mexico over Christmas?” he finally asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah.”

  “You need another chaperone?”

  “Why?” I asked, trying not to act shocked. “You wanna go?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was to discourage him from going, but . . .

  “You know, Tanner,” I said, “I’m not sure if you realize what things are like down there . . .”

  “I know what it’s like.”

  Of course he knew . . . it wasn’t as if he’d never heard any of us talk about it before.

  “Well, yeah,” I said, nodding. “We could use another chaperone. That’d be great.”

  “Great,” he said.

  “Great,” I said again.

  Everything was just great.

  ~ ~ ~

  ACTIVATION DAY CAME – the day they would hook Lily up to her transmitters and see if the surgery had been a success. We knew it was just the beginning of what was going to be a long process in helping her to hear, but it was pretty exciting just the same.

  First the technologist attached little magnets to either side of Lily’s head, right over the implants. These held the microphones and transmitters in place. She also hooked her up to some equipment that would allow her to determine if Lily was sensing anything, even if she didn’t visibly react.

  At first Lily was just introduced to computer generated sounds that we couldn’t even hear, but I could tell every time one was made because of the look on her face.

  “Okay,” the technologist said. “She’s definitely sensing those. Let’s see how she does with some ambient sounds now.”

  Ambient sounds were normal sounds . . . ones not generated by the computer.

  “Which one of you wants to talk to her first?” she asked, looking at us.

  Laci and I looked at each other.

  “You go ahead,” I told Laci and she smiled.

  Lily was playing with the technologist’s I.D. card that was clipped onto the pocket of her shirt. The technologist made an adjustment to each transmitter and then nodded at Laci. Laci glanced at me first and then spoke softly.

  “Lily? Hey, Lily . . . can you hear me?”

  Lily let go of the I.D. card and it was a wonderful moment.

  She looked right at Laci.

  We left Mike and Danica’s the next morning and after we’d been home for an hour or so, Jordan knocked on the door . . . very quietly.

  “I wanted to know how things went,” he whispered. He was holding a stuffed animal with a red bow around its neck

  I laughed at him, glad to see that he’d finally gotten out of the house.

  “You don’t have to whisper.”

  “But I thought it might all be too much for her . . .”

  “She’s doing good. Come on in.”

  Lily had heard us at the door and she’d turned around. When she saw that it was Jordan she smiled at him.

  “Hi, Lily,” he said, signing it too. “Oh, I guess I don’t need to sign it anymore.”


  “No, you should, actually,” Laci said. “That’s how she’s going to learn what we’re saying – by reading lips and having us sign while we talk to her.”

  “Okay,” Jordan smiled. “So it went good? She can hear now?”

  “Well,” Laci explained, “she’s definitely responding. She’s got to go through a series of mappings to figure out what the best settings are going to be . . .”

  “Mappings?”

  “It’s really complicated,” I told him. “I’ve been studying up on it for two months and I still don’t understand it.”

  “But she’s definitely hearing stuff,” Laci went on. “And nothing’s seemed to bother her yet either, which we were really worried about . . .”

  He sat down on the floor next to Lily, handed her the stuffed animal, and started talking and signing to her. He still talked very quietly.

  “Here,” I said after a little while. “Watch.”

  I sat behind her with a toy drum that belonged to Dorito. I hit it with the wooden mallet and Lily swiveled her head around to see where the noise had come from.

  I moved to the couch and Jordan continued sitting on the floor with her for another minute or two until the doorbell rang. Lily looked up again when it did and Laci answered the door. Jordan also turned around to see who it was.

  It was Mrs. White and Charlotte.

  Jordan turned back around to face Lily. Out of habit to get her attention he stroked her cheek before he spoke to her.

  “Good bye, Lily,” he said, and he signed it. Then he got up and went into the kitchen and never looked back. I heard the sliding glass door open and then close behind him.

  When I turned back to face Charlotte and Mrs. White, Charlotte met my eyes.

  “Gee, Dave. I guess you were right,” she said. “He doesn’t hate me at all.”