by Cathy Lamb
But Taye’s love was a problem, too. Justine loved Taye as a . . . close friend. A childhood friend. She had tried to be in love with him and it hadn’t worked. She was in love with Jed. “We’re seventeen, Taye,” she said. “We can’t get married.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re seventeen.”
“So what do you want to do? Hey! Can we talk about this after basketball practice? Want to get root beer floats?”
She couldn’t abort. She didn’t want a baby.
“I think you have to tell your parents, Justine,” I said to her later, at my house, as we made necklaces, Justine’s hands shaking. “They’re going to find out. You’re going to get as big as a cow and your mom’s been pregnant eight times. They’ll know soon.”
She sobbed again, head down on the table.
Justine told her parents a week later. Taye, once again to his credit as a seventeen-year-old boy, insisted on going with her.
It was one of those closed-door meetings. Her father couldn’t even speak. Then he glared at Taye as if he wanted to throttle him. Justine’s mother was calmer, but shocked, her face flushed, then pale, and back to flushed. Taye apologized. Said he was sorry.
Justine told them she couldn’t abort.
“I should say not, young woman,” Chief Knight said.
“That is out of the question,” Annabelle said.
“What do I do?”
“We’ll raise the baby,” her mother said.
“That’s right,” her father said. “Together.”
But that wasn’t what Justine wanted. She didn’t want to be a mother. There were already eight kids in the house. Her mother had recently been diagnosed with arthritis and was not responding well to the medications. One of her younger siblings, Savannah, who I had ended up holding right after she was born, needed a heart operation. She would be fine, but a heart operation is not something that is a “minor inconvenience” in a family. She would need extensive care and medical help. Chief Knight and Annabelle were already exhausted from having eight kids.
Justine had always said she didn’t want kids. She had helped raise her seven siblings. She was still raising them. To all of her younger siblings she was the second mother, and they still came to her for everything, from hugs to advice and help on homework. She did not want a baby. She did not want to marry Taye.
Justine told them she wanted to give the baby up, and Taye and her parents, with heartbreak, agreed. Taye did have basketball practice every night, he said, and he thought he could win state in the 400-meter dash in track if he had time to practice. “Plus, now that I think about it, my mom will kill me if I bring home a baby. She wasn’t happy when I brought home two stray kittens last week.”
The chief suggested Justine move to his sister’s house in North Dakota when she started to show. The sister, Jerrilynn, the oldest of nine, was 67. She happily agreed to host Justine. “These things happen to nice girls from nice families all the time. Come on up, Justine!”
Everyone knows when you go “visit an aunt in the country” for an extended time, it’s code for: The girl’s pregnant. We lived in a small town. Justine was seventeen. She didn’t need town gossip adding to her spiraling depression.
So when Justine barely started to show, and we knew the “visiting her aunt” announcement would have to come soon, Justine, Chick, and I thought of a solution to that growing problem.
We thought of a prank. It was a perfect prank. A perfectly preposterous precocious prank. It would do the trick.
We created a chicken/goat farm using my chickens and goats. In the school library. When the librarians walked in on Tuesday morning, the place was a-cluckin’ and a-bleetin’. The students loved the clucks and the flying feathers, the chickens on the bookshelves and the goats on the tables, but the librarians were not amused. Justine, Chick, and I were suspended for three days, plus we had to clean up the library and round up the animals.
Justine’s parents pretended that Justine “needed a new environment where she could mature and make better decisions,” and off she went. Taye kept his mouth shut, and so did Chick and I. My dad knew why we created the chicken/goat farm, I could tell. Chief Knight and he were fishing buddies, after all.
He and I didn’t talk about Justine’s pregnancy because that would have made me break my promise to Justine about keeping it secret. He did say to me, “You are a true friend, Hummingbird,” and I was not in any trouble for borrowing our feathered and horned friends.
In North Dakota Justine met with the adoptive parents, with whom her aunt had been close friends for years. They were in their thirties. They did not have children. The father, a high school teacher and coach, had lost a testicle in a diving accident when he was a teenager and could not get his wife, a nurse, pregnant.
Justine said they were two of the kindest people she had ever met. She met with them three times and told them she had chosen them to be the baby’s parents.
They cried. Justine cried. Her aunt cried.
Taye agreed and signed the paperwork that was sent to Justine’s home. Taye, according to Annabelle, cried, too. He was so upset that he didn’t even stay for Annabelle’s steak tacos, and he loved her steak tacos.
After Justine left for her aunt’s, Taye calmed way down in terms of partying. I don’t think he laughed for months, until Justine came home. Taye and Justine did not get back together. They were children who had had a child. They had given their baby to another couple. They had aged and they were heartbroken.
Though Justine has always said she didn’t want children, she has never stopped mourning the loss of her daughter, whom she named Natalie Chick. She has not contacted her daughter; she told the parents she wouldn’t. She doesn’t even know if her daughter knows she was adopted. Every year Justine flies to North Dakota. She says she feels “compelled. I can’t stop myself.”
She drives past the home where her daughter lives. Each time she has seen a black-haired girl playing in the yard, or getting into a car, or laughing with friends, laughing with her parents. It tears her up like razor blades on her soul, but she has to know that her daughter is alive and well.
Every year Justine, Chick, and I get together on Natalie Chick’s birthday and go for a long hike in the woods in a state park. There are ten waterfalls, a river, steep canyon walls, lush trees, and an abundance of ferns, squirrels, and chipmunks. You can walk on the trail behind one waterfall that shoots off a cliff. There are double waterfalls and a waterfall that plunges into a blue-green pool. If heaven has a waterfall, you will find its counterpart here.
It is a magical place where Justine tries to find peace. But to find peace, she has to open herself up and go through her worst worries and deepest fears.
“Do you think my daughter likes the woods? Do you think she likes sunsets like I do? Do you think she wants to be an accountant? Do you think she’s healthy? Do you think she’s happy? Do you think she has an ache inside of her for me and she doesn’t even know why? Do you think she’s lonely for me? Is there something in her soul that says she was rejected, and hurt, and betrayed? Will I ever meet her? When she’s eighteen, do you think I should contact her parents and ask if I can contact her?”
And then the guilt, the pain, the shame. “I shouldn’t have given her up. . . . No, I made the right choice.... No, I didn’t. My mom had arthritis, Savannah needed heart surgery, I was seventeen and I never wanted kids.... What about college? I probably wouldn’t have even gone . . . but I am so ashamed. What mother gives her kid up? What would Jed think? He’d think I’m a sorry excuse for a mother. That I’m cold and have no heart.”
We hug her, console her. “Everything you think Jed would think is what you think of yourself, and you shouldn’t,” I said. “You made the right choice, Justine. You were only a teenager.”
Giving up her daughter has caused an avalanche of pain for Justine that has never ended. She desperately wants to see Natalie Chick, to talk to her. “Just once,” she says. “I want to
know she’s okay, that she’s happy.”
We always end up crying together on that hike, sitting on a log, in front of a waterfall, wishing Justine’s daughter a life filled with peace and health, love and laughter.
We hold hands.
Afterward, Justine goes home to her high-rise condo in Portland and stays drunk for a weekend. It takes another week for her to pull herself together. She goes on with her life, the two people she loves with all her heart, Jed and Natalie Chick, not with her.
* * *
I tried making Zack my grandma Dixie’s apple pie. I had made it so many times with her, in her white and yellow kitchen. We’d roll the dough together, add the nutmeg, the cinnamon, the brown sugar, and handfuls of chopped apples from our orchard. We made crisscross crusts. We baked it, we invited my dad over, we ate it. In between, my grandma and I would read or hike or she’d talk to me about being a mechanic or what being a feminist meant. I loved that time with her.
That day, I burned the apple pie. I also forgot to put in the cinnamon. It was frustrating. I threw it out before Zack returned home but greeted him in my red negligee with the see-through flouncy skirt, so he didn’t seem to mind.
* * *
“Dad, can you help me with something?”
“I will do anything to help my hummingbird.” My dad sat across from me at our kitchen table, my jewelry supplies between us. He had brought lunch all the way from eastern Oregon for us. He’d killed a chicken so we could have chicken sandwiches. He brought us an apple pie, too, Grandma Dixie’s recipe. Delicious. Certainly better than my burned one.
“I’m making jewelry, as you can see, and I need metal pieces. So, for example, this necklace. I want to have a bird as the centerpiece, maybe a blue heron, in full flight. I’ll line it with these red and silver beads, and these tiny silver hoops. I also need two birds, the same design, but about a third the size, for right here. Can you make them for me?”
“Hummingbird, it would be my pleasure. Anything else?”
“Well . . .” I flipped through my drawing notebook. “What about . . .”
We had a fun time studying the necklaces I’d drawn in my notebook. I could tell he was thrilled to be making things for me for my necklaces. He wanted to help. He wanted to do something, anything, to help his hummingbird.
I love my dad with my whole heart.
Just as I love my lying husband, Zack.
* * *
This is what I’ve learned: Sometimes you have to let people help you because you love them and they love you and they want to help you. They will feel better if they help you. They will feel useful and needed. They will be grateful that you let them help.
Let them help you, then they will let you help them when their life falls into hell.
* * *
My mother was dating my dad for about two months before she found out she was pregnant. They met at a state fair. She told my dad she broke up with her previous boyfriend to date him. My mother has always looked for “new and improved” in her life. My dad could have been the “new and improved” at that moment. I am sure my dad married her because she was pregnant. He was twenty years old. Few twenty-year-old men want to get married then.
Anyhow.
My dad is six four, 230 pounds.
I am five three and small boned.
My dad has black hair shot through with white, and dark eyes, and his skin is slightly dark. His grandmother on Grandma Dixie’s side was half Cherokee, half French Canadian, with black hair. His granddad was Italian. Black hair, dark eyes.
I have fair skin, like my mother.
I have blond hair. I have blue eyes, like my mother.
I have no features that are the same as my dad’s. I do not resemble Grandma Dixie, either.
I know my grandma’s brother and sister. I know their children. I know their children, too. Everybody has black hair, olive-colored skin, dark eyes. They are gorgeous. They are tall.
There is no resemblance between me and them.
I know my dad and I could take one of those DNA tests.
But we won’t.
We don’t need to. He is my real dad. I am his real daughter.
And that’s all we need to know.
* * *
The window in our bedroom, right above our bed, shattered.
The earsplitting crash and falling glass yanked me out of sleep, my heart instantly pounding. The gunshot echoed through the quiet night, and I found myself on the floor, on the side of the bed near the wall, Zack on top of me. “Stay down, Nat!” he insisted. “Stay down.”
He reached over my head, underneath the dresser, and pulled out a gun.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed out, shocked. Not only because of the bullet through the window but because Zack had a gun under the dresser.
“Don’t move.”
Zack crept toward the window, holding the gun with both hands. I heard laughter. It was familiar to me, that giggly laughter, but I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard it before. It made my blood freeze in my body. I reached up and grabbed my phone on the nightstand and hit 911. As the operator answered, I heard tires screeching through the parking lot. The car gunned down the street.
“We need the police!” I shouted at the 911 operator.
“Address?”
I couldn’t remember our address. “Zack, what is our address?” He didn’t answer, his face grim as he stared out the window, gun still pointed out. “Zack? Zack? What’s our address? I can’t remember.”
In the darkness of our room, the shadows slanting over his hard jaw, the streetlight glinting off the scar on his cheekbone, our window gone, I saw an emotion I could not understand: Defeat.
* * *
“I have already told you, Detective,” Zack said to Detective Zadora, “I don’t know anyone who would do this to us. I’ve given you the names and numbers of everyone who has worked for me, even the few I’ve had to fire over the years.”
“Are you sure?” Detective Zadora asked.
“Yes.”
I looked from Detective Zadora back to Zack. There were two other police officers with her, but their names didn’t even register. It was five in the morning. The detective was called in because this was her case. We were her case, Zack and I, because of the hit-and-run, the stabbed Barbie, the headless bird, and now a bullet. We were being stalked. I had been attacked. So, ta-da! You get your own detective.
“We can’t help you if you don’t help us,” she said.
Why would she say that to us in that tone? What did she know? Why was she implying that we weren’t helping?
“I can’t help you if I don’t know who would do this.” Zack’s voice . . . it was lower. His hand was gripping mine fairly tightly. He never held my hand that tight. Our hand holding was a reflection of our marriage: a loose, warm grip.
“Business is okay?”
Zack paused. “It’s getting better.”
“I have a previous address listed for you.”
“Yes. I sold that house.”
“Why?”
Now that was odd. Why was the detective asking about our previous home sale? Shouldn’t we be talking about the bullet blasting through our window?
“So I could pay the bank off and finish the houses I’m building and sell them. I was overextended. I thought the market would keep up with the homes I was building, and it didn’t.”
“In this market, homes have been selling quickly,” the detective said.
“My homes weren’t ready in time, I had a cash problem.”
“And we had a lot of expenses,” I said. “Our deductible for my health care and expenses for rehab.” I was trying to help Zack, as I heard the suspicion in the detective’s voice.
Both my husband and the detective ignored me. The police officers sat quietly, watching Zack.
“Anything else you want to share with us, Mr. Shelton?”
“No.”
They all stared hard at him again, and Zack returned their gazes. I
watched with my mouth hanging open. Gall. I was right. They knew something. They believed Zack knew something.
“Mrs. Shelton,” said Detective Zadora, “may I speak with you alone?”
I nodded. We went to our bedroom. She shut the door.
“Mrs. Shelton, is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“What are you looking for? What do you think I know that I’m not sharing?” Somewhere amidst my fear from the bullet zinging through our window and my fear at the cryptic conversation Zack was having with the detective, I was surprised at myself. I had actually came up with prying questions through the fog of my broken brain.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Shelton. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on here. Clearly you and/or your husband are being threatened. Someone is after you, and they are not giving up.”
“I know. He’s sick. The whole thing scares the heck out of me. I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what Zack or I have done to bring this on. I have no idea who it is.”
“Do you have life insurance?”
She was implying my husband wanted me killed. “My husband is not trying to have someone kill me for my life insurance. And no, I don’t have any.”
“Okay.” She smiled. It softened the interview as she continued her questioning, which contained more financial questions about Zack’s houses and business, to which I said, “What do you think his finances have to do with this?” and she was vague in her answer.
I knew she was doing her job, but I didn’t like that she was implying that Zack was behind this, as if he had planned it all for some devious reason, because he wasn’t. I knew that, and I told her so.
The officers and Detective Zadora said they’d check the security cameras at our apartment complex, although I knew they probably weren’t working given the overall decay of this place, and they would check security cameras from businesses down the street to see if they could pick up a license plate number, etc.
“That was pretty scary,” I said to Zack after they left. I wrapped my arms around him and put my head on his chest.
“Yes,” Zack agreed, his jaw tight. He was furious. Barely contained fury.