by Sharon Sala
From there, she was taken to a counselor. The first thing Ellie noticed was the woman’s pink blouse, and that even though she wasn’t smiling, she had kind eyes. In made Ellie relax.
“Come in, have a seat,” the lady said. “My name is Mrs. Cashion and you’re Elizabeth Wayne, is that correct?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ellie said, sat down, crossed her legs at the ankles and folded her hands in her lap as Sophie had taught her to do.
“My job is to make sure that you fully understand your decision and to make sure you’ve weighed all your options, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Elizabeth, had you been on any birth control?”
“No, ma’am.”
Mrs. Cashion frowned. “So you were sexually active without protection?”
Ellie frowned. While she understood why she’d asked, she didn’t like the woman’s tone. “I was raped.”
Mrs. Cashion sighed. “I see. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, ma’am, so was I.”
The counselor eyed Ellie closer. Something was off about this young girl’s manner, but it wasn’t something she could put her finger on. Maybe it was because she was so matter-of-fact. There were no tears, no embarrassment—just a cold statement of facts.
“Did you ever consider carrying the baby to full term and putting it up for adoption?”
“No.”
“May I ask why?”
“Is what I tell you confidential, like between a lawyer and client . . . or a doctor and patient?”
“No, but—”
“Then it stays with me. I’m eighteen. This is my decision.”
The counselor nodded. “I can recommend a couple of kinds of birth control protection for when—”
“Mrs. Cashion—”
“Yes?”
“We can save ourselves some time right now if I tell you where I’m coming from. I won’t be using birth control because I don’t plan to ever get married. I don’t intend to have children, nor will I be in a relationship, sexual or otherwise.”
“My dear, it’s obvious that the rape has traumatized you to the point of shutting down. I would hate to see you waste your life in this manner. With guidance and therapy you can learn to move past this and live a full and productive life.”
Ellie leaned forward. Her tone hovered on angry—her words firing in rapid succession. “You don’t know anything about me, and I can assure you that no amount of counseling—not even until the Rapture comes down—will change anything about me. I am broken. It happened years ago—long before the rape, and there’s not enough glue in the world to put me together again. I understand there is some information I need to know about my aftercare?”
Mrs. Cashion’s cheeks were burning, so she knew she was flushed. She’d been doing this service for several years and thought she had long ago learned to control her emotions, but for some reason, she had an overwhelming urge to cry.
“Yes. I’ll go over the details with you and then you’ll be ready. You do know they’ll do an ultrasound before the actual procedure is done, don’t you?”
Ellie’s voice was flat, her face expressionless. “Lady, I don’t care what it takes, as long as they get this out of me.”
“Elizabeth? Can you hear me? The procedure is over. You need to wake up.”
Ellie heard, but she didn’t want to come back. She and Wyatt were playing in the creek, wading and chasing each other up and down the water until they were both soaked to the bone. If they went back now, Momma would know where they’d been and she’d specifically told them not to get wet.
“Elizabeth. Wake up. Wake up.”
Ellie moaned. She hurt. She must have fallen on something. Momma was for sure going to be mad now.
“Elizabeth, wake up.”
Ellie opened her eyes. She wasn’t at the creek. She wasn’t even in her house. Then she saw the uniform and remembered. “Is it over?” she mumbled.
“Yes. How do you feel?”
“Relieved.”
The nurse sighed. “No, I mean physically, how do you feel?”
“Dizzy. Thirsty. Hurts.”
“The dizzy part will wear off. You can have ice chips in a little bit, and we’ll give you something for the pain.”
“When can I go home?”
“In an hour or so . . . just as soon as the nitrous oxide wears off and you’re steady on your feet. Did you come alone?”
“Yes.”
The nurse patted her arm. “It won’t be long.”
Ellie nodded.
It was over. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Just knowing that the last remnants of the rape were finally gone was all she needed to hear.
About forty minutes later, she walked out of the clinic, past the curious stares of the women still waiting, lighter in body and spirit than when she’d gone in. She got into her car and went through the drive-through at McDonald’s, ordered breakfast burritos for three, hash browns and a Pepsi, which she drank on the way home.
The sanitary pads she’d bought yesterday were still on the floorboard. They were her alibi. She knew women used their monthly period for a multitude of excuses. It should serve her needs as well.
She was shaky by the time she finally arrived and grateful the drive was over. Grabbing her breakfast and the sack with her pads, she went inside. It was just after ten thirty.
Garrett was running water into the coffeepot when she walked in the back door. Miserable from a hangover, he snapped.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Getting breakfast and Kotex. I can tell by the snotty tone of your voice that you feel like hell, but don’t take your hangover out on me. I have my own shit to deal with, okay?”
Garrett groaned. The sharp tone in her voice felt like nails on a chalkboard.
“Don’t fucking shout,” he mumbled.
Sophie entered just as the curse word left his mouth.
“I had no idea you were just getting up, but it appears from your bad behavior that you should have stayed in bed. Do not curse in front of your children.”
Wyatt slipped in behind Sophie. “Do I smell food?”
Ellie smiled. “I brought burritos and hash browns from McDonald’s.”
When she opened the sack, Daddy gagged and bolted from the room.
Wyatt laughed. “Guess the smell of food didn’t agree with him.”
Ellie ate most of her burrito then washed it down with juice. “You guys finish the rest between you. I’m not feeling so great so I’m going back to bed.”
Sophie frowned. “Are you getting sick, honey?”
“No. Just getting my period.”
Wyatt held up a hand. “TMI. TMI.”
Sophie’s frown deepened. “What does that mean?”
“Too much information,” he muttered, then grabbed the rest of his food and disappeared.
Ellie sighed. “Sorry.”
“You pay him no mind,” Sophie said. “You lie around all day if you need to. In fact, you can spend all the time in bed that you want right now, so enjoy. No more school or job—just a summer to get your head into a mode for the future.”
Ellie was too weak and shaky to think about the future, so she took herself to bed.
Ellie’s weekend was a blur. Cinnamon came by Saturday afternoon long enough to find out Ellie wasn’t well and didn’t stay. Sophie hovered, coaxing her to eat some soup and plumping her pillows.
Ellie woke up off and on during Sunday to find Wyatt sitting in a chair by her bed.
“What are you doing here?” she muttered.
“You’re sick.”
“Not sick, just tired,” she said, and rolled over and closed her eyes.
The next time she woke, Wyatt was gone and Cinnamon was there. “Hey. It’s Monday, your first official day as an unemployed high-school graduate. Wanna go listen to some music? There’s this band playing in the park and the lead singer is seriously hot.”
“No, thank you.”
Cinnamon leaned forward, staring intently into Ellie’s face. “I see secrets,” she whispered.
“Everyone has secrets,” Ellie muttered. “Go listen to your band and let me sleep.”
Garrett got home from work that evening and was concerned when Doris told him Ellie hadn’t gotten out of bed all day except to eat soup and crackers at noon.
He went straight to her room and knocked. “Ellie, it’s me. Are you alright? Do you need anything?”
She was sitting up in bed with the television on mute, staring blankly at the screen without a notion of what was playing. When he shouted, she wished her remote had a mute button for his voice, as well. “I’m fine. Go away.”
“Doris said you’ve been in bed all day. Do you need to go to a doctor?”
Ellie sighed and closed her eyes, willing him to disappear.
“Ellie. Damn it. Open this door so I can see you face to face if for no other reason than to assure myself you are alright.’
Ellie threw back the covers, dragged herself across the room and unlocked the door.
Garrett was surprised when it suddenly swung inward, but was shocked at Ellie’s appearance. Her hair was lank and clinging to her head—her skin color almost ashen. The dark circles under her eyes made her face gaunt.
“Oh my God. You look terrible. You need to see a doctor. Get your robe and house shoes. I’m taking you to the emergency room.”
Ellie pointed across the hall at Sophie’s room. “Keep your voice down unless you want her in the middle of this conversation.”
Garrett glanced over his shoulder, then caught himself and groaned. “Stop it with the Sophie business. You need to see a doctor. Now.”
Ellie grabbed him by the arm, yanked him into the bedroom and quickly shut the door. He had no time to process the fact that he was suddenly inside her inner sanctum, and at her bidding, when she blindsided him.
“I look like this because I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good because I went to an abortion clinic on Saturday and had an abortion. I had an abortion because you got me pregnant. You got me pregnant because you raped me. You raped me because you’re a sick, controlling pervert.” She opened the door and physically shoved him back outside. “For obvious reasons, you make me sick to my stomach. I am not going to the doctor. Don’t bother me again.”
She slammed the door shut in his face and punctuated it with the sound of the slide bolt.
Garrett shuddered. All he could think about was getting to his room before he came undone. As he turned, he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror, and froze.
The man looking back at him was a stranger. He had not set out in life to become a murderer. The first time he justified it by telling himself it was for the love of Ellie. But this time, there was no justification. What he’d done to her had been in the name of jealousy and rage, not from love, and in the long run, had ended yet another life. There were no words for what he felt—only a final acceptance that there was no going back to the way it was. Not after this.
Chapter Eighteen
A strange thing was happening to Ellie that she didn’t understand. Her body was healing, but it didn’t feel the same. Instead of feeling lighter as she had when she’d first left the clinic, she began to feel weighted down. If she hadn’t seen for herself that she was actually losing weight, she would have assumed she was gaining. Her movements were lethargic—even her thought process was slower. She wasn’t sleeping well, and when she did, her dreams were tormented. She attributed it all to the trauma of the abortion, and assumed it would eventually pass.
The first time she heard the baby crying, it was in a dream. In the dream, she was running from room to room inside an unfamiliar house, but no matter how many rooms she searched there were no babies, just that long, frightened wail. After she woke, she felt sick.
Every time after that when she slept, she relived the same dream—a baby crying and crying with no one to tend it. When the dream became a constant waking nightmare she feared she was losing her mind. Momma hadn’t been right by the time she committed suicide. Maybe craziness was in the blood.
The high-pitched wail with a little catch of breath in between was like a knife to Ellie’s heart. She could feel the pain and the panic in that cry with every fiber of her being. The video she’d seen at the clinic became a running loop in her mind. They’d sucked the fetus from her womb as surely as if they’d shoved a vacuum cleaner hose in her body and turned on the power. She hadn’t considered what was in her as anything more than a foreign object Daddy had left behind, but it appeared she might have been wrong.
After forty-eight hours, the constant dirge of that mournful cry convinced her she was hearing the ghost of the baby she’d killed, and she was being haunted on her way to hell.
Sophie and Wyatt knew she was suffering, but didn’t know why. It was making Wyatt crazy, seeing Ellie becoming more and more fragile. They took it upon themselves to monitor her every move, and when they lost track of her, it wasn’t unusual for one or both of them to panic.
“Have you seen her today?” Sophie asked.
Wyatt nodded. “She looks like hell, excuse my language. But she won’t talk to me. She won’t even look at me anymore.”
Sophie blotted a tear and then wadded the tissue up in her lap. “I think we need to have an intervention.”
“That’s for addicts and alcoholics—people who are addicted. Not Ellie.”
Sophie persisted with the notion. “Then a confrontation. That’s it, a confrontation. We need to make her tell us what’s wrong.”
“You can’t make Ellie do anything she doesn’t want to do. Believe me, I know.”
“Then maybe we could ask Cinnamon. She might know something we don’t.”
The thought that Ellie would share something with that skanky redhead before sharing with him made Wyatt angry. “I don’t believe it. If something was really bad, Ellie would come to me. We share everything.”
“That’s not true,” Sophie said. “You don’t share what you do when you’re not with her.”
Wyatt shifted nervously. “That’s different.”
“No it’s not. I don’t care how close people are, there will always be things that must remain private. It’s how we’re made. Anyway, the next time Cinnamon comes, I’m going to ask her.”
“Whatever,” Wyatt muttered. “But count me out.”
“Even if it’s for Ellie?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair,” Sophie stated, and the subject was closed.
Doris was running the vacuum in the back of the house and had taken advantage of the beautiful weather to open the windows and air out the rooms. Ellie sat curled up on the window seat in the living room, watching traffic and trying to ignore the constant wail of the ghost baby’s cries.
It seemed that everything around her was amplified. The buzz and chirp of cicadas and grasshoppers, the birds up in the trees beyond the window, even the sound of her own breathing was a steady roar inside her head. She rubbed her hands up and down her legs, feeling the prickle of leg hair. The last time she’d tried to shave her legs she nicked the skin and made it bleed. The constant seeping of big red drops had turned into ladybug beetles crawling out of her skin. She didn’t know if she was losing her mind, or really had bugs, but just in case she wasn’t shaving anymore.
The baby shrieked, and Ellie covered her ears, focusing on the scent of lilacs filling the room. They reminded her of the days when Momma was still alive and how she had kept a vase of cut flowers in every room. She’d called it bringing the outside in.
Back then, Ellie would sit on a stool in the kitchen without making a sound, watching her mother arrange flowers while keeping up a running commentary about why she trimmed the stems on an angle and how adding an aspirin tablet to the water would keep them fresh longer. She didn’t know if it worked, but it had been her Momma’s way and so she’d do the same.
The baby hiccupped and paused.
E
llie’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe this was it. Maybe the crying had finally stopped. But the moment the notion went through her head, she heard a wail. About that same time, she spied a hummingbird dive-bombing the blossoms and hoped the baby’s cries didn’t scare it off.
Momma had planted the lilac bushes near the house on purpose to draw in the tiny birds, and she and Ellie made a game of counting how many they could count feeding at one time. Ellie had learned early that it was the small things in life that mattered. She wished she had Momma here now. She needed someone to tell her how to make that baby go away.
Ellie wasn’t the only one living with ghosts.
Garrett was languishing as well. He thought he might be dying—that he was rotting from the inside out. No matter how many showers he took, the scent of his body offended him. Despite Doris’s attempts to encourage his appetite, he couldn’t get down more than a few bites at a time and began taking sick days from work. The last time he’d missed work had been the day he’d buried his wife, so he knew whatever was wrong had to be bad. After a visit to the doctor he was given a clean bill of health, but he knew that wasn’t true. There wasn’t a single thing about him that was clean—certainly not his soul.
He and Ellie lived under the same roof with Sophie and Wyatt, and during the daytime, even Doris, but they were as far apart as if they were at opposite ends of the earth. He couldn’t look at her and bear the accusation in her eyes. His only resolution was to pretend she wasn’t there. What had once been an existence of constant turmoil between them had turned into a cold war.
It was the middle of the morning when Sophie caught Ellie walking the hall. She stopped to visit, but Ellie would have moved past in what looked like a trance had she not caught Ellie by the arm.
“Ellie, darling, it’s so good to see you getting up and about again. Have you eaten anything today?”
Ellie rubbed her hands over her face in a rough, scrubbing motion then suddenly jerked and tilted her head.
“Do you hear that, Sophie?”