by Grayson Cole
* * *
“We need to talk to her.” Sharp and authoritative, Carolyn’s voice commanded the doctor’s attention. Tracey had been conscious for a day with perfectly good vitals. It was time.
“I understand you need to talk to her, but as you well know, her condition is delicate right now. We don’t want her to experience a lot of stress,” Dr. Singh stated plainly.
“But you said she was stabilized.” Rett’s brow furrowed.
“She has stabilized,” Dr. Singh allowed. “Her blood pressure and all the vitals look good, but she’s dilated more than she should be. We don’t want her going into labor early.”
“I love her, I would never want to jeopardize her and the baby, but there are some things we have to settle.”
The doctor seemed to contemplate their words and finally nodded reluctantly.
“Tracey,” Carolyn called in a voice that feigned calm and civility as she swept into the room. Her mother was a bit dramatic. Her voice was never calm, civil, or smooth. She didn’t look at her and Tracey felt the way she did when she was eight and drove the car into the pool.
Then Garrett Atkins stepped into the room with the doctor right behind him. Tracey’s heart monitor went haywire. Her doctor freaked out, which of course made things worse. It was actually almost comical later. Out of the corner of her eye, Tracey saw Rett leave the room. She had to get a grip on herself. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I was just a little surprised. That’s all.” She tried to take deep breaths and calm herself. Her monitor slowed its beeping and she insisted to her doctor that she was fine.
“He can come back.”
The damn doctor looked at her mother, not Tracey.
“Stay.” Carolyn told the doctor. And she did.
Mama went out into the hall then, and was followed back by a more timid Garrett Atkins than Tracey had ever seen before.
The heart monitor sped up a little, but Tracey was steady. The doctor assured herself that Tracy was fine before she left the room.
“We have to talk,” her mother said.
The pit of Tracey’s stomach felt as though it were on a plane descending too fast. “About what?”
“About you.”
“What about me?”
“Let’s hear what you have to say, and don’t you dare lie to me. You’ve already done enough of that.”
“I don’t know if I can explain,” Tracey choked out, feeling the pregnant tears begin to well up inside her. “I just wanted to avoid any problems. I didn’t want you or Daddy to be angry with me. I just… I wanted…” And she couldn’t get the rest out because she was overtaken by the kind of sobs one always saw in the death scene of a movie, only her feelings were real. What was even more mortifying was the fact that Garrett was holding her and trying to calm her down. And what was even more ridiculous was that he was telling her that stress was bad for the baby. Her mother was looking at him as if he were crazy.
“Tracey, I don’t know what to say about this. I just don’t know what to say. I thought I raised you better. And—just a question—how long were you intending to keep this from your daddy and me? You had to know we’d find out when she was born. It’s the kind of thing you can tell just from looking at a child. What were you going to do when she looked just like him?”
“You think she’ll look like me?” Rett asked. It seemed like a ridiculous question to ask at the time. Why the hell did he sound so happy?
“All the babies in our family come out looking like their daddies,” Carolyn replied off-handedly.
“My baby girl, Nathalie,” he said in awe. He pressed his hand to Tracey’s inflated stomach. Garrett smiled, stroking her stomach as if he had been doing it all along, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Angie will be glad to know she’s going to have a little niece to corrupt.”
Carolyn turned her attention back to him. “The baby’s already big as a house, as you can see.” Thanks, Mama. “They may have to do a Caesarean. But I hope that’s not necessary.”
“That’s the way my sister and I were delivered,” he said, nodding his head. “We were both nearly ten pounds.”
If Tracey were white, she was certain she would have gone pale. She already knew the baby was big, but the very idea!
“Listen, Garrett,” Carolyn spoke with a gentle voice. Tracey recognized contrition in it. “You’ll have to forgive me for what I said in the waiting room that day.”
“What did you say?” Tracey asked.
She didn’t pay Tracey any mind.
“I believed that you had abandoned Tracey and the baby. When I saw you I thought…”
“I understand,” he said. He always understood. “You didn’t expect it to be the other way around. Listen, I was in love with Tracey.” Was in love with her? “I would never have done anything to hurt her. Then again, I didn’t think she would ever do something like this. I guess she knew that the only way to keep me from this baby was for me not to know it existed.”
“But you said you knew she was pregnant. You asked her to have the baby.”
“Yeah, well, I knew she was pregnant, but Tracey led me to believe that she was going to abort the baby. I had no idea she was going to carry her to term.”
That was not altogether true. Tracey never actually said she was going to abort the baby.
Her mother’s eyes found her. Her chin had dropped and her mouth was open. Tracey closed her eyes; she couldn’t stand much more of this. Her head began to hurt and, as if she felt it, too, Nathalie started to move within her. Garrett’s hands were still pressed to her abdomen so he felt the movement, too. Tracey felt him kneel down beside her. She heard his laughter, heard the amazement that made his voice crack as he yelled, “She’s moving! She really is moving in there! She really is in there!”
If they were any other couple Tracey would have shared this joy with him, but they were not any other couple and there would be no sharing between them.
He turned to her mother, whom he barely knew, and beckoned her. “Come feel her move.” And her mother came, the both of them touching Tracey, but not touching her at all. She opened her eyes to see them smiling at each other, kneeling there in an intimate moment that still managed to make Tracey feel like an outsider.
She did what she could to stop the tears burning in her eyes from falling.
* * *
“Baby!” Travis McAlpine came into the room bearing even more flowers. “If I hadn’t been halfway around the world, I would have been back sooner.”
Garrett jumped up then. Tracey’s mother stood as well.
Then Tracey’s father uttered a very, very rare and unrepeatable curse.
“Go ahead, tell your daddy what you’ve done,” her mother said, waving her soft hand with its long, pink-tipped nails in the air. Tracey stroked her belly, thinking of what the world had in store for her baby.
“Tracey?” His deep, stern, preacher-man voice started her to trembling. Her daddy was not going to like this.
She didn’t say anything right away. She only looked toward the window, watching the fan her mother had brought chop up the world beyond it.
“Tracey, I am not going to keep asking you this. You’ve had enough surprises for us this year already. I’m not going to pull your teeth to hear another one.”
Tracey swallowed and opened her mouth, willing the words to just come out. They didn’t, and she wished it could be easier. She wished for once she could speak out clearly, assertively. “Well…”
Her mother crossed her arms in front of her, waiting for the precise moment when her father understood what Tracey was about to say so she could jump in and either help demolish or help save her daughter. Tracey wasn’t sure which.
Tracey watched her father, but he wasn’t paying her any attention. For the first time since he’d come in, he was noticing Garrett. And staring daggers into him.
“I don’t guess you’re going to have to tell him after all.” Her mother gave Garrett a firm, supportive pat on the
back before going to stand beside her husband. Tracey absolutely thought of her mother as a traitor then.
Garrett stood, still watching her father, who was always intimidating. But Garrett didn’t seem intimidated. Garrett seemed furious. “You bastard, you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me she was pregnant. You didn’t say a word. You fu—”
“Watch it,” Carolyn warned.
“Did you know he came to see me, Carolyn?”
“She didn’t know, and if you insult one more person in my family, you are going to have problems.”
“Yessir,” Garrett nodded. Sarcastically, he added, “When you’re done, remember to tell your wife what you’ve done. I’ve already told her what Tracey’s done. Like father like—”
“I don’t need to explain a damn thing to anybody!” Travis roared at him.
“Oh really?” Garrett turned to Carolyn. “Ask him about it.”
From the look on her face, she would do just that, but not there, not then, not in front of them.
“Before you start throwing stones,” Travis bit out, “let’s look at you and what you’ve done. To start, my wife tells me that you begged Tracey to have the baby so you could raise it.”
“I did.”
“Well, why did you take no for an answer? It was your child.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You let Tracey just tell you ‘no’ and you were through with it.”
“I didn’t. Tracey led me to believe that she was going to abort the baby.”
“She led you to believe? And you accepted that?”
“I had no choice.”
“So you accepted it. A legal ‘prodigy’ couldn’t think of a way to stop her from doing it? You didn’t check on her to see if she’d done it. You never checked to find out if she really went through with it because deep down you were kind of hoping she would, weren’t you?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, I think so. I think since you had already broken up with her, had already decided that she wasn’t going to come around to your way of thinking, had already decided that she was going to burden your plans for the future, you wanted her to get rid of that baby. You wanted an excuse not to ever see Tracey again!”
“Daddy, stop it! It wasn’t like that. I’m to blame here.”
“Oh, Tracey, you have proven your naiveté. What you did was just convenient for him!”
“Oh, that’s beautiful. It really is beautiful. You told me to stay away from her!”
“Get out.” The voice wasn’t loud, nor was it soft. “Get out,” it repeated. “Even if she is partly to blame, my daughter can’t take this right now. It’s not the time, and it’s not the place. So both of you get out.” Tracey’s mother wet a towel and put it to her brow. Tracey was already losing focus again as her once love and her father had it out.
“I am going to make sure you can’t hurt my daughter or my granddaughter!” her father roared as soon as they were out in the hall.
Tracey could still hear them, at least until she passed out.
Chapter 25
“You look like hell.”
“I feel like hell.” Garrett tried to smile at his sister.
“How’s she doing?”
“Stable. At least she was when I left the hospital.”
“What did her parents say?”
“A whole hell of a lot. It started out ugly. Real ugly. But after we all simmered down, we reasoned through it. I told them I wasn’t going anywhere. The baby’s mine and they can’t keep her from me.”
“And…”
“And we came to a truce. They may not like me, but I think they respect the fact that I’m the baby’s father.”
Angie squealed and balled up her fists, knocking them together. Her face was bright and happy. “Oh, my God, Rett, you’re gonna be a daddy! And I’m gonna be an auntie!”
Rett allowed himself a moment to jump up and down with her. Every time he thought about it, he felt so many emotions—warmth, love, apprehension, and most overwhelmingly, excitement.
After a moment, he and his sister took deep, steadying breaths.
“You ready?” Angie asked Rett as she put her arms around his shoulders.
“No.” He squeezed her. She probably felt the chill that washed over his body. Then he popped away from her. “Thank you for coming home early.”
“No problem, honey. I love you.” She kissed his cheek. Then she held his hand as they went in the living room.
“I need to talk to y’all about something.” Rett pushed out a heavy sigh standing across from his parents. He looked at his mother, who sat very still on the couch. He looked at his father, who was pitching forward in his seat, trying to un-recline his chair.
When Big looked up at him he seemed to recognize something. He began to shake his head. “What have you gone and done, Rett? I told you—”
“I know what you told me, Dad. But that didn’t change anything,” Rett snapped sarcastically. He raked his hands through his hair. He felt Angie’s hand on the small of his back, reinforcing his backbone.
“What’s going on here, Big?” Mary Margaret asked as she came to perch on the arm of his chair next to him, across from her daughter and son.
Big turned to his wife with a look of dread that made everything worse for Rett. Already, without him saying anything, his father knew. And already they both knew how Mary Margaret was going to react.
“Looks like your son has gone and got himself into a little trouble. Or, should I say, your son’s gone and got someone into a little trouble.”
“What?” Mary Margaret asked, stretching the word out to show she really didn’t understand.
“Looks like there’s a little’un on the way.”
“A what? A—” And everybody heard it before she could stop it. Mary Margaret sounded as if she were halfway to ecstatic already. She tried to calm down. “What, Rett, honey? Is Kim pregnant?”
“No.”
“Then who?” Mary Margaret turned to Big, who didn’t say a word. “Who, Rett?”
“This girl from school. Her name’s Tracey.” He swallowed.
“Well, Rett, hon, you know you gotta do the right thing. I mean, we’re Christian people. You have got to look inside yourself and do the right thing.”
“And, Momma, I plan to,” Rett said, but still didn’t go any further.
“Tell her, Rett. Go on.” Big was staring Rett right in the eye. They all knew what was about to come, all except Mary Margaret. Still, Rett didn’t say anything.
Then, as was her way, Angie decided to get it all out. “What they’re neglecting to tell you is that Tracey’s a black girl.”
“No,” Mary Margaret said immediately and shook her head. Somehow, it was as if she thought that was all she had to do to make it go away.
Angie leaned forward and countered, “Yeah.”
Mary Margaret’s stood slowly and her body began to quiver. “Give him a check, Big,” she said, her voice deceptively soft.
“What?” Rett snapped hotly.
“Give him a check, Big.”
“We have to talk about—” Angie started.
“We don’t have to talk about a damn thing! Give him a check, Big!”
“I don’t think he’s going to take a check, Mary Margaret.”
“Oh, he won’t? Well, where the hell is she? She’ll take it. She’ll love to get her welfare-loving hands on it. Give him a check, Big!”
“That was uncalled for, Mother,” Rett returned with tight lips.
“I said, give him a check, Big.”
“Momma!” That was Angie.
“Give him a check, Big! Give him a check, Big! Give him a check, Big!” Her face was mottled with red splotches and her eyes were fixed on Rett’s. She was shaking and shrieking it by then. And her fingers had stretched and frozen into vulture talons. “My son’s not going to have no nigger baby by no nigger whore!” She ground her teeth together, “Give…him…a damn check, Big!” She spun on her heel a
nd stormed out of the room.
The three left stood staring at each other. “You going to go, too?” Rett swallowed deep. His throat was hot and dry. His ears and face burned hot as lava.
“No.” Big shook his head. “Won’t do any good anyhow. You tell me now, what it was you planned to say.”
“I don’t see what the point is.”
“You heard me.”
“I came here to tell you that Tracey is pregnant. It’s a long story, but she’s going to deliver in a month’s time. You’re going to be a granddaddy, whether you want to be or not.”
“Well,” Big said and reclined in his seat again. And that was all there was to be said.
* * *
“Does that word bother you?”
“What word?” Angie asked as she sipped lemonade across the table.
“That word,” Rett said.
“Oh. Yes, it bothers me.”
“Has it always bothered you?”
“Since I was old enough to know what it meant,” Angie told him. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Does it bother you?”
“It didn’t used to bother me. In fact, it didn’t bother me that much even when I was with Tracey. I mean, there was this one time when she was over at the apartment, and Charles, being who he is, said it under his breath. I threatened to kick his ass, but that was only ’cause I knew Tracey was offended.”
Angie just sighed into her glass. Her disapproval was not disguised.
“You know, it really didn’t bother me until today, ’til Momma said it, especially the way she said it.”
“Well, why do you think it’s bothering you now all of a sudden?”
“It was so horrible when Momma said it ’cause when she said it, she wasn’t just talking about Tracey. She was talking about my baby, and that’s like talking about me. I mean, it’s like she was saying it to me about me.”
“Nothing ever fazes you until it’s about you, right?”
“Shut up, Angie.”
“I’m just saying.”
* * *
“Wake up!”
Rett nearly jumped through the ceiling.
“What the—”