The story continued, detail upon detail, until she finally made her way back to the part about the tattooed truck driver, who offered her a ride to Hartford, Connecticut. The truck was a gleaming white semi, but it didn’t have any writing on it except for a notation in tall black letters: 110 INCHES INTERIOR HEIGHT.
“Did I say how crazy hot it was that day?” Carmen said. “I knew a nice new truck like that would be air-conditioned.” She shook her head. “So that’s how I wound up in Hartford—a place I never even wanted to go.”
She wandered around Hartford for two days, looking for a halfway friendly face—someone she might approach about a few chores to do, maybe a place to sleep. She had some money from her last job in Maine and some leftover snacks in her backpack. She spent the first two nights on the back porch of a crumbling house being converted into apartments, then left in the morning when the workmen started arriving. She found a park with rose gardens, a lake, a playground, and she went there with take-out food in the evenings and watched the families.
Her rule of thumb was to give a town three days, and if no work turned up, to hit the road again. On the afternoon of the third day, she passed a little mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant called Paco’s Tacos, wedged between a laundromat and what used to be a drugstore but now served as a church: Faith, Hope, and Charity Tabernacle, according to the sign in the window. On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant was a very old Hispanic man with a broom, using it as much for support as for sweeping. She asked him if she could sweep for him, told him she didn’t need money, she was a champion sweeper from way back and just wanted to help. He studied her face at length, then motioned her inside. He led her back to the kitchen, spread his arms in a hopeless gesture, and said, “You help thees?”
The kitchen was a mess. If DHEC had dropped by right then, the restaurant would have been closed for good. The old man spoke enough English to make her understand that somebody in his family had died, or was in the process of dying, and he was trying to keep the business open with the help of two others, who were coming in for the evening shift. “You clean thees,” he said, surveying the kitchen with his sad, watery eyes, “I pay a leetle.”
And that was how Carmen landed a job as kitchen help and waitress at Paco’s Tacos. Paco himself eventually got well and came back to take over, but he kept her on and let her sleep in the catchall room they called the office. He paid her with a little cash and free meals—the kind of food she had never eaten before. “But it was fine,” she said. “I ate it all—enchiladas, quesadillas, chimichangas, you name it. It was all okay. You can get used to anything.”
• • •
SHE stayed in Hartford through the end of the year—the longest she had stayed anywhere since leaving Wyoming—and what happened in those five months changed her forever, left her with guilt for a lifetime. “It’s there from the time I wake up till I go to bed, and all through the night, too,” she said. But she was dry-eyed as she spoke, staring down at her hands.
She looked up at Julia. “Have you ever read The Scarlet Letter?” Something told Julia this wasn’t just one of her goofy, irrelevant questions. Carmen laughed. “Sorry, dumb question. You have a PhD in literature. Of course you’ve read The Scarlet Letter. Even I’ve read it. Once in tenth grade and once in a library in Chicago.” She looked away. “Twice is enough.”
She could have stopped there, and Julia would have known all she needed to know. On the one hand, she wanted to say, “Please, no more. I get the general drift. You can skip all the details.” But on the other, she knew Carmen needed to tell it all—and, though she couldn’t say why, she knew she needed to hear it.
“My story’s not exactly like Hester Prynne’s, though,” Carmen said. “For one thing, I didn’t stay at the scene of the crime. I left. And he . . . wasn’t a preacher like Arthur Dimmesdale. His father was, though.” She was staring at her hands again, but now her fists were clenched. “I had a baby.” She looked up and said, “I hate the word illegitimate. A baby shouldn’t ever be called that. Life is never illegitimate.”
Julia couldn’t take this in. That day at her kitchen table, months ago, when she had reeled off questions and Carmen had answered them—hadn’t she asked about this very thing? “You told me you had never been pregnant,” she said.
Carmen sighed. “I knew I was misleading you, and I’ve regretted that a lot.” She looked away. “You asked if I’d ever gotten pregnant after a man abused me. But, see, what happened in Hartford wasn’t abuse. We both knew what we were doing, and we knew it was wrong. So I told you no. It was a . . . deception. I’m sorry.” Carmen hung her head.
After a long moment, Julia spoke. Though her mind was teeming with questions, there was one that had to be asked first: “Where’s the baby?”
Carmen took a deep breath. “She . . . died right after she was born.”
The draperies at the window were still open. It was dusk and the sky was finally clearing over Boston. Behind shreds of gray clouds were streaks of fiery orange, purple, gold. Tomorrow held the promise of sunshine, of trees aflame with autumn glory. Julia felt a sudden resentment that misery could be set against a backdrop of such beauty.
She looked back at Carmen. To think that this child had had a child—it seemed impossible.
“So now you know,” Carmen said. “I’m not the good girl you thought I was, if you ever even thought that. That’s not what kept me from telling you, though. There’s something about admitting a sin out loud that gives you a little . . . reprieve, you know? And that’s what I couldn’t let happen. I needed to feel the weight of it right here every day.” She thumped a fist over her heart. “I didn’t want anybody’s sympathy making it easier. It’s a sin I need to feel the full force of. So I’ll never forget.”
Julia studied the girl’s face before speaking. “I thought forgiveness was something religious people believed in.”
Carmen answered promptly. “I do. God forgave me. Totally.”
“So if God forgave you, why can’t you . . .”
“Forgive myself?” Carmen said. “I don’t even know what that means. You can acknowledge your sin, which I’ve done. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. That’s straight from the Bible. I don’t want to forget what I’m capable of. So if that’s what you call not forgiving yourself, then, okay, I guess I can’t forgive myself.”
Something was wrong with such stark, relentless reasoning, but Julia couldn’t put it into words. She said the only thing that came to her mind, the same words Carmen had said to her not long ago. “You’re too hard on yourself.”
Carmen nodded. “I need to be. It scares me sometimes when I see a family like the one we met in the elevator. I want that so much, but it has to come the right way. No cheating or shortcuts. For now that means waiting. And praying.”
“And rubbing your nose in your sin whenever you get to feeling too hopeful?” Julia said.
The girl frowned. “I guess I haven’t explained it very well. Hope is something you can’t ever have too much of.”
• • •
CARMEN got up from the bed and walked to the window. She stood looking out, her hands in her back pockets. “You want to know who he was?”
“If you want to tell me.”
She came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “He came to eat at Paco’s a lot. On Sundays mainly. His father preached at the church next door. The one that used to be a drugstore. It still smelled a little . . . medicinal.” She wasn’t trying to be funny, didn’t pause for effect but kept right on talking.
The boy’s name was Stephen. He played the piano at the church. He was twenty-two. He’d been to college for three years and wanted to be a music teacher but couldn’t finish because of money. So he was living at home again, working for a paving company and teaching a few piano lessons to earn enough to go back.
Before long Carmen started going to the church since it was so handy. She liked the people, liked the singing and preaching.
Julia said,
“And this was the church where they let you clean every week and work in the nursery?” She tried not to emphasize the word let, but Carmen must have picked it up.
“I volunteered,” she said quickly, defensively. “They were good people. A lot of young families. They made me feel like I belonged, and I hadn’t felt that way for a long time. Stephen’s father was a good preacher. The way he explained Scripture—it was so clear and powerful and beautiful.”
They had a little choir, and they asked her to sing a solo one Sunday. So she asked Stephen to meet her at church to practice. “And that’s how it all started,” she said. “Fast-forward a couple of months, and . . . well, you know. It happened two times.”
Julia shook her head. “Please, you don’t need to . . .”
Carmen raised her voice and kept going. “After the first time, I made up my mind to leave Hartford, just to make sure it didn’t happen again. I told Paco I had an emergency and needed to quit my job, and that night I went over to clean the church so it would be ready for Sunday.” She looked away, toward the window. “Stephen showed up before I finished cleaning, and he helped me get the chairs set back up. And we talked a little while, but I didn’t tell him I was leaving. We even prayed together, and then . . .”
Julia stopped her again. “I don’t need to hear it,” though what she really meant was I don’t want to hear it. That it must have happened at church struck her as appalling. She had a question, though. “If you loved each other, why didn’t you just get married?”
Carmen dropped her head. “That’s another part of it. He was going to marry somebody else. He was pledged to her. That’s what they called it. Their families had known each other forever. It would have destroyed her, and their parents, too. She already had a wedding dress.”
Julia didn’t believe it for a minute. The boy had undoubtedly played on Carmen’s gullibility, inventing an excuse for why he couldn’t marry her—a very far-fetched one. Surely there weren’t arranged marriages in the United States these days, unless the Amish or Mennonites still did that sort of thing.
“And so it happened again,” Carmen said. “I was so ashamed. Not just because it was a sin but because I . . . wanted it to happen. I loved him. And I wanted him to love me. Even if it meant breaking somebody else’s heart.”
“There’s nothing wrong with love,” Julia said.
“No, there’s not,” said Carmen quietly. She closed her eyes. One knee was jerking up and down. “I still dream about him sometimes.” A few moments of silence, then, “I left the next morning before the sun came up. Came to Boston. Figured I could get lost in the crowd until I got back on my feet.” She was speaking more slowly now. “I never went back to Hartford. He never found out about the baby.” She opened her eyes and looked at Julia. “So now you know.”
“Now I know,” Julia said. She also knew that the preacher’s son in Hartford had gotten off much easier than Arthur Dimmesdale.
• • •
CARMEN got up and walked to the foot of the bed, then turned around. “But there’s another thing I need to tell you. I had trouble sleeping last night. Did you know?”
Julia nodded. “I could tell.”
“There were visions and voices,” Carmen said. She appeared to be perfectly serious. “I guess it started with the baby in the elevator. Later I got to thinking about the baby I lost, and then I started dreaming. I saw a little girl running through a field. And then the wind started blowing hard and she disappeared in the tall grass. But then I heard a voice whisper right in my ear, ‘I walk the earth.’” She stopped talking but didn’t take her eyes off Julia. “And then I felt a hand on my face.”
Julia felt a sudden deep exhaustion. She had been sitting here for a long time, listening, struggling to take it all in, to keep from discounting the parts until she had heard the whole, but now this. A nighttime chimera reported as reality.
They stared at each other until Julia finally said, “But didn’t you say she died?”
“That’s what they told me,” Carmen said. “And I believed them. Until now. I heard a voice in my dream last night. It said, I walk the earth. As plain as day. It was a child’s voice.”
Julia said, “But didn’t you . . . see her after she was born?”
“I never did,” Carmen said. She sat down on the bed again. “I wasn’t really . . . with it. It’s hard to remember.”
“Tell me,” Julia said.
“I’ll try,” Carmen said. She sat for a moment, kneading her hands together. “I was in labor a long time. The midwife never left me. Her name was Luna—as in the moth. I knew her already, of course. She was sort of shy, but very nice. I trusted her.”
She told the rest briefly, simply, but among the few embellishments she included were the sounds she heard that night—strong winds, heavy rain, claps of thunder. The storm went on and on, like her labor. But at last, another sound. “I heard her cry,” she said. “Finally it was over. I think I must have passed out because all of a sudden I opened my eyes and couldn’t hear her anymore. I asked to hold her, but she wasn’t there. And Luna wasn’t there either. That’s when they told me something was wrong with the baby and she had died. And there was nothing they could do. They said she—so I knew it was a girl.”
She lifted her eyes and looked at Julia. “I asked to see her, begged to hold her just one time. They said they knew what was best in these situations, they couldn’t let me do that.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They said it was too late anyway, that a whole day had passed and I had been in and out of consciousness and they had already . . . had her taken away. They wouldn’t say where. They said just to think of her in heaven. They looked so sad and spoke so kindly to me. I thought they were telling the truth. Nobody would tell a lie like that.”
She leaned forward, her eyes still fixed on Julia’s. “But I heard her voice last night. God wouldn’t play a trick like that on me. I know he wouldn’t.”
Julia didn’t know any such thing. But she did know one thing without a doubt, that their New England trip had suddenly been blown completely off course.
• chapter 19 •
SUFFICIENTLY UNWORTHY
It was too much information too fast, like sitting in a class and having nothing to take notes with. Somehow Julia had to get her thoughts in order, remember the important things, make connections. Now there were new facts to be inserted into the timeline of the girl’s snarled history. First, Carmen had had a baby. Second, the baby died, or so she was told. Third, she had a dream that the baby was living. Fourth, she believed the dream to be true. There were other facts, of course, but these were the most pertinent to the trouble at hand.
The clock on the hotel nightstand said 7:04 P.M., but it felt much later. Julia looked at Carmen, still sitting on the bed, a picture of depletion, her eyes closed, her shoulders hunched. Julia moved over to sit beside her. She put an arm around her and drew in a deep breath. “I want to help,” she said.
In the months since Carmen’s first appearance at the stone house, the two of them had never embraced. Such a thing would have embarrassed Julia to no end. But when Carmen threw her arms around her now, she didn’t pull away.
After a few moments, Julia said, “Okay, one question at a time. Where was your baby born?”
Carmen walked over to the desk and picked up the road atlas. She flipped through it, then handed it to Julia. “There,” she said, pointing. “Danforth, Massachusetts. That’s where it was. Is.” She traced her finger from Danforth to Boston and back again, all the way across the state, to the western edge. In a state like Massachusetts, however, not that far in actual miles.
“How did you end up there?” Julia said. “And where were you living?”
Long story, the girl said, but she would give an abridged version. From Hartford she went to Boston, where she found work caring for an old woman, bedridden in a back room of her daughter’s house. Carmen asked for Sundays off, and one Sunday she walked to a nearby church. It was February now, and
there was snow on the ground. Her eighteenth birthday was only days away.
Julia spoke before she could stop herself. “Did this one meet in a storefront, too?” That the girl would have gone to any church at all after Hartford revealed something disheartening about her—some weakness of mind common among people who spend their lives making the same mistakes over and over.
No, it was a stately old brick church with a stained-glass window above the front door, depicting Jesus with open arms and the words Come Unto Me written out in chips of colored glass under his feet. A sign from God, naturally. Beside the steps was a large brick marquee bearing the name of the pastor and associate pastor. It was the associate pastor’s name that caught Carmen’s attention: Harriet Dove.
So much for the abridged version, Julia thought.
By now Carmen had realized she was pregnant, and it was Harriet Dove in whom she confided. And Harriet Dove knew someone who knew the director of a small licensed, nonprofit adoption agency in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who took in “girls in trouble,” placed them in private homes to live, and covered all their expenses. Many of their referrals were from pastors and other “Christian ministries” in New England. The births were home births, attended by qualified midwives, and it was understood that the babies would be adopted.
So that was how she ended up with Babies First Mission. Julia immediately hated the place, starting with the name. What was an adoption agency doing calling itself a mission? It sounded self-righteous, which in itself was cause for suspicion. And Babies First? What about the mothers of the babies? Why didn’t they come first?
Carmen was assigned to the home of a couple in nearby Danforth—Milo and Joyce Shelburn. Milo was the assistant director of Babies First, and he and Joyce took their turn housing girls, one at a time. The baby had been born in their home.
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