The man was handsome in a rugged, Marlboro man sort of way. About six-feet-two, he stood straight and proud. Large square shoulders and powerful muscles stretched the sleeves of his blue shirt; blond hair curled around his collar. His big blue eyes twinkled with his easy smile. He accompanied a petite blonde woman who would have been rather plain except for her radiant smile. They sat in the middle of the room facing the door with her back and his side to us.
Jessie watched the man come in, absently fingering a curl of her long hair as she stared at him—a gesture I had never seen her do. She stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and failed to notice when I asked her if she knew them. I touched her wrist to get her attention and found it hot; her pulse was racing and pounding so hard I could feel it through her blouse.
“Jessie, you’re staring.” I shook her arm. “Do you know that man?”
“Yes. I mean I don’t remember him, but I know him. I am sure of it.”
“Go say something to him.”
“I can’t.”
“If you know him, he will know who you are. Don’t you want to know?”
At that moment the man looked up and saw Jessie staring at him. His smile vanished and his ruddy cheeks went white. The woman, seeing his face, turned to see what had caused the reaction. He started to stand up, but the woman, who also seemed to recognize Jessie, placed a restraining hand on his arm.
“I must speak to her.” With that he stood and came to our table. “Jess?”
“George?” she said in a soft voice, unlike Jessie’s as I knew it. Then, in a bewildered sort of way in the voice I knew, she said, “I remember your name. I knew you.”
“You knew me?” He sounded equally bewildered. “Of course you knew me. I am . . . er . . . was your husband.”
Jessie fainted.
He helped me ease Jessie out of the chair and onto the floor. We elevated her feet and asked the waitress to get some smelling salts. “I’m Jessie’s doctor and friend, Cara Land.”
The man looked even more confused. “What’s the matter with her?”
“I think she needs to be the one to tell you that rather than me. But I will tell you that she has amnesia. You are the first person she has remembered in a year and a half.”
At that point, the blonde woman stood and in a meek little voice said, “I’ll wait in the car, George.”
“I’ll just be a moment,” he said with kindness in his voice.
“What did you mean ‘was your husband?’” I asked.
“I divorced Jess about seven months after she left. When she left, I filed a Missing Person report and looked in hospitals all over the country. It wasn’t like her to disappear like that. Then I got my credit card bill. She had paid her way to California on my credit card, and I’m still paying it off. There were charges for a baseball game in St. Louis and a bullfight in Colorado. Jess would never have done those things unless she was with a man. My lawyer said I should cancel the card and that I could divorce her after six months, so as not to be responsible for any more of her bills. Kentucky law says that after six months a marriage can be declared irretrievably broken if both persons agree or if one claims it and the other person doesn’t contest. Since I heard nothing from Jess, the judge ruled on the divorce.”
“I see.” With a sinking feeling, I asked, “What is your last name?”
“Green. Look, I have to go. Mary is waiting in the cold.”
“I don’t know what will happen when she comes to. Can you tell me how she can reach you, in case she doesn’t remember?”
“She doesn’t need to reach me. I remarried six months ago.”
“What about your children?” I asked as he walked away.
“I have full custody,” he said as the door closed behind him. The waitress arrived with the smelling salts, and Jessie came to.
“Is he gone?”
“He had to leave,” I said.
She was able to get up and sit at the table. I could only guess what might be going through her mind. At length, she said, “I assume he divorced me. He said ‘was your husband.’”
“Yes, he said seven months after you left.”
“It didn’t take him long.”
“He thought you had deserted him and gone to California with another man.”
“Why in the world would he think that?”
“He got a credit card bill that paid for a trip across the country and events you would not have done alone.”
“Oh, God. I had a credit card in my purse, and I didn’t know to report it stolen. I’d only thought about an ID.”
“Jessie, it’s even worse.” I nearly choked on the confession. “I never told you, but the hospital checked for Missing Person reports for the time you would have left home. We already knew your name was Jessie, and Ms. Long found a report that a Jessica Green was missing.”
“Yes, Green. That’s right.”
“When she called to see if it could be you, someone told her that Jessica Green had been found in California. We didn’t pursue it. If we had asked how they knew you were in California, we could have known then who you were. I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I wish I had at least mentioned the name to you. It might have triggered something.”
“Cara, I’m not sure I would have remembered if you had. I must have needed this time and distance from my life.”
“Do you think you can walk? Let’s get out of here.”
“Can you take me by the house? I want to see the kids before we go back to Lexington. I need to stay with Mr. Henry until he can find somebody, but then I will be home at last.”
Of all the painful things I had to tell Jessie, this may have been the hardest. “Jessie, George remarried six months ago. You can’t go home.”
She took deep breaths, like she couldn’t get enough air. Her hands clutched the green-and-white plastic tablecloth like a lifeline for a drowning woman. “Mary Johnson, is that who he married?”
“I guess if that’s the woman he was with. He called her Mary, and Mary was the name of the woman who told Ms. Long that Jessica Green was in California. She was at your home that afternoon.”
“She would have offered to watch the children after school.”
“She probably brought casseroles too,” I said. That caused a momentary smile. “Well, he is an attractive man.”
“Did George say anything about the children?”
“Only that he has full custody.”
“I wonder what I can do about that.”
“I don’t know. Surely a judge will reconsider when he knows what really happened?”
“Can I tell a judge I had an illegal abortion? He might put me in jail instead of giving me custody of my children.”
“I don’t think most states prosecute women who have illegal abortions. I think it is just the people who do them.”
Jessie loosened her grip on the table and stood. “At least I know who I am, who they are, and where they are. I will figure something out.”
While we were in the café, the sunny sky had turned gray and snow mixed with sleet had begun to fall. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. Highway 68 from Washington to Lexington was a two-lane road, built by asphalting over a trail made by buffaloes as they walked to the salt licks along the Licking River. There were so many hairpin turns one wondered if the buffaloes had been into Kentucky bourbon. The normal ninety-minute trip back to Lexington took three hours. For the first hour Jessie said nothing. Finally I asked, “How much do you remember?”
“Everything.” Some minutes later, she continued. “I remember meeting George. I was a sophomore in high school and he was a senior. He played on the basketball team. We met at the Dairy Queen after a basketball game. I thought he was the most gorgeous man I had ever seen. He pretended he wasn’t interested in me, but he asked me out the next week. After he graduated, he went into the Marines for two years while I finished high school. We were married right after I graduated, and I g
ot pregnant on our honeymoon. I lost that pregnancy but got pregnant again within a few months.” After a little gasp, she began to cry. “Oh my babies, my babies.”
I had so many questions, but I was afraid to ask them. Something had kept her from these memories for months. I wasn’t sure she was strong enough to bear them even now. After another hour of creeping over ice-covered roads, Jessie spoke again, this time with a smile as she remembered her children.
“Jeff was twelve when I left home; Ellen was ten; Grace was six. Though Jeff was the boy, he was most like me. Ellen was her father’s daughter, strong, outspoken, saw things in black and white. Grace was unlike any of us. She seemed self-contained. It was terrible punishment to send Jeff and Ellen to their rooms, but Grace didn’t care. She would suck her thumb and retreat into her own little world. What must they have thought when I didn’t come home?” Only the sounds of snow and ice hitting the car roof and windshield wipers scraping the window filled the silence that followed.
After two more miles of treacherous roads, Jessie continued. “Cara, I had three stillborn babies. The first one was between Ellen and Grace. We knew I had the Rh problem, but Ellen had not had much trouble and we were short on money, so I didn’t get to the doctor early enough. With Grace, I got in right away and she had intrauterine blood transfusions. Then after Grace, even that didn’t save them. I had two more stillborn babies in three years. I couldn’t bear to have another one.”
“Is that why you had the abortion?”
“Yes. I told myself it was a pregnancy, not a baby. It was easy to believe since I didn’t expect to have a baby at the end. You’ve never had children so you may not realize this, but the joy of feeling a baby move inside you is indescribable. I remember the first time I felt Jeff move like it was yesterday. I was hanging clothes out on the line to dry, and I felt this little quiver. I ran into the house and called my mother.”
She smiled at the memory. “Mom told me she was making apple butter when she first felt me move. It wasn’t long until Jeff was doing somersaults. He was very active all the way to the end. Ellen was a very active baby too, but she slowed some toward the end of the pregnancy. She was beginning to get sick. My first stillborn, a little boy, moved about ten weeks and then quit. Grace was active for only six weeks then she slowed down. They told me she had heart failure, and I almost lost her, but the intrauterine transfusions kept her going. She was the one delivered by C-section.” Jessie turned away from me and stared at the snow falling in the woods along the side of the road.
“With the stillborn babies, they would begin to move and then stop. The sense of doom I felt when they stopped moving was as indescribable as the joy was when they started. I know it sounds crazy, Cara, but I couldn’t bear to feel another baby move only to have those movements slow, slow more, and then stop altogether. I asked the obstetrician to do the abortion, but he refused. I worked in our little hospital as a nurse’s assistant in the operating room. Once in a while we would have to do a D&C on someone who had an abortion. I thought that was the worst that could happen, and it would make the doctor do what I asked.”
“Where did you deliver your children, Jessie?”
“At the perinatal unit at the University of Cincinnati. Why do you ask?”
“It occurred to me that you would need a perinatal unit since you were Rh sensitized, so I checked all the Rh cases at UK but didn’t find you. I even called the University of Cincinnati, but they never got back to me. I wish I had pursued it more. I’m sorry.”
“Cara, you did more than any doctor could have been expected to do. You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“Did you tell George that you wanted to have an abortion?”
“No, he wouldn’t even let me use an intrauterine device for birth control because they think that some pregnancies are aborted before you even know you’re pregnant with that method. I knew he would never approve.”
“Why didn’t you take birth control pills?”
“I did after Jeff was born. After just nine months, I got a blood clot in my leg. They took me off, and I had Ellen within the year. I was willing to risk another blood clot, but they wouldn’t give them to me after she was born. Pills were in really high doses then. I used a diaphragm with some success for a while before the first stillborn, but I got pregnant with that because I had it in wrong. They said the position of my uterus made it really hard to get it in right. The diaphragm and the stillborn are the reasons there are four years between Ellen and Grace. Then after so many deliveries, the diaphragm was uncomfortable.”
“George could have used condoms.”
“He did sometimes.”
“Since Grace had heart failure, I assume the stillborn babies were because of Rh disease?”
“Yes. Every pregnancy was complicated, even with Jeff. The doctor said I got sensitized with the miscarriage. Usually people don’t have a problem with the first pregnancy, but even Jeff was jaundiced and had to have an exchange transfusion. Ellen was delivered three weeks early and had the same problems with jaundice. Grace was delivered at thirty-two weeks by C-section after four intrauterine transfusions. With immature lungs as well as the jaundice, she had a respirator and four exchange transfusions.”
“Why didn’t they tie your tubes during the C-section?” I probably should not have asked, but this lesson in the horrors of Rh disease was terrible to hear.
“George is Catholic and he was against it. With the last two stillborn babies, I had intrauterine transfusions, but the babies died at twenty-five and twenty-two weeks. Labor was induced and I didn’t have C-sections for those deliveries.”
Jessie was quiet for a long time. My eyes were glued to the ice-covered road, so I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her soft sobs and occasional sighs. At length she continued. “They told us we might have an Rh-negative baby; the chances were either zero or one in four, depending on George’s parents’ blood types. They were both Rh-positive, so I had no hope even though there was still a small chance. I had seven Rh-positive pregnancies, none negative. Only after the abortion did it occur to me that the last baby might have been Rh-negative.”
I wondered what she remembered about the abortion itself, but I was afraid to ask. As if she read my mind, Jessie said, “That was the last thing I remember thinking before I passed out in that hallway.”
When she said no more, I changed the subject. “Tell me about the rest of your family. Where do your parents live? Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“My father lives in Illinois. He remarried soon after my mother died of breast cancer. She was only forty-seven years old. I lost her about six months before the first stillborn. She died in our home. Her suffering was horrible to watch, and she hated taking the pain medicine. Dad was good. He helped me take care of Mom, but as soon as she died he started seeing a woman he had known during high school. She lived in Illinois, so he moved there. With the stillborn babies, work, and the activities of the other kids, I haven’t seen Dad since he moved. It was like losing both of them.”
“I’m so sorry.” Obviously, that wasn’t a good change of subject.
“I have one much younger brother,” she said. “He was still in high school when Mom died, so he moved with my father. He came to see me once after he came home from a tour in Vietnam but then decided to move near my father. I wonder if they even know I was missing.”
After a period of silence, Jessie said, “Do you want to know something truly amazing? My maiden name is Ferguson.”
It was dark by the time we got back to Lexington. I offered to come in with Jessie, but she said no. Guilty about being relieved at that response, I drove home and thanked God I could sleep through anything.
Unlike the usual Kentucky snowstorm of two inches, gone in a couple of days, this one produced four inches and stayed on the ground for almost a week. Sunshine on the white snow would have made it look cheery and fun, but the skies were gray. It was the kind of week in winter that makes one question Kentucky�
�s place as a Southern state. Public schools closed, but the university did not, so Jessie showed up for class on Monday. Actually, she showed up through Thursday, but by Friday the weather had warmed and the roads were clear. She cooked chili for our dinner, borrowed Uncle Henry’s car, and went to see her kids. I would have gone along, worried that she might faint again and need me, but in the end she insisted that she had to do it alone. She knew her driver’s license had not expired as she had renewed it the April before she left home. While she was at home, she intended to pick up her birth certificate and social security card so she could get a replacement.
“How is she, Uncle Henry?” I asked as I arrived for Friday dinner.
“She doesn’t talk about it. She’s done all of her usual work, which keeps her busy, but then she stayed up late into the night cleaning out closets and washing curtains. I don’t know if she is preparing to leave or just doesn’t want to lie down and try to sleep.”
“I’m worried about her. I should have gone with her when she went home the first time.”
“What do you think you could do?”
“Uncle Henry, she fainted when she saw him. What if she isn’t able to drive home?”
“Cara, it was a shock when she saw him. She’s had all week to think about it. She’ll be fine.”
“What if he’s abusive?”
“Do you think he is?
“No, he seemed nice enough. It’s just . . . well . . . you never know.”
“Cara, since you were a little girl, you’ve thought that you had to fix everything. You can’t fix this. Jessie knows who she is now, and she knows what her life was before. She has to accept that her life can’t be the same. She made a new life and so did her husband. She has to figure out how to bring the old and new together.”
“What if she can’t?”
“Then she will have to make a new life, different from both.”
“I hope she comes in before I have to go home.” I made three-letter words in that night’s Scrabble game.
Saving Jane Doe Page 5