A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  For better, or for worse.

  To have and to hold, from this day forward… to love and to cherish… according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I pledge thee my faith.

  At lunchtime, Abby drove home and—in a fit of irrationality—searched like a madwoman for clues.

  She searched because she didn’t want to believe it. She searched because she didn’t want to find a thing. If she couldn’t find proof, maybe he’d say he really hadn’t done it. Maybe he’d say he’d played a cruel joke to see what she would say. Yes. That, she would forgive him for.

  Abby stood in their bedroom with the closet door open, facing the queues of David’s shirts. She slid open his top drawer and stared at BVD underwear and socks. There, shoved back inside one corner, she found sacred treasures from boyhood he’d managed to save: a fishing lure, a marble, a ski pin from Winter Park in Colorado.

  Nothing here had changed. There was nothing that might be a gift from someone she didn’t know. Eight years gone by, and the trail had gotten cold.

  Nothing here that I should have seen and deciphered. Dear Lord, please. Nothing here.

  I don’t want to be like my mother, with a household I have to fight to keep together and a spirit that has been crushed within me.

  I don’t want my son to be hurt the way my father hurt me.

  Not until she’d sifted through the game closet, past the dilapidated boxes of Pictionary and Mouse Trap and even Braden’s dreaded Hi-Ho Cherry-O with red plastic cherries that spilled everywhere. Not until she’d pawed through the Christmas supplies with swatches of wrapping paper and tangles of ribbon she would never throw away and would never use. Not until she followed with one finger along the row of titles in the bookshelf—The Book of Goodnight Stories, The Food of France, The Grapes of Wrath. Not until then did she find the evidence that she had prayed she would not find at all.

  Braden’s baby pictures. She pulled them out and thumbed through.

  Here was the naked bathtub picture they’d teased him with, telling him they’d blackmail him with it in years to come. Here was Braden in the safe cage of his crib, staring up at the mobile of primary-colored bears. Here was the shot of him sleeping on a shoulder at four months, wearing an expression that belonged to a wise old man and not a baby.

  Here was the proof, in Kodak color. Indisputable.

  Abby wasn’t in any of these pictures.

  Oh, parts of her were there. The shoulder was hers. The hand holding Braden upright in the water. Even the knee, the ankle, and the Avia athletic shoe in the photo of Braden bouncing like he was riding a wild Wyoming pony.

  The camera shots never focused on her face. Not one of them depicted her completely from head to toe, with a smile and her half-exhausted I’m-glad-to-be-a-mom eyes. He’d been hiding from her all that time. He must have been thinking, If I never look fully at her, then maybe she won’t look fully at me. With the exception of one photo snapped on Braden’s dedication day at church—that matched David’s in his office and had been posed by someone outside of the family—Abby might as well have been the headless wonder.

  Abby looked fixedly at the photos, seeing with bewilderment and horror what their lives had been.

  Oh, David.

  Another question rocked her as she sat staring at bits and pieces of herself. A question that felt almost comfortable because at least it would take some of the blame off David.

  Did I do something to make that happen? With the baby and all, wasn’t I enough for him?

  No.

  No.

  For hours each week, Abby worked to draw the answer to this from hurt, broken women who sought her advice at the shelter. Once, long ago, Abby had heard her own mother ask the very same question. And how well she remembered an aunt’s thoughtful, sad answer, because it had become the same answer she gave over and over herself at the shelter.

  You can’t be responsible for anybody else’s actions.

  You are only responsible for yourself.

  He made his choice and now you have to make yours.

  Harm and injury closed in around Abby like water closing in over her head.

  When Sophie Henderson walked back into the door at the Community Safety Network, she toted a blue, plastic trashcan, transparent enough to reveal a canister of Super-Hold hairspray, a hairbrush, two pinecones, and a packet of panty hose.

  “I grabbed what I could on the way out,” she said, the tremor in her voice belying the defiant lift of her chin. “I told Mike I was taking out the trash.” She fished deep inside the trashcan with one arm. “The truck keys are way down here, too.” With a sleight of hand, she pulled them out, two Dodge keys dangling from the chain-link body of a cutthroat trout. She tossed them onto the desk with shaking fingers. “That’s the only chance I had.”

  “Sophie!”

  Abby took two steps forward and stopped, torn between throwing her arms around this woman to welcome her back or throwing her arms around her in heartbreak because she’d returned. She waited and did neither. Instead she spoke words she’d spoken at least a hundred times before—the same words she’d already said to Sophie the first time she’d walked in the door.

  “Oh, Sophie. You did the right thing, you know. You’ve gotten yourself to a safe place again.”

  “I know.”

  Abby gave a calm half nod toward the blue, transparent trashcan. “We haven’t moved anybody into your room yet. Bring your things and we’ll get you right back in.”

  Sophie held the trashcan higher as if she was apologizing for it. “I know what you said, Abby. I know you said to plan ahead no matter what. A packed suitcase with necessities. Kept at a neutral site.”

  “A packed trashcan. It’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “I kept thinking what I’d do if Mike looked inside and saw this stuff,” Sophie jabbered on, hugging her belongings against her, disoriented and panicked as she followed Abby through the frosted door. “I kept thinking how he’d say, ‘Sophie, what are you doing? You can’t throw all those pinecones away.’ ”

  “Oh, Soph—”

  “I never packed a suitcase this time because I thought I wouldn’t need it. He was so sweet when he begged me to come back. He promised about the counseling. He promised that everything would be different.”

  Together they walked through the courtyard and Abby’s own dull senses awakened slightly—to sensation, to pain. She heard outdoor sounds: bird cheeps and bee buzzes, the screech of an unoiled swing-set, the distant chime of eleven o’clock from the city hall clock tower. The resident shelter cat, a brown-striped tabby with the look of wild Africa in her face, waited at the door to be let inside, her body ribboning curves against the wooden jamb. “Oh no, you don’t, Phoebe.” Abby picked up the cat and set her aside. “You know you can’t go in there.”

  “Hey, cat. I missed you.” Sophie bent down and scratched her ears.

  Through a tiled hallway and up a narrow, hardwood flight of stairs, Abby led Sophie Henderson to the place she didn’t need leading to at all. “That cat remembers me.”

  “There are clean towels in the bathroom down the hall.”

  “Thanks.”

  So many arrived at this shelter without hope. So many struggled to find it, and never could.

  “Oh, Sophie.” They hugged each other at last, tight and swaying. “I wanted it to work for you and Mike so badly.”

  Sophie flinched. “Don’t squeeze too hard.”

  “You’re hurt. He really hurt you this time.”

  “Guess I should unpack or something, huh?” Sophie gave a raw, bleating laugh and pulled away. She extracted the packet of panty hose, still shrink-wrapped in cellophane, and spun it like a Frisbee onto the bed. “Have you ever thought about this? What you would you take,” she asked with downcast eyes, “if you had to leave your house without any time to plan? I couldn’t even think. I live in Wyoming. I haven’t worn panty hose for fifteen years.”

  Both of them stared at the package where it
lay, with its dramatic photograph of two lacy, curvaceous legs, the toes en pointe—an impossible position that would have sent anyone but a prima ballerina to a chiropractic clinic. “You know I need to fill out paperwork again. Are you up to that yet?”

  A deep breath. Another meeting of eyes. “I can be. Guess I’m as up to it as I’ll ever be.”

  Abby retrieved her notepad and pen from inside her big skirt pocket. Vaguely aware of how miserable this was, she pulled out a copy of the official admittance papers and began writing fast.

  Sophie is depending on me. They all depend on me. Today, for the first time in Abby’s life, these burdens seemed more than she could handle.

  “It started when he shot the TV.”

  Abby’s pen paused.

  “It wasn’t that big of a deal, you know. I was watching ER and in the summer they’re all reruns. Before I knew what had happened, Dr. Corday and Dr. Kovac were gone and there wasn’t anything left but a gray hole and shards of glass. Glass everywhere. My legs got cut when I stood up, from the slivers in my pants.”

  Outside the window, far above the town, Abby could see the Tetons standing as high as heaven, with slopes spiked above the tufts of trees. The magnificent Gun-sight Notch of Mount Owen dominated the view—a U-shaped cleft with sun-touched gray cliffs, a straight-edged shadow streaming down.

  “Even Elaine’s starting to believe me now,” Sophie said, as the hum started in Abby’s head again.

  When do people ever stop hurting each other? When do marriages ever stop falling apart?

  Sophie reached for the buttonhooks on her blouse, and showed her the bruises and welts. They strung across the crest of her collarbone in various stages of healing, from pale yellow-green to the freshest one, shaped like a fiery purple sunburst.

  “At least this time I knew I could come back here,” Sophie said to Abby. “At least this time I knew I wouldn’t have to be alone.”

  A week ago, Abby had taken such joy in puttering around her own house. A week ago, she’d pinched fresh rosemary and thyme and dill from the terra-cotta pots she kept on the windowsill in the kitchen. She’d changed the colors of the candles in the entry hall, restocked fresh d’Anjou pears in the wooden bowl, and rearranged the frayed, gold-imprinted spines of her favorite novels she kept on the shelf.

  A week ago, the windows would have been thrown open to the light and the Dutch lace curtains would have been riding a touch of breeze. The teakettle would have been on the front burner for a last-minute dose of Cascade Mint Herbal. The birdfeeders would have been laden with thistle and grain.

  Today, no one had bothered to throw open the curtains or the windows. One pine siskin chattered angrily at the empty feeder. The pears in the bowl had long since been thrown out because they had withered. And the little pot of rosemary and thyme in the window was sorely in need of water.

  Abby couldn’t bear to stay inside a house that felt empty and joyless, a house that didn’t feel like a home anymore.

  More often than not this past week, with Braden out playing at the neighbors and David gone into town, Abby had traipsed through the grass along Fish Creek where a path hadn’t been beat down. She found herself a hidden, grassy spot on the riverbank and there she sat, her knees drawn beneath her jaw, her arms wrapped around her shins, her bony chin propped hard upon her knees. She sat still long enough for the life of the creek to resume around her—an occasional mallard floating past, a chorus of red-winged blackbirds in the branches of a willow, the ker-thop of a muskrat as it surfaced, saw her, and smacked itself back under.

  Today she watched as a grasshopper fell in. The current picked it up and it struggled, flopping its legs in vain against the film on the creek’s surface. Struggling like me, she thought. Just as she compared herself to the besieged thing, a cutthroat trout rose to take it; the insect was swallowed whole in one ribbony swirl of water.

  What do David and I do now? Abby asked the river, because it was the only thing she felt close enough to to ask. Where can any of this go from here?

  Nothing. Only silence, and one little thump as the trout rose farther upstream to feed.

  Abby unfastened the buckles on her sandals. She tested the water with one toe. Cold. Icy. She slid first one foot, then the other, all the way in. She put her weight on them and stood, biting her bottom lip because her feet had already begun to throb. Black mud oozed between her toes, tiny specks of mica floating over her skin. Her persimmon toenails sat magnified in the water and sunlight, looking twice as big as they really were, while the current rushed against her ankles as if it wanted to push her along.

  She was still standing in Fish Creek when she heard David calling her across the lawn. A week ago, she would have splashed out of the water and started toward him, eager to welcome him back. Today she only stood with her toes in the water, welcoming the fierce cold that had made her limbs go numb—the way she wished her heart could be numb.

  What had David said? I’m doing what I think the Lord wants me to do. Well, if the Lord wanted David to do this, he could just as well do it without her.

  “Come on, Abby. Why can’t you walk where there’s already a path?”

  “I didn’t expect you home.”

  “I called you at the shelter. They told me you were here.”

  If she had been alone, Abby would have climbed out of the water. Instead, she stood staring at him, her jeans hiked up in her hands, not moving.

  “We live in the same house,” he went on, “and we can never talk because of Braden. I can’t wait any longer for this. We’ve got to decide something.”

  “David. This has been years in the making. I don’t know what it is you want from me today.”

  “I want you to forgive me. I want us to go forward on this together.”

  Her shoulders moved as if she’d felt a chill. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen that way.”

  “It has to,” he said. Then softer, “It has to, Abby.”

  Abby began to clamber up out of the water. She sloshed up on shore and stood in the grass with wet, muddy toes. She stared at them a long time before she spoke. “You made your decisions about this nine years ago. And you made them alone. With no regard for what it would do to your family. There isn’t anything that says I have to stand beside you now. The Bible even says I don’t have to stand beside you. I looked it up this morning.” And then, probably to his horror, she quoted. “ ‘I tell you whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery—unless his wife has been unfaithful.’ I say that would apply to the husband, too. Or, maybe not. What do you think?”

  “You’re using the Bible against me.”

  “I’m using the Bible as…the Bible.”

  “You’re thinking about divorce?”

  “I’m thinking I have some options. It’s nice to have options.”

  David slapped his hands together once, twice, glancing toward their house. “If you won’t go forward with me, then I’m going to have to go forward alone.”

  “How can you do that? How can you go forward on a marriage alone?”

  “I’m not talking about marriage anymore, Abigail. I’m talking about Braden. I’m talking about having him tested.”

  She stared at her husband. “You can’t do that. That means he’s going to have to know.”

  “I wanted us to stand together on this. I wanted you to be beside me when I explained it to him.”

  “Oh, David. No.”

  “You know I’ve got to do it. To see if he could be of some help—” David stopped, as if he couldn’t say the other child’s name in front of his wife. “—for my daughter.”

  The words “for my daughter” struck a deep blow. Abby felt her stomach go weak. This mention of David’s daughter brought them both to a singular, more fragile, territory—one in which she did not dare be self-righteous. Dissolving a relationship was one thing. Saving that child’s life was another.

  “David, I’m really trying—” She swallowed hard, her stomach hea
ving, clinging to reason as a rush of salty liquid filled her mouth. Please don’t tell Braden. Don’t let him know all that his father has given away.

  “I’ve already phoned Susan in Oregon. She knows that you know, and that I’d like to proceed with tests on Braden.” David’s voice stayed cool and deliberate. “They’ve sent a second test kit to St. John’s by special courier. It will be here this afternoon. I’m going to pick him up after ball practice and take him over to the lab.”

  Oh Lord, please, she wanted to cry out. My son.

  “I’m going to talk to him,” David said. “Maybe he won’t have to know so much of it. Maybe I can tell him… just enough.” He paused and sought her face. “Do you want to be there when I do?”

  “I don’t think—” Could she trust David to handle this well, to be gentle with Braden’s heart? If he expected me to trust him, he never should have betrayed me in the first place.

  “You weren’t ever going to tell me you had an affair, were you, David? You were going to die with this. If something like this hadn’t happened, I was never going to find out.”

  He thought about that, shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t have.”

  “Braden is the only reason.”

  “Yes.”

  Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. What have I missed? What could I have had until now, if I hadn’t had David? What did You want me to have?

  Abby pushed her painted toes into her sandals, bent to buckle them. She shook her head sideways, tossing her hair, afraid to look up, as if she were trying to deny something to someone who had shamed her. “When you talk to him, David, I want you to measure your words with your life.”

  “I’ll tell him what he’s got to know, Abby. I won’t go any further than that.”

  Abby felt as though her life were rushing away from her, as if it were water tumbling and thrashing past her, and the only way to be a part of it was to leave the bridge—to jump in, to let it tumble her along, too.

  “Will you say that I love him? That we—” She stopped, furious at her husband. “This is asking way too much of him.”