He shook his head. “No, that’s not the option I meant.”
She stared at him as his words sank in. “What did you mean?”
He looked down at the uneaten food on his plate. She saw a tear fall into his potatoes. The realization dawned slowly over her.
“Not abortion,” she whispered.
His silence spoke volumes.
She felt her face reddening, her temples throbbing, her eyes stinging. “Barry, you don’t believe in abortion. Neither do I. Especially not our own child—”
“Just listen,” he said. “Try to put your emotions aside and just listen…”
She couldn’t believe he could sit there and bring up the subject of killing their own child, and tell her not to get emotional. But she grew quiet, hoping he would correct her, tell her that was not what he meant at all, that he could never consider that.
“I was thinking…about what I said the first day we found out about it…when I said it must be a mistake.”
She gaped at him, her mouth slightly open.
“And I started to realize that maybe sometimes God even makes a mistake.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. Her face twisted as she got out the words. “God does not make mistakes, Barry. This baby I’m carrying is not a mistake.”
“He gave us the technology for a reason,” Barry said. “I don’t think it was for convenience or so that teenaged moms wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of their actions.” He leaned in, lowering his voice but intent on making his point. “Maybe he gave it to us so that people who are going to have crummy lives don’t have to be born in bondage.”
Somewhere, deep within her, she felt the pain of rejection and betrayal rising up inside her like a thick, smothering fluid designed to do her in. “You’re really suggesting…we abort this baby?” she asked through stiff lips.
His eyes were filled with tears, and his mouth still trembled. “No one has to know,” he said. “We can say it’s a miscarriage. It happens all the time with babies who have things wrong with them. The mothers miscarry, and nobody blames anybody.”
“But I haven’t miscarried.”
“Think of it as that,” he told her. “Not an abortion. I mean, we wouldn’t have to go to an abortion clinic or anything. We could just go to the hospital and take care of it…”
The horror of his suggestion pressed the breath out of her. “You are suggesting we abort our baby!” The words rang inside her ears, bounced and echoed through her brain.
“I’m suggesting that we love this child enough to save it from a life of misery.”
Rage gripped her heart. “Why do you keep calling her ‘it’?” she demanded. “Are you trying to convince yourself that this is a blob of tissue and not a human life?”
“No, of course not.”
She breathed in a sob and clutched her head in both hands. The waiter came to the table, saw her condition, then quickly retreated. “Then how can you justify this?” she asked. “How? I’ve been reading about children with Down’s Syndrome. They don’t have lives of misery. They may not be as aware as we are of the ugliness and the stuff that goes on from day to day. Maybe a lot goes over their heads. But they’re not miserable, not unless we make them that way.”
“I’m speaking from experience,” Barry said, getting as angry as she. “You don’t know. To you, this is a challenge, and you think you’re up for it, but you’re not. I’ve been there, Tory. I’ve been where Brittany and Spencer are. I’ve been the neglected one because my brother needed more attention than I did. I’ve been the one who looked for my parents at ball games and they didn’t show up because Nathan was having a bad day. I’ve been the one who was humiliated at a school play because Nathan chose that moment to start moaning in the middle of the auditorium. I never went on a family vacation because we couldn’t leave Nathan with anybody, and we certainly couldn’t take him with us.”
“But a child with Down’s Syndrome won’t necessarily be confined to a wheelchair. Most of them aren’t. They can walk; they can learn. But even if they couldn’t, even if we had one like Nathan, I still couldn’t consider the possibility—”
“You have to consider it,” Barry said, slamming his fist into his hand. “I’m one of the parents. This is not just your decision. It’s mine, too. It affects the rest of my life. You have to consider our other two children.”
“And you have to consider our third one,” she said through her teeth. “Our little girl, who hasn’t done anything to deserve this.”
“You’re right,” Barry cut in. “She didn’t ask to be born. That’s what they all say. ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ So she doesn’t have to be.”
Tory gaped at him, incredulous. “What was all that pro-life stuff about? You sent letters to Congress when they were voting on the partial birth abortion ban. You go to pro-life rallies every year. Who are you?”
That seemed to break him. He set his elbows on the table and covered his face with both hands. His shoulders shook with the force of his despair. Finally, he moved his hands. “This decision…is…unspeakable to me. It’s one of the worst things I can think of doing.” He covered his mouth and looked at his plate again. “But I’ve got to tell you, Tory, there is something worse, and that something worse is allowing another baby like Nathan to come into the world and be trapped in bondage, and never be able to contribute one thing to this world.”
She thought of blowing out the candle so the diners around them wouldn’t see their tears. But she couldn’t move, except to shake her head.
“Tory, listen to me. I know this is hard for you. But it’s just a miscarriage. Nothing but a miscarriage. We’ll grieve our baby’s loss, we’ll be sad, we may never get over it, but it’s a whole lot better than being trapped for the rest of our lives.”
“God doesn’t create life that isn’t supposed to be here,” she said again. “I believe that.”
“Tory, this isn’t something that can be patched up, that a mother’s kiss can fix.”
“I won’t do it,” she said through stiff lips. “I’m sorry, Barry, but I will not do it.”
Angrily, he swiped the tears from his own face. “You won’t even consider it? What about my wishes, Tory? What about my say in all of this?”
“If you want to kill our baby,” she said, “then you don’t get a say.” With that, she shoved back her chair and headed out of the restaurant. She reached the parking lot and looked around for their car, not knowing whether to call a cab or get in the car and drive home without Barry.
He caught up to her in seconds. “Tory, don’t you walk out on me!”
“I’m going home, Barry.” The tears wouldn’t stop coming.
Barry got ahead of her and opened her door.
He got in on the other side, started the car, but couldn’t drive. He began to weep over the steering wheel. “We’ve already lost our baby, Tory,” he cried. “The baby that we thought was coming, the baby we expected…It’s gone. And instead, we have this choice.”
“My baby is not a choice,” she bit out. “It’s not a right, and it’s not a blob. This is a child.”
“Tory, all we have is a bunch of horrible choices, and I’m just trying to choose the one that is least bad. Abortion is the least of the evils I have to choose from.”
“The birth of this baby will not be an evil,” she yelled. “She’s a human being. She may not be as smart as you, she may not be as productive…” Contempt rolled off her tongue with the word. “Barry, I hate this, too! But when you can’t figure things out for yourself, you don’t choose between evils! You go back to God and you let him tell you what to do. If God wants us to lose this baby, then I will have a miscarriage, but if he doesn’t, then this baby was meant to be in our family. My child…”
“It’s my child, too,” Barry said.
“No, it isn’t.” She slammed her hand on the dashboard. “Not if you could do this. Not if you could even suggest it. It’s not a choice, Barry, it’s a sin. A heinous,
horrible sin. The worst one I can think of.”
“There are times when we have to sin,” he said. “I would steal bread to feed my children. And in a way, that’s what I’m doing now.”
“Stealing bread to feed your children?” she repeated, incredulous. “You can turn this into some noble thing that you’re doing for our family?”
“You don’t understand! You’re not even trying to understand. I’ve been there; I know what it’s like. You don’t.”
“So I don’t,” she said. “So what? Your mother had never done it before Nathan came along.”
“You’re not up to this, Tory. I know you.”
“And I know me, too,” she said. “I know that I’m selfish and resentful and I know that sometimes I put other things ahead of my family. I know that I want to be a writer. I know all that! But I’ll have to work on this, I’ll have to change, and maybe God gave us this baby so I would. Maybe he did so you would. Maybe there’s good to be seen here somewhere. We can’t just assume there’s not!”
He started driving, silent as he navigated the streets home. She was silent, too, except for the sound of her crying. When they pulled into Cedar Circle and into their own driveway, they sat there for a moment before going in.
“Tory, I know what a shock it’s been for you to hear me say this tonight,” he said. “All I ask is that you give it a few days and consider it—”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“I’m the leader of this family,” he said. “I’m responsible for it, I have to protect it, and I have to support it. You have to at least consider my wishes.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “So you’re using the submission card? Barry, I’ll submit to you on everything except things that go against God’s will. I will not do something that is heinous and awful. If I did this I could never live with myself. It would ruin my life, just like I believe it ruins the life of every woman who does it. I’m gonna follow God instead of you.”
“How do you know that I’m not listening to God, too?” he yelled. “How do you know that I haven’t talked to him about this, that this isn’t exactly the answer he gave me?”
“Because the answers God gives never include sin. And if you can convince yourself that abortion is not a sin, then you’re not the man I thought you were at all.” With that, she got out of the car and stormed across the yard, unwilling to face Annie’s teenaged chatter or the kids who might still be up. Barry would have to do that, she thought. Let him explain why their mother was distraught.
She went to the swing in the back of their yard, sat down, and doubled over, pressing her hands against her face. As softly as she could, she sobbed into them, all the injustice and crushing disappointment of her husband’s answer to this crisis falling over her like an avalanche.
CHAPTER Fifteen
The woman who had run into the school barefoot and covered with mud was hysterical, shouting and wailing out rapid-fire Spanish too fast for Sylvia to understand. Harry ran from the room he’d set up as an examining room and called across the noisy gymnasium for Jim.
The bilingual pastor broke free of the people he was attending to and hurried to the woman’s side. He barked out Spanish to her, but didn’t get much out before she began to rant and rave again, pointing to the door and toward the Cerro Negro volcano whose mud slides had brought hundreds of people here for help.
Jim looked weary from all the work so far. They had been taking people in and trying to feed them and find places for them to sleep, while the hurricane grew closer.
She saw Jim’s face twist with emotion, and he turned back to them. “She says she sent her oldest child to get an elderly neighbor to come ride the storm out with them, but he never came back. She decided to leave her four other children and go looking for him, but…” His voice broke off, and the woman began chattering again. “She…says a mud slide buried her house while she was gone. Her four children…” He rubbed his mouth. “She’s been trying to get to them, but some of the rescue workers pulled her away and brought her here.”
Sylvia reached for the mud-covered woman and pulled her into her arms. The woman wept and wailed against her, clinging as if she knew instinctively that this was another mother who would know the pain.
“The child she went looking for?” Harry asked Jim.
Jim shook his head. “She hasn’t found him, either. Harry, he was probably buried before she went looking for him. That volcano is nothing but sand. When it rains like this…”
“Well…should we go there and try to dig them out? See if there’s some way they lived?”
“There’s no possible way,” he said. “Besides, there’ll be more mud slides as the hurricane gets closer. Even after it’s gone. We can’t go near it.”
The woman cried and groaned in agony, stomping her foot and pulling at her mud-caked hair.
Dear God, how do I comfort her? Sylvia prayed. It was too much. She couldn’t do it.
She took the woman to a cot and sat down with her. She and Harry prayed over her while she wept and moaned. When they had finished, Harry gave her a sedative, and eventually, the woman lost her fight and lay back on the cot, still weeping softly. Sylvia didn’t leave her until she was asleep.
She got up, feeling shell-shocked, and not even noticing the mud covering her own clothes, looked for someone else who needed her help. She could hear the wind tearing at the walls of this weak structure, pulling off pieces of the roof. Something crashed on the side of the building, and she met Harry’s concerned eyes across the room. It was a tree, she thought, or a piece of someone’s house. She wondered how long these walls would remain standing. What would they do if their own roof flew off?
She looked helplessly around her. Families were huddled side by side and on top of each other in the smelly gym. Children cried at the sounds around them. Some of the men stood at the doors, watching through the windows that hadn’t shattered yet. Mothers tried to keep the children occupied and distracted. Spanish was spoken all around her, but even without understanding their words, she knew how to attend to their needs.
But this was only the beginning. After the hurricane, diseases would be rampant because of the corpses of animals lying around. Those who didn’t have their property ravaged by flood may well be those who lost everything to the mud slides. Tornadoes would take what floods and mud slides didn’t. It was as if God’s wrath was beating down on this country…but if so, it was beating down on others, as well. There had been too many hurricanes in too many places this year. Three had already threatened the East Coast of the States. One had ravaged the Florida coast.
She couldn’t believe that, just yesterday, she had felt sorry for herself because she lacked purpose.
She wished she could call the neighbors on Cedar Circle and tell them to pray without stopping. She wished she could talk to her children, Sarah and Jeff. If she could just hear those voices, maybe she could forget the anguished cries of that mother who’d lost everyone she loved in one moment. But there wasn’t time to make calls, even if the phone lines worked. There was too much to do.
She prayed she would have the energy to do it.
CHAPTER Sixteen
Brenda read the clipped e-mail Sylvia had sent during the night, and tears came to her eyes at what her friend was experiencing. She went to the television and turned on the Weather Channel to see if the hurricane showed any sign of leaving Nicaragua. But it seemed parked there, intent on ravaging the small country that wasn’t equipped to endure it.
“Lord, please keep her safe,” she whispered under her breath. “Protect her so she can help those people.”
The door of her little computer room opened, and David stepped inside. He was a large, ruddy, red-haired man who seemed to have aged years in the last few months. “Are you finished with the computer?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I was just checking my mail from Sylvia.”
“Everything all right?”
She shook her head. “The hurr
icane sounds bad.” She got up and offered David the computer chair.
“How’s it feel to have a night off?” he asked.
She smiled. “Thank the Lord for Saturdays. David, the kids are all in bed. I’m going to walk outside for a little bit. I need to think.”
“And pray?”
She breathed a laugh. “Yeah, actually. How’d you know?”
He took the seat she had occupied and pulled up his money program on the computer. “You know, you don’t have to say ‘think’ if you mean ‘pray.’ I won’t be offended.”
“It’s just that I know you don’t see any value in that.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “There must be some. We have Joseph to prove it.”
Something in her heart swelled. Maybe her prayers for David were being answered. “We sure do.” She leaned over and hugged him from behind.
The money program came up full-blown on the screen, and David clicked a few keys and waited for the bottom line. “How’s it looking?” she asked.
He got that look on his face that he got each time he examined their finances. “Well, when you get paid, we’ll almost be okay. I was thinking of taking on some extra work, doing it at night after the kids go to bed.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want the kids in here alone. Maybe I could find something I could do during the day. Typing or something.”
“You can’t take on any kind of daytime commitment when Joseph has to see the doctor so often. With the biopsies and the echocardiograms and the meetings with the transplant teams, they take half a day, at least, every week. And if anything ever even looks like it’s going wrong, they’ll have him back in the hospital so fast we won’t know what hit us. You can’t hold a daytime job and handle that. Besides, you’ll be exhausted. It isn’t worth it.”
“To make sure we can keep paying for Joseph’s medical bills, I’ll do whatever I have to do,” she declared.
He looked up at her. “I hate it. I hate having you out at night. I hate that the kids don’t have you here when they go to bed. I hate going to bed without you.”
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