by Amy Sorrells
“I was just coming for my car to go home,” I say.
Hersch steps between Bryan and me before I know it. “Hear that, son? The lady’s going home now.”
Bryan glares at me, his hands still in fists, which open, close. Open, close. He raises one and points at me. “There’s no going back on this, Jaycee. We’re done. You hear me? Done.”
I step behind Hersch and watch as Bryan climbs back into his car. Black lines of rubber steam from where he squeals off. My arms ache.
“How’d you know?” I say to Hersch.
Just like when he’s cooking an egg or flipping a chopped steak at the grill, Hersch barely turns his head as he says over his shoulder, “Hersch just knows.”
Hersch waits and watches until he is sure my car starts before turning and heading back to the diner and whatever business he has there. Maybe some late-night deep cleaning of the grill. Whatever he’s been doing, I’m sure glad he was there.
10
* * *
Dear Jaycee,
I don’t blame you for not answering most of my letters. Wouldn’t blame you for hating me, either. I hate myself. Not much else to do here besides think over what I’ve done to get here, what I’ve done to you, to your brother.
A preacher was here on Sunday. He’s here every Sunday, but I decided to go to the service this time. He and his people brought fresh donuts, and we don’t have anything like that on the block. He talked about the same things Reverend Payne always talked about, but I don’t think any of that is for me anymore. What kind of God would want a woman who’s done the things I’ve done?
But I’ll keep telling you I’m sorry.
I guess I’ll keep telling Jesus I’m sorry too.
I love you.
Mama
I don’t have an answer for the question in Mama’s letter, which I find on top of the stack of usual bills and mailers. ’Specially since I wonder the same thing myself lately.
I don’t expect answers from him anymore. I’m not like Sudie, who says she hears God speaking to her in the wind when she’s tending the graves or watching her critters heal and return feral as ever to the wild. But like Mama, that doesn’t stop me from talking to him. I guess for some crazy reason I think maybe he’ll get tired of me talking and say something back.
Walking across the matted-down path of grass to my home, the trailer looks especially small, fragile, and I shiver at the unusually cold spring night. The dried brush, all of the Joe Pye and ironweed, the asters and oxeye daisies are brown and withered from the long winter. If spring wasn’t such a sure thing, I’d never believe they could be tall and green again. One snowflake, then two, land on my eyelashes, and I can see even more falling across the uncovered bulb that lights the front stoop. A barred owl yelps from a nearby tree: whooh-whooh-whooh-woo-woo-woo-woo.
I almost step on the plate wrapped in tinfoil on the top step of my stoop. It’s still warm, and I lift up a corner and see it’s full of butterscotch cookies.
The note on top says,
Church at 8:30 tomorrow morning.
—Sudie
Inside, I flip the light on. The place is quiet except for the hum of the old refrigerator and the click of the furnace. I lock the door behind me, even though there’s about as much inside to steal as there is outside.
Anymore, nobody leaves anything around they don’t want stolen. Folks needing their drugs steal everything but the siding off trailers if they can turn it around for cash and a balloon full of smack. They stole the fake wooden wishing well from the front yard of Shawnie and Tim’s place, the bald tires off another neighbor’s car that was up on blocks for repair, and the clothes—including underwear—off Sudie’s clothesline. The fact that Dewey and Virginia Johnson’s couch hasn’t been stolen from their side yard is a testimony to how gross it is.
For the longest time after Mama went to jail, I lay awake at night listening for the doorknob to rattle, seeing shadows—real and imagined—creeping by my window. Took several weeks of Mama being gone before word got out and they stopped coming around for their fix.
My stomach growls and I’m glad I remembered to buy fresh milk the day before so I can have it with Sudie’s cookies. The first soft, buttery bite melts on my tongue, and the milk is cold and silky on my throat, still tight from Bryan’s anger.
I intended to tell him about the baby. Really, I did. But after this, no way.
Hot tears come, tears I’ve been holding back since the sting of Bryan’s hands squeezing my arms, and they keep coming as I go to my bedroom and pull out a pair of pajamas, pink flannel pants Sudie bought me for Christmas with a pattern that looks like they were made for a little girl, only I’m not a little girl anymore. Little girls don’t sleep with their boyfriends. Little girls don’t get pregnant.
I curl into bed and turn on my phone. I wrap myself around a spare pillow in the spot where Jayden used to lie, and I try not to acknowledge the shadowy thought in the back of my mind as I flip through the latest Internet and Twitter news. I didn’t think it would ever be something I’d consider, but I didn’t think I’d be pregnant like this either. Feels like two sides of my brain are arguing with each other.
It’s just a clump of cells.
God’s knitting him together.
Get rid of it.
He has a heartbeat.
Kill it. Get an abortion. It’s legal. People do it all the time.
I count the months again since I last had a period.
October . . . November . . . December . . . January . . . February . . . March.
I’m at least six months along, maybe closer to seven.
My fingers feel like they have weights attached to them, clumsy as I type the word into the search bar: A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N.
I’m about to hit Enter, then add Cincinnati. The closest city.
There are almost five hundred thousand results, everything from a map with icons identifying surgical centers to information about the abortion pill. The closest clinics are about an hour’s drive from Riverton.
I could easily get to and from Cincy in a day. Maybe even a half day and not be missed. I’ll call in sick. Carla won’t mind. And she won’t have to know.
Other results include things like postabortion help, postabortion syndrome, and snippets of information like how the cost of the procedure increases after the first trimester.
I’m way too far along to even be looking at this.
I click on a button that reads, Find Help, and another that says, One Girl’s Story. The girl’s about to have the abortion and she sees the baby move like it’s waving, its tiny legs kicking, its heart beating. I read about all the abortion doctor did to her, all he did to the baby with the forceps and severing limbs and the bleeding afterward and the shame and the regret.
Nausea threatens before I can finish reading everything.
What am I supposed to do, Lord? I can’t kill this child. But how am I supposed to carry him? And what am I supposed to do once he’s born?
Silence answers my questions and I shiver with loneliness.
The blue glow of my phone screen glares at me: images of girls who look like me; images of embryos and fetal development; images of shiny-faced couples seeking adoption; links to things like choices and life and rights and morning-after pills and abortion risks and parenting and child support; words like safe and legal and options.
I scroll to the clinic website and click through the pages about the procedure.
Ninety-nine percent effective.
Safe.
Legal.
Confidential.
Fast.
Common.
An abortion would make all of this a memory. An annoyance. I’d be free from Bryan, free from this one little mistake. After all, it was just a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t want to turn out like Mama.
But still.
It’s a baby.
Inside me.
My baby.
After Mama turned, I never felt like I belo
nged to anyone, and now here I am with a baby growing inside me who not only belongs to me, but somehow, I feel like I belong to him.
It’s just a line on a stick. It can’t live any more than the kits born too soon whose mothers leave them. It happens in nature. Nobody knows. Nobody ever has to know.
And Bryan wouldn’t have to know.
He’d be furious.
I think of Mary and imagine her crumpled from the blow to her gut.
Before tonight, I told myself I’d marry Bryan. Seems like forever ago when we first started dating, not long after Jayden died. Back then, when I was with Bryan the emptiness of losing Jayden disappeared. Wouldn’t have been a perfect marriage, but I thought I could make it work. Thought I could tolerate him, his temper. Especially if I had a baby to focus on. I thought we could have a second, even a third. We’d be fine, like me and Mama were fine when I was little. And we’d have a roof over our heads, a real house on one of the streets in town.
I thought I could live with Bryan if I had all that. Anything to fill the heart-hole inside me. Now I know no man, no roof, and especially no baby can fill the empty. Bryan would beat any chance of joy, any chance of life, out of us for sure. Even now, being with Bryan means no more than things the feral cats do under the trailer or the coyotes I hear screaming in the meadow as they come together.
I’m far from the only unmarried girl who’s been pregnant in Riverton. There’d been at least a dozen in my high school class alone. Terri Brown sat next to me in anatomy class and I saw how each passing week it became harder for her to fit into the all-in-one chair and desk. Eventually she’d started sitting at one of the lab tables in the back of the room because she got tired of sitting sideways. We were lab partners and spent hours dissecting a cat and a cow’s eye, but Terri never spoke of her pregnancy, even though it was right there in front of us in plain view. And I never asked.
Terri ran with the rough crowd, the sort of kids who smoked in the bathrooms between classes and wore impossibly tight jeans, usually paired with a concert T-shirt of some kind. The sort of crowd who asked me if I sold smack since they knew Mama did. Pregnancy happened a lot in Riverton. It just didn’t happen, at least as far as people knew, to people like Bryan Blair.
I click off my phone and put it facedown on the floor next to my bed. Getting rid of this child is not a solution. He can’t help that he was created. The fact that I’m going to have to carry this baby and deliver him is getting more and more real. And I’m more and more scared.
Help me, Lord.
The wind blows through a crack in my trailer window, but it sure sounds like a voice says, Trust me.
As if on cue, I feel movement, gentle as a feather, pressing inside me, against the rise of my belly. It’s the first time I’ve felt anything. But it’s there. My baby. Inside me. Alive.
I curl my knees up tight against me, as if to protect the life inside me from my own dark thoughts, and slide under the sheets. I long for Jayden and the way he curled himself against me at night before I put him in his crib. He was so fragile—all velvet, wrinkled skin when he was first born. So perfect. So completely reliant on Mama—on me—to live.
I’d chosen rabbits over Jayden.
I might as well have been the one to put the methadone in his bottle.
How in the world could I raise a child of my own?
Help me, Lord.
Trust me.
That voice isn’t the wind. And it’s not my imagination.
It’s the voice I’ve heard before, in the summer when the rain dies down, when the whole earth is swollen with deep green life, the whole world is coming into its own, and the first of the monarchs are returning to the milkweed. It’s the voice I hear in the spring, when katydids are floating on top of the meadow grass, cardinals and sparrows are calling, rabbits are chasing each other and tumbling over themselves in a dance of courtship. It’s the voice I heard when my toes sank bare into the sand along a quiet bend of the Ohio River, the day Sudie gave me the Bible that’s on the table next to me.
Reverend Payne and the two deacons had looked a little silly standing waist-deep in the river, the big white gowns floating up all around them. A handful of adults and my eighth-grade confirmation class were dressed in the same white robes, waiting our turns to be baptized. Bryan Blair included. None of us knew how we’d turn out back then.
Behind us, Ida Lambert directed a little choir of about half a dozen in songs like “Take Me to the Water,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” and “Abide with Me.”
Hawks hung in the air above the trees on the opposite side of the river, and a heron flew by, neck tucked in an S, while a few sandpipers played with each other along the shoreline. And Reverend Payne went on about how just like the river, things change up and down the shoreline of our lives, but the water running through them never changes course. It never stops and always runs the same direction downstream. Unchanging. Living water, just like the Lord himself.
One by one, folks waded in ahead of me, my stomach clenching at the thought of coming up wet in front of everybody or my nose plugging up or choking on the water. My feet sank into the soft river bottom and mud squished up all around my toes as I half walked, half swam out to Reverend Payne. His hands were strong but gentle to steady me, since I had to struggle to find my footing. When I turned back to the shore, Mama and Sudie were standing together, tears of pride running down both their faces.
Reverend Payne said something about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and I remember looking for a dove to come down like it did for Jesus and John the Baptist, but none did. Still, I felt the old go and the new come as Reverend Payne and the deacons floated me back and under and brought me up out of the water, and I knew right then I was new and clean as I’d ever be.
The crowd along the riverbank clapped and cheered, Mama and Sudie loudest of all. After the last person had their turn, we all held hands in a big circle and sang a song before praying and then sang one last hymn before changing back into our Sunday clothes in the park’s public restroom and joining up for a picnic in one of the shelters. I remember pulling on my old stained canvas shoes, the rubber edges split and cracked, my heart full from the very certain feeling that God was smiling down on me.
That’s when Sudie gave me the Bible, the one that promises that like the river, God doesn’t change. The one that tells about Moses and David being murderers and Gideon and Peter being afraid, of Rahab being a prostitute and Jacob being a cheater, of Jonah running away from God. The one that says God never gives up on anyone despite the sinning and the running and the coming and going and the fearing and doubting people do.
I’m not much different than them, am I, Lord?
I love you, the voice says.
But I’m a mess, Lord.
I’m your strength.
But I don’t know what to do, Lord.
Be still and know.
But I’m scared, Lord.
I am with you always.
Help me, Lord.
Trust me.
Before I turn off the light, I open the Bible and settle on Psalm 139, how God made me and he’s making this baby, every little part he’s knitting together. He watched as I grew in Mama’s belly, and he’s watching as this baby grows in mine. He saw me before I was born, and he sees this baby inside me. He recorded all my days, and he’s recording my baby’s days, too. There’s no place I can go and no place this baby can go without God going there first.
And somehow, for now, that’s enough.
11
* * *
In the morning I hear a baby wailing and for a moment my heart stops.
Jayden.
But then I remember. It’s just a neighbor baby, across the way. The thin metal walls of the trailers allow sound to travel like kids playing telephone with a couple of cans.
I still reach for him when I wake up in the mornings like this. I miss his heartbeat. I miss him reaching for me. I even miss his fussing. Sometimes I keep my eyes closed
on purpose and imagine nothing ever changed, because sometimes I don’t know how to live without him, or without Mama if I’m honest. She was there, on the bank of the river, cheering for me once.
I fix my eyes on the ceiling, yellow in spots where the roof leaked and I patched it up with Sta-Kool for the hundredth time, something I learned about by watching the neighbors. My eyes adjust to daylight, my mind to the airy stillness until a breeze presses against the sides of the trailer, making it creak. I hear the wind rustling through the branches of the old ash, and I remember the snowflakes on my windshield last night.
Pushing the curtain back, I see frost settled hard on the world, along with about half an inch of snow, just enough to coat the trees, each blade of grass, the roofs of storage sheds, shimmering with a thick layer of icy white. I shiver and feel the soft rise of my belly.
Nausea rises when I think about what I was considering last night. Bryan or no Bryan, there’s no way I can do away with the life inside me. It’s bad enough that one beating heart stopped on account of me.
I shower, blow-dry my hair, and put on my makeup for church. Usual things feel unusual since last night. Next to a bong stain on the kitchen counter, my cell phone is still for the first time in a long while. I’m caught between feeling relieved and being angry that Bryan gave me up so easy. I take my time letting the oatmeal cook; watching the eggs turn from clear to soft, formed gold; and feeling the way they warm my insides on the way down. One thing’s for sure: this child inside me wants me to eat.
Before heading to Sudie’s, I fill the bird feeders. Outside, the new snow muffles the morning sounds of doors creaking open as folks fetch Sunday papers and traffic passes along the highway. The world smells clean, as if the snow has brought newness with it, and I imagine what it would be like if the brown wasn’t underneath it all. A squirrel arcs along the ground, pauses, and rises on its haunches to stare at me before continuing on, circling up and around the ash tree.