by Amy Sorrells
“Don’t let their calm fool you,” Sudie always warns. “Wear the gloves every time.”
I learned this the hard way with a kestrel. A couple years back we had a female we’d been rehabbing for weeks and she seemed almost tame, so I didn’t bother wearing the gloves one afternoon when I’d been in a hurry to help feed her. Maybe she sensed my hurry. Maybe her keen watching figured out I’d let my guard down. I’d no more than pulled that cage door open an inch before she came grabbing at the half of a mouse I’d brought for her to eat, sinking her talons into the side of my arm so deep it’d required a couple of stitches and a tetanus shot at the clinic in town.
I don’t take chances with caring for most critters now, not even the redtails. I pull the leather gloves on one at a time, careful not to move the bandage too much on my still-tender hand. I unlatch the door of the cage and set the carrion inside.
As much as I’d like to touch the feathers, to run my hand down the bird’s back, to talk to it, I don’t. I close the door quick and step back, quiet.
I jump when my phone bleeps with a text. You home?
It’s Gabe. I pull the gloves off to text him back. At Sudie’s. Feeding the hawk.
Three ellipses bounce at the bottom of the screen, indicating he’s writing a reply.
Mind if I stop by?
If I say no, that I don’t mind, I’m giving in to the silence between us. On the other hand, if I say yes, I do mind, well . . . I’m not so sure I’m willing to risk severing whatever hope I have of feeling again what I felt when he wrapped up my arm, when he pushed my hair back, when he looked in my eyes and I looked in his.
I start to type when I hear the crunch of tires on gravel.
Sudie went to the cemetery and she’s not due back for a while. When I round the corner, I’m surprised to see who it is.
“Gabe Corwin. You didn’t even give me a chance to answer. What if I’d said I minded?”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he says, getting out of his car. “If you’re half as stubborn as me—which it seems that you are—you would’ve told me not to come.”
Relief rushes through me at the sight of him, at the fact he’s here in front of me, looking right at me, but I can’t let him see that. I put my hands on my hips and stand as tall as I can, which I realize makes my baby bump, which I’m not even trying to hide anymore, stick out even farther under my T-shirt. “You’re right. I would have. I have things to do.”
“Well, I won’t take up too much of your time.” He stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets and steps toward me. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”
I cross my arms, as if trying to defend myself against the kindness in his eyes. It’s not working.
“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting . . . about . . . well . . .”
“You mean the way you’ve been acting about me being pregnant?”
“Yeah. It’s just . . . well . . . it was a surprise is all.” He kicks at a bare spot in the grass. “It isn’t right, us being in such close quarters and not talking to each other, trying not to look at each other. I thought maybe if I came here, if I could see you, that maybe, well, maybe at least we could work that out. Carla’s right. Acting like this makes for awfully long days.”
I can accept his kindness, or I can go on showing him I’m just fine without him. Like that redtail. He fussed and fluttered and threatened us with those talons until he realized we’d keep giving him food and a safe place to heal. I don’t know for sure about Gabe and his intentions toward me, but I do know there’s no way to find out without taking at least a little of what he’s offering.
“I guess I’m sorry, too. I didn’t exactly know how to tell you.” My voice sounds small, weak.
“Sounds like it’s uncharted territory for both of us.”
“Yeah.”
He runs one hand through his hair, and his cheeks are pinked up. He locks eyes with me. “I meant what I said the other day, when we were at your place.”
“I guess learning about this is one way to get past cordial.”
“It is.” A grin breaks out across his face.
That dimple. The way his mouth turns up on one side when he smiles. The outline of his muscles beneath the heather-gray sweatshirt he wears with well-worn jeans. The way my heart burns inside my chest whenever I’m with him.
“You up for a little walk?” I say.
He tilts his head. “I thought you had things to do.”
“Hmm, well, they can wait. I want to show you something.”
I walk him across the meadow, back to where the craggy slope leads down to the creek. Flashes of yellow columbine and branches of volunteer forsythia mix with the bright green of the spring underbrush, which I push past. He breathes heavy behind me as we shinny over fallen tree trunks, up and over rocks and roots jutting across the trail, lightly worn and only by the steps of me and Sudie.
Oak. Sycamore. Maple. Sycamore. Ash. I recite the names of the trees as we pass them.
Suddenly the trees turn sideways and pain ricochets against my knees, my bandaged hand. I taste the grit of dirt.
I curse and pull my pants up over my knees, which sting from the shock of impact. They’re not bleeding. My hand is still wrapped up. Glancing back at the trail, I see the root that caused me to fall, and curse again.
“Jaycee! You all right?” Gabe offers me his hand.
“I’ll be fine.” I try to get up myself, but the woods still look like they’re moving. I sit back and run my hands over my belly, straining to sense if the fall hurt my baby. I’ll go to the doctor, like I promised Carla. I will.
“Here. Let me help.” Now both of his hands reach toward me.
I eye him for a second, but then am grateful for the boost. I brush the dirt off my pants and pick a few burrs off my bandaged hand. “I seem to be prone to accidents these days.”
“I guess so! Sheesh. Should you even be traipsing through the woods like this?” he says.
“I’m pregnant, not sick.”
“Right.” He looks skeptical.
“Besides, where we’re going is just up the bend.” Nothing in my belly feels out of sorts. There’s no pain like the one I had the other day.
“What’s that smell?” Gabe scrunches his nose up.
I smell it too. Like a dead animal. “I don’t think I landed on anything.” I look around to make sure, and I see the cause of it. “Here. Look.”
Several scaly plants that look like cream-colored pinecones stick up from around the bottom of a nearby oak.
“What is that?”
“It’s called squawroot. They are nasty smelling. Probably keeps them from being eaten. They only come up every four years.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, it’s really weird. A good sign they’re growing, though. Means the forest is healthy, despite all the ash trees dying.”
“How do you know so much about plants and trees? And animals?”
“Sudie, mostly.” I start down the path again, this time slower. My knee smarts.
“What’s wrong with the ash trees?”
“You haven’t heard about the borers?”
“Only thing I knew about trees before I met you was that I was glad if there was one to sit under during off innings when I played baseball.”
Could we be any more different? I laugh and tell him all about how there didn’t used to be emerald ash borers, until they came in on a shipment of some kind in Michigan and have been eating their way south ever since. The ash across Riverton and all along the Ohio River Valley started to show signs of dying the summer Jayden died. By last fall, whole tree lines full of them that had been green and thick were over half dead. “Can’t see them, either. They’re tiny and green, and they get underneath the bark and eat from the inside out. By the time the leaves start dropping, it’s too late to save them. They say the only thing that’ll stop them is when they kill all the ash and have nothing else to eat.”
“Can’t somebody spray th
em or something?”
“I guess not. I heard a couple places might have some kind of a preventative now, but it’s too late for most of them. That great big tree by my trailer’s an ash. One of a few I’ve seen not showing signs of dying yet. Probably too late for it, too. Besides, I probably couldn’t afford whatever the treatment is anyway.”
The trail turns and heads uphill to a set of worn steps and a bridge, too rickety to trust walking across any longer. “Used to be part of the state park. Still is, I guess. But they don’t maintain it anymore.”
“Pretty place,” he says and scans the creek running below us, the hillsides with several big ash on their sides, the entire root system upturned along with them as they fell.
“Another one of my favorite spots.”
“I can see why.” He looks pensive.
“You haven’t told me exactly why you came to Riverton.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I thought it might be nice to live near the river.”
I raise my eyebrow. “That’s it?”
He shrugs again. “Columbus is a bigger town than this one, but I was tired of the same old same old. Tired of everyone knowing everything about me, thinking I’m the same person I’ve always been. You ever feel that way living here all your life?”
“Mmm-hmm.” If he only knew that’s one of the reasons I like him. Just like the kids I went to school with, he would have never sat with me in the cafeteria or paid me any attention if he knew the Jaycee Givens the rest of Riverton knows.
He leans against the fence and faces me. “I guess I felt like I just needed someplace where I could start new.”
“That’d be nice, starting new.” I look across the creek valley, at the hawks circling above, at the sparrows hopping from branch to branch, at the squirrels circling up and down tree trunks, at the white snowdrops blooming in clusters, at the first bees gleaning nectar from the blooming clover at our feet. “That’s what I like so much about the spring out here. All of this coming up from nothing.”
For a while, our breathing is the only sound besides a cardinal calling across the way.
“I used to come here more often, before.”
“Before?” he asks.
I push down a tightness in my throat. “The other day, at my place, you asked about my brother.”
He straightens, waving a hand as if surrendering. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pried—”
“No, it’s okay.” It is okay. He can be trusted. And if he can’t, I’d rather know now. “The other day, when you overheard about this baby at the diner? I saw the look on your face and I realized keeping things from a friend can hurt worse than telling them outright. You might as well know the whole story.”
He is silent as I tell him everything. About my father. About Mama and the drugs. About Jayden, him being born addicted. About the junkies coming in and out at all hours. About me being Jayden’s one chance, about the rabbits who lost their mama and how I saved them but let my brother die.
When I finish, I turn and see that Gabe’s face is wet with tears, which is peculiar because I don’t seem to have any left to cry for myself.
“No wonder,” he whispers.
“No wonder what?”
“No wonder you act the way you do.” He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it.
“And how is that?”
“Jumpy. And scared.”
“Knowing all this . . . it doesn’t make you like me less?” I’ve been so afraid of what Gabe would think of me, that he’d leave me for sure. But if he looks at me different now, it’s only with more affection. He doesn’t act like he has pity for me as much as he has mercy, and I know plenty well the difference between the two. Pity’s what folks at food pantries and shelters had on their faces when handing me and Mama a box of toilet paper or canned corn, or a stack of used clothing. Mercy’s when someone acts like I’m just as human as they are despite the inhumane things happening to me.
“No,” he says, looking out across the valley before looking straight into my eyes. “It makes me like you even more.”
He reaches for me, but I pretend not to notice and start down the path. Heat rushes through me, the shame of my swollen belly all mixed up with the feelings I have for him. But I keep on walking. I have to, to hide the part of me that wants him with the part of me who knows better than to give my heart away to another man.
19
* * *
That Friday, I take the afternoon off work to see the doctor Carla’s set me up with, and to help Sudie at the cemetery after that. The office is nice enough. Fancy, really. At least a dozen magazines on parenting and homemaking sit stacked on the granite countertop next to the sink. I cross my legs and try to rub the cold out of my arms. On the pale-blue wall is a framed print of a mother bathing a child.
The exam table is hard and awkward, especially through the thin paper gown they had me strip down and put on. Carla offered to come back with me, but I told her I’d be fine if she stays in the waiting room.
“You’ll like Dr. Fitzgerald. He’s so nice,” she said.
My first reaction is to doubt whether he’ll be nice to someone like me, unmarried and pregnant, but I figure it’s my own shame making me feel that way. He probably sees unwed moms all the time. It is Riverton, after all.
There’s a rap on the exam room door and, without giving me time to respond, a plump woman in purple scrubs pushes a little machine on wheels into the room.
“Ms. Givens?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Paula, Dr. Fitzgerald’s nurse. I’ll be taking your vital signs, asking a few questions, and such before he comes in.”
“All right.”
Paula speaks softly and her touch is gentle as she takes my temperature, my blood pressure. She wears a simple gold cross around her neck that I notice as she presses her fingers against the inside of my wrist for my pulse. “How’d you hurt your hand?”
“Burned it on coffee. I’m a waitress. At the diner.”
“Hmmm . . . That’s a great little place. Maybe that’s why you look familiar.” She scribbles notes in my file. “Is this your first pregnancy?”
“Yes.”
“And where have you been getting your prenatal care before this?”
“I . . . well . . .”
She looks up from her paperwork, the corners of her mouth turning downward. “You have been seeing someone before now, haven’t you?”
I shake my head.
She looks as if she may say something, then hesitates. “Okay. Let’s start with this. Do you remember the date of your last period?”
“September?”
“You’re not sure?”
Not only have I calculated in my head too many times to count, but I remember Walmart was packed the last time I bought my monthly supplies, the aisles full of back-to-school shoppers and signs. I just don’t want to admit I haven’t seen a doctor before now.
“No, it was September,” I say, avoiding her eyes. “I’m sure.”
She grabs a paper wheel, a measurement tool of some kind, from the counter and turns it, adjusts it.
“That makes you about six, maybe six and a half months along.”
I nod, trying not to let on at my shock at someone putting words to the whole situation. Trying not to think too much about how that means I really do only have a handful of weeks.
“Let’s see how you measure.”
I lie back on the table.
Paula stretches a cold measuring tape from my panty line up across my belly. She scribbles some more in the folder that’s now on her lap. “Yep. Looks to be about twenty-eight weeks. Maybe even thirty. I’m sure Dr. Fitzgerald will want an ultrasound to confirm.”
“An ultrasound?”
“Yes.” She peers at me over the top of her bifocals, then reaches over and pats my thigh. “You’ll get to see a picture of your baby today. We can tell you the sex, too, if you’d like.” She hesitates. “Is there . . . would the father like to com
e watch when we do that?”
The ceiling light is too bright. Glaring. I close my eyes so she can’t see the tears starting up, and shake my head. “No.”
She pats my thigh again. “You can go ahead and sit up now. Dr. Fitzgerald will be in, in just a few minutes.”
A few minutes feels like forever, the cold room, the magazines with smiling mothers and laughing babies, the silver tray with tubes and instruments set in neat rows on top, all of this making me feel like I’m watching this happen to someone else.
“Jaycee Givens,” a voice booms.
Dr. Fitzgerald fills the room, a giant of a man dressed in light-blue scrubs and a long white coat, his name embroidered in bright-red cursive. He shakes my hand, his grip strong, sure.
“Paula told me a little bit about your history. So this is your first visit to a doctor? About this pregnancy?”
I nod.
His brow furrows. “We prefer to see patients for the first time around four to six weeks. The fact that you’re around twenty-eight . . . well, it could be just fine. But we’ll need to take some blood, run a few extra tests maybe you weren’t expecting, along with an ultrasound. We’ll do all that right here, so you don’t have to worry about having to go anywhere else. But I need you to know, you need to see us regularly from here on out until this baby arrives.”
He does seem kind, not like the nurse at the hospital who right away thought I was stupid when I brought Jayden in.
I nod again, fear beginning to gnaw at me. “Did I . . . I didn’t hurt him . . . did I?”
“I don’t see anything concerning yet, but like I said, we’ll be running a few tests to be sure. Without a father in the picture . . . well, let’s just say you’re not the first young lady I’ve had to counsel about not coming in like this. Most of those turned out just fine, but it’s not ideal. If something is wrong, we can often catch it early before it turns into something worse.” He smiles. Yes, his eyes are kind. “Just promise to come back for the rest of the prenatal visits we’re going to get scheduled for you, okay?”