Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  Michelle’s chin trembles. “Thank you.”

  “Michelle’s right. We meant everything in that letter,” Joe says. “We didn’t want . . . we don’t want you to feel like . . . we’re not taking your baby. We’re just carrying on where you’re leaving off.”

  With that, all three of us launch into all our likes and dislikes, our dreams, our hopes. They tell me all about their house and their town, their church and their extended families, and the North Carolina beach. I tell them how River likes to eat at least every two and a half hours, and that once he’s decided he’s hungry he cries like he’s never had a meal. I tell them how he likes to be burped up high on someone’s shoulder, how he looks handsome in blue, and about his uncle Jayden, who he never knew.

  I stop there and lay him flat on my lap.

  It’s time.

  No one has said anything, but I know.

  River’s eyes are wide-open, as if he knows he’s about to go on a new adventure. I think my limbs are shaking as bad as his as I unwrap him from the blanket, one thing I’ve decided to keep to remember him.

  “You do look handsome in blue, River.” Carla brought me the onesie, pale blue with fine white stripes. “So very handsome.”

  I have to do this. Help me, Lord.

  The plaque on Sudie’s wall comes to mind. Hosea 14:3. “In you alone do the orphans find mercy.” In you alone do any of us find mercy, Lord. I know this now. Please have mercy on my son.

  I press my lips to River’s head one last time, breathe him in, feel the rise and fall of his chest, the beating of his heart.

  Help me, Lord.

  All you have to do is reach, the voice says.

  I think about the woman in the Bible who was bleeding, and all she could do was reach for the hem of Jesus’ cloak.

  And so I reach. As I lay River in Michelle’s arms, I reach for Jesus. And somehow, I find him there and am able to let my baby go.

  The Moores collapse themselves around him, and somehow I understand this is not to keep me out, but to welcome River in. After a few moments, they look up and thank me again. And again.

  Donna shows us all where to sign the pieces of paperwork that have to be done in these last moments, and things begin to feel awkward again. All I want to do is leave the room. To get away.

  The nurse seems to pick up on my panic. “I’ll walk back with you, if you’re ready.”

  I nod, unexpected blackness closing in on my field of vision.

  “Would you rather ride?”

  “No . . . I think I’ll be okay.” I turn toward the door and walk out of the room. The hallway looks even longer than it did when we came here. Impossibly long. My legs feel heavier. My arms ache more. My breasts ache more.

  I need to feed him. He’s hungry. He needs to eat.

  We’re halfway back to my room when I turn and run back to them.

  “Wait!” I scream. “Please. Wait.”

  Terror fills the Moores’ faces.

  Donna Howard turns pale as a sheet. “Jaycee—”

  I wave my hands. “It’s not what you think. I’m not changing my mind.”

  I’m not.

  “I just . . . I need you to do me a favor.”

  “What is it?” Joe says.

  “Please . . . just . . . please don’t tell him I couldn’t afford him.”

  “Of course not,” Michelle says.

  “Or . . . that he was an accident.”

  “All right,” Joe says.

  Michelle steps toward me. “What would you like us to tell him, Jaycee?”

  “Tell him . . . Tell him that I couldn’t afford not to let you raise him. Tell him I watched and prayed and knew, and that when God formed him inside of me, he had you and Joe in mind too.”

  “I will,” she says. She hesitates, as if carefully choosing her next words. “I will tell him all of that, and that while I taught him to read, you’re the one who gave him sight. I’ll tell him that while I taught him to ride a bike, you gave him lungs to breathe. I’ll tell him that while I taught him to love, you are the one who loved him first.”

  Within an hour, the nurse has discharged me, and Gabe and I are driving home on the same stretch of road that’s taken me to the end and the beginning of myself. We pass the schools and the car dealer, the strip malls and liquor stores, the rickety homes with sagging front porches, the trailers and the farmhouses on stripes of newly mown grass, the corn and bean fields. Everything’s changed, but it’s all the same.

  River is mine.

  And he is theirs.

  Both at once.

  There is no explanation for this.

  It just is.

  Epilogue

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  The trees have all dropped their leaves, and the branches clack together when the wind blows through them as Gabe and I hike the trails at the state park.

  I didn’t need the final adoption hearing at the River County courthouse to remind me it’s been six months since I placed River in Michelle Moore’s arms. I see him. All the time. Everywhere.

  Every face of every little boy on the playground, in the grocery, at church, and in cars and front yards. I wonder if he’s trying foods yet, if he can sit tall enough to swing, if he’s noticed flowers and birds, if he knows it’s winter now and Christmas is coming, and spring will come again.

  I wonder if he will have freckles in the summertime, if his eyes will stay blue or turn brown like mine, if he still has my dark hair or if it’s lighter, like Bryan’s. I wonder if he’ll get scared at night, if Michelle knows the words to “Jesus Loves Me” and “You Are My Sunshine” and sings those when he’s upset or falling asleep. I wonder what kinds of broken he’ll have to face with them, because it’s a guarantee he’ll have some hurts in life. I just pray they’re not even close to the broken I had.

  Mostly, I just wonder if he’ll ever, someday, wonder about me.

  There are glimmers of hope around Riverton. The ash tree outside my trailer made it through the summer. In fact, a team of scientists came by and treated it with a new experimental insecticide for free. The governor started a needle exchange program, and new treatment centers are sprouting up across the county for heroin addicts. Shorty’s doing a good job mowing and trimming at the cemetery, although he’ll need help in the spring planting the right flowers. I see the Blairs at church, but we are all careful to avoid each other. Not everyone sees the good in breaking cycles of pain. But if there’s anything I learned from Sudie and taking care of all kinds of creatures, there’s room in God’s Kingdom for all of us.

  Mama’s up for parole in the spring. She writes me letters, telling me in every one how much she loves the pictures I sent her of River, how perfect he is, and how sorry she is that she never got a chance to meet him. I’ve been trying my best to write her back, because I think I’ve figured out that no one sets out in life wanting to hurt people. We just get broken and cracked, like the roads and the seasons. Water gets in and freezes and thaws and buckles us, is all. Some folks more than others.

  “Did I ever tell you about the monarch, Gabe?”

  He takes my hand as we head down the path that leads to the highest waterfall. The winter woods hold a beauty that can’t be appreciated in the summers, the thin layer of snow like a silver lining on the decaying foliage beneath it.

  “I think you have,” he says.

  “I think I have too. But can I tell you again?”

  “Sure.” He grins, the early-winter sun catching on his dimples.

  “The monarch offspring eat milkweed when they hatch, which turns to poison, which is what makes their wings bright orange.”

  “You don’t say?” He pretends to be in awe.

  “Well, I think it’s fascinating anyway, that an innocent creature can feast on poison and survive. It’s a miracle the monarchs get back here at all, don’t you think?”

  Gabe stops and grabs me around my waist. “I think you’re a miracle.”

  “I think you’re as big a sap a
s ever.” I kiss him square on the lips and wiggle free.

  We stop when we get to the top of the waterfall. Farther up the creek, the water that feeds these falls is the same that runs behind Shady Acres. The rapids leading up to the edge bubble and roil before flowing off and dumping into a larger creek that runs into the slow and meandering Ohio River. I don’t know, nor do I try any longer to understand, the reason for pain. I only know loss is as much a part of life as gain. The river that moves and waters and baptizes is the same one that floods and dries up and takes.

  I put my hand over the place on my belly where they stretched and pulled and lifted River from my womb. Sometimes I wake up at night and think I feel him there, a foot or a hand pressing against me. But then I remember.

  To be sure, the Lord heals the brokenhearted, and he binds up wounds. But scars . . . well, they never go away.

  “C’mon, Jaycee.”

  I take Gabe’s hand and we start the hike downhill toward home.

  A Note from the Author

  The Bible contains 31,102 verses, 23,145 of which are in the Old Testament.

  Three of those verses are about a woman named Jochebed.

  Three brief verses describe how she had a beautiful baby boy, that she tried to hide him from men who wanted to take his life, and that she had to give him up so that he could live.

  And live he did.

  His name was Moses, and the glimpses we are given of his mother, Jochebed, appear in Exodus 2:1-3.

  As with Tamar (2 Samuel 13), who inspired my novel How Sweet the Sound, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to be Jochebed in today’s world, a birth mother faced with the heart-wrenching decision to entrust the life of her child not only to a new family, but to the Lord. I began to research birth mothers, and the more I learned, the more my heart broke for the silence and stigma surrounding their journeys. I pored over online support groups and stories, read books and memoirs, and realized that while every story is unique, the one thing that unites them is hope: hope that their child can have, as Jaycee says, a chance.

  The other commonality I discovered uniting birth mothers is silence. Many birth mothers don’t want to be found. Others feel ashamed. Of the countless birth mother scenarios I researched, so many expressed feeling alone and overlooked and unseen.

  I hope this story gives readers a unique and intimate perspective into the heart of what a birth mother goes through. And most of all, I hope birth mothers who read this realize the Lord knows their story. He sees the unending love they have for their children. He can take what feels like a small and unnoticed part of their lives and turn it into something epic. And he sees them as heroes, because heroes are people who choose to protect someone else at their own expense, even when it means letting go (John 15:13).

  At the same time my heart was burdened for birth mothers, the opiate crisis was reaching epidemic proportions in southern Indiana and across the rust belt, resulting in needle exchange programs and killing dozens at a time. As an RN, I have cared for newborn and premature babies—some who didn’t make it—just like Jaycee’s little brother, Jayden, withdrawing from heroin or methadone or both. I’ve cared for the young adults, too, filling our hospital wards and the obituary pages, their babies overwhelming the already-burdened foster system. This heartbreaking epidemic became an easy parallel to the life-threatening decree of Pharaoh that Jochebed faced. Indeed, the lives of young mothers and children are threatened in rapidly growing and devastating ways, and not just in small towns, either. The opioid epidemic knows no boundaries. At the heart of it are people—like Jaycee’s mother—who are hurting and grasping at anything that eases their pain.

  Finally, I can’t write a novel without infusing it with my love for nature. For Before I Saw You, I read countless books on raptors and woodland plants and trees. I hiked in state parks and quarries all across my beloved state of Indiana, including those around my alma mater, DePauw University. While there (and thanks to Facebook), I reunited with the beloved woman who was—and still is—a cook at my sorority, Anita Akins. She helped me with hilarious stories and facts about her and her family’s work over the years as cemetery caretakers in Greencastle, which became the basis for Sudie’s life and work. (And she makes the best cinnamon rolls in the state!)

  I especially enjoyed weaving the thread of wildlife rehabilitation into this story as a thread to parallel Jaycee’s journey. During my research, I had the privilege of meeting with a local certified wildlife rehabilitator named Holly Carter in my hometown. I was immediately enamored of her work and the process involved in the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured animals, and she helped me immensely by checking my facts and the scenarios I imagined for the hawk and the turtle and other animals featured here.

  Finally, the plight of the ash trees was something I knew I had to include, the emerald ash borer killing acre upon acre of the beautiful trees in recent years. This served as a perfect, albeit heartbreaking, parallel to the way the opiate epidemic has spread throughout the Midwest region and beyond. In all the great silences around us, whether grief or praise, I believe God reveals himself to us all across nature. As Jesus said in Luke 19:40, even the rocks cry out and testify, whether turtles and their homing instincts, the migration of monarchs, the lifelong monogamy of raptors, the delicate balance between bats and air temperature, or the emergence of life each spring.

  More than anything, I hope through Jaycee and her friends that readers appreciate—as I came to more deeply while writing about them—how so many people fighting silent battles among us are overlooked and forgotten. But God doesn’t forget anyone. He has a purpose for everyone. And not a sparrow falls without his knowledge.

  Suggestions for further reading on birth mothers, the plight of American small towns, the opioid crisis, and wildlife:

  Websites:

  The National Institute on Drug Abuse: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids/opioid-crisis

  National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association: http://www.nwrawildlife.org/

  Life Centers: https://lifecenters.com/

  Books:

  Delivered: My Harrowing Journey as a Birthmother, by Michelle Thorne

  Reader’s Digest North American Wildlife, by the editors of Reader’s Digest

  Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich

  The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, by Julie Zickefoose

  Shadow People: How Meth-driven Crime is Eating at the Heart of Rural America, by Scott Thomas Anderson

  Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones

  Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance

  Kay koule tronpe soley men li pa tronpe lapli.

  “A leaking roof may fool sunny weather, but cannot fool the rain.”

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  ANNISTON

  I thought I’d lived through everything by the time I was thirteen.

  Hurricane Frederic nearly wiped the southern part of Alabama off the map that fall, and half of our family’s pecan orchards along with it. Daddy said we were lucky—that the Miller pecan farm down the road lost everything. The Puss ’n’ Boots Cat Food factory supplied our whole town of Bay Spring with ice and water for nearly a week until the power and phones came back on along the coast of Mobile Bay. Anyone who could hold a hammer or start up a chain saw spent weeks cutting up all the uprooted trees and azaleas, pounding down new shingles, and cleaning up all that God, in His infinite fury, blew through our land. Like most folks who lived along the coast, we’d find a way to build back up—if we weren’t fooled into thinking the passing calm of the eye meant the storm was over.

  If I’d only known this about Hurricane Frederic—that the drudging months leading up to Thanksgiving would be the only peace we’d see for some time. Weren’t no weathermen or prophets with megaphones standing on top of the Piggly Wiggly Saturday mornings to shout warnings of storms and second co
mings to us.

  The only warning was the twitch of my grandmother’s eye.

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” Mama, Daddy, and I said in unison.

  Princella pulled the front door open to let us in, kissing us each coolly on the cheek as we passed. Her graying hair was twisted into a tight, smooth bun on top of her head, and a purple suede pantsuit hung on her too-thin frame.

  “Thank you. Oralee, Ernestine will help y’all take that food on to the kitchen.”

  “How are you, Mother?” Daddy had grouched around the house all morning as we readied ourselves to go to the big house.

  “Why, I’m fine. Thank you, Rey. Your father is in his den.” Princella nodded toward the book-lined room to the left of the foyer.

  I followed Daddy. Though I loved peeling potatoes and painting butter on yeast rolls as they came steaming out of the oven, I didn’t feel like being around Princella, who preferred I call her by her proper name, saying she felt too young to be called Grandma. I couldn’t figure her out. Then again, who could? Mama called her an enigma. I called her old and bitter.

  The thick, wide shoulders of my granddaddy, Vaughn, filled every inch of the leather chair behind his desk. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat on the tip of his nose, and he rubbed his neatly trimmed mustache as he concentrated on the thick ledger open in front of him. As soon as he saw Daddy, he got up and threw his arms around him hard, patting him on the back. “Good to see you, Rey.”

  “You too, Daddy.”

  “And how’s Miss Anniston today?”

  “Fine, sir.” The sun caught on the silver bevels of a sword sitting on Vaughn’s big wood desk, sending shards of light dancing across the walls and ceiling.

  “Wow, I haven’t seen that in a long time.” Daddy gently picked up the sword and let his fingers glide along the blade, down to the tip and back again. Carvings of horses and soldiers wrapped around the thick handle.