The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  At seventeen, Ruth lay on her back, her hair matted like a bird’s nest. It was oppressively hot that day and her thin pink nightshirt clung to her damp skin.

  “I can’t do this,” Ruth cried from her bed.

  “I don’t see how you got much choice in the matter.” Mama dipped a hand towel in a bucket of hot water, just as midwives used to do in those old black-and-white movies.

  “It hurts so bad.”

  Pressure built in her groin, spreading to her stomach and back. This felt twenty times worse than her most intense menstrual cramps, the ones that had kept her home from school many days. Rocking back and forth on the bed, Ruth writhed on the sheet, riding each wave of pain.

  “Women been birthing babies for thousands of years. No different this time.” Mama’s face had turned into a black cloud hovering over her. Still, Ruth pawed the air until she gripped her grandmother’s arm, digging her nails into her skin.

  “Please. I need to go to the hospital,” Ruth begged.

  Mama dabbed her forehead with a cool sponge. “Now, you know better than that. You’re going to be just fine. Trust me. Have I ever led you wrong?”

  Ruth watched Mama looming above, her breasts swaying in her threadbare gown like two pendulums. Mama had been so careful to keep the pregnancy secret, and a trip to the hospital would expose their lie. She’d insisted that Ruth wear long tunic sweaters to cover her stomach and bright short necklaces that lured people’s eyes away from her midsection. When she could no longer hide the obvious, Ruth stayed hidden in the house, feigning illness and completing her schoolwork at home those last two months of senior year.

  The whistle from the nearby plant sounded, cutting the day in half. Work had ended, and it was suppertime. Eli’s shift would’ve been over, but he had called in sick that day. Her brother always wore a baseball cap, even inside the house, but on this afternoon, he’d taken it off in reverence for what was about to happen. A crease lined his forehead as he looked down at Ruth.

  “Come on now, lil bit. You got this,” he said, holding to her ear a Sony Discman that played Erykah Badu’s “On & On,” which had been her favorite song that year.

  But the music did little to calm the war raging inside her body. Her lower back seized up and the muscles twisted into one long braid of unbearable pain. It got so bad she even begged God to take her from this world and end her misery.

  Mama covered her mouth lightly with her hand. “Now, you hush with that kind of talk. Don’t play with God like that.”

  There were moments when the pain subsided, after one contraction ended and before the next one began, and Mama reminded Ruth of the pact they’d made as a family. As she dipped the sponge in a bucket of water on the floor, Mama’s eyes never met Ruth’s.

  “Once you have this baby, you leave it right here with us. You go on to Yale like we planned and don’t think any more about this child.”

  “It’s not up to you or you.” Ruth swung her head between her grandmother and her brother. “It’s my baby. My choice. Actually, it’s our baby. Mine and Ronald’s.”

  Eli laughed, but it came out as more of a snort. “You don’t even hear from him anymore. You think he’s sticking around to raise a kid? Soon as he finds out, he’s ghost. I’m telling you.”

  “You can’t keep this baby,” said Mama. “How are you going to go to Yale as the Black girl on scholarship toting a baby? I don’t think so.”

  “Plenty of girls have kids and still go to school.”

  “I don’t care about plenty of girls. I care about you. And if that’s the way you want it, you might as well stay here in Ganton and go to community college. Your papa and I worked our fingers to the bone so you’d have a chance like this to get your education and make something of yourself. I bet your grandfather’s turning over in his grave listening to your nonsense right now. We can’t have a baby messing things up now.”

  “For months, all you been talking about is Yale this and Yale that,” Eli chimed in. “You always bragging about being smarter than me, lil bit. So why you acting dumb now? We already settled on all this.”

  Ruth tried to steady her voice, knowing she was up against Mama and Eli, a formidable force when they got together and ganged up on her. “I don’t have to go to Yale. At least not right now. Ganton Community College is perfectly fine. It wouldn’t be forever.” Her voice sounded shrill and foreign to her own ears because of the exhaustion that had overtaken her. Tears spilled from her eyes because she didn’t know what she wanted and knew she’d been dreaming of life in the Ivy League, away from everything in Ganton that suffocated her.

  A framed copy of her acceptance letter from Yale sat on the nightstand next to her bed. Eli picked it up and held it out to her. “Sis, I’m supposed to be the dummy in the family. But even I know you can’t give up on this shot right here. That would be like being a number-one draft pick for the NFL or NBA and saying, ‘Nah, I’d rather ball with my boys on the block.’”

  The sticky air choked Ruth. The contractions had come again, faster this time.

  “Do we understand each other?” Mama said, trying to pry a promise from her before the baby came.

  Ruth had no energy left to argue. Sweat dribbled onto her lips and pooled on her chin. It tasted salty. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

  Then everything happened fast. A fresh wave of pain overtook her body. She was caught in the undertow. Trapped.

  Mama slid a plastic sheet under her bottom. It clung to her thighs. For a moment, Ruth thought someone was yanking organs from her body, one by one. The louder she wailed, the harder she squeezed Eli’s hand, the way she’d imagined doing with Ronald. For the most part, she kept her eyes closed, but a few times she peered through the curtains of her eyelashes at Mama’s face between her thighs.

  “One big push now. Let’s go,” Mama said.

  Pressure built in her pelvis again until she thought she might explode from the force of it. Then what felt like sharp nails ripped her insides apart. When she thought she might die there in her bed, her eyes shifted from Mama to Eli, memorizing their faces because she was sure she’d never see them again.

  In an instant, though, the baby slipped from between her legs and all that pain disappeared as fast as if none of it had ever happened.

  When Mama placed the baby boy on her slightly deflated stomach, Ruth’s arms wouldn’t move at first. They seemed wooden.

  The baby slid in her hands like a hard-boiled egg. His black hair soft like the belly of a kitten. Thick white paste covered him, and his face was swollen, eyes scrunched in a cranky way like he wanted to smash the alarm clock. She could make out a small burgundy spot on his cheek that Mama would later tell her was a port wine stain, an abnormality of his tiny blood vessels. Nothing to worry about. God marks some babies as special, that’s all is how she put it. Still, that baby was the ugliest thing Ruth had ever seen, and she found it hard to believe he had come from her body.

  This baby’s face would always represent a mistake she couldn’t undo. It would haunt her. Somewhere deep inside, even back then, she knew this. After nine months of planning for how this little person would fit into her life, finally seeing him in the flesh, not as an abstraction, hit her hard. No matter where she went in the world, she couldn’t escape what she’d created, and that scared her.

  When Mama and Eli turned their backs, Ruth lifted the baby’s head slightly, so her lips were close to his ear.

  “I hate you,” she whispered.

  “I heard that.” Mama dipped a washcloth in warm water and returned to wipe goo from the baby’s eyes. “Don’t say that to your child. You’ll regret it.”

  The baby must have known they were talking about him. Had he heard what she’d said? He opened his eyes for the first time, like a light turning on, and she could feel his innocent milky-eyed gaze on her. She couldn’t take her eyes off his.

  The reality of her situation gnawed at her. She remembered the agreement with her family. If she kept the baby, she couldn’t go awa
y to college. Everything she’d worked so hard for would be lost and she’d be stuck in Ganton, a town that killed dreams before they took root. But if she let go of her baby, there would be a hole inside her that could never be filled.

  “Give him to me, sweetheart. It won’t do you no good to keep holding him,” Mama said. She tapped her granddaughter’s ashy knee. “Close your legs now. You gon’ catch a fly up in there.”

  Ruth pressed her knees together, conscious for the first time of her indecent exposure to her grandmother and especially her brother. But she didn’t let go of her son. His skin felt warm and sticky against her chest. She needed more time.

  “He’s mine,” Ruth said, as if she were a toddler laying claim to a toy, and she hated how childish she sounded.

  What she felt made no sense, not even to herself. This was more than a simple binary choice. She wanted her baby, yet she didn’t. She loved him and hated him at the same time.

  Eli had shrunk into the corner of the room, embarrassed maybe by seeing his sister in such a primal state, watching life come into the world for the first time.

  The three of them had talked only in vague terms the past nine months, and Ruth hadn’t thought far enough ahead, hadn’t truly visualized the baby living outside her body, a living, breathing person who would require someone to care for him.

  The baby fussed in Ruth’s arms, squirming, and she held him tighter. “Where are you going to take him? Can’t you just watch him for me here at the house until I come home for summer break?”

  “No, it’s been decided already. Don’t worry about where he’s going. He’ll be just fine.” Mama tugged at the baby’s arm. “Let me have him, honey.” The boy’s eyes pleaded with Ruth. Turning her head away so she couldn’t watch, avoiding his eyes, she slowly released her grip on her son, her own eyes hot with tears.

  Eli held Ruth’s arm firmly, as if she might spring from the bed to reclaim her baby. “Hey, sis, you ain’t got to worry about nothing. Stop being hardheaded and let us fix this for you. We got this,” he said.

  Mama whispered, “I know you’re mad at me now, but it’s for your own good.”

  The linoleum floor creaked under Mama’s heavy footsteps. The baby whimpered before the side door slammed shut.

  Thirteen

  Ruth

  Ruth took her foot off the gas pedal and let the car move slowly through the streets of Grundy. After only one day and night back home, she had to get out of the house. The sky turned pale. It had emptied itself. But within minutes, snowflakes fell on the windshield and melted right away. The night was as confused as she was. The weather had always been unpredictable in this part of the country.

  The car windows fogged, and Ruth jammed the defrost button. Winding her way through Grundy, she passed a faded malt liquor ad and empty lots with mangled signs for a braiding salon and a chicken wing joint.

  Poverty didn’t discriminate in Ganton, with Blacks and whites both getting their share of hard times. Her headlights shone on two young Black men with short braided hair jostling in the middle of the street. Just the sight of her people made her heart swell with pride. Still, when she heard their raised voices, she clicked the lock button on her car doors, a reflex she wasn’t proud of, and she wondered if they were really jostling or maybe joking. How could she both love and fear her own people?

  She wondered about the street her son lived on and hoped the house had heat that ran through the winter and working smoke detectors. She imagined a Black neighborhood like Grundy, where she grew up, a place where joy lived. Where people threw up a hand to wave when they checked the mailbox and piled into their Buicks for bingo and bowling on Saturday nights and church on Sunday mornings.

  A few blocks over, stillness fell on Franklin Street, everything quiet except for the murmur of her car engine. Outside her window, she passed a building with a Cold Meats sign in front and a laundromat next to it. A small figure in a blue hooded jacket walked in front of the check-cashing store, kicking a mound of snow. The glare of her headlights caught his face. It was Lena’s grandson. She hadn’t forgotten that he’d pelted her car with snowballs. This boy’s smugness irritated Ruth, and she drove past him. Her only mistake: looking in her rearview mirror. Regret dogged her almost constantly these days. A dustup of snow blew in Midnight’s face. She put her car in reverse and rolled down the passenger’s-side window.

  “Midnight! Let me give you a ride.”

  “I can walk.” She heard the defiance in his voice.

  “It’s cold and it’s dark out here and this area—”

  Even now, just as Black boys didn’t walk the streets of Pratt, white boys didn’t walk the streets of Grundy. Not at night. Not alone.

  “I’m not allowed to accept rides from strangers!” he shouted with a smile.

  “That’s a good rule to follow, but it’s freezing out here and besides, I’m not a stranger. We met yesterday at your grandmother’s shop.” Driving slowly beside him, she tried to keep her car going in a straight line while leaning over to yell to him through the passenger’s-side window. “Please. Get in.”

  The wind picked up and Midnight staggered trying to push against it. He jerked the door handle and climbed in, his breathing hard and his long eyelashes dotted with snowflakes.

  “Why were you walking the streets by yourself this time of night?”

  Midnight curled his booted feet under his legs and reclined the seat. He ripped off his mittens and held his fingers with their reddened tips over the heat vent.

  “I needed to get away to think.”

  Midnight was one of those kids the old folks would say had been here before in another life. She laughed, and his face became drawn, making it obvious he thought he was being laughed at.

  “What have you been thinking about?” Ruth said.

  He shrugged and didn’t answer. She hadn’t known him long, but it seemed Midnight stood on the outside of things, bitter, chafed by the unfairness of life. Yet his face also had an open, pleading countenance that she recognized in herself. He tried to mask his need with feigned indifference.

  Midnight had to be around the same age as her son, and she wondered if they knew each other. Ganton was small, but what were the odds of that in a town of twenty-five thousand people? Besides, she had no idea what her own child looked like, so she couldn’t describe him. Also, she felt sorry for Midnight and it didn’t seem right to use him to get information. So, she stopped scheming in her head and tried to make conversation. The topic of the weather was always safe, if uncreative.

  “Snow’s really coming down hard. Nobody should be out in it.”

  “Daddy went to the plant every day in the snow, even when it was ten inches deep.”

  She heard the pride in his voice, same as Papa’s. She also recalled the deep disdain her brother had for this boy’s father.

  “I can tell you’re strong just like your dad.”

  “Can you drop me off at Granny’s? My address—”

  “316 Kirkland in Pratt.”

  Midnight raised his eyebrows in surprise. Pratt was one of the white working-class neighborhoods Mama told her and Eli to avoid as kids, even if Lena did live there. Don’t be caught over there after dark, she’d said. Ruth had stayed home most high school nights, lying across her four-poster bed studying for AP exams. But Eli hadn’t listened. One night, he came home with a bloodied, busted lip and a story about a couple of teen boys at a Pratt pool hall who fought him over which song to play on the jukebox. Come to think of it, Midnight’s dad, Butch Boyd, had been one of those boys. Ruth wasn’t sure how much had changed over the years. Now, she tried to shake off the jitters she felt about having to drive through Pratt, a Black woman with a white kid in the passenger seat. A white kid she hardly knew but still gave the benefit of the doubt. A courtesy too magnanimous for the Black kids on the street who reminded her of who she might have become if she’d stayed in Ganton.

  “Why is it so quiet when it snows?” His voice rose from the darkness,
startling her when she was getting accustomed to the silence. A bag of doughnuts Midnight had pulled out of his jacket pocket lay on the seat between them, and he reached for a glazed one with green sprinkles.

  “The weather’s bad, so not as many people are on the roads. I guess that’s why it’s quiet now.”

  The day of her wedding, she recalled Eli’s young children asking why the sun was yellow and why water was wet and why the stove was hot. Maybe children never outgrew the why questions. Even the best answers led to an endless cycle of more whys.

  “No. I mean snow is always quiet when it falls,” he said.

  “I give up. You tell me.”

  Midnight pushed his hood back away from his face and turned in his seat to face her. He licked his lips, outlined with sugar glaze and cracked from the cold.

  “It’s all about texture,” he began, taking an exaggerated breath before continuing. “When you drop something on the hard ground, it makes a loud noise. But snow is soft, and it absorbs sound. Kind of like carpet.”

  Ruth suppressed a smile. “Yes, unlike rainfall. Raindrops fall at a higher velocity, so they make that slapping noise when they hit the pavement.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Science was my favorite subject in school.”

  That seemed to surprise and please Midnight. A blast of wind rocked the car like a tiny earthquake, and Ruth tightened her hold on the steering wheel to steady it. The motion knocked the phone out of Midnight’s hands, and it slid under his seat. When he bent to look for it, he bumped his head on the glove compartment.

  “Ouch.” He muttered under his breath, “Some people don’t know how to drive.”

  “I heard that. I could have left you out there in the dark walking by yourself in a blizzard.”

  “It’s not even that bad out here. I walk by myself all the time.”

  And why was that? she wondered. In every city, neglected children walked the streets looking for the love they either didn’t get at home or rejected when it was offered. Lena nurtured almost instinctively, though.