The Atonement Child (16 page)

Hannah sat in the darkened living room, her daughter asleep upstairs. So far Dynah had slept twelve straight hours; she, on the other hand, had tossed and turned all night.

She had thought she had cried enough to last a lifetime when she was nineteen. Now she realized she’d had no clue what grief was. She hadn’t known how deep it could go or how long it could last and that there were ramifications she had never suspected.

Sometimes when she read her Bible, she envied the Israelites. They could wear sackcloth and ashes. They could wail and scream. They could prostrate themselves before the Lord God.

Oh, she had done that, numerous times in the years following that fateful one. She had even lain flat on the floor of the Presbyterian church in which she had been reared, begging for God’s forgiveness, begging Him for a child to replace the one she had sacrificed. That’s how she saw it now: a sacrifice of fear. A sacrifice to protect her honor. Honor nonexistent. A mask she wore for the sake of her parents and friends.

But God knew.

And it seemed God would never forget.

Oh, Lord, why do You have to take it out on Dynah? It was my sin. What I did was of my doing. I know it! Oh, God, don’t You think I know it yet? You’re not being fair! Dynah’s loved You since she was old enough to utter the name
Jesus
. She’s never walked away from You like I did. Oh, Lord, why does she have to suffer too?

She flashed back, remembering the trailer parked beside a garbage dump miles out in the desert. She remembered the pain and humiliation, the sick fear and shame. And she remembered what the doctor had said to her when it was all done.

“You were a little further along than you thought. Do you want to see it?”

“No.” She just wanted to leave, to get as far away from that trailer and him and what she had done as she could. And even after she had, she couldn’t stop wondering.

What had he done with the child he had scraped from her womb? What had happened to it?

All the while, in her heart she knew. And grieved. Silently. Without anyone knowing. How else could a mother mourn her aborted child? She couldn’t share her grief with loved ones; they would never have understood. Not the birth. Not the death. She couldn’t even allow herself to express it for fear someone might ask the cause of her weeping. And so it became like a dark hole, bottomless, threatening to drag her down.

Most of the time she could manage to forget. Or make herself forget by steel resolve and abject necessity. She had been good at that.

Now the old pain came welling up from the grave of buried dreams. Her relationship with Jerry had disintegrated with her pregnancy. Jerry had been angry and disbelieving. He wasn’t ready to get married. He was going to finish college. If he wasn’t ready for a wife, he sure wasn’t ready for a kid. She could do what she wanted about it. It was her problem anyway, since she hadn’t had the courage to go to a doctor and get a prescription for birth control. She should have taken the necessary precautions. He thought she had. How could she be so stupid? “Don’t come crying to me now that you’ve gotten yourself in trouble,” he’d said. He was out of it. Out of the situation. Out of her life.

A student loan paid for the abortion. She told the people at the administration office she needed the money for books and tuition. Lies. All lies. One upon another, a mountain of them. She finished school, moved to San Francisco, got a good job, paid off the loan, dated any man who asked her out, partied too hard, and didn’t allow anyone too close. Her life had been frenetic, packed full, overflowing. When she came home to her little apartment near the beach, usually after working late, she had the television going or the radio on or music playing on the stereo. When work didn’t answer the restlessness in her, she took up watercolor painting. She tried sculpture. She dabbled in the occult. She studied Buddhism and Taoism and New Age universal brotherhood and practiced a little of all of it. She took classes in gourmet cooking and yoga and music appreciation and world history. She attended plays and concerts, lectures and public rallies. She took aerobics and exercise classes and jogged along the macadam pathway that ran the length of the beach. Anything to keep her mind occupied. Anything to keep the quiet voice at bay.

And nothing helped for long.

Until she met Douglas Odell Carey.

Douglas said he loved her the first time he laid eyes on her. She was running to catch the bus on Market Street. He left his car in the garage the next afternoon and stood at the same bus stop, hoping to see her again. When she arrived, he followed her onto the bus and sat next to her, striking up a conversation. For five days he rode the bus and tested the waters before he asked her out. Of course, she said yes. Why not? They’d laughed together later when he’d admitted he got off the bus two stops after she did so he could flag a taxi back to the garage where his car was parked.

She liked him from the beginning. She fell in love with him after three dates. He was a good kisser and lit the fire she thought had gone out of her forever. He was good at everything he did. He tackled life the way a football player tackles an opponent: grappling him, wrestling him down. Douglas, the powerful. Douglas, her savior. Douglas, the man from the dark waters, or so his name meant. So apropos. Still waters run deep. She had almost drowned in the beginning. Deep hurts, deep longings, deep feelings, deep convictions.

When she lost their first baby, the rough, vibrant weave of their relationship began to unravel. In a moment of weakness and grieving, she came clean and told Douglas about the other child, Jerry’s child. Douglas held her and cried with her, and she thought he understood. He did in his head, but his heart was haunted by her relationship with another man. Her despair reminded him piercingly that she had loved someone else, loved him enough to go that far. What if she’d loved this other man more? What if she still loved him?

He struggled to get past it all. He worked through it intellectually, reasoning and justifying and excusing. But logic didn’t dissolve his feelings of hurt and betrayal. It wasn’t rational. He admitted to her he knew it wasn’t. Not in today’s world, where anything goes and there is no black and white or right and wrong. But there it was, like a wound he couldn’t stop tearing open. It would begin to heal, and he’d rip away the scab. Someone else had been in her life, and that someone had taken her innocence and destroyed her ability to trust. And poor Douglas was stuck with what was left. Oh, he forgave her. Countless times. Or so he told her. But after a while, she just stopped believing him. Forgiveness meant forgetting, didn’t it? But she’d see that look in his eyes, and the monster would come to dwell in their living room again. Even when they pretended it wasn’t there, it was there. Silent. Putrid. Corrupting. Destroying.

Paradoxically, Douglas hated Jerry. He even said to her once that he’d like to find him and beat the living daylights out of him for what he had done to her. It didn’t seem to occur to Douglas that had things been different, had Jerry been different, she would never have met him on the bus and married him.

But then maybe that was part of it too. Or so she thought in her own confusion and pain and self-recrimination. Maybe Douglas wished things had happened differently so he wouldn’t have to suffer with her for something she had done before she ever knew him.

All of it haunted Hannah.

And drove her.

After losing their second child, she and Douglas went to church. It was an act of desperation. “We’ve tried everything else. We might as well try God,” he said that morning when they backed out of the garage. On the way home, Douglas said he knew what had been missing in their marriage: Jesus. That’s what they needed to fix themselves. So they began going to church regularly. They joined a Bible study. They joined the choir. Their relationship improved, but the ghosts were still there, occupying the house. Occupying their lives.

Then everything changed for Douglas. After one private meeting with the pastor, he never mentioned Jerry or the lost child again. Even when she brought it up, Douglas refused to discuss it. “All that’s over and done with, Hannah. What happened then has nothing to do with you and me. I love you. That’s all that matters.”

The words were meant to comfort, but they didn’t. It wasn’t finished for her. Swallowing her shame enough to ask questions, she learned from her doctor that abortions sometimes did cause problems in later pregnancies. And then he said the abortifacients her general practitioner had prescribed, and which she had taken for seven years, might also have compounded the difficulties she was having in conceiving and carrying a child to term. She had never heard the word before that day.
Abortifacient.
He had to explain that the birth control pills she had been using weren’t made to prevent conception but to abort early pregnancies.

And then she knew.

God hated her for what she had done.

There are six things the Lord hates—no, seven things he detests: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that kill the innocent, a heart that plots evil, feet that race to do wrong, a false witness who pours out lies, a person who sows discord among brothers.

Hadn’t she done all of that? She had been too proud to seek help. She had sought a way out, any way out, and then had lied to get the money for an abortion, sacrificing her unborn child. And since then, she had lied to herself and others. She could remember saying in countless office conversations that she thought women should have the right to have an abortion, even while her heart cried out against it. Oh, she had been politically correct. That was so important these days. She had been astute, glib, tolerant in the world’s eyes. Sowing seeds of destruction.

Why had she done it? To hide her shame? To pretend the past couldn’t harm her? To avoid condemnation?

And what had she accomplished? She was ashamed, hurting, and condemned anyway. She could make a hundred excuses for herself—and did—but none mattered. None helped heal the secret pain within her because her own blood cried out against her.

You can’t run away from God!

Jonah had tried, and look how far he got.

It was there, always there, staring her in the face. Trumpets on the walls of the holy city. She was on the outside looking up at the stones that protected those inside.

God was punishing her.

And why shouldn’t He? She had taken from Him, and now He would take back from her.
How many before the score is even? How many, Lord?

Mea culpa. Mea culpa!

Finally, in desperation, she went before the Lord and gave herself to Him to do with as He wanted, promising that whatever issued from her womb would belong to Him. If God would grant her a child, she promised to raise up him or her to love Jesus above all else.

And Dynah was born. Blessed Dynah, the joy of her life. She could finally breathe again. She could kneel and drink the living water beside the streams. She could slake her desert thirst. Praise God! She was forgiven.

At least, that was what she’d thought. Until now. Now it seemed God had just been biding His time until He found a more painful way of punishing her.

If this is the way it has to be, Lord, so be it.

Hannah leaned her head back and looked up through eyes blurred with tears at the stained-glass window of a dove flying above a turbulent sea.
Oh, Lord, will I never be at peace? Better I had never tasted the joy of redemption than to have it stripped from me like this.

She was going to have to walk the sorrow road with Dynah and go through it all over again. All she could see ahead were the women in Ramah weeping for their children because they were no more.

“Smells good,” Ethan said, taking the chair near the window and stretching his long legs out beneath the small kitchenette table.

Joe put a plate with eight strips of crispy bacon on the table. Turning back to the stove, he removed the frying pan and scraped scrambled eggs onto two plates. He set one down in front of Ethan. Before sitting down himself, he ran water into the frying pan. “You want some coffee?”

“Yeah. Why not? I could use a jolt of caffeine this morning to get going.”

Joe took another mug from the cabinet.

“I’ll do the honors,” Ethan said when Joe joined him.

Joe bowed his head and listened to his roommate’s fulsome eloquence. His words dripped with sincerity, adoration, and gratitude.

“Did you call Dynah yet?”

The muscles tightened on Ethan’s face, and his eyes flickered to Joe briefly before he picked up his fork. “I called her.”

Joe raised his brows slightly.

Ethan ate two bites of egg before saying more. “Okay. I said I was sorry about how things turned out. I wished her well.”

“That’s it? She went home. So you can write her off?”

His head came up again, blue eyes flashing with anger. “That’s a lousy way of putting it!”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Joe said, hanging on to his cool with difficulty.

“What was I supposed to do? Chase after her? Beg her to come back? Dean Abernathy’s the one who gave her the options, not me! Blame him.”