Maria
I
couldn’t believe what was happening.
All of a sudden, a time I had tried to put to rest more than forty years ago was coming back in a most hideous way. My Isabel. I’d failed her so. If only I had been a better mother. If only I had known how to handle her rebellion.
Was there a day in the past forty-one years that I hadn’t imagined what her last moments had been like? This is what I’d been picturing for all those years: Isabel was at the bay, alone on the platform in the darkness, excited that Ned would soon be joining her there. Then the black boy, George Lewis, appeared on the beach and started to swim out to her. Next followed the part I could never understand. Isabel was an excellent swimmer. Why didn’t she jump into the water to try to escape him? Why didn’t she swim to the beach or the pier or…I don’t know. Or
maybe she didn’t see him. Maybe he’d cut through the water so quietly that she’d been unaware of him until he climbed onto the platform with her. There had been bruises on her arms. Did he try to rape her? Did she jump into the water to escape him? Did she hit her head on the platform or did he knock her out with a weapon? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. All I knew was that my baby had to have been terrified. My little girl had been trying to act so much like a woman, trying so hard to be grown up, to make decisions for herself, albeit poor ones. She thought she was so independent, on the road to freedom from me and my rules. I was certain that, at that moment on the platform, she was reduced to the little angel of a child I used to carry around on my hip. The little girl who called me Mommy, who thought the sun rose and set on me.
Whenever I thought of her final moments, I felt her fear, a wringing, wrenching terror, in the center of my chest. It made me want to scream and pound the walls. It once made me strike my little daughter, Julie. It was hard to admit to hating one of my children, but for a few days, I believe I did hate Julie for her part in Isabel’s death. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was myself I loathed. But back then, Julie took the brunt of it all. She took the full weight of my grief.
Sometime in the last forty-one years, I’d been able to make a sort of peace with that night.
Peace
might have been the wrong word, but I’d at least been able to live with what happened and with my failings as a mother. I’d forgiven Charles for his permissiveness with Isabel, and I’d taken comfort in knowing that the man responsible for her death and for those last horrible minutes of her life was rotting in prison. I’d felt such hatred for George Lewis, and that hatred extended to every other black man
I’d see, before my intellect would take over and I could remind myself that Lewis was one man who acted alone and was not representative of his entire race and gender. Now it seemed that all the hatred I’d expended on him might have been misdirected.
Had it been Ned himself then who murdered Isabel? That was certainly the implication of the letter he’d written to the police. What else could it mean? I believe he loved Isabel as best as an eighteen-year-old boy could love a seventeen-year-old girl, and therefore I had to assume it was an accident for which he never came forward to take responsibility. In a way, that explanation was reassuring to me, because Izzy would have been with someone she loved and trusted, so fear might not have been the last thing in her heart. But if it
had
been Ned, Ross must have fabricated his alibi.
My mind spun as I tried to figure out what had truly happened. Julie said the police might want to talk to me again. How I would tolerate that, I didn’t know. I would tell them that I was a bad mother who didn’t know how to parent a teenage girl. I’d tell them that I was jealous of how my husband adored her and that maybe that got in the way of how I treated her. And I would long to ask them questions of my own, but I never would. Asking my questions could only invite more of theirs, and I had far too much to hide.
Julie
I’
d never felt more like a part of the sandwich generation than I did the day I told my mother about Ned’s letter. I was a middleaged woman caught between the concerns of her aging parent and the challenges of dealing with her child. I worried that I was going to fail both of them—or that I may already have done so long ago.
After bringing armloads of hydrangeas into my mother’s house and placing them in vases in the living room and kitchen, I knocked on her bedroom door.
“Mom?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just tired.”
I didn’t want to leave her alone but was not sure what else to do.
“Would you like me to stay here awhile?” I asked through the door. “I could make you something to eat or—
“There’s no need to stay, Julie,” she said. “I’m going to sleep. Don’t worry about me.”
“All right,” I said.
I made some tuna salad for her and left a note on the table telling her it was in the refrigerator. I didn’t know what else to do. I felt helpless.
I came home and sat down in front of computer. I checked my e-mail; there were many notes from my fans that had accumulated over the past few difficult weeks. I hadn’t had the concentration necessary to answer them and I wasn’t sure when that would change. I sat staring at them, thinking that I should open Chapter Four and try again, but I knew I wouldn’t. Writing a story about Granny Fran, a woman who didn’t exist outside my imagination and whose silly life was filled with silly mysteries solved in three hundred silly pages, seemed completely pointless.
I was still staring at the e-mail when I heard the front door open.
“Mom?” Shannon called, and I felt a rush of much-needed joy. I missed having her around so much.
“In here,” I called.
She walked into my office and sat down on the love seat. “Sorry to interrupt your work,” she said.
“Oh, honey,” I said. “You’re never an interruption.” We both knew that wasn’t the truth. I’d had a rule that I was not to be disturbed while I was writing unless it was a dire emergency. Was that one of the many areas where I’d screwed up?
“Well, I have something I need to talk to you about,” she said. She was watching me, making good eye contact with those longlashed dark eyes, but there was no hint of a smile on her face.
“You sound serious,” I said. I suddenly understood how my own mother had felt a few hours earlier when I’d said I needed to talk to her.
“I am,” she said, and then she looked away from me, down at her hands. She was pressing them together in her lap, hard enough to turn the knuckles white. “I’m really, really sorry about what I’m going to tell you, because I know how much it’s going to disappoint you…and everything.”
“What is it, Shannon?” I tried to imagine what she was going to say. Did she want to stay with Glen when she came home on holidays? Had she changed her mind about Oberlin and now wanted to go somewhere else? I was unprepared for her next words because they were so far from anything I might have guessed.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I was dumbfounded. Absolutely dumbfounded. “You…you haven’t even been seeing anyone,” I said.
“Yes, I have,” she said. “I met someone during spring break, although I’d actually known him for months over the Internet.”
Oh, no
, I thought.
“He’s from Colorado and he was here visiting friends and he and I have stayed in touch by phone and e-mail and I’m in love with him.” She smiled then and gave a happy little shrug of her shoulders.
I don’t know what she made of my silence. I was measuring my response, afraid of driving her away with anything I might say. I moved next to her on the love seat and took her hands in mine. Hers were ice-cold.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “This must be very difficult for you.” It was the best I could do. I would make myself support her, no
matter what option she chose. I can understand a woman having an abortion early in her pregnancy—in some circumstances. So, I would let this be Shannon’s decision, let her be the grownup. She looked surprised by my reaction.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Did you just find out?” I asked. “Do you know how far along you are?”
“Eighteen—almost nineteen—weeks.”
“Oh my God,” I said, realizing that an early, first-trimester abortion was not even an option. “You’re…are you trying to decide…” I was stammering, and she stepped in.
“I’m going to have the baby,” she said.
“But what will you do?” I asked. “What about school? What about…you’re only seventeen!” I was losing it. I felt the control of my head and my heart and my tongue slipping away from me.
She shook her head and her voice was much calmer than mine. “I’m not going to go to school this fall,” she said. “Someday I will, but not right now.” She offered me an apologetic smile. “Mom, I’m so in love with him. His name is Tanner. He’s an awesome person. He goes to the University of Colorado in Boulder. And…Mom, don’t be mad,” she pleaded, “but I’ve decided to move there and start a life with him and our baby.”
I let go of her hands and stood up, simply unable to sit there another second. I ran my fingers through my hair. “All of this has taken me by surprise, Shannon,” I said. “And I’m going to need some time to absorb it, but the one thing I know right now is that you can’t move away.”
“Tanner and I have talked about this for hours and hours,” she said. “We want to do this right. We want to—”
“You
cannot
go to Colorado with a baby and a total stranger,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve thought through what it’s going to be like for you to be a mother at seventeen.”
“I’ll be eighteen when the baby’s born.”
“You’re still more of a child than a woman,” I said, “and the fact that you got pregnant to begin with is proof of that.”
“Mother,” she said. “Don’t start.”
“I know you’ve been having sex,” I continued. “And I knew you were on birth control. I’ve seen your pills around—you’ve made no secret of it. I haven’t said anything to you about it and I’ve tried to be really…” I frowned at her in bewilderment. “How did you let this happen?” I asked. “Did you do it on purpose? Did you feel like you weren’t ready for school? What is going
on
with you, Shannon? I feel as though I don’t know you anymore.”
She stood up, toe to toe with me but two inches taller. “I am a woman who is going to have the baby of the man she’s deeply in love with,” she said. “That’s who I am, Mother.” There were tears in her eyes. “And there’s really nothing you can do about it. I just thought I should let you know. And now I’m going back to Dad’s.”
She turned on her heel and walked out of the room, and I didn’t know what to say to stop her. I heard the door slam behind her and I sank numbly to the love seat. I couldn’t have said how long I sat there before I finally lifted the phone and dialed Lucy’s number.
“Hey, sis,” Lucy greeted me.
“Shannon’s pregnant,” I said.
There was silence on her end of the phone that went on for too long.
“You
knew?
” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Lucy, damn it! Why didn’t you
tell
me?”
“I haven’t known long,” she said. “And I was going to tell you but wanted to give her a chance to talk to you herself first.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe my class president, straight-A, musically gifted daughter is pregnant by some guy in Colorado I’ve never even heard of. This is just insane.”
“I know,” Lucy said, and it scared me that she agreed, because there was very little that Lucy considered insane. “You know, the only thing that I find completely unbearable is his age,” she added.
“Which is…?” I’d figured he was a little older than Shannon, since he was already in college.
Again the silence from my sister.
“Lucy.”
“He’s twenty-seven,” she said. “I assumed she’d told you.”
“Oh, my God,” I said again. “Oh, Lucy. It’s statutory rape.”
“No.” Lucy sounded so damned calm. “She would have to be under sixteen for that.” I heard her sigh. “I just don’t know what to say, Julie. I don’t get this any more than you do, and I’m upset, too. The thing is, it’s happened, and she plans to have this baby. We need to check this guy out, of course, but I think that this is just going to happen and we have to do whatever we can do to be there for her.”
“How can we be there if she’s in Colorado?” I asked.
“I hope she’ll reconsider that,” Lucy said.
I thought of all the colleges we’d visited. The nerve-racking auditions. The waiting for acceptances. Her excitement at getting into Oberlin. “All her plans…” I said, my voice trailing off. There was not much to say about those plans. They had little meaning now.
“I know,” Lucy said. She hesitated, then finally spoke again. “On another cheery topic,” she began. “Did you tell Mom about Ned’s letter?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice had gone flat. I felt weary to my bones.
“Oh, Lord,” Lucy said. “What did she say?”
“She got really quiet. She went into the house and lay down. I was worried about her and I checked on her before I left, but she said she just wanted to sleep.” I looked at my watch. “I was going to call her in a few minutes, but I’m a little too shaken up to do it right now.”
“I’ll call her,” Lucy volunteered.
“Thank you,” I said. “Shannon could still have a safe abortion at eighteen weeks, couldn’t she?”
“Wow, I can’t believe I’m hearing you say that,” Lucy said. “Everything changes when it’s your own kid, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t lecture me, all right? Could she?”
“Yes,” she said. “But that’s not what she wants.”
“How does she even know what she wants?” I asked. “She’s not thinking straight. None of this makes sense. Do you think Glen knows?”
“She told me she’d tell him after she told you, so I guess he will know very soon.”
“I suppose he and I should talk.”
“Good idea,” Lucy said, then added, “I’m going to call Mom now. Will you be okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
When I got off the phone with Lucy, I started to dial Glen’s number, then hung up. I didn’t feel like hearing his voice or listening to his controlled and inevitably dispassionate reaction to the fact of Shannon’s pregnancy. I also didn’t want to tell him
the news through my filter. Let him get it from Shannon, the same way I did.
I lifted the receiver again and dialed Ethan’s number. His was the one voice I
did
want to hear.
“Shannon is pregnant,” I announced when he answered the phone.
“Oh, no,” he said.
I told him the whole story, including Tanner’s age and the potentially botched college plans and it felt wonderful to vent to someone who simply listened. He didn’t speak again until I’d poured out every ounce of it.
“I know exactly how you feel,” he said then.
“You do?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Abby got pregnant when she was sixteen. I don’t think she’d mind me telling you that.”
“Oh, Ethan.” I felt empathy, both for him and from him. “What did she do?” I asked.
“She placed the baby for adoption,” he said.
Adoption.
Of course. That made the most sense. That was what Shannon should do.
“Maybe Shannon would consider that,” I said.
“I bet Abby would be willing to talk to her about it, if you like,” he said. “It was an open adoption situation, and I have to say, as terrible as the whole experience was—and it was very hard for all of us—it’s turned out well. She has a relationship with her son, who’s nearly ten now. I even get to see him once in a while. His parents are great people.”
I was thinking about Oberlin. She would still miss the fall starting date if she placed the baby for adoption. I wondered if she could go in the spring or would she have to wait until the following year?
“I’ll talk to her about it,” I said, knowing the conversation would not be easy or welcome.
“I think you need me to come up there and give you a hug,” he said.
He was right. That was exactly what I needed.
“Could you come right now?” I asked, feeling a little brazen. I remembered him holding my hand on his thigh. I wanted him to do that again.
“How about Friday evening?”he asked. “Can you wait that long?”
There was a hint of sexual innuendo in his voice that both surprised and titillated me and, however briefly, made me forget about Shannon’s dilemma.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I’ll try.”
I got off the phone and sat smiling for a moment. Amazing, I thought, that I could smile after a day like this one. I leaned my head back against the love seat and looked at my ceiling fan, which was spinning lazily. Could I do it? I wondered. Could I make love to Ethan? I rested my hand on my belly and felt my nipples harden at my own touch.
Yes
, I thought,
I could.
I stood up and left the office, heading for my bedroom, remembering that long-ago priest telling me I must
never
commit the grievous offense of masturbation. I laughed out loud as I walked into my bedroom.
This afternoon
, I thought,
I am going to sin.