Authors: Karen Harter
He set his bucket down and gestured with his head. “Right over there. There’s a hose. Do you want me to get it?” He finally
sauntered over toward the wall around the corner and returned with the hose. First he sprayed the vulnerable wall of the barn,
and then the loose hay. He kicked the burning bales toward the center of the barn floor and sprayed them until they were sopping
sponges.
“What the . . . ?” I felt a wounded bird flailing in my chest. “What was that all about?” I demanded when I caught my breath.
“If you’d waited a few seconds longer, this whole place would have been the Towering Inferno! Your hose wouldn’t have done
any better than spitting on it!”
Suddenly the Judge yanked an antique lantern off its nail and swung it like a bat against the wall. Glass shattered and metal
crumpled. The fire blazed now in his eyes.
I took a step backward and stared at him in shock. That lantern had been there forever.
“Does that bother you?” he shouted. “Does it seem a little destructive? You know, you can destroy things different ways, Samantha.
You can do it deliberately, or you can do it by just not doing the right things in time. When are you going to start taking
care of yourself? You’re playing some kind of denial game that’s going to kill you. What were you thinking tonight? Drinking,
smoking, staying out late. If your doctor hasn’t made it clear to you, I will. Your condition is serious. Life or death serious!
And this is not just about you. You have a son to think of. For God’s sake, Sam. Do the right thing this time!”
“Or what? Are you going to kick me out again?”
“I never kicked you out.”
“I was barely seventeen years old and you kicked me out on my fanny!” I was furious now and hot tears stung my eyes. “It’s
always been ‘my way or the highway’ with you!”
“I didn’t want you to go. I wanted you to make the right choice.”
“Yeah.
Your
choice.
Your
way. There never was any other way but yours! Never another side. Did you ever think about me? About how I felt? Do you have
any idea what it’s like to face raising a kid for the rest of your life when you haven’t even lived yet? When all your friends
are playing baseball and going to proms?”
“We weren’t dealing with a disagreement over summer school, or whether or not you got braces. You wanted to kill your own
baby, Sam. That’s the truth. You can ignore it, whitewash it and call it your
choice
, your
right.
You can march with a hundred women, or two hundred thousand, or millions who all agree a woman has a right to do what she
wants with her own body, but it doesn’t change the fact. The fact is you can’t have an abortion without killing a baby. A
person. An eternal soul whom God knew before it was conceived. This is not my opinion, Sam. It’s straight out of the Word
of God.”
I didn’t need to hear this from him. Not again.
“You could have at least let someone else raise the child. It was wrong. You wouldn’t murder TJ, would you? No matter how
inconvenient he may be sometimes.”
“Shut up!” I put my hands to my ears and staggered toward the door. “That’s enough!”
I tripped. He reached to help me to my feet. “Look, Sam, that’s all over now. There’s nothing that can be done about it. Let’s
put it behind us.”
I pushed him away and headed for the house.
What he didn’t know was that it was always behind me. Like a wolf lurking just out of sight.
IT WAS NOVEMBER the night I awoke to squeals of laughter. I remember because I had just turned eight. My mother and her old
friend Minnie from Redwood City were having midnight cups of coffee. I crept from my bed and peered into the living room,
where they sat cross-legged by the fire, looking more like teenagers than moms. The streamers and wilted balloons from my
party still hung from the dining room chandelier. I had been about to head on to the kitchen for a drink of water when I heard
their voices hush and take on a serious tone. My mother shook her head sadly. “If Blake hadn’t done something—well, I can’t
even think about that.”
“Tell me from the beginning, Lucy.” Minnie’s satin pajamas shimmered in the firelight. “I remember you and Blake tried for
so long to have a baby and the next thing I know, you’ve got two. We sure got sloppy about writing to each other after our
babies came along.” Minnie was not as pretty as my mother, and I thought with a name like Mini she ought not be so tall. She
had long pearly fingernails and chunky rings and twice I had seen her leaning on the porch rail smoking a cigarette. I took
Mom aside and told her, but she just smiled and said not to worry about it.
Mom stretched her feet toward the fire and wiggled her toes. “This woman was an attorney at the firm where Blake started out.
Kathleen Mayes,” she said with a frown. “What a loud, obnoxious . . .” She caught herself and smiled sheepishly. “Well, I
guess you’ve got to have some voltage to be as dramatic and, I must say, effective in the courtroom as she was. She had such
wild hair; it was red at the time, but in reality probably closer to plain brown like Samantha’s. I know Sam inherited the
wildness. It takes forever to get a comb through her hair in the morning.”
I lay silently on the hardwood floor of the hallway. What were they talking about? What did this wild-haired woman have to
do with me?
“The first time I saw her was at a Christmas party at the home of one of the partners.” She sipped her coffee and put it down
on the hearth. “Elegant home. Everyone was dressed for the Emmys—tuxedos and floor-length gowns. Anyway, Kathleen shows up
in tight red satin pants and cowboy boots with some weird spangly halter top contraption.” Minnie laughed with delight at
my mother’s contortions as she described the top. “Of course, everyone was shocked, and Kathleen loved every minute of it.
She sat with her legs apart and her elbows on her thighs, and no matter where you were in that huge room, you could hear Kathleen.
“A few months later, Kathleen is standing by the coffeepot at the office and announces to anyone and everyone that she is
pregnant. Blake didn’t even mention it to me at first. He’s not one to pass on that sort of thing. Besides, here we were trying
so hard to get pregnant with nothing happening and this single woman who doesn’t even want a baby . . .”
“Who was the father?”
“Supposedly a former client. A married man. He denied his paternity, of course. Not that she really pursued it. She had no
intention of having the baby. When Blake found out she had scheduled an abortion, he tried to talk her out of it. He said
it was wrong. My husband has always been passionate about his beliefs. And when the law, to which he has devoted his life,
so blatantly conflicts with what he believes to be right . . . well, needless to say, Blake was furious. Imagine that debate—two
skilled attorneys, one equipped with
Roe v. Wade
, the other the Bible. He came home that night still brooding and told me all about it. That’s when I thought of it. If she
didn’t want the baby, why couldn’t she just give it to us? That would solve the problem for all of us.”
Minnie leaned forward. “Go on.”
“So we drew up a proposal. We pay all her expenses; she gives us the baby. Of course, it was more elaborate than that. Attorneys
are like engineers, you know. Take a simple thing, complicate it to the max, put it on paper and then let everybody argue
about it. What we ended up paying her was probably about a hundred dollars an hour with overtime on weekends and a stiff fine
for every time the baby kicked.
“Poor Blake. He tried to avoid her at work. She would pat her belly and make embarrassing innuendos about ‘their’ baby when
she was in a good mood. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, she complained bitterly about every ache and pain
and tried to make him miserable.” She shrugged impishly. “But I was happy. I painted a mural on the nursery wall, refinished
an antique crib, shopped. I was so busy and so happy that I hardly noticed my own symptoms. I honestly thought there was some
mental-spiritual-physical connection going on between my baby and me. I mean the one Kathleen was carrying.”
“You always were naive.” Minnie stretched her body onto the floor and began doing leg lifts, her painted toes pointed toward
my hiding place behind the hall door. “So when you found out you were pregnant, didn’t you try to get out of your contract
with Kathleen?”
It got quiet. I held my breath.
“Yes. I did.”
“And?”
“Well, the idea never got past Blake. I’m glad now, of course,” she inserted almost guiltily. “At the time I was overwhelmed
with the thought of having two infants at once. When I realized that I myself was carrying a child, flesh of my flesh—of our
flesh, Blake’s and mine—well, it changed everything. I suddenly wanted all of our attention on the little miracle happening
in my body. I no longer had any desire to live vicariously through some brash woman with big orange lips.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Minnie touched my mother’s arm reassuringly. “That’s perfectly normal.”
I couldn’t see my mother’s face. She poked the fire and a flurry of embers raced up the flue. “Blake said it wasn’t the written
contract that bound us to our agreement. It was his word.”
“But, honey, sometimes circumstances change. Everybody has to go back on their word sometimes.”
Mother shook her head. “Not Blake.” She looked Minnie square in the eyes. “Not ever.”
I crept back to my bed. People always seemed confused when Lindsey and I were introduced as sisters. They would inevitably
ask our ages, which eight months out of the year were the same. “One is natural, the other chosen,” my father would say, just
like that. Matter-of-fact. No explanation. Immediately he would turn the conversation to something else, which I realized
now was his way of saying none of your business. If anyone dared to ask the details, they never asked in front of me. I knew
that I was adopted but until that night I had no concept of what that really meant. It had never seemed important somehow.
In the morning I poured cereal in a yellow-rimmed bowl and sat by the kitchen window. My mother stumbled in with her short
blond hair sticking up in the back and began making a pot of coffee while Minnie used the shower. Lindsey popped cinnamon
bread in the toaster, humming a tune from the Mary Poppins movie we had seen the night before. My father’s newspaper and empty
coffee mug were abandoned in their usual place, and I knew without asking that he had left for the courthouse.
Everything seemed the same. Everyone seemed normal, except for me.
M
OMMY, WHEN’S GRANDPA COMING home from work?” TJ was draped over the ottoman by my chair, pulling and twisting my shoelaces.
“Hmm? I don’t know, baby.” I kept trying to read my book.
“Is Aunt Lindsey coming today?
She
might take me to the creek. She likes to run and play even though she’s a grown-up.”
I sighed. “I like to run and play too. I just can’t right now. Why don’t you go out and catch some more bugs?”
“Ohhh, they keep getting away,” he breathed dejectedly. “We should have brought Mikey with us when we came here.”
“Don’t you think Mikey would miss his family?”
TJ climbed onto my lap, pushing my book aside. “Mommy, tell me a story. About when you were a little girl and you lived here
with Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Lindsey.”
I placed my novel on the table beside me and smoothed his hair while I thought. Being home had breathed fresh life into so
many memories. “Okay. I think I have one you’ve never heard.” He sprawled across my lap with his head on one armrest, his
feet on the other, gazing up at my face.
ONE FINE SATURDAY, the first bright morning after five consecutive days of torrential rain, I awoke to the elated calls of
robins fluttering in the trees beyond the barn. I must have been about nine at the time. I pushed my window open and hung
my torso over the sill. The river roared louder than usual, like someone had turned the volume up on the radio noise between
stations. All that rain had funneled into it, along with snows melting off the Cascade mountains. My heart skipped with excitement.
Maybe the river was over its banks! Rather than risk waking my parents by opening a squeaky drawer to find clothes, I hoisted
my long cotton nightgown, crawled over the windowsill and dropped to the ground.
The grass was long and wet, and soon the hem of my nightie became a wick. I had no specific agenda beyond obeying the call
of the morning and the robins, who repeated the same sweet melody over and over in an entrancing chant. The river gushed muddy
and high. So high that the sandy spit where I often played was completely covered and some of the alder trees waded tentatively
at the river’s edge. I threw a branch into the powerful current and watched it disappear into the boiling gravy. I turned
away from the river and loped across the field toward the barn. Beyond the barn and pasture my beloved woods dropped into
a ravine carved by Haller Creek, which meandered down to the north fork of the river, forming the southeast corner of our
twelve acres. This was my haven. The trees were my older brothers and cousins—surrounding, comforting and watching over me.
They held the ropes for tire swings. Their branches formed the thatched roofs of forts. They hid me, high in their boughs,
when I needed to cry.
This particular morning, I paused at the top of the hill, straining my eyes to see the swollen creek through the trees. The
trail that traversed the side of the ravine and zigzagged to the meadow below oozed between my bare toes. But I was shocked
when I reached the place where the trail was supposed to zag. The trail was gone! To my amazement, a large chunk of the hill
had simply broken off and slid into a huge brown heap below me on the floor of the ravine. I stared in disbelief for some
time before deciding that the phenomenon must be observed from another angle. Grabbing the protruding end of a cedar root,
I stepped gingerly onto the slope.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. What happened next was disastrous, or absolutely wonderful, depending on how you looked
at it. My feet shot straight out from under me. The root slipped through my fist and my backside slapped onto the slick clay-mud
hillside. I was off. At first I fought it. I grasped wildly for newly exposed roots to no avail. I flipped onto my belly and
then spun, shot headfirst down the slide like an otter, skimming over the right edge of the pile of loose mud at the bottom
and landing abruptly on terra firma.