If I Had You Page 4

  She sat alone in her regular spot, tense with concentration, unruffled in appearance, her outfit as neat as a pin. The collar of her yellow summer jacket turned up jauntily at the nape of her neck and her earrings clamped onto her earlobes like two miniature gold suns. No one could have known, as she closed the tissue- thin pages of her hymnal and slid it, thunk, into its proper padded shelf, that she wasn’t thinking about heavenly things at all.

  She’d emptied the guest-bathroom trash early this morning and had found exactly what you’d expect to find in a young woman’s bathroom—rosettes of toilet paper, an empty travel bottle of Pantene shampoo, an over-large wad of purple gum. At first, when the white plastic wand toppled out, she was confused. One side had a deep, round circle, the other a little square; Nora could see the vertical pink line inside the square opening. And beside that, the label read:

  | °

  Pregnant Not Pregnant

  The line in the window matched perfectly.

  It’s really true, she’d thought. Until now, she hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted Tess to be wrong about being pregnant. As she’d dressed for church, her heart vaulted between despair and anger. I’m not going to let her upset our lives again! Nora decided. There’s only one way to deal with this.

  Now she balanced on the edge of the pew with her hands folded into each other as if the only thing she had to hold onto was herself. Her stockinged knees, which she kept crossed, and her skirt, which she kept tugged down, provided the perfect perch for her clasped fingers. Her lips were set in an unreadable slash of Revlon Moulin Rouge red.

  Pregnant, the line had indicated. Of course.

  As she stared straight at Pastor Franklin in the pulpit, not hearing a word he said, her mind was a battlefield.

  I can’t believe this has happened. She’s made another mess for us to clean up.

  It isn’t the end of the world, you know. This is just another problem for me to fix.

  So why do I feel like my world is falling apart?

  She shouldn’t have come to church. Here she sat, pretending to be in the presence of the Lord. And no one could have known that the ideas she cast off so lightly last night hung around her neck this morning like heavy pearls.

  Folks said the black soil in Butlers Bend—God’s gift for growing cotton and winter wheat and grain sorghum—could suck the tires off a pickup truck when it was wet just as sure as it could swallow up a man in one of its cracks when the dirt dried out. Everything that Nora wasn’t, everything she knew she couldn’t be, welled up within her like that black Texas clay. Nora felt riddled with cracks, dry-broken, rock-hard.

  She tried to concentrate on the service. Pastor Franklin was saying, “. . . so important to make choices to do things God’s way . . .”

  What would they think down at the Gilford County Right-To-Life if they knew what I’m thinking of?

  “. . . even when it’s difficult in our lives . . .”

  Who cares what they think? This is my private business. I refuse to condemn myself.

  “. . . there are always those choices.”

  It’s Tess’s sin, not mine, she spoke to the thing that swelled and ached inside her. Tess has done so many things wrong already, what is one more mistake going to matter?

  Later, Nora would tell herself she didn’t understand what made the church stained-glass window begin to glow that moment. A cloud must have been blocking the sun and, at that moment, moved away.

  The window, located directly behind the pulpit over the pastor’s head, depicted Jesus Christ standing upon a mountain, his arms outstretched, offering a loaf of bread and a golden chalice. The first stained-glass window in all of North Central Texas, some said. It may even have been designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. When the 1953 tornado had hit Butlers Bend full bore, every window in the church had been shattered. Every window, except for that one. Mavis Halloran still kept pictures at the Gilford County Museum of the destroyed windows beside this perfectly whole pane.

  The window grew jewel blue, amber golden, ruby red, the light so strong that colors streamed in slabs onto the floor. The pastor’s head shone red from the radiance of Jesus’ cloak. Nora glanced at her lap and saw her fingers shining red, too.

  I will have blood on my hands if I let Tess do this.

  Even though it was warm in the room, Nora began to shiver. Pastor Franklin’s head turned as he spoke to worshipers in the side pews. The sun spilled through the glass behind him; his silhouette stood like a pinprick against the light.

  Nora felt as if she was being drawn further and further away from him. His voice droned on while her ears buzzed. The sea of heads began to stretch out in front of Nora, growing larger. The words that penetrated from the pulpit were: “. . . choosing God’s way even though there may be difficult consequences on earthly terms.”

  Don’t dwell on the past, beloved. I will carry you through this.

  Nora placed a hand over the dead weight in her chest.

  “Jane,” she asked her neighbor in a hoarse whisper, “is anything funny about that window right now?”

  “Heavens, no,” Jane Ruckmann said, narrowing her eyes at it.

  The church smelled of candle wax and flame, bruised carnations, someone’s strong aftershave. Nora massaged her temples. She had the beginning of a headache. Pastor Franklin was still speaking monotonously, still far away.

  No one really knows when life begins. It’s just a cluster of cells right now.

  In the choir loft the sopranos were getting antsy. Nora saw Frieda Storm touching up her lipstick, Fran Coover straightening the stole on her robe. Any minute now, their director would rise and instruct them to stand to their feet. If Nora made it out the door before the end of the hymn, she’d beat the rush of hugging. She’d beat everybody clapping backs, discussing Pete’s message, and getting a group together for lunch at Leslie’s Chicken Shack.

  She couldn’t bear to talk to anybody.

  Just as she’d known it would, the choir rose and the organ began to play. Nora waited until the third verse of I Stand Amazed in the Presence before she collected her Bible and made her getaway. She exited the side door, thinking she’d gotten away clean. But when she rounded the corner, there stood one of Milton Hubbs’s used-car customers shining her left front fender with the rear of his jeans. He bent to inspect what he could see of her dashboard.

  “I got here first.” He switched his frayed toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “This here’s a beauty. My dad’s always been a Chevrolet man.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “How many miles she got on ’er?”

  “What? That’s my car.”

  “Yeah, but how many miles?” He squinted through the window glare. “That what I think I see? Sixty-eight thousand?” He took the toothpick out of his mouth and pointed with it. “That’s pretty good.” He tried the handle on the Lumina and found it locked. “Got any idea what Hubbs wants for ’er?”

  “Excuse me.” Nora slipped right in front of him and used her key, smooth as butter. “No, I don’t.” She bumped into him while she climbed into the driver’s seat. The upholstery was hot as Hades. She bit her lower lip as the seat seared the underside of her legs. She ignored that, though, and hit the ignition. “This is not for sale.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Most people who knew about kicking cocaine said the craving only got worse. Tess lay in the crisp bed that had never belonged to her, the guestroom blanket wadded against her jaw as her need for a hit grew into a physical pain.

  Of course, she’d brought her stash with her. A lid or two of pot and enough coke to keep her going. But that had run out over two days ago; she’d never intended to be here this long.

  The slant of the sun through the blinds told Tess it must be late in the day. When she wasn’t craving, she wanted to sleep. Underneath everything else, her stomach roiled. She felt like throwing up. She thought, Maybe it’s not because of withdrawal that I feel this way. Maybe it’s becaus
e of—

  She tried to stop herself. She didn’t want to think about this part.

  —the baby.

  And then the great, crippling, pulsing need started all over again.

  Even though she’d buried her head beneath the sheet, light burned her eyes. Her ears throbbed. She lurched from the bed, yanked shut the blinds, and scrabbled through the pack on the floor. She shoved aside clothing, a hairbrush, a square of rolling papers. Maybe she’d brought more blast with her than she’d thought. But nothing. Wishful thinking. She raked the plastic bottom with her fingers two, three times before she gave up.

  She couldn’t bear the sound of her mother’s sewing machine in the next room. “Couldn’t you just—?” she called in a fierce voice, her heart roaring in her ears. And then she submitted, nauseated again.

  I just want to go. I just want to get out of here.

  She slammed open her door, ran for the bathroom. For a long time as she clamped herself around the toilet bowl and retched, she could hear the Singer speeding up, slowing down. Her hair stuck to her neck with the sweat.

  Tess felt incapable and dirty. She hugged herself with her shaking arms and the thrumming bursts of her mother’s sewing surging forward, holding back, surging forward, seemed to take her where she’d never wanted to go. The cold on the tile floor soaked through her pajama shorts.

  She didn’t hear the sewing machine stop. Her mother called, “Tess?”

  Silence. Just staring at the tile on the bathroom counter, remembering when she’d barely been tall enough to prop her chin there.

  “Tess?”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She grunted some incomprehensible answer.

  “Do you need something to eat?”

  “No.” Then, “I-I couldn’t eat anything.”

  “You’ve got the door locked. Tess, are you sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need help in there?”

  “No.”

  Their words to each other sounded as brittle and crisp as a hornet’s nest.

  “I just keep thinking—” came her mother’s voice.

  Mom, Tess wanted to say sarcastically as she clenched her teeth, thinking is so hard. Don’t hurt yourself.

  It was the last thing her mother said for a very long time. The house went quiet. Tess’s left arm had gone to sleep. Her hands were so cold. There were times she thought she might have moaned, only she wasn’t certain she heard herself. Her ears felt disconnected from her head.

  Tess had no idea how much time had passed before she unfolded her stiff legs, pulled herself up, and turned on the shower. In the middle of August the air was breathless with record-breaking heat, and yet she felt so cold that she ran hot water until the room filled with steam. She let the water pound her head, her shoulders, and her belly until the water heater began to run low. Still shivering, she turned off the faucet, stepped out of the shower, and wrapped herself into two thick towels. She closed her eyes, smelled the laundry-fragrance of the terrycloth, and would have thought it nice if she hadn’t felt so bad.

  There was another knock at the bathroom door. “You took a shower, didn’t you? You can borrow one of my robes. If you’ll unlock the door, I’ll hand it to you.”

  Tess wanted warm wrapped around her so badly that she opened the door. “Your father and I want to talk to you when you come out,” Nora said.

  Tess took the robe from her mother, then closed the door and locked it again.

  SHE FOUND HER PARENTS sitting stiffly on the sofa, side by side. When she saw them waiting for her that way, she knew exactly what it meant. “You aren’t going to help me, are you?” she accused.

  Tess’s father did all the talking. “It depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “You can’t raise a baby, Tess,” he told her, “not with the life you lead.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “It isn’t our responsibility to fix your mistakes, Tess.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “My only responsibility is to tell you what I think is right.”

  “So.” She stood before them, crossed her arms over breasts that had begun to ache. “Tell away.”

  “You can stay here until you give birth and put the baby up for adoption,” her father said. “We will help you any way we can if you agree to do this. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t want to have this baby. I want an abortion.”

  “We will not help you financially or any other way to get an abortion,” he said.

  Tess glanced pointedly from her mother to her father, then back to her mother again. For a long time, she stared at her mother. Then she rubbed the underside of her wrist with her fingers and issued this challenge. “Mom, you don’t agree with Daddy. I can see it.”

  Her mother started. “Don’t.”

  Tess stood twenty seconds or so, her arms wrapped around her own ribcage, considering something. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” She saw her mother go pale. “For this baby to go away?”

  “Tess, listen—”

  “Daddy, Mom feels the same as I do. She wants me to get an abortion.”

  “You don’t know what I’m thinking.” Oh, but she did. By the darkening of Nora’s eyes, Tess could tell her mother was lying. “Don’t you dare speak for me.”

  “I don’t want to have a baby. If I have a baby, a person related to me would exist somewhere. Someone I would have to wonder about. Someone I would have to think of.”

  “Right now, in this town, right now,” her father argued, “I’ll bet there are houses with a room all ready, decorated into a nursery. These are solid homes, with fenced-in yards and two parents. Good for a baby.”

  “I just want this to be over,” Tess said. “I just want it to end.”

  She leveled her eyes on her mother’s face. She had struck a nerve when she changed her tack; she could see it.

  “I know you want it to end, too. I know you don’t want me here.” She had some distant view of her mother shifting her weight on the sofa. Tess thought with pleasure, Good. Because a long time ago in this family, it had become the thing to do, to wound each other. Then, in the midst of her insight came something so overpowering, so true, that it burst from her mouth before she could prevent it.

  “I’m afraid to have a baby.”

  Not afraid of stealing CDs from Walgreen’s that she could sell, or shoplifting underwear or fried chicken; not afraid of sleeping in a house where the Ambrose Deuce gang threatened to break down walls and shoot them if Cootie dealt anywhere close to Kiest Park. But this she recognized breathlessly: “I’m scared to have a baby because I might love it.”

  Those words hung in the air, shocking. Tess’s ears began to clamor again. But before she had time to consider what such a statement meant, her father interrupted her. “Somebody else out there loves your child right now. Somebody’s arms are aching. Somebody who doesn’t know where it’s coming from, and yet already cares for it.”

  “It’s always been this way, don’t you see, Daddy? All those times you tried to make me accept help from you. Now that I really need something, you aren’t going to give it to me.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “It’s always the way you want to help, never the way I need to behelped. Everything from you comes with strings attached.”

  Tess stopped, fists clenched at her sides, her eyes flashing defiance. She waited to see what they would throw at her next.

  Only they didn’t say a word.

  Her parents sat elbow to elbow on the sofa, their knees aligned. Her mother did not rise from her seat in tears or fling accusations at her. Her father did not begin another tirade about babies and the thousands of strangers who wanted them.

  “Well?” she asked, baiting them. “Well?”

  They only gave her one answer, and she didn’t know what it meant.

  She saw her mother place fingers over her father�
��s hand.

  NORA WAS NOT going to let this divide her and Ben. “I want to stop talking about this, Tess,” she told her daughter firmly. “I want you to just stop.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to listen to me.”

  “I’m sick of listening.”

  Late Sunday-afternoon sounds filled the neighborhood outside, sparrows roosting and warbling in the side-yard tree, a neighbor parking his speed boat after a trip to Lake Texoma. Tess watched her mother’s eyes close, as if in prayer. Then, in warm certainty, the words came. “You need to hear me—” There was no indictment in Nora’s voice, only a tone as gentle as the rustling of the birds in the trees outside. “—telling you that you are right.”

  Tess’s fists, which had been clenched in bitterness, opened at her hips. She straightened her shoulders as if she were bearing the weight of Nora’s words.

  To her daughter Nora offered the one thing she would never have expected. “You’re right about me.”

  Tess’s chin jerked up. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Tess took one step forward. “What am I right about?”

  “The way I feel. The conflicts I have. Seeing you here. Thinking it’s impossible to start over.”

  Tess stared at the ground, tracing a seam in the linoleum with one big toe. Ben shifted his weight awkwardly from one hip to another. Not one of them knew what was going to come next.

  Then, “I am choosing to stand beside your father in what he thinks is right.”

  “I see.”

  “You are right. I want you to have an abortion. But that would be wrong.”

  Tess’s chin jerked up in disbelief. She stared at her mother with piercing blue eyes. “How can you tell me to do something that you don’t even want me to do? Why are you making this decision based on what you think is right? What about me? What about how this will affect me? How I feel? What I need?”