Lead Me Home (21 page)

Shiloh spent the rest of the morning grocery shopping and running errands. With Thanksgiving looming, the stores were packed. Shiloh was glad she needed to buy only a ham and enough food to get them through the next five days before they headed back to Atchity.

When she turned into their neighborhood just before noon, she discovered she needed to park on the street. David, Raphael, and a few friends were playing basketball in the driveway, using the hoop hanging in front of the garage.

Omari sat on the porch stoop with an iPod in his hand and earphones dangling from each ear, bobbing his head and half watching the game.

“Playtime, huh? Their rooms better be clean,” Shiloh muttered.

Her motherly frustration was a futile attempt to ignore the knot of tension returning to her stomach, because she knew their carefree demeanors would soon change. How did one tell the children you wanted to look up to you, and cherish you, that you’d done some very wrong things? How did you go on to serve as those children’s role model, and to urge them to make good and godly choices?

Randy appeared in the doorway. Shiloh could tell that he was feeling anxious, too. His lips were pursed, and his words to the boys were terse. “Wrap up your game and come inside, boys. We have to have a family meeting.”

“Just ten more minutes, Dad, okay?” Raphael called.

Randy responded without looking his way. “Not today, son. Come on in.”

Randy unloaded the groceries and Shiloh wandered into the kitchen. She sent Lem a text to let him know she was home, and told him to come downstairs. Shiloh glanced at the clock and saw that it was 12:30. She washed her hands in the sink and quickly pulled together a light lunch for the boys. She’d tell them at the table after they ate, she decided, since there was never going to be a perfect time.

Lem trotted down the stairs just as Omari, Raphael, and David tumbled in from outside. Shiloh wrinkled her nose.

“I can wait ten more minutes, so you smelly basketball players can at least take off those sweaty shirts,” she told David and Raphael. “As a matter of fact, go ahead and wash up a little, too. Twenty minutes won’t kill us.”

Shiloh saw that Lem wanted to roll his eyes, but didn’t want to get in trouble. “I was on ooVoo with Lia; can I go upstairs and get back online until those two are ready? Or can we eat without them?”

“No, we aren’t eating without them,” Shiloh said. “Fifteen minutes max on your video chatting. I want you down here when they come down.”

Lem headed back to his room, but Omari settled onto one of the stools parked at the kitchen island. “We watched the last hour of the pageant last night. That would have been so cool if Mrs. Smith had won. I told you she was a winner.”

Shiloh glanced at him and tried not to show her amusement. If he thought he was hiding his crush, he was doing a very poor job.

“Did you watch the whole pageant, or just the end?”

He swiveled around on the stool before answering. “I watched most of it. The other guys joined me for the last hour.”

“She did great, right? Did you see me on TV?”

“Nah, I didn’t see you. But she was awesome. I never would of thought someone like her would need hearing aids, though.”

“What do you mean, ‘Someone like her’?”

Omari shrugged. “She’s so pretty and young … I thought that was for old folks.”

“But that was part of her message,” Shiloh said. “We have to look past the surface, into one’s heart and into their character, to really see them and understand them. Her having to wear hearing aids doesn’t detract from her beauty or her role as a pastor’s wife and mother; it’s just another detail, another piece of information about her, just like it would be if she had to wear glasses.”

Omari pursed his lips as he thought about it. “I see your point.”

By the time everyone had reconvened in the kitchen and chitchatted over lunch, Shiloh was reluctant to have her heavy conversation. But Randy gave her the eye, and she knew she had to move forward. She cleared her throat. “Guys, settle down, I need to tell you something, and I need your full attention.”

They stopped talking and peered at her. She surveyed the remains of their lunches on the table and pushed her chair back from the table.

“You know what? Let’s move into the family room. I think that would be better.”

Randy gave her a look that warned her to stop stalling. She ignored him, and led the way out of the kitchen.

When everyone was settled on a sofa or a chair, staring at her like they knew more chores or a lecture was coming, Shiloh opened her mouth to begin. But instead of words coming forth, tears spilled from her eyes. David furrowed his brow and dashed over to hug her.

“Don’t cry, Mama. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Realizing that she was scaring them, Shiloh took the tissue that Lem had trotted to the bathroom to retrieve, and wiped her eyes and cheeks. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, then
looked each of her sons in the eye. The fear she saw in return saddened her, but what made her sadder was knowing it would soon be replaced by anger and shame.

“I’m fine, David,” she said and hugged and kissed him. “I just have something very hard to tell you.”

He stayed next to her, and she let him.

“I have to tell you boys about a couple of things that I did a long time ago, that I’ve held inside for a very long time, nearly twenty years,” Shiloh said. “Your father was the first person I ever told, and he just found out a few nights ago.”

The boys looked at Randy, who was doing his best to remain expressionless. He left his seat on the sofa and moved closer to Shiloh, and grabbed her hand. She was grateful, and struggled to stave off the fresh round of tears that sought to erupt. Instead of looking at her sons, she stared at her hands.

“I did some things when I was twenty years old that I’ve been ashamed of ever since. One of them is really personal, almost inappropriate to share with you. But with the world we live in, it’s probably not something you’ve never heard before.

“The summer after my second year in college, I won this great fellowship.” She looked at David to better explain. “That’s like a special opportunity to do something unique or different, and it’s an honor to be chosen.”

He nodded, and she continued. “My goal was to someday be a professional flutist, and to travel the world sharing my music. So I won this fellowship, which allowed me to spend a summer in France.”

All of the boys looked surprised.

“You’ve been to France? And you never told us?” Omari was stunned.

Shiloh gave him a wry smile. “Yes, son, I had a life before marriage and motherhood, and in one season of it, I had a wonderful
opportunity to study abroad. I went to Paris for ten weeks. I lived in an apartment with a French family, and I studied and practiced with some of the best flutists in the world, at a university based there.”

Lem sat back on the sofa and shook his head. “Wow, Mrs. Smith almost winning that pageant last night has nothing on you.”

Shiloh smiled at him, but continued. “There were also other college musicians from around the world studying that summer, and I became special friends with a young man from Spain named Armando. We really liked each other, and we wound up dating exclusively the whole time we were there. He had never dated or even been friends with a black woman, and I hadn’t dated much at all, maybe once or twice before that. Anyway, I thought he was something special, and I thought what we had together was special, so … after a few dates when he wanted to … go all the way … I agreed.”

Lem turned his head and Omari and Raphael wrinkled their noses.

“Mom, please,” Omari said.

“I know, son,” Shiloh said, “but I have to tell you all everything. Long story short, I wound up pregnant, but by the time I found out, the summer program was about to wrap up, and Armando and I had already said our goodbyes. I decided that I was too young and had too much going for me to keep a baby, especially a biracial one that would have to be raised in Alabama.”

Shiloh took a deep breath and Randy squeezed her hand in support.

“Boys, I set aside all I knew about how God cherishes life, and I thought only about what I wanted at that time, at my age. I killed that baby before I left France, as if it was no big deal. I had an abortion.”

Silence engulfed the room, and David, who was still standing next to her, peered at her, as if in shock.

“Did you understand what I just tried to explain?” she asked him.

He nodded and stepped back. “You said it: You killed your baby.”

“Because it was inconvenient,” Raphael said. “Oh, wow, Mom.”

“So I’m really not your first child,” Lem said and glared at her. “At least I shouldn’t be.”

Shiloh nodded. “If I’d had the baby, it would be seventeen years old now—a year older than you, Lem. I think about that often. Who or what would he or she be doing; how would he or she have turned out?”

“That might have been the daughter you’ve never had,” Lem said. “What were you thinking?”

Chills ran through Shiloh. She hadn’t known what to expect from her boys, but Lem’s third-degree interrogation was unsettling. How would he handle the rest of what she had to share?

“And you never told the guy?” Omari asked.

Shiloh shook her head. “There was nothing to tell after I had taken care of it.”

“But it was a baby, Mommy, a person,” David said. “I can’t believe you did that.”

Shiloh peered at him for a long while before speaking. “I can’t believe I did it, either, David, but you know what? Lots of people do it every day, and it’s legal. I’m guessing a lot of them believed like I did that if they just ‘took care of it’ and moved on with their lives, it would soon be forgotten. Truth is, it hasn’t been that way at all. There’s not a day that I don’t ask myself ‘what if’; and every time I enter a hospital, I remember how terrible and disgusting I felt when I did that in France.”

She almost told them about the annual commemoration of that child’s life that she held every year, on the date of her abortion, but she hesitated. Doing so might come across as her making an excuse, or trying to show how she had redeemed herself. But telling them about her sin wasn’t for the purpose of justifying her actions or making herself look better; she had to let the truth out, and let them chew on it and process it however they needed.

“So why are you telling us this now? What gives? Did Armando show up in Milwaukee or something?”

Shiloh tried to smile.

“No—at least not to my knowledge. I’m telling you because … because just like Mrs. Smith stood on that pageant stage last night and shared one of her truths, I might need to share this information with the St. Stephens Baptist congregation, to help some people in the membership.”

Lem grew angry. “This is about that Monica girl getting knocked up, isn’t?”

Shiloh’s eyes grew wide. How had he heard about this? Monica attended school in Sherman Park, in the city, and Lem was in the Mequon school district thirty minutes away. Was the rumor started and spread only at church?

“It’s all over Facebook and Twitter, Mom. They say Trey Holloman got her pregnant and then dumped her. He’s going to get a big college scholarship to play football, and he doesn’t want to be tied down with any baby mama drama.”

Now it was Shiloh’s turn to be stunned. Social media was dangerous. If that’s how the news was circulating, Monica surely knew what was being said.

“Monica’s having dinner with us tomorrow, Lem; please don’t tell her what you’ve been seeing about her online; none of you boys say anything about her, or her circumstances, you hear me?”

The grim-faced boys nodded, including Lem, who looked angrier than she’d ever seen him.

“So now you’ve got to do a tell-all confession in front of the church,” he said. “That’s just great. Next thing you know, all my business is going to be all over Facebook and Twitter, and I didn’t even do anything.”

He stood up and headed toward the door to leave the family room, but Randy called him back. “Son, I know this is hard. It’s hard
for your mother to even tell you all this, let alone the world. You need to be respectful and come back and sit down, though. You have to hear her out. You need to know what she has to say.”

Lem reluctantly returned to his seat on the sofa across from his parents, but hung his head.

Shiloh felt numb by this point, but continued. “I am just as uncomfortable as Lem with the thought of standing up at St. Stephens as the First Lady, and putting all of my business on Front Street,” she said. “But when God puts something on your heart and challenges you to be obedient, you have to honor that call, or you’re sinning again. I have to do this, boys, to honor how far God has brought me, in spite of that grave sin, and to help someone else who may be struggling.

“When I came back, your daddy and I started dating seriously, and got married. I dropped out of college because I felt so guilty. I believed that if I gave up everything earthly that mattered to me, God would know I was truly sorry, and he would forgive me. I feared that like some people who’ve had abortions, I would never be able to have children, and yet he soon blessed me with Lem, and then the rest of you.

“Your dad has been gracious in allowing me to take the lead in naming each of you. It’s by design that, put together, the letters of your first names spell LORD,” Shiloh said and smiled at her sons. “And as you know, each of your names—Lemuel, Omari, Raphael, David—means something biblically significant. I haven’t taken for granted that God has smiled on me and granted me unusual favor with four healthy sons. So I need to share this painful and shameful part of my past so others can see how God can move them forward, whatever they’ve done, even if it’s something as murderous as this.”

“You keep calling it murder,” Raphael said. “But it’s legal, right?”

“It’s legal in the eyes of many countries, Raphie,” Shiloh said, “but I try to live by God’s principles, and I knew way back then that
God considers even the seed of life sacred. So the minute I got the idea in my head to do this get-rid-of-it-quick scheme, I knew I was premeditating something that wouldn’t please God. The fact that it was so easy, and so affordable, made me feel okay about it, leading up to the act. And even as I cried my way through it, I couldn’t help feeling that I was snuffing out a life, just because I could.”