No Defense (8 page)

A sharp pain gripped me, filling the
silence. I reached for my stomach. Again, my abdomen was as hard as
stone. According to my watch, fifteen minutes had passed since the
last contraction. Although it didn’t necessarily mean
anything-during the last months of both pregnancies I’d had lots of
contractions off and on, some almost as piercing as the last few
I’d felt-I knew that I should go to bed or at least sit down in the
living room and prop my swelling ankles on the footrest.

I stared at the back door to the apartment
as the last vestiges of the warm sunny day disappeared and darkness
engulfed us. I just could not bring myself to go in
there
.
After all my worrying, Jessie didn’t seem to be particularly
bothered by the burglary, but it had shaken me and left me feeling
unusually vulnerable. Waiting right where I was in the backyard
took all the energy and courage I could muster.

Jessie ran back around the side of the
house. “Two police are inside,” she announced as she climbed back
into her swing.

I pushed her back and forth. Her long
golden-brown hair flew out behind her when she went up in the air,
and her shoes pointed to the stars. My eyes followed in that
direction. I looked for the familiar constellations of my
childhood. Only the brighter ones, like Ursa Major, Leo, and
Gemini, were visible thanks to the uninhibited growth of downtown
Atlanta, which was leaving in its wake a dull haze that
increasingly interfered with a clear view of the night sky.

When I was not much older than Jessie,
before I’d learned to read, my father and I had studied the night
sky most evenings after dinner on the side-porch swing, while Jane
and Mother sewed or worked on some church thing or other at the
kitchen table inside. I could easily imagine Eddie and Jessie on
the same porch in the same swing, “star hopping,” as my father had
always called it.

Eddie was wrong, though. I hadn’t made up my
mind about moving. I was being pulled in that direction, but I had
doubts and reservations. If anyone had asked me a few years ago
whether I’d ever return home to live, I would have laughed. Plain
and simple. As much as I loved my family, Jolene, who’d helped
raise me, my horse, and my old friends, Tallagumsa belonged to my
past, not my future.

But my future was not falling into place
quite the way I’d imagined. I had always assumed I’d finish
graduate school and teach or do research, Eddie would be a
respected political cartoonist, his work appearing in every major
newspaper, we’d buy and renovate an historic home, and then,
perhaps in our early thirties, we’d focus on children and raising a
family. In my future, we lived happily ever after.

It was hard for me to believe that my dreams
could be worn away by reality in much the same way the sand castles
Jane and I had built together as children were worn away by the
tides. During family vacations in Florida, Jane and I often spent
our mornings constructing elaborate sand structures. In the
afternoon, after high tide had destroyed our work, I was shocked to
find that a lump of sand had replaced that day’s masterpiece. Jane
(or “Sis,” as I called her back then), older and always the
pragmatist, took the loss in stride. I, on the other hand,
stubbornly refused to accept the inevitable.

One such occasion had been preserved for
posterity by a photograph Mother took during a Gulf Coast vacation
when I was five and Jane eleven. In the picture, Jane and I are
standing on the beach in our bathing suits. I am sobbing, my head
on her shoulder. Her arms are wrapped around me, consoling me. Next
to us are the remains of the castle we’d worked so hard on, and in
the background is the tide, rushing in to take even more of our
creation away from us and out to sea.

Could the Steak House be just another sand
castle?

With the next contraction, I felt something
inside me give. A rush of warm liquid flowed down my legs. Ready or
not, my future was here to claim me.

As I had before giving birth to Jessie, I
focused on this moment, after which my life would always be
different. This time around the scene before me was one of moderate
chaos. Jessie was swinging and laughing, giddy from lack of sleep.
Eddie and the two policemen, one a small black man, the other a fat
white man with a thin black mustache, were huddled outside the back
door, talking. The stillness was periodically broken by the
squawking and screeching of the police radios. More stars had
appeared, though not enough to suit me. I shivered and touched my
sopping-wet pants leg. Yuch.

In contrast, the day preceding Jessie’s
birth nearly four years ago had been slow-moving and quiet. Eddie
and I had been sitting in this same backyard reading, the summer
sun hot and wonderful overhead. I had marked my place in
Dog
Soldiers
, Eddie’s favorite novel of the year, closed it, and
willed myself to know the look and feel of the moment because I had
understood that very soon our lives, Eddie’s and mine would be
transformed forever by the birth of our first child.

This time, three would become five.

“Eddie,” I called.

“One sec,” he said, without looking
over.

Eddie conversed the questions with questions
of his own about police training. The policemen might have assumed
that Eddie was interested in joining the force, but I knew better.
Eddie loved to talk to people from different walks of life-firemen,
construction workers, plumbers, painters, mailmen, lawyers,
doctors, poets, singers-anyone who would answer his questions about
the details of their work, details he somehow remembered and worked
into his political cartoons days, weeks, or even years later.

I gave out a yell. Although I was standing
behind Jessie and the swing set, the contraction gripping me was so
powerful and intense that for a moment I was sure she had somehow
swung all her weight smack into my lower back. Jessie, as far out
in front of me as the swing could take her, turned around and
looked at me, concerned. “Eddie!” I screamed.

He looked over.

“I think we better get to the hospital,” I
said. “Now!”

All three men, two of whom had certainly
been trained for more serious emergencies than this one, stood
stock still and stared at me as if I’d spoken to them in ancient
Greek. After a moment, during which each digested the information I
conveyed, everyone sprang into action.

Jessie skidded to a stop and took my hand.
Eddie rushed to my side, a look of disbelief on his face. The black
policeman offered to radio for an ambulance.

“Thanks, but Eddie can drive me,” I said.
“Can’t you, Eddie?”

Eddie nodded.

“We’ll escort you then,” the white policeman
said. “Which hospital?”

“Emory,” Eddie said. “We have to drop Jessie
at her friends. At Abby’s, right, LuAnn?”

“Right,” I said. “It’s on the way.”

“What should I do now?” Eddie asked. He
sounded mildly frantic.

“Call Abby’s mother and Dr. Powers,” I said.
“And I’ll get my stuff”

Everyone went inside-Eddie, Jessie, the two
policemen, and I. In the bedroom, I changed my pants, underwear,
and socks and packed. Jessie followed me each step of the way, so
closely that I had to move cautiously lest I step on her. Then we
packed her overnight bag, a small pink duffel with pictures of
ballerinas on it.

“Mommy, do you want to take Lily Lee with
you?” Jessie asked in a small voice, holding out her doll to
me.

“That is the sweetest thing you’ve ever
said, Jessie.” Tears filled my eyes. “But I think she’d like to be
with you at Abby’s. Thank you though, honey. Thank you so much.” I
sat on the edge of her bed and opened my arms to her. She tried my
lap, gave up, and we snuggled side by side. “Daddy will pick you up
at Abby’s as soon as he can, and then you can come visit me at the
hospital,” I assured her.

I’d hoped to get a gift for Jessie to give
her when she visited the hospital, but hadn’t had time. Eddie would
have to pick something out for her.

Jessie didn’t know-though I’m sure she
sensed-that this was a moment in her life after which things would
never be the same. I felt guilty for that.

As we approached the hospital, our police car
escort close behind us, I thought back to when Jessie had been
born. The thing I remembered most about that day, besides Jessie of
course, was how I’d felt about Eddie. I’d been warned that during
labor I might hate him, scream at him, accuse him of horrible
crimes, but instead the day Jessie was born I fell in love with him
all over again. What a marvelous feeling that was. If only we could
repeat that experience now, when we needed so much a reminder, a
sort of refresher course in the intense feelings that had brought
us together in college.

My freshman year I’d known all about Eddie
Garrett the way you know about someone famous, but I didn’t meet
him until my sophomore year. He was known as a wild man, almost a
legend at age twenty. Part of his fame was based on the fact that
one of the political cartoons he’d done for the school paper had
been published in the
New York Times
. But there was more. He
rode a motorcycle, he rarely went to class but always made straight
As
, his best friend, Sam, was black, he dated women from the
city, he played pool, he was the star of the track team, he wore
cowboy boots, and he spoke--along with Sam-at just about every
civil rights and antiwar protest, both on and off the campus.

Eddie turned up one evening at an
out-of-the-way hospital snack bar where on any given night five to
thirty students studied. A few doctors and nurses dropped in for
junk food out of the machines, but usually the small room served as
a college hangout, an extension of the library for those who liked
to eat, drink, or smoke while they studied. I preferred the
hospital snack bar to the modern college library because it had
windows that opened, as well as a small patio area good for study
breaks and star hopping.

That evening Eddie and Sam sat two tables
away from me. I couldn’t help but watch Eddie and listen to his
conversation with Sam. While I’d seen him before, up close I was
struck by his compelling good looks, his steel-gray eyes, and his
wonderful but infrequent smile. When he did smile, he looked like
he was about to do something that most likely would get him
arrested. When he did smile, any woman close enough to think he was
smiling at her found him hard to resist.

By the time I left the snack bar that night,
we’d talked, he’d smiled at me, and I was in love. It was an
instant, almost chemical reaction that had occurred only one other
time in my life, and, as on that occasion, I was not merely
interested, I was one hundred percent committed.

Thereafter I dreamed about Eddie. I thought
about Eddie. I stared at Eddie (in the hospital snack bar, in the
coffee shop, on the quad, at demonstrations, anywhere I could find
him), trying to will him to call me, to talk to me, to do something
with me. By the time of our first date, I had memorized him.

I was brought back to the present by a
vicious contraction at the same time the car slowed to a stop at
the hospital. The black policeman helped Eddie park the car, while
I waited with his partner in the police car. He didn’t talk much,
spending those endless minutes unnecessarily brushing his thin
mustache with his finger.

Eddie returned. He helped me out of the
police car and then just stood there looking at me, smiling that
smile. He seemed surprised at what he saw, and I felt a connection
between us that had been missing for some time. I took his hand.
Together we walked through the sliding-glass hospital doors into
the fancy new building not fifty yards from the old hospital snack
bar where we’d first met.

Will and Hank were born ten hours later,
identical twins. Will weighed six pounds nine ounces, Hank six
pounds five ounces.

The afternoon following the births, Eddie
came to my hospital room carrying a grocery bag in the crook of his
arm. I was sitting up in bed in a standard-issue blue and white
hospital gown. He set the bag down at the foot of my bed, kissed
me, then stood for a few moments with his back to me, watching his
two sleeping sons in their clear plastic hospital bassinets, both
swaddled in blue receiving blankets. They were turned on their left
sides. Tiny white cotton caps covered their thin, fuzzy layers of
light brown hair.

“I nursed them twice,” I said proudly. “Once
in the middle of the night. Once this morning. They’ve slept the
rest of the time.”

Eddie turned to look at me. “They’re playing
that trick Jessie played.” He laughed. “Being real good, sleeping a
lot in the hospital, waiting ‘til they get home to stay up all
night. How do you feel?”

“I feel great,” I said. “I took a shower,
ate a huge breakfast, and even slept some.”