The Beach Quilt (9 page)

“Cindy? Good to see you.”

It was Mrs. Armstrong. Cindy knew her from The Busy Bee as well as from a reading group she had belonged to briefly. (She had dropped out because she hadn't liked the choice of novels. She had found most of them very depressing. Why did some people equate literature with misery?)

“And you, as well,” Cindy replied, forcing a smile. Ann Armstrong was a perfectly nice woman, but Cindy just wasn't in a mood to talk to anyone.

“Seems like the grocery store is our entire social life in winter, doesn't it?” Ann noted. “What with most of the restaurants closed until spring and the bad weather keeping us indoors most days.”

Cindy agreed, and Mrs. Armstrong moved on in search, she said, of some sort of marginally healthy food that would entice the appetite of her terribly fussy seven-year-old daughter.

Cindy wheeled the cart down the aisle stocked with diapers and wipes, jarred food, formulas, supplements, and snacks that promised everything from increased mental powers to physical perfection. She tried not to look too interested in the products; if anyone she knew saw her, suspicions would be aroused and rumors would start to circulate that one of the Bauer females was pregnant. Still, she looked closely enough to determine that none of it was inexpensive, neither the necessary items like food, nor the optional items like wipes soaked in moisturizing lotion.

Cindy moved on. At the end of the next aisle, she spotted the reverend from the local Episcopal Church. Quickly, she turned her cart around.

Before long, everyone would be asking her about Sarah. Some would hesitate before speaking, painfully aware of the delicacy of the situation. Some would offer ready sympathy and support. Others, the gossips, might just be looking for any bit of information, good or bad, they could spread to others. And there would be pity.

And why not? Cindy believed that Sarah deserved to be pitied.

Cindy checked her shopping list. She still needed cat food, bread, and paper towels. On her way to the paper products, she passed the aisle containing greeting cards, magazines, wrapping paper, cheap stuffed toys, and Mylar balloons. There were cards for grandmas and grandpas. There were cards for grandchildren. Blue bears and pink bunnies, yellow flowers and happy sentiments, glitter and scrolling print.

Cindy walked on. She had always expected to be a grandmother at some point down the line—she assumed that most mothers did—but certainly not before her fortieth birthday. It seemed somehow . . . what was the word? Well, it definitely seemed odd.

In fact, to some degree, it seemed like only yesterday that she had been caring for Sarah and then Stevie as small children. She remembered how much energy it had taken, how much patience and courage it had required. She remembered the nasty colds and the bouts of fierce flu and the raging fevers; she remembered the routine bumps and scrapes; she remembered the time Stevie had broken her arm falling out of a tree; she remembered Sarah's sprained wrist the time she had fallen off her bike. She remembered the easy times, too, the fun times, but they loomed less large at the moment.

And now there would be another small Bauer to care for and watch over. Because even though Sarah would be willing, Cindy knew that so much of the baby's welfare would be up to her. She felt tired just thinking of what lay ahead.

Cindy wheeled her cart to the check-out counter. She had only two coupons today. She would be using a lot more coupons in the time to come. Now, she haphazardly stuffed them into her wallet where they often remained until well after their expiration date, but maybe she had better get serious about creating a filing system and carrying it with her.

The sky looked ominous as Cindy left the store. Hurriedly, she loaded the bags in the trunk of her car and slid behind the wheel. As she pulled out of her spot, she saw a teenage girl pushing a shopping cart onto which she had balanced a baby carrier. Was the baby hers? Or, maybe, it was her mother's child or a sister's or even an aunt's. Maybe the girl was babysitting.

But Cindy didn't think so. Something told her that this teenager was the baby's mother. The girl and child disappeared through the automatic sliding doors as Cindy turned the car toward home.

How would the girl pay for her food? Was she married? Had she had to drop out of school?

That will be Sarah someday soon,
Cindy thought, her lips compressed tightly, her hands gripping the steering wheel. And people would wonder what had brought that tall, skinny girl to that point of being a parent. They might wonder if the girl's parents had abandoned her. They might shake their heads in pity or in self-righteous smugness. And there would be nothing Cindy could do about the speculation, however kind, however mean.

Cordelia was lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling and wishing for the umpteenth time that she could have a dog or even a cat (though she would rather have a dog, a smallish one with white fur like that unbelievably adorable one in the dog food ads). If she had a dog (or even a cat) to cuddle with right now, she just knew she wouldn't feel so lonely. If only her mother wasn't so insanely allergic!

Pinky, her old stuffed unicorn, would have to do. Cordelia had taken him off the shelf where he lived and brought him into bed with her. She looked at him now with fondness. His horn was a bit askew, and cuddling had permanently flattened some of his fur. She still thought he was beautiful.

And a lot easier to take care of than a baby! Everyone knew that a baby took every single moment of a mother's attention; a baby required constant and vigilant care. Everyone else in a mother's life fell by the wayside, at least for a while. Fathers didn't have it quite as bad. Fathers who stuck around, that is. Not fathers like Justin Morrow.
And let's face it,
Cordelia thought.
Even though Justin had offered to marry Sarah, no one who knew him even a little bit could believe that he would go through with it.

Cordelia sighed. Why couldn't everything just have stayed the way it was? Now, when she and Sarah went back to school in the fall, Sarah probably wouldn't have the time or the money to participate in all the fun senior year activities with her. Cordelia would have to make new friends....

And how exactly would
that
happen? By senior year, everyone was already paired up or embedded in a tightly knit social group. Sure, Cordelia knew she was well liked, and she didn't have any doubt that some of the other girls would probably welcome her along when they hung out at the mall or went to the movies. Which was fine, but Cordelia was not someone who could live without a best friend with whom she could share secrets and jokes and the boring little details of daily life and celebrity crushes and all the other essentials, both large and small, that best friends shared.

Cordelia sighed again. No, it just wasn't fair.

Okay, she knew this wasn't about her, and yet, it
was
to some degree about her, wasn't it? Everything you did or said or experienced in some way affected the lives of the people close to you. It certainly wasn't like Sarah had set about getting pregnant, but she
had,
and so now her parents and her sister and her best friend and even her best friend's parents were involved whether they wanted to be or not.

Like babysitting. Cordelia supposed she would be doing her share of that, like when Sarah had to be somewhere, like at work or at the dentist. She supposed that for the first time ever she would absolutely have to act responsibly. You couldn't take chances with a baby. You couldn't forget that she was in the room and use bad words in case somehow they got absorbed in her unconscious and left a negative impression. You couldn't play your favorite music too loud when a baby was around because you might damage his hearing. You couldn't smoke or drink alcohol (not that she did either) when a baby was in your care, for all sorts of obvious reasons. You couldn't take a sleeping pill or a painkiller, even one prescribed by a doctor, because you might not wake up if the baby was choking to death on one of his toys.

Cordelia pushed Pinky's horn back into place. It flopped back again. She wondered if her mother knew about Sarah yet. If she didn't, she would soon. Maybe it wasn't Cordelia's news to share, but she needed to talk. Maybe her mother could help her make some sense of it all. But what could her mother say—what could anyone say?!—to make Sarah un-pregnant? And Sarah
not
being pregnant was the only thing that would cause the world to make sense again.

With a sigh, Cordelia got off the bed. She really had to start work on that paper for English class. It wasn't, as her father would say, going to write itself. She reached up to put Pinky back on his shelf, but then changed her mind and set him against the pillows on her bed. She had a feeling she was going to need more of his plushy companionship in the weeks and months to come.

It was very cold, well below freezing. Sarah was dressed in a thermal undershirt, a wool sweater, a parka, long johns under heavy jeans, wool socks under boots, a hat, scarf, and gloves, and still the cold had made it through such defenses and into her bones. What was exposed of her face burned, and her fingers were beginning to feel dangerously heavy and numb.

She didn't feel the sense of peace she usually felt when she was out alone in the woods behind her house. Maybe that sense of peace was gone forever.
Don't be silly,
she told herself.
Don't be so gloomy. Of course things will get better again.
But only after they got much worse. At least, much more difficult than they had been.

And all because she had screwed up very, very badly. How had it happened? How had she acted so outrageously out of her nature?

Sarah's foot slipped on an icy stone, and she grabbed a dangling branch to steady herself. She caught her breath and continued on.
Maybe,
she thought,
that nature hadn't been real.
Maybe she had appropriated it, like an actor assumes a role. Responsible. Cautious. Reasonable. Maybe that had never been the real Sarah Bauer, only a facade, only the words other people had used to describe their version of her, and she had believed them.

Could that be true? Or could she be mentally ill? Could she have a split personality or schizophrenia? Because in all of her sixteen years, she had never felt so massively disoriented, so horribly alienated from the self she thought she had been.

A cardinal alighting from a branch on a tree just up ahead caused a fall of powdery snow. Once, she would have delighted in that sight, a slash of intense, living red against a background of gray and white. Today, she seemed to be seeing it through a murky veil.

Only that morning, while still in bed, she had asked herself if having sex with Justin could have been an unconscious act of teenage rebellion. No, she had decided, it
couldn't
have been! What was there to rebel against? She had had everything she needed, and more importantly, everything she wanted. And she had
not
wanted to get pregnant. Oh, why hadn't she said no to Justin? Why hadn't she waited, at least until she was eighteen and out of high school!

Sarah felt a little sob escape her. Well, she knew the answer to that question. She had been so very attracted to him, so compelled to be with him, to touch him and to be touched by him, that in the end she hadn't been able to say no. She hadn't
wanted
to say no.

She knew that Justin should never have suggested they have sex. He was the legal adult. He should have acted like a man and not a boy, but he hadn't. He hadn't cared enough about her to resist his own impulses. He had been thrilled when she had finally agreed. He had told her that she was awesome.

That word again!

Sarah carefully negotiated a jumble of stones that had once been part of a wall marking off a farmer's land and felt a surge of righteous indignation flood her veins. Just because she had committed an irresponsible
act
(having sex with only a condom), didn't mean she was an irresponsible
person
. It was on the order of, I told a lie, but I'm not a liar; I committed a crime, but I'm not a criminal. A person couldn't be entirely defined by one action, could she? No. That wouldn't be fair at all. And there was context, too, and background to consider. Pressures a person was under, a precipitating crisis, even unexpected physical duress might propel a person to do something out of character.

Or was that all lazy rationalization?

She was so,
so
worried that the people she had known all her life—her teachers, the regular customers at The Busy Bee, the man who owned the local fish market where her family shopped, the senior librarian at the public library—would assume that because she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old she was unaware of the enormity of her situation. She was so,
so
worried that those people would see her as only a negative stereotype.

She had never realized until now just how conscious she was of her reputation. It should be enough—shouldn't it?—to know that you were a good person. Why was it so terribly important that you prove it to virtual strangers?

But maybe that was just human nature. People needed to be viewed as decent and upright even when they were neither—or maybe, especially when they were neither.

Oh,
why
couldn't you turn back the clock after you made a big mistake?! Why?! Everyone deserved one big erasure, one complete do-over, didn't they? But no one in this world got one, unless they were extremely powerful and had the money and the connections to buy back the appearance of innocence and virtue. Like politicians and celebrities.

Sarah came to an abrupt stop and buried her face in her gloved hands. She stood there for a long time, her mind sinking into a kind of torpor. Finally, the throbbing of her frozen fingers and toes got through to her sluggish brain, and she turned around and headed toward home.

There was nothing out here for her, she realized wearily. Not the vast blue sky or the trees laced with snow or the birds on the wing. Nothing.