Why the Sky Is Blue (6 page)

10

When Katie and I returned from Michigan, I was strangely at peace. Dan seemed alternately glad and worried that I was so calm and collected. He didn’t think it was normal. He urged me to call Patty and tell her the latest news, meaning the pregnancy and Philip Wells’s arrest. He had decided it wasn’t wise to keep her uninformed of such significant developments. I didn’t say this, but I wanted to tell him to call Patty. He was apparently the one struggling to deal with emotional overload.

But I called her and told her everything. She wanted to see me. I thanked her but told her I was feeling fine, that I was working through my feelings of disappointment and relief in “positive and affirming ways.” Those were her exact words to me several weeks before. I don’t think she liked being quoted.

“Well, we can talk about other things, then,” she had offered.

For what possible purpose
, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“I’ll think about it, Patty,” I said. “Right now coming in to see you seems rather pointless. I’m sure you’re a great therapist, but I don’t need any therapy at the moment.”

There was silence on the other end. I hadn’t remembered ever being so blatantly honest before. I wondered if my head injuries had flipped a switch in my brain that had never been “on” until then. We hung up shortly after that.

That night after supper, Dan asked me if I had called Patty.

“What did she say?” he asked when I told him I had.

I told him instead what I had said.

“Claire, why don’t you just go see her? It can’t hurt just to talk with her,” he said.

“I am not going to see her just so you can feel better,” I replied. “That’s like my putting on a sweater because you’re cold.”

And then I added what I hadn’t earlier and shouldn’t have then. I guess the switch was still flipped inside my brain: “If you’re having trouble dealing with what has happened, by all means, call her up.”

I regretted saying it the moment the words left my mouth. I apologized, but as is always the case, spoken words cannot be unheard, even though they can be forgiven.

I promised Dan that I would go to Nick the moment I felt emotionally unstable or unsure. I reminded him that that was what he was doing. And he seemed to relax after that. But we were so obviously at different poles in our still-black abyss. He struggled to see my perspective on so many things just as I struggled to see his. We struggled in every area of communication, including our most intimate moments in our bedroom. It was nearly the end of November before Dan felt brave enough to approach the topic of lovemaking. We stumbled through our first night of intimacy after the attack like newlyweds in an arranged marriage.

“When this is all over, it will be different,” Dan said afterward, in the darkness of our bedroom. “It will be the way it was.”

I convinced myself that he had to be right. My attacker would steal—at the very most—nine months from me. But only nine months. The rest of my life belonged to me. And the rest of our marriage belonged to Dan and me.

By Thanksgiving, the morning sickness had ceased, and I felt particularly well. Hormones, surely. My parents and Matt flew out for the long Thanksgiving weekend, and we had a wonderful time. I only had a few moments alone with my mom, just long enough to confirm to her that I was still pregnant. She asked if I had been back to a doctor, and I guiltily told her I hadn’t. Becky had been bugging me for several weeks to set up an appointment with her doctor, but I hadn’t felt shamed about not doing it until my mother asked me why I hadn’t.

“Claire, you must know that you may not have a miscarriage,” she told me gently.

She was right. I did know it. But I didn’t want to think about giving birth to this child. And I figured if I held off going to a doctor, I wouldn’t have to. I was pretty sure I would know one way or the other by the fourth or fifth month of the pregnancy. All a doctor would do between now and then is feed me vitamins, measure my abdomen, and listen to the staccato sounds of an infant heart beating. I had no interest in those things.

We celebrated my birthday before my family left, though I wouldn’t officially be thirty-seven until December first, and then the wonderful weekend ended. The day after my mom, Stu, and Matt returned to Michigan, the first winter storm rolled in, instantly transforming the barren Minnesota landscape into a stunning and elegant scene.

I spent the rest of December preparing the house for Christmas and putting off making a doctor’s appointment. Both were easy to do.

We had a slumber party on the night of December twenty-first for Katie’s twelfth birthday and it was two in the morning before the house was finally quiet and Dan and I fell exhausted into bed.

Outside, a gentle snow was falling, and the house was peculiarly silent after having been so noisy. I was lying on my side, near enough to Dan to feel his chest rising and falling against my back. The house was warm and cozy and the scent of evergreen from the freshly cut Douglas fir standing in the living room wafted up the stairs.

In the serene quietness of that moment, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I became aware of the slightest flutter inside me, like the airy movement of butterfly wings. My eyes snapped open. I felt it again. The child was moving inside me.

It was as if a fairy princess was making those tender, flawless movements within me. I think I knew at that moment that the baby growing inside me was a girl. Those perfect movements just inches below my heart were remarkably feminine.

The next half minute was equally split into fifteen seconds of wonder and fifteen seconds of despair. I had nearly shaken Dan awake to tell him when I suddenly realized I could share this incredible moment with no one. Especially not him.

So despite the coziness of the house, the gently falling snow, and my husband’s warm nearness, once again I felt alone in the dark place I had been in for weeks.

I couldn’t stop the tears from slipping out of my eyes and onto my pillow, so I tried very hard to lie still and just let them come. But every now and then a stifled sob would ripple through my ribcage and cause me to move with its rhythm. And each time, my movement was answered by the matched shifting of the tiny one inside me, like echoes across a moonlit valley.

It wasn’t until mid-January that I finally called Becky’s doctor and made an appointment. By then I was wearing the baggiest sweaters I could find in my closet and pants with an elastic waistband. I had only gained five pounds but my waist had disappeared, and a thick, elongated lump had replaced it. I was nearly halfway through the pregnancy. It would soon be difficult to hide.

Dan offered to go with me to that first appointment, but I really didn’t want him to go, and I could tell he really didn’t want to go, either. Becky offered to come too, but I really didn’t need anyone to hold my hand.

Dr. Whitestone was indeed as personable as Becky had promised. He had every right to scold me for waiting until I was four months pregnant to see a doctor, but he said nothing about it. Becky had made it easy for me by telling him my circumstances, for which I was very grateful. It was a sad story I didn’t care to share with anybody. But I was glad he knew.

He wanted to do an ultrasound, which I figured would be the case. As I lay there with my stomach bare in the dimly lit room, he quietly asked me if I wanted him to turn the screen away from me and turn the volume off. I was touched by his consideration. I thought about it for a moment and decided I wanted to see for myself the child I was carrying. We both watched as he moved the sensor across my middle. The heartbeat was clear, steady, and unmistakable. And it wasn’t as painful to hear as I thought it was going to be. It actually calmed me to hear it, though I don’t think I could ever explain why. There were shapes on the screen that I couldn’t quite make out, but Dr. Whitestone pointed to them and said, “Here’s the skull,” and “Here’s the spinal cord.”

I then saw a tiny rod with a bloom on the end of it, like Tinkerbell’s wand, propel itself away from the center of the screen. It was a tiny arm, graced with tiny fingers. I was in awe.

“The placenta’s in a pretty good place, a little low,” he was saying, and I was instantly struggling to reconcile the awe I felt with the news that my placenta wasn’t causing any trouble.

“How low?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not in the ideal place, but it’s not in the danger zone, either,” Dr. Whitestone said. “We’ll have to watch it. As the baby grows, the placenta might move upward or it might slip down farther than is safe.”

“I know all about that,” I said with a sigh.

“It’s a little early to think the worst, Mrs. Holland.”

I just sighed and asked him to please call me Claire.

*

That evening, I told Dan that maybe we should tell Katie about the baby. Maybe Spencer too. He didn’t agree at all.

I began to think I should have brought him to the doctor’s office after all so he could have seen what I saw, heard what I heard. He was still pretending none of this was real, that I would miscarry before he had to deal with any visual evidence that I was pregnant. He didn’t want to deal with it verbally, either.

“Dan, I’m starting to show,” I said as softly as I could, because I knew he would wince at hearing it. And he did. “The doctor said the placenta’s not in the danger zone. It’s just a little low. It could be many more weeks before anything happens. I could be six or seven months pregnant by then, Dan. Katie will know. She will be able to see it. Everybody will.”

He almost put his hands over his ears—that’s how frustrated he was. But there was no easy way to make him understand.

I said nothing for a few minutes as he wrestled with the reality of that which he wanted to believe was only a nightmare; just a bad dream he would soon awaken from.

“I’ve dealt with not having protected you from this happening, but, by God, I was going to protect them from knowing,” he finally said, hoarse with anger. “They shouldn’t have to deal with this. They’re just children.”

“I know, Dan. But I don’t think we can wait much longer,” I whispered.

He didn’t want me to be right about this, but he knew I was. He just nodded and then started to walk away.

“I want to make sure we do it right,” he said.

“Yes,” I said in response, hardly knowing how we would do it at all.

We told them that night after supper. Dan got a fire going in the family room, and I made hot chocolate. We gathered on the couch, the four of us in a row. It was a blistering cold evening, and a frigid wind was howling around the eaves of the house. It felt snug and warm in the house.

It was difficult to tell them both at the same time because Katie, at nearly twelve, knew a great deal more about life than Spencer at nearly seven. While she understood all too well how this baby had started growing in me, Spencer was full of questions that we hadn’t planned on getting into for a couple more years. We tried to keep it simple, but it kept getting more complex.

“But how did the bad man give you the baby?” he kept asking me, even after Dan and I had tried twice to vaguely explain that the father of the baby wasn’t Dan.

“It doesn’t matter how he did it. It just matters that Daddy didn’t give it to her,” Katie snapped, surprising Dan and me with her abruptness.

In any case, it satisfied Spencer for the moment.

“So what are we supposed to do with the baby?” he asked next.

Although Dan and I had never talked specifically about giving the baby up for adoption, we both knew that it seemed like the only option we could both live with.

“If I don’t have any trouble, and the baby is born okay, then we will find a good home for it,” I said, shaking a little as I said it. “There are many people who want very much to have children and can’t.”

“Why can’t they?” Spencer asked, ever the inquisitor.

“Stop asking so many questions, Spencer!” Katie snapped, again. I could tell I was going to have to spend some time alone with her. She was terribly angry.

“So it’s not going to be our baby?” he continued.

“They don’t want it. Can’t you understand anything?” Katie exclaimed, glaring at her little brother. She was slipping into as dark a mood as I had ever seen her in. It scared me. It also occurred to me that we weren’t “doing it right.”

“Look, kids,” Dan ventured. “Your mom has had lots of trouble with her pregnancies. She may have trouble with this one, and then it won’t matter.”

“But what if she doesn’t?” Katie retorted. “What if she doesn’t have trouble?”

Dan was quiet for a moment and then he shared something from the depths of his aching heart that I hoped Katie and Spencer would always remember.

“Kate, you and Spencer mean the world to me,” he began. “I would walk through fire for you. I would do anything to keep you safe. That’s how much I love you both. I have loved you like this since before you were born, since the day Mom and I knew she was expecting. Every child deserves a love like that from his or her father. Every child.”

He was close to tears, and Katie was crying freely. Spencer had climbed into my lap, and as he rested his head on my shoulder, my own tears fell onto his blond curls.

“But why can’t you love this baby?” Katie said, her voice softening. “I could.”