Your Chariot Awaits (19 page)
“You'd use your birthday as coercion to get me to church?” I protested indignantly.
Joella just smiled her sweet smile. “Whatever works.”
SO I WENT to church with her the following morning, and I ventured one small prayer:
Thanks for bringing Joella into my
life, and please help her make the right decision about her baby.
Okay, that's two. Does God have a quota, especially from an outsider like me? Or maybe I didn't have to be an outsider? An interesting thought, though I wasn't sure I was ready to act on it.
Afterwards we went home to change clothes, then to the grocery store for wieners and onions and buns and everything that went with them. Plus Greek salad from the deli, because Joella was looking at it with such longing, and a big fat dill pickle for her, too, because she said she hadn't had one in a zillion years. I'd baked a cake before going to bed the night before, so I also bought a box of birthday candles.
Fitz, in khaki shorts and forest green T-shirt with the ever-present sailboat logo, was waiting in the parking lot when we arrived at the marina. He had long-handled forks for roasting wieners over a fire, plus chili left over from yesterday's lunch on the boat.
It was a glorious day for a birthday, a picnic, or anything else. The tide was almost out when we reached the park over on the far side of Hornsby Inlet, the long, narrow channel of water that connects Vigland Bay with the main part of Puget Sound. A nice stretch of rocky beach lay exposed below the picnic area.
I'd brought kindling and wood saved from a tree that blew down in my yard a couple winters ago, and Fitz had a fire blazing and crackling in minutes.
“We'll let the fire burn down until we have good coals for roasting the wieners,” Fitz said. “That's the best way to do it.”
So how long did that good advice last? Just long enough for Joella and me to thread wieners on our long forks and gleefully stick them right into the blaze. Where a few seconds later they were blackened, burned, and splitting. The fat in mine even caught on fire, and I whirled it merrily like a Fourth of July sparkler.
We both piled our garlic-flavored buns high with onions and mustard and pepper-jack cheese, which Joella declared, between chomps of big dill pickle, was “exactly the way limo-dogs should be!”
“Limo-dogs?” Fitz said. He was still waiting for the fire to burn down to those nice coals.
So we had to explain the concept of limo-dogs to him, and then he started singing a song about a long, black limousine. I couldn't tell if he was massacring a real song or making up an incredibly bad one as he went along, but by the time he motioned us to join in on the chorus, which was, “And then I painted my long black limo pearly blue, and we all ate chili beans and Mountain Dew,” we were all giggling.
By then he'd given in and had a burned weenie of his own. The chili he'd put in a pot over the fire was hot, and the next round of limo-dogs we smothered in chili. With Greek salad on the side. I stopped there, but Joella and Fitz went on to third and fourth limo-dogs.
Afterwards I brought out my gift for Joella, an inexpensive watch to replace the one that had conked out. Then to my surprise, and Joella's, too, Fitz also had a gift stuck down in the plastic bag in which he'd brought the pot of chili. “I've had this for a while, so maybe today is a good time to give it to you.”
It was a little book of stories and songs to read and sing to a baby, and I was as touched as Joella by something so sweet. Although I also guessed this meant Fitz didn't know she was considering giving the baby up for adoption.
Then I stuck twenty-one candles on the cake, with Joella giggling that it looked like a chocolate porcupine, and we sang “Happy Birthday” while she gave a mighty puff and blew them all out.
She gave us both big hugs after we ate cake, Joella claiming an outside piece with the most frosting. “Thank you both so much. This is a twenty-first birthday I'll never forget.”
Which turned out to be true in a way none of us anticipated at that moment.
W
e sat around the fire for a while, and then I decided I should work off some of the calories before they homesteaded on my thighs. Fitz said he'd walk on the beach with me, but Joella decided she'd rather take a nap. I spread a blanket from the car on the grass for her.
The tide had gone out even farther while we were eating, exposing all kinds of interesting creatures. Starfish, purple and orange and pink. One a different kind of starfish with seventeen stubby arms. Fitz called it a sunstar. Little blobs of jellyfish. Tiny crabs scuttling around in shallow water. A log occupied by five seagulls, like first-class passengers sightseeing on a cruise, gently floating by.
On this pleasant day I didn't feel like talking about murder and suspects, and Fitz seemed to know that. Here, on the north side of the inlet, the houses weren't as numerous as on the south side opposite. Over there, a man on a riding lawn mower cut geometric swatches on a green lawn sloping to the water. The house I'd once shared with Richard stood on a wooded point to the west, glass soaring from deck to vaulted roof, the azaleas I'd planted long ago now blooming gloriously. But seeing it gave me no pang of loss. Too much of life in that house had been a lie.
The framework for another house was going up to the east, the sound of a hammer hitting a nail reaching us a smidgen after the hammer struck. A girl was throwing a stick into the water, a big black dog enthusiastically retrieving it. A motor-boat roared by, its wake sending waves swooshing against the shoreline.
I lifted my face to the sun. A great day to be alive, well fed, healthy, walking in the sunshine, with a nice man telling me about seeing a rare pod of orcas in the inlet a few weeks ago.
Thank You, God
.
Now, where did that come from?
Behind us, on our side of the inlet, madrone trees drooped glossy green leaves over the rocky beach, and here and there cliffs eroded by the endless action of the moving water rose above us.
We picked up occasional bits of colorful rock or shell as we walked. A young couple showed us a pretty reddish agate they'd found, as proud as if it were a diamond. They were holding hands, and Fitz gave me a speculative sideways glance. I wondered if he was thinking about holding hands too. Instead he asked about my name.
“Andi. Is that short for something?”
“Andalusia.” I said it a bit defensively, maybe even in a wanna-make-something-of-it tone. “I shortened it to Andi when I was a little girl. We moved around so much, and the kids could never pronounce it, much less spell it. Mostly they just made fun of it.”
“They should have studied their geography better. It's a region in Spain, isn't it? How'd you get a name like that?”
“My father was there during World War II. He liked the friendly people and the climate and mountains. He wanted to go back after the war was over.”
“And did he?”
I shook my head. “The closest he ever got to Andalusia was giving me the name. Never enough money, I suppose. But he was always . . . looking for something, even if he was stuck on this continent. We moved every few months, all over the country. Mom's family disapproved of him, and she pretty much just walked away from them.”
“That's too bad. Family is important.”
“He always had ideas about starting a business of his own. Big, outlandish ideas, I can see now, although back then I was just impatient for him to
do
it, and then we'd settle down and live in one place forever. I remember once he invented some new kind of beaters for Mom's electric mixer. Except when she used them, it was like an egg hurricane in the kitchen. It took us hours to clean up the walls and woodwork.”
I smiled, remembering my father's dismay. And my mother's endless, supportive good humor. “I think it needs a little fine tuning,” she'd said diplomatically as she wiped beaten egg off her eyebrows.
I spotted a little crab sitting motionless a dozen feet from the water. I thought he was already lifeless, but when I carried him to the water, he revived and scuttled off. I applauded, and Fitz grinned at me.
“Your folks aren't around here?” he asked.
“When I was about fifteen, they got involved in some back-to-nature, live-off-the-land movement. People came to our house bringing stuff like thistles and lilies and alder bark to eat. Did you know crabgrass is edible? Kind of. The sum-mer I was seventeen, we spent four months camping out on the other side of Mount Rainier.”
“Just you and your folks?”
“Other people came and went. Everyone would get up before sunrise and sit cross-legged in front of their tents with their eyes closed and palms up, waiting for the sun to rise.”
“And you?”
I laughed wryly, although I also had a catch in my throat. Looking back, I saw my folks as so young and naive and vul-nerable, so much younger than I was now. “I was huddled in my sleeping bag in another tent, wishing I could take a hot shower and have something other than those awful boiled weeds for breakfast.”
Fitz picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the smooth surface of the water. The inlet was in that lull between tides now, before the water started rushing back in. I was always astonished by the speed with which the water moved up the inlet toward the bay, like a river running backwards. When Richard and I lived in the big house across the way, Sarah and I'd toss out sticks just to watch them zoom away.
“Did you have a falling-out?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. When cold weather froze us out, we moved over to Anacortes. Where I was a month late starting school, of course. Then in early spring my folks got the nature bug again and went out to the mountains to commune with the snow or something. Their pickup got stuck, and they were dead by the time searchers found them several days later.”
I could still feel the awful shock of that, the pain, the dis-belief and sharp stab of betrayal. Rationally I knew they hadn't chosen to leave me, but deep inside the feeling was there, and I did feel abandoned.
“And you were on your own. Were you resentful and angry?”
Angry? Oh, yes. Angry that they would do such a careless, stupid thing, and then angry at myself for being so angry at them. But a resolve had come out of that anger.
“Mostly I was just determined to marry a man who was totally different from them, and to do it as soon as possible. Someone rooted and rock-solid and dependable. I made the mistake of thinking that someone was Richard McConnell.” I glanced over at Fitz and smiled. “So there it is, the story of my life. You'll probably see it on âLifestyles of the Muddled and Misguided' any day now.”
We turned around, where a creek flowing into the inlet changed the beach from rocks to mud. The fire had burned down to ashes by the time we got back to the picnic area, and at first I thought Joella was still asleep. The blanket was wound around her like a cocoon. Then I realized she was bunched into a fetal position and making small whimpering noises.
I ran to her and yanked back the blanket. Sweat rivuleted down her face and plastered her blonde hair to her head. “Jo, what's wrong! What is it?”
“I . . . I think the baby's coming.” Her hands were crossed over her abdomen. Her eyes looked not quite focused. “I feel all tight and hard inside. Oh!” A pain hit her, and she balled up even tighter.
But the baby couldn't be coming! Joella was only a little over seven months along. If she had it out hereâ
“We have to get her to the hospital!”
Fitz didn't ask questions. He shoved everything to the center of the tablecloth on the picnic table, grabbed it all in a bundle, and slammed it into the trunk of the car. I helped Joella to her knees, then to a shaky stand. Together Fitz and I half walked, half carried her to the backseat of the car.
“You get in back with her,” Fitz said. “I'll drive. I know where the hospital is.”
I got in back with her, but about all I could do was wipe her damp forehead with a tissue. What did I know about child- birth? I'd had one child by caesarean while fully anesthetized in a hospital almost forty years ago.
“Can you tell how often the pains are coming?” I asked anxiously.
“It's all one great big pain.”
Fitz drove fast but carefully. Joella groaned. I cursed the minuscule size of the backseat, the seat-belt straps and buckles that kept getting in the way, and the delaying traffic light where the inlet road joined the highway into town. Traffic was heavier on the highway. Some idiot cut around us, making Fitz screech the brakes to keep from hitting him, and I shook my fist at him. I also prayed, recklessly asking for God's help even if I wasn't on some approved list of prayers.
Please, God, this is a child of Yours. Don't desert her now. She
and her baby are depending on You!
J
oella kept groaning and holding her abdomen.
I said the only thing I could think of. “Don't push. Wait till we get to the hospital. Everything will be all right.
Don't push
!”
Joella gritted her teeth. “Easy for you to say. You're not the one . . . trying . . . to hold back a . . . rocket ship about to launch.”
“Think soothing thoughts. Ocean waves. Birds singing.”
“What does it feel like when your water breaks?”
I had no idea. Sixty years old, I'd be the matriarch in any primitive tribe, the wise old woman. But, product of civilization and caesarean that I am, I knew nothing!
We whipped into the parking area, then under the covering that sheltered the emergency entrance. Fitz ran inside. Thirty seconds later he was back with two guys in white and a gurney. They loaded Joella onto it, and I followed them inside while Fitz went to park the car.
He caught up with me in the emergency room a couple minutes later, as I was giving the woman at the admitting desk information.
