Pregnant Pause (25 page)

I look at my baby's round little head, the broad forehead, the happy eyes, the teeniest little nose and little red lips—I want her. I want to take care of her—feed her and bathe her and change her diapers and teach her how to walk and talk and read, because I know my little girl will learn to read. I want her so badly. I can't explain it—why I feel so strongly—but I do. I hear what my mom is saying, and I know she's right. I know it. I'm trouble. I want what's best for Emma Rose, but there's something, something inside me that's telling me that this is what I'm meant to do. As if my whole life up to this point was in preparation for having her and caring for her. I'm meant to be a mother to this child. I know it. I can feel it. I know I can do it.

"You have high school to finish, and then hopefully college to attend, and where will you live? How will you support yourself?"

I think of Ziggy. My sweet, loving Ziggy. He said he'd take care of me and the baby. He's the only one who wants both of us.

"I'll find a way," I say. "And anyway, I can stay at the cabin till I find something better, or until you find a new home to rent."

"Oh, El, there's no cabin anymore. The Lothrops are out of the picture."

"Out of the picture? Totally? Because I didn't want Lam in the delivery room?"

"No." My mother gives me this pitying look and smoothes back my hair.

"What? I can't live there anymore because Emma Rose has Down syndrome?"

"Yes, that's right, sweetie. It's just too painful for the Lothrops. She told me a little of what they went through when they lost their first child. They're afraid of getting attached and then—"

"And then Emma Rose dies? But I've seen grown-up people with Down syndrome. My baby isn't going to die. No way."

Mom's eyes show worry, but she covers up by smiling at the baby and making cooing sounds.

"But Lam's her father! They're her grandparents. You're her grandparents. Really, I don't understand how you all can just reject her like this."

"Oh, El, it has nothing to do with rejection. It's about doing what's best for the baby."

"Well, okay, but I can live with you and Dad, can't I, until I find a job and a place of my own?"

Mom's whole face just sags. "Elly, I think you misunderstood my letter. We're not here to stay. We just came for the delivery, but we've got to go back to Kenya. So many people are depending on us—a whole community. It's where we belong."

"But, what about me? I'm depending on you, too."

Mom starts to say something, but then the nurse comes in and says it's time to take the baby back and that I need to rest now. I hate to let go of Emma Rose. I'm so afraid my mom's going to tell them to take her away and give her to an orphanage or something. Before she leaves I make her promise that she won't do anything, and she does. "She's your child, Elly. I won't do anything without your consent. But think it over. Pray about it. Listen to God. I think you'll realize adoption is the right thing to do."

She kisses me, and leaves.

Everybody's gone. It's quiet. Even on the other side of the room, where the other mother rests, it's quiet. I'm left alone with my thoughts.

My first thought is that my mom is always saying something like, "I think you'll see it's the right thing to do." She always knows what the right thing to do is, and I never do. Is it because she's a mother or because she's got an in with God, or just because she's always had her head screwed on straight? If I'm a mother to Emma Rose, will I suddenly know all the right things to do? Is that how it works?

Mom always thinks doing the right thing is so important. "Do the right thing, Elly," she says, or "I expect you to do the right thing," or "We always knew you'd do the right thing." How? How did she know? Did she really, or does she just say that as a kind of bribe, or as a way of persuading me to do what she wants me to do? Because always the right thing to do is the exact same thing as what she wants, and it's not usually what I want. I always seem to want the wrong thing, and now I want Emma Rose—oh, yes, I want her so badly, and that's the wrong thing to want. I'm supposed to want to give her away. At first the right thing was to give her to Sarah, but now that's not the right thing anymore. Emma Rose has Down syndrome, so now there's a new right thing. Now the right thing to do is to give her away to strangers and maybe never see her again. But that's just impossible. How could I do that? How could I risk nobody ever adopting her? If my own family doesn't want her, who's to say a stranger will? How could putting her up for adoption be a better choice for her than keeping her? And how could I stand it knowing that I abandoned my baby? I couldn't bear thinking of her being alone. I know about being alone. I know about loneliness, and no, I can't do that to Emma Rose. I remember Banner. How alone she must have felt to want to kill herself—how desperately alone.

Do the right thing. Do the right thing.
I wish those words would get out of my head. Why don't I ever do the right thing? I did the wrong thing last night when I was in the break hut with Banner. Show 'em, I said, show 'em. That was so not the right thing to do. How do I live with that? How do I live with that kind of guilt? I see Banner in the lake with her hair spread out all around her head like a fan of light, a halo, and then she's on land and her eyes are open and she's staring up at the sky, looking toward heaven. That's someplace I'll never see, that's for sure, but I hope, if there is a heaven the way my parents think there is, that Banner is there.

My thoughts go round and round. I sleep some and cry some and think about my baby some and try to figure out what to do, and then I sleep some more. Then it's nighttime, and I eat dinner and I get to see my Emma Rose one more time. I try to breast-feed her, but it doesn't work. The nurse tells me that it's okay. Then the nurse shows me this contraption she calls a breast pump and teaches me how to use it so the baby can have my breast milk even if she can't take the breast. That's how the nurse talks. "Even if she can't take the breast." If Lam could only hear her, he'd die laughing.

Before she leaves, the nurse reminds me that the doctor will be in to see me in the morning.

I ask when I can get the catheter out of me because they forgot to take it out, and she says no, they didn't.

"We'll take it out tomorrow," she says on her way out the door. Then she pauses and adds, "If you're good." She winks and leaves, and I wonder if she's been talking to my mother.

I THOUGHT if I dreamed, I would dream about Emma Rose, my beautiful baby, but instead I dream about Banner. She's whispering something to me, only I can't hear her. I keep asking her to speak louder so I can hear, but she just whispers again. She puts the necklace she made around my neck and whispers something else, and still I can't hear her. I want to hear her. Why can't I hear her? "Speak up! Speak up, Banner. Tell me what you're trying to say."

I wake up all in a tangle in my bed, and my belly hurts where they cut me open. I'm crying again and I can't stop, but I try to be quiet about it so I don't wake the mother asleep on the other side of the curtain.

I get breakfast and painkillers, and the nurse tells me to get up and walk as much as I can today. She says after the doctor has seen me, they'll take the catheter out. I can't wait.

I ask to see Emma Rose. "Let's just let the doctor visit you first," she says.

"But the lady next door got to see her baby."

"That's different. She and her baby will be going home today. You've got two more days. Don't worry. Everything's fine."

The nurse pushes me back against my pillows so that I'll lie down and relax, but I don't feel relaxed. Shouldn't I be trying to feed Emma Rose again? I'm anxious to see the doctor. It seems nothing happens until I see him, so let's get the show on the road. Let's see him already. Where is he? It's six in the morning. The hospital is bustling with activity, so the doctor must be here somewhere. Let's see him. The nurse hands me the breast pump to use again so they can feed my baby with a bottle of my breast milk. I want to feed her. Why can't I at least feed her the bottle?

***

It's nine in the morning, and still no doctor and no Emma Rose—and I still have my damn catheter in. A new nurse is on duty now, a male nurse. I ask him when the doctor will be in to see me, and he says soon. "Well, what the hell does 'soon' mean?" I shout at him. "I've been waiting all morning."

The nurse whispers, and it reminds me of my dream. "Shhh," he says. "You're not his only patient, little one."

While he's saying this, a man, an old geezer with a little bit of white hair on a mostly bald head, comes in and looks around. He's short and wearing a pair of black slacks, a white shirt, and one of those beanie caps on his head—a Jewish hat thing.

He comes over to my bed and clasps his hands together and kind of bows a little bit. "Eleanor Crowe?"

"Yeah?" I pull my sheet and blanket up to my neck and slide down in my bed a little. He reminds me of an undertaker. I wonder if he's about to tell me Emma Rose died in her sleep. Please don't tell me that. Please!

"I'm Rabbi Yosef."

Rabbi? Oh, no! A rabbi. Oh, yeah, now I get it. When I filled out my admission forms, the nurse asked me what religion I was, and I thought it was none of her business, so I said Jewish just for the hell of it. Now I'm probably going to get arrested for impersonating a Jewish person. The rabbi's probably going to quiz me to see if I'm Jewish, then have the police haul me away as soon as he realizes I don't know beans about being Jewish. Well, these police can just stand in line with the rest of the force, because I'm about to get hauled away for pushing Banner Sorensen into suicide and probably as soon as I step foot out of the hospital the officer from Bethel who picked me up yesterday will be waiting to haul me off, too.

"I'm not Jewish," I say. "I lied."

The rabbi sits down. "You did, did you?"

"Yeah. Sorry. I didn't know what I was doing."

"Well, now that I'm here, maybe I can help you?"

"Help me? Help me how? I don't need a rabbi. I need a grief counselor. That's what I need."

The rabbi nods. He nods really slowly. Then he smiles. "I am trained in grief counseling, Eleanor Crowe. Is there sorrow around the birth of your baby?"

"Okay, look, no offense. There was a little girl at the camp where I work, and she just died. She killed herself, and I need to sort out some thoughts, but if I talk to you, I don't want all this God stuff brought in, okay?"

"But God is already in it. I don't bring Him in. He is already here."

"See? Like that. Go easy on that kind of talk."

The rabbi raises his brows. "What happened, Eleanor? Tell me about the little girl who killed herself."

And so I do. I tell this geezer everything, including how I sometimes just wanted to kick Banner in the butt for being such a wimpy crybaby. I tell him about my talk with Banner in the break hut. I tell how she must have thought I meant show 'em by killing herself. By the time I'm through telling him everything, I'm in a pool of tears.

Rabbi Yosef hasn't said anything the whole time, but now he takes my hand and just holds it.

I grab a tissue off the little tray table I've got on the side of the bed and with my free hand blow my nose. I grab another and wipe my eyes. "I just never realized how desperate she was. I mean, to want to kill yourself, that's as desperate as it gets."

"You want to feel better about it."

"Yes."

"You want not to hurt so much."

"Yes," I say. "Yes, it hurts so much. It does."

"You want not to feel like it was your fault?"

"Right. Yes. That's right."

"Just let yourself hurt, Eleanor. It is a painful thing that's happened. You're supposed to hurt."

Okay, I didn't expect him to say that. I thought he'd tell me what my parents always tell me; that God will forgive me, no matter what.

Then he asks, "What does the pain feel like?"

"What? What do you mean?"

"Feel it. Feel the sadness. Feel the loss of this young girl. Feel the guilt."

"I do. I do feel all of that."

"Really feel it, Eleanor."

"Yeah, I do." I close my eyes and I tell myself to really feel it, as if I haven't been really feeling it already. This guy's a nut case.

Feel it. Feel it. I feel this spot in the middle of my chest, that's where it hurts the most. I feel all caved in there. I tell the rabbi this.

"Yes. Yes," he says. "Keep feeling it."

I try to keep feeling it, but it's weird about trying. The more I try, the more the feeling seems to just kind of dissolve away. I think about how guilty I feel.

I open my eyes. "I shouldn't try to get rid of my guilt," I say. "I am guilty. I should feel that. I don't want to not feel guilty, otherwise..."

I can't finish what I was about to say, because I don't know how to, but something is dawning on me.

"Yes, Eleanor. What would happen if you didn't feel guilty?"

"It would be like I didn't care, and I do care. I care a lot."

"And feeling guilty lets you know how much you care?"

"Yeah. That's right. I can't just go around feeling guilt-free. What if I did that? My mother would kill me. Everybody would kill me."

"So you feel guilty to keep people from being angry with you." He says these things like a statement, not a question, but I answer him like he's asking me.

"I feel guilty because it's the right way to feel." I put my hand over my mouth. I can't believe I just said that. "I mean, I feel guilty because I am guilty, because I do feel guilty, because it's the right..." I said it again. I look at the rabbi. "Shouldn't I feel guilty?"

"It's natural, sure," he says, nodding. "Go ahead, feel guilty. Feel as guilty as you can."

He's got some kind of game here, but I can't quite guess what it is. Somehow I figure I'm not going to feel guilty by the end of it, so I'm willing to play along. I close my eyes again and try to feel as guilty as I can. I think of Banner trusting me. I think of the way she leaned on my shoulder and looked up at me. I remember telling her to show 'em. How stupid could I be? I'm so stupid! Here it is. Here is the guilt. I feel it in my head and shoulders. My head feels like it's on fire, but the more I'm aware of this feeling, the more the feeling starts to leave, just like the painful feeling I had before. It's crazy. I get scared. I do. I feel really scared. I open my eyes. "But if I don't feel guilty for what happened to Banner, won't I feel guilty for not feeling guilty?"