The Gift (18 page)

Liz gave her a number of additional assignments then, and promised to see what she could do at school, and she told Maribeth she'd let her know, as soon as they told her.

They talked for a while after that, about other things than school, mostly about Tommy, and his plans. Liz was obviously still worried that he would marry her, just so she wouldn't have to give up the baby, but Liz didn't say that. She just talked about the colleges she hoped he would attend, and the opportunities open to him, and Maribeth understood her completely. She knew what Liz was saying to her, and she couldn't help herself finally. She looked straight at her, and spoke very softly.

I'm not going to marry him, Mrs. Whittaker. Not now anyway. I wouldn't do that to him. He's been wonderful to me. He's the only friend I've had since all this happened. But we're both too young, it would ruin everything. I'm not sure he really understands that,” she said sadly, “…but I do. We're not ready for a child. At least I'm not. You have to give it so much, you have to be there for your kids …you have to be someone I'm not yet …you have to be grown up,” she said with eyes filled with tears, as Liz's heart went out to her. She was barely more than a child herself, with a child of her own in her belly.

“You seem very grown up to me, Maribeth. Maybe not grown up enough to do all that …but you've got a lot to
give.
You do whatever is right for you …and for the baby. I just don't want Tommy to get hurt, or do something foolish.”

“He won't,” she said, smiling as she wiped her eyes, “I won't let him. Sure, sometimes I'd like to keep the baby too. But what then? What am I going to do, next month, or next year … or if I can't get a job, or there's no one to help me? And how is Tommy going to finish school, with a baby? He can't, and neither can I. I know it's my baby, and I shouldn't be talking like this, but I want what's right for the baby too. It has a right to so much more than I can give it. It has a right to parents who are crazy about it, and not scared to take care of it like I am. I want to be there for it, but I know I just can't …and that scares me.” The thought of it tore at her heart sometimes, especially now, with the baby so big and so real, and moving all the time. It was hard to ignore it, harder still to deny it. But for her, loving her child meant giving it a better life, and moving on to where she was meant to be, wherever that was.

“Has Dr. MacLean said anything to you?” Liz asked. “About who he has in mind?” Liz was curious. She knew a number of childless young couples who would have been happy to have her baby.

“He hasn't said anything,” Maribeth said with a look of concern. “I hope he knows I really mean it. Maybe he thinks Tommy and I …” She hesitated on the words and Liz laughed.

“I think he does. He kind of hinted to me a while back what a great
'young
man' Tom was. I think he thought the baby was his. At least that was what I thought when I first found out. Scared me to death, I'll admit …but I don't know. I suppose there are worse fates. Tommy seems to be handling it pretty well, even though it's not his, and that must be even harder.”

“He's been fantastic to me,” Maribeth said, feeling closer to his mother than she had felt to her own in years. She was loving and warm and intelligent, and she seemed to be coming alive again after a nightmarish year. She was someone who had grieved for too long, and knew it.

“What are you going to do for the next two months?” Liz asked as she poured her a glass of milk and gave her some cookies.

“Just
work, I guess. Keep on doing work for school. Wait for the baby to come. It's due Christmas.”

“That's awfully soon.” Liz looked at her warmly. “If I can do anything to help, I want you to let me know.” She wanted to help both of them now, both Maribeth and Tommy, and before Maribeth left late that afternoon, she promised to see what she could do for her at school. The prospect of that filled her with excitement, and Maribeth told Tommy all about it that night when he picked her up and took her to the movies.

They went to see
Bwana Devil
, in 3-D, and they had to wear colored glasses to get the three-dimensional effect. It was the first movie of its kind, and they both loved it. And after that, she told him all about the time she had spent with his mother. Maribeth had a great deal of respect for her, and Liz was growing fonder of her daily. She had invited her to dinner the following weekend. And when Maribeth told Tommy about it, he said that having her around his family sometimes made him feel almost married. He blushed when he said the words, but it was obvious that he liked it. He had been thinking about that a lot lately, now that the baby was coming so much closer.

“That wouldn't be so bad, would it?” he asked, when he took her home, trying to seem casual. “Being married I mean.” He looked so young and innocent when he said it. But Maribeth had already promised his mother, and herself, that she wouldn't let him do it.

“Until you got good and sick of me. Like in a year or two, or when I got really old, like twenty-three,” she teased. “Think of that, it's seven years from now. We could have eight kids by then, at the rate I'm going.” She always had a sense of humor about herself, and about him, but this time she knew he wasn't joking.

“Be serious, Maribeth.”

“I am. That's the trouble. We're both too young, and you know it.” But he was determined to talk to her about it again. He wasn't going to let her put him off. She still had another two months to go, but before it was all over, he wanted to make her a serious proposal of marriage.

And she was still avoiding it, the following week, when he took her skating. They had just had the first snow, and the lake was shimmering. He couldn't resist going there, and it reminded him of Annie, and all the times he had taken her skating.

“I used to come here on weekends with her. I brought her here the week before …she died.” He forced himself to say the words, no matter how much they hurt him. He knew it was time to face the fact that she was gone, but it still wasn't easy. “I miss the way she teased me all the time. She was always bugging me about girls …she would have driven me crazy about you.” He smiled, thinking of his little sister.

When she had gone to their house, Maribeth had seen her room. She had wandered into it accidentally, while looking for the bathroom. And everything was there. Her little bed, her dolls, the cradle she put them in, the bookcase with her books, her pillow and little pink blanket. It tore at Maribeth's heart but she hadn't told any of them that she had seen it. It was like visiting a shrine, and it told her just how much they all missed her.

But she was laughing, listening to him now, as he told her stories about the girls Annie had scared off, mostly because she thought they were too dumb or too ugly.

“I probably wouldn't have made it either, you know,” Maribeth said, sliding out on the ice with him, and wondering if she shouldn't. “Especially now. She'd probably have thought I was an elephant. I certainly feel like one,” she said, but still looked graceful on the ice in the skates she had borrowed from Julie.

“Should you be doing this?” he asked, suspecting somehow that she shouldn't.

“I'll be fine,” she said calmly, “as long as I don't fall,” and with that she made a few graceful spins to show him that she hadn't always been a blimp. He was impressed with her ease on the ice, and she made her figure eights look effortless, until suddenly her heel caught, and she fell with a great thud on the ice, and Tommy and several other people looked stunned and then hurried toward her. She had hit her head, and knocked the wind out of herself, and it took three people to get her up, and when they did, she almost fainted. Tommy half carried her off the ice, and everyone looked immensely worried.

“You'd better get her to a hospital,” one of the mothers skating with her kids said in an undertone. “She could go into labor.” He helped her into the truck, and a moment later was speeding her to Dr. MacLean, while berating her, and himself, for being so stupid.

“How could you do a thing like that?” he asked. “And why did I let you? …How do you feel? Are you all right?” He was an absolute wreck by the time they arrived, and she had no labor pains, but she had a good-sized headache.

“I'm fine,” she said, looking more than a little sheepish. “And I know it was dumb, but I get so tired of being fat and clumsy, and enormous.”

“You're not. You're pregnant. You're supposed to be like that. And just because you don't want the baby, you don't have to kill it.” She started to cry when he said that, and by the time they reached Dr. MacLean's, they were both upset, and Maribeth was still crying, while Tommy apologized and then yelled at her again for going skating.

“What happened? What happened? Good heavens, what's going on here?” The doctor couldn't make head or tail of it as they argued. All he could make out was that Maribeth had hit her head and tried to kill the baby. And then she started crying again, and finally she confessed, and explained that she had taken a spill on the ice when they'd gone skating.

“Skating?” He looked surprised. None of his other patients had tried that one. But they weren't sixteen years old, and both Tommy and Maribeth looked seriously mollified when he gave them a brief lecture. No horseback riding, no ice-skating, no bicycling now, in case she fell off, especially on icy roads, and no skiing. “And no football,” he added with a small smile, and Tommy chuckled. “You have to behave yourselves,” he said, and then added another sport they were not supposed to indulge in. “And no intercourse again until after the baby.” Neither of them explained that they never had, nor that Tommy was a virgin.

“Can I trust you not to go ice-skating again?” The doctor looked at her pointedly, and she looked sheepish.

“I promise.” And when Tommy left to get the car, she reminded him again that she was not planning to keep the baby, and she wanted him to find a family to adopt it.

“You're serious about that?” He seemed surprised.

The Whittaker boy was so obviously devoted to her. He would have married her in a moment. “Are you sure, Maribeth?”

“I am … I think so …” she said, trying to sound grown up. “I just can't take care of a baby.”

“Wouldn't his family help?” He knew that Liz Whittaker had wanted another baby. But maybe they didn't approve of his son having one so young, and out of wedlock. True to his promise to the kids, he'd never asked them.

But Maribeth's ideas were firm on the subject. “I wouldn't want them to do that. It's not right. This baby has a right to real parents, not children taking care of it. How can I take care of it and go to school? How can I feed it? My parents won't even let me come home, unless I come home without it.” She had tears in her eyes as she explained her situation, and by then Tommy had come back again, and the doctor patted her hand, sorry for her. She was too young to shoulder such burdens.

I'll see what I can do,” he said quietly, and then told Tommy to put her to bed for two days. No work, no fun, no sex, no skating.

“Yes, sir,” he said, helping her to the car, and holding her tight so she didn't slip on any icy patches. He asked her then what she and the doctor had been talking about. They had both looked very serious when he came back to get her.

“He said he'd help me find a family for the baby.” She didn't say anything else to him, and she was startled to realize that he was driving her to his house, not her own. “Where are we going?” she said, still looking upset. It wasn't a happy thought, giving up her baby, even if she knew it was the right thing. She knew it was going to be very painful.

“I called Mom,” he explained. “The doctor said you can only get up for meals. Otherwise you have to stay in bed. So I asked Mom if you could spend the weekend.”

“Oh no …you can't do that … I couldn't …where would I …” She seemed distraught, not wanting to impose on them, but it was all arranged, and his mother hadn't hesitated for a second. Though she had been horrified by how foolish they had been to go skating.

“It's all right, Maribeth,” Tommy said calmly. “She said you can stay in Annie's room.” There was the faintest catch in his voice as he said it. No one had been in that room in eleven months, but his mother had offered it, and when they arrived, the bed was made, the sheets were fresh, and his mother had a steaming cup of hot chocolate ready.

“Are you all right?” she asked, deeply concerned. Having had several miscarriages, she didn't want anything like that to happen to Maribeth, particularly at this stage. “How could you be so foolhardy? You're lucky she didn't lose the baby,” she scolded Tommy. But they were both young, and as she scolded them, they looked like children.

And in the pink nightgown Liz loaned her, in the narrow bed in Annie's room, Maribeth looked more like a little girl than ever. Her bright red hair hung in long braids, and all of Annie's dolls sat gazing at her from around the room. She slept for hours that afternoon, until Liz came to check on her, and ran a hand across her cheek to make sure she didn't have a fever. Liz had called Dr. MacLean herself and been reassured to hear that he didn't think she'd done any harm to the baby.

“They're so young,” he smiled as he talked to her, and then said he thought it was too bad she was giving up the baby, but he didn't want to say more. He didn't want Liz to think he was intruding. “She's a nice girl' he said thoughtfully, and Liz agreed, and then went to check on her. Maribeth was just stirring and she said her headache was better. But she still felt guilty about being in that room. More than anything, she didn't want to upset them.

But Liz was surprised how good it felt to be back in Annie's room, sitting on the bed again, and looking into Maribeth's big green eyes. She looked hardly older than Annie.

“How do you feel?” Liz asked her in a whisper. She had slept for almost three hours, while Tommy played ice hockey and left her with his mother.

“Kind of achy, and stiff, but better, I think. I was so scared when I fell. I really thought I might have killed the baby … it didn't move at all for a while …and Tommy was yelling at me … it was awful.”