Tuesday Night Miracles (33 page)

It appears as if all four women are swallowing at once.

“Who would like to go first?”

Before anyone can say anything, Kit turns to look at Leah, narrows her eyes, and then shifts back to face Dr. Bayer.

“Can I ask something first?”

“Certainly.”

“We never really got to hear Leah’s story and what her dreams were, and maybe it would help us—even though I assume we have all done the assignment—to know more about her life before we move on,” Kit shares with a half shrug that makes her question seem uncertain and almost brave.

Kit has developed great affection for Leah and so wants to know her and the rest of her life story, even if she’s terrified about sharing hers. Maybe Leah will say no. Maybe not.

Dr. Bayer leans forward for a moment, as if she is stretching her back, and admits that she briefed Leah when she missed the first class. But, yes, it’s true they never got a chance to hear details of her life that are terribly important.

Leah is sitting with her ankles crossed, her hands folded in her lap, as if she is about to hear a church sermon.

“Yes, Leah, would you mind telling everyone your entire story—how you came to be at the shelter, what happened before that?” Dr. Bayer asks almost tenderly, as if she planned this very moment weeks ago.

38

A Life on Hold

T
he small kitchen light hanging above Kit’s sink begins to flicker on and off the moment Dr. Bayer asks Leah if she will tell her story. No one notices the soft movement but Leah, who is absolutely mesmerized by the blinking light.

Before Leah begins speaking, she forces herself to look away from the light. It reminds her of something—a place, a moment, perhaps another window. But she can’t quite remember where the memory begins.

Dr. Bayer and the other women are quiet. They are all looking at Leah, who turns first to Dr. Bayer. Leah knows Dr. Bayer has heard most of her story from the shelter director. She has also read it in what must now be volumes of court documents. It was Dr. Bayer who gave her the chance to be in this group. It was Dr. Bayer who somehow understood how Leah had gotten from where she was before the shelter to Kit’s living room. It was Dr. Bayer who told her that yes, it is true, sometimes life is truly unfair.

But Dr. Bayer had never heard the story from Leah’s lips. She deserved to hear it, and hear it all. This chance, this group, was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given her. And these other women? It really didn’t matter now, because here she was and she had this chance and she was going to keep it.

And maybe if she shares her story, her life up to this point it will also be a way for her to bury it and move forward even faster. Leah trusts Dr. Bayer, and a part of her has come to see the other women as fellow travelers, comrades, maybe—just maybe—even friends.

“Okay,” Leah whispers, turning then to look from one woman to the next before she continues.

The broken light in the kitchen catches her eye again and she is glad to look at it. It’s as if she is being hypnotized so that she can remember. All Leah has been trying to do is forget, but perhaps this is important, perhaps this is part of the process, perhaps this will help her design a Tuesday-night miracle.

Her first sentence makes time stand still.

“I got pregnant in high school the very first time I had sex,” she begins, watching the light, moving only her lips. “He was just a boy. I was barely a young woman, really only a girl.”

And then Leah’s story unfolds as if the world has stopped and nothing else matters. None of the women move. There is no sound but Leah’s voice, low, sweet, and laced with a kind of sorrow that is electric.

Leah’s family all but disowned her. They were Christians, after all, who had standards, and premarital sex was not part of the program. It didn’t matter that the sex was not consensual and that the boy was an angry, selfish person who came from a family where things like kindness, love, and respect were nonexistent.

Seventeen. A high-school senior. Alone.

There were no choices for a young girl living in rural Illinois who had been raped and who had a family who would not listen, and seemingly did not care, and very quickly orchestrated so many years of her life that Leah is embarrassed to tell them how old she is.

The boy-man, whom Leah can’t bear to name, was forced to marry her. Leah remembers those days as a kind of blur and recalls feeling as if she were being crushed from the inside out. Her younger brother and sister weren’t allowed to speak to her, her mother packed her one small bag, her father drove her to the courthouse, signed papers because she was underage, and left her there. She would never see him again.

There is a sigh of disbelief rolling through everyone except Dr. Bayer. In this day and age? Leah surely is under the age of thirty, which means this happened ten or so years ago? How can this be?

Kit and Jane are especially stunned. Leah is being totally open, sharing intimate details of her life, something neither of them has yet done in class.

Dr. Bayer senses the shock that must be surging through Kit, Grace, and Jane, and before anyone says anything she simply reaches out, rests her hand on Leah’s for just a moment, as if to say, “Keep going,” and then pulls it away.

No one else says a word.

Leah blinks, inhales, and continues to talk while everyone, Dr. Bayer included, remains temporarily paralyzed.

“I have been trying very hard to forget all of this so I can move forward and so my children can move forward,” Leah explains. “But I suppose it’s healthy to share it. Not that I’m wanting to use what happened to me as an excuse for what I did.”

This thought springs to her mind and grows larger, and Leah suddenly stops talking. Will these women now think even less of her? Will they discard her because of what they hear and tell her she should have known better? When she tells them all of her secrets, will all be lost?

“We are not here to judge, Leah,” Dr. Bayer assures her. “We all have stories; even I have a story. Sharing is very brave. Right now, you tell us what you can, what you think you need to say. But I do think your story is something that can help all of us right now.”

Leah looks surprised. Kit, Grace, and even Jane are still not moving. Surprisingly, it is Jane who speaks.

“After last week, Leah, I think we should all be able to trust each other,” Jane offers, shocking everyone in the room. “This is important for all of us. Please, tell us the rest of your story.”

Dr. Bayer knows she is going to remember this night for a long time. She thinks Leah’s story is not just important but also something the other three women need to hear. And Jane? Well, maybe Jane is finally realizing that her life of excess in all arenas, especially her personal behavior, is pretty damn ridiculous.

All eyes are back to Leah.

The boy’s father forced him to marry Leah and stayed to make certain everyone did what they were supposed to do. Of course he blamed Leah, who must once have been beautiful before the years of anguish, loss, and yearning set it. Back then she was so young and pretty. How could his son resist?

Leah recalls the months following the day she was forced into a relationship she never wanted as lonely, hard, and often very cruel.

It is hard for Leah to say the word
husband
. A husband is a loving companion, someone you can trust, the better part of your entire life, the one who pulls you up when you fall, causes your heart to constantly exhale with gladness, keeps his warm fingers on the pulse of your life.

This man was not a husband. He was a mean person who resented as much as she did what they had been forced to do. They moved into an apartment so small that the only place for privacy was a bathroom that was as big as Kit’s front-hall coat closet.

How did they live? Why didn’t she run? Was there no one to help her? Where was her own mother? Was there absolutely no one to rescue her?

The women can’t help themselves. They are jumping over one another to ask these questions, and everyone but Dr. Bayer appears so astonished that it looks as if a window is open and a strong wind is blowing their faces into poses of disbelief. Eyebrows are slanted, eyes are wide, mouths gape open, chins grow taut.

You don’t understand, Leah explains. I lived in a different world.

“Have you ever been to Dunbar, Illinois? It is a small farming community. It is a place where the men are in charge of everything and where everyone goes to the same church. There is one small factory on the edge of town where they make steel components for machinery. The women knit. It may as well be a cult.”

The high school one town over, which everyone in the county attended, was Leah’s only island. She was preparing herself for a much larger world and was so close, so very close to leaping into a life she had already designed for herself inside her mind.

But that baby.

“This may be hard to understand, because you’re all such strong, successful women, but I felt as if I had to try and it was because of the baby.”

Kit’s living room is now so quiet that the soft ticking of the old kitchen clock sounds like a moving tank.

Leah tells them that she finished high school and could have garnered a scholarship to any state school. But she was six months pregnant by then, working at a gas station, and her husband, of course, was working at the local factory.

And he was rarely home, rarely nice, rarely interested in anything but what an eighteen-year-old should be interested in—drinking, cars, other girls, anything but being a daddy and a husband.

It sounds like a movie. Leah realizes this and tells everyone that she was sort of living in two places at once. The real place, with a very mild hope of someone flying out of the sky to rescue her from what was on most days a kind of living hell, and the world she had created inside her own mind and heart.

Leah closes her eyes when she tells them what that world was like. Her face grows soft, her hands relax, and she lets her head drop so that it almost looks as if she’s falling asleep.

In that world, the one she dreamed about constantly, everything was different. She did not live there with him and she did not have to let his loathsome body slide against hers night after night. She was nowhere near Dunbar or Illinois but in a place filled with warmth, light, and searching minds. She could do and be and go and live how she wanted.

And she survived where she was by looking through and past all the people. She looked through the people who bought coffee and cigarettes from her at the gas station. She looked through the people who pretended they didn’t know her. She looked through the man who threw his lunchbox on the table every night.

And she started to look through herself.

By the time her classmates were literally running off to college, and away from the lives they feared they might fall into if they didn’t hurry and leave, she was about to go into labor.

That is when a live angel appeared. It was her high-school algebra teacher. A man who had seen some genius in the bright girl in the third row who passed every exam no matter how hard and who shared a very small slice of her anguish because he saw where she could have, should have, must someday go. He came into the gas station and asked Leah if she needed anything, if he could help her, if everything he had heard about her was true.

Of course it was.

The angel slipped her his phone number and said there were ways to climb onto dreams and ride them out of town. Leah memorized the number, burned it into the secret half of her world, and then she had a baby girl.

Kit can’t stand it. She has to say something, even though she’s ashamed that she’s still unable to reveal her deepest secrets. She knows there has to be more to the story, and she can all but guess at what that will be, but she is so angry that she has to say something.

“Dr. Bayer, I’m sorry, but this kind of thing gets me upset and I just have to say how appalled I am that in this day and age this kind of thing still happens,” Kit doesn’t so much say as spew through her teeth. “If I could write in my anger log right this second, I would be writing all about this. Monsters. Jackasses. Hurtful idiots. This is the stuff we read about when we were in college that happened to other people.”

Dr. Bayer doesn’t get a chance to say anything, because Leah pulls up her head and jumps right back into the story.

“Oh, I was going to leave and I had a friend or two who probably would have helped, but the first time the baby moved and I thought about that, about being a mother, and how the baby needed a chance more than I did, there was no leaving.”

No leaving. But suddenly this third person who needed the tender touch of a mother’s hand. A simple, sweet baby girl who triggered what would turn out to be nine more years of a kind of abuse that Kit and everyone else reads about on page two of the morning newspaper and is followed by severe swearing into coffee cups.

The husband got angry because what little bit of attention he was getting from Leah was now totally taken away. He hit her the first time when the baby was only two days old.

The baby was Jessica, or Jessie, and she was a girl and, husband and men be damned, this is when Leah’s secret world began to grow inside her so desperately that she called the algebra teacher. She did not mention the hitting or the lack of food in the house or the times she was forced to have sex before she was allowed to tend to the wailing baby in the next room.

All she said was
help me
. Help me get a diploma. The kind man paid for her to enroll at the community college, where she could take courses through the mail. He had everything sent to his house, and then took the lessons to the place where she worked, and Leah studied during her break and on the nights—thankfully so many—when the husband never came home.

Leah passed every exam and moved so rapidly through some of the courses that the instructors couldn’t keep up with her.

One day when the teacher came in she asked him why. Why do you help me? He was a married man with three daughters and a wife who worked, and Leah imagined they had the kind of life she dreamed about. The man looked at her and said, “Everyone deserves a chance.”

So Leah had a plan. It would take two or three years to get an associate’s degree while studying in the dark and sneaking and caring for the baby and working and making certain that he never found out. Because God forbid someone should excel or move beyond him, which is exactly what she planned to do.