“Did you know!”
“Here,” he said softly. “Let me see that.” He took the diary from her and Martha eased a few quiet steps toward them, and then everything sort of came to a standstill while Patrick read the letter.
After a few moments he slowly closed the diary and handed it back to her. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“Huh, imagine that.”
“You have to remember how much your mother loved you.”
“Oh, wow? Really? I guess that’s why she wanted to abort me, then-because she loved me so much.”
“Listen, she did love you. You know that. It’s not right to-”
“To do what? Judge her? She wrote that the day she found out she was pregnant was the worst day of her life. What is there to judge? She didn’t want me!”
“She did want you.” Patrick reached for her shoulder, but she pulled back. “She was a loving woman, a caring woman-”
“No.”
“But she was human.”
“Stop it.”
“Just as human as you or me. And she-”
“Stop it! I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not gonna work.”
“Tessa.” His voice had become firm, but she could tell he wasn’t mad. Not really. “I know you’re upset, but just stop and listen for a second. Please. She never regretted having you. She told me that you were the best thing that ever happened to her. She told me that before she died.”
“June 3rd, Patrick,” she said, and she could feel something deep inside of her cracking. “Paul wrote that letter on June 3rd. You know when my birthday is, right? So, do the math. Mom was twenty weeks along when he wrote this letter. You know what that means.”
“Tessa. Please don’t do this.”
“My heart was beating. My brain was working. I could learn things. I could feel pain. Be calmed by music, experience mood swings.” She could hear the hurt filling her voice, but she didn’t care, didn’t try to hide anything anymore. “I could have been delivered and survived, but-”
“Tessa-”
“You know what they do in a late-term abortion? Maybe a D amp; E? Maybe she could have done that to ‘get it taken care of.’ They insert a clamp up through the uterus, grab a part of the body, and they-”
“Shh,” Martha said.
“-pull it apart-”
Patrick shook his head. “Tessa-”
“-piece by piece and then they crush the head and suction out the pieces. Or a D amp; X? Stick a surgical scissors in right here.” Tessa pointed at the base of her skull. Her finger was trembling. “It would have been right here on me. Right here! They pry open a hole… and insert a…”
Martha rested her hand gently on Tessa’s shoulder. “Don’t think about such-”
“Then after they’ve suctioned out the brains… the skull collapses and they… they can finally…” She felt dizzy, physically ill, and she couldn’t say the words. She just couldn’t.
Patrick drew her into his arms, and this time she let him. And then she felt Martha holding her too, her frail arm bent around her shoulder. And she was glad they were there.
But that was all she was glad about.
Tessa leaned her face against her stepfather’s chest.
And trembled as she cried.
84
I tried to comfort Tessa but had no idea what to say, so I just hugged her and told her that I loved her and tried to think of something, anything that I could do to help.
Moments passed.
My mother found a box of tissues for Tessa, and after a little while she began to control her breathing again.
Finally, she pulled away from me, wiped a handful of tissues across her face, and said softly, “I wish I never read it. The diary. I wish…”
“I’m so sorry, Tessa. If I’d known it would hurt you, I never would have given it to you. You have to believe me.”
She took a small breath. “I need to be alone.” Then she left for her room, and I thought she might slam the bedroom door, but instead I heard it close gently.
So gently that, in a way, it frightened me.
It wasn’t at all clear to me what to do-give her some space, or go to her, see if there was something more I could say.
In the past, Tessa had struggled with cutting as a way to cope, and although she’d mostly moved past it, I was concerned for her and I didn’t like the idea of standing here doing nothing.
I walked upstairs. Knocked softly on her door.
“Leave me alone.” I could tell that she was crying again.
My mother was climbing the stairs to join me.
“Please, Tessa,” I said.
“Just leave me alone. I want to be alone.”
I tried the doorknob. Locked. “C’mon. Unlock the door.”
“I’m OK. I just wanna be by myself.”
As I stood there trying to figure out how to solve things, my mother approached and whispered, “She needs some time, Patrick. Let her be for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready.”
“How do you know?” I kept my voice low enough so that Tessa wouldn’t hear. “Maybe I can-”
“Listen to your mother,” Tessa called from inside her bedroom.
I blinked.
Martha raised a gentle, knowing eyebrow.
“Did you hear me?” Tessa said.
“Yes.”
Knowingly, my mother patted my arm and then turned to leave.
“I guess I’ll be downstairs then,” I told Tessa through the door.
“In the kitchen. I won’t leave for the airport until you’re ready for me to go, OK?”
No response.
I stood in the hallway for a few more minutes, sorting through everything, then Tessa called through the wall, “Don’t lurk,” and I finally left to join my mother in the kitchen.
I looked at my watch.
As much as I wanted to stay and work through things with Tessa, I definitely needed to leave in the next twenty minutes if I was going to make my flight.
But that was no longer my priority.
Last night I’d told Cheyenne that Tessa meant the world to me. And now I realized how true that was.
I would stay here if I needed to. Even if I didn’t make it to the trial.
Still, I did feel a little guilty and conflicted, because even though I hadn’t known about Paul or the letter, one time while we were dating Christie had told me about her decision to abort her child.
85
Christie and I had been going out for about four months when she told me the story.
We were both single and in our midthirties and things were getting serious, so we’d finally decided to get everything on the table, see if there was anything in our respective pasts that would make the other person shy away from something long term.
And we chose to share those secrets on a hike in the Adirondacks on a crisp and cool Sunday afternoon in September.
We’d been hiking for a few hours, slowly revealing more and more intimate details from our lives, when I lost the trail and ended up spending nearly half an hour leading her aimlessly through the underbrush looking for it. Finally, I was so irritated at myself that I kicked a log. “OK. Here’s one: sometimes I can get impatient.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I shoved a branch out of the way. Hard. It snapped back toward Christie, and thankfully she was far enough behind me so that it didn’t smack her in the face. “And moody.”
“Huh.” I couldn’t quite read her tone. “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”
Then I found something that might have been a trail, at least at one time, and it was leading vaguely in the direction we wanted to go, so I decided to give it a shot.
As we walked, I told her about the problems I’d had over the years getting along with my older brother, who owned a bait shop in Wisconsin and spent most of his time muskie fishing when he could have been doing something meaningful with his life.
“Well.” She stepped over a fallen tree lying across our path. “At least you’re not judgmental.”
“One of my few virtues.”
Then I admitted to a tendency of getting caught up a little too much in my work. Occasionally.
Once in a while.