It was the day after Easter in early April when I got the official confirmation of what I’d suspected for weeks. I was pregnant. Missing a period in the wake of what had happened to me didn’t necessarily seem unusual, but missing two was something I couldn’t ignore. Plus, the truth is, I already knew. I felt you inside me, sweetheart. I was sure you were there. You gave me the strength to get better.
When the doctor called that Monday, I was eating jelly beans and chocolate and playing with the green paper curlicues filling the big Easter basket that Darrell had made for me. As soon as the phone rang, I knew it was the doctor, and I knew what he’d say. Even before I answered, I remember staring at the Easter basket as if it were a bassinet and imagining a baby amid those curlicues, rather than a chocolate bunny. The doctor broke the news to me, and I started to cry. They were tears of pure joy. Knowing that I was going to have a baby was the first happiness I’d had since awakening on the floor.
I suppose I should have been scared at the idea of being a single mother, but I wasn’t. You made up for everything else, sweetheart. The things I’d been through in life had led me to that one moment. Of course, I had no idea if I was having a boy or a girl, but in my heart, I knew you were a girl. Rebecca Colder would have a daughter to share her life. I began to talk to you right away, telling you the things we would do together. I sang to you. I wrote poems for you. I know you don’t remember any of it, but I like to think that I’m back there somewhere, that my voice is tucked away in a little corner of your brain.
You’re probably wondering if I ever called Tom Ginn to tell him what happened to me, or to tell him that I was pregnant. I didn’t. Oh, believe me, I was tempted. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up the phone and then put it down. I knew if I called, he’d be at my side in an instant, but it didn’t seem fair to push my way into his life like that. He had his father to take care of. He had his own responsibilities. And this sounds so vain, but I looked terrible in those weeks after the beating. I didn’t want him to see me like that. In his mind, I was pretty. An angel. A perfect little fantasy, the girl who’d saved him. Instead, he would come to me and see a woman who was swollen and cut and bruised and bedridden. He’d stay out of obligation, not desire. I hated that. When the weeks of my recovery had finally passed and I looked like myself again, I felt that too much time had gone by to reach out to him. His life had gone on. I half wondered if he’d even remember me, although my secret heart said he thought of me every day. But I let him go. I never called.
I assumed I would never see him again.
I was wrong.
At the end of April, I went back to work. No, not as a deputy. Jerry got his wish. After my behavior on the night of Jay’s death, the sheriff could have fired me. Even Darrell wouldn’t have defended me for leaving the scene of a suicide and not reporting it. But Jerry didn’t like the optics of firing a deputy for dereliction of duty while she was in a hospital bed after being raped and nearly beaten to death by her husband. So I got a reprieve. Jerry was actually very sweet, visiting me a couple of times during my recovery and making sure I had everything I needed. As I say, people can surprise you.
However, I’d be the first to admit that I couldn’t do my former job anymore. I was feeling better and getting around pretty well, but that didn’t mean I was anywhere close to the physicality needed to be a deputy. Plus, I was pregnant, so even as my body got stronger, I was already suffering from what the sheriff considered a disqualifying disability. He couldn’t imagine that I wanted to come back to work at all, but I had bills to pay, and so he agreed to take me back in the role I’d had before. Mrs. Mannheim transferred to a job in the county licensing bureau, and I became the office secretary again.
The rest of the deputies treated me better after that, partly because of what I’d been through and partly because I was back in a woman’s job. I missed being out on the road, and working with Darrell, but I didn’t miss the abuse. At that point in my life, I’m not sure I could have handled it.
And the murder investigation? The death of Gordon Brink?
Jerry closed the case. He did it while I was in the hospital and unable to offer any kind of protest. The sheriff interviewed Ben Malloy, who told him about Jay’s confession to the murder before the boy killed himself. Maybe Ben couldn’t hear everything that had been said between me and Jay on the ice — the wind had been howling the whole time — or maybe the sheriff had twisted around Ben’s statement to suit what he really wanted to do, which was put Gordon Brink’s murder to bed. Had anyone asked me, I would have said that Jay made up the story to protect Will, but by the time I was in a condition to say so, nobody cared. Darrell hadn’t objected. Neither had Norm and Will. I suspect Norm had a long talk with Will about it, because as a result of Jay’s false confession, Will went back in the closet. I’m not sure anyone believed it, but most of the town pretended, and Will was able to live his life again without violence. In another year, he’d go away to college. I doubted he would ever make his home in Black Wolf County after that.
So we’d found the killer. He was dead, and that was that. The thick folder that Darrell and I had gathered about the death of Gordon Brink got put away.
I filed it myself.
In the fifth month of my pregnancy, my father died. I told you I’d had a sixth sense about it coming soon, so I wasn’t completely surprised to get the call. He was on the road when it happened, in a cheap motel outside Wichita. The check-out time passed without him leaving his room, and the motel owner found him dead in the twin bed. He’d died in his sleep, which was probably a blessing. According to the coroner, he’d been in the advanced stages of stomach cancer, so he must have been hiding extraordinary pain for a long time. He’d shown me no hint of it while he was staying with me. The end could have been much worse, but apparently God and his heart had decided that he’d had enough.
We had his funeral in Random. Most of the town came. My brother was there, and he and I spent a couple of awkward days together before he headed back to his latest job. After New Mexico, he’d gone to Oregon to work in the lumber mills. He was never going to settle down. The itinerant, Bob Dylan lifestyle suited him, going from place to place, making friends, sleeping with women, leaving them all behind. He had no interest in living in Random again, and he seemed to have no idea what to say to his pregnant sister. I loved my brother, but really, I hardly knew him. We’d spent very little time together. That one camping trip when I was ten years old is still the only real memory I have of us as a family.
My brother and I inherited my father’s house, but neither one of us was sentimental about keeping it. I wanted to stay where I was. So we sold it, and the deal went through quickly, because homes didn’t come up for sale in our area very often. Norm, jack-of-all-trades lawyer that he is, handled the closing and title work for us. Dad had been whittling away the mortgage on the house, so my brother and I came out of the sale with a reasonable amount of equity — enough to put me on solid financial footing for the first time in my life. I paid off my own little house, and I had enough in the bank that I didn’t cringe at the thought of my small paycheck.
All that activity took up most of the summer that year. Life settled into a routine, or at least as much routine as I could expect while I waited for you to join me in the fall. I did my job. I lived day to day. For a while, I stayed something of a recluse, but gradually, I let the town see me out and about again. Occasionally, I’d stop by the 126 and chat with Sandra and some of the other girls. Enough time had passed that they saw me not as a victim but as Rebecca Colder again, the girl they’d known their whole lives.