And then, though it was a little embarrassing, I talked about dealing with some of the temptations all single guys face.
She listened quietly, asked a few questions, but didn’t act as if any of this was a big surprise. And then she told me about how she wasn’t really good with money and had built up almost twenty thousand dollars of credit card debt and how she hated housework and sometimes got panic attacks when she was really stressed.
The trail ended.
She’d tried to commit suicide twice in high school; she told me that too. And after a long pause, she added that she wasn’t able to have any more children.
Then we were both silent.
I got the impression she wasn’t finished sharing, so I waited for her to speak. After walking about a hundred meters she suggested we backtrack and as we turned around she said, “I never told you about when I was pregnant with Tessa. Maybe I should have.”
We came to an overlook, but she kept walking.
“I was nineteen when I found out I was expecting. I was scared and single, and I wasn’t in love with her father.” She paused, then added, “And I was ashamed too. My parents didn’t take sex outside of marriage lightly. At the time I didn’t understand their point of view. Since then, well…”
She didn’t need to elaborate; I knew she was a strong believer, a woman unashamed of her faith and her Lord, and from the very beginning of our relationship, she’d wanted us to remain, as she put it, “chaste.” I’d respected her convictions, although it hadn’t made for an easy couple of months.
“In any case”-she’d stopped hiking now and was looking at the way the trail curved to the east-“I took a long time to decide. But finally, I made an appointment at the clinic: 10:00 a.m. and I even arrived early.”
She was staring past me, toward a horizon that lay hidden and out of sight beyond the trees.
“While I was waiting, I started paging through the magazines that were piled on the table between the chairs and as I flipped through them, I started noticing all these ads for laundry detergent and Kool-Aid and vacations at Disneyland. And every ad seemed to have a child in it: holding up a dirty sock, drinking from a Dixie cup, riding down a water slide, but they didn’t seem like advertisements for those things anymore. They seemed like ads for kids.”
I listened quietly. Took her hand. She curled her fingers around mine.
“I started thinking about all the things a mom deals with-the diapers and the colic and the sleepless nights, the loneliness and the sacrifices. But then, the other things too: seeing my baby walk for the first time, birthday parties, dropping her off on the first day of school, helping her pick out a prom dress.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “We can talk about this some other time.”
A tear formed in her eye, and she smoothed it away. “I couldn’t do it, Pat. I couldn’t go through with it. I went back to my apartment-I took that magazine with me. And then, since I was due in the fall, I canceled my college enrollment and started working fulltime to earn enough money to have the baby.” She paused. “It was always just… We never had a lot.”
“I know.”
Christie had never finished college, never owned a home, always worked two jobs. By her tone of voice I could tell she wasn’t complaining, but I could also tell how profoundly her choice to have Tessa had changed the entire course of her life. “You gave up a lot,” I said softly.
“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Until the first time I held Tessa in my arms.”
By the time we found the trail twenty minutes later, I’d decided that I would ask Christie Rose Ellis to marry me as soon as I’d picked out a ring.
As a young woman she’d been scared and alone and desperate but had still found the resolve to give up her dreams and pour them into someone else. And she’d done it for fifteen years, even though it had never been easy. A woman who would do that was a woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
As it turned out, though, we only had a few more months together.
Yet, even when she was dying she never told me the name of Tessa’s father. She just told me that he was no longer a part of their lives. “You have to trust me on this, Pat, please. It’s best for everyone if he just remains a part of the past.”
That was all.
And up until fifteen minutes ago when Tessa showed me Paul’s letter, that had been enough.
But now, it no longer seemed like it was.
Steven James
The Knight
86
Tessa lay on her bed, curled on her side.
She’d stopped crying for the moment, but the pain inside of her was as sharp and real as ever. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mom’s decision to abort her and she couldn’t stop thinking about what happens in abortions. She wished she could just think about it all in the safe, innocuous terms people use: of “terminating a pregnancy” by “having a procedure” to “remove a fetus.” But when you know what happens, what really happens, you can’t help but hurt, can’t help but feel.
Especially when you find out those things were going to happen to you.
For a long, teetering moment she wrestled with the urge to get out a razor blade and slice at the emotions pulsing just beneath her skin, but finally, she pulled out her notebook instead, and as soon as her pen touched the paper, the words spilled out. i float in stillness the black before-life life. somewhere, a heartbeat comforts me; and i sleep in the sweet, promising riddle of time. but silence and sirens wrap their arms around me, whispers of knives and needles seep into my skin; and in the end, nothing remains except the echoes, of a fledgling soul dropping alone into the belly of the day.
Tessa looked at the words, scratched a few out, tinkered with a couple of the lines, and it felt good to write. Good to get the harsh images out of her mind.
But even that didn’t make the pain go away.
She set the notebook aside and picked up the diary. Stared at it.
OK. So her mom had eventually changed her mind and had her baby. Great. Wonderful. But she hadn’t wanted to deliver her, that was the point, and Tessa just couldn’t deal with the thought of reading even one more word about how much her mom hated the idea of having her in her life.
She targeted the trash can on the other side of the room and launched the diary into it, where it bounced to the bottom with a thick, angry thud.
Then she pulled out the razor blade she kept hidden in her purse. She hadn’t self-inflicted in a long time, but it always seemed to help. At least a little.
She rolled up her sleeve, revealing the row of thin, two-inch-long scars on her forearm. She placed the blade against her arm, just below the lowest scar.
Stared at it.
She knew that cutting was just a way of exchanging one pain for another, of course she knew that, but at least it would get her mind off the diary, at least it was something she could do.
And so she did.
87
“Patrick,” my mother said. “You really need to leave for your flight.”
Over the last few minutes as I’d thought about Christie, I’d managed to put the case out of my mind, but when my mother said those words, it all came back: the whispering voices, Basque’s trial and all the blood and all the bodies.
“Patrick,” she said again.
“I know.”
My flight left in less than an hour.
I put a call through to United Airlines but found out that all the flights for the rest of the day were already overbooked. Even with my FBI clearance they weren’t able to get me a seat.
My mother watched me hang up the phone. “Tessa needs me here,” I said. “I’m not going to leave her.”
“I’ll take care of her. It might be better, considering… I just mean that since I’m a woman, she might feel more comfortable.. .”
“I understand, but-”
“It’s OK.” It was Tessa’s voice, at the bottom of the stairs. “You can go, Patrick. I’m fine.”