Rain Shadow (26 page)

“I have a creed, too: Don’t expect someone else to fix your
woundedness. They can’t and it isn’t fair. Even though my wife lef
t
m
e
there are things I have to figure out before involving someone else. I need time to do that.”

On the drive home, Taylor thought about Jacob’s creed. Even though his words hurt they felt strangely affirming. Perhaps relationships, more than anything else in life, needed an honoring creed to navigate by.



Chapter 34

A

s surely as the sun rose in the sky each morning since the abortion, Taylor had known the moment would eventually
come. Avoiding internet websites and anything baby related did not
protect her. Rather, an unexpected friend unknowingly insisted she revisit the past. With heart racing, she watched Jennie smile and flip the large laminated pages at the front of the classroom.

“Fourteen weeks is an exciting time, guys. Your babies are all about the size of your clenched fist. Actually, they can clench their own fists now and even suck their thumbs.”

“How cute is that?” Melissa whispered. She elbowed Taylor and put a hand on her stomach.

“Is it possible to know what sex they are?”

Amanda, pregnant with number four, was hoping for a girl. She smiled and added, “We’ll be happy with another boy, of course.”

Jennie grinned back. “Yes, your babies all have sex organs. They are growing hair on their heads and making faces. They can express themselves and make all sorts of movements, though you won’t feel it yet. When I was pregnant with my third … ”

Taylor looked around the room, desperate for something else to focus
on. She wanted to sprint out of the room, far away from the happy couples and smiley Jennie who used cloth diapers on her children and home-schooled so she could spend more time with them. They would all hate her if they knew the truth, that she had laid on a table at week fourteen and allowed a stranger to remove her thumb-sucking baby.

She hadn’t intended to wait so long. The pregnancy counselor said the first trimester was the best time for the abortion yet somehow she failed to show up for the scheduled appointment. Instead, she’d concealed her morning sickness with complaints about the flu and lay in bed for over a week listening to Anthony cough in the next bedroom and avoiding conversation with her father. Certainly Ian would call, she believed. He’d realize he had chosen the wrong girl and remember all the things they had in common: an adopted sibling, an intense love for the ocean, and eating Indian food. Not to mention a baby. Surely those things meant something. He would miss her and know, in the way all lover
s
kne
w
, that they were meant to be together.

At week thirteen Taylor got out of bed and opened her underwear drawer. She dug under the bras for the dirty wad of bills kept together by an elastic band. Ian’s goodbye gift. She called the clinic in a sudden panic, afraid that it was too late. 

“We can’t get you in again until next week, which puts you,” the receptionist rustled some papers, “at week fourteen.”

“Can you still do it?”

“Terminate the pregnancy? Of course. It’s a common procedure called a ‘D and E’—dilation and evacuation. We have to do it in two
steps now, though. You’ll need to come in prior to the actual procedure.”

The wor
d
procedur
e
seemed so mild and ordinary. Lots of things were procedures: getting braces, a real estate license, making a perfect latte. The tiny fetus with movement, fingers, and a gender portrayed on Jennie’s full color poster did not strike Taylor as part of any common procedure.

“Are you paying attention? When we get to the breathing/coaching part in a few months you better be taking some serious notes.”

“I’m not feeling so well … I gotta go.” Taylor rose from the chair and threaded her way to the front of the room.

“Everything okay?” Jennie paused in the middle of answering a question about ultrasound safety.

“Not really,” Taylor grasped the cool metal of the door knob and steadied herself. “I don’t feel well. Something I ate … ”

“Sorry. See you next month then?”

Taylor didn’t answer. She stumbled out of the classroom and nearly ran to her car.

All the way home emotions gained momentum, swirling into a tornado that instantly transported her to the past. Before Ian, before the abortion, she prided herself on being a girl without drama. Not like so many girls she knew who were addicted to the details of romance and jealous friendships and seemed to enjoy navigating life like it was a stupid reality show. She’d learned her mother’s lessons well: feelings were a private matter and their display a shameful thing. No tears. Not even when she’d fallen, face down, on a concrete sidewalk outside the condo when she was five years old.

It had been a cold day. Taylor could still remember the circumstances
in detail. Instead of holding her mother’s hand, she’d stuffed her hands inside her coat pockets for warmth. She scuffed at the slick winter crystals that sparkled over the sidewalk’s hard surface, oblivious to her mother’s quick steps in front of her. The ripple of broken concrete ahead had escaped her, its edge catching her toe as she shuffled along, lost in a crisp winter wonderland. With her hands secured deep inside fleece pockets, nothing stopped the forward sprawl when she tripped. She still remembered her front teeth driving into her lower lip as her chin hit the unforgiving gritty, cold surface, and the salty metallic taste of blood that filled her mouth.

Even with blood spilling from a split lip and broken nose it had not occurred to her to cry
.
No sense in crying over what’s already been done
.
Calmly she accepted her mother’s hand and the cloth held to her face as onlookers gasped.

“Not even a tear,” her mother said. And Taylor felt pride, warm as an embrace, wrap around her.

Since the abortion something had happened. Something unsettling. It reminded Taylor of a certain movie that depicted a broken submarine and crew of men trapped at the bottom of the ocean. As the men watched in agony, screws on the bulging metal ceiling of the leaking vessel began to loosen from the pressure outside. The cameras focused, close-up, on a thin trickle of water that leaked around the screw heads. Dramatic music built into a crescendo as the water turned into a steady stream and the metal gave way in a screeching rush.

That’s what she was doing, giving way. What began as a trickle with her arrival in Washington turned into a stream when Melissa became
pregnant. Her metal could not hold on much longer.



Chapter 35

I

nstead of drowning the feelings with several beers, Taylor walked outside the cottage and across the street to the cemetery. She meandered a path around the grave sites, pausing to read the inscriptions, examine the flower vases and balloons adorning specific headstones, and ponder dates of death. Many had been pioneers to the area, their
names etched into history by the naming of nearby county roads: Bowerson,
Steadman, Olesen.

Taylor continued her stroll through the cemetery and silently figured up the ages of the deceased—ten, thirty-one, eighty-nine, two, seventeen. She saw graves with pictures, and homemade markers, graves planted with rose bushes, peonies, and lilacs. Some had special verses or phrases. Her favorite was written under the photo of a portly grandfather wearing a baseball cap and a warm smile. His hand rested on the head of a black Lab
.
Husband, father, grandfather, friend. You are deeply loved and greatly missed.

The graves of children were equally scattered among those of adults and the elderly. One simply read “Baby” on a small headstone dwarfed next to a huge stone marking a family plot as “Roman.” Taylor touched the crumbling stone, picking at the moss imbedded in the crevasses, and tried in vain to make out the dates of birth and death.

In the few months she’d lived in the cottage, Taylor had watched the practice of grieving with a growing interest. Some people knelt by
the graves, others sat in cars, some released balloons on important anniversaries,
some came and left quickly leaving behind small tokens of their thoughts: shells, stones, coins. A key chain with a football. Rituals and gifts meant to honor the lives and spirits of the dead. What did the living hope to get by returning to the past? Closeness? A whispered message they prayed God would deliver to their loved one?

Near the back Taylor paused at a newer headstone and read the inscription
:
Jack Colton Smith, lived and died on May 1, 2010. At rest in the Lord’s arms.

No matter the length of Jack’s small life he had been given a name. And a tiny toy fire truck. Taylor picked up the small vehicle perched under the stone and just as quickly replaced it fearing her touch violated something private and deeply personal. Remembrance was a powerful thing, honoring and sacred.

She thought of her father visiting Anthony’s grave, each side guarded
by a newly planted Mister Lincoln. The roses would bloom every year, delicate crimson velvet unfolding in a wave of perfume, each blossom as sweet and fragile as the boy they remembered. 

In a sudden rush her deepest emotions broke free and tears flooded
Taylor’s eyes. She fell to her knees beside little Jack’s grave and for the first time allowed herself to imagine the daughter she would never know. She would have been dark-haired, Taylor felt certain, and perhaps have inherited Ian’s cleft in the chin and her own smallish ears. She would love horses. Taylor lay on her back, grass tickling her neck, and stared into the cloudless sky overhead.

Savannah.

The name came to her clearly as if spoken out loud in a mysterious eternity. It whispered of sun and smiles and tall grasses dancing in warm summer breezes. Taylor nodded silently and bit her lip until she tasted blood.

At that moment the crunch of tires on gravel brought her back to the present. Taylor at once rolled to her side and sat up. She brushed her hair back and wiped the tears racing past her cheek bones. The car parked and two women got out. They began walking her way and Taylor’s heart thumped in her chest. Jack’s mother, perhaps? What would they think of a stranger sitting by his grave crying like a fool? She scrambled to her feet just as the women gave her a curious stare and turned in the opposite direction. They approached another grave and stood with their backs to her.

Taylor relaxed. She picked at the grass and dirt on her knees while observing the strangers. She heard soft voices. One of the women bent over and deposited something near the stone. When she stood her companion put an arm around her and they stood in silence, heads bowed and touching in shared sorrow. Were they praying?

As she watched Taylor felt the strong fingers of guilt squeeze what was left of her heart. She didn’t deserve comfort or even the solitary rituals of grief. Not for a child for whom there were no memories. 

You are deeply loved and greatly misse
d
. Taylor hoped that, somehow, Savannah was “at rest in the Lord’s arms.” 

Overhead an eagle floated on an up current, its bald head clearly visible against a backdrop of cloudless sky. As she left the cemetery, Taylor watched the bird drift effortlessly over the pine trees toward the snowy peak of Mt. Baker and disappear into an endless blue horizon.

~ ~~

Rain watched, head over the gate, as Taylor walked toward the cottage. Instead of turning the door knob and disappearing into the bliss of a six pack of beer, she went to the horse.

Taylor stroked the mare’s face, fingers tracing the long scar over her eye socket. She felt her breaths coming fast and shallow as she waged an internal battle for self control. Rain shifted and bumped Taylor’s arm. She bobbed her head and moved off, stopping a few feet away to observe from a distance.

“
Horses value congruency
.
”

“I’m no good to be around right now, Rain, I know. There’s nothing anyone can do for me.”

At that moment her cell phone buzzed in a back pocket. Without thinking, Taylor picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Are you okay?”

Melissa’s voice sounded husky and concerned. Taylor’s response was automatic. “I’m fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“Uh … ” Taylor glanced at Rain, “just taking my horse for a little ride. Nice day and all.”

“I thought you were sick.”

Taylor felt her face flush even though no one was around to see her caught in a lie. In the space of a couple hours she’d blanked out the birthing class entirely. Her frazzled mind scrambled at an explanation.

“I … ”