The Color of Heaven Series [02] The Color of Destiny

by Julianne MacLean

  “What’s the matter?”

  Of course he would know something was wrong. He could read my moods like no one else.

  “My period’s late,” I bluntly said.

  Glenn’s eyebrows pulled together. “How late? A few days?”

  I swallowed uneasily. “I’m not sure. I haven’t been keeping track, but I think it’s been at least seven weeks since the last one.”

  Glenn squeezed both my hands in his. “I thought we were being careful.”

  “We were,” I replied. “We didn’t take any chances last month. I don’t know how it could have happened.”

  His eyes lifted. “Maybe it didn’t. You said you weren’t keeping track, and you’re always late. Aren’t you?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s been a long time. Unusually long.”

  “Can we find out for sure?” he asked. “Can we get a test from the pharmacy? Or is it too early to tell?”

  There was no Internet back then, no way to Google the answer to a question like that.

  “I’m not sure. We should go at lunchtime and see what it says on the box. Do you have any money? I brought what I could. I have ten dollars.”

  “I have twenty. Will that cover it?”

  “I don’t know.” My heart was racing and I felt sick to my stomach.

  The bell rang. It was an abysmal sound because it meant we had to go to class and be apart until noon. How was I going to get through the morning?

  Chapter Sixteen

  WE BOUGHT THE pregnancy test during our lunch hour, and let me tell you, it was the most stressful thing I’d ever done. First we had to linger in the feminine products aisle, searching for the right box while keeping an eye out, hoping no one from school would come along and discover what we were looking for. It was a small town and there was no way to remain anonymous.

  When we found what we were looking for, Glenn agreed to take the box to the cashier while I discreetly slipped out to wait for him on the street corner.

  He handed me the plastic bag and I shoved it deep into my purse.

  “I’ll do it right after school,” I said.

  We were so shaken by the experience that we spoke not a single word on the way back to school.

  The bus ride home seemed to last forever. Thankfully, no one sat beside me, which was exactly how I wanted it, but it left me no choice but to stare out the window and imagine the worst-case scenario.

  If the test was positive, how would I ever find the courage to tell my parents? My father especially. What would they say? And what would they think of Glenn? No doubt, Dad would place all the blame on him. He had certainly warned me enough. ‘Boys that age are only after one thing...’

  I felt sick and nauseous at the mere thought of it. God, it was going to be rough. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What about the next nine months? I was in the tenth grade. What would my teachers think if I came to school with a belly the size of a basketball? I was a good student. A good girl. I couldn’t bear to imagine it.

  Two hours later, I stood in front of the mirrored medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom and read the test results.

  God help me.

  My knees buckled. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the fuzzy blue bathmat, staring dazed and wide eyed at that plastic white stick.

  No. It couldn’t be true. There had to be some mistake. I couldn’t possibly be pregnant. Not me.

  I dropped the stick on the floor, covered my face with both hands, and took a deep breath. I needed to think this through.

  Though I was in a state of shock and panic, I did not cry or fall to pieces. I remained outwardly calm and picked up the stick and the rest of the packaging – heaven forbid if my father should come in later and find it on the floor.

  Then I went quickly to my room to call Glenn.

  Glenn met me an hour later at the public park in town. He had biked all the way there and was out of breath and perspiring when he leaped off his bicycle. Pulling me into his arms, he said, “I love you, and no matter what happens, I’ll be right here beside you, and in front of you with a big stick if I have to be. Everything’s going to be okay. I promise. As long as we’re together, that’s all that matters.”

  In that moment I realized there was no ceiling on what existed between us. He was my partner, my dearest, most trusted friend, and we were in this together, come hell or high water. I believed him when he said he would be at my side, and that gave me the strength I needed to survive anything... everything that was about to come our way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE FIRST MATTER of business was to break the news to my parents. Maybe I should have told Mia first and asked for her advice, gained her support, but we had grown apart since Glenn and I started seeing each other. So, when it came time to sit down with Mom and Dad and spill the news onto the table like a heavy can of nails, I was on my own, with only Glenn at my side.

  “Mom. Dad. We have something to tell you.” My heart nearly burst out of my chest. After a brief pause, I said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Glenn squeezed my hand under the table.

  Mom and Dad stared at me in disbelief for a full ten seconds. They did not look at Glenn.

  “Are you sure?” Mom asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I took a test from the pharmacy.”

  “Have you been to see a doctor?” she asked.

  “No, not yet, but I don’t need to see anyone to know it’s true.”

  My father sat forward in his chair. “You can’t trust those over-the-counter tests,” he said. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “I’ll see one as soon as you want,” I replied, “but it won’t make any difference. I’ll still be pregnant.”

  No one said anything, and the silence had weight, like a giant sack of wet sand on my shoulders.

  Though my father was strict, I had never feared him before. Not until that moment when his eyes darkened with rage and his fists clenched and unclenched on top of the table.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” he said to Glenn. “Are you proud of this? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I love your daughter,” Glenn replied, “and I’m sorry for this. We didn’t plan for it to happen.”

  “Well, that’s obvious!” Dad shouted. “You didn’t plan for anything! You were reckless, selfish, and irresponsible! Just like your father.”

  Dad stood up and knocked his chair over onto the floor.

  Mom clasped his hand. “Please, Lester, sit down. Let’s hear them out. We need to decide what we’re going to do.”

  My blood grew hot and sped out of control through my veins. I was terrified Dad was going to leap across the table and beat Glenn to a pulp.

  At the same time, I was infuriated. Glenn and I were in love. He was nothing like his alcoholic father. It was my life, and I would run away and marry him before I would let my father separate us.

  To my immense relief, he sat back down and worked hard to calm himself. His chest heaved and a muscle twitched at his jaw, but he didn’t throw any punches.

  “How could this happen?” he asked.

  My mother covered his hand in hers. “I don’t think there’s any point in discussing that. We all know how it happened.”

  Her eyes bored into mine. I felt ashamed.

  “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” Mom asked. “I would have taken you to the doctor, Kate. We could have prevented this.”

  I lowered my gaze. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Well,” Dad said, “the whole town is going to know soon enough – when you’re walking around with a...” He stopped himself.

  The neighbor’s dog barked savagely outside at something. I wanted to run out the door and escape all of this.

  Glenn sat forward. “I want you to know that I love your daughter, and I’ll marry her tomorrow if it will make things right. I can increase my hours at the grocery store and support us.”

  A wave of love moved through me, a
nd I squeezed his hand.

  My father scoffed with derision. “If you think I’m going to let my daughter marry you, you have another think coming. And do you really believe you could support a family by packing groceries? Honest to God. You’ll ruin everyone’s lives, if you haven’t already.”

  “Dad!” I couldn’t let him talk to Glenn that way. “This is just as much my fault as it is his. You can’t blame him.”

  “I blame both of you,” Dad coldly spat.

  My heart broke at the sight of his disgust. I was no longer his smart, clever daughter. I was ruined. Dirty. Soiled by teenage sex. That’s what he thought. I could see it in his eyes.

  I had no idea what the law said about teenage marriage. I was only sixteen. Could we get a license without my father’s consent? I certainly hoped so, because that was all I wanted – to walk out of there with Glenn at my side and make our own way in the world. We could get an apartment and be together forever. We would be happy, loving parents. That’s what my heart wanted.

  Yet the sensible, more prudent side of my brain knew it could not be that easy. Glenn would have to quit school and so would I. He would never become a teacher. I wouldn’t go to college and enrol in a program I had yet to decide upon. I wasn’t stupid. I knew we would struggle financially, and those struggles would eventually bring stress down upon us. What if, down the road, Glenn grew to resent me for taking away all his choices?

  He had so much potential. We both did. I wanted us to be happy and fulfilled. Was any of that even possible if a teenage pregnancy shifted everything out of order, created chaos, and crushed all our dreams?

  I tried hard to think rationally, but in the end, all that mattered was my wild, mad love for Glenn. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, yet I had no real knowledge of the world outside my little bubble of romance. I didn’t know that disappointment and grief could become all consuming. I couldn’t comprehend how those feelings could cripple a person permanently and cast a shadow over an entire future.

  Unfortunately, in time, I would learn more than I ever wanted to know about that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IN THE DAYS following that dreadful conversation under the bright light at our kitchen table, my parents decided that my best option was to have an abortion. It was the only option, they said. Glenn and I weren’t capable of supporting a child. Clearly trying to do so would ruin our lives. They argued that with a baby, I wouldn’t be able to finish high school. Neither of us would go to college. My reputation would be ruined. The shame would be momentous, and that was a major factor in the decision. My father was an elementary school principal, and he dreamed of being superintendent of all schools eventually. He was ambitious. In those days, my scandalous pregnancy would ruin everything. We would be forced to move to another town and start over.

  Move? No, no, absolutely not. That was out of the question. Leave Glenn? I couldn’t imagine it. He was every breath in my body, the very life in my veins. Anything but that.

  So we would stay, my father said, as long as I agreed to the abortion, which would solve this problem. Rub it out as if it had never existed. ‘None of us would ever so much as mention it again,’ Dad said. We would put it behind us and move forward. Everything would return to normal.

  But was any of this normal? I asked myself as I got into the car to drive to the hospital on the day of the procedure. Would it be normal to pretend that something never happened when it did? Would it be normal to spend the rest of my life wondering what my child might have looked like? What he or she might have accomplished?

  What if I was purging a genius from my womb? What if this tiny embryo might grow up to discover a cure for cancer?

  All these questions spun around in my brain like a tornado, and I could barely think straight. What I needed was time. Time to make a decision, to explore what was important to me, but my parents had convinced me there was no time to think. If I was going to have the abortion, I needed to have it right away, or it would be too late. I was pushed and shoved and pressured into believing that it was the right decision. I was not given the chance to listen to my own heart.

  Then, just as we were backing out of the driveway, Mia hopped into the back seat of the car beside me. “I’m coming with you,” she said. She sat next to me in silence, then took my hand and looked me straight in the eye with an intensity I had not seen before.

  Chapter Nineteen

  LOOKING BACK ON that day, I will always wish I had been stronger, more decisive, and not so easily influenced by what my parents wanted, for I had allowed them to talk me into something I was not comfortable with. The only reason I have forgiven myself is because I was so young, and I had been brought up in a home where my father set the rules, and we were expected to obey them.

  He did not come with us to the clinic that day. I believe as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, he considered the problem dealt with. But he was unaware of the turmoil in my heart, which could not be dealt with so easily.

  I sat in the waiting room staring at the posters on the walls. One explained the importance of prenatal vitamins. Another showed a mother in a rocking chair, bottle-feeding her baby and looking wonderfully fulfilled.

  Magazines were stacked tidily on the tables, but I couldn’t read because I felt nauseous – especially when my gaze fell upon the pregnant woman sitting across from us. She must have been in her last trimester because she was as big as a barn. I watched her rub her hand in graceful, soothing circles over her belly.

  My nausea was mostly a result of morning sickness, but it was intensified by stress and the unthinkable fact that I was about to have my womb scraped clean.

  I couldn’t figure out how my mother could sit calmly in the chair next to me, reading a mystery novel, as if we were there for a routine flu shot.

  Mia sat on the other side of me, chewing gum. “Are you okay?” she quietly asked.

  I swallowed hard, to keep my breakfast down. “Not really.”

  “You don’t look so good. Are you going to be sick?”

  I didn’t want to open my mouth to speak, so I simply nodded.

  With impressive authority, Mia stood. “Come with me. The washroom is this way.”

  My mother looked up from her novel.

  “She’s not feeling well,” Mia explained. “I’m taking her to the bathroom.”

  I felt everyone’s eyes follow me – and judge me – as we hurried down the hall. By now the situation was urgent and I pushed through the door, not even bothering to turn on the lights before I bent over the toilet and retched up the contents of my stomach. Only vaguely was I aware of Mia flicking on the fluorescent lights, closing and locking the door behind us, and holding back my hair.

  I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, so I was cursed with a violent spell of dry heaves. When I finished, Mia pulled a tissue from the box on the back of the toilet and handed it to me. I used it to wipe the tears from my eyes and blow my nose.

  “Feel any better?” she asked.

  I nodded, then closed the lid on the toilet and sat down. I rested my elbows on my knees, my forehead on the heels of my hands.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Mia asked.

  I looked up at her. “Do I have a choice? I’m sixteen and pregnant.”

  “You do have a choice,” she said. “It’s your body.”

  “But I already agreed to this. I told Dad –”

  “It doesn’t matter what you told Dad,” she firmly said. “You can change your mind if you want to. I just don’t want you to have any regrets.”

  She backed up against the door while I stood to splash water on my face. I pulled a square of paper towel from the dispenser, and patted my mouth dry.

  “What does Glenn think?” she asked.

  “He feels the same way I do.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Lost. Uncertain.” I dried my hands, crumpled up the paper towel, and threw it into the trashcan. “But he said he’d support me, no matter w
hat I decided.”

  “Even if you decided to keep the baby?” she asked.

  I looked at her directly. “Yes. He said he’d marry me tomorrow if that’s what I wanted.”

  “Is it?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “Part of me does. My heart wants it, but my head tells me it would be a mistake to rush into something like that. I do want to marry him, but we’re too young. I’m afraid of how it could turn out. And Dad is right about one thing. We couldn’t support ourselves, and I don’t want to hold Glenn back. He wants to go to college, and so do I. I don’t want him to be a grocery store clerk for the rest of his life. And when we have a child, I want to bring that child up right.” I laid a hand on my belly. “Maybe I’m too practical, but I don’t believe that love is enough. It might be at first, but I’m afraid all the hardships and money problems will eventually chip away at our love, and we’ll grow to hate each other. Then we’ll get a messy divorce and our kid will be totally screwed up.”

  I turned to look at myself in the mirror. “God, I’m a mess.” I was the color of wet cement in a bucket.

  “It’s stress,” Mia said. She unzipped her purse. “Here, put on some lip gloss. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “Really?” I replied skeptically. Only Mia could suggest that lip gloss could cure the woes of a pregnant teenager.

  When we returned to the waiting room, Mom looked up from her book. “What took you so long?”

  “What’s the matter?” Mia asked. “Were you afraid she changed her mind and tried to climb out the bathroom window?”

  “That’s not funny, Mia.”

  Just then, a nurse with a clipboard entered the waiting area. “Kate Worthington?”

  “She’s right here,” Mom said, stuffing her book into her purse and rising to her feet.

  She followed me toward the door that led to the examination rooms, but I stopped and turned to face her. “I can do this myself.”