“Everything went fine. All the tests from Orlando came back okay, and he basically gave me a clean bill of health.”
He gave her a hug. “Oh, that’s great, honey. I’m so glad that’s over with. Are you doing okay?” He held her away from himself and looked into her eyes.
She opened her mouth to tell him about the unexpected pregnancy test, but he looked so hopeful and things felt so close between them that she hated to ruin the mood. Instead, she gave him a smile and drew his arms back around her, snuggling into his warmth.
They were in the middle of supper when the phone rang. Anna had almost put the test out of her mind, but before she picked up the phone, she remembered and knew that this would be the lab.
“Anna?”
It was Dr. Blakeman’s voice. An alarm went off somewhere inside her head.
“Yes. This is Anna.”
“Anna. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Is someone there with you?”
“Yes. Paul’s here…” Her mouth went dry and cottony, and her words trailed off weakly.
“Anna, the pregnancy test came back positive. The first one we did this morning turned out positive, and I thought it must be a mix-up. But now the new test is reading positive as well. There’s always a chance it could still be a mistake, but I’d like to see you in my office just to confirm this one way or another.”
“But…what…what are you saying? Are you saying I’m…pregnant?”
“Well, like I said, I’d like to see you so we can be sure. But yes… That’s what the tests are indicating.”
The room began spinning. She held the phone out and croaked Paul’s name.
He rushed to her side and took the receiver from her hand. She slumped into a kitchen chair as the buzzing in her head drowned out Paul’s murmured conversation with Dr. Blakeman.
Chapter 8
On Thursday morning, for the second time in as many days, Anna sat in Dr. Blakeman’s waiting room. This time Paul was at her side. Neither of them had slept last night, and yet in all the hours of tossing and turning and pacing the floor, they had not been able to talk about the shadow looming over them.
Paul was taking the attitude that they would deal with it when they knew for certain that it was a fact. Anna was too shaken to have any attitude at all. She now knew the meaning of the old cliche: it was all like a bad dream. Only she hadn’t slept, so there would be no awakening from this nightmare.
After an interminable wait, they were ushered into an examination room. The nurse handed Anna a flimsy hospital gown and asked Paul to wait outside.
Dr. Blakeman examined her in silence while a nurse stood at her side, offering to hold her hand. Anna was too numb to voice any of the questions that catapulted through her mind. She barely remembered getting dressed and being led with Paul to the doctor’s private office, but now they sat in front of his desk in large upholstered chairs, fingers entwined, exchanging pained glances. But they sat in silence.
Ten minutes later, Dr. Blakeman opened the door and made his way to the swivel chair behind his desk. He settled into his chair with the labored breathing and heavy sigh of a harried and troubled man. He looked at the open folder in front of him as though it were a script that would give him the words to say.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t look good,” he said finally. “It’s very early to be seeing any obvious symptoms of a pregnancy, but my examination does confirm what the tests are telling us. And since Paul had the vasectomy, let’s see”—he leafed through the folder—“seven years ago, almost eight, I think you know what that means. There are tests we could do to verify paternity, but they’re expensive, and they take sometimes weeks to get results. I assume you’d like to take care of this as soon as possible, and from a medical point of view, that would, of course, be in your best interest, Anna.”
He rested his elbows on the desk in front of him, hands clasped, his index fingers forming a steeple. He studied them for a minute, and when he spoke again, his voice was so quiet Anna had to strain to hear his words. “I’ll be honest with you. In twenty-two years of practicing medicine, this is the first time I have ever been faced with a situation like this. I don’t know what your views are on abortion. Ordinarily, I’m opposed to it, but if ever there were a case where it would be justified––”
Why was he talking about abortion? Anna couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She squeezed Paul’s hand and tried to make sense of what the doctor was saying.
Dr. Blakeman cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, we’re too close to the cutoff for me to feel completely comfortable with the abortion pill option… While I don’t perform abortions myself, I can refer you to someone right here in the clinic who does. This early on, it would be a fairly simple procedure––done on an outpatient basis. You would be back home in a few hours. Within a week, ten days, you should feel pretty much back to normal. It may take your menstrual cycle a while to regulate itself, but you should feel up to doing just about anything you usually do within a week or so.”
Dr. Blakeman paused and looked directly at Anna. “If you should decide to abort the pregnancy, I would want to do a careful medical history on you, Anna—especially if there is any history of breast cancer in your family. You may be aware that studies have shown a possible link between abortion and breast cancer. It’s a controversial topic, and of course there’s some risk involved in carrying a pregnancy to term at your age, but we would need to weigh those risks, and I think it only fair that you be made aware of the risks with both factors.”
In stunned silence, Anna listened to the verdict, listened to the offered solution. It didn’t seem possible this could be happening to them. This was the stuff magazine articles were made of. This was a hypothetical question in one of Anna’s situational ethics classes. It didn’t happen to real people. Certainly not to them.
Paul had let go of her hand when Dr. Blakeman came into the room. Now he reached for it again. He cleared his throat. “This is too much for us to deal with right now. We…we’re going to have to go home and talk this over…think it through before we make any decisions.” He stood and pulled Anna up beside him. Then turning back to the doctor in a last plea for hope, he asked, “You’re sure there could be no mistake about this?”
“You mean about the existence of a pregnancy?”
Paul nodded.
“No, there’s no mistake. We can run the test one more time if you want us to. I understand your wanting to be absolutely certain. But the test is rarely falsely positive. The due date would be December 13.”
Anna sat stunned. Hearing that date––a due date––made it all too real. By Christmas––if they didn’t do something––they would have a baby. She would have a baby.
“I know it must seem unbelievable to both of you at this point,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry, but…” He shrugged, apparently at a loss for any words that would offer them any comfort.
Paul rose and offered his outstretched hand, but Anna could tell it was taking everything he had to compose himself. “Thank you,” he said. “We…we’ll let you know what we decide.”
Dr. Blakeman opened the door for them, and they walked down the long corridor to the outer waiting room, Paul’s arm protectively around her. She bent her head to hide the tears.
They drove the short distance home in silence. But when they pulled into their driveway, she crumbled. “What are we going to do, Paul? I don’t understand why this is happening. Haven’t we been through enough already? Why us? How could God do this to us?” Her voice climbed a pitch with each question.
Paul put the car in park, reaching for her across the console. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t know… All I know is that I would do anything to have spared you this whole ordeal. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’ll get through this somehow…somehow together, with God’s help, we’ll get through it. I promise you that.” He held her head against his chest and stroked her hair away from her face.
Anna felt stronger in his
arms, but–– If Paul didn’t know how they would get through it, any hope she’d had earlier dissipated like morning mist.
They went through the motions that night—fixing sandwiches for supper, cleaning up the kitchen together, watching the news, getting ready for bed. They ate little, spoke little, and touched often, taking comfort in each other’s very presence. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between them that the time for talking would make itself known, and until then they would hang on to a thread of hope so thin it didn’t seem capable of holding one of them, let alone both.
After she’d washed her face and brushed her teeth, Anna walked through the rooms of their house in her nightgown and robe. Everything was so sweetly familiar to her tonight––the round oak table that had belonged to her grandparents. The pillows on the sofa, painstakingly embroidered in shades of pink and deep rose by Paul’s mother. The clock—a wedding gift—sounding its comforting cadence on the mantel. This little house on Fairmont Avenue in their quiet Chicago neighborhood had always been a haven from the storms of life. Even after they’d come home from Orlando and the horror that had happened there, after that first week of fearfulness, she had felt enveloped once again by the safety of this home and the people who came and went from here.
Was there finally an intruder so evil, so horrible that it could penetrate not only this house, but her very body?
Shivering, she walked through the house and checked all the locks, turned out the lights, then went back to their bedroom. Paul was already in bed, propped on pillows against the headboard. He turned down the blankets on her side of the bed and patted the place where she usually lay.
“Come here.”
She turned off the lights, leaving the room in the dim glow of Paul’s reading lamp. She crawled into bed, found the cradle of her husband’s shoulder, and there the words began to flow—a trickle at first, building word on thought on emotion. But then they came in a rush, like the breaking of a dam.
“Are you okay?” How many hundred times had he asked her that question in the past weeks?
She shook her head against his chest. “It’s not real to me yet, Paul. I think I’m in shock. I don’t… I don’t feel pregnant.”
“Have you thought at all about what Dr. Blakeman was suggesting?”
“You mean…abortion?” She could barely bring herself to whisper the word.
“I’d want to do some research before I looked at it that way.” He rubbed his temples.
“It’s strange…” She bit her lip. “It’s always seemed like…such a horrible thing. I mean we’ve talked about it so many times––in church, with the girls––how wrong it is. It’s always seemed like such a drastic decision. But… I don’t know…”
“I’ll be honest, babe. I can’t imagine any other option at this point. I just keep thinking that this could all be over…we could go forward from here.”
She nodded. “I know. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to face anything else. But…we’ve always said we were against it. We’ve preached to the girls about how immoral it is…the easy way out and all that. Maybe if I felt pregnant I wouldn’t be saying this, but …” She hesitated. What she was about to say seemed heretical. “Is there anything there yet, Paul? I mean, is it really… a baby this early?”
“He’s probably right, honey. If we take care of it right away, it’s easier all the way around.”
Anna started crying then. “Paul, listen to us. Have we been wrong in our view of abortion all these years? Have we been judgmental all along? Are we seeing a new side to this that’s really changing our minds? Or are we just justifying what would be the easy way out of this? I’m so confused.” She buried her face in her hands.
“Okay.”
Paul’s voice took on a no-nonsense tenor. He was an executive in control of a meeting now. And she needed his clear, analytical thinking.
“Let’s at least lay all the options on the table,” he said. “We—you could have the abortion, and it’ll all be over and done with, and this time next month our lives will be relatively back to normal. No one would need to know. That’s one option.”
“Or we can carry this through,” he continued. “Maybe you will miscarry, Anna. That surely could happen with all the stress you’ve been under. Maybe we should pray for that.”
“Paul, that just sounds awful to pray for something like that!”
“I know. I know.” He held his palms toward her in a posture of apology. “I’m sorry, Anna, but I…Anna, I just can’t picture a baby at the end of all this. I’m sorry. I just cannot.” His voice had risen, but now it was a whisper. “Especially not another man’s baby…especially not that.”
“Oh, Paul. I can’t blame you for that. I don’t blame you.”
“And what if there’s something genetic that caused that man to…attack you? Could we be bringing something even more evil into the world?”
She hadn’t thought of that. Was there such a thing as a “bad seed”? She didn’t know.
They lay together in silence, utterly exhausted. They hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time since Orlando. And now they seemed to be going around in circles. Every thought they gave voice to brought them back to where they’d started.
Paul reached up and switched off his reading lamp. “Anna, we can’t make a decision like this overnight. And right now we’re trying to think clearly on virtually no sleep. We can’t rush into anything, and neither of us is in any shape to think straight right now, let alone make a decision of this magnitude. We’ll do the right thing. That’s all I can promise you. We’ll do the right thing,” he said again, as if saying it might guarantee its truth.
“Paul, please pray for me. I’ve…I’ve tried to pray since we left the doctor’s office, but I can’t seem to. It’s not that I’m mad at God. At least I don’t think I blame Him for any of this. But I just can’t pray. I know I need to, but I can’t. I… I don’t know where God is in all this… It almost seems like this is too…ugly for Him to hear.”
The tears came again. And as she wept, she could feel Paul’s chest heave in grief beneath her. Her hot tears fell on his bare skin, but he held her tightly to him, and she somehow knew that he was praying as he had never prayed before.
Chapter 9
They slept fitfully until Paul’s alarm jangled them awake at seven. It was Friday, and Paul offered to stay home from work, but Anna couldn’t ask that of him when he’d missed so many days of work already, staying home while she was recovering from Orlando, then accompanying her to the doctor yesterday. He couldn’t very well offer an honest explanation to the agency either. He’d given them a vague excuse, using Anna’s doctor’s appointments as his reason.
She knew he was behind on some important projects at work, and besides, they had the weekend ahead of them. Besides, she needed some time alone to sort things out. She hushed his protests and kissed him goodbye as cheerfully as she could manage.
She stacked the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher and poured herself a second cup of coffee. She carried it into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The sunlight was so beautiful this time of morning, filtering through the layers of lace at the front windows. She’d always loved this room, filled with wonderful reminders of her family. She had known such happiness in her life. Was it all about to end? To crumble around her?
Her thoughts turned back to her conversation with Paul the night before. If only she could talk to someone else. Someone who wasn’t emotionally involved in their situation. But if they decided to go through with the abortion, she knew they would never tell anyone. They would never speak of it again. And that was part of the horror of even considering such a solution.
Oh, how she hated secrets. All her life, even happy secrets––like surprise birthday parties or Christmas gifts––had made her feel on edge, afraid she would slip and reveal too much. She hated feeling she had to carefully measure every word she spoke. Yet this was certainly not the kind of thing you told. Even their own d
aughters must not know if they decided to go through with it. How hypocritical would this be, after all their moralizing and lectures.
But there were no other choices! She was forty-five years old. Even if she could go through the pregnancy at her age, this child would not belong to Paul. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to even think of her bearing a child like that. Who knew what kind of person it might turn out to be? She’d searched the internet this morning, typing in the phrase: Is criminal behavior hereditary? What she’d found left her more frightened and confused than ever.
What about adoption? That was something they hadn’t talked about yet. But they’d have to reveal the truth about the baby’s…heritage. Wouldn’t they? Would anyone want the child of a rapist? Were such babies adoptable? But even if they were, she couldn’t go through a pregnancy here. She would have to go into exile. She simply could not face her friends, her classmates at the university, people at their church, her parents… Oh, dear God, her parents!
They’d decided not to tell Anna’s parents about the rape. Jack and Charlotte Greyson lived two hours from Chicago. They were retired but healthy and active. Her parents were dear to her, but her mother was such a worrier, and she had her hands full caring for her own mother who was ninety-six and in frail health. Anna hadn’t felt anything would be gained by telling them.
They’d told very few people of the attack. The girls, of course, and Paul’s mother. Anna was very close to her mother-in-law, seeing her as a friend more than a mother figure. Even so, they hadn’t even intended to tell even her. But Shirley Marquette had stopped by for an unexpected visit a few days after the attack, and of course there had to be an explanation for Anna’s bruises and bandages. In the end, they’d told her everything, and Anna was glad her mother-in-law knew. Shirley had been unwavering in her support at a time when Anna needed that strength desperately. But Shirley would never understand the unspeakable thing they were actually considering now. No. If they did this thing, no one could ever know. No one.
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