by Steven James
– Paul
Tessa did not breathe for a long time. She let her eyes walk through the words two, three times.
All of her life she had hated her father, had thought that he didn’t want anything to do with her. So now, even though the main intent of the letter should have probably struck her the most, her initial reaction was shock that her biological father, her real father, had wanted to be part of her life.
His name is Paul.
Your dad’s name is Paul. And he wanted to help raise you.
But then the deeper, more obvious impact of the words settled in.
“Please don’t do this…” he’d written. “I’m the father.”
“I’ll do whatever you want-pay the medical bills, help raise the baby, find someone to adopt it, but please don’t do this.”
“No…” she whispered. “Oh, please no.”
“Keep our baby.”
The truth slammed into her.
Harsh and brutal.
Her mother, the person Tessa had loved and trusted more than anyone else on the planet, had wanted to abort her and her father, the man she’d always hated, had begged to save her life.
83
Everything Tessa had believed about her mother and her father, all of it, everything, had been a lie.
A lie.
A lie The front door to the house banged open, and she heard Patrick’s voice: “Hey, guys. I came to say good-bye.”
He knew about this. He had to have known!
She snatched up the diary and, using her finger to mark the place, stormed downstairs and into the living room. Patrick stood beside the door. “So, Raven, how’s the-”
“What do you know about this?” She held up the diary.
“What do you mean?”
Martha emerged from the kitchen.
“Tell me. Don’t lie to me,” Tessa said to him. “Did you read it?”
“I told you before, I didn’t read it. What’s going on?”
“Did you know about this!” She flipped the diary to Paul’s letter.
“It’s a letter from my dad, my real dad. And he’s telling Mom that he doesn’t want her to get a… a…” Her voice broke apart, and she couldn’t finish her sentence.
Patrick looked at the page but didn’t answer.
“Did you know!”
“Here,” he said softly. “Let me see that.” He took the diary from her and Martha eased a few quiet steps toward them, and then everything sort of came to a standstill while Patrick read the letter.
After a few moments he slowly closed the diary and handed it back to her. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“Huh, imagine that.”
“You have to remember how much your mother loved you.”
“Oh, wow? Really? I guess that’s why she wanted to abort me, then-because she loved me so much.”
“Listen, she did love you. You know that. It’s not right to-”
“To do what? Judge her? She wrote that the day she found out she was pregnant was the worst day of her life. What is there to judge? She didn’t want me!”
“She did want you.” Patrick reached for her shoulder, but she pulled back. “She was a loving woman, a caring woman-”
“No.”
“But she was human.”
“Stop it.”
“Just as human as you or me. And she-”
“Stop it! I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not gonna work.”
“Tessa.” His voice had become firm, but she could tell he wasn’t mad. Not really. “I know you’re upset, but just stop and listen for a second. Please. She never regretted having you. She told me that you were the best thing that ever happened to her. She told me that before she died.”
“June 3rd, Patrick,” she said, and she could feel something deep inside of her cracking. “Paul wrote that letter on June 3rd. You know when my birthday is, right? So, do the math. Mom was twenty weeks along when he wrote this letter. You know what that means.”
“Tessa. Please don’t do this.”
“My heart was beating. My brain was working. I could learn things. I could feel pain. Be calmed by music, experience mood swings.” She could hear the hurt filling her voice, but she didn’t care, didn’t try to hide anything anymore. “I could have been delivered and survived, but-”
“Tessa-”
“You know what they do in a late-term abortion? Maybe a D amp; E? Maybe she could have done that to ‘get it taken care of.’ They insert a clamp up through the uterus, grab a part of the body, and they-”
“Shh,” Martha said.
“-pull it apart-”
Patrick shook his head. “Tessa-”
“-piece by piece and then they crush the head and suction out the pieces. Or a D amp; X? Stick a surgical scissors in right here.” Tessa pointed at the base of her skull. Her finger was trembling. “It would have been right here on me. Right here! They pry open a hole… and insert a…”
Martha rested her hand gently on Tessa’s shoulder. “Don’t think about such-”
“Then after they’ve suctioned out the brains… the skull collapses and they… they can finally…” She felt dizzy, physically ill, and she couldn’t say the words. She just couldn’t.
Patrick drew her into his arms, and this time she let him. And then she felt Martha holding her too, her frail arm bent around her shoulder. And she was glad they were there.
But that was all she was glad about.
Tessa leaned her face against her stepfather’s chest.
And trembled as she cried.
84
I tried to comfort Tessa but had no idea what to say, so I just hugged her and told her that I loved her and tried to think of something, anything that I could do to help.
Moments passed.
My mother found a box of tissues for Tessa, and after a little while she began to control her breathing again.
Finally, she pulled away from me, wiped a handful of tissues across her face, and said softly, “I wish I never read it. The diary. I wish…”
“I’m so sorry, Tessa. If I’d known it would hurt you, I never would have given it to you. You have to believe me.”
She took a small breath. “I need to be alone.” Then she left for her room, and I thought she might slam the bedroom door, but instead I heard it close gently.
So gently that, in a way, it frightened me.
It wasn’t at all clear to me what to do-give her some space, or go to her, see if there was something more I could say.
In the past, Tessa had struggled with cutting as a way to cope, and although she’d mostly moved past it, I was concerned for her and I didn’t like the idea of standing here doing nothing.
I walked upstairs. Knocked softly on her door.
“Leave me alone.” I could tell that she was crying again.
My mother was climbing the stairs to join me.
“Please, Tessa,” I said.
“Just leave me alone. I want to be alone.”
I tried the doorknob. Locked. “C’mon. Unlock the door.”
“I’m OK. I just wanna be by myself.”
As I stood there trying to figure out how to solve things, my mother approached and whispered, “She needs some time, Patrick. Let her be for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready.”
“How do you know?” I kept my voice low enough so that Tessa wouldn’t hear. “Maybe I can-”
“Listen to your mother,” Tessa called from inside her bedroom.
I blinked.
Martha raised a gentle, knowing eyebrow.
“Did you hear me?” Tessa said.
“Yes.”
Knowingly, my mother patted my arm and then turned to leave.
“I guess I’ll be downstairs then,” I told Tessa through the door.
“In the kitchen. I won’t leave for the airport until you’re ready for me to go, OK?”
No response.
I stood in the hallway for a few more minutes, sorting through every
thing, then Tessa called through the wall, “Don’t lurk,” and I finally left to join my mother in the kitchen.
I looked at my watch.
As much as I wanted to stay and work through things with Tessa, I definitely needed to leave in the next twenty minutes if I was going to make my flight.
But that was no longer my priority.
Last night I’d told Cheyenne that Tessa meant the world to me. And now I realized how true that was.
I would stay here if I needed to. Even if I didn’t make it to the trial.
Still, I did feel a little guilty and conflicted, because even though I hadn’t known about Paul or the letter, one time while we were dating Christie had told me about her decision to abort her child.
85
Christie and I had been going out for about four months when she told me the story.
We were both single and in our midthirties and things were getting serious, so we’d finally decided to get everything on the table, see if there was anything in our respective pasts that would make the other person shy away from something long term.
And we chose to share those secrets on a hike in the Adirondacks on a crisp and cool Sunday afternoon in September.
We’d been hiking for a few hours, slowly revealing more and more intimate details from our lives, when I lost the trail and ended up spending nearly half an hour leading her aimlessly through the underbrush looking for it. Finally, I was so irritated at myself that I kicked a log. “OK. Here’s one: sometimes I can get impatient.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I shoved a branch out of the way. Hard. It snapped back toward Christie, and thankfully she was far enough behind me so that it didn’t smack her in the face. “And moody.”
“Huh.” I couldn’t quite read her tone. “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”
Then I found something that might have been a trail, at least at one time, and it was leading vaguely in the direction we wanted to go, so I decided to give it a shot.
As we walked, I told her about the problems I’d had over the years getting along with my older brother, who owned a bait shop in Wisconsin and spent most of his time muskie fishing when he could have been doing something meaningful with his life.
“Well.” She stepped over a fallen tree lying across our path. “At least you’re not judgmental.”
“One of my few virtues.”
Then I admitted to a tendency of getting caught up a little too much in my work. Occasionally.
Once in a while.
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 rid
dle 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.
