After the Flag Has Been Folded

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  And I knew that she did. I was never afraid of Donna Mendenhall after that visit. I knew that while her expectations for her daughter—for all us kids—were high, ultimately she wanted only what was best for us. Her wanting that for me made me want it for myself.

  Linda didn’t come by the hospital. I hadn’t expected her to, really. We never talked about the abortion. Not then and not now. I was a big disappointment to my sister. Linda was the lone child that Mama and Daddy really could be proud of. Although the youngest when Daddy died, Linda has handled the loss better than the rest of us. I suspect that’s because she learned from her siblings’ mistakes. But maybe it’s because she was born with a stronger heart. One that didn’t tear so easily. I’ve always envied her that.

  Mama did check on me during the night, but we didn’t have much to say to each other. I knew she was wishing I would change my mind. I felt guilty for putting her in a situation where she had to give me her permission to do something she didn’t want me to do. But I was still convinced that letting her raise my child was a bad idea. Pastor Smitty was right. There were no easy answers, just a list of wrong choices from which to pick. I’d made my choice, and Mama was forced to agree to it. Seemed like the only thing we had in common anymore was our mutual resentment of each other.

  I woke up early Wednesday morning. Surgery was scheduled sometime before noon. I was not allowed to eat or drink anything. I was terribly thirsty. Mama stopped by after her shift ended. I was lying in bed, reading. There was a lot of activity in the hallways as nurses carted hungry, squalling newborns to their mothers. Any other time I’d have been tempted to sneak off and get glimpses of the babies, but not on this day. “How’d you sleep?” Mama asked.

  “Fine,” I replied.

  Mama looked tired. I could barely see her brown eyes behind their heavy lids.

  “I’m really thirsty,” I said.

  “I’m sure you are,” Mama said. “But don’t drink anything, otherwise that anesthesia will make you sick. Has the doctor been in yet?”

  “No, ma’am, not this morning,” I said. “I saw him yesterday.”

  “You sure you want to do this?” Mama asked. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said without pause. “I’m sure.” I didn’t feel nearly as convinced as I tried to sound, but I wasn’t about to let on to Mama that I was having doubts. Whenever I felt like maybe, just maybe I ought to keep the baby, I envisioned the bickering that would surely take place if Mama was raising my baby. And if that wasn’t enough to persuade me, I thought about what an absolute cad Wesley Skibbey had turned out to be. The last thing I wanted to do was to be tied to him for the rest of my life.

  My answer disturbed Mama. She looked away and began shuffling through the side pockets of her uniform for her cigarettes. When she found the cigarettes and the lighter, she took her leave. “I’m going to go on home and try and get some sleep, Karen,” she said. “I’ll be back later this afternoon. Don’t worry. They’ll take good care of you.”

  Mama did not lean over and kiss me on the forehead, and she did not hug me. She simply turned and left.

  “See ya later, alligator,” I said. Without trying really, Mama had taught me how to take shelter behind my insecurities and just push on through the hard things in life without too much thought. In doing so, she taught me how to shut down emotionally, how to be just like her.

  After she left, I went back to reading my book. A technician came in and drew my blood. Shortly before 11 A.M. a nurse came in and gave me my first-ever IV drip, along with a shot that she claimed would help relax me. Then an orderly came and wheeled me on a gurney to the operating room. On the way, we passed a room where I saw a mother cradling her newborn.

  The surgery room was freezing.

  “Would you like a warm blanket?” a nurse asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t believe how cold it was. I felt like I was in a meat-market refrigerator. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see slabs of meat, curing and hanging from the ceiling’s corners.

  Dr. Whitfield came in and sat on a stool as a nurse positioned my feet into stirrups. “Honey, I need you to scoot down just a bit to the edge of the table,” the nurse said. I edged my rump to the table’s end.

  Dr. Whitfield wheeled his seat over so he could look me in the eyes. “We’re going to give you something to put you to sleep in just a minute,” he said. “You might hear a loud noise. Don’t be frightened. This machine is like a vacuum.” He pointed to a large, round canister at the foot of the table. “We use it to clean out your uterus. This won’t take long. You’re going to be just fine.”

  Too terrified to say anything in response, I simply nodded.

  Dr. Whitfield reached up and patted my forearm. “You okay, Karen?”

  “Yes, sir,” I lied.

  The anesthesiologist asked me to lift my head so he could wrap a mask over face.

  “How long will it take for me to fall asleep?” I asked.

  “Not long,” he replied as he slipped the mask over my face. “Start counting to one hundred.”

  I don’t remember anything after twenty-five.

  I slept most of the rest of the day. The next day, around noon, Dr. Whitfield released me. He told me to expect bleeding and cramping for the next couple of weeks. He told Mama to call him immediately if I ran a temperature or had any clotting.

  We drove home in silence. I stayed out of school the rest of that week. Wesley didn’t send flowers or come by the house to check on me, and neither did his mother.

  MANY YEARS LATER I felt compelled to tell my brother that I was wrong not to heed his advice. I’ve never enjoyed admitting that Frank is right about anything, but time had passed, and my attitude about my own abortion changed when I cradled my firstborn and realized what it meant to give life to another.

  Frank was bouncing Konnie, the youngest of my four children, on his lap. I laughed as my eight-month-old daughter yanked on his fuzzy beard. Later, as he walked me to my car and helped load Konnie into her car seat, I turned to my brother. “I need to ask your forgiveness for something,” I said.

  Frank leaned up against the door to my Toyota and crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I had that abortion,” I said. “I wish I’d listened to you. But I was angry with you. I didn’t think you had any right to tell me what to do with my life. I was wrong. You were right.”

  “I made mistakes, too, Karen,” Frank said. “I messed a lot of things up. I understand why you were angry with me. I don’t blame you for being mad.”

  Then he reached over and wrapped me up in a big bear hug. Forgiveness is something our family has learned to embrace. We’ve had to.

  CHAPTER 27

  looking for a fresh start

  I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL THE WEEK AFTER THE ABORTION AND ACTED AS IF NOTHING HAD HAPPENED. I FINISHED reading How Green Was My Valley and handed in my book report. My peers at CHS were reading In Cold Blood and The Exorcist. I started Truman Capote’s book but I couldn’t finish it. It scared me too much. The last thing I wanted to worry about was some crazed killer lurking outside our bedroom window. And I didn’t even trouble myself with Blatty’s demons. I had enough of my own to worry about without hunting up some more.

  The bickering between Mama and me increased. We just didn’t know how to be civil to each other. She resented me because she wanted to move to Oregon, and I despised everything about her. We fought all the time.

  My pregnancy convinced Mama that I couldn’t be trusted. She instituted a curfew. Be home by 11 P.M. school nights, midnight on the weekends. I scoffed at her demands. “Who’s gonna make me? You and who else?” She wanted me to go on the pill or quit seeing Wesley. The relationship between us had cooled significantly, but I was still seeing Wes and occasionally still having sex with him. I told Mama to mind her own business.

  Linda never said much of anything. She’d go to our room, close the door, and si
t quietly on her bed, books open, doing her homework.

  One morning, a few weeks after the abortion, Mama suggested that maybe it was time I move out. “Perhaps you ought to get out on your own if you can’t show me any more respect than you do,” she said.

  Finally she’d done it—thrown me out, the way I’d always feared she would. I refused to cry in front of her. Grabbing a handful of hanging clothes from my closet, I tossed them into the back of my car. I was late for school. A hard rain had been falling all morning long. “I’ll come back for the rest of my stuff this evening,” I said as I stormed out the door and slammed it behind me.

  As soon as I got behind the wheel, angry tears rushed forth. With cold rain pelting my windshield and hot tears stinging my eyes, I whipped my car around in the middle of Fifty-second Street.

  Condensation on the windows obscured my view as I ran a corner stop sign. The front end of my Dodge nearly clipped a young girl crossing the street. The crossing guard reached out and pulled her to safety. I saw it all in slow motion from the corner of my eye, but I was crying too hard. I wasn’t about to stop and get another lecture.

  A city police officer showed up at school looking for me during third period that day. The minute I saw him in the counselor’s office, I knew why he was there. “Let’s go somewhere else so we can talk,” he said.

  We walked across the street, to Lakebottom, the city park where Karen and I would sometimes go to knock around a few tennis balls. Karen was a decent player, but I hadn’t improved any over the years. I was still using my wooden Billie Jean King racket.

  “I guess you know what I want to talk to you about,” the officer said.

  “I suppose it’s that little girl I hit this morning,” I said.

  “You didn’t hit her,” the officer said, correcting me. “But it appears you came pretty close.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I checked with your counselor,” the officer continued. “She said you’ve never really been any trouble at school. She said you’re a pretty decent kid.” The officer wasn’t much taller than me. He had dark, close-cropped hair. His smile was generous, and he seemed genuinely concerned. I looked away from his steady gaze. “So you want to tell me what happened this morning?” he asked.

  “Mama and I had a fight,” I replied not looking up. “I was crying. It was raining. I didn’t see the girl until it was too late.”

  “Do you and your mama fight a lot?” he asked.

  “Seems like it,” I said. “This morning she told me I needed to get out.”

  “Do you have someplace to go?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” I replied. “Maybe.”

  “I think it might be a good idea for you to go elsewhere for a while,” the officer said. “Until things between you and your mama calm down.”

  “Yeah, probably,” I said. “I have a friend whose mama is an attorney. I’m going to go talk with her this afternoon.”

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Rufe McCombs.”

  “She’s a good woman,” he said. “I think that’s a good idea. You know, Karen, you don’t have that much longer until you graduate. You need to finish up.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You need to get things figured out at home,” he said.

  “I know,” I replied. “I’m going to see Mrs. McCombs as soon as school’s out today.”

  “I think that’s a terrific idea,” he said. “Meanwhile, stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  RUFE MCCOMBS WELCOMED ME into her office that afternoon. “To what do I owe this honor?” she asked. “Please, please, sit down.”

  “I have a favor to ask, Mrs. McCombs,” I said. As calmly as I could, I told her how Mama and I were fighting all the time. I told her about the abortion; about how I almost ran over a kid that morning; about the police officer coming to see me at school. And then I asked her if it would be okay if I moved in with their family for a while. Until things between Mama and me cooled off.

  Rufe studied me carefully, her chin resting in her hand. “Well, I don’t have a problem with it,” she said. “But I’ll have to check with Mac, of course.”

  Mac was Rufe’s husband. He was like a father to me. I was confident he wasn’t going to turn me out into the streets.

  “And I’ll want to talk with your mother, first,” Rufe added.

  That troubled me. Mama had never had anything to do with any of my friends’ parents. I knew she felt inferior to Rufe McCombs in all sorts of ways. Whenever Rufe and Mac invited me to join them for dinner at the country club, Mama said I was putting on airs. Trying to live a life I wasn’t born to. Mama measured everything with material terms, and she always came up short. I knew Mama wouldn’t like the idea of me moving in with the McCombs family. But honestly, I didn’t know where else to go.

  I moved in that very night and stayed gone until the end of winter term. I went weeks without talking to or seeing Mama. If I needed something from my room, I made sure to go by the house when I knew Mama wouldn’t be there.

  Mac and Rufe never pressured me to repair my relationship with Mama. Each morning Mac would wake Beth and me with a cheery “Hello, darlings!” Before we could crawl out of bed, he would carry in bowls of cornflakes for us to eat and glasses of Tab for us to drink. The only time he yelled at me was when I went to bed with wet hair: “You’ll catch pneumonia!” In many ways Mac mothered me more than any woman ever did. He would wash my clothes, fix me dinner, fill my car up with gas, and make sure I had lunch money. What girl in her right mind would want to give up that kind of attention?

  But in those days a parent had to sign your report card, so at the end of winter term when I received mine, Rufe suggested that perhaps it was time I moved back home. The cooling-off period had helped, and Mama and I did our best to be civil to each other. We even started to actually talk, rather than just yelling all the time.

  While I was at the McCombs’s, Wes quit coming around altogether. I got word he was seeing some other gal. I caught a glimpse of him and his new girlfriend heading downtown one afternoon as I was driving to Rose Hill, and I realized again how foolish I had been to take up with him in the first place. We had nothing in common. I abhorred drug use of any sort. Frank’s experiences gave me all the reasons I ever needed to just say no to drugs. Despite Wes’s pleas for me to just take one toke, I never did—not then, not ever.

  Before he started seeing another gal, Wes had agreed to be my prom date. Mama didn’t want me seeing Wesley for any reason, but she did take me shopping at a fabric store to pick out material for my dress. We settled on a dotted-Swiss organza with tiny blue flowers, and I’d found a seamstress in Bibb City who could make the dress.

  It turned out perfect. When I put it on, I felt like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. I wanted to twirl and sing at the top of my lungs. I cut my hair short that spring, and I’d been steadily dropping weight. Beth and I would go on these crazy fad diets where we’d see how many days we could fast. Diet cola was our only nourishment. We once went three days in a row without a thing to eat.

  I didn’t particularly want to go to the prom with Wes, but there wasn’t a line of beaus waiting to take me. I suppose I could have asked one of my friends from church, but that never really occurred to me, even after Wes told me he couldn’t escort me. He had been caught smoking pot at Pacelli. The administrators decided that the appropriate punishment for him was a weekend at a monastery. It was the very same weekend as prom.

  I didn’t believe Wes when he told me. Nobody sends a kid to a monastery for smoking pot, but when Pauline Skibbey called me to apologize, I knew it was true. I spent my senior prom sprawled across my bed, crying and envisioning slicing my wrists. Mama would find me in the morning, dressed in a prom gown covered in blood. My relationship with Wes had continually caused me to think and act recklessly. I probably would have carried out my vision if Linda hadn’t been home. I knew she’d find me before Mama. The thought of doing that
to Linda was enough to stop me. I’d already caused her enough trouble. I did find an occasion to wear my prom dress—to Angie Skibbey’s wedding. Wesley’s jaw dropped to his chest when I arrived at the church in Mike Garcia’s spiffy MG.

  Mike was a Columbus High graduate and one of the best-looking guys in town. His father was a professor at Columbus College, and his brother, Rick, was a classmate of mine. Mike worked at the Medical Center. I worked afternoons and weekends at the uniform shop near the hospital. Mike offered to escort me to the wedding because he was just a great guy. He’d listened to some of my travails with Wes, and I think he relished the thought of making Wesley jealous as much as I did. Walking into that church on Mike’s arm was the closest thing to a Cinderella moment I’d ever experienced. He was dressed in a white tux coat, black pants, and black cummerbund. All the Garcia boys owned their own tuxes. Pauline Skibbey was so taken with Mike Garcia that she remarked, “Oh, Karen! What a handsome man. He looks like he could be the groom. Do you want to have a double wedding?”

  After the ceremony Mike and I drove off in a fit of laughter. And then, just for fun, Mike took me to his home in Green Island Hills, long considered the town’s best real estate for palatial homes. Mike wanted to parade me around in front of his brother, as if to say, “See what you missed, Buddy?” It was the same message he’d delivered to Wes.

  Mike’s friendship was invaluable to me during a time when I had little, if any, self-confidence. He treated me with respect and kindness, something that Wes never did. Mike helped me set a standard for myself and for the guys I would later date. He never took advantage of me in any sense of the word.

  And the really good thing about Mike was that Mama absolutely adored him. Mike was known about town as a lady’s man—and apparently it didn’t matter what age the lady was. Mama was thrilled to see me out with someone like him. Being with Mike made me feel as if I had done something worthy in Mama’s eyes. I knew it wouldn’t last—Mike was just being big-brotherly to me, that’s all—but as long as he was around, Mama seemed to warm up to me.