Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  I nod, determined to follow through with however many appointments I have left.

  “Can Carla come back here?” I ask Paula, who’s preparing the ultrasound machine.

  “Is she your mother?”

  “No.” I think about the other mothers I saw sitting in the waiting room with their daughters. I think about Mama, sitting in jail. “Carla’s the one who brought me here. She’s my friend.”

  “All right.” She leans into the hallway and tells someone to bring Carla back.

  I lean back on the paper-covered table.

  Paula puts a blanket across my naked legs and up over my privates, then squirts cold gel on my belly.

  “Hey there. Everything okay?” Carla says, sliding past Paula and the machine. She comes alongside the exam table and grabs my hand. “You all right, darlin’?”

  “I think so.”

  “This’ll be cold. I’m sorry about that,” Paula says, then presses the wand against my belly.

  Whooshing and static come from the machine, followed by a pulsing sound.

  “There it is.”

  A spot on the screen blinks in time with the swish-swish-swish.

  That’s him.

  That’s my baby.

  “Would you look at that,” Carla whispers.

  “Is that his hand? His arm?” I say, unable to take my eyes off the moving black-and-white parts of the screen.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Paula says, smiling. “And that curve there, that’s his spine. This one here, that’s his head. Oh . . . and . . . do you want to know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

  I look at Carla. “Do I?”

  She shrugs. “It’s up to you. But you’ve been calling him a ‘him’ all the time. Maybe you better get that confirmed.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  That’s my baby.

  Right there.

  On the screen.

  Paula presses the wand around, pushing it harder. “Okay . . . I think . . . yes, that’s it.”

  I squint at the screen. “I can’t tell a thing.”

  “Right there.” She points. “Your hunch was right. It’s definitely a baby boy.”

  I can’t contain my giggling. Carla leans down, squeezes my cheeks, and kisses me square on the forehead.

  A boy.

  My baby is a boy.

  Paula clicks away on the machine, and I try to memorize every move of the baby’s hands, his arms, his legs.

  “How’s he look?”

  “Technically, I’m not supposed to interpret these things. But I can tell you, all his measurements are right where they should be. He has all his arms and legs. His spine looks nice and straight. I think he looks pretty fine.”

  So I haven’t hurt him.

  Not yet anyway.

  He is safe inside me, growing, living.

  His heartbeat is small, but strong and fast, there on the screen, blinking right at me.

  The heartbeats of those baby bunnies were strong and fast that summer night three years back, too. So strong, me and Sudie were able to eventually let them all go.

  20

  * * *

  There’s only one person who drives the two-toned, early eighties Cadillac that’s pulling out of the cemetery as I turn in. Sudie asked if I’d like to come help her plant some annuals, and sitting on a cool patch of dirt, tucking in begonias and petunias, dianthus and coleus, sounds like a blessing. My belly’s getting so swollen I can’t do much else. It’s only been two weeks since I went to the doctor, but it seems like the baby has grown a whole month’s worth.

  “What grave was Mr. Crawford visiting?” I ask Sudie, who’s already planting a flat in the beds alongside the entrance. Jack, the cemetery dog, appears to be smiling as he pants contentedly under the nearby locust tree.

  “Walter Crawford?” Sudie asks, not looking up from her work.

  “Yeah. That was him, wasn’t it? Just left? Can’t miss that car he drives.”

  “Oh, I suppose it was him. I’m not sure. Maybe just passing through. It is a pretty place to visit in the spring.”

  She’s right, planters filled with spring flowers, lilac bushes in full bloom, and rows of pink and white peonies spilling all over themselves. An exception would be the locust tree that appears budless compared to the other trees around. “Think that tree Jack’s sitting under is okay?”

  “It’ll be all right. Just give ’em time.”

  “If you say so.” Losing the ash trees is enough. The cemetery had already lost half a dozen when we counted last fall, leaving behind stumps big enough to spread out a whole church potluck. I bend down to pull a stray thistle from the flower bed, the whole root long, thin, and white as I slide it out of the ground. A cramp starts across my side and I stand to stretch.

  “You all right, child?” Sudie sits back on her haunches and eyes me with concern. Her own face is damp with sweat, and a little pale despite the warm day. “Don’t you overdo it.”

  I feel like telling her the same. “It’s nothing. Just a growing pain. I asked the doctor about them.”

  “Glad you went to see him.” She nods and goes right back to pulling, despite her breathing, which sounds a little ragged.

  “I’m going to walk a bit, see if it goes away.” Jack gets up on his aging legs and trots alongside me. We pass the Pinkett family plots, well-known for having the tallest monuments in the cemetery, a shrine to their successful socket wrench factory established by the patriarch, Cooper Pinkett. Cooper’s marker is the tallest of all, complete with a gleaming granite socket wrench at the top. The factory closed a couple decades ago, but no one who visits the cemetery will forget it thanks to his foresight. Cooper’s wife, Ada, is buried by his side, and spread out on either side of them are shorter stones engraved with the names of the next three generations of Pinketts, many of them still alive, an empty space where their death date will eventually be inscribed.

  Before long, I’m standing over my father’s grave and Jayden’s next to it, Jack sniffing at the headstones. It’s a nice spot, as far as plots go here, acres of farmland stretching out and a dandy breeze from the west. Most all the tree buds are bursting open, branches of weeping willows tinged with green. Little helicopter seeds twirl off a maple, and a robin, unmoving, peers at me from a nest tucked in one of the high crooks of its branches. Three-petaled blooms of trillium push up between rocks and out from the bottom of fallen trees along the fencerows bordering the cemetery. And across the way are six mounds of fresh-covered graves, the latest casualties of the heroin. The fact there were so many at one time made the national news. Riverton’s fifteen minutes of fame. A ranger at the state park found them all dead inside their car, which they’d parked alongside the waterfalls there. The heroin they’d taken had been part of a bad batch, the newspaper said. Three more had died in a neighboring county, and nearly fifty patients in all had been treated for it at area hospitals. Gabe had been on duty and said it was a nightmare. One of the calls dispatch had assigned him to was from a four-year-old girl who knew something wasn’t right with her mama and knew enough to call 911. He said while he’d been giving the mother the lifesaving Narcan, his partner had found a baby who’d been in his crib so long he was covered in stool and urine.

  “Hey, Jayden.” The modest headstone was a gift of the church, since he otherwise wouldn’t have had one. The daffodil bulbs I planted last fall have already bloomed and folded for the season. The grass is green and the ground smooth over the top of him.

  How can he really be here, in the ground, gone? How can any of what’s happened to us be real? He never had a chance.

  The baby flutters in my belly and I imagine one of the tiny arms or legs from the ultrasound, pushing and working against me.

  Me and Bryan, what we did, it’s not this baby’s fault.

  I wonder what my father would think, if he would’ve liked being a grandpa. And Jayden. How he would have surely loved having a little nephew to play with, to grow with.

  “You’d have been the best un
cle, Jayden.” Two boys, running and playing in the meadow, catching fireflies and toads, growing tall and strong. But that wasn’t meant to be. It isn’t meant to be. At least not for Jayden.

  But it can be for my baby. He can have a chance. I can give him a chance. The meadow was once my kingdom. I can make it that for him, too. I won’t make the kind of decisions Mama did. I won’t be like that mother with the little girl and the baby in the back room.

  Trust me.

  The voice is as real as the wind playing through my hair, the leaves above me.

  What do you mean, Lord? Trust you for what? To give me what I need to raise him alone? Or for me to give this baby to you? How am I supposed to do that, Lord? How am I supposed to let someone else raise him? Haven’t I given enough?

  I don’t hear anything, let alone an answer.

  “C’mon, Jack. Let’s go.”

  By the time we get back to Sudie, she’s finishing a second flat of red petunias.

  “Better?” she asks.

  “Better.” I grab a flat of coleus, sit next to her, and pull a glove over my hand. The burn is scabbed over, but I still keep it wrapped. The little spade slides smooth and easy into the dark, rich earth. I pull out a single plant and gently separate its roots, tight and shaped like the square of the plastic container. “I’ve been looking at websites. About adoption.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I’ve been thinking about how you said I have a choice, that I can give this baby a chance.”

  “I did.”

  “Since I saw him on that ultrasound screen . . . it’s hard to imagine giving him up, Sudie. Can’t imagine someone else holding him and rocking him . . . I can’t imagine someone loving him as much as me.”

  “That is hard to imagine.” She pats another petunia into the soil. “But it happens all the time.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” I think about a family at church who recently brought an adopted baby girl home from China, how much they adore her. How her father swoops her up and sets her on his shoulders and she squeals with laughter. How I never had a chance to know my father like that. “’Sides that, this baby should have a daddy.”

  “A child needs a father, that’s for certain.” She stops what she’s doing, sets back, and squints at me, the sun in her eyes. “Jaycee. If you’re looking to me to make this decision for you, I won’t.”

  I sigh long and loud. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can. And you will, when the time comes. And if you’re listening to the Lord.”

  I wonder if she sees things I can’t, things like Saul did on the road to Damascus or the disciples who about near ran right into Jesus in the middle of the road after he rose again. “I don’t think he talks to me like he talks to you.”

  She stands slow, her knees stiff and cracking. She grabs a thermos of lemonade and takes a drink, then offers it to me.

  Beads of sweat collect under her nose, run down the side of her face. She pulls a faded red bandanna out of her pocket and wipes it away. “He doesn’t speak like the world speaks. I’ve told you that.” She looks over at the locust trees, branches cold and brown. “You know, you were asking about those locust trees. Every year they’re some of the last ones to bud. And every year I worry about them. But every year I remind myself their buds already formed in the fall. Can’t do much about what happens to them in the springtime. Just have to wait and trust the work the tree did the season before. You’re in a wintertime of your life, child. The Lord knows you don’t have the energy to do what you’ll need to do, whatever that is, when it’s time for that baby to come. But he’s already been preparing you. He’s already got you ready for spring.”

  “I don’t feel ready for anything.”

  “You don’t have to feel. You just have to know.”

  “That doesn’t help either.” I pluck a thistle from the bed and toss it into an empty flat where Sudie’s been collecting other weeds to throw away. What would she know about giving away a baby?

  Sudie exhales and sets a flat of begonias beside me. “Come on, child. I want to show you something.”

  She starts trudging and I heave myself up and follow her. Jack looks as weary as I feel as Sudie leads us toward one of the older sections of the cemetery, where a giant oak shades a smattering of thin white stones, the names and dates of Civil War veterans whittled nearly unreadable. Between these are gray stones, many with baby lambs and praying hands carved into them, most of them with dates of death in the 1870s when the cholera came and wiped out whole families and nearly the whole town. Shut the railroad down one summer, it was so bad.

  When we get to a row of three flat grave markers we stop. The names, which I’ve never stopped to notice, are etched on small, plain granite squares:

  MARY

  JOHN

  SAMUEL

  Behind them is a taller, wide granite stone with details listed:

  MARY

  JULY 31 – AUG. 20, 1972

  AGE 21 DAYS

  JOHN

  JULY 8 – AUG. 26, 1973

  AGE 1 MO. 18 DAYS

  SAMUEL

  JAN. 2 – JUNE 5, 1975

  AGE 5 MO. 3 DAYS

  CHILDREN OF E. R. & S. J. ADAMS

  “We didn’t have a chance to try again after Samuel,” Sudie says.

  We? These are her children? I stare at the names of the parents, where only initials are listed. I try to think of a time she’s talked about a husband. Children. I can’t.

  To the right of the children’s grave is another stone in matching granite, one I never paid that much attention to. A Vietnam veteran star is embedded above the name:

  ERNEST RAWLINGS ADAMS

  JUNE 14, 1949 – APRIL 4, 1975

  And next to it, with an empty space for the date of death:

  SUDELLE JANE

  MARCH 14, 1952 –

  Sudelle. “Sudie, I didn’t know—”

  “I know. It’s been more than forty years. After a while, people stopped asking about them. And I stopped bringing them up. Easier than explaining everything.”

  “What happened?” I can’t stop myself from asking, and I’m ashamed as soon as the words leave my mouth. Like I’m walking on forbidden ground. But it’s Sudie. She had three babies? A husband?

  A look comes over her I haven’t seen before. Far away. Almost joyful, as if right now in front of us she’s watching those three babies grown enough to be playing under the tree or picking her a dandelion bouquet. “They were perfect. All of them,” she says. “The most beautiful babies you’ve ever seen.”

  The more Sudie talks about them, the more her countenance changes. The lines around her mouth soften. Her thin, worn lips fill out like the withered flats of flowers once we’ve watered them in. She pauses, looking up into the spring sky, crystal-blue and the sun angled in such a way that the leaves on the trees, the edges of the clouds all seem to glimmer. She closes her eyes and for a moment I think she’s not well.

  But soon she speaks again, this time with tears puddling in her saggy lids. “Each one lived a little longer than the one before. By the time Samuel came, I thought maybe he’d live. But it was the same thing, every time. They’d stop growing. The doctor, he tried to help. Different kind of milk, formula. Everything. They’d get fussier and fussier. They wouldn’t hardly sleep. When they cried . . .”

  She looks at me now, maybe recalling the way Jayden cried and wouldn’t stop. “They were in pain. I kept bringing them to the doctor, asking him, begging him to help them, to stop the hurting. But nothing ever helped. Eventually they quieted, but then I knew . . . I knew the quiet meant they didn’t have much longer. I wouldn’t put them down . . . Ernie, he tried to get me to sleep, but I wouldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t let them go. Not until they passed. One minute I could feel their little lungs working, the next they’d stop and I knew. They were gone.”

  “Lord, have mercy.”

  “That’s what I prayed. I suppose there’s a fancy name for whatever ailed them, that it
’s something they can fix now. But it doesn’t matter.”

  I can’t stop comparing the date of Samuel’s death with Ernie’s. Two months apart.

  As if she read my mind, Sudie says,“He never got to meet Samuel.”

  Just like my father. He never got to meet me.

  “My, how we prayed for that child. Prayed like Hannah in the Bible prayed for her Samuel. Prayed the Lord would spare us from losing another. Ernie, he was home the spring before on leave. Left again for what was supposed to be a diplomatic mission. Something called Operation Babylift, I learned later. They knew the war was ending and they were working on ways to help the babies there. In Vietnam. He was on a plane that crashed carrying some of those babies. He would’ve been home in less than a month to see his own.”

  “It was an accident?”

  She nods.

  “You had to bury your husband and then . . . bury Samuel by yourself?”

  She nods again, same faraway look in her eye, as if she can see something, as if she’s a part of something I can’t see that’s happening right in front of her, something that’s part of earth and part of heaven.

  My heart hurts. I ask my next question as carefully as I can. I have no right to know about any of them, really, or about her reasons for never speaking of them. “But, Sudie,” I say, reaching toward her slumped shoulder, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Oh, child. I’m sorry.” For a moment, her face pales and loses some of the otherworldly look. “You must think I’m terrible, never mentioning them before. It’s not that I don’t think about them. Truth is, they’re so much a part of me I never stop thinking about them.”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  Jayden’s never far from my mind. Not even my father, really. I’ve just rearranged my life so that I can keep on going without them. And for the first time, I consider how Mama must’ve felt, losing my dad. Then Jayden.

  “What is the Lord asking you to give up?”

  Back when Jayden died, it took everything in me not to pull his tiny casket back up out of the dark hole when they lowered it in the ground. It’s just not right, something so small. “How have you managed to go on?”