Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  “Oh, I barely made it those first few months. Years, really. I worked odd jobs, cleaning people’s homes mostly. Started taking in injured animals as a way to feel like I was helping something live. Spent so much free time at the cemetery they eventually offered me this job.” She looks me square on. “It still hurts, child. I feel the holes of where they used to be in my heart every day. I’m just doing the best I can with what I have. And somehow, the Lord has repaid me for the years the locusts have eaten.”

  “But . . . why are you telling me all this now?”

  “So you can see why I can’t tell you what I think you should do. So you know how easy it would be for me to tell you to keep your baby. But so you also know life goes on if you decide to let go.” She pauses, her eyes moving over each one of the stones, each one of the names. “You know, following those hearses in here, each time I felt what I thought Abraham must’ve felt when he was leading Isaac up the mountain. The Lord, he didn’t save my babies, but he has saved me.” She turns and starts walking back to where we have more work to do. “There’s always letting go to do here on earth, Jaycee. But the Lord, he never lets go. And because of him, we never have to either.”

  21

  * * *

  I fill Jack’s water bowl outside the cemetery work shed, and he laps at it, splattering it everywhere, and Sudie waves from atop the big riding mower halfway across the cemetery. We managed to plant four dozen plants without any pains returning to my belly, except the one gnawing at my stomach because it’s craving a huge scoop of chocolate ice cream.

  I’m due to meet Gabe at the Dairy Barn in twenty minutes, and the low-gas warning light gleams from the dashboard when I turn on the car. I forgot I needed gas. Good thing there’s a station right near the Dairy Barn, the only one in town as a matter of fact, and a fact that riles up the guys at the diner like few other subjects. Even Hersch joins in on the complaining since the station owner, Bill Spradley, seems to enjoy gouging folks with his monopoly on the business. Closest gas station to town is ten miles to the interstate, or fifteen miles the other direction to the next town. But I suppose that’s just the way it is in a small town.

  Main Street is busy as it usually is on Friday evenings, folks a little happier with paychecks in their pockets and a week of work behind them. The gas station is quiet, though, as I pull up next to one of the pumps. The nozzle rattles as I put it into the gas tank, and I lean back against the car, warm from sitting in the sunshine all day. An older-model car rumbles by, the ground shaking under me from the souped-up woofers blaring. A passenger throws a cigarette butt out the window, the gleam of ashes tumbling in a trail behind it.

  I’m inside paying when I hear the voice come up behind me to the second register.

  “A box of Red Man and ten dollars in gas.”

  Fear burns down my spine and I try not to look back.

  Bryan.

  Maybe he hasn’t seen me.

  I haven’t seen him since I’ve taken to not hiding my belly anymore. Should’ve known better than to let my guard down about running into him in this town.

  “How you doin’, Jaycee?”

  I can feel his breath against the back of my neck and I shiver. Takes all the courage I have to stand up straight and face him. “Bryan.”

  “Saw you leaving church the other day with some guy. Who is he?” He steps closer and I can smell the fresh tobacco stuffed inside his bottom lip.

  My stomach turns. “None of your business.”

  “I remember when everything about you was my business, baby.”

  Icy fear shoots down my spine and weakens my knees. Why can’t he leave me be?

  The attendant, one of the crusty Spradley cousins who’ve been working here for generations, clears his throat. “That’ll be $17.53, ma’am.”

  I fumble for my wallet and set two ten-dollar bills on the counter. When I turn, Bryan is staring at my belly.

  “That what I think it is?” he sneers.

  I cross my arms so quick I drop my wallet, change clanging and rolling everywhere. “It’s nothin’.” Lord, help me. Please. I bend to collect the pennies and dimes. I reach for a quarter near the candy display and he puts his steel-toed boot on my wrist, just under my hand bandage.

  “Is it mine?”

  I don’t want to look up at him. I scan the store, already aware there’s no way out of this.

  “Get off of me!” I yank my hand back and scramble away from him, toward the door, and somehow manage to get on my feet again.

  “Hey, now, you two be amiable. Don’t need no trouble here,” cousin Spradley says.

  I use the moment to run out the door, gulping in the cool dusk air. I don’t think I was breathing in there.

  Help me, Lord.

  The fluorescent lights flicker above my car, and I hear the bells on the station door jingle as Bryan follows me out.

  Adrenaline pulses through me and I fumble for my keys. I feel him close behind me. When I try to open the car door, his hand is there holding it shut.

  “Leave me alone.” Keep your voice strong. He hates weakness. Like a coyote. Looks for the wounded deer, the struggling newborn calf in a farmer’s midnight field. Weakness fuels the mean in him. I try to yank my car door open. If I can get it open I can get in and lock it and drive away.

  But that’s not to be. He grabs hold of my shoulder, turns me around, and shoves me against the car.

  “I said, is it mine?”

  The way he says mine, all hard and drawn out, feels like a noose tightening around my neck.

  “What’s the matter? You sleep with somebody else when you were sleeping with me? That it? Maybe you don’t know whose it is. You little—”

  “Stop it! I wasn’t with anyone else. It’s yours, Bryan. Okay? It’s your baby. It’s yours!” I regret the words as soon as I say them.

  I’ve heard about blood rushing from someone’s face but haven’t actually seen it happen until now. Just as quickly, it turns red with rage like my words slapped him. He comes at me in an instant, so close I feel the heat from his mouth, his neck. He grabs hold of my arms. His fingers dig in deep. “Don’t you raise your voice at me. Especially while you’re carrying my baby.”

  I feel like the hurt rabbits me and Sudie save, the way they look up at us from their crate, eyes black and darting around full of fear, no way for them to know we mean them no harm. Difference is, Bryan does mean harm.

  He turns all calm. Scary calm. Except for the fingers still digging into my bones. “I miss us, Jaycee,” he says, letting go of one arm to push a stray piece of hair back from my face. “Don’t you miss us?”

  “He botherin’ you, Jaycee?” Another man’s voice.

  Gabe.

  “Who are you?” Bryan sneers and lets go of my shoulder.

  I scurry away and run behind Gabe. “This is that boy you were asking about—the one you saw me leaving church with.” I hadn’t heard his car, or any car, pull into the station. Thank you, Lord.

  Bryan squints at Gabe, then puffs out his chest and smirks. “Oh, yeah. You’re that new guy. The one from the diner.” He locks his eyes on me. “Didn’t take long for you to find a new guy, did it, Jaycee?”

  “You all right?” Gabe asks me over his shoulder.

  “Fine.”

  He nods, then rears back and sinks his fist right into the middle of Bryan’s face.

  Bryan careens into the gas pump, loses his balance, and lands on his behind on the asphalt. He dabs at the corner of his mouth, which is split and bleeding.

  “I believe the young lady was saying she’d like to leave.” Gabe says as Bryan struggles to get up off the ground.

  “C’mon, Gabe,” I say. “I’m all right.” I lower my voice to a whisper, the thought of Bryan’s wrestling abilities on my mind. “He’s not worth it.”

  “Yeah, but you are,” Gabe says to me, his eyes not leaving Bryan’s face for a second.

  “No, she ain’t,” Bryan snorts, then shoots tobacco spittle out of the c
orner of his mouth at me before shoving past Gabe and heading toward his car. He sneers over his shoulder. “You can have that piece of trash. And her baby, too.” He revs the engine a few times, squealing the tires, stopping the car hard near us. His eyes leer down to my belly and back up at me again, eyes so full of hate I have to look away. “Don’t be coming to me for money, you hear?”

  That gives me the gumption to look at him again. Right then I know sure as I’ve been about anything in my life that I have to let this baby go. That I have to make a way for him to live safe and free. I glare right back into his dark and bitter eyes without flinching. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m giving him up. For adoption. Only thing I’ll ever need from you again is a signature.”

  “That right?” He revs the engine, wipes a new trickle of blood from his mouth. Calm comes across his face, then anger, just as quick. “We’ll see about that.”

  What’s he mean? That he wants this baby? Surely not. Horror turns my stomach. “I hate you!” I scream at the glaring red taillights of Bryan’s car as he drives away. I clench my belly, as if somehow I can draw it further into myself and away from this nightmare, then sink into Gabe’s arms. My knees are weak, from fear and from relief at Gabe being there.

  “You sure you’re okay?” His breath is warm on the top of my head as I lean against him.

  “I will be.”

  22

  * * *

  Chocolate ice cream puddles around the ridge of my cone. The sign on the front of the Dairy Barn flickers, and the air is so still, feels like we’re on a movie set instead of Main Street Riverton. Gabe takes his two scoops of butter pecan on a sugar cone from the attendant, a teenage boy who smiles shyly and averts his eyes from customers, and we sit on a concrete bench at one of several red-topped tables. Nearby, a mother helps her little girl with dark curls with her rainbow ice cream, and a glob of it lands in the middle of her princess T-shirt. Her father lifts it off with his finger and eats it, then lovingly taps her nose.

  “Thank you,” I say to Gabe.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Not just for the ice cream.”

  “I know.”

  I shift my weight at a sudden twinge in my side, but that doesn’t help much. It aches the same as it did at the cemetery, and when I run my free hand across my middle it feels tight.

  “What is it?” Gabe asks, butter pecan dripping down the side of his cone.

  “It’s pulling. And it’s hard.”

  He reaches toward me, and I jump.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Me too. I jump at the littlest thing. Here.” I take his hand and hold it against my belly.

  “Is that a contraction?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” A foot or an arm rolls underneath where his hand rests. “Did you feel that?”

  His face, bright with surprise, gives me the answer. “Does it hurt when he does that?”

  “No.” I laugh and press his hand tighter against me. The way he looks at me and something about the blinking lights, the way my skin feels hot where he’s touching me, the way our thighs rest against each other . . . something about this almost feels right, him and me and this baby inside. But this isn’t Gabe’s baby. And I meant what I said to Bryan. I know I have to let this baby go—to protect him as much from me as from the Blair family. Chocolate ice cream runs down my hand and drips to the ground. When I go to take another bite, another pain comes, sharp and low. “That pulling sure does, though.”

  His brow furrows. “We better get you home.” He shakes his head, then surprises me by cursing about Bryan. “What’s wrong with him anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I breathe.

  Gabe puts his hand on my back, as if trying to steady me through the pain.

  “There’s always been talk about that family. Talk about the way his dad treats his wrestlers. What happened with another girl Bryan used to date.” I think about Elizabeth glaring at me, whether at church or across the checkout lanes at the Walmart or passing each other on the road into town. “Seems like anger’s just something that runs through that family.”

  “You’re pretty brave, you know that?”

  “Brave?” Pain stifles my laugh to a chuckle. “I’m not brave. It’s like Sudie says. I’m just doing the best I can with what I have.”

  “Whatever the reason . . . I’ve seen too many women stay with men like that. It only gets worse.” He takes a napkin and touches it to the side of my mouth. “You’re a messy ice cream eater.”

  “Am I?”

  “You are.” He dabs at the other side. “Why don’t you leave your car here? Let me take you home.”

  “That’d be fine.” I’m not up to being alone, for one thing. For another, I’m not up to being away from him.

  It’s not even nine o’clock when he pulls up alongside my trailer. He shuts off the engine and the song of hundreds of bullfrogs, mating in the nearby low spots in the meadow, fills the car.

  “I love that sound,” he says.

  “Me too.” The moon hangs low, surrounded by a thick haze. “Storms are coming. S’posed to get a lot of rain the next few days.” The thought crosses my mind of me and Gabe and this baby, the three of us on my front stoop . . . then another summer after this, me and Gabe watching a toddler dressed in bib overalls, wobbling across the yard chasing after fireflies. I shake my head to get the thought out of my mind.

  “Still hurting?”

  “No. I think I’ll walk a bit, see if that doesn’t help ease this pulling. It helped earlier today. I’ve got the mail to get besides.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “I was hoping you might.”

  The sky darkens to black above the trailer park as we walk around the horseshoe drive. Clouds cover the moon, the stars. We pass Sudie’s, and soft yellow squares of light from her windows reflect off the pale-gray gravel. A breeze comes and rustles white seeds from the cottonwood like snow. I remember trying to catch them as a little girl as they swirled around Mama pinning sheets to the clothesline. I’d catch one and run back to show it to her, and back then, she’d stop what she was doing and pull me tight to her chest, then we’d sit awhile on the warm grass and she’d teach me to hold a piece of crabgrass between my thumbs and blow to make a whistle, or how to pop the heads off dandelions, or how to get helicopter seeds from the maple tree to spin. I still recall the smell of the borax on her hands, cracked from always scrubbing something, and the way the whole world had seemed safe and right. I was a princess, and the trees, the yard, the meadow were my kingdom then.

  A door creaks and Virginia Johnson emerges from her trailer, glass bottles clanging against each other inside the trash bag she carries down the redwood steps.

  “At least she’s not throwing them at her husband,” Gabe whispers, and we dissolve into laughter.

  Dewey’s always been a drinker, a habit Virginia most likely enables since Dewey passed out is a heck of a lot better than Dewey sober. Doesn’t matter if they’re on food stamps like me and Mama were. They’d find a way to sell the food and buy their beer and cigarettes with the cash. She traipses down the path toward the community Dumpster, where the evidence of all our low-income lives intertwine, the stench of alcohol, diapers of toddlers who too often wander alone, their bellies swollen from diets consisting of gas-station snacks.

  Not every residence has problems. Take Shawnie and Tim. They go to church and take care of their lot and keep themselves clean, same as Sudie and me, now that Mama’s gone. Problem with that is they’re so responsible they get put in charge of things like calling the trash company when the Dumpster overflows, mowing the common areas because they’re the only ones with a working lawn mower, and calling the police when the late-night domestic situations get out of hand or someone overdoses again.

  “You asked me once if I have dreams.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I do. I have dreams of getting out of here.”

  “Here’s not so bad.”
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  I look at him as if he’s off his rocker. “Anyplace is better than here. We’re invisible here.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? Think about it. When people tell stories, write books, make movies, make the news, they don’t tell about people like me, people like the six out at the graveyard with fresh mounds of dirt over them, people like Sudie—who have the kindest and best hearts in the world but who don’t matter because we’re small and poor and people think that means we’re dumb and don’t matter. And if they do tell those stories, nobody wants to hear them. No one sees people like me.”

  He stops in his tracks and takes my hand. “I see you.”

  I can’t help but giggle. “That’s noble of you, Gabe. C’mon.” I start walking again.

  He gives me a look of exasperation. “Is that why you’re giving your baby up for adoption?”

  It is the most direct question he’s ever asked about my predicament.

  “No . . .” But is it? “I mean . . . what I said to Bryan . . . I don’t know.” I study his face to see what he thinks of my fickle uncertainty, and he does not appear to be bothered, but rather sturdy, like no matter what I say he’d be sure as ever that the sun rises in the morning. I’m not used to sturdy. “Sudie and Carla, they say I have a choice. A choice to give my baby a chance.”

  He kicks at a rusty bottle cap. “Seems to me he’d have a chance either way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seems to me . . .” He hesitates, as if searching for the right words. “He’d have a chance whether you keep him or give him away. Any child would be blessed to have a mama like you.”

  “You think I should keep him?”

  He stops walking again, and his eyes search mine. “I don’t know. But I’ll be here for you either way.”

  I think about the mom and dad with the little girl with the dark curls at the Dairy Barn, how I felt the ache of wanting something like that with Gabe. Had he felt that too? Not that it matters. That’s not a reason to keep this baby. I sigh and start off down the drive again. The pulling in my belly starts up again, and I try to massage it away. “A child would not be blessed to have me,” I say over my shoulder.