Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  “Is that why you’re going with adoption? What happened to your brother—that wasn’t your fault, Jaycee.”

  I shake my head. “He had a chance. Not much of one, but he had one. And I let him down.”

  “It was an impossible situation, Jaycee. You were doing the best you could. It’d be different with your own.”

  “Would it? How? I don’t have anything more to give him than Mama did.”

  “You don’t do heroin.”

  “Mama didn’t always do heroin. She was even married, which is more than I am. But my dad died before I was born. She had to find work. Ended up being an aide at a nursing home. I remember she liked it well enough, until she hurt her back. Couldn’t get the pain medicine she needed.”

  “That’s not going to happen to you.”

  We get to the mailboxes and stop. The sweet smell of honeysuckle hangs in the air, and the bush is thick and high, the vines wrapped around the posts and up onto the makeshift roof that covers them.

  “Maybe not, but it’s everywhere, Gabe. You saw it the other night when you found that baby in its crib.”

  “What makes you think he’s not going to be exposed to it with a different family? In a different place? Just because they’re married and live in a nicer part of town, that doesn’t mean it’ll be perfect.”

  “No, but it’ll be a heck of a lot better than it is here.”

  “But you have good friends. A home. A church. Me . . .”

  “You?” As much as I like him, I don’t know. . . .

  “Yeah. Me. You can trust me, Jaycee.”

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I know enough.”

  “Really? What’s my favorite color?”

  “Yellow.”

  “How’d you know that? I never told you.”

  “That first day in the diner. I watched you tying those yellow ribbons on the bottles with the daisies.”

  “Well, you don’t know my favorite book. And it’s not Watership Down.”

  “No, it’s not. Your favorite book is that romance novel that was on your shelf. That one that had the lighthouse and the couple on the front.”

  “How in the world did you know that?”

  “I saw it on your bookshelf. It was the one with the most worn-out spine.”

  “So you notice things. Fine. But what about when things get hard, Gabe? What about when my mama gets out of jail? What about if I keep this baby and there’s Bryan and his family? What if I don’t keep this baby? What about the fact that this life, this hard life, it’s like Bryan’s family and the anger, one generation after the other. Would I have you then?”

  “I know about hard, Jaycee.”

  “What’s been so hard about your life? Really. I’d like to know.”

  “Everybody’s got problems. Some you just can’t see. You think because I have a nice car, my school’s paid for, that I can’t understand what you’ve been through. And you’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to lose a brother, to see the things you’ve seen, to have done the things you’ve done. Maybe my life has been a little boring compared to yours. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love you.”

  Love?

  By the look on his face, he’s as surprised as I am at the word, huge and real and hanging out there right in front of us.

  “Doesn’t mean you can, either.”

  “If that’s true, if you really mean that, then you’re judging me as much as you think I’m judging you, which I’m not.”

  “Really? Tell me honestly. What’d you think the first time you drove into this trailer park in your shiny blue Jeep?”

  He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know I’ve been blessed with much. I know I haven’t had to suffer, not like you or anybody around here has.” He waves a hand at the trailers behind us. “I don’t know why some folks are born like me and why some are born like you, and why where we’re from decides half our lives for us before we’re old enough to know we can do things different from the way our parents or our grandparents have always done them. All I know is, love is bigger than all this. At least, it can be. So every time I drive my shiny Jeep in here, I feel ashamed because I know when people see it they think the same thing you do—that I’m some jerk who thinks he’s better than them, that I can’t understand them, and worst of all, that I’m not capable of loving them.”

  Loving.

  That’s twice now he’s mentioned it. And twice now that I’m wanting to run. Instead I turn to the mailbox and make a racket rattling the key around until the door swings open. A couple of bills. Mailers. But no letter from Mama.

  The dim light over the mailboxes makes the envelopes look dingy, yellowed.

  “Nothing around here ever changes, Gabe.”

  “Doesn’t mean it can’t.”

  I don’t argue with him, though I have plenty more I can say to prove him wrong. It is for that reason I try to push the thought of me and him and this baby, together, out of my mind as we head back to my place in silence. At least the walking has helped ease the pain in my belly. I let him kiss the top of my head when he says good night and watch his taillights shine as he drives off until the night swallows them up.

  Maybe Gabe’s right. Maybe things can change.

  Maybe it’s time I write Mama a letter.

  Dear Mama,

  I was helping Sudie at the cemetery today. Did you know about her husband and babies? I can’t believe how she gets along after losing all that.

  It made me think of you, Mama.

  You’re right that nothing can bring Jayden back, or make everything that’s happened in these last few years go away. But I’ve been thinking about one of Reverend Payne’s sermons a lot. He said sometimes God shows his faithfulness not by what he brings to our life, but by what he takes out of it. Then he asked us what the Lord is asking us to give up.

  I think he might be asking me to give up being so mad at you.

  Jaycee

  23

  * * *

  “Doctor says I’m measuring about thirty-four weeks,” I say to Sudie outside at the elevator cage, where the hawk eyes us and, in particular, the breakfast of dead mice in my hand. He’s getting stronger every day, and today she’s moving him to the long flight cage. It’s release day for the turtle, too.

  “Not much longer then. What’d he say about your pains?”

  “Says they’re probably from stress. Wants me sitting every chance I can at the diner. Carla doesn’t want me to work, but I can’t afford not to. Besides that, I haven’t had any more for over a week now.”

  Sudie nods, the space suddenly and unusually awkward between us.

  Guilt twinges through me. She wouldn’t take any chances with a baby. Not after what she’s been through. I change the subject. “My prison visitor permissions went through.”

  “Good. You should see your mama before you have the baby. And with Mother’s Day coming up . . .” She pulls on her falconer’s gloves, thick and long and wide leather up to her elbows.

  “I haven’t told her yet. I just . . . I didn’t know how to tell her in a letter.”

  Sudie stops fiddling with the gloves. “She needs to know.”

  “I know, but after everything . . . I didn’t feel like she deserved to know.”

  The hawk blinks and cocks his head, taking in every movement. Sudie tosses a towel over him and wraps him tight so he can’t grab her and fight her with his talons. She carries the bundle of him to the flight cage and sets him inside, quick to close the door before he wriggles himself out from under the towel.

  “Can’t rely on feelings all the time. You know that. You’re only hurting yourself when you don’t forgive,” Sudie says to me. She kneels down just inside the cage and nudges the hawk to step off her arm and onto the ground. “’Sides that, there’s a girl that lingers within a woman, no matter how old she gets, that never gives up the hope of pleasing her mother.”

  I kn
ow she’s right about that, too, but I don’t let on. As much as I try not to think about Mama in prison, about the things she did that got her there, about the letters we’ve been trading this summer, the closer I get to having this baby, the more I think about her. The more I wonder how she managed to raise me as a single mama. She’d kept my baby things. Wrote in her journal that she dreamed of having a little girl like me and how grateful she was to have me. I wonder what she’d say I should do, now that she’s sober.

  “Were you close to your mama?”

  “Didn’t have a chance to be. She died when I was little.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Isn’t there a limit to how much one person should be allowed to lose? “How can you be so sure about God after all you’ve been through? Aren’t you angry at him?”

  She looks at me, her brow furrowing for a moment. Her brow smooths with her answer. “Yes. Yes, I was. For a long time I was very mad at him. I didn’t want to have to be like Abraham, giving up my husband, my babies, like it was some kind of test to see if I loved God more. I didn’t want anything to do with a God like that.”

  “What changed?”

  “I did.” She quickly comes out of the flight cage and closes the door behind herself, and I know by the way she begins trudging back to her trailer that she intends this to be a sufficient answer to my question. She turns her head and says over her shoulder, “You mind feeding those raccoons for me? Let ’em out to play a bit?”

  A state policeman delivered a gaze of five raccoon kits to her a couple weeks ago, after a farmer noticed the mother wasn’t coming back to the nest. They’d been old enough to lap up the special formula and baby cereal, and had moved on to moistened cat food she kept sealed tight and locked in a plastic bin outside the long, pine-framed screened-in cage at the edge of the woods. I take the bag of cat food and see their little banded faces bobbing and peering at me coming toward them. They sniff at the bag and chirp, rolling around and playing at my feet as I duck inside the cage and fill their bowl, pouring in just enough water for the cat food to soak up and get soggy. They eat as if they haven’t eaten in days, though I know they ate the night before. When I’m finished, I keep the door open so they can venture out and play a little. Sudie sits on a stump next to the hawk cage, and soon the kits mosey out of the cage and are playing at our feet. Once they’re out, they’ll follow Sudie everywhere, like ducklings after their mama.

  “Oh, sure, you’re cute now,” Sudie says to them, shaking her head.

  I know what she means. We’ll keep them and help them learn to forage for their own food, but we’ll be sure to release them when they’re five or six months old. Any longer than that, they get spoiled to humans, for one thing. And for another, they get vicious when their hormones kick in, which makes them not cute at all.

  “Gabe going with you to let the turtle go this afternoon?”

  “He is. I’m expecting him anytime now.”

  “He’s a nice young man.” Her eyes gleam.

  “I suppose he is.”

  She nudges me and laughs.

  “Oh, of course he’s wonderful. But I can’t let anything get in the way of whatever it is I need to do for this baby.”

  She nods. “Unless this thing is something the Lord is using to help you make your decision.”

  I think about the little family we saw at the Dairy Barn. About my life here, life with Mama. About Dewey Johnson. About the fresh graves at Sudie’s cemetery. About Bryan and the ache in my bones when he gripped my arms. I think about the websites I’ve been looking at of parents wanting to adopt, the way these couples have arranged their whole lives to welcome a child, together, some of them with other children, and all of them with homes that look safe and loving and whole. Families who pray every day for a birth mom and baby they haven’t even met. “I don’t know, Sudie.”

  “Listen,” she says as a female jay calls in a tree above us. A male replies from many yards away. “Listen for the Lord. He may not send pillars of fire or clouds of smoke like he did for the Israelites, but he sends his Spirit. Listen for it, and you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

  When she stands, I see sweat stains the pits and back of her shirt. It’s not that hot out. Not for that much sweating.

  “You feeling okay, Sudie?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.” She waves off my concern and trudges around to the front of the trailer, the five little kits scrambling and tumbling at her feet.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor to make sure?”

  She raises an eyebrow at me. “No way. No doctors for me. All they’ll do is tell me I’m not eating right and I’m not exercising enough, neither of which I am willing to make changes to at my age.”

  One thing about Sudie, she’s as stubborn as she is kind.

  Gabe’s blue Jeep appears down the drive as we’re about to go inside. The soft top is off, and the radio is playing one of the popular country songs. “Ladies.” He tips his baseball cap at us and hops out. “So where’s this turtle?”

  Sudie’s breathing sounds raspy as we follow her inside and she fusses over getting the turtle out of his cage. She spreads newspaper on the table and sets him on it, along with a couple of containers of car touch-up paint.

  “I thought you aren’t supposed to paint turtle shells,” Gabe says.

  “You’re not. Unless they’ve been fixed with Bondo like this one and need to be camouflaged.” Sudie hunches over the turtle and covers the Bondo with dark-green paint.

  “Where are we going to let him go?” he asks.

  “Same place he was found. Off Old Mill Road, near the bridge over Big Clifty Creek.”

  “Do you always let them go where you found them?”

  “We do,” I answer. “They have a better chance of surviving when they’re back where they started. Their instincts help them remember where to find food, mates.”

  “So we’ll eventually let the hawk go back where I hit him?”

  “We will.”

  “I think I’m going to visit my mama on Sunday,” I say to Gabe as the Jeep rolls to a stop beside the Clifty Creek Bridge. “Mother’s Day and all.”

  He switches off the car and turns to me. “You sure about that?”

  I can’t blame him for asking. He’s seen the way I act when I get her letters. “I need to tell her about this baby. Besides that, Sudie says the only person unforgiveness hurts is me.”

  “Sudie’s a wise lady.”

  “Might be a good time to go since the pains seem to have gone.”

  He nods, then reaches for my hand. “You shouldn’t go alone. What if she upsets you and they come back? Besides that, it’s not a short drive.”

  “Gabe, you don’t have to . . .” The baby turns inside me. And yet, part of me feels like I’m taking advantage of him being so nice. If he’s doing this because he wants more than friendship . . .

  “I know I don’t have to.” He looks at me as if he senses my larger concern. “Look, Jaycee, I know it’ll be a long time before you’re ready to make any big life decisions beyond what you’re doing with the baby. But I want you to know I’m offering this, I’m doing these things for you, because I want to. Not because I expect anything back.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Right now, just remember I’m a friend who cares about you—cares about you quite a bit—and I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Well . . . thank you.”

  “Now, I’m not gonna lie. If someday you think you might feel more for me than friendship, that would be a fine day indeed.”

  That grin. For a moment I think I might let him kiss me. But a semi barrels by, and the force of it shakes that thought right out of me.

  Gabe opens his door. “C’mon. Let’s get this turtle to where she needs to go.”

  “Sudie says turtles only wander an acre or two around where they live,” I say as we traipse down the incline toward the swollen creek. “And they have such a strong sense of home, you have to bring them back right where yo
u found them. Otherwise, they’ll do anything, including crossing roads and getting hit again, to get back. That’s why we have to be sure to release them where we found them.”

  “Didn’t this one get found up by the road?”

  “Yes, but we can’t leave her there. Sudie said her nose was pointed this way, so we’ll take her this way.”

  “What about hawks? They have to fly more than a couple acres. How do you know where to take them?”

  “Best bet is to take them where they were found.” I step over an old tree fallen on its side. “Redtails mate for life. Don’t you remember the one we saw watching us the day you hit it?”

  “Oh, yeah, now that you mention it.”

  “It was sitting up in a giant cottonwood. Watching everything we did. I think that was his mate.”

  “How can you tell it’s a male?”

  “Just a hunch. Besides that, the one that was watching was a lot bigger than ours. Females are a lot bigger than the males.”

  We’re at the edge of the creek, wide and high from the wet spring. Cardinals call, boo-kee boo-kee boo-kee, and a couple of bullfrogs banter in the tall grass and new green brush. “Looks like as good a place as any.” I lift the turtle from the box and set her on the ground, on a soft bed of dried leaves which crunches beneath her. She’s tucked tight in her shell without any indication of wanting to come out.

  “Now what?”

  “Watch.”

  The turtle slowly pokes her nose, then the top of her head out of the shell, and before long it’s stepping slowly in the direction of the creek and away from the busy road.

  Gabe and I are halfway back to the road when he grabs my arm and stops me. I’m off balance for a moment, the weight of my belly more awkward every day.

  “Sorry,” he says apologetically. “But look.” He points to I don’t know what. At least not at first. “Over there. At the base of that tree.”