Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  A buzzer sounds, the prison-side door of the visitation room opens, and the guard lets in a slight, slumped woman. He points her in my direction.

  Mama.

  26

  * * *

  She looks better than I thought she would. Instead of the bony, sunken-faced heroin addict I’d said good-bye to in the courtroom, Mama has regained some fullness to her cheeks. The gray, saggy circles are gone from under her eyes. She appears showered and clean.

  When she sees me, she stops. Her eyes fill with tears.

  And to my surprise, mine do too.

  Mama pulls out a chair across the table from me and sits down. The bright-orange jumpsuit casts a strange glow on her sallow skin, but her fingernails are pink instead of stained black from soot and filth. She reaches out and covers my folded hands with hers. “Jaycee, I . . .”

  “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” I say, taking advantage of her hesitation.

  “You look so good, Jaycee.”

  I feel tears pricking my own eyes as a couple slide down her cheek. I wipe them away quick. “Thanks, Mama. You do too.”

  She shakes her head. “No, I don’t. I look awful. Besides that, orange is not my best color.”

  I smile for a moment, before I notice her elbows, bony, resting on the table. She is fragile. The realization overwhelms me. Not pity, but mercy.

  The same mercy the Lord’s been giving to me.

  We’ve both been thirsty.

  The baby kicks, and I’m glad I’m sitting down so I can keep my baby hidden from her, for now.

  “How is home?”

  “It’s okay. Got it all cleaned up. Bud and Larry from church, you’d be amazed how they helped fix it up. Painted the walls. Helped lay down new carpet.”

  She nods. “How is Sudie? Shawnie and Tim? The others?”

  “They’re all good.”

  “And the diner?”

  “Good, too.”

  At the table next to us, a plain man visits with a woman with her hair cropped short and blunt. She leans across the table toward him as if she’s hanging on his every word. He has his Bible open and holds a polished wooden cross.

  The baby turns inside me. I stare at my own hands, empty, nails bitten to nubs. They begin to blur as tears fill my eyes. The voices in the visiting room rise and fall like waves pounding against a seashore, as if one person reaches out and the other pushes back.

  “What is it, Jaycee?”

  I look up and see real concern in her eyes. A look I’ve been longing for, more than I even realized. “There’s something I have to tell you.” I push my chair back from the table and wrap my arms around my belly.

  “Oh, darlin’ . . .” She gets up and runs around the table and throws her arms around me. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the guards start toward us, but I wave at him to let him know it’s okay.

  My heart and everything I’ve been holding in for so long crumples. “I don’t know what to do, Mama.” The words come out all desperate and ugly like the tears and now the snot running down my face.

  “Jaycee—” She pulls back and brushes a stray strand of hair away from my eyes.

  “I was so mad at you when they took you away. I was so glad you were gone.” I think about the first letter I tried to write her, how angry I was. And how glad I am that I tore it up. “But all this—” I motion toward my belly and suck in air between sobs. “When it comes down to it, I need a mother . . . I need you to help me know . . . how to be a mother.”

  She’s crying about as hard as I am now, the two of us a hot mess. I’m sure the others in the room are starting to stare, but I don’t care.

  “Well, I’m not so sure I’m the best one to help you with that.” She looks away.

  It’s my turn to reach toward her. “I remember, Mama. I remember you and me when I was little, before you got hurt. I remember who you were, Mama. Who we were. That’s the Mama I need.”

  She shakes her head and pulls away from me, then sits in the chair next to me. “I’ve done a lot of thinking in here. Not much else to do besides think. I’ve thought about everything that happened to us, everything that led up to losing . . . to losing Jayden.” Tears gather fresh in her eyes. “I just don’t know if I’ll ever be the person you remember again.”

  I nod, grateful for her honesty.

  There is one more thing.

  “Mama, I need to ask you something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit? Stop using the heroin? Didn’t you love us enough to quit?”

  “I love you and I loved your brother, that’s for certain.” A visitor at the next table hands us a couple of travel packages of tissues, and Mama dabs at her eyes. “You have to understand, when I was high . . . what the smack did . . . for the first time since your father died, the world was beautiful. I was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. And I was so tired of fighting the pain and the ugly and the hard of life. I never stopped loving you. Problem was, I loved the heroin more.”

  The words sting. I think of Gabe in the waiting room and am so grateful he is here. I have plenty more to say and ask, but a pulling starts in my belly and I shift in my seat.

  “Everything all right?” she says, concern washing over her face.

  “It’s just a pain. It’ll pass.”

  “You shouldn’t have come—if I’d have known you were pregnant, I wouldn’t have asked you—”

  “It’s all right. I wanted to come. Really.” I rub my hands up and down my belly, and slowly the pain subsides.

  “I remember those feelings, the way every twinge made me worry. You and your brother, the way you moved inside me.” She smiles softly. “I ever tell you about the day you were born?”

  “No.”

  “Sudie took me to the hospital when I was laboring with you.”

  “Sudie?”

  “Yes. Sudie. She stayed with me the whole time. You came out all gooey and wide-eyed, your hands and feet still purple like they weren’t quite ready to come out and work just yet. They laid you on my belly, you looked up at me with all the expectations in the world, and I knew I couldn’t meet them. Not without your dad. I also knew that I loved you more than I knew it was possible to love.

  “After you were born, I worked as hard as I could to give you things I didn’t have, but I always felt like it wasn’t enough. I hated that we were poor. I hated when you started to realize we were poor too. When I hurt my back, started taking those pills, all the shame I had about not giving you what you needed, about horrible things I’d done . . .”

  “Mama. I don’t need to know—”

  “What I’m trying to say is while I had a choice about the heroin, back when I had you, I didn’t think I had a choice about how I raised you. I was stuck there in that trailer, and all I could see was you being stuck there too.”

  “Why didn’t you give me up for adoption?”

  “I didn’t think about it at the time. Besides that, the second I saw you . . . there’s no way I could have even if I’d wanted to. You were all I had. You were the only part of your father I had left, and we were in it together. I loved every second of taking care of you. But when I look at you now—” her eyes puddle with tears again—“I see that giving you up might’ve been the best thing that could’ve happened to you.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry for that.”

  “The rose is for you,” Reverend Payne said. . . . His eyes were kind. . . . I felt the old go and the new come as he brought me up out of the water . . . and Mama was there holding my hand, singing next to me. . . .

  Maybe mercy is the rose I’m supposed to give Mama today.

  “I didn’t think you cared about me anymore, Mama.”

  “I never stopped caring. Never stopped loving you for a second. I hated myself. And heroin was the only thing that made me feel better. But those are my burdens, not yours. I passed them on to you, and I didn’t even know it until I’ve been stuck in here with all the time in the world to think about it. You c
an give your baby—my grandbaby . . .” She chokes up. “You can break the cycle and give him a chance.”

  A chance. I can give this baby a chance.

  “So you really never thought about giving me away?” I ask again.

  “No. Never. ”

  “Because that’s what I need your help with, Mama. I think . . . I know . . . I’m giving this baby up for adoption.”

  She starts to say something, then stops. She studies my face and starts to say something again.

  “Am I a horrible person? I mean, what kind of a mother gives up her own child?”

  “No. You are not a horrible person,” she says, without pausing a second to think about it. She scoots her chair closer to me and takes hold of my hands. Her eyes are stern now, but soft with something I haven’t seen in them in a long, long time. Something that reminds me of when she’d take me to the park and swing alongside me, or when she spent hours teaching me how to tie my shoes. Something that reminds me of the kindness in Sudie’s eyes when I went running to her trailer on cold, dark nights. “If that’s what you feel the Lord is telling you to do, that’s what you need to do. And that’s a decision that’s not bad or good or anything, except for loving a child deep enough to trust it to the Lord. You can do better than I did, Jaycee. You can do better for you, and for that baby. You become what you’re not willing to give up, whether you know you’re hanging on to it white-knuckled or not.”

  “But how do I know giving him up is giving him the right chance, Mama?”

  She thinks on that for a moment. “You remember the story about those two women, both claiming to be the baby’s mother and fighting over it in front of King Solomon?”

  I nod. “He said he was going to cut the baby in half.”

  “And that’s how he figured out who the real mama was. The one who was willing to give up the child so that it could survive.”

  Elizabeth Blair comes to mind, and I tell Mama about the scene in front of the church. “She says she can get custody. That if she can prove me unfit—”

  Mama puts a hand up. “Now wait just a minute. Folks can say what they want about the things I done, but no one can say anything about you.”

  “I don’t think she sees it that way. And besides that, they’ve got money. Lots of money. They used it against Mary Ashby. I know they’d use it the same against me. Against this baby.”

  Mama shakes her head. She knows I’m right. The Ashbys weren’t even poor, by comparison to us.

  “We don’t stand a chance against folks like the Blairs,” I say.

  “You’re right. We don’t. But we’ve got the Lord.”

  I start to argue with her. Where was the Lord when Jayden died? And when my father died, for that matter? But then I look at her, the way her eyes are bright for the first time in years even though she’s in the middle of a concrete room. I think about the miracle of that, right in front of me, and I begin to understand the living water Jesus was offering at the well, how he wanted that woman to trust him to change her life, how he wanted to take away the pain in her soul. I pour my own heart out to Mama then. Everything about Bryan. I tell her the good, too, about Sudie and the animals. About Gabe. And somehow in the middle of all that telling, I realize it is in the pouring out that I am filled. I realize he is making a way for me and Mama, and if that’s true, he can make a way for this baby, too.

  Me and Mama, we sit there in silence for a good long while, holding on to each other for the first time, and letting go, too, our lives intertwined, like so many mothers and daughters I suppose, like sweet honeysuckle vines weaving themselves into inseparable knots on a barbed-wire fence.

  A buzzer sounds, signaling the end of visiting hours. I stand and take a step toward the exit, then pause at Mama’s side. I lean down and hug her one more time.

  “I love you, Mama.”

  “I love you, too, Jaycee.” She gives my hand one last squeeze before I walk away.

  “You take care now,” the guard says, opening the steel door for me.

  The weight of it slams shut, and I jump. My belly tightens in response. I take Gabe’s hand, and we drive the whole way home in silence.

  27

  * * *

  “There you go, little nuggets.”

  The raccoon kits tumble over each other to get at the bowl of cat food I set inside their cage. Sudie texted earlier. Says she isn’t feeling well. Would I mind feeding the critters for her? Of course I don’t.

  Dark skies line the horizon to the west, and the meadow is strangely quiet for this time of the morning. Weatherman says to expect days of rain, something the valley is most certainly not in need of since this spring’s been wet already. The trapeze inside the flight cage creaks, but not from a breeze. Rather, the hawk is on it. He keeps his eye right on me as I toss a couple pieces of mouse into his cage. The trapeze swings as he spreads his wings out, stretching one, then the other, and he balances himself without faltering so I know it’s near time to let him go.

  Before heading into the diner, I check on Sudie, lift the blinds in her front room, where a passel of baby opossums nuzzle together under the special heat lamp. A local police officer brought them in after finding the mother alongside the road, having had the wisdom to check if she had babies in her pouch before shoveling her carcass into the woods.

  “Sudie?” I say in the direction of her darkened room.

  “I’m okay, child,” she finally replies. “Just slow moving. Thank you kindly for helping me.”

  “Of course . . . but are you sure you’re feeling okay to handle the rest?”

  Her voice is raspy. The young opossums, eyes closed and still hairless, will die without frequent attention and feedings.

  “Fine, fine. I been up with them through the night. I can do it through the day.” She coughs hard. “Come sit by me a minute. Tell me about the visit to see your mother.”

  My eyes adjust to the dark, helped by the new light pouring in through the front windows, and I sit on the bed next to Sudie, who lies beneath a quilt that looks to be handmade. The room is neat but spare, except for the corner where there is a tall, narrow curio cabinet painted white with gilded handles. The piece is nicer than anything else in her place. Makes me wonder where it came from. Something unwanted at a flea market? Something her late husband’s family passed down?

  “So how was it?” Sudie asks, interrupting my wondering.

  “So, you were right.”

  “Really?” Her eyes widen. “And how’s that?”

  “Well, I found out forgiving isn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”

  A knowing grin comes over her face. “And?”

  “And . . . while not everything that happens is good, the Lord can take the things that happen to us and work them into something good down the road.”

  “Amen to that.” She grins even wider, reaches a calloused hand toward mine.

  “I am scared, though.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Elizabeth Blair. Those custody papers. They haven’t come yet. What if she’s right? What if she can take my baby? What if she can keep me from giving him a better chance than I ever had?”

  “That sounds like an awful lot of what-ifs for someone who just said the Lord can work things for good.”

  “But, Sudie—”

  “But nothin’. Listen here. The Lord promised we will have trouble in this world. But he also said he’d be right there with us. The way I figure it, you can sit and worry all day long about Elizabeth Blair and those what-ifs, or you can trust that God loves that baby more than you could even imagine and spend these last weeks in peace about that. There’s always gonna be what-ifs. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego probably had plenty of what-ifs when they walked into the fire. Daniel was probably thinking about what-ifs when he walked into the lions’ den. And I’m pretty sure Moses’ mother was thinking about what-ifs when she set him in that basket and pushed it into the river. Point is, they trusted God with the what-ifs. And God delivered them.”


  “I don’t need a sermon right now, Sudie.” Tears prick at my eyes. Surely she knows those old Bible stories feel pretty impossible when the hard is here and now.

  We sit there for a while in the darkened room until her breathing evens out. I am about to get up and leave her be when she starts coughing something fierce, wheezing hard as she tries to catch her breath.

  I fetch a glass of fresh water from the kitchen. “Let me call Mary Beth to take care of the animals,” I say as she takes the cup from my hand. Mary Beth is younger, and she has a husband who works along with her, the two of them licensed wildlife rehabbers the next county over. She’s always happy to take in Sudie’s overflow in the height of the summer and anytime she needs help.

  Sudie doesn’t reply right away, which tells me she is considering this. And if she’s feeling bad enough to consider it, she’s feeling awfully bad.

  “That might be all right,” she says finally, her voice faltering.

  I fill an oversize plastic cup with ice and Sprite and take it to her room. Her lips are cracked and the skin under her eyes blue and sunken. “Please go to the doctor, or at least call him. I’m sure Shawnie or Tim, even Gabe, would come drive you there.”

  “Pshaw. I’m fine. Nothin’ the doctor can do for a virus. That’s probably what it is. Just gotta ride it out.”

  I’m not so sure. She’s been so tired, and this bug doesn’t help. When I leave her place, I can’t help but think about how I left Jayden alone too. It takes all I have to drive away.

  I call Mary Beth first on my way to the diner, and she agrees to come pick up the baby opossums and to check on the other critters inside and feed them while she’s there. Not only does this help Sudie out, it makes me feel better knowing Sudie won’t be alone all day. After we work out those details, I call Gabe.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s not been right all spring.” I tell him about her sweating spells, her energy that seems to be dwindling by the week. “She won’t go to the doctor, Gabe. Maybe if you came by she’d let you take her blood pressure or somethin’?”