Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  “This might be a terrible time to say this—really, please stop me if it is. It’s just that, well, sometimes I think the Lord . . .”

  I can tell she feels awkward since she’s my nurse, but I can’t help but want to hear what she has to say. “It’s okay. Go on.”

  “My best friend and her husband—they’ve been trying to have a baby for years. Of course she’s my best friend, but even if she wasn’t, anybody can tell you they’re the kindest, most loving couple around.”

  “You’ll know when the time comes,” Sudie said, “if you’re listening for the Lord.”

  “Do they live here?” Worry shoots through me.

  “No, they don’t. But they’ve got a website.” She hesitates again, as if she’s worried about overstepping. “I’ll just write it down so you can look at it if you want to.” She scribbles the web address on the back of a paper towel and hands it to me, a look of apology and hope at the same time on her pretty face. “Like Donna said, I’m not trying to tell you what I think you should do. I’m really not. But here it is, just in case.”

  I made a way through the waters.

  “Isaiah 43,” I say to Carla after the nurse leaves the room.

  “What one’s that?”

  “About God making a way. I highlighted that in my Bible the day Reverend Payne mentioned it in his sermon. The one about Moses’ mother setting him in the river. How I remember it now, I have no idea.”

  Carla smiles, a knowing smile. “The Holy Spirit. He reminds us of the things the Lord teaches us.”

  “I want to believe that, but Bryan . . . those custody papers.”

  “Just because Elizabeth Blair dragged Bryan by the ears to Walter Crawford’s office doesn’t mean she’s going to get her way.”

  I think about Walter Crawford, the look in his eyes when we were standing beside Sudie’s grave, what he said about Bryan giving up his rights and how that would trump the papers his mom coerced him into signing.

  “Bryan’ll never go around his mom.”

  “You never know. Miracles can happen,” she says, with what seems to be a twinkle in her eye.

  “I’m tired of hoping for miracles, Carla.” I shake my head and reach for the scrap of paper the nurse left. “Why even get my hopes up?”

  Reluctantly, I type the website address into my cell phone.

  The first photograph that appears on my screen is of a couple, arms around each other, standing on a beach with the sun rising over the ocean behind them.

  The ocean.

  “Look at this, Carla.” I motion her to come look at the web page with me. “My baby could live by the ocean with a mom and a dad like this.”

  A few scrolls and clicks later, and Carla and I learn that they are in their late twenties, that they dated a couple years before they got married, that they both have big, close extended families. The woman, Michelle, is a psychologist. The man, Joe, is a carpenter who owns his own business and renovates houses. They live year-round in a beach community . . . in North Carolina . . . and their work schedules would allow one of them to be home with my baby all the time. They love to explore. To celebrate holidays. To cook. They have two dogs and love animals (except for cats, they note). They have a house in a neighborhood with sidewalks and good schools, and a nursery already decorated and ready.

  But what really gets my attention is their letter.

  Dear Birth Mother,

  Thank you for giving us a chance. Because that’s what we want to do for your baby. We want to give him/her the chance you’ve been praying for, for him/her. We know that you are the person who has chosen to give him/her life, and that nothing will ever change that bond between the two of you. We also suspect that you’re reading about us because you are considering giving him/her up for adoption.

  We want to assure you that to us, adoption is not about you giving us a child. Adoption is about you choosing to trust the Lord with him/her, for a chance to have a life that you, for whatever reason, are not able to give, and that we promise to provide by His grace.

  We have been praying for you before you even visited our page, that the Lord will give all of us wisdom and strength, and that you will know your decision is the highest love one person can have for another. Most of all, we pray that the Lord will give you peace in every step of your journey.

  Love,

  Joe and Michelle

  “Listen for the Lord,” Sudie said. “Listen and you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

  Problem is, even if I know what I need to do, I can’t do anything if Bryan gets custody.

  35

  * * *

  I wake from a fitful sleep to extraordinary pressure rising through the effects of the epidural.

  “Carla . . .”

  She’s fallen asleep too, in the chair next to me.

  “Carla!”

  She jolts awake. “What is it, hon?”

  “I don’t know. I think . . . I need to do something . . . I think I need to push!”

  She scrambles to find the nurse call button, and soon a handful of nurses are in the room.

  “I’ll call Dr. Fitzgerald,” one says.

  “I need to check you,” says another, flinging back the sheet and spreading wide my numb and floppy legs. “She’s at ten. Fully effaced.”

  A flurry of activity begins as nurses come in and out, tearing blue paper wrapping off boxes of supplies, turning lights on above the nearby baby bassinet, adjusting bags of fluid running into me.

  “Jaycee,” Gabe says, skidding into the room.

  “You have great timing,” I say.

  “It’s time?”

  “It’s time.”

  He scoots by the nurses and wraps his arms around me. “I love you. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “I didn’t have time . . . I’m not ready.”

  “I don’t know if anyone’s ever ready,” Dr. Fitzgerald laughs. He extends a hand toward Gabe. “You must be the significant other.”

  Gabe steps back and looks to me to affirm this.

  “He is.”

  “I’m not sure where that leaves me.” Carla winks. “You want me to stay, honey?”

  “Yes.” I turn to Dr. Fitzgerald. “Is that okay? Can they both stay?”

  “Absolutely,” he says, smiling at us all. “Whatta you say we have a baby, then?”

  An hour later I’m still pushing.

  Gabe and Carla’s shirts are stained with sweat from holding my legs. I am sure Gabe had no idea what he was in for when he offered to stay with me, but the nurses put them both to work. Good thing he’s an EMT.

  “Now I know what Aaron and Hur must have felt like holding up Moses’ arms at the battle against the Amalekites,” Carla quips.

  “Your jokes are awful,” Gabe says to her.

  I fake a tired laugh.

  Dr. Fitzgerald does not look pleased.

  Lights on the baby’s monitor are flashing and alarms keep ringing.

  “Is something wrong?” I say to Dr. Fitzgerald. “What’s wrong?”

  The lights and alarms sound again, and two more nurses rush into the room.

  “Notify the team. OR. Now,” he says, his brow furrowed with worry.

  One nurse tells me to put my legs down and another straps an oxygen mask across my face.

  Like the mask they put on Jayden.

  Panic rises inside me.

  Lord, help my baby. Don’t let me lose my baby.

  The team of workers push Gabe and Carla aside and pull the side rails of my bed up, then rush me out of the room and down the hall to another room that’s cold and bright and top to bottom white tile. Everyone is putting masks and gowns on.

  I want to sit up and see what’s happening, but I can’t move. The epidural has me numbed. The strap is still across my belly. The people in masks appear on either side of my bed and count to three, and I feel them pulling me from my bed to a narrow table. It’s so skinny I’m sure I’m going to fall off until they put mo
re belts across me and splay my arms out onto arm boards on either side of the table like a cross. People put more stickers on my chest.

  “What’s happening? Someone tell me what’s happening!”

  No one answers.

  “Gabe? Gabe! Where’s Gabe?”

  “Shhh—shhh-shh. It’s okay.” Dr. Patel suddenly appears next to my head with a tall cart full of drawers and monitors. “They have to get the baby out now. You have to have a C-section.” He points to a screen. “Look. There. That’s your baby’s heartbeat. It’s slow, but it’s there. We will take good care of you. We will take good care of your baby.” He pushes a syringe full of clear liquid into my IV. “This will help you relax.”

  I don’t want to relax. I try to argue, but the medicine soon makes me not care.

  Help me, Lord. Help me. Please. Help my baby.

  Trust me.

  My breath fogs up the mask that covers my nose and mouth. Warmth runs up my arm and I see Dr. Patel pushing another syringe full of something into me, something that makes me feel sleepy. I struggle to stay awake.

  Gabe appears next to me. He’s wearing a white paper suit, a blue paper shower cap on his head. His eyes are wet with tears. “I love you. It’s going to be okay,” he says.

  Someone puts a screen of fabric between my chest and my belly. I feel pushing and pressure on my belly, and my entire body jostles with the force of whatever Dr. Fitzgerald and the other staff are doing.

  “It’s a boy!” someone hollers.

  Or do they? Am I dreaming?

  “A boy?” I ask. My tongue feels huge in my mouth.

  “A boy,” Gabe repeats, tears falling freely now. He leans down and kisses my forehead.

  More jostling and pressure on my belly.

  The room is quiet.

  Too quiet.

  “Why isn’t he crying?”

  Gabe looks across the room. “They’re cleaning him up. . . . It’s okay.”

  I don’t believe him, but then I hear the cry. Even through the fog of all the medicine, I can’t keep back the sobs.

  A nurse comes from around the curtain holding him, wrapped snug in a soft, striped blanket. She holds him against my shoulder, my face, so I can feel him and see him, and I can’t believe he’s here.

  He’s here.

  And he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my whole entire life.

  “Congratulations, Mama,” Dr. Fitzgerald says, peeking over the top of the curtain. “You both did great. Cord around his neck caused a bit of a scare, but it’s all good now.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He’s beautiful,” says Dr. Patel, pausing to look at him before getting back to tweaking knobs on his machine and fiddling with all the vials on top of his cart.

  “He’s perfect,” says Gabe.

  Something breaks loose inside me, something I can’t name. I didn’t think I could love anyone more than I loved Jayden, but this is different. This is my baby.

  My child.

  My son.

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

  Help me, Lord.

  Trust me.

  I feel his breath against my face, see the quick rise and fall of his chest, and I wonder what it must feel like to take in air for the very first time. To see light for the first time. To feel air for the first time. Fine, velvety hair covers this side of his face, his back, and he has a thin layer of dark hair, like my own, on his head. Every finger, every toe, every curl of his ears, the round edges of his nose, every single part of him is perfect.

  One look at his inky-blue eyes, glazed with the first sight of life, and I know I have to let him go. I have to give him a better life. Better than growing up in a trailer in a town with a mama and a daddy who can’t stand each other, better than growing up with the feeling that no matter what he accomplishes, folks still look at him like he’s stupid or no good because they know that’s the kind of people he came from. I feel it with an urgency right then and I know. I have to set him free.

  God willing.

  The photo of the couple on the beach fills my mind, the ocean and the sunrise, brilliant, behind them.

  My next thought is of my mama. “Gabe, could you call the prison? Have them get a message to my mother. Have them tell her she has a grandson.”

  36

  * * *

  My baby stirs and searches for my breast. I unsnap the hospital gown and lift my breast to his mouth. He shakes his little head back and forth until he feels it in his mouth and finally latches. It seems as if he’s always known this rhythm.

  “Isn’t it something he just knows?” I say to Gabe, who is watching us from an armchair next to the window.

  “It is,” he says.

  Light from the parking lot and streets outside the window create angled shadows in my hospital room, dark except for that and the soft glow of the TV that Gabe has turned to a sports channel.

  “You’re beautiful,” Gabe says.

  No one has ever told me that. And I certainly don’t feel very beautiful, my hair a mess, my belly saggy and stitched up, my face puffy from all the fluids they gave me.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says again.

  I can’t help blushing. “Stop.”

  “No. I’m never going to stop telling you that.”

  I grin at him. Imagine for the hundredth time it’s the three of us back at my place, or a brand-new place Gabe’s picked out for us. A real house, where we can live together. But mostly I imagine me and Gabe, just the two of us and the memory of my baby, and three green soda bottles holding fresh flowers by our little kitchen sink. One for Sudie. One for Jayden. And one for him.

  The rattle of a blood pressure machine on wheels approaches and a new nurse comes in the room, older and heavyset and sighing as if this is the hardest thing she’s had to do all day. She fiddles with the machine, the pump next to me, and the bags of fluids attached to it without looking at me or saying hello.

  Gabe clears his throat a little too loud. “Are you the new night nurse?”

  I try to hide a giggle.

  “I’m Sue,” she sighs, and finally looks at me and the baby at my breast. “Oh,” she gasps.

  “Oh what?” I say.

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “What?”

  She pinches up her mouth and puts her hands on her hips. “Why, that breastfeeding. We don’t recommend it for mothers who’ve chosen adoption. He probably shouldn’t even be in here.”

  I look down and watch his tiny chin and cheeks tugging, swallowing, tugging, swallowing. I don’t even know what to say to her. Shame comes and sits beside me, laughing and mocking same as always, whether in third grade watching the taillights of a white Mercedes headed out of Shady Acres, seeing Mama strung out and walking toward me in the middle school cafeteria, or at the register of the diner with the loudmouth mother smirking at me. I have the urge to rip the tube out of my arm and run out of this room, to find a bus to the east and the Carolina coast, where no one would know me or where I came from, and where I could live with my baby forever. Except for Bryan. And those papers. Nausea washes over me. I haven’t had time to think about that with everything happening so fast.

  Help me, Lord.

  Trust me.

  “Why not?” Gabe asks her, a hint of anger behind his words.

  “Can’t let yourself get all attached if he’s going to belong to someone else.”

  Something rises inside me, something that feels like the way a mother raccoon arches and hisses when something gets too close to her nest of kits. “I haven’t decided anything yet.” At least not as far as she’s concerned.

  Sue’s eyes widen, then scrunch up all mean and narrow. “Suit yourself.”

  She is not gentle as she slaps a blood pressure cuff around my arm, pokes the thermometer in my mouth, and whips the sheets back to press on my belly and check my pad. “Do you need anything for pain?” she asks, not bothering to pull the sheet back up.

  �
�I’m fine. Thank you.”

  She spins on her heel.

  “Oh, Nurse, this water pitcher is empty. And I think—” Gabe leans down, where a bag hangs off the bed—“yeah, the urine bag needs emptied.”

  She huffs out of the room and it takes everything we can to keep our laughing quiet so she doesn’t hear us.

  My baby’s latch slackens, and I wipe drops of milk from the corner of his sweet mouth. I set him on one of the hospital blankets and crisscross the corners over his bony little arms and legs. They’re shaking, I imagine from what must be the dizzying feeling of being free and undone outside my womb. He calms once he’s wrapped snug and cradled snug in my arms.

  A nursing assistant brings in some water and drains my urine bag. When she’s finished, she comes and leans over me, peeking at my baby, sleeping sound. I’m expecting another chastising.

  “He sure is something,” she says. No chastising at all.

  “Thank you, Hannah,” I say after reading her name tag.

  She smiles, then straightens my linens and collects the trash on her way out the door.

  Gabe and I are left in the quiet again, the three of us. As much as we laughed at Sue, her words still sting. I can’t help but think of the reason why Sudie never let me name any of the rescue animals.

  Releasing them is hard enough without getting too attached. . . .

  37

  * * *

  “Good morning, sleepyheads,” a cheery nurse says in the shade-drawn dim of my room.

  I’m relieved to see the day shift has arrived, and that it’s the nurse with the highlights in her hair who gave me the website of her friend.

  “I’m Amanda. I don’t know if you remember me from yesterday.”

  Amanda. “I remember.”

  Feels like neither of us want to bring up her friend or the website. The silence feels awkward as she goes about checking my stitches, my vital signs, then checking my baby.

  “He’s just perfect, isn’t he?” she says, measuring his head, turning him over, and checking his back.