Sarah's Choice

by Rebecca St. James

  She collected her mug and plate and slipped into the kitchen. Denise was right behind her.

  “You going to tell me what’s up with you, or do I have to get out the bamboo shoots and start sliding them under your fingernails?”

  Sarah evaded her eyes and went with, “It still feels wrong without Dad.”

  “Uh-huh. And?”

  When Sarah didn’t answer, Denise curled her fingers around Sarah’s wrist and pulled her through the other swinging door and into the hallway. Beyond them the chirp of little-boy voices wove among their mother’s murmurs, and the cassette player Agnes couldn’t part with provided a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album as backup. Around them the cozy darkness of the place they had always come to as kids to share secrets closed in. Denise’s first crush. The only D Sarah ever received. Their plans for Dad’s breakfast in bed for Father’s Day.

  Sarah leaned against the stair railing, her back to the living room. Denise perched on the edge of a step and waited.

  “I guess I should tell you,” Sarah said. “I’m pregnant.”

  The calm Sarah counted on was right there. Denise nodded as if Sarah had just announced she was having her brows waxed.

  “I’m guessing this was an accident.”

  “A train wreck.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Not tell Mom, for one thing.”

  Denise zippered her finger across her lips.

  “Thanks,” Sarah said. “I can’t handle that right now.”

  “Is this my sister Sarah I’m talking to? The one who can handle anything?”

  “I know, weird, right?”

  “Maybe not. Having a baby is a huge deal. It changes everything . . .” Denise touched Sarah’s hand. “Even you.”

  Sarah stiffened. “You’re assuming—”

  “Are you and Matt getting married now?”

  “It doesn’t look that way.”

  “Sarah, I’m sorry.” Denise pressed her hands to the sides of her face for a long moment. “You know we’ll all be there to support you and the baby. Even Mom. You see how she is with the boys. This is her grandchild. Whatever the circumstances, that trumps everything.”

  “Denise.”

  Sarah knew it was her tone that froze her sister’s smile. She couldn’t seem to talk to anyone about this without turning into Cruella de Vil.

  “This is just bringing out the worst in me. But you’re assuming I’m having the baby. There is another option.”

  Denise pushed at her face again, as if she were trying to keep it from crumpling. “Sarah, no. Listen to me—”

  “If I have a baby, I won’t be able to pay off the loan they took out—or the IRS—or the medical bills insurance didn’t cover—and who else is going to do it? I can’t wait around for Matt to grow up. He goes from one ridiculous scheme to another and his ‘real job’ is with an investment firm. That could fold with the next dip in the stock market. I might not have a choice.”

  While Denise shook her head and visibly fought back tears, Sarah reeled. Where was this coming from? When she talked to Megan, she wouldn’t even consider abortion. But with Denise, having the baby was out of the question. Megan would love what was coming out of Sarah’s mouth right now.

  Because it sounded just like her.

  “All right, look.” Denise was so obviously trying to be soothing. “This isn’t a decision you should be making alone. You’re saying all these things about Matt, but what does he think? He’s wonderful with children—”

  “He’s wonderful with children because he thinks they’re toys. He thinks everything is a toy and life is one big playground. To me, being wonderful with children means you can support them. He’s just not ready to have a baby.”

  “I said this to you before: is anyone ever ready to have a baby?” Denise’s voice warmed. “It’s difficult and demanding and messy and annoying and at the end of the day . . . it’s just more satisfying and rewarding than you could ever imagine.”

  “And more expensive and—”

  “Sarah, have the baby. We’ll get the bills paid eventually.”

  “Before they take Mom’s house?”

  “Yes! And Matt will grow up if he has a reason to. And besides, he loves you.”

  “Enough to get me into this mess.”

  “Like you had nothing to do with it?”

  Sarah raked a hand through her hair. “I know. That was a stupid thing to say. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.”

  “Then don’t make a decision right now that you’re probably going to regret.”

  “I don’t have that much time, Denise. I’m almost eight weeks along.”

  “There’s still time. Keep talking. We’ll figure this out.”

  “I have talked about it. All I can see is that my whole career has been leading up to this promotion. I had a plan. I wasn’t going to let Mom lose the house, and I wasn’t ever going to be in that position myself. If I have this baby . . . so much for the plan.”

  “Why?”

  “Carson won’t give one of their most profitable accounts to a pregnant woman.”

  Sarah felt like she was parroting Megan again. She clamped her lips. This conversation was pointless.

  “You won’t be pregnant forever. You can practically work up to the last minute. And I don’t think you’re employed by a bunch of jerks.”

  “You should hear what they say about the pregnant woman who’s leaving.”

  For that matter, she should hear what Sarah herself had said. About that woman who breathed kindness. She wanted to throw up again, and this time it wasn’t hormonal.

  “Working women who get pregnant have legal rights. You can take up to twelve weeks off after a pregnancy and go back without losing your job.”

  “Twelve weeks without pay. I looked it up.”

  “So you don’t use all twelve weeks.”

  “And then what? I go back to work with a baby strapped to my back?”

  “Come on, Sarah. Like I said, this is you I’m talking to. The woman who got through college and grad school and came out with honors. And then sacrificed a job in New York to be here for Dad. And then took on his finances and yet is still thriving at work.” Denise gave an elaborate shrug. “Look at this as life’s next challenge.”

  “Impossible challenge. How would I pay for day care?”

  “I could take care of the baby while you’re at work.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You’re not asking. I’m volunteering. I’m home all day anyway.” She attempted a laugh. “Trust me, I wouldn’t let my two have a bad influence on your baby.”

  “I don’t want to punish you for my mistakes.”

  “You wouldn’t be punishing me. This is my niece or nephew. If it’s a girl, how much would I love that? And I know what to do with boys.” She looked straight into Sarah’s face. “Let me help you.”

  Sarah tightened her arms and stared hard at her boots. “If I decide to do it, would you still help me? Would you take me to have the abortion?”

  She expected the silence, but not the horror on her sister’s face when she finally looked up at her. Denise’s eyes had shifted to something over Sarah’s shoulder, and even in the dim light of the hall, her face was ashen.

  “Mom?” Sarah whispered.

  Denise nodded.

  Let me die. Just let me die right now.

  Sarah turned and watched her mother come to the bottom of the steps. Even the lines in her face trembled. Tears already gathered in the pockets under her eyes—eyes so wounded Sarah couldn’t look into them.

  The only thing she knew right then was that she had never hurt anyone this way before, and it stabbed at her.

  “I’m sorry you heard that,” Sarah said. “But, Mom, please don’t—”

  “You can’t have an abortion, Sarah.” Agnes whispered the word as if it burned her lips. “It’s a sin.”

  Sympathy immediately began to seep away. “Please don
’t start with that.”

  “It’s the truth. You would be committing—”

  “I’ve already committed a sin by getting pregnant in the first place. I’m trying to fix it.”

  “But you cannot negate one sin by committing another. The Word of God says—”

  “Don’t talk to me about God!”

  Denise was by now standing up, hand on her mother’s arm. “Mom, now is not the time to preach at Sarah.”

  Agnes wrenched away. Sarah wedged herself between them. The tension that had pulled her apart for so many days snapped like a brittle rubber band. There was nothing left to hold her back.

  “Do you remember the night I was sobbing on that couch in there and you sat next to me and you said, ‘Don’t worry. God told me your father’s being healed. We just have to keep trusting him.’ Do you remember that?” Sarah’s temples throbbed. “He died the next day. The next day, Mom.”

  “Sarah, that doesn’t mean—”

  “So—what? God was lying to you? Or maybe this whole thing is in your head.”

  Denise said, “Sarah, you’re—”

  Sarah shook her shoulders from her sister’s reach. “It doesn’t matter. Daddy wasn’t healed, and that’s when I stopped counting on God for anything. God’s not making this decision for me. I am.”

  Although her mother’s face was all but frozen in shock, she still shook her head, still got out, “God knows what’s best for us, Sarah.”

  “You know what, Mom? Right now I don’t think God even knows I exist.”

  “No. Sarah, no, no, no—”

  Denise clamped both arms around her. “Mom, you have to calm down.”

  “Nobody’s going to calm down until I leave,” Sarah said.

  She grabbed her coat and managed to get herself out the door before the angry sobs erupted. She stumbled blindly down the steps, trying to jam her arms into sleeves and her anger and fear and confusion back into her chest. Neither attempt worked. When she fumbled her way into the car, her coat was draped crookedly around her shoulders, and her body shook so hard she had to grab the steering wheel to keep from flying apart.

  She had never screamed in her mother’s face before. Never slammed that front door in a fit of rage. Or left her sister to pick up the pieces she’d left behind.

  Had that just happened? Or was it another ‘vision from the Lord’?

  The front door opened and Denise slipped, coatless and visibly shivering, onto the porch. She beckoned to Sarah with her hand, but Sarah shook her head and cranked the starter and stomped down on the accelerator. Buzz lurched forward and down the street, straight into a patch of black ice. The rear end fishtailed and Sarah steered, still sobbing, into the spin and managed to get the Toyota under control and around the corner. She pulled to the curb and pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and fought, hard, until she could breathe.

  This couldn’t go on. She was tearing Matt apart, tearing her family to pieces. Ripping herself in two for that matter. She had to make a choice. Even if it was wrong, at least this whole thing would be over. Wounds would get covered up, and she could move forward. Just like she’d done the last time she was in this kind of pain.

  “This won’t make you proud, Daddy,” she whispered. “But I think I have to do it.”

  She felt for the scarf, but it wasn’t there.

  Sarah turned Buzz’s brittle heater up as far as it would go and pawed through her purse for the card the nurse at the clinic had given her. She’d only looked at it long enough to see there was a number you could call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  “Stop shaking,” she said out loud.

  But her finger still trembled as she tapped the number on her phone.

  “Hello,” the plastic recording said. “Thank you for calling the Lincoln Park Women’s Center. We are now closed. If you’d like to make an appointment for a procedure, press one for our twenty-four-hour scheduling.”

  Good. She wouldn’t have to talk to another person who would assure her she was just having a wart removal.

  “Hi, this is Marsha. Would you like to make an appointment?”

  Not a recording. A cheery live voice that should have been scheduling appointments for family photographs.

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “And what is your name?”

  “Sarah Collins.”

  “Hi, Sarah.” The voice grew even cheerier, now that they were on a first-name basis. “Is this your first time for this procedure?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We just like to know if you’ve had this done before—”

  Sarah hung up before she even knew why. Despite the failure of the car heater, her face burned.

  Women did this more than once? Like it was nothing?

  She closed her eyes, tried to imagine herself in a waiting room with newly pregnant girls who flipped through magazines and checked their text messages as if they were about to have a Botox injection, but she couldn’t get it to come clear.

  Sarah restarted the engine. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she couldn’t imagine that.

  The only thing she could imagine was to do just what Audrey said. Hide.

  Hide just for a little while, someplace where she could get things to go back into their compartments.

  She picked up her phone again and went to e-mail. Audrey had included her number with the directions.

  Sarah tapped it and waited.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Saturday was snowless but bitter. Since Chicago seemed to be entering another ice age, Sarah decided to take the train to Wilmette instead of chancing the streets with Buzz Lightyear. His windshield thick with hardened cold, he looked as forlorn as she felt as she started the hike for the train station.

  But once she was ensconced in a seat, face pressed to a warm window, Sarah sank into the cocooned feeling the train always gave her—a mixture of cradle-like swaying and rhythmic clacking and somebody else’s driving.

  And the memories. One in particular tonight, of coming back from a day of ice skating—she and Dad and Denise.

  Dad always embraced anything she or Denise showed an interest in and took it to the limit with them. The year Sarah asked for ice skates for Christmas, when she was eight, he took them to the downtown rink on the train every Saturday and had them doing double salchows before the winter was over. Denise got more into it than Sarah and even competed for a while. Sarah could almost see them both leaning on Dad’s shoulders on the train-rocking ride home from Denise’s competitions, Denise asleep and Sarah wide awake asking him questions about anything she could think of, just to hear him talk. She knew more about term life insurance and church politics and the history of the Jeep than any kid in America.

  Things were so clear then.

  Audrey met her at the stop in her giant SUV with the baby seat in back. She had jazz playing on the car stereo, which wasn’t what Sarah expected.

  Neither was the house.

  It was an original Craftsman bungalow in an older Wilmette neighborhood, probably built in the 1920s and redone in recent years. Sarah followed Audrey across the wide porch and stood inside the glass-paned front door while Audrey took her coat and hung it on a hall tree Sarah knew she had to have acquired either from an antique store or her grandmother’s attic. Probably the attic. It was hard not to just stay there and soak in the gleaming wood floors and the earthy colors and the tiled fireplace where Audrey already had a fire going.

  The whole place said, “Come in. Curl up. Be.”

  It was like an extension of Audrey’s office.

  By then Audrey, who had still said very little, had slipped into the kitchen Sarah could see across the open floor plan. More gleaming, from a copper kettle and pots hanging from the ceiling and the glass fronts of the cabinets.

  “Does the nausea get better as the day goes on?” Audrey called out to her.

  Sarah folded her arms and moved slowly to the sit-down counter Audrey motioned her to. Some
how a fat mug of hot cocoa had appeared there.

  “It does,” Sarah said.

  “Well, just in case, I made the soup I was able to keep down those first few months. My mom’s recipe.” Audrey smiled her apple slice of a smile. “She had seven babies, so she pretty much had it down.”

  “You have six brothers and sisters?”

  “Yep. We ate a lot of soup. You?”

  “We ate soup too. Oh—you mean do I have siblings.”

  “You can answer either one of those. How are you with bread?”

  Sarah nodded. She’d already sniffed the air enough to know it was homemade.

  “So is there anything you can’t do?” Sarah said. “You’re amazing at your job. Your home is awesome. You obviously have a great marriage. And you cook from scratch. I feel like a slacker right now.”

  “Oh? This from the girl who’s already had one promotion and is about to get another one—and dresses like a fashionista—and is put together so doggone sweet I have body envy every time I look at you—even before I turned into the Goodyear Blimp.”

  Sarah laughed. The sound was rusty. She probably hadn’t let out so much as a real chortle in about ten days.

  “You so do not look like the Goodyear Blimp,” she said, and didn’t add that she had once mentally compared Audrey to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Right now she was more reminiscent of a Rubens painting. That Sarah did say.

  “I’m going to go with that until I deliver,” Audrey said. She set two steaming bowls on a tray. “I thought we’d eat by the fire.”

  The scene couldn’t have been more Norman Rockwell–idyllic, and Sarah settled into it, soup and bread on a wooden tray table in front of her, a sympathetic woman across from her, and the friendly spits and crackles of a fire beside her. This was true hiding. After an evening of this, she could absolutely get things sorted out and get this thing decided once and for—

  “You know, I used to hate women like you.”

  Sarah froze, spoon halfway between the bowl and her mouth.

  “You girls got pregnant without giving it a thought, and half the time you didn’t even want to be. And there was me, ready to do just about anything to have a baby and seeing that dream recede further with every birthday.”