Sister of Silence (11 page)

Little did I know
then that by the time spring arrived, Eddie would join them in his big Ford. It all left me with even more questions about them, and myself, than I had before.

Once Mom returned
to our house, there was plenty of work to do. Leaky faucets or water pipes that had frozen and burst needed fixed; the house needed a thorough cleaning, and we were again without wood and coal. Eddie made sure he was right there, doing anything we couldn’t do for ourselves.

Soon he began coming to the house straight from the coal mines, after his shift ended late at night. My bedroom was next door to Mom’s, but the small creek below our windows virtually cut off any sound between the two rooms. Just on the other side of the creek, the shrill whistles from the hourly trains would blow when they went roaring by, cutting through the black night.

Coal was still king when
we first moved to Independence, (West Virginia), in the early 1970s when I was eight, and trains ran constantly on the three sets of train tracks beside our house. Every morning I would jump out of bed and run downstairs to find Dad already dressed in dungarees, his morning coffee in one hand and an ink pen in the other, poised above the daily crossword puzzle. Because Dad was having a hard time sleeping, they became his early morning gripe sessions. There at the kitchen table, he told Mom that because of “those blasted trains making all that noise,” he wasn’t sure the house had been a good investment after all.

Not only would the trains blow their whistles long and hard, but the tracks were so close to our house that its large, old windows would rattle all the while. Then just
a child, the huge masses of steel were like toys to me, and I couldn’t understand my father’s anger. I would stand outside on the blackened railroad bridge that bordered our property and watch the fully-loaded locomotives lumber by, as car after car of coal passed by.

But
all of us had long since gotten used to the large locomotives and slept peacefully through the commotion, making them a perfect accomplice for Eddie. He had to walk through my room to reach the spare bedroom where he sometimes stayed. He might wake me with a kiss, quietly pleading with me to come to his room. Or some sixth sense awoke me, as he stood over my bed watching. Sometimes, I had no warning until his skin touched mine, and I refused his request. But that only resulted in him returning to my bed later.

No matter how hard I tried to stay awake, so I could plead and beg, just when I thought he really wasn’t coming back, I fell asleep. And then he would return, as a train came roaring by. I would feel a touch somewhere on my body, and before I knew what was happening, he was on top of me. I tried to writhe out of his grasp silently, scared to death my mother would wake and find us. It was a thought I couldn’t bear
, so most of the time I just lay there and prayed for it to end.

Sometimes when Eddie was ly
ing on me, I thought I heard the sound of metal squeaking; the bedsprings on my bed were quite old, and sounded as loud to me as if someone had broken a plate glass window. My heart began racing and I told him to stop. All the while he was with me, he whispered in my ear continually, saying things I could never imagine myself hearing about. I wondered where his vast knowledge of sex came from, and I hated what I heard.

To block out the squeaking and what was causing it,
in my mind I returned to my childhood days, where I could breathe deeply of both the train’s diesel fumes and the creosote from the bridge, which turned warm and gooey when the sun’s rays touched it. I climbed onto the lowest rail, while leaning over the top one, looking into the creek bed below. Then I took my fingernail and scraped the soft stuff that had turned to oozing black tar, and which bubbled up between the boards. I squeezed it into shapes between my fingers until it left dark stains against my pale flesh.

Or I tried to count the empty cars that flew furiously by, and when one with an open door neared,
in my fantasy I began running alongside it, grabbing the edge and flinging myself up into the car, so the train would carry me far, far away.

After Eddie left my bed, I tried to cry tears that refused to come. I thought I loved him, but wondered how I could when I felt so dirty. I wanted to get up and shower, to turn the water on as hot as it would go and scald every touch and kiss away, but
I knew that would only wake Mom. All I could do was lie there, hating myself and tell myself I loved him, as the aftermath of his antics mocked me.

One weekend night I became so churlish that first Mom, then Eddie, went to bed, leaving me alone downstairs. I wanted to be free of Eddie’s torture as long as possible so I lay down on the living room floor beside the heat register. I hoped it would warm the coldness deep within me while I peered into my mother’s well-worn poetry book, searching for an answer to the lies and hypocrisy I was living.

What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel so alone? I hate myself. I hate you, Eddie! Please God help me!
I prayed to God, over and over again.

I think it was the rebel—that part of me still needing to be exorcised, and which had lain dormant for too long—that made me do
what happened next. I went into the kitchen, reached into the cabinet for Dad’s homemade wine and poured myself a glass, drinking it in one long gulp. Then a second, and a third, glass.

I knew better, but I didn’t care. I returned to
my tiny corner next to the heat register and tried to figure out what I should do about my life, which I felt powerless to change. By the time I was becoming drowsy, I remembered I still had to bring in the coal for Mom to refill the heating stove in the morning.

To reach the coal bin, we had to cross the length of the yard behind the house. The wood was stacked right against the house, making it closer, but also requiring several trips outside.

Since the roof leaked, the black stuff inside the coal bin was wet, shiny and frozen solid. Using the pick, I finally broke it apart and found some dry coal below, which I shoveled into two five-gallon buckets. I felt lethargic by the time they were full, so when I tried to pick them up, I only made it a few feet across the yard. I stood there, dizzy, before dropping the buckets and collapsing onto my back in a bed of snow. The sky overhead was filled with tiny, sparkling gems that winked at me. I didn’t want to move, but the dampness from the snow began seeping through my clothes, and I vaguely recognized that I should get up.

I could just lie
here and go to sleep
.
It would so peaceful and painless. They’ll find me tomorrow, when it’s too late.

I don’t remember making it back inside. Nor do I recall dropping my coat, boots and gloves to form a path that led Mom straight to me. All I remember is someone holding my hair back from my face while I threw up in the toilet, asking the same question over and over again, “Daleen, what’s wrong with you?”

Even without the alcohol numbing my brain, I knew I couldn’t answer her question. Ever.

Winter soon left and spring arrived, and on a warm day near the end of March, Mom went into labor. I stayed at her bedside at the hospital, feeding her ice chips and rubbing her back when the contractions grew strong. I had gone to all her Lamaze childbirth classes, so I basically knew how it happened, but nothing prepared me for the raw, natural beauty of childbirth, or the intensity with which it can engulf a woman. After several hours, my brother Michael was born, letting out a lusty yell as he entered the world.

A nurse gave him to Mom to hold, and after taking him and cooing softly at him, she placed him at her breast to nurse. I watched, amazed, and then went to call my father overseas, leaving a message for him to call Mom at the hospital. I made sure she was all right, and after holding my baby brother myself, I went to school, like it was just another day.

One morning not long after Michael was born, I woke up and ran to the bathroom, where I threw up in the toilet. The virus lasted for days—until a terrible thought came to me. I stared into the toilet bowl, gripping the rim tightly with both hands as waves of nausea hit me along with the next thought that reverberated in my brain.

I haven’t had my period
. I had spent so much time pushing away the fear of becoming pregnant, that I didn’t even realize when I missed a month.

My head began spinning, making me feel even worse. Getting up, I wrung out a washcloth and wiped my face, staring at the mirror. Looking at the dark circles hanging like half moons under my pale eyes
. I didn’t see myself, instead I saw my mother, while pregnant with Jackie and more recently, Michael. I stared into my reflection, barely able to comprehend it.

I
can’t. Absolutely can’t. Be pregnant.

Overnight I had changed, going from a budding journalist to a scared girl whose dreams were evaporating right in front of her eyes.

I’m just another sad statistic: a teenager trapped by a pregnancy I don’t want and a future I didn’t ask for. Now I really am like all those other girls.

As if in a trance, I told Eddie.

“You’re what? What did you say?” He stared at me.

“You heard me.” I kept thinking about what it would mean, and how, when I grew fat, everyone would know what had happened—the terrible thing we had done together. I hated it, and I hated Eddie for doing it to me.

“When was your period
due?”

“I’m not really sure.” My soft voice was quieter than usual. We never used birth control, because I never planned to have sex. But when we did, Eddie always promised it was “the last time.”
Somehow I just believed it wouldn’t happen to me.

I heard Eddie say we would just have to get married. “Does your mom know?”

I shook my head. I knew it was going to be such a big disappointment to her, considering how she tried so hard to raise me to live by Bible principles.

“I don’t even think I can face her.” I stared out the window.

I couldn’t, so the next day I took the coward’s way out, writing a letter telling her I was pregnant. I told her how sorry I was and I wanted her to know it wasn’t her fault. It was mine.

After I left it on my bed and went to school, I could hardly concentrate the entire day. When the bus dropped us off again that afternoon, I walked as slow as possible, wanting to delay the inevitable. The minute I saw her, I wanted to cry. Mom mustered a smile, and even asked me how classes had gone. I gave some vague answer and then, after Carla left the room, she began talking. She didn’t raise her voice or yell, just kept speaking in that mild, flat tone of hers. I wondered how she could be so calm, when I was in agony over what I had done, and what was going to happen.

“You need to see an obstetrician, just to make sure. If you are, then since you and Eddie want to get married, you should do that right away. I’ll deal with your father,” she finished.

I nodded, unable to speak. We lived in the Bible Belt, that part of Appalachia filled with God-fearing church folk
. Where the Ten Commandments were still revered, and parents weren’t afraid to use the “rod” so they wouldn’t “spoil the child.” Due to her own deep religious beliefs, I suspected Mom felt she had somehow failed me—failed to teach me right from wrong. But she would never say so out loud. She didn’t need to, because the words hovered there unspoken, for a long time to come.

What happened next made me wish I had died that night in the snow. More than a few girls bore the fruit of a big belly, waddling down the hallway. Some of them had already gotten married, wearing a wedding band as well as a new last name. But when we were placed in the national spotlight, after our school was featured on an episode of
20/20
. I think everyone was stigmatized. According to that segment, West Preston High had the highest number of pregnant teens of any school in the country. Overnight we became the topic of conversation for everyone in our county, if not the nation.

Mrs. Niles shook her head when she heard the locker room buzzing. “It’s pretty sad when a school gets national attention, not for academics or even sports, but for this. We’ll be the laughingstock of the country,” she
told us, frowning.

In reality,
I wasn’t counted in that study but knew I should have been. If anyone else had known I was pregnant, I would have been responsible for the number climbing even higher. If anything, the news only made me feel more ashamed, like an outcast, and I guarded my secret even tighter, determined no one would know what I had done.

The next few weeks were a complete blur. Eddie broke the news to his parents and though they seemed to be disappointed, his mom was also excited at the idea of getting a grandchild from the deal. It was agreed his father, a minister, would perform the ceremony.

Mom and I went shopping and found a simply styled wedding gown with an empire waist and a short train. “I feel guilty about wearing white.” I grimaced while standing before the floor-length mirror. “White is for virgins.”

“I’m sure it’ll be all right this once,” Mom said absently, paying for the dress the only way she could—with the same credit card she had to use to buy us our new school clothes every year
so she could make payments over time.