A Time to Dance/A Time to Embrace (20 page)

Abby nodded, embarrassed that she was unable to control her tears. When Jo looked down at her photographs, Abby dabbed quickly at her cheeks, stopping the watery trail from landing squarely on her scrapbook and ruining pictures that would have been impossible to replace.

Haley Ann.
Was that when Abby’s faith had taken a turn for the worse? It hadn’t seemed so at the time, back when her ties to the Lord had been her only assurance that one day she’d hold her daughter again, cradle her in her arms in a place called eternity. But really, now that she looked back, God could have given her second daughter more time on earth. What sense was there in allowing a precious angel like Haley Ann to be born into this world only to take her back four months—

“Was she older than Nicole?”

Abby wanted to curse at the woman, beg her to stop asking questions about the one place in her heart where no one trespassed. But logic told her Jo meant well. Abby summoned her strength, ignoring the way fresh tears blurred her vision, and without gazing up she searched desperately for her voice. “She was . . . she was younger. Eighteen months.”

Jo squirmed in her chair. “I know you probably don’t talk about her much, Abby, but since you and me’s gonna be family from here on out, I hope you don’t mind my questions. I never knew anyone who lost a child so young. Most people say it’s the death knell for a marriage. But you and John, I mean, look at you two. Still going strong after all these years. You’d never know the two of you’d been through something awful like that.”

Despite the photographs spread out before her, a different picture came into focus. She and John at the hospital emergency room saying good-bye to the lifeless body of little Haley Ann. SIDS, the doctors had said. Sudden death, a risk for any infant. And there was John, T-shirt and gym shorts, tears streaming down his rugged, handsome cheeks, cradling the baby in his arms as though he could somehow love her back to life. Abby could still see him, still feel the tears shaking his body, still hear his voice.
“Dear God, I loved her.”
She remembered how he wrapped his arms more closely around their baby’s lifeless little body, protecting her the way he hadn’t been able to when she lay dying in her crib. “Haley Ann . . . my precious girl, Haley Ann . . .”

The image of John and their second daughter stayed in Abby’s mind, burning its way into her consciousness until she couldn’t take it another moment. “Excuse me.” She pushed herself away from the craft table, hurried into a back bathroom, and dropped herself on the closed lid of the toilet. As real as Haley Ann been, there was no room in Abby’s life for thoughts of her now.

“Why did you take her from us? Why?”

The whispered question bounced around the tiled bathroom walls and came back to her. There were no more answers today than there had been back when Haley Ann died. And though that secret place in Abby’s heart kept Haley Ann alive, monitored her milestones and birthdays, she never allowed herself to drift back to the day when she found her baby girl facedown in her crib, motionless and not breathing.

Abby clenched her fists and the tears came with a force that was almost violent.
Why here, God? At the craft store?
Couldn’t she have had a neutral response to Jo Harter’s question? Would it take another twenty years before mention of Haley Ann didn’t ignite a bonfire of emotions?

Five minutes passed, then ten, and there was a soft knocking at the door. Abby’s heart rate doubled.
Don’t make me explain myself,
God, please.
She swallowed hard. “What?” Her throat sounded thick from the effects of her tears.

“Abby? It’s me—Jo. You all right?”

If Abby had made a line of people she might choose to befriend in this, her season of letting go, Jo Harter would have most certainly been at the end. The woman was all frosting and no cake, too caught up in surface conversation to understand the workings of the heart. Still, they were about to be linked by the marriage of their children and Abby would not be responsible for doing anything that might alienate her. Even now, when all Abby wanted was to disappear through a crack in the mortar and find herself under the covers of their guest-room bed.

“I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

There was a beat.
Make her believe it, please . . .

“All right. I was getting a little nervous out there by myself. Wasn’t sure if you were sick or something.”

Sick of your questions . . .
“I’m fine. Really. I’ll be right out.”

When Jo had moved away from the door, Abby stood and splashed cold water on her face. There was no hiding the fact that she’d been crying, but most of the women would be too involved in their scrapbooking to notice her tear-stained face. Drawing a deep breath, she refused to think another minute about Haley Ann and the time in her life when she had needed John Reynolds just to make it through the day.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Focus on the here and now, Abby.” Her heart seemed to toughen some in response. She could do this, go back out there and face Jo and whatever other questions she had, finish an evening of photo layouts, and make it home. She could do it all without giving in to the pressing urge to go back in time, back to Haley Ann’s birth and all that their lives had been that year.

Forget about it, Abby. Think about today.

With a resolve she hadn’t known she was capable of, she drew a deep breath and returned to the craft table. The rest of the night, despite Jo’s questions and well-meaning attempt to steer the conversation back to small talk, Abby hid behind her heart’s iron gates and refused to let herself feel.

Not until she came home at half past ten that evening and found her entire family asleep did she do the thing she’d wanted to do since Jo first brought up the topic. Moving quietly so as not to wake them, she bundled into a parka that would protect her from even the most frigid temperatures. Then she wrapped scarves around her neck and head and donned a pair of thermal gloves. Grabbing a folding chair from the garage, she trudged outside through the snow to the pier, opened it, and sat down, gazing out at the moonlit reflection on the icy lake.

Had it really been nineteen years?

The cold made its way through a crack in her scarves and she pulled them more tightly. Whenever she needed time alone, space to think and dream and remember how to be again, Abby came here. To the pier: winter, spring, summer, or fall. The weather made no difference.

She remembered the dates like it was yesterday. Haley Ann, born October 24, 1981, an hour after the league football game against Southridge High. Dead just four months later, February 28, 1982. Nights like this it seemed as though Haley Ann had never really died at all, as though maybe she was asleep upstairs in the room next to Nicole, as much a part of their family as Kade or Sean or any of them.

Abby’s body adjusted to the cold, and she relaxed. Across the backdrop of the shimmering lake she watched pictures take shape, saw scenes come to life again as though they were happening for the first time. Her pregnancy had been a dream, and more than once John had whispered to her that this child, this second baby, would certainly be a boy.

“You know, Abby . . . to carry on the tradition.”

He’d been teasing of course, and as her due date neared he no longer even joked about having a boy. “I’m sure it’s a girl. As precious as Nicole and as perfect as you. What could be better than being surrounded by princesses?”

And sure enough, when he arrived at the hospital after the football game in time to join her in the delivery room, they learned together that he’d been right. There was nothing difficult or remarkable about the delivery, nothing that might lend even a shadow of foreboding that this little girl was anything but the picture of health. Her skin was pink almost from the moment she was born, and her cries came in short bursts that sounded more like the tinkling of her older sister’s laughter than the wailing of a lusty newborn.

“I knew it, Abby girl; she’s perfect. Another precious princess for the Reynolds castle.”

She could still hear him, see him holding his tiny daughter, cooing at her, welcoming her to the world. “Only the very best princesses have the good sense to be born after a football game is over . . .” He sang to her and whispered silly nothings to her while Abby fell asleep exhausted.

The next morning when Abby woke, there was John, long legs stretched across the hospital room, one hand on Haley Ann’s back as she lay in the bassinet beside him. Abby remembered well the feeling of joy that grew in her heart that morning, the way she’d imagined only sunshine and rainbows for all the days that lay ahead. Her mother was down from Wisconsin watching Nicole, and later that day the group held an informal birthday party for the newborn with cake and streamers and balloons and a song that Haley Ann slept right through.

“She’s
my
sister, right, Mommy?” Nicole angled her head lovingly, putting her nose so close to her baby sister’s the two were almost touching.

“Yes, she’s all yours, Nicole.”

Abby had imagined the fun these two would have, growing up together, sharing a room and secrets and clothes and friends. They would be inseparable, not like Abby and her sister, who was four years younger and too caught up in her own life to have much of a friendship with Abby.

Nicole and Haley Ann.

Not long after Abby brought the newborn home, she stenciled the girls’ names on their lavender walls and bought them matching bedding. Abby closed her eyes and let the memory become real in her mind. She could see the white, swirly letters, smell the fresh paint on the walls, hear the infant cries of Haley Ann when she was hungry or needed to be held.

Football season ended in December, and that same week they sold their two-bedroom home and moved into the house on the lake—the home where they’d lived ever since. Each day afterward brought hours of family time, leisurely evenings with John spread out on the sofa, Haley Ann bundled in the crook of one arm while Nicole cuddled into the other. He was such a wonderful dad, gentle and loving with the innate ability to make Nicole and even Haley Ann giggle at will.

One night when the boxes were unpacked, not long after the girls had fallen asleep, John took Abby by the hand and led her outside to the pier. In the bustling activity of moving and having a newborn in the house, Abby had done little more than admire the pier from a distance. But that night, bundled in their winter coats, John wove his fingers between hers and gently turned her so she was facing him.

“Do you hear it, Abby?”

She listened intently, the winter night quiet like the moon across the water. John moved his hands along her arms, drawing her close, pulling her into a hug. “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

As she did, she heard gentle sounds she hadn’t noticed before. A subtle breeze in the trees that lined the lake, the simple lapping of water against the frozen shoreline. The heartbeat of the man whose arms surrounded her. “I think so.”

He pulled back then and stared into her eyes, and she sensed he loved her more deeply than before, if that were possible. “It’s the music of our lives, Abby.” A smile played on his lips, and he leaned toward her, kissing her in a way that made her feel safe and protected and wanted. Desirable, despite the circles under her eyes from late nights with Haley Ann. “Dance with me, Abby . . . dance with me.”

Taking her hand carefully in his, John led her in small circles, dancing with her alone on the pier to the melody of life, while their angel girls slept inside. Never mind the areas where ice made the wood slippery, in John’s arms she was safe and secure, a ballerina being led across the grandest dance floor of all.

It was something he did often over the next two months: swept her outside and danced with her on the pier. Something that made her forget the day’s diapers and feedings and sleepless nights. With all her heart Abby believed those days, those feelings between John and her, would never end. It wasn’t just the dancing; it was the way Nicole became tender and gentle around Haley Ann, the way they felt together as a family. Invincible, almost. As if no bad thing in all the world could touch what they shared.

Abby blinked, trying to contain a tidal wave of sadness.

There was nothing remarkable about February 28. Nothing during Haley Ann’s morning feeding to indicate it would be the last time Abby would hold her little girl close or stare into her eyes as the two of them held a conversation only mother and child could understand. When the baby was finished eating, Abby kissed her tenderly and lay her down on her side.

Two hours later, about the time when Haley Ann usually woke from her morning nap, Abby was folding a load of laundry on her bed when she was pierced with a sudden sense of panic, a warning she could not explain. “Nicole?” Abby’s voice rang urgently through the house and her older daughter, nearly two that month, was quick to respond.

“Yes, Mommy?” Her voice told Abby she was where she was supposed to be. Situated in front of the television, watching
Sesame
Street.
“Is it lunchtime?”

Abby tried to calm her racing heart. “No, sweetie, not yet. Mommy has to get Haley Ann up from her nap first.”

She dropped the towel she’d been holding and hurried into the baby’s room. “Haley, sweetie, wake up. Mommy’s here.”

The memory sent a shiver down Abby’s spine. Haley Ann was on her stomach, a position she often wound up in, but even with Abby’s singsong voice she showed no signs of movement.

Hot tears forged a trail down Abby’s cheeks as she relived the moment, felt again the slight stiffness in her baby daughter as she swept her into her arms and saw the blue in her face and fingers.

“Haley Ann! Wake up!” She had shouted the words, jerking the tiny baby just enough to jump-start her breathing, to waken her from the terrible sleep she had fallen into. When there was no response, no signs of life, she grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

“Hurry, please! My baby isn’t breathing.”

For the next ten minutes she gave Haley Ann mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, oblivious to the way Nicole sat huddled in the doorway watching, singing the alphabet song to herself over and over again.