Choices (33 page)

One brutally cold week passed by with temps in the teens. The frigid weather outside matched the frigid wall of ice surrounding my heart and soul.
I stopped by to see my best girl.

“Hello…”

“Hi, Aunt Laurel, how are you?”

“Why hi there Spence. Are you getting ready for hockey practice? I think we have an hour before I need to take you. Oh, don’t worry about it Aunt Laurel, my Dad’s gonna do it or my Mom.”

“Hi Laurel.” Mitch came out of the office with Jack in his arms. He leaned in to give me a kiss when Jack tangled his chubby little fingers into my hair.

“Ha Ha, gotcha! Gotcha! Won’t let go, won’
t let go, Gotcha!” Squealed Jack with such pure delight.

“I see that you do have me Jack
.” I pried his fat little fingers out of my tangles and rubbed my frigid nose against his and kissed it.

“Ouch! You cold Aunt Laurel! Ma
ke my nose hurt.” Mitch put the baby down and told Spencer to take him into the office to play with the computer.

“I’m sorry Jack
. Next time I’ll be sure to warm up my nose.” I smiled at him and then turned my eyes up to Mitch’s whose eyes looked just as frozen as my nose. I hugged him and tried to force into his heart all the heat I could muster.

“How are you?”
I managed to push out.

“I’m…” He
shrugged and held my hands. “Laurel, how would you be if you lost your baby?” I nodded, looked at him and nodded again.

“How’s Kristy?”

“Oh, you know Kristy, doing six things at once and not completing any of them; doing anything and everything to keep herself distracted. I try to talk to her but she changes the subject or leaves the room and just always responds with, ‘they’ll find her, they’ll find her. God, wouldn’t take my baby away, he just wouldn’t.’ She finds something else to occupy her mind and her hands. Talk to her Laurel, talk to her, like only you can. She hasn’t even cried. I’ll drop off Spence at practice and the others I’ll take out for McDonald’s.”

“You don’t need to take all of them, Mitch. I’ll be here. I can watch the others while you’re gone and help Kristy with dinner.”

“Thanks, but no, I want you to talk to her and I like having them all with me all the time now.” I shook my head and hugged him again and could feel him lean into me and let his shoulders just sag.

“I understand, I’ll talk to her.” I smiled and put on my bravest nurse’s face reserved for parents whose children wouldn’t survive.

I helped Mitch get Spence and the others together and loaded up into the car.

“Jesus, Laurel, enough! Now, go inside. It’s freezing out here.” I rubbed my stomach. “You forget Mitch I have my own portable heater.”

“Yeah, I know.” He looked up at Kristy from the kitchen
window, blew her a kiss, wiped away what could have been a tear or melted snowflakes, waved goodbye and hustled into the minivan. He rolled down the window and motioned me closer. “Get her to talk Laurel, scream, cry anything to get her out of avoidance mode.” He kissed my check rolled up the window and pulled out of the driveway. I looked up at the window put on my nurse’s warrior smile, waved, trudged up the steps and prayed the Lord would give me the right words to say.

I walked into the kitchen and found her cleaning out the pantry. Food was all over the kitchen counter.

“Well, shit, if I knew you were going to be re-organizing I would have told you to come to my kitchen first.” She smiled at me.

“I know, right. I never do anything like this unless you’re up my backside to do it.” She closed the distance between us and gave me a hug and a kiss. “Sheesh, you’re cold
.”

“I know, your youngest son said the same thing to me just minutes earlier.”
She was buzzing around the kitchen and hiding in the pantry. “So, how long how you been at this?” I asked her while I tried to rub blood back into my arms.

“Um…hm, about an hour or so. Hey, where are the kids?” She murmured into the pantry.

“Helen has them and she’s making you eggplant parmesan this week.” She popped her head out of the pantry and her face was dotted with flour from an exploding flour sack.

“Dang flour bags, not very sturdy! You know Helen does not need to keep bringing food over. I’m perfectly capable of cooking for my family.” Kristy emerged from the pantry wrestling with the flour sack to prevent it from exploding
and looking slightly perturbed. Whether the irritation was from my comment or the flour was yet to be deduced.

“Honey, no one ever said you couldn’t.
You know Helen, she doesn’t feel useful unless she’s cooking during a tragedy. See, now you know why I weighed so much. All that damn cooking Helen did after her husband left, forced me to eat it all! Not that it was so hard, really.” I threw up my hands and did a twirl around in my spot.

“Well, it’s not necessary. At all.”
She threw the sack of flour onto the counter forcefully, covering me and her in the process. “You know, Laurel, I’m not an invalid. I’m not paralyzed; I’m not in a wheelchair. I’m not blind and I’m not deaf and I wish to hell people would stop treating me as such.” She tried to brush the flour from the front of her and walk out of the kitchen when I grabbed her hands and then threw more flour into her face to get her attention. She spurted and looked furious.

“Wait a minute! Honey, look, no one thinks that you’re an invalid. We just want to help you. We just want you to know that you’re not alone and that you have family and friends who love you and want to make things easy for you as much as they possibly can be.” She looked at me nonplussed.

“EASY! EASY! Are you insane? What could possibly be easy about any of this?” She screamed and threw up her hands.

“I know Kristy, that’s what I’m saying, it’s not easy and we want to help you through your sorrow and your pain.”

“Well, to hell with your help.”

“Kristy, you don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do! I don’t want or need any help.” She threw more flour at me, in huge handfuls. I threw more back at her.

“Kristy, there is nothing wrong with asking for or needing a helping hand. It doesn’t make you weak, in fact I think, it makes you even stronger to know something is too hard, too big for you to handle alone. God, wouldn’
t want you to handle it alone. God gives you guardian angels right here on Earth in the form of your friends. That’s what I’m here for Kristy. Lean on me. God has shared his strength with me to help you.”

“God!” She smirked and threw around more flour. “Yeah, and just where the hell is this God; this God I put so much trust and faith into
. A God I prayed to nightly, devoted my Sundays too, A God who was supposed to look after me and my family. Where is He now?” She was cracking now. I could see it. There were clear streaks running down her face now making a paste out of the flour that smeared across it. She was cursing God. This was new territory for Kristy and I knew I was making some head way. The wall around her heart was slowly beginning to cleave and crumble.

“Kristy, I’ll never know why God chooses to do what he does all I know is that there has to be a reason from which good can come.”

“A reason from which good can come!!” She shrieked and threw more flour at me and pounded her fists into the flour smeared all over the counter. Kristy ran her flour coated hands threw her hair and she looked like a screaming banshee. She grabbed my arms and shook me.

“Kristy, please, honey, you’re hurting me. STOP!” She was gone now, completely be
wildered and unhinged, finally allowing herself to feel all the pain, all the hurt, all the anger. The only way I could get her attention now was to throw more flour at her right into her eyes. She stopped and looked at me stunned.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Laurel, I’m…I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?” She was crying now,
the wall finally fractured, shattered into tiny specks of flour on the floor. She was sobbing into flour coated hands, making a thick gooey pasty mess and slowly slumped to the floor, rocking with her mouth wide open, tears making rivulets of flour down her checks, not making a sound. She didn’t need to make any sounds to express this type of pain. This pain had no words, no sounds. This type of pain came from the depths of the soul, came from a darkness you never wanted to visit. It didn’t need any explanation just release. I wrapped my arms around her as best as I could wishing my own belly wasn’t in the way.

“That’s it, Kristy, let it out. Don’t hold it in anymore. It’s just me and you, honey, just me and you. Let it out. I’m here for you and I’ll never let you go. Never! Cry, sweetheart, cry for Emily and don’t ever stop. She screamed at that point. A scream that chilled my blood and pierced my eardrums but I didn’t care. She pounded the kitchen floor with everything she had, scattering flour
everywhere that it looked like it was snowing inside, until she finally lay spent, exhausted, laying in a mess of sticky, gooey flour screaming one mournful cry of why.

I lay there with her on the floor as best as I could until she found the strength and the breath to get up and face the world again.

“Thank you, Laurel, thank you.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t need to thank me. Although you can thank me once I clean your ass up and this filthy kitchen. Y
ou had to grab the bag of flour! Really, Kristy, the bag of flour.” She sat up and smoothed back her hair and looked around the kitchen. “Yes, I had to.” She grabbed two more handfuls of flour and dumped them in my hair.

“You do realize that you are going to pay for this!”

“Yeah, I know, but right now, it feels pretty good to laugh and cry. Kristy threw more flour at me.

“Ah, you know when this belly is flat again…” my voice trailed off. She looked at me with eyes filled with sadness and horror. “I’m sorry, Kristy.” For a split second she fought a multitude of emotions, ones that I could only guess at and suddenly threw more fl
our at me and smiled. At this point Mitch walked in.

“What in the hell have you two been up to? This place is a mess! Holy Shit!”

“Now, if I did this I’d be grounded for years!” Spencer slipped into the kitchen. Kristy shot up and threw her arms around Mitch.

“I miss her so terribly and I’m so scared she’s never coming back and she’s lost to us forever and I can’t understand why God would do this!” Mitch wrapped his arms around her and they both cried.

About three months later, Kristy and Mitch of course were still suffering but Kristy at least now was able to share her fears and feelings with her husband. Not all the time but sometimes. Baby steps, baby steps. I was moving about my days as best as I could as well. That’s all anyone could ask.
I was about three weeks away from my delivery date and I was moving slowly, wishing I didn’t have to go to work but knowing that I did. The child support from Paul wasn’t enough to pay the bills. I had just finished tucking the kids into bed, lumbered myself down the stairs when Helen walked in to spend the night so I could work the third shift and make some extra money, when the phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize but certainly a voice I did.

“He’s hurt! C
ome right now! He’s asking for you! Meet me at Camp Meeting Park. NOW! I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”

I came to with a smell of gasoline and iron permeating through to my brain and a jostling motion that had the smell not been so obnoxious and the quarters so cramped and frightening I would have enjoyed the lulling sensation and the hum of what I thought was a car engine.  My shoulder hurt like hell and it felt warm and sticky and I could feel this warm and sticky fluid run down my arm. I was feeling nauseous and incredibly uncomfortable and my muscles screamed in protest to the twisted position they found themselves in with this throbbing ache in my shoulder and numb fingers and toes and something scratchy across my mouth when suddenly it all slammed into me again like tidal waves, one reverberating nightmare memory after another…the open field, the cool, crisp, spring air that held all the promise of delightful warm evenings of chasing fireflies with Jake in the backyard, the flash of light, the sound of a car backfiring and the screaming, my God the screaming and the pain and muscles resembling noodles and jellyfish. I remember…I remember…cradling my hands against my stomach and seeing a blur of arms and legs and a tangle of multicolored cloths flailing in the breeze, the searing, white hot pain that exploded down the right side of my body, seeing the sky slide into the ground and I remember thinking
, ‘don’t worry Brandon, I’ll protect the baby…don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to what we created. I’ll protect all the children, Brandon.’
I struggled with my arms and feet and tried to get my body to cooperate with me. The panic was rising and beginning to incapacitate my thought processes. The bandana stuffed into my mouth and tied around my head was not helping the situation at all. 
Breathe, Laurel, breathe, slow and steady, stay calm for the baby,
if you don’t your just going to throw up through your nose, not good, not good at all.
Voices, I could hear voices…did I remember that or was someone actually talking now… something about Kristy and the new baby. Did I see someone else there? I heard two shots and screaming more likely my own but it may have been Jo’s voice too. I thought I saw another large shadowy figure with Jo…one minute they were standing and the next they were rolling on the ground like a horror flick version of Jack and Jill and then everything went black…my God the pain, the pain was really mind splitting now, the warm, sticky ooze was running down to my fingertips now and the smell of iron was cloying in my nostrils. Wait I’m losing blood! I can’t be bleeding, I can’t be losing blood. I’m about to give birth in three weeks! She shot me! For the love of all that’s holy Jo shot me.
Pull yourself together, Laurel, focus, breathe, slow and easy, slow and easy. Panicking will only bring on false labor, slow and steady.
I tried to think of Brandon, but that just made me cry so I forced myself to remember exactly what happened and then maybe I could figure out what to do next instead of bleeding to death which was not on my list of things to do currently.