Drenched in Light (42 page)

“I know it is difficult to hear, more so because on the surface, our school appears to be a golden example of the magnet concept—exceptional kids given the opportunity to pursue their gifts.” I raised my voice as the murmur grew louder. “It is hard to imagine these bright, talented kids throwing away that opportunity, picking up a fix on the way to school so that they can get through the day, or partying in the parking lot before classes begin. It seems a picture far too ugly for a place like Harrington. But to understand it you have only to consider the kind of pressure these children are dealing with. Not only do they confront all the normal teenage issues, but they have the lure of stardom, the threat of failure, the expectations of parents, teachers. They’re looking for an escape from the load, a means of fitting in with their peers, a sense of identity, a way to blow off steam, a thrill—you name it. You can fill in the blank with the reasons, but the fact is that just blocks away, the taco stands sell drugs—most likely everything from marijuana, to controlled substance inhalants, to methamphetamine. The kids know it, the police know it, the Harrington administration knows it, and in my opinion, few effective measures are being taken to prevent it from overpowering our school. We’re turning our heads when we should be fighting back.”

In his seat behind the board table, Mr. Ansler glared at me, then checked his watch. Three chairs down, the school board president did the same, then continued monitoring the passing seconds. My time was nearly up, and it couldn’t be too soon for them.

“Please,” I said, scanning the board members like opponents in a bad game of poker, “something needs to be done. We’re on a collision course with reality. The only question is whether it happens now, or whether we wait until we’re attending the funeral of one of these exceptional kids. In my opinion, that’s where we’re headed. I won’t sit back and quietly watch it happen, and if that costs me my job, then it’s a price I’m willing to pay.” I didn’t wait for the school board president to tell me my four minutes were over. There was nothing left to say, except, “Thank you for listening. Please do what is best for our kids.”

When I turned around, Bett was walking toward the door, with Jason and my father holding her elbows. My mother was halfway out of her seat, gathering their things.I met Mom at the aisle as Bett left the room. “What’s going on?” I was vaguely aware of chaos escalating around us and the board president rapping his hammer, trying to bring the meeting back to order.

“Bett’s having a few cramps.” Mom’s expression was dark with concern. “It’s probably just the stuffiness in here. We’re going to go on and run by the doctor’s, and we’ll see you at home.” Laying a hand on my arm, she paused to smile into my eyes. “I’m so proud of you, honey. Don’t let them bully you.” Her hand fell away, and she started after my sister.

In the back row, a woman stood up and shouted something about having taken her son to drug rehab and the school acting like he was a leper when he came back.

I was aware of glances shooting my way as I hurried after my mother, catching her at the door. “The doctor? Mom, it’s after eight o’clock on a Monday night. Do you mean the emergency room? Are you taking Bett to the emergency room?”

The two of us slipped into the relative quiet of the corridor. Mom sucked air through clenched teeth, glancing toward the crack in the door, then down the hallway toward the women’s restroom. My father was pacing a circle under the sign. Jason must have gone in with Bett. “She didn’t want you to worry. She thinks she might be bleeding.”

“Bleeding?” The seconds stretched out, and I watched in slow motion as Jason rushed out of the restroom with Bett wrapped in his arms.

“Let’s go!” my father hollered.

Mom waved him on. “Go ahead with Jason and Bett. I’ll get the car and be right behind you.”

“I’ll drive you.” I spun around to go back into the board room for my purse, but Mom caught my arm.

“Bett didn’t want you to—”

“Wait for me,” I said, then yanked the door open and hurried into the meeting room, where things had quieted somewhat. A frightened-looking woman was making her way to the podium with a milk crate full of school banners and pom-poms. The board president raised his gavel at my hasty entrance, as if he thought I might knock the pom-pom lady down and take the podium again. The entire room fixated on me as I grabbed my things from my chair.

“My sister is having a medical emergency,” I told the board president.

Letting his gavel fall loosely, he opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, as if he didn’t know what the official procedural response should be.

I didn’t wait for an answer, just hurried back up the row, looking neither right nor left, suddenly aware of how little any of this mattered. Compared to the idea of Bethany rushing to the hospital, this meeting was nothing.

Keiler jogged up the side aisle and met me at the back door. “Is there anything I can do?” His expression was steadfast and calm, reassuring. “Can I give you a ride?”

“No, I’m driving my mother over.” My fingers shook as I grabbed a business card and pen from my purse and scrawled my cell phone number on the back. “Call me later and tell me what happens in the rest of the meeting, all right?”

Nodding, he shrugged toward the podium. “Good speech. I’ll be sure to report in.”

“Thanks.” I rushed out the door, then hurried to the car with Mom.

On the way to the hospital, my mother sat with her eyes closed, her head resting against the seat, and her arms wrapped around her stomach. Tears seeped from beneath her lashes.

“Mom, it’s going to be all right.” The words held a false confidence, but inside I was afraid that the stress of trying to support me, on top of everything else Bett was dealing with, had somehow caused this to happen.

My mother drew a shuddering breath, then exhaled a faint sob. “I hope so,” she whispered. “Oh, I hope so.” She looked for answers in the night sky outside the window. “Surely they’re at the hospital by now. I hope they went the shortest way.” She craned to see around a gasoline delivery truck that was blocking traffic in the intersection ahead.

“They did. You know they did.” I’d never seen such a look of pure horror on my mother’s face. Pounding her hands in her lap, she tried to peer around the tanker truck again, then wiped her eyes impatiently.

“Mom, it’ll be all right,” I promised again. “It will.”

“I hope so,” she repeated, kneading her hands in her lap, then fiddling with the door latch as if she were considering hopping out and running four miles to the hospital.

“Mom, you have to calm down. If you don’t, you’ll be checking in right alongside Bett.” Her cheeks were flushed and trembling.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being such a mess.” Digging in her purse, she found wadded Kleenex, then dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose. “This same thing happened when I was pregnant with you—two and a half months, just like Bethany is now. I was so terrified when I saw the blood.” Her hand slipped over mine on the gearshift, her fingers a clammy circle, just as Bett’s had been in the boardroom. “I was so terrified I’d lose you. I prayed every minute that God would leave you with me. The doctors said it was a miracle that you survived. If I hadn’t already been at the hospital for a prenatal appointment when it happened, there would have been no way. I think about that day, and I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine how I would have gone on if I’d lost you.”

I can’t imagine how I would have gone on . . .
The words replayed in my head as we inched forward, then stopped at the intersection. Slowly, I looked sideways at my mother, now collapsed against the seat with her eyes closed again, her face pinched and drawn. In the red glow of the traffic light, in the pained lines around her mouth, the tears seeping down her cheeks, I found the reality of my life—the one I had been seeking as long as I could remember.

Even before my birth, I was loved, and wanted, and desperately needed. I was not an accident.

“Mom, who was my father?” The words came so quietly, I wasn’t sure I’d said them. I’d always imagined that question entering the space between us in a roar of indignation, during an argument sometime, when the mother-daughter pressure built up so high that the cork finally exploded, uncapping all the secrets and unspoken truths.

Instead, it came in a whisper.
Who was my father?

Turning her hands over in her lap, Mom stared at them like a palm reader. “I wondered when you would ask.” Her voice was soft and pensive, as if she’d rehearsed this scene in her mind many times, and the question had transported her into her own thoughts, away from the excitement over Bett’s condition.

“I’ve always been afraid to ask,” I admitted, thinking of all the times those words had been on the tip of my tongue, and I pulled them back, certain that I’d be lighting a powder keg and nothing would be the same afterward. “But I need to know. I’m sorry.”

Mother glanced sideways at me. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.” She tucked my hair behind my shoulder like she would have when I was a child.

“I don’t want to hurt Dad.” The truth choked in my throat, filling me with the old fear that once he knew I’d asked, he would quit the masquerade of being my father, and let himself be replaced by this shadow man of biology, whoever he was.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Mom ran a finger along my cheek. “Your father thought we should sit you down years ago and talk about it. He didn’t want you to think it was some dark secret. But I didn’t want to force that reality on you if you didn’t want it.”

“I was afraid he wouldn’t love me anymore.” I felt like a little girl saying those words—as if they were coming from some arrested place inside me that had never grown beyond eight years old.

Mom looked shocked, then sad. “Oh, honey, I never intended for you to feel that way. Your dad loved you from the first moment he saw you. He couldn’t have loved you more if you were his own. I think he was more taken with you than with me the day we met.”

I knew the story of the day my parents met, only there had never been any mention of me in it. She was reenrolling in college after having dropped out at the end of her second year. He was a graduate student working in the admissions office. He helped her with some complicated paperwork, and then he asked her to share lunch on the lawn outside the student union.

“I was there?” The picture rushed to repaint itself in my mind—my mother, my father, me on a picnic blanket near the reflecting pool. “How old was I?” A car horn honked somewhere behind us, and I realized we were sitting in the intersection, not moving. My ankle quivered, the muscles tense as I moved from the brake to the gas. The world outside the car seemed far away and unreal.

“You were about six months old when we met”—it was startlingly matter-of-fact, as if the story were nothing out of the ordinary—“and about a year old when we married.” I glanced over, and she was smiling slightly, looking out the window, her gaze far away. “Of course, back in those days, people thought differently about things. Everyone felt that, with you being so young . . . well . . . we should just go on and make a normal family life, without . . . issues.”

I pictured Mom in Bett’s wedding dress, me hidden somewhere in the wings, or with a babysitter, because it wasn’t proper for me to be there. “Where was my father . . . my biological father?” Behind that, there was the other question—the one that bit and burned.
Didn’t he ever want to know me?

Smile fading, Mom shifted uncomfortably. “We had . . . problems. We were married less than a year—long enough to create you, of course, but we divorced just before you were born.”

“Divorced?” I repeated. I’d never imagined that my mother and my biological father were married. By virtue of the fact that I didn’t have his name, I’d always assumed I was the result of an unwed pregnancy. “You were married to my biological father?”

Mom craned to look for the emergency parking entrance as we reached St. Francis Hospital. “There’s so much to the story, Julia, and it was so long ago. He was young, and I was young. I was going to school and working part-time for the wardrobe mistress at the Kansas City Ballet. Your father was a wonderful dancer. He came with a touring company that was doing a guest production of
The Nutcracker
.” Her eyes fell closed, and she sighed, as if she could see him there in front of her. I pulled the car into a parking space, but she didn’t move. “He was beautiful to see—tall, with deep blue eyes and blond hair like yours. And his smile, oh, when he smiled . . .” Her lips curved upward, and she laughed in her throat. “I fell so in love, and when the production moved on, we eloped, and I went with him. It never occurred to me that we wouldn’t have much of a life. I thought we’d live on love, I guess.” Turning her head, she faced me. “Your father wasn’t a bad man, Julia. He was just a dreamer, and it’s a hard world for dreamers.”

Pulling the keys from the ignition, I tucked them into my purse, knowing we needed to go inside and see about Bett. “Where is he now?” Behind that, there was the unspoken question again.
Didn’t he wonder about me at all? Ever?

Mom reached for her door handle, lifting it slowly, so that only a faint click disturbed the silence. “He died when you were three. I never really knew the details, but it was a car accident. He didn’t have any family to speak of, so I heard the news from a mutual friend.” Frowning sadly, she reached across the space between us and smoothed a hand over my hair. “He came to see you once before that. He was at your third-birthday party, and he brought you a jewelry box with a little ballerina that twirled when you lifted the lid. You know—the white one I’ve always kept on your dresser? That was from him. He would have been so proud of you, Julia. If he could be here to see, he would be so proud. He loved you enough to want you to have a normal life.” Her tears glittered in the dim light, tracing the fine wrinkles around her eyes. Without bothering to wipe them, she turned away and pushed open the door. “We’d better go inside.”