Feels Like the First Time (19 page)

Finally, I needed to repair my grade point average. I had registered for a full schedule and I was determined to get better grades. With Dawn in my life again, I found myself focusing on the future.

Even though we were apart, we talked on the phone occasionally. Long distance was still an expensive luxury we couldn’t afford, but we supplemented those short conversations with long letters.

I spent January studying the intricacies of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
in Middle English and preparing for Speech and Debate classes. In the meantime, one of my roommates got the Vega running again after many hours of unpaid effort. I was no longer chained to my room.

Valentine’s Day eventually appeared on the horizon. Through brief phone calls and longer letters, Dawn and I decided we would see each other then. It fell in the middle of the week, so we decided to celebrate the weekend before. I would drive down and watch Dawn play in her volleyball game at Morton on Friday night. We would spend as much time together as we thought we could get away with that weekend before I departed late Sunday afternoon.

The Thursday night before I was supposed to leave for the Rock, I was on a studying jag. I was attempting to get an entire weekend’s homework done in one night. It was getting late, and I was in the middle of writing an essay about the symbolism in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
when my landlord shouted downstairs that I had a phone call. I climbed the stairs, picked up the phone. “Hello?”

I was met with a hurricane of screaming and obscenities. It changed my life forever.

After listening to a steady torrent of abuse for thirty seconds, I figured out it was Dawn’s dad, Walt, on the other end. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was too upset to enunciate.

“Walt. I can’t understand you,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

He wouldn’t stop screaming. It was like yelling into gale force winds. Finally, with an exasperated howl, I heard him slam the phone down on a table. I didn’t know what was happening, but my insides were congealing.

I held the phone to my ear, waiting for the silence to be broken. A few seconds later, I heard Colleen’s voice on the line. Her tone was deadly calm.

“Shawn? I have to apologize for my husband. He’s upset. So am I.” Her voice was so calm that she didn’t sound upset at all.

“Okay, just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Shawn,” Colleen said. “We know you had sex with Dawn. Now, we need you to know Dawn is pregnant. And, before you get any ideas about what’s going to happen next, I need you to know you will never see our daughter again. We have already scheduled an abortion, which will cost $400, and you will pay for that. In exchange for that and never seeing Dawn again, we will not press statutory rape charges against you.”

It was way more information than I could absorb.

They knew Dawn and I had been together. That was bad.

Dawn was pregnant. That was mega-bad.

She had said, “We’ve already scheduled an abortion.” I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around that idea. There was too much pain there. The phone was silent for what seemed like an eternity.

“I… I’m sorry,” I said limply. “I know how wrong it was for Dawn and me to have been together. It was my fault. I messed up.”

“Yes, you did.”

I said that Dawn wasn’t the only one to lose her innocence that night. She blasted back at me, saying it wasn’t her fault I was a bathroom idiot. It took me a while after the phone call to understand what she meant.

“Please don’t schedule an abortion, I’ll do anything,” I pleaded with her. “My sister can help me pay for all of Dawn’s medical expenses. Even if she has the baby and gives it up for adoption that would be so much better.”

“Shawn, Dawn is fifteen years old. We will not allow her to have a baby.” I felt like I had wandered onstage in a play where everyone but me already knew their lines.

I told her I would quit school immediately and get a job to support her. That finally cut through her calm demeanor and she snapped at me.

“We know you
want
to marry Dawn, but don’t you get it?”

“What?”

“You’ve ruined Dawn’s life. She never wants to see you again.”

I was stunned. How could that be?

Colleen repeated herself and I stood motionless. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I ruined her life. Of course she didn’t want to see me again.

I didn’t want to give up. But no matter what I said, she came back to the same two options: give her $400 and promise never to see Dawn again, or face criminal charges. I wasn’t willing to accept either, so I told them I was driving down to meet with them face-to-face.

Colleen agreed to meet me Saturday afternoon at their house, but left me with a final warning.

“We’ll meet with you,” she said. “But these options won’t change.” Her words rang in my ears after I hung up the phone.
I was numb. I stumbled down the stairs and sat on my bed, waiting for my brain to kick into gear. I sat on my bed with my back, fittingly, against the wall. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t digest Colleen’s words. I found only darkness and despair at the end of every thought. I was only nineteen, but I felt old and wasted.

I could handle not seeing Dawn again for a long time. I’d been training for that. It would be horrible to lose her again so soon after getting her back in my life, but I could handle it. The idea that Dawn was pregnant and Walt and Colleen were going to force her to abort the baby was something I could not begin to accept.

Before I left for Mossyrock that morning, I drove to Auburn to meet with Terri. I poured my heart out to her and told her the whole story. Terri wanted to go to her bank, take out $5000, give it to Walt and Colleen, and tell them that would cover the baby’s birth.

I wouldn’t let her do it. I knew it wouldn’t work. I believed this situation had presented Walt and Colleen with a final solution to the problem of me being with their daughter. I did ask to borrow the $400, so when I met with them I would have all options open.

My final stop before Mossyrock was the small town of Salkum, where my former newspaper advisor and English teacher Jim Bartee lived. After listening to my tale of woe, Jim berated me for putting myself and Dawn into this situation. Eventually, he saw I was already as low as a human being can be, and he agreed to go with me the next day to meet with Walt and Colleen.

I needed to find Dawn. Her feelings would strongly influence how I would respond to the choices Walt and Colleen gave me. I decided to drive to Morton to watch Dawn play her volleyball game. That might be my only chance to talk to her before the confrontation with her parents.

As I walked into the Morton gym, my stomach knotted with the anticipation and dread. I had no idea what her reaction would be. Would she be afraid to talk to me in public? Would she even want to talk to me? Did she hate me already for getting her pregnant? Could she still love me?

I found a spot on the sidelines where I thought I might be able to catch Dawn’s eye during the game. She was already on the floor when I sat down. She spotted me within a minute of my arrival, just in time to miss an easy dig.

The match ended in less than an hour with a victory for the hated Morton Huskies. I didn’t care. I stood outside the locker room in the most obvious spot I could, hoping to catch Dawn before she boarded the team bus. Right on schedule, she came through the double doors and made her way straight to me. She was so scared and nervous I felt like I was talking to a complete stranger.

“How are you?” I asked. I had never meant that question more. I really needed to know. Her expression was completely blank, but with a hint of fear hiding underneath. She shrugged and looked around anxiously.

“Baby, I really need to talk to you,” I said.

“I don’t know how we can. I’ve got to go.”

It happened so fast. I’d had a plan. I was going to go up to her and hold her and tell her how sorry I was I had put us in that situation. I loved her more than anything in the world and I would do anything to save our baby. I rehearsed it on the drive down from Seattle. But when the moment arrived, I was frozen and helpless. I was paralyzed by her anxiety and fear. I stood motionless while she boarded the team bus. I imagined her staring out through one of the darkened windows while I watched. I stood there until the bus slowly pulled away and watched it cruise slowly into the night.

I drove silently home from Morton, slipped into the quiet trailer, and spent another sleepless night in my childhood bed. It was the same place I had spent so many nights before, dreaming of Dawn Adele.

Seeing her so freighted by nerves and fear clarified the harm I was causing her. The worst thing was that it was entirely my fault. I knew Dawn had no chance for a normal high school life as long as I was in it. I wanted her to have football games and dances and fun with all of her friends. I didn’t want her to have to jump at shadows. I loved her too much to think of her throwing everything away for an endless series of clandestine meetings. I’d already had my happy high school days. I knew I couldn’t ask Dawn to go straight from adolescence to adult responsibility.

I finally had the answer to the question I had posed to myself in my poem to her,
Where Can I Find the Strength
.

Which will finally prove the stronger/my need for you/or my desire for your best?

I was ashamed by how long it took me to reach the answer.

Late Saturday morning, after my second consecutive sleepless night, I sat on my front porch waiting for Jim Bartee. Right on schedule, Jim’s silver Volvo with the bumper sticker,
One World, One Faith
pulled into my driveway. It felt like my world was coming to an end, but I knew it was important to have Jim there.

Jim knocked on the door and Walt let us into the living room. Walt and Colleen sat in their usual places while Jim and I sat in two chairs that had been moved to the far end of the living room. Dawn stood next to the wood stove, with tears in her eyes but unable to look at me. There was a stiff and formal air to the room like an arraignment. It turned out to be more like a sentencing.

Walt and Colleen passed their final judgment and I forced myself to my feet. I asked Colleen if I could say goodbye to Dawn. She said that was fine. We moved as far away as we could get, but still stood within easy earshot of Walt, Colleen and Jim.

“You know I’ll still love you when we can see each other again, right?”

I wanted to grab her hand but I could feel Colleen staring at us.

“Do you… remember
I Will Still Love You?
”
Dawn’s voice was choked by her tears. I could barely understand what she was saying.

“The song by Stonebolt?”

She nodded and looked down.

I couldn’t speak any more either. My throat was so tight it hurt. Tears ran down both our faces without stopping. I didn’t want to leave her, but I couldn’t stand the feeling of impending doom. I kissed her softly on the cheek and walked out the door, Jim trailing behind me.

When we got back to his Volvo, Jim said, “I counted your tears, and they were the perfect number. There was not too many or too few.”

I nodded, although I had no idea what that meant. I thanked him again for being there. He got in his car and drove off.

I would only talk to Dawn one more time until December 1
^st
, 2006.

Oh, and that song that Dawn asked me to remember? That was an odd song to bring up at that moment. Music was so important to us, and we had so many songs we thought of as ours. Oddly enough,
I Will Still Love You
had never been one of them. I listened to the lyrics of that song hundreds of times over the next few years, trying to decipher the last message she gave me. The song talks about leaving your lover, finding your own way in life, and then returning to each other. As I got into my car and drove back to Seattle, I could only hope that was what lay ahead for us.