Why the Sky Is Blue (10 page)

I hated the mountain of paperwork we were already wading through. Private adoptions weren’t legal in Minnesota. Since Ed and Rosemary weren’t blood relatives, we had to get connected with a licensed child-placement agency so that the adoption would have state oversight. I had nothing against the agency Dan found; the people were more than kind—to us and to Ed and Rosemary. But the legalities felt like a dehumanization of my predicament. The adoption would take place inside a county courthouse in front of a judge, a complete stranger. Legally that’s how the adoption would appear to take place. But it wouldn’t be that way for me. The surrender of my child would take place inside my very soul.

Dan took advantage of the time I was preparing supper to go over with Ed a few details our lawyer had advised Dan about. Rosemary came into the kitchen to help me and told me she had spent some time alone with Katie. Actually it was more like a confession.

Rosemary was worried she had overstepped her bounds by speaking to Katie about the adoption without Dan or me there.

I told her I trusted her with Kate. And it was true. I did.

“Did you have a good talk with her?” I said.

“I think so,” Rosemary replied as she tore up romaine lettuce for a salad. “I feel badly we’ll be living so far away. I think maybe Katie was hoping she would be able to watch the baby grow up.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” I said absently.

“Maybe. It is hard to know, isn’t it?” Rosemary said.

“Very,” I agreed, then added, “Did Katie tell you it’s a girl?” I could not help smiling as I said it.

“Yes, she did,” Rosemary said, smiling herself. “But she told me not to say anything in case you wanted to be the one to tell me. She was looking out for you. She loves you very much.”

I smiled again.

We finished supper preparations and then enjoyed a nice meal featuring my mom’s stroganoff recipe. It occurred to me that I should have invited my parents. They would have flown out if I had asked them. I hoped there would be another time.

We passed the evening by looking at slides from our family vacations and just getting to know one another better.

On Sunday morning, Rosemary and I hid eggs all over the downstairs for Kate and Spencer—there was still some snow on the ground—while Ed and Dan made French toast.

After church, it was time to say goodbye again.

“Call me anytime,” Rosemary said as we hugged goodbye. She had called me twice in the three weeks we had been apart. It was nice to be invited to do the same.

We had Easter dinner at Dan’s parents’ house with Karin, Kent, and the cousins. Nina used her good china and served the gravy for the ham in a soup bowl.

14

April was one of the wettest months in years, and it seemed that spring would never come. The changing season—or lack of it—really didn’t make a difference to me. I didn’t feel the eager expectancy that long Minnesota winters typically create for those who must bear them. I was already keenly aware that new life waited just around the bend; I didn’t need the spring thaw or protruding tulip tips to remind me of that.

My mid-April doctor’s appointment was encouraging, at least from the standpoint of labor and delivery. I wasn’t looking forward to either one, especially since there would be no joyful homecoming to follow. But I didn’t want to have the baby delivered by Cesarean. I wanted to physically recover from this as quickly as possible. I wanted no stitches, no searing after-pain, no scar. Dr. Whitestone said the placenta seemed to be inching its way upward, but he still wanted me to watch my physical activity. He didn’t want me going into labor—or worse, starting to bleed— this early and at this stage.

So I did what came natural to me. I went to the library and checked out piles of books. I also dug around in the house for old favorites, especially my volume of Tennyson’s poetry, which I read twice.

Spending so much time taking it easy at home actually provided me with a good reason not to be out and about, exposing myself as pregnant. It also gave me time to find new reasons for loving Tennyson, like the neurologist had advised me to do seven months before, which I did.

On one day in the middle of that wet and dreary month, Dan came home early from work with a manila envelope in his hands and a childish smile on his face. He was up to something.

“Claire, I have something I want to show you,” he said, coming to sit by me on the living room couch. He swept away the books and magazines I had on the coffee table and set the envelope on the bare surface. He reached in and pulled out half a dozen color photographs. One was of a white, two-story house with a porch and gabled windows. Another was of a barn—red with white trim. A third was of a ravine with a brook running through it. The rest were interior shots of a house, presumably the white one. The rooms were spacious and empty. Hardwood floors. Cherry fireplace. Kitchen cabinets painted sky blue.

“What do you think?” Dan said, excitedly.

“I think they’re pictures,” I said, a little dumbfounded. Was he thinking what I thought he was thinking?

“But what do you think of them?”

I looked at the photos, picked up a couple, and declared it looked like a nice place.

“I think we should buy it,” he said, almost breathlessly.

“You mean buy it to live in?”

“It would be great! Look at all the room. And there’s a barn. We can finally get the kids some pets. Maybe a horse or something. At least a dog. Do you know how weird it is to be a veterinarian who has no pets?”

“What are you saying?” I asked, my head spinning. I could tell this was what he had been ‘working on’ when he had been thinking about our immediate future. This was what he’d had at the top of his list. He wanted us out of Minneapolis.

“I think we should move,” he said, locking his eyes onto mine. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Even before you got hurt, I was thinking about it. I’m tired of fighting traffic, tired of city life, tired of spending my days spaying cats and clipping dog ears.”

And then he said what was really motivating him to do this.

“And I think it would be good for us to have a fresh start. We both know there will be questions when you come home from the hospital without a baby. I don’t want you or the kids to have to deal with that. We could begin a new life without the past haunting us at every turn.”

I didn’t know what to think. It felt like we would be running away. I told Dan this. He said indeed we would be running away; we would be running away from congested city life, high crime rates, long commutes, a hectic pace, and, first and foremost, too many painful memories. We would be running to a simpler life, with a new beginning and a new home free of a painful past.

I looked at the pictures again. It looked like a charming place, but it also looked very foreign to me. I had never lived anywhere but in a city. City life was what I knew. This place looked like it could be almost anywhere, but definitely not in the Twin Cities suburbs.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“It’s a couple miles outside a town called Blue Prairie, about two hours south of here.”

Two hours away. What Dan was suggesting was extreme. It would mean changing jobs, schools, our church. Everything.

“What about your practice?” I asked.

“This is the best part,” he said, breaking into a wide smile. “Remember Wes Gerrity? He was a year ahead of me at the U? He has a practice there with four other veterinarians. One of them is retiring, and he wants me to join them. He specifically asked me to join them, Claire. I didn’t even have to go looking. And I will finally have a chance to do more than just take care of overweight dogs and cats. It’s a big practice. They handle cattle, dairy herds, swine, sheep—the works. It would be a great career move for me.”

He was practically there already. I was still trying to imagine a life other than the one I knew.

“You’re afraid of the big animals,” I said meekly, trying to buy time and come up with a real response.

Dan laughed. “Not afraid. Just inexperienced.”

“But what about our friends? And my job at the school?” I said.

“We’ll make new friends,” he said confidently. Then he pointed out that Blue Prairie had a high school, too. He also reminded me that neither one of us had cartloads of friends we would miss. I had a few acquaintances in the English department at the high school where I taught, but I hadn’t seen them since Christmas and hadn’t even missed them. And Becky, my closest non-work-related friend, was a friend to countless others. It was her nature to be on emotionally intimate terms with dozens of other women in the church. She was the personification of the perfect pastor’s wife.

“Did you already tell Wes you would come?” I asked.

“I told him I wanted the job. He knows I need to talk to you first.”

“And this house?” I said, picking up the photo of the white house.

“It’s half the price we’ll get for the house we’re living in right now, Claire. And it includes four acres and three outbuildings. It’s been on the market for nearly a year. The owners are anxious to sell.”

“Is there a white picket fence around it?” I said, partly in jest and partly not. I was weary of the burdens I was carrying, figuratively and actually. I wanted the fairy tale ending. I wanted us to live happily ever after.

“There will be if you want there to be,” he said, drawing me into his embrace.

He took the stillness of that moment as a “yes.”

A few minutes before the kids got home from school, Dan called the real estate agent, and the two of them made arrangements for us to come down and look at the house that Saturday.

I dreaded telling the kids what we were considering. Well, actually, I dreaded telling Katie. The circumstances that had fallen on us as a family were already testing the limits of her blossoming adulthood. This would come as another blow. I imagined her storming upstairs to her room and refusing to speak to us after we told her what we were thinking of doing. I began mentally preparing myself for accusations of how unfair we were.

But Katie surprised me by her response. She barely said anything. Spence loved the thought of living on a little farm and finally getting a big dog. He couldn’t wait for Saturday to come so we could go see the place. Katie sat there absorbing it all but giving no indication of how she really felt. I actually found myself wishing she had exploded. That would have been normal. Her disinterest didn’t seem appropriate.

I didn’t know if Dan sensed this also, but somehow I managed to communicate to him without saying a word that I wanted to be alone with Katie. He announced he needed to take care of some things back at the clinic before it closed and invited Spence to come along.

The excitement of perhaps an upcoming move followed Dan and Spencer out of the kitchen like a loyal dog, and Katie and I were left in a room with no aura of anything in it.

She was on the verge of rising out of her chair, and it felt like if I didn’t stop her, she would disappear into her room and maybe disappear altogether.

“Katie, please tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

She had her hands on the table like she was going to get up and I had interrupted a shift she had been looking forward to completing. Her hands fell to her lap in defeat. She looked at me. Her eyes met my eyes in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she was considering how could I not know what she was thinking. Was I supposed to know? Would a good mother have known? I decided to tell her the truth; that I had expected her to resist.

She looked away then, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I had said the right thing or the wrong thing.

“It wouldn’t change anything,” she said, looking at the stove for no reason at all. “If I put up a fight, it would change nothing. If you and Dad decide we’re moving, then we’re moving.”

It pained me to realize she was right. I also realized that even if I had put up a fight, Dan was determined to do this. He had already told Wes he wanted the job. He had already contacted the real estate agent. Maybe he even had a moving date picked. And he had done all of it on his own.

But I trusted him. I knew Dan was motivated by love—for me and for our kids. Dan and I were still on different paths, but despite the isolation I felt, I still trusted him. Somehow I had to communicate this to Katie. Suddenly I knew how I could.

“Kate, when my dad died and Grandma moved us to Minnesota, it was a huge step for her, and for me and Uncle Matt,” I said. “It was really hard for her to know what was the best thing to do. Uncle Gene and Aunt Elizabeth stepped in for her and made choices that changed everything for us, but in the end, it all worked out for the best. She had to trust that the people who loved her would know the right thing to do.”

Katie continued to stare at the stove. A tear slipped from her left eye. I thought this was a good sign. I waited for her to speak next. It seemed like a long time before she did.

“But how do you and Dad know this is the right thing to do?” she finally said.

How indeed? How do we ever know what is the right thing to do? She was asking the question that sooner or later everyone who believes in God asks. Assuming God is the God of right things, how did a person know the right thing from the wrong thing when both choices seem practical? Did it matter to God which one you chose? Has he chosen already for you but waits to see if you agree with his choice? Then when you choose, does he thwart the plan he will not bless? Or does He allow you to make a choice you will later regret so that you will become wiser by experience?

I could think of times when my mother let me make a mistake so I could learn from it. I also knew there were times when she forbade me to do something that was inappropriate for the same reason. Having faith was as simple as that and as complicated as any puzzle dreamed up by man. What I knew of God is that he was above being completely figured out. I knew I would never be able to say, “Now I understand how God works.” A small God who could be fathomed in his entirety seemed a pitiful thing to me.

As I sat there with my daughter, I knew Dan and I had to live by this faith, using the knowledge we have at the time, and daily make it our goal to do the “right thing.” I suddenly felt empowered to pray something other than a psalm.

“Does it seem like the wrong thing to you?” I asked, in response to her question.

She sat very still, her eyes still on the stove, but I could tell she was not seeing it. Then she looked down at her feet, like she had seen something else, something meant only for her to see.

She turned her head and looked at me. “No. It doesn’t seem like the wrong thing.”

*

Our drive to Blue Prairie was a wet affair, and I prayed the whole way down that the rain and sleet would stop when we got there. By the time we reached the little town of four thousand, the skies had brightened a little, but there was mud and water everywhere.

The town’s main street was the kind of quaint avenue that now only exists in small towns blessed with entrepreneurial shopkeepers who know how to thrive in tiny, dying Midwest towns. There were two grocery stores, two drug stores, a hardware store, and a county courthouse that looked like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were also numerous specialty and gift shops, a fairly up-to-date twenty-bed hospital, two nursing homes, and several restaurants.

Mel Houghlin, the real estate agent, was eager to show us the farm site, but drove us around the town first, showing us the high school, the elementary school, the community center, the city’s two parks, and the town’s self-proclaimed highlight: the two bed-and-breakfast establishments—side by side Victorian mansions owned by twin sisters. One was painted blue with white trim; the other, white with blue trim.

He drove by Wes’s vet clinic too, which Dan pretended for the kids’ sake to be seeing for the first time. I got the impression he had seen it before. I was going to ask him if he had come here by himself to look at it first, but I decided it didn’t matter.