Authors: Paige Farmer
Nan felt a flicker of fight well up inside of her for the child she carried, but it was promptly snuffed by the certainty that if she went through with the pregnancy, Heath would no doubt leave her and the baby. She recalled the look on Joe’s face when she’d left her mother’s house months before and thought there was no way she would ever go back to them under those circumstances. With tears in her eyes and regret in her heart, she gave in.
Three days later, he drove her to a nondescript house surrounded by tall hedges in the suburbs of Portland. The streets were deserted, which seemed strange for a sunny July morning. Nan was feeling ill and nibbled at saltines she brought. It occurred to her that by this time the following day, her morning sickness would be gone. Guilt sliced at her.
“I’ll pick you up in two hours,” Heath told her as he pulled up to the curb.
“You’re not coming in with me?” she asked, trying to keep the whine out of her voice.
“Look baby doll, I would if I could,” he lied. “But the doc, you know, he said it’s not a good idea. Doesn’t want cars parked out front. Now just go in there and I’ll be back at eleven. I’ll take you out for a nice lunch after.”
Resigned and scared, Nan got out of the car. She waited until it turned the corner before slowly walking up the stairs and into the building. At first she thought perhaps no one was there after calling out twice and hearing no answer. Nan was about to turn and leave when a disheveled man appeared in the foyer. He was short and stooped, with wild gray hair flailing out from his scalp. He wore a brown sweater over tan pants, which Nan noticed were wrinkled and stained.
“Nan?” he asked her. Heath told her that no last names would be used.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Did you bring money?”
Without answering, she pulled a small white envelope from her purse and handed it to him. He carefully counted the five twenty dollar bills.
“Good,” he said, and motioned for her to follow him.
They walked through several poorly lit rooms until they reached a small one at the back. In the center was a bed similar to those found in military hospitals. There were two stirrups wrapped in wads of duct tape at the foot and a flat gray pillow at the head. A slightly antiseptic smell stung her nostrils and she tried to convince herself that the tiny, circular stain on the floor near her foot wasn’t blood. The man held out a faded gown and instructed her to strip from the waist down. Once she was changed, she was to hop up on the table and ring the bell sitting on a tray next to several sharp looking instruments and a syringe.
Moving as if under water, Nan tried to convince herself that it would be just like a physical. She hoisted her naked bottom onto the bed, but before ringing the bell, ran her hands over the baseball size lump in her midsection. It would still be weeks before any outside movement could be detected, but she had a hard time dispelling the image of CJ as she held her belly.
Stalling, she surveyed the surroundings. A sink in the corner dripped water, tapping out a generic rhythm. It’s got a good beat, but you just can’t dance to it, Nan thought madly. A bulky black phone atop a shelf next to the sink caught her eye. She didn’t think as she hopped off the bed and picked up the receiver. She wasn’t sure why she expected it to be dead, but it wasn’t. Without realizing it, she dialed her mother’s number. The phone rang once before Elsie answered it and Nan wondered if her mother had been waiting for a call since she never answered before the third or fourth ring.
“Hello?” Elsie repeated several times, insistence creeping into her voice.
Nan opened her mouth, but said nothing. She laid the receiver back in its cradle and returned to the bed. A solitary tear ran down her cheek before she took a deep breath and rang the bell. The old man came back into the room, and with naked hands, picked up the syringe, squirting a little fluid into the air.
“Something to relax you,” he told her, without saying what exactly it was.
The quick pinch in her arm immediately led to a loosening of her muscles and her tongue started to feel thick. She found it difficult to ask if this was a normal reaction but managed to get the words out. He assured her it was and helped her lay back, fitting her feet into the primitive stirrups. She could barely feel the speculum being inserted and dilated, but then felt a sharp, piercing pain in her cervix.
“Just hold still,” the man said impatiently from between her wide-open legs. “You can’t move around.”
Nan tried to stifle the moans that escaped her as she felt her uterus being tugged back and forth. Tears began to flow down the sides of her face and onto the bed beneath her. She had reached the point of no return, though before she could consider this any further, a searing pain ripped through her lower abdomen and she fainted.
When she awoke, she was still lying on the bed, and the man, or doctor, or whatever he was, stood over her.
“How do you feel?” he asked, holding out a drink of water. “Think you can sit up if I help?”
She nodded, only vaguely aware of the throbbing in her stomach. The pain hovered somewhere between period cramps and contractions, but Nan found she could tolerate it. She sat up and sipped some water. The man seemed convinced she could stand on her own and he left her to get dressed.
Swaying drunkenly, she tried putting her leg through the opening in her panties, but had to grab the bed to steady herself. As her left foot eased through the proper opening, Nan saw a trickle of blood run down her thigh. Startled, she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or throw up, but knew she wanted to be out of this place before she did either.
The man came into the room once more and led her back through the maze of hallways to the front door. Heath was sitting in the running car parked at the curb, looking around nervously. Nan observed relief wash over his face when he saw her. He’d obviously been afraid that she would lose her nerve to go in once he left, but her ashen appearance indicated that the job had been done. He didn’t get out and help her as she gingerly walked down the stairs holding the railing firmly. She opened the car door and eased herself onto the seat.
“So that wasn’t so bad, huh?” Heath asked her. She looked at him with contempt. She wanted to spit in his face, but her mouth had gone completely dry.
“Just take me home,” she said.
Without saying another word, Heath flipped on the radio and drove, bouncing his thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat of the music. Once they pulled up in front of the sad little house they shared, Nan stumbled into their bedroom and let herself sink to the bed. She wanted nothing more than to sleep, get away from this world, and her life, if for just a few hours. Fumbling around in her purse, she pulled out her cigarettes and a small bottle with four pills that the “doctor” had given her for pain. She lit one and swallowed the other, washing it down with half glass of whiskey that Heath left on the nightstand the night before. It was her first sip of alcohol since she found out she was pregnant and it tasted like pure absolution.
Nan slept fitfully for several hours, waking late in the day, writhing in horrific pain. The buzzing ache in her belly had reached a deafening roar. She called out weakly for Heath and had almost convinced herself he’d left her, despite what she’d been through, when he entered the room. She’d kicked the covers off at some point during her fretful nap, revealing a pool of blood on the mattress between her legs.
“Nan, hey baby doll, what’s wrong?” he asked her.
“Hurts,” she replied in a hoarse whisper. “Hurts bad,” she repeated.
Heath felt her forehead pulling back quickly from Nan’s hot, dry skin. No thermometer was needed to confirm her fever.
“Here, take one of these,” Heath said, grabbing the bottle of pills he spied, handing one to her. “Try to get some more sleep, okay? You’ll probably feel better once you wake up,” he said in an unconvincing voice.
“Water,” Nan told him.
Heath left to fill up a glass at the sink in the kitchen, and while he was gone, Nan spit the pill into her hand. Although desperate to stop the pain, she knew something was very wrong. She was beginning to feel lightheaded, and she was afraid that the pill might cause her to fall asleep and never wake up again.
She guzzled the water Heath brought, instinctively not wanting him to know that she hadn’t taken the pill, and then lay back down. He brought a chair in from the living room and placed it near the head of the bed, watching her intently. Moaning and trembling, Nan heard Heath mutter to himself. He ran his hands through his hair and cursed the world for handing him another hassle. If he brought her to the hospital, they’d know for sure what happened, he griped.
“Heath,” Nan said, between gasps, “I need help. You gotta’ get me to a doctor. I’m bleeding bad.”
Her face was covered with sweat from the effort it took to speak.
“Now listen Nan, you know we can’t do that. If you don’t start to feel better soon, I’ll go to the pay phone and give that guy a call. He’ll know what to do.” Heath replied.
Panic erupted in Nan. She knew that she could bleed to death, maybe not in the next few minutes, but if she didn’t get help soon, she believed it might not be more than a few hours. She wanted to scream at him to get her the help she needed, but a fresh wave of pain from her pelvic bone to her belly button pushed her back into unconsciousness.
When she awoke the second time, trying to pull her knees up to her midsection in an attempt to ease the roaring pain, but her right leg wouldn’t come. She looked down, and as if from a great distance, she could see the handcuff around her ankle, tethering her to the rail at the foot of the bed. Heath had won them some time ago in a game of cards, and she remembered how he’d suggested they use them for sex. Nan had always found one excuse or another for putting off that particular experience and hadn’t seen them around in months.
Heath was sleeping in the chair, which he’d at some point positioned in front of the open doorway to the bedroom. She could see his chest rise and fall deeply with each of his snoring breaths. Realization cut through the fog of pain like a jagged piece of glass and Nan understood that he would let her bleed to death in order to save his own hide. Knowing that she might try to help herself, he made sure that she couldn’t escape on her own. Terror threatened to overwhelm her as she fought gray waves of agony to stay awake.
A voice inside her, calm and clear, asked her if perhaps she didn’t deserve what was happening. Maybe a little bit? She had turned her back on her son, a baby who depended on her to love and care for him. And the second chance to be a mother, a chance to make her life right, she’d handed back saying ‘no thanks’. Exactly just what kind of monster was she?
Closing her eyes at the next wave of pain, forcing herself to feel every shard-like prick, she unexpectedly found herself thinking of Charlie Parker. She remembered with precision that it had been he who she’d been talking with about heaven and hell. As she recalled there had been no clear answers that day in the fort, Nan’s vision began to close in on itself except for a bright, white light off in the distance. Something inside of her knew she had the power to go to it, and if she did all of the anguish and mess of her life would be over. She felt rushing all around her and realized that the light was getting closer. She was embraced by a great sense of peace and not a trace of fear. Suddenly, she heard Charlie’s voice. It was from the day on the ledge when she was eight and he was convincing her that he
could
save her.
“Just hold on tight,” he’d said, and she was hearing it now as if the words were being spoken aloud this very minute.
As quickly as the light had appeared it was gone. Barely coherent, she promised herself that if she lived through this day and ever saw Charlie again, she’d tell him yes, she did believe. Heaven was real and it was beautiful. She also promised herself that she would do right by CJ, including leaving Heath, and come hell or high water, she’d make everything up to him.
Before she could do that, she had to figure out what to do
now
. In her condition, she couldn’t very well move Heath and the chair out of the way. And she knew with clear-headedness she wouldn’t have thought possible under the circumstances, that he would stop her if she tried. She started counting her breaths in order to steady herself, her options for getting out of this situation dancing just out of reach. She looked back over at Heath and saw the key to the handcuffs sitting on the floor at his feet. Nan racked her brain trying to think through how she might get to it without waking him up and almost cried when she recognized that even if she could unlock herself, he wouldn’t stay asleep while she moved him. As if she could move him.
It was then she remembered the gun. Heath kept it in a shoebox under their bed, despite Nan’s unease at having it in the house. She hadn’t wanted one in the first place, and was especially uncomfortable when the prospect of a new child coming into it their world was still alive. But Heath had scared her with tales of hobos and tramps around the tracks. Nan was all by herself out here most days and so she’d relented. If she could get to it, she wouldn’t actually
use
it. She was just hoping to scare him into getting her some help.
Nan tried to lift herself up into a sitting position and found that there was no way she could. Between the pain and the gush of fresh blood she felt spew from her, she had to lie back on the bed, panting. She was going to have to roll herself onto the floor. Using her left arm to rock her body back and forth, the momentum finally tipped her all the way over. She landed on her hands and the unshackled knee, stifling a scream at the agony it caused. The other ankle, the one secured to the bed, kept her right leg dangling above her, and her spread legs issued another wave of blood.