Those were the days when Sandra would get out of bed at seven and go downstairs to our pregnant, sick daughter, sit there on the bed, pick her up by the shoulders, and talk to her.
"I don't want to go," Carrie said, dozens of times. "I can't stand school."
It was all about shame, and for a moment or so her mother, the woman I love, would nod as if to say she understood.
"I can't go back there," Carrie would say, even while she was sick and heaving. "I can't do it," she'd tell Sandra. "I won't. Please let me stay home--I can't stand it."
That's the way it went every morning for longer than I care to remember. Sandra would hold our daughter--our beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty--and tell her the same things: how all of this was going to be over soon, how what was important was that she stay in school and keep her grades up, how she was beautiful, how her mother believed no girl in that high school was any more loved than her daughter. And then they'd cry. There was lots of that.
Every morning for a couple of months. It's something nobody knows because that kind of intimacy isn't something for the world. Maybe I shouldn't be saying it right now, except that it's something about love that explains how empty I felt when just tonight I reached for my wife in bed and she just wasn't there.
You want tears? We used to talk about what was going to happen to that baby--our grandchild; but only at night, only in the security of our bedroom, and even then in hushed voices, no lights. Sandra said that from the very moment Carrie told us she was going to have a baby, she knew Carrie would never keep it. Not for a moment did Sandra expect this baby to grow up in our house, to see her there, a little girl, to imagine it there. She said she knew this child, her grandchild, would stay in her arms only for a day, maybe even for an hour. If at all. She was just preparing herself for the worst, and she knew it, right away.
What would happen to this little girl was going to have to be Carrie's decision--had to be. Even though our daughter was only 16, only Carrie could make that awful determination, a decision bigger than many people will make in a lifetime. It's one thing to go through a pregnancy when you’re that young, but to have to make that kind of decision seems as appalling as it is impossible. That’s why sometimes at night my wife's silent crying could wake me. That’s what I remembered this morning.
I'm not sure how they made up their minds exactly--she and Jeff—but I’m both of us believed it was the right move--to place the baby up for adoption. It may well have been easier for Carrie than for other pregnant teens, her having been adopted herself; and perhaps it was easier for us, having adopted Carrie. I don't know. But if other grandparents suffer more than I did—more than Sandra did. . .I haven’t the imagination to create room for more.
Sandra says the fire started in her toes and her feet and worked its way up through her body like the kind of raging flames that take out acres and acres of woods, an inferno of pain, this flaming torch of sadness and grief that consumed her when the five of us--our pastor, Jeff and Carrie, Sandra and myself--stood together holding hands and praying that day in the hospital.
She says that fire in her started already the moment she saw the preacher come up the hospital corridor because she claims she knew right then that in just a short time that darling baby she’d just seen for the very first time would be gone forever down that cold hospital hallway. There we stood waiting, my Sandra burning up, my Carrie crying, and Jeff, our son, a bewildered boy caught in a storm of tears.
The caseworker walks in, a tight smile drawn across her lips.
I shouldn’t have said what I did right then. It just made things more painful. “Carrie,” I said, “we don’t have to do this. We can still take her home.” I think I said that for Sandra, but I know I said it for me.
That little girl was as beautiful as her mother. I can’t describe her.
Carrie looks at me. “We can’t make a decision like that in the heat of emotion,” she said.
She was right.
So we allowed that case worker to walk over to the basinet, where Sandra had laid our grandchild. She picked her up and wrapped her in the blanket my wife had picked out; and then, just as deliberately as she could without being cold, that woman walked out of the room, a baby in her arms in a moment I’ve tried to forget, a moment a good deal worse than anything else I’ve suffered in my life.
They had told us they were going to put our grandbaby in some foster home in Milwaukee that night, and between the two of us—Sandra and myself—I don’t believe we slept a wink in that motel room, because all the while we were trying to imagine where that baby might be. We listed everybody we knew there, as if the agency might by some chance put our granddaughter with one of our friends. I’d have gone door-to-door in a city of more a million people just to lay my eyes once more on that beautiful child. That’s how much we hurt--certainly for Carrie, who had to lie there alone—and certainly, too, for ourselves. That child was ours too.
_____________________
Tomorrow: Time passes.
No comments:
Post a Comment