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SECOND PLACE
A Secret Kept
By Fred Venturini
Patoka, Illinois
Beth left for the clinic before the
sun rose that morning. A stiff, even frost clung to
the windshield, costing Beth time and energy as she
scraped away, sweating against the temperature’s
cold, violent attack. The round lights in the campus
parking lot were being strangled by the smoke of morning
cold, while the posts they rested upon, as well as
the trees in the backdrop of the dorm buildings, were
shadows against the steel-gray curtain of dawn.
Beth wrapped her diminutive, black-gloved hand around
a Styrofoam cup of even blacker coffee. There were
dull-red lipstick stains around the rim, branded as
perfectly as fingerprints. After the engine was warm
and the windshield clean, she pulled out of the lot
and into the recesses of the still-drowsy town. A red
light offered her an opportunity to check herself in
the rear-view mirror. A young-old face stared back
at her—pretty, smooth and perfect with blonde
hair streaming down her shoulders. Her eyes were a
rich green, sparkling like emeralds under a jeweler’s
lamp, but the flesh beneath them was dark and swollen.
Around her shoulders was a black leather coat, a rare
gift from her mother. Underneath it was a gray cashmere
sweater and her favorite jeans. She used the back of
her glove to soak up the tears gathering at the corners
of her eyes—tears that became more difficult
to battle as she turned toward the Hamilton Clinic,
where she had a ten o’clock appointment.
Beth felt alone, but by choice. She didn’t know
who the father was. Maybe Marty, maybe James, which
equaled a lose-lose situation. Marty was her ex-boyfriend,
too erratic and possessive to raise a child. He bordered
on cruel and Beth was still getting over their most
recent break-up, and this time she was sure that she
would make good on her promise to never speak to him
again. James was a sweet man who truly cared for her,
and it made Beth hurt to listen to the beautiful assurances
of love and protection he gave. It hurt because she
was simply not in love with him, and probably never
would be.
Adoption had briefly crossed her mind, but Beth quickly
dismissed that idea. She wanted to keep the baby from
Marty so that they wouldn’t rekindle a relationship
that was a disaster in waiting, and she didn’t
want to intensify a relationship with James that was
clearly going nowhere fast. Carrying a child, even
if the intention was adoption, would shake her life
to pieces, widening the rift between her and her family
while preventing her from working enough to support
herself. So she wanted to go alone to assure that her
secret was under her control, that it lived and died
with her. She could’ve convinced a friend to
go, but decided against it, not wanting to see a reminder
of the deed in someone else’s eyes.
Beth didn’t choose to have an abortion. She convinced
herself to, promising herself that she could forget
about it and start over with a clean slate.
Her only asset was her resilience, which helped her
believe she could overcome by burying her feelings
as she had for so many years, and if it meant forgetting,
she was prepared to do whatever it took for her to
survive, to live.
The interstate whirred by her. She knew what she was
getting into thanks to the lengthy abortion segment
of health class during her freshman year. The effects
of mental anguish can sometimes have a more lasting
impact than long-term physical repercussions, her textbook
read. To Beth, textbooks had a certain power and importance
with big, bold type, hard covers, and sharp corners.
Their words were like scripture, rarely wrong and well-researched,
and she was sure that her attack of mental anguish
would be crying herself to sleep for a few days, and
that would be it. After it was over, she could let
go, but for now she was proud of holding herself together,
especially since she was by herself.
Thoughts raced, making the long trip seem brief. The
sun peeked out as she pulled into the Hamilton Clinic.
There were sagging junipers lining its brick walls,
with large tinted windows above them. She got out of
her car, and the February winds still prickled her
skin as she locked her Corsica’s door and then
double-checked, stalling. She collected herself and
pushed on.
The doors were flanked by fresh, serious-looking security
guards. At one time, the news was peppered with stories
of violence at abortion clinics—but the world
had grown even more violent and daring, replacing the
abortion horror stories with falling towers and sniper-fire.
Beth felt as if she were trapped in a world of fiction—that
the guards with greasy-black hair and fake smiles,
as well as the clinic, were just another place on T.V.,
and that particular illusion of distance made it easier
to walk forward.
The woman at the desk was bright-eyed and very friendly,
handing Beth a clipboard full of forms and a pen. They
wanted to know everything—twice. She wrote down
her birthday, address, emergency contacts, and even
her allergy to strawberries and her lactose intolerance.
Beth wrote, sitting elbow to elbow with the others
in the clinic. She was shocked that it was so full,
but everyone else brought their support network in
the form of family or boyfriends. The only thing that
comforted Beth was that it didn’t seem to help
much—there wasn’t one smile to be found
in the waiting room.
The nurse would periodically peek out from the door
and call in the next patient by first name and last
initial. Cortney S. was called. Natalie M. soon followed.
The theme of sterilization had been carried out to
the fullest extent.
When the nurse finally called Beth to the back, she
answered almost the exact same questions that were
on the clipboard, only this time it was the nurse scribbling
away while Beth answered orally.
After all the quick, one line questions were done,
the nurse, whose name was Pam, began to ask more specific,
abortion related questions. “And now, the essay
portion of the exam,” Beth thought, rubbing her
thumbs together in a nervous fashion, rarely making
eye contact.
Pam wanted her to know every step of the procedure
and every other option. She wanted to know if she discussed
this decision with her mother since she wasn’t
sure who the father was. Beth just lied with robotic
precision and said yes, her mother knew. Her conscious
was purposely disconnected from her responses. She
hadn’t told a soul, especially her mother, but
it seemed to ease Pam and move things along.
“And who will be taking you home?” Pam
asked, just as she rose to leave the room. Beth thought
she
might escape the question, but had prepared a lie ahead
of time, and recited it as she had carefully practiced
it in the car earlier.
“My friend, Jane Roloson. She’s the only
person I would share something like this with . . .
and she
has a horrible fear of these places. She’s doing
it out of a great deal of love for me, but insists
that she wait at the Denny’s just down the street.
She doesn’t want to come inside. I think she
just wants to act like nothing happened.”
Pam paused. Beth was scared that she might sense her
lie and feel the need to call or otherwise prove the
story’s validity. But the nurse knew all too
well the emotional factors linked to such a situation.
“I understand.” With that, Pam was out
the door, and the moment was ever closer.
The time passed, and Beth wondered how these clinics
got any business at all. They seemed to spend a lot
of time trying to convince their potential clients
to go home. She looked at the clock, marveling at how
even the slowest of time passes when dreading something.
No matter how horrible the fate each second carries
closer, it is still just one second. They stack up—one
upon another, pushing pain into the past until it’s
gone, which Beth was depending on. Beth couldn’t
wait for a month from now to arrive, when the fear
and pain would be dulled by the passage of time.
She didn’t see the doctor until she was naked
from the waist down with her feet locked into cold
stirrups. She could hear the doctors and nurses opening
and closing doors, talking in low tones, sliding charts
into their holders—but there was something else.
It was a faint sound, but it was captivating and real.
“Maggie.” That was its name, her baby’s
name. It floated across the air as a sharp whisper.
Her baby was begging, her baby Maggie. Beth could hear
the cries of her infancy. She could hear her cries
for mommy as a toddler. She could hear her Maggie asking
if her dress looked OK on a prom night that would never
be. More and more, she could hear the cries for help,
as if Maggie were buried alive and hoping to escape
before time ran out.
The door opened with squeal and an older, balding man
with glasses resting on the tip of his nose came in
the room, scrubbed and ready to go.
“She’s been prepped, Dr. Stevens,” Pam
said as she walked into the room with latex gloves
on.
“Time’s out,” Beth said in a low
whisper.
“Just relax hon,” Dr. Stevens said. He
never made eye contact as he prepared an injection
for her cervix
to numb the pain. Pam stood beside her, squeezing Beth’s
hand.
Beth was breathing faster now. As the shot hit her,
she became sick and dizzy, tense and clammy, and Maggie
kept begging with muffled cries. Begging for her life.
Beth’s heart was beginning to soften, and she
felt like an exposed criminal as the doctor inserted
a thin, humming tube. Maggie was screaming now, shrieking
in pain. Beth bit her cheek and squeezed her eyes,
hoping to will it away, to silence it, but nothing
could. She hoped it was a hallucination, a side effect
of the drugs, because the screaming continued even
after the procedure was over.
When she woke up, she felt swollen all over, like she
was ready to burst even though she had never been so
empty. Pam declared her coherent enough to drive, but
urged her to call a friend. Beth assured her that she’d
be fine, and she shuffled out of the door with her
paperwork in hand and her coat draped on her shoulders.
Beth sat at the wheel of theCorsicafor a long time,
the engine silent. The sun was falling, yet she remained
there, electrified by frustration and disappointment
that had finally reached its peak. The phantom screams
certainly didn’t help her resolve.
“Ridiculous!” she screamed, slamming both
hands on the wheel, trying to bite the tears back.
“Ridiculous, there is no way to know!” She didn’t know if her
baby was a girl, she never did find out, but reasoning didn’t stop Maggie
from crying in her car right along with her mother. Beth pleaded with herself,
hoping that reason would come and the cries would stop. When they didn’t,
she forced herself to start the car, and she turned the radio turned up as loud
as she could stand it. With the help of the radio, she felt a bit better, especially
as home came closer. Once there, she could break down, let herself cry it out,
let herself heal. Let time heal her. The barrage of green signs and yellow stripes
on the interstate finally ended. She was close now, on one of the final stretches
of country road.
Beth felt sick—her heart was sick. Her head felt beaten and watery, and
her eyes burned like coals. There were no more tears to cry. Her stomach hurt
in the very pit, and she was empty in more ways than one as she hadn’t
eaten in a day and a half. Her only solace was that home would come, and time
would pass.
In her haste, she drove faster, trusting her knowledge of the old country roads.
She slung the dark blueCorsicaup the first of many small, rolling hills, and
just when she came over the crest, she saw headlights bouncing in the distance.
Beth rubbed at her eyes, noticing that she was dangerously close to falling asleep.
She sat up in her seat and slowed a bit, knowing how dangerous Chestnut Hills
road could be, especially at night.
Both cars came closer to a one-lane bridge at the top of a small hill, and she
slowed to a creep, allowing them to go first since they were approaching quickly.
“Slow down,” she said out loud. The other car defied her, chugging
towards
the bridge.
“Jesus Christ, slow down!” Beth said, but before she could finish,
the car hit the bridge and launched into the air, leaning sideways and landing
on the
pavement directly on the passenger door, violently flipping once and coming to
rest upside down in the center of the road. The sound of the long, white car
slamming into the concrete echoed like a cannon shot.
Shocked and unable to move, Beth took almost ten full seconds to realize that
what she’d just seen was real. When she was convinced it was, she took
her foot off the brake and eased forward. She saw that it was aLincoln, hissing
and making crunching noises against the gravel as it rocked to rest.
Beth was already on the cell-phone, reporting an accident on Chesnut Hills road.
The dispatcher asked if there were injuries. “It looks bad, I mean, really
bad, the car is upside down. They were going so fast. Too fast.” The dispatcher
promised that an ambulance would be sent.
Working on instinct more than intellect, reached into her glove box for a plastic,
pink Ever-Ready flashlight. As she approached the Lincoln Continental, she could
hear the radiator dripping against the road and some muffled sobs coming from
the ditch, and it sounded like a woman.
“It’s OK, ma’am,” Beth yelled. “Just hold on.” She
shined the flashlight along the car, and walked around the back of it to go to
the woman in the ditch when she ran into a man in the road, face down in a pool
of blood.
“No, no its not,” the woman cried. “No, no, no its not.” She
repeated the phrase in hysterical breaths as Beth knelt down to examine the man.
His right arm was mangled so badly that Beth took the flashlight off of it, feeling
ill. It was nearly non-existent. Most of its flesh was gone, and the bone was
in splinters. Blood gushed from the shoulder area and ran down the road in a
thick, syrupy stream.
He was older, nearly bald with a rim of black hair around his head. In the cold
air, she could see her own breath, but the man had no such puffs coming from
his nostrils or mouth. He wasn’t moving at all—no rise and fall of
his body. The blood from his arm streamed down the road. She didn’t need
to check his pulse to know that he was dead.
Caught in the moment, Beth rose. She was repulsed by the sight, the feel of a
dead man. It was her first encounter with an actual death—or was it? Beth
wasn’t sure, but she was sure she couldn’t handle it. Looking at
him gave her a feeling of disbelief, like he couldn’t be dead, that he
would just wake up, yawn, and begin his search for a prosthetic limb as if he
were merely nicked by the accident.
She scrambled around the front of the car and made her way to where the woman
was. She sounded older, but it was hard to tell much more under the light of
a cheap flashlight. Clouds assaulted the February moon, making it all the darker.
The woman was still babbling.
“No, no no, no it’s not its not OK how the heck could you say its
OK when
it’s not it’s not . . .”
“Ma’am!” Beth yelled. The woman continued to rock back and
forth with her arms locked around her knees, reciting the same words as if they
were magical.
“Ma’am!” She yelled again, this time grabbing the woman’s
arms
and trying to calm her down. “It’s OK, help is on the way. Just settle
down, can you do that for me?”
The woman slowed, and acted as if she just noticed someone was there. Her eyes
were aimless and glazed.
“I don’t know what happened. I was just driving, and Henry hates
it when
I drive. He was sleeping and I don’t know what happened. My head hurts,
my back, oh God my back.”
She buried her head in Beth’s shoulder. Beth rubbed her back and whispered
that everything would be fine. The woman’s hair was long and silky, much
younger than her voice.
“Not so bad,” the woman said after a minute, drying her eyes. “I’m
. . . I’m Rhonda.”
Rhonda backed off a bit, and she was shaking. Beth took her back into an embrace,
wanting to keep her warm and calm to prevent shock from setting in.
“Hi Rhonda, I’m Beth. So nice to meet you. I’m from Chestnut,
just
up the road.”
Rhonda looked around, ignoring the attempt at small-talk. “Where is he?
Henry? Get over here and introduce yourself! Don’t be so rude! He’s
got nothing in the way of manners you know.”
“I’ve already met Henry, dear. Bet you just love him to death,” Beth
said.
“I do, I do. Just never get a chance
to tell it to him much. We bicker something awful here
recently. I guess after ten years some of the magic
leaves
you.”
Beth continued to rub her back, not responding.
“I just don’t know,” Rhonda muttered. “It would be different
if we had children. If you ask me, it’d be a nice way for us. I think
he hates me because we don’t have a child.”
Beth remained silent, hoping Rhonda would just be quiet and cry until help
arrived. Her words were far too sharp, more real and disturbing than Henry’s
body. They were almost mystical.
“We tried but, but I can’t,” Rhonda said in short breaths. “I
say it’s him but I just know it’s me. We’re going to adopt
one day, he says. He’s lying to both of us—I just know we won’t
be able to. Not enough money, getting a bit too old. He says we will but we
always argue because I want my own, is that too much? I want my own to love.
Oh dear,
I wanted my own to love, but now, now I just . . . I just love Henry.”
Rhonda choked up again, shaking as she moaned for Henry.
“Oh, he loves you Rhonda,” Beth said. “He loves you so much,
more than you’ll ever know.”
Then Rhonda stopped. Her shaking and writhing ceased, she was as still as an
infant in Beth’s arms. She withdrew her head from Beth’s shoulder
once more and looked at her with gray, pained eyes, as if a terrible crime
had been committed.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Beth said nothing.
“Oh my God, he was my life. Henry was everything to me.”
Beth just hugged Rhonda even harder, giving her a silent affirmation. This
time, Beth’s embrace wasn’t tactical, it was genuine. Their bodies
were a huddled mass now, and the heat of sorrow radiated from their bodies
in thick,
boiling clouds of frost.
As they held each other, Beth was overcome with an instantaneous clarity—sharp
and painful, a splinter of glass driven into the delicate, vulnerable flesh of
her heart—a wound that time could never heal. She had robbed her child
of the opportunity to love and be happy, but she now knew that she had robbed
herself of happiness and love at the same time.
Rhonda would be able to see pictures of Henry, to go to sleep at night with
warm memories of him walking with her in the park or giving her flowers. She
would
remember all the good times, all the smiles, and she would recover. For Beth,
the only memory of her child would be of death, an image that would recycle
itself in every nightmare and every thought as long as she lived. And she could’ve
stopped it. All she had to do was hit the brakes or change her mind or treat
the people at the clinic with ears that would listen, not just hear. Her child
was gone, and Beth felt like a murderer whose selfishness was as lethal as
any car accident could ever be.
“Maggie,” she whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” Rhonda muttered aimlessly. She may have
been speaking to Henry for all Beth knew, but Rhonda’s words drove the
daggers of guilt even deeper. She wanted to tell Rhonda everything, and her mother,
and James, and Marty. She wanted to tell everyone that would listen, hoping
that
somehow it would relieve her, that proclaiming it to everyone would be like
sucking the poison out of a snakebite.
Beth heard the ambulance wail in the distance. It wouldn’t be long before
she was home. There, she would breathe, she would cry, and she would go to
sleep that night. The next morning, she would wake up, force down some breakfast,
and
go to work. Her friends and eventually her family would see her, but she would
say nothing, knowing all the while that confession could lead to understanding,
and in time, peace.
Beth instead banished herself to the desolate, limitless regions of the dead
where forgiveness was foreign and forgotten—where Maggie’s screams
would echo eternally, filled with confusion, pain, and worst of all, love.
Copyright (c) 2003 for the
author, all rights reserved. |
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