Now or Never (45 page)

Ranier House was a long drive away in a leafy suburb that petered out into real countryside a mile farther down the road. It was raining, a fine Irish-mist sort of rain that soaked her hair as she walked the short distance from the parking area to the glass front door, and the garden smelled fresh, of rich loamy earth.

The house had been built as a country estate by a wealthy logging baron at the turn of the century and was a mix of English Tudor-style gables and Washington State red brick. It was big and square and forbidding, with bare wooden floors and white walls, like a school. It had plain pull-down shades at the windows and worn-looking furnishings, and the smell of institutional cooking lingered in the hallways.

A couple of heavily pregnant young women came by, arms linked, as she waited in the hall. They eyed her up and down as they walked past. She thought, horrified, that in a couple of months she would look like that.

Mrs. Rhodes hurried into the hall. She was small, thin, and brisk. Mary told her the details: her age, where she was living, her job. She explained about college and the scholarship. And she told her about her mother. Mrs. Rhodes wrote it all down, then asked who the baby’s father was.

Mary shook her head, her mouth set in a firm line. “There is no father,” she said grimly.

“But my dear, if the child is to be adopted, the natural father should be informed.” Mrs. Rhodes looked at her with irritation. They were all the same—they never wanted to tell.

“I’d rather kill it,” Mary said in a calm, dead voice.

Mrs. Rhodes glanced sharply at her. She could see from her face, hear in her tone that she was dealing with a severely traumatized young woman. The mother recently dead … the girl just eighteen … they had better do something to help her.

“Very well, my dear,” she said, trying not to sound patronizing. “I think it would be best if you came to us at the end of the month. You can work out your notice at the supermarket and contribute whatever small amount you can toward your upkeep here. If there’s nothing, well, so be it. Ranier House is run as a charity. We’ll see you through, and that’s the important thing.”

M
ARY HAD BEEN LOCKED
in a safe little time warp—she had not thought beyond the next day. All she had wanted was to continue living in her own attic room, occasionally sharing a cup of coffee and a sandwich with Jim and Alfie, and picking up her paycheck regularly every Friday. Now it was over. Jim and Alfie had made up their minds, the house had been sold quickly, and they couldn’t wait to be off. The hardest part was saying good-bye to them.

They shared a final celebration dinner the night before they left. There was a smile on her face, but she was dying inside. They had been kind and treated her as an equal. They had been her friends.

When the taxi came to take them to the airport the next morning, Jim hugged her. He ruffled her hair and said, “Chin up, Mary Malone. You’ll get through it. I’ll be thinking of you.” And Alfie kissed her hand and said, “Go for it, Mary. We’ll drop you a postcard.”

She stood on the steps, waving good-bye until the taxi turned the corner, then trailed heavily back upstairs and packed her own bag. The next day she took up residence in the home for unwed mothers.

There was a nursery wing at Rainier House, and she often heard the sound of babies crying, but she never wanted to see them. Eventually the matron insisted that she look around, and she walked her through, pointing out the facilities: the labor ward, and the delivery room
where she would give birth, with curtained-off beds where two young women lay sleeping. “Being a new mother can be exhausting,” Matron warned her.

“Not for me,” she said quickly. “Mine is being adopted right away.”

Matron frowned. “I’m afraid it will take a few days,” she said. “We have to know the baby is healthy and feeding properly, and then we’ll wean him. We’ll have to expel your breast milk, make sure he’s thriving before he can go.”

Mary stared at her, horrified. “I can’t do that,” she said, panicked. “I can’t breast-feed it, I can’t—”

Matron had heard it all before. “We’ll see,” she said calmly.

As usual, Mary kept to herself as much as she could in those last few weeks of waiting. She didn’t want to talk to the other girls because when she left, she wanted to put this behind her, as though it had never happened. It was the only way.

The days dragged by, though they kept the expectant mothers busy all the time, and even those who were giving up their children were taught how to look after an infant, how to bathe and diaper it, and about sterilizing bottles—all the things Mary did not want to know.

She learned what would happen when she went into labor, that it would probably take a long time—ten, twelve hours, maybe longer—because first births always did. She told herself she didn’t care, she just wanted it over and done with.

The morning she went into labor, she received a postcard from Jim and Alfie. It was a blurred, brightly colored picture of a palm-fringed island, and they had headed it, “From Paradise.”

“Good luck, Mary,” they had written. “And remember, Paradise is where the heart is.”

Her water broke right after that, and the contractions
came not much later. They surprised her with their intensity, but she told herself bravely that they were bearable. Matron came to inspect her. She said the doctor would be along shortly and that she was doing fine, but she had a long way to go yet. Mary glanced at the clock on the wall: it was eleven
A.M.

At eleven
P.M.
she was lying in a metal hospital bed in the labor ward with the sides up to keep her from falling out when she thrashed around, crazy with pain. She gritted her teeth and told herself to take it one minute at a time, one second—just get through it, and tomorrow it would be all over, and she would be free. The pain ripped through her, and she gasped, clenching her jaw, not making a sound.

“Scream, for God’s sake girl, why don’t you,” the nurse said, astonished. “If ever a woman was entitled to a good scream, it’s now.”

But Mary just clenched her jaw tighter. The face of the man who had raped her floated in front of her closed lids. His staring dark eyes were drilling into hers as she wavered between the agonizing contractions. She would rather die than give him the satisfaction of screaming.

Eventually, when she thought she could bear it no longer, at around five in the morning, they gave her an epidural, and suddenly the pain was no longer there. She floated in a pleasant haze somewhere above the bed, and then they dragged her back to reality. “Push, Mary, come on, girl, get on with it. Push more, harder, harder….”

She didn’t feel the baby sliding out of her, but she heard its cry. She wanted to put her hands to her ears and shut it out, but she couldn’t move—her feet were in the stirrups, and the nurses were holding her hands, and she was trapped. All she could do was lie there and think horrified,
“That’s his baby. The monster has been born.”

“It’s a girl,” the doctor said, handing the infant to the nurse to clean.

“I don’t want to know,” she muttered, lost in a muzzy nightmare. She began to cry, and the nurse wiped her tears. “It’s all right,” she said kindly. “You were brave, Mary. You can cry now.”

A short while later she was safe in bed in a curtained-off cubicle in the ward. The window was wide open, and the sun had just come up, and its warmth touched her face. She felt peaceful and very calm; it was all over now.

“Mary,” Matron said.

Her eyes flew open, and she stared nearsightedly at her.

“Here’s your baby,” Matron said, holding out a pink-wrapped bundle. “It’s feeding time.” And she laid the baby down in the crook of Mary’s arm.

Her whole body went rigid with shock. Her throat was as dry as cinders, and she was unable to speak. She could feel the small weight resting against her arm, but she could not look at it.

“Unbutton your nightdress, dear,” Matron said.

“I can’t,” she croaked, unwilling to look. “I can’t.”

“She’s a beautiful baby,” Matron coaxed. “She needs you to feed her. Come on now, Mary. Accept your responsibility.”

Mary dragged her eyes away from Matron and looked unwillingly at the creature who was about to draw nourishment from her. She stared at her daughter for a long moment, then she lay back on the pillow again and closed her eyes.

The sweet scent of lilacs drifted on the breeze from the tree outside her window, and their fragrance filled her with sudden blissful happiness. She looked at the child again. The baby’s eyes were exactly like hers, big and blue and slightly unfocused. She had a round pink face and a sweet rosebud mouth and a delicate fuzz of blond hair. The baby was not a monster at all—she was beautiful, perfect. And she was hers.

Mary leaned back against the pillows, her arm around
her baby. She ran a finger wonderingly across the blond down on her head. The scent of lilacs surrounded her, and the sunshine warmed her. And she knew that what she felt for the small, helpless infant, was pure love.

The next day she told them she had changed her mind and could not give the child up for adoption after all. Matron tried to reason with her, pointing out all the difficulties that lay ahead. She would miss her college education, men did not marry single mothers, and she would have to work hard and be both parents at once. Besides, they had a well-to-do couple waiting to take the child, ready and eager, with a nursery all prepared. The baby would have a wonderful life as their daughter. She would have a proper home and a real family; she would go to good schools and college.

Mary dug her heels in and stubbornly refused to listen. Finally they recognized defeat and helped her find a small studio apartment and a job in a drugstore.

The day Mary took her little girl “home” was the second happiest of her life. She had a week before she started work, and she had to find someone to look after the baby. The tiny apartment was hot in the June sunshine, and it smelled damp, but it was soon homey, awash under a sea of blankets and bottles, with tiny baby clothes hanging over the shower rail to dry.

She called her baby Angela because she was such a perfect little angel. She pushed her around the streets to the local park in a thirdhand stroller given to her by Ranier House, and she fed her and bathed her and dressed her up in the free hand-out clothes, as if she were a little doll. The baby gazed at her with those huge blue eyes, and Mary cooed loving words to her,
“Precious,”
she said, and
“baby,”
and
“darling,”
and “
I love you
.” The words were like a foreign language, but they came easily to her, now that she knew what love was.

In order to go to work, she had to wean the baby onto
a bottle, and she exhausted herself pumping out her milk and sterilizing bottles and doing all the other hundred-and-one little tasks that are necessary with an infant. When the day came for her to start work, she wheeled the baby three blocks to the baby-sitter’s house and handed over the bottles of milk and the diaper bag and all the other infant paraphernalia. She kissed the baby good-bye, then hurried off to the drugstore and work before she broke down and cried.

She worried all day, and at lunchtime she called to see how she was. “She’s doing okay,” the woman told her laconically. “At this age they just sleep a lot anyway.”

Maybe the baby did sleep all day, but she certainly didn’t sleep nights, and neither did Mary. Just when she would climb wearily into bed and close her eyes, Angela would cry again. She tried feeding her, tried putting her in bed with her, tried holding her and walking around and around the small room. But Angela was a night person, and the baby-sitter reaped the benefit of a sleepy infant all day, while the exhausted Mary crawled around the store trying to keep her eyes open and her wits about her, then walked the floor all night.

A couple of months passed. She had made several mistakes at work, and the manager warned her, but when she goofed again and gave a woman change for fifty instead of five and her cash didn’t tally, he hit the roof.

“That’s it, Miss Malone,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go on like this. You sure as hell can’t hold down a job the state you’re in.”

“You mean I’m fired?” she asked, close to tears.

He sighed and gave her another chance. “Just think what you’re going to do about it,” he warned. “You can’t be a mother and work full time.”

But Mary couldn’t be a mother if she didn’t work full time because there wouldn’t be enough money.

It was December, and Christmas was looming when she
finally realized she couldn’t go on. The baby cried all the time, and she thought guiltily that it was because she was unhappy—she didn’t have a proper home, a full-time mother, the right care and attention. All Mary had to give her was love, and that was cheap. Anyone would love her.

Her pay disappeared on rent, the baby-sitter, and food. There was nothing left over, not an extra cent. She didn’t even have enough to buy her baby a Christmas gift. She sat limply in a chair at the side of the crib, watching the baby toss her head from side to side, wailing. She didn’t have the strength to pick her up. Total despair overwhelmed her. She was at the end of her rope.

The baby slept that night, but Mary paced the apartment, asking herself what to do. The next morning she dropped the child off and dragged herself unwillingly to the drugstore. Somehow she got through another day and picked up the pay packet, which had mostly been spent even before she received it. She bought a newspaper and a Snickers bar for a treat and walked wearily back to pick up Angela. This time when she saw her, the baby smiled.

Mary’s heart turned over, and she smiled back, hardly believing it. It was like a shaft of sunlight on the gloomy cold December day.

Later, when the baby had been fed and was lying content for a few minutes on a blanket on the floor, Mary opened her pay packet and counted out the money. She stared at it, surprised. He had given her two weeks’ pay instead of one. Then she saw the pink slip still in the envelope, and her heart sank. He had not even had the guts to tell her she was fired.