Protect and Serve (17 page)

“Penny looked me in the eye and said she did it. She said she had sex with you.”

“Oh…oh…” Terrill sighed. “She’s going to kill me, then. Either she’s gonna kill me, or I won’t have any best friends left when it’s all said and done. I guess she’s still lying, and she must have figured out a way to lie while looking you dead in the eye. She never used to be able to do that.”

“Are you saying you didn’t have sex with her? Ever?”

“Never, man. Penny is my dearest and oldest friend, and I love her like a sister. But that’s it. Listen, man, can you just tell her I called and I’ll call her back later?” Terrill broke off the call.

Jason couldn’t believe it. Somebody was lying, and he was determined to find out who it was.

His mind went back to fifteen years earlier, when they’d just graduated from high school and their friendship had come to an end….

He’d come home after a ten-hour shift at the car dealership where he was working, tired and ready for bed.

His boss had needed someone to drive a car down to Delaware and bring another one back. Ever since he and Penny found out she was pregnant, he’d been picking up as many hours as he could.

He wanted to do the right thing by her, and he wanted to take care of his responsibilities. Even more, he loved her and he knew she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. If a baby meant things would happen sooner than he’d expected, he was cool with it.

As soon as he walked in the house that Saturday evening, he knew something was wrong. His parents were both sitting in the front room. And his mother looked as if she’d been crying.

“Penny lost the baby, son. She’s at St. Joseph’s Hospital. We had no way of reaching you to let you know.” His father’s rich baritone voice sounded heavy with sorrow.

Jason felt his knees give out.

Both his parents rushed over to him.

He heard them saying things like “Everything happens for a reason” and “You need to get to the hospital and be strong for Penny.” But his heart felt as if it were going to explode. Everything seemed cruel and pointless. How could their baby be dead?

Somehow he made it to the hospital and found his way to Penny’s room. The guilt from the thought that she’d had to go through it all alone tore at his soul. He should have been there. When he saw Terrill sitting on the edge of her bed and heard Penny’s body-racking cries, the guilt multiplied.

He walked over to the bed with tears coming down his face. His girl was in pain. He had never heard her cry like that, and he never wanted to hear it again.

“Hey, Jason.” Terrill’s somber voice matched the expression in his eyes.

Jason nodded. He didn’t trust himself to talk.

Penny didn’t look at him at all. She held on to Terrill and sobbed.

Terrill shot Jason a pleading look. They both seemed at a loss to know what it would take to make Penny stop crying.

“Penny, baby—” Jason started.

“Leave. I want you to leave, Jason. The baby is gone, so you don’t have to hang around and do the right thing anymore. It’s over.” Penny’s voice had a gravelly texture and seemed to be laced with pain.

“Penny, I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner. Baby, I’m sorry. Babe, look at me, please…” Jason pleaded.

She kept her head nestled in Terrill’s shoulders.

“I don’t want to look at you, Jason. I don’t want to…I can’t be with you anymore. It’s over. Leave me alone. Go on with your life and leave me alone.”

Her words felt like a hot knife slicing through his heart. Jason stared at Terrill, who seemed just as shocked as he was.

“I’m not leaving. Look, I know you’re mad. You have every right to be upset. But I would have been here if I could have. Terrill, man, can you leave us alone for a minute? We need—”

“No! No, I don’t want Terrill to leave. I want you to leave, Jason. What is it going to take to get you to see that it’s over? I’m not the right girl for you.”

“You’re talking crazy, Pen. I love you. You’re the love of my life.”

“I want out of this relationship. I want to be with…I want to be with Terrill now. He’s the one I want now. He’s the one who should mourn the loss of my child with me. We’re a couple now, Jason. Terrill and I will mourn the loss of our child together.”

Jason took a step back. He hadn’t thought she could say anything more hurtful than the things she’d already said.

Stunned, he grabbed the railing of the bed for support.

“You’re with Terrill? You’ve been with Terrill? What do you mean? Are you saying Terrill was the father? What are you saying, Penny?” The questions tumbled from his mouth in a fast-paced rush. He felt the circulation giving out in his hands, but he couldn’t loosen his hold on the bed. He didn’t trust what he might do if he did.

Terrill’s eyes were wide. But he didn’t say anything.

“Yes. Is that what you need to hear in order to leave? Yes. I slept with Terrill and he was the father. Will you leave now?”

Jason let go of the bed rail and snatched Terrill off of the bed. Before he even realized what he was doing, he’d punched his friend in the face twice.

Terrill was down on the floor, glaring up at him, his expression a mask of shock, anger and sadness.

Penny buried her head in the pillow and started sobbing again.

“You want me to leave? Fine. I’m out. The two of you deserve each other, a backstabber and a slut. I can’t believe I ever trusted either one of you. My aunt Sophie was right all along. You’re both ghetto-gutter trash, and neither one of you is good enough to call a friend.” The ugly words caused a trickle of pain to run through his heart. But he couldn’t stop. He wanted to hurt them as much as they had hurt him.

“Like mother, like daughter, huh? If I would have known you would become such a slut, I would never have bothered with you in the first place.
The both of you can go to hell
.”

The creaking of the bedroom door let Penny know that Jason had entered the room again. But she wasn’t in any frame of mind to face him. She’d spent the past hour tossing and turning, torn between wanting to go after him and wanting to go home. It had turned out worse than she thought it would, and she hadn’t even given him her full confession. She’d been crying her eyes out from the time he left the room, and she knew she wasn’t done.

She figured if she stayed really still, he’d just go to sleep and she could get out of there in the morning. When the light came on, she knew that wasn’t going to happen. She felt the bed bounce, but she didn’t look up from her pillow.

“Penny?” His voice had a firm and slightly irritated tone.

She could tell he wanted to talk. But how in the world was she supposed to do this? Yes, she’d messed up. She was more than willing to admit that. But her heart was on the line now.

She still loved him. There was no denying it anymore.

“Penny, I know you’re not sleeping. We need to talk.”

She sat up in the bed and tried to wipe her face. It was no use. She could feel the clamminess the tears had left, and she figured her eyes and nose were a big, red, puffy mess.

His eyes seemed to soften for a moment, but then they took on the same determined gaze of steel he’d had a few days ago, when she saw him at the wake.

“I spoke to Terrill. He called your cell phone and I answered it. And I’ve been sitting in the living room for the past half an hour trying to figure out which one of you is telling me the truth and which one of you is lying. He says the two of you never had sex. And you just sat here in this room and told me you did.”

Penny eyes went wide. “I said I did you wrong. I didn’t say I had sex with Terrill. I did you wrong when I lied to you about it. I caused you to lose your best friend. I’m a horrible person, and I know that. And I know saying I’m sorry isn’t going to change what I did. But I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Jason squinted and leaned forward. “You’re admitting it was a lie?”

She nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Why? Why did you lie?”

She took a deep breath and kept her focus on him. He deserved to hear the truth, all of it. It didn’t matter if he never forgave her or he decided to kick her out of his home in the dead of night. It was time to come clean.

She swallowed and twiddled her hands.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I was so scared. I was seventeen and went from having my entire life in front of me to having to put off college for a year, maybe more—”

“You were going to be able to go to school. We were going to work it out so that I would start first. You’d have been able to take classes in a year or two, once we saved some more money and the baby was old enough for day care.”

“
We
didn’t make those plans, Jason.
You
did. You made all the decisions, even down to deciding we were ready to have the baby, that we would have the baby and keep it. You had it all figured out, and I was starting to feel trapped. I knew I wasn’t really ready.

“But rather than be a woman about it and let you know, I just worked as many hours as I could at the boutique so I could save money and have enough before it was too late…So I could really make the decision based on all of my options…I was saving money because I didn’t want to have a child just because I didn’t have any other choices open to me…”

The disgust and horror on Jason’s face almost made her want to stop talking. It was the same look she’d been so afraid of seeing when she was seventeen. She’d known even back then how ready Jason was to be a father, to do the right thing. She’d known he wouldn’t really understand her fears. She hadn’t been ready to become a mother. She let her fear keep her from being honest about her feelings then; she couldn’t do that now.

“I was seventeen and I was scared. And I thought about abortion.” She let the words settle. She had thought about it. She didn’t know if she would have gone through with it. She’d never know because the decision had been taken away from her.

“I was working hard to save money, and I wasn’t taking proper care of myself. Between working that summer job, the stress and fear of being a teenage mom and ruining my life the way Carla used to say I ruined hers, the fear of thinking I might one day resent my child and say some of the jacked-up things my mother had said to me to my child…I ended up having a miscarriage.”

She took a deep breath and started to rub her scar.

The confession was even harder than she’d thought it would be. “When I lost our child, I felt so much guilt, and then I felt a little bit relieved, and then I felt even more guilt about my relief. At the time, I felt as if I had killed our child by working too much and not eating right.”

Jason sighed. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, Pen. It just happened. No one was to blame.”

“I know that now, but at the time, I felt like I was to blame. Then, after I’d had the emergency D and C and they took what was left of our child from me, I had to listen to your aunt—a freaking
nurse,
no less—standing outside of my room, telling one of her colleagues how glad she was I lost the baby, because I wasn’t good enough for you and I would only ruin your life. She actually stood right outside my door and went on and on about how the only way a silly little slut like me could hold on to a fine young man like you would be to trap him by getting pregnant. She said she hoped you wouldn’t be so foolish and allow me to trap you again.

“She was glad I lost the baby. And then I thought, well, Penny, you’re no better. You’re sort of relieved. You’re thinking, well, I can go to college now. I can have a life now. You’re a selfish and awful person. And you really
aren’t
good enough for Jason.”

“That’s ridiculous. How could you even think something like that? And how could you let anything Aunt Sophie said get to you? Why do you let her get to you? Who is she to judge anyone?” Incredulous, Jason just shook his head in dismissal.

But he wasn’t the one who’d had to grow up listening to jokes about her crack-whore mother and being made to feel small because she was being raised by her grandmother and not by two loving parents in a traditional family. Saying she shouldn’t have let any of that get to her was fine in theory. But the cruel things she’d heard growing up had left scars on the psyche.

Penny rubbed her fingers back and forth over the tiny scar above her eye.

She was through pretending she wasn’t damaged. Frankly, it was just too darn tiring. Yes, she had issues. How could she not have them, given all she’d seen, all she’d been through?

“She was your aunt. And she had been making snide comments about Terrill and me from the time we were kids and playing at your house. She always said things to make us feel that we were not fit to play with her nephew.”

“But you two were my best friends. And
you
were my
girl
. Mine. I never made you feel like that.
Ever.
I loved you. And Terrill? I would have laid down my life for him. He was like another brother to me. I don’t understand why he would do this. Why didn’t he try and talk you out of it?”

“But when you thought we had betrayed you, you repeated just about every vile thing your aunt ever said about us, Jason! I know you were hurt, and I know I pushed you away. But hearing those things from you made me feel as if I had made the right decision…That you would have thrown me away eventually anyway, because I wasn’t good enough. And no matter how much I wanted to call after you and admit I had lied, I couldn’t after that.” Penny sighed. She had to finish her confession now, or she never would.

She also had to try to make things right between Jason and Terrill again. If nothing else, she had to do that.

“When Terrill showed up at the hospital, he found me in a horrible state. My hormones were so out of whack, and I was crying hysterically. I guess I must have told him what your aunt said…I don’t know. I felt like I was going crazy at the time. The guilt and sorrow just seemed to be beating at me. I do remember I asked for his help, and he said he’d do anything for me if I’d just stop crying. And then you showed up. And I told you to leave, that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore—”