We said a lot of things to each other that night. Some of it, I still can’t bear to think about. I’d been a lot of things to my father over the years: a help, a surprise, a responsibility. This was the first time I’d been a disappointment. The hurt in his voice was something I would’ve given anything to undo—only undoing it would have been even worse. When I said the word abortion, he reached out with both hands and laid them on the sides of my face.
“My Lizzie,” he said. “Since the day you was born, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You hear? I would’ve killed for you. I’d have given my own life. But this . . .” He trailed off, pressing his lips together, gathering himself. “I can’t condone it. It’s an innocent life. So it’s your choice, girl. I won’t stop you. Even if I could, I wouldn’t, because that’s your body with the baby inside, and you got the right. But it’s wrong, Lizzie. I know that much.”
I think sometimes, about whether I would have done it. Even with Pop’s words weighing heavy on me, I might have made that choice. But I didn’t get to, because back at Dwayne’s house, the same news was being reckoned with, and the preacher was doing what the preacher did. And in the end, it almost felt like it was meant to be. Like we were following a path laid out for us years before, by some puppet master with a taste for heavy-handed drama and a shitty sense of humor. It was early spring, not summer, and we weren’t children anymore, but the rest of it was very much the same: the preacher’s sedan pulled up, this time with Dwayne behind the wheel. He got out, he pushed a toe into the dirt, and he said the words his father had told him to say.
“I want to do right by you.”
I looked at him, my arms folded protectively over my chest. It would be a while yet before I started to show.
“Do you?” I said.
The boy, my boy, lifted his eyes and met my gaze.
“Yeah,” he said, and then, so quietly that I had to strain to hear him: “I want to marry you.”
Maybe he meant it. I don’t know. Maybe Dwayne had his own secret dreams about barbecues and babies, or maybe he just didn’t want to walk the path laid out for him. In Copper Falls, he was our hometown hero, the golden boy who threw a no-hitter and was bound for a glorious future. At the state university, he would have been a small fish in a big pond, not even a starting pitcher despite the athletic scholarship. Maybe he was afraid of what it would be like, not to be special anymore. But as far as the town was concerned, Dwayne had been derailed, and I was the scheming jezebel bitch who’d blown up his future with just a twitch of my evil ovaries.
“He had his whole life ahead of him,” they’d say. I mean, they did say it. At our wedding. Imagine hearing that on your way down the aisle, people talking about a guy marrying you like he’d been struck down in his prime by cancer. I was four months along then, still barely showing in my yellow dress, which only made it worse when I lost it. I know there are still people in town who think I made it all up, that I was never pregnant at all.
But I was. I made it all the way to November. It was wet and cold, colder than usual, and my belly was big enough by then to throw me off balance. I stepped out our door that morning and saw my breath, but not the ice. I went down hard, and they told me afterward that this was the beginning, the moment the placenta broke free, the moment my baby started dying. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I stood back up, hurting but not bleeding, and thought everything was fine. It wasn’t until a week later that the nurse at the clinic went looking for a heartbeat and found only silence. They drugged me for the rest of it. I was grateful not to be awake for that part, and guilty for how grateful I felt.
And there it is. My sad story. There was more after that, of course, but it was just more of the same. Ten more years in Copper Falls. Ten years, which ended up being the rest of my life. And if you’re wondering why I stayed, then you don’t know what it’s like—to be eighteen, with a mortgage and a husband and aching breasts that won’t stop leaking for a baby who’s not there. You’ve never built a life to hold a family, only to end up caught inside a cage for two. It’s not what you imagined, but it’s what you know. It’s safe. You might as well live there. The truth is, Dwayne and I never even talked about splitting up, just like we never talked about the baby after he was gone. We were like two drowning people, alone in the middle of the ocean, clinging for dear life to the same shitty scrap of wood. Sure, you could always release your grip, let yourself sink all the way to the bottom. But if he’s not letting go, are you going to be the first?