Sophomores
As Jif and I made our way up the Blue Ridge Mountains, we learned every word to Fun and Games, the new Connells CD. It took our minds off our equally awkward family good-byes: I had learned on a trip downstairs for a late-night glass of water that Daddy was sleeping on the sofa, and Jif overheard her own mother in the bathroom after the farewell steak dinner refusing to come out until her husband agreed to schedule her for a tummy tuck before the deb ball.
“Marny,” Dr. Ferguson had called to her harshly, “if you don’t stop this foolishness, I’m going to call a shrink.”
Marny Ferguson wanted Jif to have a car so that she could continue her beauty maintenance at a Roanoke salon, so she allowed her to take the candy-blue Mercedes to school.
“Nice wheels,” I said when Jif rolled into my driveway earlier that morning. I had thought Jif was going to be driving the old Ford station wagon she drove in high school.
“It sort of comes with strings,” Jif said as she helped me load my luggage into what little room was left in the trunk. (Jif was such a clotheshorse, but at least she wasn’t stingy, and there were several tags hanging from suede jackets and cashmere sweaters that I looked forward to borrowing.)
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re going to have to be in pageant condition when you go home for Thanksgiving.”
“Something like that.”
“Your mama is so misguided,” I said, strapping myself into the passenger seat, “and I’m not going to let you puke your guts up all semester over this.”
Motioning to the fancy dashboard with all of its knobs and gadgets, I looked at Jif head-on until she acknowledged my stare. “We’re talking about your body, here, Jennifer Ferguson. Your health and well-being. You’re certifiable if you’re willing to jeopardize that for a second!”
“Yep,” Jif said, nodding her head in a kind of resigned disgust at her mother’s twisted priorities.
“Getting sick to lose weight is playing with fire,” I said, waving away the Slim-Fast bar she offered on our way out of Williamstown. “You know that.”
Before we veered onto the highway, I turned to face the old mill houses. Thankfully, there was no haunting face staring back at me. In fact, there were hints of life: a red geranium hanging on a front porch, a tricycle at the side door, and even a patch of grass here and there that softened the view of the shotgun homes, propped crudely on cinder blocks. What had changed—the village or my point of view?
Word around town was that Averill Skaggs had just married Charlene Roe, and I wondered if they were building their home here as their parents had. I half hoped to see them as I looked, but I didn’t.
When we reached the picturesque NBU campus, Frankie was waiting for us on the piazza. He was leaning against a column smoking a cigarette, which was nearly a prerequisite for the campus newspaper staff that he had been invited to join. He hugged me hard after our car pulled onto the quadrangle lawn, then took my largest bag and said, “Let’s get a cup of joe after y’all unload.”
When we reached the top of the grand staircase to our sophomore dorm, we were thrilled to be reunited with Ruthie, who had shared a summer similar to ours as a deb in Gastonia and Charlotte.
We’d moved up to West, an eighteenth-century dorm that faced the quad with an awe-inspiring view of the Blue Ridge and glorious afternoon sunlight. Things would have to be better this year, I proclaimed as we sipped our cappuccinos on the second-floor piazza and watched as wide-eyed freshmen walked fretfully back and forth between the building pillars, looking for their orientation classes as the upperclass frat boys sat on rocking chairs, scoping out the fresh meat.
In my caffeine rush, I leaned over the banister and shouted:
Freshman meat
do beware
poachers seek
to devour
you rare!
Frankie bounded up and grasped the pillar beside me as a few folks stopped and took notice.
“It’s the truth!” he said, shouting down on the emerald lawn.
“Those Greeks’ll eat you for lunch. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
Some upperclassman called back “Freak show!” to us, and some of the frat boys rolled their eyes, but a few of the KNs who knew Frankie from last year nodded to one another and discreetly made their way off the quad.
Daddy had told me plainly that if I didn’t raise my grades by the end of the semester, my scholarship would be withdrawn and I would have to transfer to USC. There would be no asking Papa Great for the extra money, no matter how hard Juliabelle and Mae Mae striked.
I had done well my freshman year before I botched my exams last spring, and I knew that I could make the grades with the exception of the mid-level calculus class that my liberal arts scholarship required. Tapping into that side of my brain was seriously tough for me, but I vowed to focus on the strange little Greek and geometrical shapes in those orderly algebraic patterns until my eyes throbbed with exhaustion. I had come too far to give up what I hoped were still positive opportunities for me here. For better or worse, NBU was my yellow brick road.
The semester got off to a good start. I kept myself away from the gravelly road that led to the graveyard. I didn’t want to reopen that wound, because I had to stay sane in order to remain focused. Bury it, I told myself. Put it six feet under just like the Founding Father himself, Nathaniel Buxton, whose corpse was enclosed in that hill. Not to mention his favorite horse as well as his wife and children.
From time to time I thought I saw the silhouette of Devon Hunt out of the corner of my eye, and one night when walking by the provost’s house on the way to class, I relished a fantasy that involved climbing the latticework to his bedroom window, cocking Juliabelle’s shotgun, and pointing it toward his private parts while he slept.
Thankfully, my workload didn’t seem to be as difficult as expected, and most evenings I had energy and time to spare, so I began reading the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that Dale Pelzer had given me.
As soon as I read the first chapter, I was riveted. Lewis’s words were a wrecking ball, smashing through the walls in my mind. It was like a beautiful secret—this window into a brilliant and reluctant convert’s head, and I came to savor those moments when I could curl up in a rocking chair on the quad or in one of the plush library sofas that overlooked the mountain stream and ingest his argument for the faith.
I bought a brown leather journal for such occasions and became determined to pin down what he was saying, to wrap my brain around the message. How I loved having to read the page over again before comprehending it. And when it finally set in, I would copy the idea down and then respond:
There is a Law of Human Nature that is pressing in on us, but none of us are keeping it. We have failed to practice for ourselves the kind of behavior that we expect of other people. (p. 6)
First, [the human race] is haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second [they are haunted by the fact] that they did not do so. (p. 13)
Mr. Lewis,
Do you mean to tell me that there is a universal moral code? And that a blueprint exists somewhere in the back of each of our minds?
I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way. (p. 21)
I’m not an atheist. I mean, I don’t think it’s all a mistake. I’m just not ready to commit. Also, I don’t think I’m all that bad, either. I try hard to be good, and usually I think that I am. Is that really obnoxious of me?
When I got the nerve to ask Lewis the question that had been eating at me since the rape—that is, why does a supposedly good God allow suffering?—here is how he responded:
You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will . . . A great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. (p. 33)
And then:
This is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. (p. 37)
Why did it go wrong?
Christianity agrees with dualism that this universe is in a war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. (p. 40)
So we’re on the foe’s turf. That could explain a lot. I have to admit I’m rather snobby about this whole Christianity thing. My take has been that it is backwoods, cryptic, and superstitious. Not to mention, a social embarrassment. Am I wrong?
About Christ who claimed to be God, I copied down Lewis’s words:
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. (p. 45)
Or you can just step away for a little while. Get busy with other things. Take your toe out of the water because you aren’t ready for full immersion.
Sorry, you dear and charming Englishman, but I’m not going to lay down my arms just yet.
I came to love my one-way conversations with Mr. Lewis. He was fascinating and convincing, but like an ill child who refuses his medicine, I remained stiff-necked.
Then the thought crossed my mind that there might be other respected writers who shared Lewis’s view. In my creative nonfiction class, we had begun reading the Pulitzer prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which a writer with a microscope on the natural world discovers wonder and God-created miracles at every turn. Upon further research on these lively nights in the library, I discovered that there were other notable writers who aligned themselves with Mr. Lewis’s beliefs: Leo Tolstoy, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Harriet’s beloved Flannery O’Connor.
“Can you say obsessed?” Frankie whispered in my ear one Thursday night while I was intently writing in my journal. (We’d look for each other in the library around midnight to take a walk.)
“Let’s take off. I need a smoke.”
He was on a high this particular night. The paper had been put to bed hours earlier, and he needed to blow off some steam.
Regardless of what Harry had said to Sally earlier in the year in their famous movie, Frankie was my friend, and so far the sex thing hadn’t gotten in the way. He knew about Randy, who was now mailing me a poem at least once a week despite his hectic travel schedule with the football team. In the verses Randy likened me to the moonlight or a magnolia bloom or a fiery fall leaf. (Randy. Humph. I think there’s room for just one poet in a relationship, don’t you?)
But even though Frankie and I shared a lot, I never could bring myself to tell him what happened to me on my date last spring, and he didn’t invite me to where he went on weekend nights with the newspaper staff, who were an oddball combination of activists, hotheads, and Harmony Society members. Frankie was a social misfit.
He wasn’t in a frat, and he wasn’t an athlete, so he’d become more and more linked with the fringe groups that bound together for survival.
“So, you finding religion?” he asked as he lit up his cigarette, grabbed my elbow, and began walking around the quad.
“Just exploring.”
“More power to you,” he said. Then he read me the three articles he’d written in the paper: one about campus recycling, one about a student who spent his summer working in a shelter for battered women in Philadelphia, and one about Iraq’s military buildup in Kuwait.
He walked me back to the sofas in the library and lay down on the adjoining one to sleep. “Wake me up when you’re ready to go.”
Frankie. Hmm. Was he an active member of Harmony or just a really nice guy? The jury was still out.
Ah. Back to Lewis. When I opened the book, I could not help but feel that yearning I had felt that night in my room when I dusted off my childhood Bible for the first time and made out the mysterious messages in the book of John.
On weekend nights, while others were blowing it out on frat row, I found myself at the apologetics section in the library, where I would rub my fingers over the books that would come next: The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, Surprised by Joy. Part of me wanted to devour them whole, make them settle in my innermost parts, and another part of me wanted to sample them and spit them right back out again as if they were one tray on a never-ending spiritual buffet.
I stared for whole minutes at Lewis’s photograph on the first page of Mere Christianity—the warm eyes surrounded by fleshy circles of late-night thought and the itchy tweed jacket that surely smelled of pipe and English mist.
I am smitten
with a deceased
Englishman
whose words
are more
than manna.
It was not unlike me to become enamored with dead writers. Once I wrote a love letter to William Faulkner in which I confessed that if he invited me to the Yoknapatawpha County in his mind, I would make a life refilling the ink and stroking the top of his wide forehead as he foretold our region’s doom. And when I chose to save a cockroach that scurried across my Governor’s School classroom, I wrote a poem to Kafka in which I kissed the roach and became transported to early twentieth-century Prague and into the arms of a dark, delicate Jewish man.
But this new literary flame was pointing me and the rest of the sad world to a Source that was alive. A Source he claimed was at work even in the loss of his mother at a young age or the horrors of a world war in which he had served, and I couldn’t help but hope that this Force was seeking me out against all odds as it had him.
Those evenings when Frankie and I would push through the library doors and out into the crisp darkness of the Virginia nights, I looked up at the very same star-studded sky I had watched with Devon Hunt on the worst evening of my life, and I wondered if my true suitor was this Force in the universe that was pressing in on me, and more specifically (as Mr. Lewis was persuading me), this Jewish carpenter who was either a madman or a Savior who laid down His life nearly two thousand years ago.
Yes, I might be destined to fall for a dead writer. (It was safer that way.) But this one, this Jewish carpenter, claimed to be alive somewhere out there in the night sky. Not just alive, but resurrected and sitting at the right hand of God.
Ruthie continued to steal away most weekends to Chapel Hill to see Tag Eisley. Exhausted from either her arrival or her preparation to depart again, she would draw all of the blinds and turn off the lights so that she could sleep most hours of the day and night. Between classes, she would sleep, before dinner she would sleep, and when she finally seemed to rouse herself from her cavelike condition around midnight, she’d order a pizza or Chinese takeout, which she scarfed down like there was no tomorrow while I held my nose and memorized my exponent rules or conducted my convergence tests.
Calculus,
thou art
loathsome.
“I can’t come in your room past midnight anymore,” Jif said to me as we walked toward the science building one blustery November morning. “It’s too tempting, what with Ruthie ordering all of that fast food late at night. Does she know how bad it is to go to sleep having just ingested that many calories?”
Jif lifted her hand up like a claw and grabbed her own backside. “It’s like asking a clump of lard to attach itself to your derriere.”
“I don’t know what’s with her,” I said. “It’s the sleeping that gets me. She makes me feel weird if I turn on the light after supper to study. She groans and puts the pillow over her head, and it’s not even time for Wheel of Fortune.”
“Does she ever crack a book these days?”
“Hardly,” I said. “Maybe she’s depressed. I mean, she gets sort of weepy sometimes when Tag calls. Think they’re on the brink of a breakup or something?”
“Fat and lazy is how I would diagnose her condition,” Jif said. (She had no sympathy for unexplained weight gain.) “See if you can get to the bottom of it, Adelaide, before she’s too slothlike to curtsy at her deb ball.”
As if Ruthie sensed our growing concern, she seemed to take great pains to avoid Jif and me during the remainder of the semester. She was asleep before I came back from the library most evenings, and she drove her car places late at night to get her fast-food fix. I dreamed about derivatives and logarithms as the stench of vinegar fries or chili dogs wafted across my sheets. And whenever the opportunity to talk presented itself, Ruthie packed her bags and headed down the mountains to Chapel Hill again.
Just before finals in early December, Ruthie seemed to fall into a real depression. It happened the day we all received our fine linen invitation to the State of North Carolina Debutante Ball, where Ruthie and six other young ladies from well-bred families across the state would make their debut at the beautiful Mountain View City Club in Charlotte. Her incessant munchies ceased after that day, and she didn’t take calls in our room from Tag Eisley. Instead, she’d sneak down to the end of the hall and enclose herself in the phone booth, where they’d whisper well after I fell asleep.
One morning on our way to Intermediate French, I described to Ruthie the emerald dress I’d bought for her deb ball.
“Jif ’s going too,” I said. “You know we wouldn’t miss it.”
Suddenly, Ruthie stopped in midstride along the path to the language building, sat down on a bench, and said plainly to me, “I’m pregnant.”
Then her eyes brimmed with giant tears and her face went as red and contorted as a rotten tomato.
Not again, I thought to myself as I pictured Georgianne unwrapping those Pyrex dishes after the summer of our high school graduation.
Taking my place on the bench next to Ruthie, I rubbed the back of her head as she hovered over a little pool of tears that was forming on the sidewalk.
But then, and quite by surprise, I almost grinned when I pictured Baby Peach and his sticky little hands grabbing everything in sight: the remote control, a picture frame, the crystal candy bowl. As I was making the mental leap, with a kind of ease, to my roommate’s wedding, Ruthie blurted out, “Tag wants me to abort.”
The bell tower on the front quad rang out, declaring that we would certainly miss Intermediate French for the day. As grieved as I was about the premature turn my roommate’s life would surely take toward domesticity, the notion of abortion shocked me even more. It made my stomach turn.
I had not considered abortion as an actual option for a pregnant woman in my circle of friends. Just the word sent shivers of dread up my spine.
“What do you want, Ruthie?”
“I want to keep Tag,” she said as she crunched an orange maple leaf under her tennis shoe. “And I want for this never to have happened. I want things to continue the way I had planned—make my debut, graduate, marry Tag, maybe go to graduate school, then start a family.”
I could tell that Ruthie was utterly tormented by her condition. She loathed what was taking place inside her, and she could hardly stand to be in her own skin.
After an official test at the college health center, Nurse Eugenia made the call to the Roanoke clinic and set the appointment for the second week of December. Exam week.
For seven days and nights, Ruthie begged me and Jif to go with her to the clinic. Jif had an easy out. Her chemistry final was the very hour of the appointment, and she couldn’t be two places at once.
So I reluctantly agreed to go. Not only did I have no desire to partake in this course of action, but my calculus exam, the one that would decide the fate of my scholarship and my very future, was scheduled for that evening at six. The appointment was at two, and we would have to rush back in order for me to grab a bite at the snack bar and make it to my final.
My heart ached for Ruthie, who grew more and more paralyzed as the appointment approached. Her study room was littered with used tissues, and she had already made a D on her first exam.
“I can’t make it through this without someone there, Adelaide,” she had pleaded with me two nights before the appointment.
By default I was that someone, since Tag was preparing to take his MCATs and Jif was due at an exam.
The date of Ruthie’s debutante ball was approaching fast, and her breasts were swelling with life. I endured the hushed calls to Tag in the middle of the night that always ended in groans of despair. Twice I told Ruthie that she didn’t have to go through with it, that there were surely other options for her, such as adoption, but that seemed to make things worse, and she told me not to say that word again.
“Make me do it,” she had whispered to me in our beds the night before our trip to the Roanoke clinic. “Be a friend, and make me go through with it, Adelaide, okay?”
A voice let out a late-night study howl somewhere down the hall.
The whole campus was wired with caffeine and candy.
“All right,” I whispered, half exhausted from the whole ordeal and trying to keep my faculties collected But I was sad when those two small words left my mouth. Would I be the Gen-X depiction of Lady Macbeth tomorrow evening, unable to wash the spots off my hands? There seemed to be no way out of this trouble, and Ruthie was determined to cut off one of her own limbs in order to set herself free.
Still, I tried not to get too wrapped up in it all. I had to focus if I was going to make the B needed to keep my grade point average in good standing with the scholarship requirements. This was it. All my years of study had come down to this, and I didn’t want to give my future away, either. Sitting in that clinic tomorrow would surely be the same as Ruthie sitting in the bathroom when I took my two-hour shower after my date with Devon Hunt. None of it was good. But I supposed we had to be there for each other if we were to survive. Right?
Mr. Lewis, whom I hadn’t picked up in weeks, responded out of nowhere:
There is Something which is directing the universe and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. (p. 22)
His words surfaced momentarily as I tried to fall asleep. Now, how come I can never comprehend you when I want to, and then you pop up as familiar and easy as a country music song when I want to forget?
I exerted my will and stuffed his words into the trash bin of my mind. Tomorrow night everything would be better, wouldn’t it? We were in a race, in survival mode, and we had to press on.
When we arrived at the clinic, there were protesters holding graphic posters on the street beside the parking lot. Ruthie shielded her eyes with her hands and started to gag as the line reluctantly parted to let us drive in. I was sure that she wouldn’t be able to get sick. She had hardly consumed a morsel of food in the last several days and had taken only a few small sips of water just to keep her strength. How she hated the life that was thriving in her body.
Tag’s check hadn’t arrived in time, so I had to ask Mae Mae to wire me some money on the pretense that I needed a dress for the NBU Christmas ball. In fact, Whit, from my social justice class, had invited me, but I would wear my standby black dress from freshman year.
Mae Mae was glad to help, but I learned during our conversation that Papa Great and Daddy hadn’t spoken in a month. “He’s lost his marbles over this pyramid scam,” Mae Mae told me. “But even so, we’re still your grandparents, and you can call on us with or without him in our good graces.”
“Thanks, Mae Mae,” I said, though I really didn’t have time to dwell on the decaying condition of my family.
Focus, I told myself. Roanoke clinic, calculus exam, then deal with the fam. Survival mode.
Now, I was as frightened as Ruthie as we hurried out of our car and into the clinic, despite the piercing pleas of the protesters.
“No!” they called to us. “Don’t end another life!”
I knew that abortion was a hot political topic that sharply divided people, but it had never come across my small-town path, and I had never made my decision about it. Certainly, Ruthie’s body belonged to her, and she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But if I stopped for a moment to think about the other one—the little life growing quietly inside—I would make myself crazy.
As we sat for two hours in the solemn waiting room, listening to the muffled pleas from the street, there was a sadness in the very air that was palpable. The receptionist’s face was like a cake that had fallen in on itself, and when she looked up to acknowledge the next people who walked through the door, her heavy eyes stared past them to a clock on the other side of the wall that ticked down her workday.
No one in the waiting room spoke or looked one another in the eye. But with my peripheral vision, I made out the clientele. There was a sweet-looking preteen girl not much older than Lou who was sucking on a strand of hair, with a woman who must have been her young mother sitting beside her. What was her story? There was a middle-aged couple off to the corner who would not look up from their respective newsmagazines. And a young professional-looking lady dressed in a designer suit and sitting alone, preoccupied with her workload. She might have been a lawyer preparing for a case, I thought, as the woman scanned a variety of file folders before writing notes fast and furiously on a yellow legal pad.
When a scantily dressed woman walked in with a bulging belly, bile rose in my throat. How far along was this one? Six months, perhaps. There was no denying it. The receptionist gave the woman a slow nod of familiarity and directed her to a seat across from me and Ruthie.
What a messy world we live in, Mr. Lewis.
Every now and then I was assaulted by the image of Baby Peach tottering around the patio, but I pushed it aside. This was hard.
Much harder than I imagined it would be, but I had promised Ruthie I’d be here for her. My roommate was breaking down before my very eyes, and I earnestly believed that if she carried this life a moment longer, it would surely do her in.
Plus, there was the calculus exam. I still did not grasp the logarithm rules, and I had to get them straight before 6:00 p.m.
Another half hour passed before the thin door that led down the hallway opened and one of the New England beauties, Miranda Coates from NBU, scurried out as fast as her legs could carry her without looking at anything but the brown-and-purple pattern of the waiting-room carpet.
I watched Miranda as she bolted through the door, down the stairs, and across the line of protesters into an SUV where a handsome boy sporting a Sigma baseball cap was waiting for her, the car idling. He reached across the seat to unlock her door. Then he tossed out his cigarette through a crack in the window, and I watched it roll into the gutter after they drove off, its thin curl of smoke wafting up into the air.
Within minutes the nurse opened the door and called Ruthie’s name. Ruthie had been fidgeting, blowing her nose and scraping down her cuticles. She refused a sip of water or a bite of the granola bar I had brought along.
When the nurse called Ruthie’s name a second time, I nudged her, and she seized my elbow, pleading, “Go with me.”
“What?” I whispered. Surely Ruthie did not expect me to go beyond the waiting room with her. I couldn’t bear to be that close to the procedure. And I had to study. For heaven’s sake, I’d driven her here and crossed a line of protesters. She had to do the rest on her own.
Without warning, Ruthie dragged me up to the door that the nurse held open. As we stood on the threshold, with the blank screen of an ultrasound machine to our left, Ruthie began to shudder at the droning noise of a device that was being used on a patient two doors down the hall. We could make out a faint whimper and a quick shriek, and with this Ruthie turned back and buried her head in my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, you can’t bring a friend with you, hon,” the nurse said in a hushed tone. She patted Ruthie’s shoulder and added, “You’ll be fine.”
Ruthie looked up to me and did not move for whole seconds. We were face-to-face, a few inches apart, and she was searching my eyes.
I knew Ruthie was calling on me to address her second thoughts. To address the sound of that machine and the whimper of a woman on the other side of the procedure.
“Don’t put this decision in my hands,” my eyes said back to my friend. I was scared and angry, and I resented the fact that she was calling on me in this way. I glanced back to my seat. To the pile of calculus books.
The whole waiting room was staring at us now. We were a scene in an awful movie. The nurse was uncomfortable with the tension, and she tried to gently pull Ruthie farther down the hall.
“Sit down here and make yourself more comfortable,” the nurse said, pointing to a reclining chair beside the ultrasound machine.
Ruthie wouldn’t budge. Her eyes just kept pleading with mine.
Now I was furious. The young professional woman cleared her throat in frustration at this drama, and that was all I needed to distance myself from the situation. This isn’t fair, I thought. I had reluctantly agreed to go along in a supporting role. Did Ruthie want me to suddenly make the decision for her?
No, I thought, but I didn’t say it. This is between you and Tag, and I’m not going to decide for you.
How I wanted to escape into the maze of calculus problems at my chair—the center of a mass of inertia of a solid, the flow of water through a river, the rate of growth of bacteria in a culture. My college career was on the line, and I had only a few hours before the final. What more did Ruthie want from me?
“This way,” the nurse entreated.
As Ruthie looked back at the nurse, I saw my way out, and I turned my back toward them and moved quickly to the waiting-room chair.
I was already escaping in my mind. Reenacting the little trick Mama had taught me. This time I was following the shrill cry of little Lou’s voice down by the salt marsh behind our house. My baby sister had been playing there with a friend who had thrown a stick at a wasps’ nest, and they were both wailing at the multiple stings on their arms and legs.
Ruthie took a step down the hall and then stopped to look back once more before the nurse pulled the door closed. I sensed her silent plea, but I didn’t have anything left to give her, so I took my seat, picked up my textbook, and began to examine the logarithm rules. I didn’t look up until I heard the door close and the muffled sound of two pairs of feet moving down the hallway.
We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try. (p. 20)
As I stared at the dark grain of the closed door, I wondered, have I failed Ruthie and that little life inside her?
Now I was finding it difficult to even breathe. I placed my calculus book on my lap and tried to focus, but I could not get through the first question.
“‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.’” Shannon had recited those words from Deuteronomy to me last summer when I feared that the rest of my days were doomed by the anxiety that took control of me after the rape. As I thought on the words, I became aware of a resounding thump in my ears.
It was another hour before Ruthie emerged through the doorway. She was holding little round butter cookies, like the kind they served in Sunday school at St. Anne’s. She was drinking a Hi-C juice box and looked like a little girl, except for the two boxes of Anaprox and birth control pills that she carried in her other hand.
She wept all the way home, writhing in pain and stopping at a gas station to puke up the butter cookies. Then she fell asleep in the bed and slept through dinner and on through the night while I failed my exam.
“I did it,” Ruthie said to Tag when he called. I left the room to give them some privacy, but returned after hearing what sounded like Ruthie slamming the phone down on the floor.
Something awful had happened in that clinic in Roanoke. She was worse than she was before, according to Jif, who had caught her in the bathroom pricking her finger with a razor and pinching the incision until it bled. Her sociology professor and then the chair of the department called to find out why she wasn’t showing up for her exams, but she refused to return their calls.
And I was suffering too. I was confused and afraid to consider that I had messed up and harmed my friend when I should have had the gumption to reach out to her in the clinic and say, “If you’re unsure, don’t do it.” Or insisting, “There has to be another way through this.”
Was there a darkness inside me that I had never faced before? I hadn’t meant anyone any harm, so why did I feel so sick inside?
To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself? (p. 51) “Shannon,” I said aloud, my hands trembling across the open page of Lewis’s book.
When she answered my call, I could barely speak.
“Can we talk?” I said through my cracking voice. “I’m desperate.
Please meet me somewhere.”
She took a deep breath. She was probably in the middle of exams herself, but just as I was about to say, “Never mind,” she insisted, “I can meet you at the Appomattox truck stop off I-81. That’s about halfway for both of us.”
“When?”
“I can leave here in an hour,” she said.
“Me too.”
Jif promised she’d sit with Ruthie. She threw me the keys to the candy-blue Mercedes so that I could drive as fast as the German wheels would carry me down 81.