fifty-three

“WHAT?” I almost fell on the floor. “Brenda’s baby? What are you talking about?”

“Snobby spilled the beans at the press conference this morning. Brenda was almost four months pregnant. She had made an appointment at an abortion clinic for later this week.” Amanda grabbed my remote off the coffee table and turned on the television.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My sister flipped from one channel to the next, looking for local news. At long last, I said, “And it’s Detweiler’s for sure? Chad Detweiler’s baby?”

Amanda shrugged. “Who knows? Snobby wanted to get a jump on the Illinois D.A. by announcing it. Got his licks in there. Good job of it, too. Now everyone knows that Brenda Detweiler wasn’t the loving, innocent woman her father makes her out to be. She was pregnant, using drugs, and planned to get an abortion. Your attorney did a great job of giving her corpse a black eye.”

Anya padded in, rubbing her hair dry with a towel. She squatted beside me, concern written large on her face, her T-shirt damp in spots where she hadn’t dried off properly. “You okay, Mom?”

“Yes, sweetie.” I took her face in both my hands and stared into those steady blue eyes. How I loved her! I had been so careful when I learned I was pregnant with her. Not a sip of wine. Not even an aspirin. No artificial sweeteners.

And Brenda had wanted to abort her child. That made me sad.

My daughter was, is, and will always be the most precious part of my life. As I let go of her face, my right hand dropped protectively to my belly. I pledged the same love to my unborn child.

What had gone wrong with Brenda Detweiler? How could she have done such a thing?

“You sure nothing’s wrong, Mom? You were shouting.” Anya frowned.

“Um, you tell her what’s up, Amanda. I can’t. I just can’t.” I went into my bathroom for a chance to collect myself. I pulled my phone from my pocket. The text-message light blinked over and over in rhythm. But I backed away from it as though it could bite me. I could just imagine why Detweiler was calling. He was trying to break the bad news to me before I heard it somewhere else.

I turned on the shower full blast to muffle the noise. Tears came hot and hard. I pounded my fist against the sink and growled in anger. The sorrow lodged in a primitive part of me, and I gave it full rein.

Why for once couldn’t I just be happily pregnant? What was it about my lot in life that the sky had to fall on my head when I should be radiant with joy?

There were no answers, and I didn’t expect any.

After a while, I washed my face and dried my eyes. No, I wasn’t cried out. Sometime soon, I planned to cry me a river, but not just now. Instead, I determined that come heck or high water, I would enjoy this day. I had a lot to be thankful for. My sister and I were on good terms. My daughter was happy and healthy. Sheila was coming home. My mother was out of my hair. I had a job. I was healthy. What more could I want in life?

Don’t answer that!

I resolved to think of my problems as if they were two gigantic icebergs. I named them Murder and Mayhem, referencing Brenda’s killing and Nathan’s death. Armed with an ice pick of resolve, or stubbornness, depending on how you looked at it, I would chip, chip, chip away at the glacier. I would go about my life, ignoring the blocks of ice, except for those occasional opportunities to pick up my chisel and whack away.

“I can live with that,” I told the woman in the mirror. “I can stay focused. I can do a little each day toward it. But those problems belong to other people. They can’t consume me.”

There wasn’t a single thing I could do about Brenda Detweiler’s pregnancy. I had to say a prayer for her and her baby and let it go.

As sick as I felt thinking of them together, the logical side of my brain found it difficult to fault Detweiler for having gone to bed with his wife. Sure the knowledge that Brenda was pregnant left my ego hurting as though I’d been the recipient of a smart slap. But like it or not, Detweiler and Brenda had still been married at the time that this must have happened. In fact, they were still legally husband and wife when she died. And as we all knew, marriage brought with it certain privileges, rights, and habits. Habits hard to break.

It was my dumb luck that he’d cashed in all his I.O.U.s only a month before he and I spent an evening alone together.

A new thought: Maybe it wasn’t Chad Detweiler’s baby.

A man so protective, so concerned about his child’s welfare was unlikely to have unprotected sex with a woman on drugs. More than most, Detweiler knew the problems of infants born to addicts.

Grabbing my tube of concealer, I covered the dark circles under my eyes. No matter what Brenda had done, she’d paid the ultimate price. Worse yet, a baby had died with her. Had her pregnancy further fueled her rage at me?

Was it possible that she’d been killed precisely because she was pregnant? Maybe her death had nothing to do with her using drugs. Or her wild behavior. Maybe someone out there didn’t want his name associated with Brenda Detweiler. Didn’t want his relationship with her to be exposed to public scrutiny. Once she’d taken shots at Johnny and me, she’d become big news. Until then, she was just another junkie, another example of a wasted life.

As I brushed my teeth, I narrowed down the questions that needed answering:

Who was Brenda’s baby’s father?

Did the mystery man know she was pregnant?

Did he care?

There was only one person who might be able to provide answers: Detweiler’s sister Patty.