Stu shrank away from me. “Just . . . just one. No . . . maybe two,” she whimpered. “I forgot to take my meds this morning . . . I feel so bad . . .”
“I don’t believe you!” Panic bubbled up in my throat. Oh God, Oh God, what should I do? Call 911, that’s what. I lunged for the phone on her nightstand—but Stu’s free hand shot out, grasping my wrist with a surprising steel grip.
“Don’t, Jodi! Please!” She dropped the water glass in her other hand, grabbed the phone, and clutched it fiercely to her chest. “Don’t call an ambulance. I didn’t do it! I . . . I was thinking about it, but I didn’t! I didn’t!” The braided rug beside her bed had broken the fall of the glass, yet I felt water splash all over my shoes.
“I don’t believe you,” I hissed, twisting my wrist free. “I called up here—twice. I banged on the door. You didn’t answer! Something’s wrong. You need help.”Why was I even arguing with her? I turned and headed for the door. I’d call 911 on my own phone.
Stu came hot on my heels. “Jodi, please don’t! I’m okay! See?”
I kept moving, out the back door, down the outside stairs. She clattered right behind me. “Jodi! Jodi! Wait! I can explain!”
I charged through my kitchen door and tripped over Willie Wonka, lying in his usual spot. Stu collided with my back and we both went down, cushioned by Wonka’s soft, square body, like a football pileup. The dog grunted heavily and tried to wiggle out from under our tangle of legs and arms.
The ridiculous heap we made was all out of proportion to how upset I was. The feelings in my chest felt ready to explode—either in hysterical laughter or hysterical crying. But as I struggled to get up, Stu’s arms clung tightly around me. “Jodi, wait. Please wait. Don’t call any-body. I’ll tell you.”
I hesitated. Oh God, I don’t know what to do! Then it came to me.
Ipecac syrup. The little brown bottle that sat in our bathroom cupboard in case any little kids ever accidentally chewed on the philodendron or mistook the anti-histamine pills for candy. I scrambled to my feet, pulling her up with me. “Come with me,” I ordered, hauling her toward the bathroom. To my surprise, she didn’t resist. I put the toilet seat lid down. “Sit.” She sat.
I stood on the little wooden stepstool—another relic from the kids’ younger days—and got down the brown bottle. “Hold this,” I barked, feeling like an army sergeant with a new recruit. I dashed back to the kitchen for a tablespoon and a glass of water—thirty seconds, tops—and to my relief she was still holding the bottle, looking bewildered.
“Throw up,” I said. “That’s the deal.You throw up and I won’t call 911.”
I knew good and well I was supposed to call poison control or some medical person before giving ipecac, but Stu was no two-year-old and if she’d swallowed any-thing, it was medicine—not anything acid or toxic like cleaning supplies that would burn coming back up. I poured the dosage into the tablespoon; with the resignation of a cornered stowaway, she swallowed it. I pushed the glass of water at her. “All of it,” I ordered. She drank.
We didn’t talk. I just sat on the edge of the tub, and she sat on the stool, staring at the floor, waiting. Willie Wonka’s nails clicked on the wood floor of the hallway and hesitated outside the bathroom. A neighbor’s door slammed. The bathroom window rattled—boom! ba-da boom! boom!—as a car with a serious sound system invaded Lunt Street, then faded away.
Within fifteen minutes, it all came up. Afterward I wet a washcloth with warm water and washed her face, feeling a sudden tenderness for Stu I’d never felt before. I knelt awkwardly on the bathroom rug, put my arms around Leslie Stuart, and pulled her close. She leaned into my shoulder and began to cry. The sobs became a wail; her whole body shook within my embrace. But I just held on, murmuring comforting words, wondering. Had I done the right thing?
HALF AN HOUR LATER, I’d gotten Stu back up to her apartment, picked up all the pills that had flown around her room, and was making some peppermint tea to settle her stomach. Denny wasn’t due home till late afternoon, but the kids might’ve wandered in at any moment, and they’d definitely ask questions if they’d seen us entwined in the bathroom. I put two mugs of hot tea on the pert white table that served as a breakfast nook and sat down in one of the matching chairs across from Stu.
“All right. Tell me.” My words came out gentle; she gave me a brief smile.
“I thought . . . I could do it,” she said in a half-whisper. “I knew what his birth date was, but I prayed about it, I really did, and I knew Yada Yada was praying for my visit.” She suddenly squinted at me. “You did send that e-mail for me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I sent it! Whose birth date? Andy’s?”
She nodded. “When I got his case reassigned . . . there it was. That date. And I wasn’t sure I could do it. Becky was counting on me, though, and . . . I knew all the Yadas were wondering why I hadn’t been to see him. So I asked God to help me, but—”
“Stu.What in the heck are you talking about? What about Andy’s birth date?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and I pushed a wicker holder of paper napkins toward her. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. “His birthday,” she whispered. “The same day . . . the same day . . .” Her shoulders began to shake.With a dose of wisdom from on high, I said nothing, just reached out and touched her arm.
She finally took a long, shuddering breath. “His birthday is . . . the same day my baby was due.Would be the same age. But . . . but my baby died. I mean . . .” Her voice fell to a mere whisper. “I killed my baby.”
It wasn’t wisdom that kept me from saying anything this time. Killed her baby?! I was so shocked, I could hardly breathe, much less talk.
Now that Stu had said the words, it was as if she’d pulled her finger out of the dike. “An abortion. I had an abortion. Maybe it was a little boy—I don’t know. A little boy like Andy. I didn’t want to, but what could I do? The jerk left me, dumped me like a rotting carcass when I told him I was pregnant—”
A loud knock at Stu’s back door made us both jump. “I’ll get it,” I told Stu, hastily rising from my chair and spilling my tea in the process. Stu waved me away and mopped up the spilled liquid with a wad of napkins. I could see Josh’s shaved head framed in the glass window of Stu’s kitchen door.
“Mom!” he said when I slipped out onto the second story porch. “Stu’s car is blocking the garage door! I can’t get the minivan out, and I want—”
I held up my hand to stop him, stepped back inside and scooped up Stu’s car keys, still lying on the floor, and went back outside. Josh’s quizzical expression made him look like an overgrown, comic-strip Swee’Pea. “Here. Move Stu’s car into the garage. Leave the keys downstairs on the counter. Yeah, yeah, take the Caravan.”
He shrugged. “Okay.” As my lanky teenager headed down the outside stairs, it occurred to me that I hadn’t done my errands yet. Or asked Josh where he was going. It also occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Not now.
IF I WASN’T GOING to call 911, I sure didn’t want to leave Stu alone for even a minute. I didn’t trust her. Wasn’t even sure I understood what was really going on. I knew I needed help; I couldn’t be her shadow every second.With another person we could spell each other, get some sleep, whatever. I thought about asking Stu whom I should call, then decided just to tell her I was calling Avis. She opened her mouth to protest, but I was getting good with the steely eyed “This is the way it is, buster,” and she deflated.
All I got was Avis’s voice mail. Humph. Where could she be? Now that she’d given Peter Douglass the boot, seemed to me Avis ought to be home staring at her four walls, realizing she’d made a big mistake.
Who else could I call? Chanda lived closest—ha, not likely. Not the way Stu had skewered her a few weeks ago. There’d be no sympathy there. Adele? It was Saturday. Adele’s Hair and Nails was surely full of weaves, pedicures, and braided extensions.
I dialed Flo’s number, told her Stu was having a melt-down, and asked if she could help me sit it out. Florida didn’t even ask what it was about. Just said, “Be there in an hour. But Carl and the boys ain’t here. I’ll have to bring Carla.”
My heart sank. “Carla? I don’t think—”
“Carla?” Stu, who’d been slumped on one elbow at the small kitchen table, sat up. “Sure, let Carla come. I’d like that.”
I covered the receiver. “Stu, I don’t think that’s a good . . .”
But she was smiling. I let it drop. If Stu was comfortable with Florida and Carla being here, so be it. Maybe it was a cover, so she wouldn’t have to talk about her feelings or what had just happened. Almost happened. Or maybe it’d be a good thing. It wasn’t as if I really knew what I was doing here. Just knew, for the first time since I’d met Leslie Stuart, that God had crossed our paths, and I needed to walk with her right now.
Turned out, Carla was a good thing. An air of normalcy returned to the second-floor apartment. Carla’s short, beaded braids bounced from room to room, then she settled down to play with a set of Russian dolls from Stu’s bookcase—ten wooden babushkas of graduated sizes hidden inside one another.While Florida hunted in the refrigerator for something to cook for supper, I took advantage of the distraction to go downstairs, where I dis-covered Amanda and José eating pita pizzas and watch-ing Spiderman in the living room.
“Ahem!”
Amanda sparred first. “Where were you, Mom? I would’ve asked if José could stay to watch a video but nobody was home, and the door wasn’t even locked!”
I let it go, even though we had a no-boyfriend-if-an-adult-isn’t-home rule. When Denny got home, I gave him a brief rundown of what had gone on upstairs, told him not to ask any questions because I didn’t know any answers, and handed him the grocery list. “Would you mind?”
He recovered from the blitz. “Sure. Except the car’s not here.Where’s Josh?”
Huh. Like I know. Probably down at Jesus People. He’d been hanging out there nearly every weekend. Undaunted, I spied Stu’s key ring he’d returned to the kitchen counter. “Here. Take Stu’s car. Take Amanda and José. Buy out the store.”
“Cool,” Denny said—which struck me so funny, I started to laugh. The pent-up emotions of that day suddenly erupted like a Texas oil well, and I leaned against Denny’s shirt to stifle my torrent of wet giggles, pointing silently upward at the ceiling, not wanting Stu to hear my hysterical laughter. Denny circled me with his arms till I’d calmed down and wiped my eyes on his T-shirt, leaving black mascara smudges. “You did good, Jodi,” he murmured into my hair. “Go back upstairs. I can handle the Alamo down here all by myself.”
FLORIDA HAD PUT TOGETHER a taco salad from Stu’s pantry and refrigerator, and Carla kept us entertained with her new repertoire of vampire jokes. Carla: “What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?” Three ignorant adults: “We dunno.” Carla: “Frostbite!” Laughter punctured the tension, and supper almost felt like a party.
Later, while Florida and I cleaned up the kitchen, we could hear Stu reading Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends to Carla in the front room with much giggling at the silly poems. “Maybe I overreacted,” I murmured, loading the dishwasher while Florida tackled the dirty pots in the sink. “Stu seems okay.”
“Nah.What you told me ’bout how she was actin’ this morning? She shouldn’t be alone. We’re okay, Carla and me. Don’t have church clothes with us for tomorrow, but I did grab some clean underwear.” She smirked.
Stu appeared in the kitchen doorway just as we gave the counters a last swipe. “Carla’s asleep. I put her in the spare bedroom. Hope that’s okay.”
“Good,” Florida said. “Now we’re goin’ to talk.” She steered Stu toward the living room. To my surprise, Stu didn’t resist but curled up in one of her wicker basket-chairs while Florida and I took the futon. The fading daylight outside the front windows filled the corners of the room with shadows, leaving the three of us in a small pool of lamplight.
“You carried this too long by yourself, girl,” Florida prodded. “Get it off your chest.We’re listening. An’ God already knows about it; no surprise to Him.”
The hours of just hanging out, giggling at dumb jokes over taco salad, and putting Carla to bed seemed to give Stu the needed strength to bring the dreaded memories into the light. It was a common story, yet strangely peculiar coming out of Stu’s mouth. All my stereotypes of “Ms. Perfect” crumbled as she spoke, and in their place was a wounded, vulnerable woman, opening her soul and letting it bleed.
She’d been dating the guy for several months, some-one she met through a friend. Said she didn’t know for sure what had happened that night—they’d gone to a singles’ nightclub, had some drinks, woke up the next morning in her apartment—until she skipped a couple of periods and the home pregnancy kit tested positive. When she told the boyfriend she was pregnant, “He just disappeared,” Stu said, her forlorn features betraying the sense of abandonment. “I couldn’t prove I’d been date raped, couldn’t face telling my family, couldn’t bear raising a child alone. I’d seen too many single moms trapped, struggling, ending up on welfare. And I . . . I was embarrassed. I was thirty-two, for heaven’s sake! I’ve got a master’s degree! How could I let this happen to me? I’m smart, I’m educated, I’m supposed to be helping people who make dumb mistakes!” Stu’s eyes glittered for a brief moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “So I . . . I told myself I had no choice. But I cried for days. Everyone wondered what was wrong. To cope, I . . . I shut every-body who knew me out of my life. Distanced myself from my family, stopped going to St. John’s, quit my DCFS job, took a real-estate course, moved, started a new life. Put it out of my mind. Proved to myself I could survive one mistake and start over. But . . .”
She picked at a loose thread, lost in her thoughts. Florida and I exchanged glances but said nothing. Stu looked up. “Then I heard about the Chicago Women’s Conference last May. I was so hungry for something—I didn’t even know what.” A wry smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “Ended up in this crazy group of women. The Yada Yada Prayer Group! Don’t know why I stayed. You were all so . . . so . . .”
“Weird,” Florida finished. “Uh-huh. Thought the same about you.” I stifled a giggle, but Florida plunged right on. “It was God who called us into this here prayer group and gave us that name, Yada Yada, even when we didn’t know it had all sorts of God-fearin’ meanings. Called each one of us by name too—Jodi, here, been helpin’ us with that. Called you, Stu. Called you by name and said, ‘I’m puttin’ that Leslie Stuart in Yada Yada, ’cause they need her. An’ she needs them.’ ”
Florida’s hopeful words raised goose bumps on my arms, but Stu began shaking her head, and the tears welled up again. “No . . . no . . . I ruined it! Ruined my name. ‘Caretaker,’ Jodi said . . . but I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .” Stu rolled herself up into a ball and gulped air between sobs. “I didn’t take care of my baby!”
Florida shot off the futon and pulled Stu’s flaxen head against her small chest. “Jesus! Jesus! ” Her own brown face was wet with tears. “Now we know Your blood done already covered this terrible pain in Stu’s life. You came to take the sin and the pain and cover it with Your own. An’ Jesus, we know You’ve got that baby in Your hand right now. You’ve called that baby by name too. He . . .”
Florida stopped. “Stu. Did you name that baby?”
Stu shook her head between Florida’s strong hands. “No. I . . . told myself it was just a blob of tissue—you know, so I could go through with it.”
“Stu, now you listen to me, girl. Somewhere in the Bible it says God knows us even before we was born, still inside our mama’s womb. An’ somewhere else God says, ‘I called you by name, you are Mine!’ Hear that? Your baby belongs to God, and nothin’ you did changes that. ” Florida held Stu at arm’s length, eye to eye. “So we goin’ to name this baby, an’ give him back to God, where he’s already safe and waitin’ for you when you get to heaven. What name you want?”
Stu shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know.” She looked at me, pleading. “Jodi, you’re good at this naming business. You pick a name. For a boy. I just know in my heart it was a boy.” The tears kept running—her nose too—and I handed her another wad of tissues. But a light had come into her eyes.
My mind scrambled.What did I remember about the meaning of boys’ names? Biblical names. Isaac? No, that meant “laughter.” Not so good. Jacob? Matthew? David?
Yes.
I knelt down beside Stu and took her hands, which were busy wadding the damp pile of tissues. They stilled under my touch. The moment felt sacred, and I could hardly find my voice. But I whispered, “His name is David. It means . . . ‘Beloved.’ ”