Beauty from Ashes

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16

It’s like kicking off your sneakers and unsnapping your bra after an eight-hour shift at the old-people’s home. That’s how I feel when Patricia takes her once-a-week nap. She’s not religious or anything. I’m sure that woman would find fault with Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus if she got the chance. But every Sunday, she sets her timer and takes an hour-long nap. Not fifty-nine minutes. Not sixty-one.

It’s the most relaxing hour of my entire week.

Natalie’s had her formula and is quiet for the most part. She’s got her apnea monitor on, and I don’t expect her to need anything for another thirty minutes or so. That’s usually when she has to be suctioned out after a tube feed. The doctors think she has some reflux, which is bad for her long-term lung health, but there’s not much they can do about it right now. We have her in her car-seat insert by our bed so Jake’s mom can nap quietly in her room. It’s funny how fast we stopped calling it the nursery as soon as Patricia moved in.

Jake and I are snuggling under the blankets. He’s the big spoon, even though I’m two inches taller and about twenty pounds heavier. At least I am right now, but that will change eventually. There’s no rush. If I can wear my swimsuit by Fourth of July, I’ll be content. Maybe I’d be a little more freaked out about things if Natalie hadn’t gone through what she did, but when you’ve seen your kid at all the possible variations of blue-gray on the spectrum, that extra baby fat doesn’t seem like the death sentence you once thought it would be.

Jake’s quiet, and I’m quiet, and it sort of reminds me of the night before Natalie’s G-tube surgery. It had been a pretty hectic day. When I told Sandy about the procedure, she dropped everything and flew from Boston to Seattle. I don’t even want to guess what she paid for a last-minute ticket like that. I don’t know how she managed it on her husband’s pastor’s salary, but she came by that afternoon and rented a car. I hadn’t said anything to her about it, but she must have known that after three weeks staying at the Ronald McDonald house with no way to get around I could use a shopping spree. I don’t even remember what I got that day. Pads and underwear, I’m sure, and some cereal and things we could keep in our room for easy snacks. But I wasn’t used to that kind of running around, plus I was worried about Natalie’s surgery in the morning. Sandy was staying with a couple she and her husband met all the way back in their seminary days, so Jake and I had the evening to ourselves. I was so tired I don’t think I even made shift change that night.

“You worried?” he asked me, and his breath was hot on my shoulder while we spooned.

“A little.” I hated the thought of Natalie having that procedure. Hated the thought of her getting knocked out by some anesthesiologist. I already regretted signing those papers. Maybe it wasn’t just the surgery itself, either. Maybe it was because putting in the G-tube was a permanent solution, and I was still stupidly hoping for a quick and easy cure. A drowning sailor will hold onto anything he can get his hands on, right?

“I worry about her, too.” It sounds like the regular sort of stuff two people would say when their child’s about to have a major operation, but it really struck me that night because Jake didn’t talk much those days. I mean, he doesn’t talk much now, but it was worse back then, which is why I sometimes tried to drag him into an argument. I figured if I gave him a good fight to get all that extra stress out, he’d be a lot happier in the long run. Maybe his brain’s just wired differently because it never worked.

But that’s why the conversation we had that night stands out to me. He opened up a little. Shared some of his fears. Not about Natalie dying. Neither of us were ready to talk about heavy stuff like that yet. But about what had happened. And how guilty he felt.

“Do you ever think this is God’s way of punishing you?” he asked me while we cuddled.

I was pretty surprised. Jake had never mentioned God before. His mom raised him without any religion, boasting that when he got older he’d have the freedom to choose any path of faith he wanted, but of course it just meant he didn’t choose any path. As far as I knew until that night, he didn’t even believe in God at all.

“I don’t think it works that way,” I lied. I didn’t want to tell him about my own guilt and shame. About the David and Bathsheba reference I’d read from Elder Tom. About those chastity pledges I took back in high school, years after I’d lost my virginity. That’s the problem with those things. Your youth leaders tell you not to sleep around until you get married, make it out like that’s the most sure-fire way to book your one-way ticket to hell, but they don’t tell you how to do it. How to handle the boyfriend who keeps reminding you that if you don’t put out he’ll find someone who will. Seriously, I mean these people are so pro-life and all — and so am I — but if I’d gotten pregnant in high school, I probably would have had an abortion in secret just to keep proving to everyone at that church I was still on God’s side. How backwards is that?

I guess you don’t have to grow up in a real churchy foster home to pick up on that whole guilt thing. Jake was feeling it too, maybe even more than I was. “Sometimes I think God’s mad at me.” And he buried his head between my shoulder blades and I swear he started to cry. It was quiet so I couldn’t hear him, and I acted like I didn’t notice at first, but there were definitely tears. After a few minutes, it was stupid for me to keep pretending when both of us knew what was going on, so I rolled over and tried to cheer him up.

“Come on,” I said. “You’re like the most solid guy I know. You couldn’t do anything to make God mad. You’re too good a person for that.”

He buried his face in his hands then, and that’s when I started to get that worry pit growing deep in my gut. And I knew what he was going to say before he said it because it sort of felt like I was floating up above our heads when he yanked the blanket over his face so he wouldn’t have to look at me when he admitted, “I cheated on you.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone come up to you and just throw their fist into your gut when you’re not expecting it, but that’s how it felt. I yanked the blankets off him. If he’d done something that horrible to me, he was sure as anything going to look at me when he confessed. “You did what?”

“I cheated on you.” And he was sobbing, and the whole story came out, and it’s not even that juicy. It was when I was on bedrest, he was stressed out because he was worried about the baby, and there was a girl from work, Charlene, who by the sound of it took advantage of him in that situation. She came over one night, brought some beers, blah, blah, blah. It’s not that I wanted to hear the whole story, but after a statement like that, I was going to make him tell me every stinking detail.

But really, that’s all there was. He said afterward he felt so bad that he sent her a text. Said some horrible things to her to make sure she’d never come around again. In a way it was a relief. It was the first time I’d seen him act like a jerk to anyone. It made me feel like I was dating a regular, normal guy, not some saint I didn’t deserve and certainly could never hope to keep. Even the fact that he cheated on me wasn’t as upsetting as you might think. Maybe if Natalie hadn’t been about to undergo a major operation because the doctors were convinced she was so brain-damaged she’d never learn to swallow on her own, I might have been more upset.

Everything’s relative, right? Besides, I’m no Mother Theresa. Let him without sin cast the first stone, or however that Bible quote goes.

“What about you?” Jake asked.

“What about me?”

“Have you ever ... Did you ever want to ...”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” And the conversation ended there.

Thank God.