Beauty from Ashes

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18

I arrive home before Natalie’s breathing gets too wet, and I throw on the suction machine. It’s so loud I’ll probably go deaf before her first birthday. After I clear out her airway, I take a quick picture of her because she looks like a little Eskimo in her downy winter wrap-up. Once she’s unbundled, I put her on her little buckle-in chair in the living room and plop down on the couch to post the photo online.

I’m trying to think of a grabby caption when my phone beeps. It’s a message from Sandy. How’s my sweet girl today? I’m not sure if she’s asking about me or Natalie, so I tell her we’re both fine and send her an attachment with the photo I just took.

What a tiny thing. Is she gaining weight? Sandy asks, and I have to love her for not lying through her teeth like most of my friends will when they see the photo. She’s getting so big! She looks so healthy! You’re doing a great job!

I give Sandy a brief reply because I really don’t feel like having a long, drawn-out conversation over messenger. It’s just such a pain waiting for someone’s response, not knowing if they’re in the middle of typing something or maybe they’ve gone out partying for the rest of the afternoon and won’t get back to you until tomorrow night. Not that Sandy’s the partying type. In fact, she’s the most straight and stable person I know. I met her when I was fourteen, and I lived with her until I was eighteen, and that whole time I only saw her and her husband fight once. I mean, they bickered quite a bit, but most of that was good natured and just the way they interact with each other. But this was a real fight. I’m sure if Jake had been there he would have crawled into the corner and peed his pants.

I’m trying now to remember what it was. Something about one of their adopted daughters. Blessing, I think her name was. She was already out of the house by the time I moved in, but she still gave Carl and Sandy a ton of grief. Always either strung out on drugs or in recovery, and I probably shouldn’t judge her because when that anonymous savior rescued me from the trash bin and I started my journey as a foster brat, I figure most people wouldn’t have expected me to grow up and become anything more than a crack queen or heroin addict myself.

Well, Blessing had checked herself out of whatever recovery center she’d been in, and Carl and Sandy didn’t know where she was. They’d already tried tracking her down in the usual spots, her no-good friends who were more than willing to shoot her up again or that uncle who pimped her out for drug money from the time she was in a training bra. But they couldn’t find her anywhere. Carl’s the nicest guy you can ever hope to meet. He’s a pastor, so I guess he has to be kind and loving, but he was a professional football player for a couple years before that. Nice as he is, he’s no pushover. I don’t know too much about his upbringing, but he survived being a black kid in the South way back when, so you know he’s got to have some street cred.

He was telling Sandy that Blessing was an adult now and responsible for her own actions, and if the two of them rescued her every single time she went off the deep end she’d never learn to take care of herself. Sandy wouldn’t hear it. I’m sure in her mind, Blessing was still the scared little pre-teen who came into their lives so many years earlier with her trash bag full of hand-me-down clothes over one shoulder and a lifetime of emotional trauma sitting on top of the other. And Sandy was freaking out. I mean, that woman can yell when she sets her mind to it. But Carl’s not the kind to stand hen-pecking either. And man, the two of them went at each other’s throats. When they finished, Sandy knocked on my door. It was past bedtime, but I think she figured I was still awake. She came in and found me crying and asked, “What’s the matter, sugar? Were we being too loud?”

I didn’t know how to express how terrified I felt right then, because Carl and Sandy’s home had felt like heaven to me. And Sandy sat down on my bed and started rubbing my back and said, “Talk to me, pumpkin,” and I’m sure it took ten minutes for me to get out one coherent sentence, but I finally managed to tell her what I was scared of.

“You’re going to get a divorce, and then I’ll have to find a new home.”

Sandy kept rubbing my back and explaining how she and Carl made a promise before God to always love each other and always stay together, no matter how much they disagreed. And one day God would bring a Christian man into my life, and we’d make that same promise, and I had to remember that even when things got hard not to give up on our relationship. She made it sound simple. I’m surprised I wasn’t so jaded by life at that point that I didn’t laugh in her face. But I wanted to make Sandy happy, and I wanted to believe that it was true, that two people who fought could make up afterward and still have a pleasant marriage that didn’t result in cracked ribs or ER visits or their foster kids getting whisked out of the home in the middle of the night. I wanted to believe Sandy when she said one day I’d meet a wonderful man, and even if we disagreed from time to time, we’d love each other just as much as she and her husband did.

See, I told you I was naïve.