Adelaide Piper (27 page)

“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.

13

A Contrite Heart

Because of God's tender mercy,
the light from heaven is about to
break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in
darkness and in the shadow
of death,
and to guide us to the path of peace.

Luke 1:78–79

I
'm in trouble,” I said through tears when we sat down at the truck stop and ordered two coffees. It was nearly midnight, and there were only three other people dining in the place, each at his own separate booth.

It had been an exhausting drive down the mountain. The sunset gave way to a foggy darkness, and there were times when I could hardly see a foot in front of Marny's Mercedes. I kept imagining a runaway truck knocking me over the side of the ridge. But I was determined, and I even prayed,
Help me get there.

Squinting to make out the lanes and the guard rails, I thought about the doubts and questions I'd written in my notebook last summer and presented before Dale and Darla Pelzer, half wanting to know the truth and half wanting to trip them up and expose their unenlightened state of mind. I suspected that I could follow the maze of each question and each doubt for years until I made a decision.

But I didn't have time for all of that now. I had to get help.

“What's going on?” Shannon said from the other side of the booth.

I tried to talk, but when I opened my mouth, I wept so intensely that it was fifteen minutes before I actually uttered an intelligible word.

She moved over to my side and held me, wiping my dripping nose with coarse truck-stop napkins, until I could speak.

“I'm bewildered,” I said. “I was doing better since last summer, but yesterday I took my roommate to an abortion clinic, and she's worse off than before, and I might be too.”

“I'm sorry,” Shannon said. She shooed away the waitress, who kept wanting to take our food order.

I wept without reserve in my friend's arms as bacon sizzled in the frying pan and trucks pulled in to fill up with gas or bed down for the night.

When I could look back up at her, I said, “I'm so weary.”

Shannon took a deep breath. She was anxious and sympathetic, and I could tell she wanted hard for me to see.

“You don't have to be. You don't have to be alone, Adelaide.”

I was beaten to a pulp, and I wanted to believe her. I was tired of the mazes in my mind about the reality of God. If there was any hope for me, I had to step over them now and get to the other side. What other choice did I have?

“Okay,” I said. “What do I need to do?”

Shannon pulled me close beneath the fluorescent lights of the diner and prayed a simple prayer of my need for forgiveness and asked me to list silently the things that were weighing down my heart. Then she prayed for me to acknowledge and accept that Christ had paid the debt for the very things I'd just named and others that I might not even know about.

I muttered, “I accept,” and Shannon thanked God for washing me clean.

Then she pulled a Bible out of her backpack and read a passage from Hebrews 10:9–10:

He [Jesus] cancels the first covenant in order to establish the second. And what God wants is for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all time.

“And that is that, Adelaide,” she said. “You have received God's grace, once and for all time, in a two-minute prayer at a truck stop off Interstate 81.”

I actually chuckled for a moment. She knew that was exactly what I would have said, and I loved her for that.

Though I still didn't fully get it, I stepped across that gaping chasm that Dale Pelzer had drawn on his makeshift chalkboard. Nothing overtly supernatural happened as Shannon prayed for me—no bright light or chorus of angels—but I guessed I didn't deserve any icing on the cake like that right now. What I hoped was that it was true, because it was the only thing I had. I had no choice but to accept the offer. And I was thankful for the chance to take hold of it.

Then Shannon gave me such a tight hug good-bye that I thought my eyeballs might pop out. I hugged her back just as hard, because I knew I had this old friend to thank for the slight relief I was feeling.

And though it was midnight, I scurried back to the car and started on my way back to school. As I started the fine-tuned engine and flicked on the high beams, I could see that the fog had dissipated and a Carolina moon was as clear as a prop in a play over the road before me. I rolled down my window and breathed in the cold night air, and as I exhaled, my own breath rose before me like burning incense before an altar.

Everything looked clear. So clear that I could almost make out the corners of the stars. The thought occurred to me that I had been seeing only shadows of the world until now.

It was two thirty in the morning by the time I got back to NBU. Jif was studying in my bed, and Ruthie was curled up with her knees to her chest. She was making a sound as if she were snoring, but her eyes were open.

“Hey,” I whispered to Jif.

“Hey,” she said. She nodded in the direction of Ruthie. “She's been cramping pretty bad, but she just took two Anaprox, and she should be out any minute.”

“Thanks, Jif,” I said.

“No problem,” she answered. “I'm too tired to talk. Tell me about it tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said.

The next morning I woke up and saw Ruthie taking a Band-Aid off her forearm and pinching the incision until the blood surfaced.

“Ruthie!” I felt such a strong mix of sympathy and frustration toward her that I thought I might explode. “We've got to talk.”

Lurching, I grabbed the razor on her desk and threw it in the trash.

I knelt down beside her bed, grabbed her tepid hand, and said, “Forgive me for my role in what happened the other day.”

“Don't—” Ruthie raised her hand as if to say she couldn't bear the idea of even mentioning that day.

“Hear me out,” I pleaded. “That morning in the clinic, you wanted me to do something, and I didn't. I know you were having second thoughts when the nurse called you in, and I didn't do right by you by not asking you to reconsider.”

Ruthie hugged her knees to her chest and shook with grief as I continued, “You were looking to me, and I failed you. I distanced myself. And I ignored you. I'm sorry.”

Ruthie pinched her arm again until crimson appeared.

“Look, Ruthie,” I said, pulling her hand away from her arm. “I'm not going to sit here and watch you mutilate yourself. It's
sick
! Now, I don't know what to do to make things better, but I know you need help, and I'm going to tell Tag that when he picks you up. And if he doesn't do anything about it, then I'm going to tell your parents.”

Ruthie stared straight ahead, trancelike in the morning light.

I pulled her pajama sleeves down to her wrists.

“Jif said you went to meet Shannon,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did it help?”

“I'm not sure yet, but I think so.”

Ruthie let out a guffaw and then looked up at me as if she were the last canine at the pound, and I was preparing the injection with which to put her down for good.

I grabbed my roommate's knees and whispered, “Ruthie, there has to be a way out of this misery.” Tears trickled down her face, and I went to the refrigerator to pour her a cup of orange juice.

She took a sip, then whispered, “When I close my eyes, all I can see is that heart beating on the ultrasound machine. That tiny organ in a sea of gray fuzz. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't walk by the mirror. What kind of person would take the life of her own baby? Just because it didn't fit into her neat and tidy future?”

Then she took the cup of juice and tossed it too hard in the direction of the trash can. It hit the open closet and left a streak of orange across her dresses and shoes.

“I don't deserve a thing.”

Minutes passed as Ruthie shook her head and stared into the rumpled sheets beneath her feet. Then she looked up at me and was able to make eye contact, though her brow began to furrow before smoothing out again.

“What am I going to do?” she said, and it almost sounded like the tone of her old, strong voice before all of this awful stuff had happened.

“Tell your folks and get help,” I said. And I sat with her as we waited for Tag to pick her up.

When the phone rang, I answered it.

“Adelaide, it's Mrs. Baxter,” she said. “Tag's car broke down on the way out of Chapel Hill, so I'm here to get Ruthie.”

“I'll be down in a sec to let you in.”

This turn of events was too good not to deny a guiding hand in it.

When I hung up the phone, I looked to Ruthie and said, “Your mama's here. Now, let's tell her what's going on.”

Ruthie nodded her head in agreement.

The chapel bell tower rang eleven times as Mrs. Baxter sat at the edge of Ruthie's bed and wept while she heard the account of the last few months of her daughter's life.

I was thankful that she didn't come at her with anger or disappointment. She could sense her daughter's earnest regret, and what she wanted was for her to forgive herself.

When Ruthie pulled up the sleeves of her pajamas to show how she had dealt with the last week, her mama held her tight and said, “We'll get you some help.”

As Mrs. Baxter rubbed ointment from the dorm's first-aid kit on Ruthie's thin arms, Jif and I zipped her suitcases and lugged them down the stairs and into the car while big, papery snowflakes—the first of the season—lightly coated the quadrangle and the slate roofs of the buildings on the hill.

After they left, I took a shower, aced my French exam, and walked around campus one final time before Jif and I headed back down the mountain the next morning.

I was relieved to be alive. No, the sadness and regret over Ruthie's abortion didn't disappear, but I had confessed my part in it, and I honestly felt that I could breathe again.

As I treaded up faculty row and by President Schaeffer's house, I thought of the wonders that I had seen at NBU. The pastoral scenes of silos and cows grazing along the hillsides. The friendly voice of my creative writing professor, Josiah Dirkas, and the words of truth that Dr. Shaw, my religion professor, brought to life in his social justice class. A part of me would be sad to bid the place farewell, and I would tell those two professors as much if they were in their offices tomorrow morning.