A New Leash on Life (3 page)

“What do you think it is?” Trevor asked.

“Parvo.” I spun around to get my medical bag. “I’ll need to start an IV on her and pump her with some antibiotics, vitamins, sugar, and potassium. Can you start the walks while I get her settled?”

He nodded and headed back to Max’s kennel.

~ ~

The lights zapped off. Natalie screamed and Trevor jumped off the stool.

“The worst hasn’t even begun and you’re already falling apart?” I turned on the flashlight. Fright hung on their faces.

The wind whipped and howled, pitching higher than the dogs’ whimpers and howls. I reached out for Melanie’s hand and squeezed it. She squeezed mine back and steadied her trembling body against mine. “You’re not supposed to panic,” I said to her.

“I’m a human being.” She wrapped a sheath of her salt and pepper hair in front of her eyes. “I’m allowed to panic.”

I shuddered. I should’ve planned this better. I should’ve rented a box truck like Millie said and trekked out of this vulnerable matchstick building and into a stronger shelter. Melanie never caved. Not even the time when a couple of ski-masked thugs mugged us one night. She didn’t even blink when she surrendered her purse to the bulkier of the two and told them to have a nice life. When I rear-ended a police car one snowy night, instead of mirroring my panic, she sat submerged in a sea of tranquility, patting my hand.

This night, though, sitting in the dark recesses of the pharmacy room, huddled up against the unforgiving cabinets, she moaned with every creak as if the world threatened to cave in on all of us.

I couldn’t have her break down.

“You think it’s going to hold up?” she asked with a touch of timidity clinging to her voice.

“The roof?” I asked

“The building.”

I lost my breath on that one.

Chapter Three

Chloe

Since leaving Elkwood thirteen years ago, I’d learned some things. One, never trust my gut instincts. Two, consequences sucked. Three, perfect moments didn’t exist. Before I learned these things, my life had spiraled out of control. I was eighteen-years-old, pregnant, and alone.

The one and only time I ever considered tossing my sorry self over the St. Mary’s River bridge was right after I walked out of the Sisterhood Clinic. I sunk into misery, stepping out of their double glass doors and into the cloudy, fall day, ambivalent over the news. How could an eighteen-year-old have a baby and survive in the world? I had barely crossed the stage of my high school auditorium, had barely placed the tassel from left to right, had barely a chance to embrace the new freedom of the open road to a hopeful, fruitful future before my boobs had started aching and morning sickness took a front row seat to life.

The baby’s father stammered, “I’m not ready to be a dad. I’m going to college. I’ve got plans for my life. I don’t want a kid.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Get an abortion?”

“Well, yeah. You’re eighteen. That’s what I say you do.”

I walked away numb, harboring our secret, assuring him I wouldn’t bother him again with this.

Thankfully, my Aunt Marie, my only blood relative still sane and competent, answered my cry for help. My age number still ended in the word teen, my belly swelled, the girl I loved hated me, and my maturity didn’t add up to absorb any of this mess. Aunt Marie, who lived only thirty minutes from town, drove up to get me on a rainy, freezing Saturday morning. I had returned Olivia’s winter jacket to her already, and so, I huddled under four sweatshirts waiting for my aunt to arrive at the bench on Mulberry Avenue. She pulled up honking her Buick LeSabre’s horn, waving as if hyped up on too many candy bars and skidding her tires into the curb. I climbed into her car, frozen and scared, foaming over in tears from the mess I’d stirred into my already screwed up life. As she hugged her steering wheel with crochet-mittened hands and drove down Mulberry Street, past the small chapel that Olivia and I would go into from time to time, no option compared. I had to ditch my mess and leave town.

I’d leave for a while, have the baby, and when I could secure an adoption, I’d return and piece my life back together again. My gut instinct cheered me towards this brilliant plan that surely would not result in consequences, and would land me back in the pocket of perfect moments.

My aunt set me up in her spare bedroom. I entered the cheerful room, blossoming with a canopy bed complete with a pink and white flower bedspread, and adorned with fancy round and oblong pillows. A gray cat with eyes as black as coal spread across the bed like a king. His name was Oony Gato, and according to my aunt, he coveted the supreme role as keeper of the house. She and I just borrowed some of his space.

My aunt and I shared Earl Grey tea and biscuits by the fire in her den that first afternoon. Amidst the crackling of wood and the smell of a cold winter’s night, she asked about my mother, first. I reported what I could recall. Guards, locks, nauseating green metal doors scrambled in my memory. Compassion dripped off the cheeks of mental health staff ushering me in to the community area where people talked out loud to no one, yelling and screaming at them as if being attacked, chastised. It pained me too much to drum up the details of walking up to a lady knotting her stringy black hair and realizing that lady was my mom. I didn’t want to remember the stale smell of cafeteria food, or the squeak of the orange cushion as I sat on the couch next to her. I didn’t want to remember the hollow fright in her eyes as I called her mom and reached out for her hand. I didn’t want to remember the kicking, crying, screaming as the guard shuffled her back to the safety of her room, away from me.

Instead I told Aunt Marie my mother thrived in her new home, a place that served her scrumptious cucumber and avocado sandwiches for lunch, punch in the afternoon under a maple tree, and long walks at dinner to ease her into the sweet lullaby of a long night’s sleep. I added how she enjoyed watching reruns of
Happy Days
on the flat screen TV in the pretty community area that had tables filled with daisies that smiled at us as we sat hand-in-hand laughing as Fonzie stuck his two thumbs up in the air at the end of a good scene before a commercial break. My aunt smiled and patted my hand, happy to hear the nice report. I knew Aunt Marie didn’t buy an ounce of that story.

Then, she asked about my stepfather. I lied and told her he encouraged me to leave town to deal with the baby situation. I couldn’t bear to go into detail about how he tried to kill Josh with a baseball bat that night we returned the ring. I certainly didn’t want to let on that I spent two years sneaking into my girlfriend’s bedroom for a safe place to sleep. She would’ve been hurt that I hadn’t turned to her first.

I didn’t want to spend my high school years with my aunt a whole thirty minutes away. I wanted Olivia.

So, coming as no surprise, sitting there in her living room drinking tea like an old lady, I sunk into a mellow funk. “I’m not cut out to be a mother,” I said to her.

“Of course you’re not, sweetheart. That’s why we’ll do the right thing and find the right parents for your baby.”

I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to push out a baby. I didn’t want to live for the next seven months with a constant reminder of all that I’d just destroyed. What an idiot I had been, all pumped-up and emotional, falling into that stupid guy’s arms and allowing him a quick, sufficient release. A clumsy act performed and swept away in a riptide of a cruel miracle.

I placed my hand on my belly and imagined cells bursting into life, forming organs and fingers and toes, a face, eyes, ears, and a cute little nose. “You’ll help me?” I asked my aunt.

She looked up from her teacup with the kind of gentle smile I had prayed to see since my mother first went crazy. “I’ll keep you safe.” She patted my knee. “Now, drink your tea before it gets cold and yucky.”

Aunt Marie never judged me, even when I told her the truth finally that night about my being in love with Olivia, and my falling victim to happenstance. She simply urged me take good care of my nutrition and fed me smoothies with blueberries, bananas, wheat grass, and fennel seeds. I hated it, and pinched my nose every time just to get it past my lips.

I grew enormous fairly quickly. Around the middle of my second trimester, I stopped digging my friends back in town for info on Olivia. Dread crawled up my back whenever I’d hear about how they’d seen her out sharing coffee with new college friends or how she’d just won a community award for her work with shelter animals. She grabbed onto life and ran with it, without me.

I couldn’t call her. She despised me. I couldn’t explain the real reason I had disappeared. I’d have to lie more. I wouldn’t pile on more lies. I would wait.

I figured, after I placed my baby in the loving arms of adoring adoptive parents I could ease back into her life with love as my tool. I’d sweep the guilt away and eventually get past the lies I dealt her. Of course, at holidays I could just picture circumventing the truth, hiding my secret under cinnamon, Christmas carols, and Yuletide gifts, smiling for the sake of covering up the biggest lie I’d ever tell.

About the close of my second trimester, I decided to focus on having this baby and finding the perfect parents. We met with some beautiful people with tragic stories of how they couldn’t have children because of a childhood disease or injury, and we met some who already had children and wanted to adopt a baby in need.

My baby was a baby in need. This phrase ran through my head night after night. My choice would change a couple’s life and place them on a trajectory far different than the one they traveled at that point. My baby harnessed that power and she hadn’t even been born, yet. Imagine the possibilities when she actually learned to breathe the air, focus her eyes, wriggle her toes? Pride shot through me, hitching a ride on my nerves and splashing me with all sorts of mommy jubilee. Whenever this happened, I’d further punish myself with countless hours in a baby boutique, perusing over baby bottles, pastel diaper bags, soft blankets decorated with sheep and ducks, and baby carriages that looked comfortable enough to sleep in myself. I’d leave gooey and confused.

Aunt Marie came to every counseling meeting with me and after each session, she’d talk me through my fears and apprehensions of the whole adoption process, helping me to decide if I wanted an open or closed adoption. She eventually helped me select a nice couple of Hispanic descent to be the adoptive parents. We talked endlessly over milkshakes about what life would be like for my baby growing up in a house with two capable parents, one a lawyer, one a doctor. They planned to hire a nanny and teach the baby Spanish and Mandarin before the age of five when the ability to learn new languages started to fall off, as they explained to me in hushed, soothing voices. The child would go to the same private school they both attended, where they both met. He or she—the sex didn’t matter, they said—would attend summer enrichment camps and participate in school music and sports, whichever the child preferred. I imagined my baby growing into a beautiful, bright, well-respected young adult, surrounded by grand pianos, recitals, and fine people who could carry on conversations with others around the globe, accentuating dialects with an expert tongue. Who knew, maybe my baby would grow up to be president of the United States, or a world class tennis star, or the creator of the next big technological device capable of changing the world as we all knew it. Maybe, just maybe, my baby would invent a transportation device that would allow us to beam ourselves from China to The Keys faster than we could blink.

Aside from all of these wonderful benefits my baby would acquire, I couldn’t help but worry if the child would be loved enough. Would she sit and worry about how others viewed her? Would she stumble over insecurities of not being loved enough because her mommy shipped her off to strangers? Would she recognize me one day, twenty years or so into the future, when we reunited with the help of a good lawyer? Would she hate me for sending her off into the arms of people who wanted a prize baby they could show off to their rich friends?

When that sunny Monday morning of my baby’s birthday arrived and I stood in a puddle of my fluids, my aunt shuffled me to the car. She drove like a mad woman, weaving around buses, cars, pedestrians to get me to the hospital. She stood by my side, covering my hand with hers, blanketing my forehead in wet towels, urging me to push and breathe. Five hours later, when I pushed my baby out into the world into the arms of a waiting doctor, I cried. I already missed her.

I feared for her life without me.

I wailed when the doctor handed her to me all slick and innocent. I kissed her slippery face and smoothed her dark hair, loving her before the nagging moment when the joy of this precious baby would be sucked from my life forever. My aunt wept along with me, stroking my hair and cradling me as I stared into those unfocused eyes and fell in love with my baby girl. Aunt Marie and I cradled her tiny fingers. She wriggled. Our souls connected.

I prayed that God would help ease the blow for the couple waiting on their new baby because no way in hell was I handing her over to anyone.

My life corkscrewed out in front of me, going off in a tangent far removed from the life I envisioned I’d be living with Olivia one day. I kept telling myself as the weeks turned into months and then finally into a year when my daughter, Ayla, blew out her first birthday candle, that one day I’d get back to her and confess the whole messed up story. I’d tell her everything because time healed all wounds, even ones created out of dark secrets.

I’d introduce my baby to her father and he’d rescind on his idea that aborting her would’ve been the best choice for us. He would take one look at his beautiful girl and hug her and cry for time wasted. He’d blame me and forget he ever told me to abort her. He’d fault me for keeping such a gift from him that whole time.

I’d take the blow for Ayla.

As the years passed, I could only assume that Olivia probably hated me for not attempting to contact her. I prayed that she didn’t view me as a spoiled brat starring in off-Broadway plays and allowing money and fame to consume my every waking moment. I hoped that she didn’t envision my life to be one filled with caviar, fine champagne, a dazzling beauty nestled into the crook of my arm, attending one lavish party after another, ending the day spread eagle in a pile of my money, laughing, giddy with selfish pride over my artistic luck.