Little paula, p.1
Little Paula, page 1
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PROLOGUE
Daddy stole my baby.
He and his girlfriend, Gabby, did it at night while Trevor and I were asleep. I was exhausted and completely unaware of their intention. The moment Daddy had found out I was pregnant, he forbade Trevor to sleep in my room. He sent him to the Forbidden Room, not realizing that for Trevor, sleeping there could never be a punishment.
After our baby was gone, Trevor blamed himself for not waking, rushing into my room, and waking me. “Mama had the house trying to warn me with its creaks and moans. All the spirits of the ancestors who Mama told us lived on in our very walls were screaming. I’m sorry, Faith. I was already too deep in the darkness of fatigue and vaguely heard the frantic alerts in what I thought was a dream.”
I was too upset to ask him to explain in more detail. He had never seemed so convinced that the house held voices. Little Paula had colic and for two days was constantly crying, especially at night, keeping not only Trevor and me awake but also Daddy and his girlfriend, Gabby, who slept in the bedroom that Daddy—Big John, as we often called him—used to sleep in with our mama, Paula. They constantly heard the baby’s crying. Sometimes Daddy would scream, “Shut her up or take her downstairs!”
Daddy had recently returned from another long-haul trucking job with time requirements that caused him to violate safety rules and drive well over fifteen hours a day, sleeping and eating in his eighteen-wheeler. Gabby’s brother, Nick, who was Daddy’s best friend, often teamed up with him on jobs, though he couldn’t this time because he had a new job himself. I knew Daddy was irritable because of his workload. Even his having both sides of the truck cabin proudly labeled EDEN TRUCKING didn’t reduce the stress of the job. My baby’s crying only added to his stress, but there was no doubt in my mind that Little Paula’s colic wasn’t what spurred him and Gabby to action. In fact, I now believed that they already had made that decision days after I had given birth to Little Paula, if not during my pregnancy.
Neither Trevor nor I saw any possible name for our baby but Paula. It was Mama’s name, and she had planned for us to have a child and build a family in this very house. She’d had this in mind from the very day she set eyes on us in the foster home. Our biological mothers had deserted both of us. I could barely remember mine, but Trevor had a clear enough memory of his to wonder if he would recognize her on a street someday.
“Would she see me and walk right past me?” he sometimes asked aloud.
“How could a mother not know her own child?” I would say, but he remained skeptical. I understood his need to know.
We were empty vessels waiting to be filled with love. Mama saw this and saw Trevor’s and my special relationship at the foster home. That was what made us perfect in her eyes, ideal to continue her family.
Nothing was more important to Mama than her family and the heritage that she had molded for us. She was confident that Trevor and I were the way to ensure it would all continue, because the affection and the need we had for each other were precisely what she said came with being part of a family. It was why she took such good care of us, homeschooled us, and taught us how precious her home and her legacy were to her. We weren’t physically of her blood, but we would be spiritually.
“And believe me,” she said, “that’s more important. Blood-related brothers and sisters often grow up despising each other, competing, but you two won’t ever hurt each other.”
But that didn’t mean our daddy wouldn’t hurt us.
Little Paula was only three weeks old when they took her away from me. I quickly realized afterward that her being born in the house instead of a hospital was something Daddy and Gabby had planned as well. To make their intention easier for them, they had deceived me about my medical needs. Daddy always had been scheming ways to keep my pregnancy a secret and then find a way to make it seem as if it had never occurred. It was one more reason he wanted Trevor sleeping in another room.
So why would this abduction of Little Paula come as any surprise? Why wasn’t I more suspicious, guarding my baby night and day?
“Trust,” Mama once said, “is wonderful but dangerous. It makes you more vulnerable.”
I wish I had remembered those words before it was too late.
Gabby had been taking me to see Dr. Lewis, an ob-gyn whom she claimed a friend of hers had recommended, which was why I had no idea of her and Big John’s real plan. It seemed at first that they were doing everything they could to make all go well. I should have known something wasn’t right when Gabby took me to Dr. Lewis, who practiced almost fifty miles away, instead of to a doctor nearby. There could be no local chatter, which helped maintain the secrecy Daddy wanted kept sacrosanct. No one knew me at the doctor’s office; they didn’t even know Gabby.
After I was showing at five months, I was forbidden to be outside where anyone could see me. No one but Nick was invited to the house. I was afraid, and Trevor was afraid for me should I be disobedient. Since Mama’s passing, Daddy had no chains or doors confining his anger. I was sure his unbridled roar woke the sleeping ancestors. He could very well lock me up in the basement—or worse—so I didn’t really complain that much or question their intention.
Daddy’s size alone made him terrifying, even when he wasn’t upset or irritable. It was why he was known as Big John, even to us. He lumbered through the house with his 240-pound, six-foot-four-inch body. I think the furniture even shuddered. When I was little, I definitely thought the earth shook. He wasn’t unattractive, but he had facial features to match his size, his nose prominent and a little crooked, his lips thick, and his black eyes startling like bright ebony marbles with bushy dark brown eyebrows, eyebrows Mama always had to trim.
Gabby trimmed them now, and because she had once thought she’d be a hairdresser someday, she would cut his hair. She also did Trevor’s reddish-brown hair, a shade lighter than Daddy’s, but I didn’t like her trimming mine. I thought her work was always uneven. Because mine was close to Mama’s light brown, I felt even unhappier about it. I had wanted to look like her for Trevor and resisted as long as I could. It felt like it violated Mama, too, and if there was one thing I never wanted to do, it was add to the memory of her misery. But whatever resistance I had, it wilted when Daddy grimaced and said, “Let her do it. You look like a shaggy dog.”
All during my pregnancy, I read and studied as much as I could about babies and how to care for them. “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry,” Gabby practically chanted. “Caring for babies just comes natural to a woman.”
Nevertheless, I was anticipating more information and instruction from the doctor, especially as my birthing grew closer. “You don’t have to keep seeing a baby doctor. You have to wait for your pregnancy to develop,” she insisted. “You don’t have any problems anyway.”
Early on in my ninth month, however, I became a little suspicious, but Gabby did such a good job of allaying my concerns. Gabby had many excuses why she couldn’t take me to see the doctor, but she constantly told me that I shouldn’t worry. She said she had another close friend, Nina Stokin, who was a maternity nurse and would be here in a jiffy if I needed special attention.
Almost as soon as I began to have labor pains, Gabby told me they were nothing about which I should concern myself, that they weren’t real, that this was common. Although she herself had never been pregnant, she constantly talked about her friends who had been and therefore claimed firsthand knowledge. She could be very sweet and convincing. It was hard to believe that, all along, she and Daddy were scheming. Every whisper between them should have lit my hair on fire.
Finally, because I complained so much, she had Nina stop by to examine me. Nina was a tall African American woman, almost as tall, I thought, as Daddy. Although she didn’t smile much, she spoke with a confident tone that eased my concerns. She was just as confident as Gabby. She told me I was having Braxton-Hicks contractions, which were false labor pains women have before “true” labor.
“They’re just your body getting ready for the real thing,” she said.
I told her I had already had them at the beginning of the month. She finally smiled and assured me that I was still a good three to four weeks away from delivery and that being late was very common these days. She made pregnancy sound like some sort of modern phenomenon, and again, she reassured me that all was going as expected.
“I know three other young girls about your age who had babies. Seemed more like ten months, but of course, they probably lied about when and how they got pregnant.”
I ignored her insinuation.
“The doctor told me I’d give birth about now, didn’t he, Gabby?”
“Turns out, he’s not all that good a maternity doctor,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you and get you upset. Nina said she heard some bad things about him, didn’t you, Nina? That’s the real reason I stopped taking you to him immediately after she told me.”
Nina just grimaced.
“Don’t we have to find a new one, then?”
“Nina’s as good. How many would you say you delivered, Nina?”
“Not coun ting my own, twenty, at least.”
“See? Nothing to worry about,” Gabby said.
They went off to have some wine and chat before Nina left.
Of course, I soon had good reason to doubt Nina, despite her assurances. The very next day, in fact, the pain increased, and the contractions were closer together. They began to last longer, too. I cried and complained, but Gabby and Daddy were drinking more since his return from his recent trip. They partied with Nick downstairs in our finished basement into the early hours and practically had to drag each other up the stairs when he was set to leave.
Hours later, I screamed.
Trevor came running in. I was already sitting on the edge of the bed.
“What’s happening?”
“My water broke,” I said.
He turned on the light, saw it, and ran for Gabby. She was quite dazed, still quite drunk, but the sight of what was happening woke her enough for her to call Nina. Nina told her things to do until she arrived. And Little Paula waited for her, waited to enter this world.
While the birthing was happening, Trevor was so terrified that he couldn’t bring himself back into the bedroom. After nearly five hours, Little Paula was born in my very bed. Several times, I thought I would die.
At the end, I managed to say, “I thought you said I was having false labor.”
Nina ignored me, cared for the baby, and left as soon as she could. She didn’t even wish me luck. Again, I missed the signals between her and Gabby, signals that would have confirmed she was part of their plan.
After Little Paula and I were settled in, Trevor came to see me. I was cradling our baby. Nina had left some instructions before she had gone home, and Gabby and Daddy couldn’t wait to get back to sleep.
“How are you?” Trevor asked.
“Exhausted,” I said. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
I turned the baby toward him.
“Yes,” he said. I knew what he was thinking. “It’s almost as if Mama is here,” he added.
I smiled and nodded.
Little Paula was sleeping, occasionally whimpering.
“She’s probably having a nightmare that she was born,” Trevor said. “I’m sure I did.”
We both laughed, even though the memories of our own infancy were better left smothered.
I closed my eyes. Trevor kissed me on the cheek and, despite Daddy’s warning, got into bed beside me. He put his arm around me, and I cradled my head against his shoulder. He kissed my forehead. I saw the smile on his face, but I was afraid to smile, too. It almost didn’t seem right to be happy with Mama gone. I would forever blame myself. Both of us blamed ourselves.
Trevor had convinced me that Little Paula was going to restore both of us, bring light to the dark pain of sorrow. So comfortable and secure were we in each other’s arms, I let myself believe it. But neither Trevor nor I could imagine, after the first happy night with Little Paula, how threatened our lives as a very, very young family would be.
ONE
When Little Paula started her uncontrollable crying a week or so after she was born, I knew, even without the confirmation of a doctor, that she had colic. However, nothing I had read on the internet, no comments I saw from other new mothers, and not even medical journals I had read seemed to have a definitive cause for it or a perfect cure.
Some thought it was simply acclimation to the world outside the womb, which could make babies irritable for some time. Others thought they might be reacting to gas, having something called acid reflux. Some suggested allergies. I tried all the remedies described, especially laying her on her tummy, carrying her constantly, and making sure to hold her upright after she fed. I massaged her, gave her a pacifier, and even sang and hummed to her for hours.
Her crying even kept our cats, Moses and Becky, from coming upstairs. Maybe they thought she was another cat. They hadn’t been behaving like themselves since Mama died, anyway. They’d stay away for days sometimes. Trevor went looking for them when they didn’t return recently. If he had found them killed by some coyote or some other animal, he didn’t tell me. I didn’t want to look hard at him and see the truth. There was almost no other reason they wouldn’t have come home by now. Daddy certainly didn’t care or wonder. They were more Mama’s pets than his. Besides, Little Paula was taking up most of my time and concern. There was a great deal I didn’t think about, including my own appearance.
Last night, Gabby came into my bedroom and said she would give me some hours of relief and take Little Paula into her and Daddy’s room for a while.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “It doesn’t do the baby any good if you’re exhausted.”
“Are you sure?” I had some trepidation, but I really was exhausted and had just finished breastfeeding her.
“Your father told me to tell you that,” she said, which was a little surprising. Up until that moment, he rarely seemed to care about any difficulties I was having. He never came to look in on the baby and me and said almost nothing about her, about how beautiful and perfect she was. I thought maybe he didn’t like the thought of being a grandfather.
If he had known Mama’s true plan for us from the start, he either ignored it or, after some small attempts, just gave up caring. Most of the time, he returned home too tired to argue or wanting to save his energy for partying. However, we knew that from the first day Trevor and I were brought from the Wexler foster home to Mama and Big John Eden’s home and were adopted, Big John was opposed to us sleeping in the same bed. Trevor was nearly six, and I was little more than four, but he still didn’t think it was right. Mama told him he was being ridiculous. There really wasn’t much choice when it came to where we would be, anyway: Mama already had turned the other available guest room into a classroom for us. She was determined to homeschool us. She had been a grade-school teacher and was confident she could give us a better education than what we would get in the “inferior” public schools.
There was one other possible bedroom in the house, but when Mama was alive, that was kept locked most of the time, and we were told almost from the first moment we arrived that it was the Forbidden Room. More than ten years later, when Mama and Trevor caught me out behind the garage with our neighbor’s grandson, Lance, she had put me in the Forbidden Room and locked the door. That alone was terrifying. Big John was on a cross-country trip, though his being home wouldn’t have helped. He surely would have been quite angry, too, and wouldn’t have interfered. In fact, he might have beaten me with that thick belt he wore, something he always threatened to do.
Inside the Forbidden Room, Mama had told me to go to the unmade, stripped bed and wait. Neither I nor Trevor had ever seen her so enraged. Whatever she had given me to drink put me in such a daze that I didn’t realize where I was or what was happening to me. I spent two nights in a row like that. I had forgiven Mama for it and forgiven Trevor for what she made him do to me while I was in that room in my stupor.
As we grew older, and Mama still didn’t give us separate bedrooms, there was no longer any doubt that Big John understood what Mama’s intentions were. Neither of us ever heard him specifically say it, but it was like one of those blemishes or scars on someone’s face that you pretend not to see. There is blindness that provides comfort.
I quickly realized that what terrified Mama was that I could become pregnant from being with someone else, someone she would consider outside our family.
Mr. Longstreet, our neighbor, had his grandson Lance visiting from New York City because his parents were in a somewhat nasty divorce proceeding. He was very handsome, and I dreamed of him wanting me to be his girlfriend and returning often to see me. Of course, if I had been a little more experienced, I might not have been so surprised to learn that he did have a girlfriend back in New York and was after me for one thing only.
Mama had been beside herself when Trevor revealed I was to rendezvous with Lance. Trevor didn’t like betraying me, but there was never a doubt in my mind that he wanted to please Mama more.
Mama wasn’t wrong about Trevor’s and my relationship. There was always something very special between us. From the first day we were brought together at the foster home, both of us having been given up by our mothers, we stayed close to each other and practically ignored the existence of the other children. The Wexlers’ daughter, a woman we called Nanny Too because she had been a nanny and now basically ran the foster home, was annoyed by this. She said we were so close that we shared a shadow.
