Loneliness was just as difficult to withstand when you had happiness as it was when you had sadness, I thought, for you needed to share it. I began to understand what loving someone really meant. It meant sharing every discovery, every realization, every tear, every laugh, every dream, and even every nightmare.
It meant having someone to trust with your fears and your hopes.
It meant so much more than the people in this house thought it did. Maybe the birth of the baby would bring them the understanding they lacked. The Tates might stop doting on themselves and their problems and dote on the child. It could bring them together in a good way. They would share the baby's development, laugh at its smile, be in awe of its growth, its first steps, first words. And then maybe Octavious would prove to be right: Gladys would want more children, children truly of her own.
When something bad happened, Mama, quoting Scripture, often said, 'To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven . . . a time to rend and a time to sew.'
The baby kicked again.
I had passed through the season of rending. Now I was about to begin the season of sewing.
7
A Friend Appears
Now that I had felt the life stirring within me, what remained of my pregnancy seemed less terrible to endure. Starting my eighth month, I felt as if I had rounded a long, windy bend la the road and could see my destination looming just ahead. Despite her unhappiness over my being kept secretly in the Tates' house for months and months, Mama seemed pleased with the progress of my pregnancy and the baby's development. Now, during most of the time Mama visited with me, I would ramble on about how the baby had kicked and jumped, how it felt to have a living thing turning and twisting, anticipating its own birth, forgetting for the moment that Mama knew all this better than I did. After all, she had been pregnant with me!
'The baby kicked so hard last night, I nearly fell out of the bed, Mama! I had to sit up and then I spent most of the night rubbing my stomach and talking soothingly to him or her. I wish I knew whether it was a boy or a girl.'
'It sounds like a boy to me,' she said.
'That's what I thought,' I whispered. 'I just feel it's a boy and I've been talking to the baby assuming it's a boy. It doesn't feel like I'm being kicked with a dainty foot,' I said, and laughed.
Mama listened with her face frozen in a wise smile that gradually turned into a look of concern and worry. I was so wrapped up in my excitement and fancy that I didn't notice for a while, and then I felt my heart skip a beat when I saw how her eyes had darkened.
'What's wrong, Mama?' I asked. 'Has Daddy done something?'
'Your daddy always does something to curl the hairs at the back of my head, but no, it's not him I'm thinking of right now.'
'Then who? What?'
'It's time we talked about what it's going to be like afterward, honey.'
'Afterward?'
'Something magical happens when a woman gives birth, Gabrielle,' she explained. 'There's all those months of discomfort, labor pain and the birthing pain, of course; but once the baby emerges and the mother sets eyes on this wonderful creation that took shape inside her, all the agony slips from her memory and she is filled with a joy beyond description. I seen it hundreds of times, honey. Especially with first births, the mother can't believe her eyes. I couldn't believe mine when you were born.' She sighed so deeply when she paused, I had to hold my breath until she continued.
'That's going to happen to you, Gabrielle, and then, in the same instant, the baby's going to be ripped away from you. You got to prepare yourself for it, although, to be honest, I don't know what to tell you, what to do for you to make that ordeal any easier.'
Mama held my hand while she told me these things, and I could see from the grimness in her face that she had already seen my future misery and was feeling sad for me.
'First you were raped and then you had to go through all this with what follows. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, honey. It's a wrenching the likes of which you'll never know again,' she said. 'I've seen the horror when a baby's born dead. For you, it will be just like that, I'm afraid,' she concluded.
I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn't work. Tears clouded my eyes as my heart drummed the fear Mama had stirred in my chest. Suddenly she smiled with a new thought.
'You remember once when you were a little girl you came to me with a dead baby bird and I told you the mother bird had probably thrown it out of the nest?'
'Yes, Mama. I remember. We buried the bird under the pecan tree.'
She laughed. 'Yes, we did. Anyway, honey, that mama bird did what she thought was best for the other babies. You couldn't accept that then. What I was trying to explain was the mama bird had to think more of her babies than she thought of herself, of her own sadness.
'That's something you're going to have to do, too. I'm just telling you this now because I want to prepare you for it, prepare you for what you have already decided to do.'
I nodded, deep sadness continuing to cloud over the sunshine that had been in my heart. 'You told me I had to give up ray innocence, Mama.' I nodded. 'Now I understand.'
'I'm sorry, honey. I should have talked to you more about this before you made your decision, but you were so determined this was the right decision.'
