Chapter 4Fluttering Wings

The soft click of the door closing still woke Leo.

I looked up to see him standing by his bedroom door, clutching a fruit knife, his small body tense and alert. A wave of sorrow washed over me.

While I was beneath another man, while I was at the hospital with my mother, this was how my son spent his nights—alone and terrified.

“Mom!”

A smile broke across his face, and he rushed forward, wrapping his arms around my waist.

For so long, I thought of Leo as the symbol of all my suffering.

If my father hadn't died, my parents would have surely taken me to a clinic to end the pregnancy. But he was gone. Both my parents had lost their own parents early in life and had no siblings. If it hadn’t been for my father’s students, his funeral would have been a desolate affair.

After the funeral, my mother started talking about suicide constantly. In her lucid moments, she would beat me, screaming that I was a shameless whore who had killed my father. Soon, her lucid moments became rarer. She ran out of the house and attacked a neighbor. We paid a hefty sum in medical bills, and with what little savings we had left, I admitted her to a psychiatric hospital.

There, she was diagnosed with kidney failure.

During a brief period of clarity, she learned of her diagnosis. Not wanting to be a burden, she threw herself from a window.

She survived, but she was paralyzed from the waist down.

There was no one to take me to get an abortion.

Anyone reading my story up to this point would probably scoff. “She was eighteen, a legal adult. Couldn't she have gone by herself?”

The me of today wants to scoff at the me of back then, too.

But the truth is, I couldn’t. I was too scared.

Before I met Ethan, the most embarrassing thing I had ever done was take off my shirt for a physical exam before my final exams. I didn’t know how to walk into a women’s clinic and tell a doctor I was pregnant. I couldn't imagine the look in their eyes. Would they hand me a form for a family member to sign?

I had no family.

On TV, miscarriages seemed so easy. A fall, a cold drink. I threw myself down the stairs, I punched my own stomach, I swallowed a whole bottle of herbal laxatives. Nothing worked.

Every morning, I would tell myself, tomorrow. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Those days passed in a blur of caring for my mother—feeding her, cleaning her, enduring her beatings and curses when she was lucid. I was miserable, but the days flew by.

And so, Leo grew inside me. I was so thin the pregnancy barely showed.

It wasn't until my father’s colleague, my high school homeroom teacher Mrs. Gable, came to visit my mother that anyone noticed. Mrs. Gable thought I was only five months along and was preparing to take me to a clinic.

An examination revealed I was already eight months pregnant.

Leo was born weighing only four pounds, small and fragile as a baby bird.

Mrs. Gable cried. “Valerie, don’t you know? You’ve ruined your life.”