CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO #2
I had noticed the shift since entering into my second trimester. The sickness had gone and I knew the color had come back into my face. I felt beautiful, supple, energized, but I didn’t know how to break the news, so I just blurted it out.
“Greg, I’m pregnant.”
He stared at me, blinking. I knew he was calculating when we had last slept together, and knew the moment he realized when my accidental conception had taken place. I could see it play out in real time on his face.
“Sid…is this…is this what you couldn’t tell me before? Oh, God! Honey,” he reached for my hand across the table. “I knew something wasn’t right. I knew you weren’t telling me the whole story…look, it’s not your fault…we can take care of it. I know some doctors who will be discreet and—”
“What are you talking about?” I said, snatching my hand out of his grasp.
“You were…raped?”
I closed my eyes at the word, and for a brief moment I saw another path converging in this moment.
I could tell him, yes, that I was raped and I could go to his doctor friends and have this life removed from my womb.
I could end the pathway my fleeting uncalculated choice with Jahnu had opened, and I could create a whole new one with Greg—here—in this moment—with one word—one choice.
It would be much easier than having to admit what I’d really done.
There would be talk, but it would be less talk than what the truth would bring.
But I knew I could never live with myself if I did that.
Peace with others at the cost of one’s peace inside is not peace.
It is surrender. A slow death from within.
Jahnu’s words came to me, to remind me. I told myself in the jungle, I would live with the consequences of my choice, come what may, and I intended to stand by that.
What had Jahnu told the children? The last of the human freedoms was to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances…to choose one’s own way. I would not surrender—not to the fear and judgments of others. I would not choose a slow death from within when life was blossoming inside me.
“I wasn’t raped,” I said, opening my eyes and making eye contact with him. He held my gaze for an eternity. I saw the muscles of his jaw ripple with the effort to control his anger, but it eventually won out.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Then I felt it. The shame. The embarrassment. I’d made a rash, and selfish decision and I’d hurt the man I’d promised myself to, and I would seek forgiveness for years.
No choice is without its consequence.
“During my time with…the Hundi…I fell in love.”
The gears in his mind spun behind his eyes, “The leader? The one I was supposed to kill? Is that why you—you chose to sleep with a savage when you were engaged to me!”
“I know it sounds crazy. I don’t know what happened, but…but I’m keeping the baby.”
He threw down his fork, its clang inciting curious looks from the diners around our table. “How the hell could you do this to me?” he whispered in a rage.
He couldn’t reconcile himself to the new path I’d chosen for myself and we’d parted ways that night. Not that I blamed him. This wasn’t the life he had wanted.
When I told my mom, she cried. I told her everything.
Everything that happened between me and Jahnu and how my heart broke right open.
I hadn’t even gotten to say a proper goodbye, and the agony of losing him while his child grew within me was both sharp and comforting at the same time. I missed him so much.
Mom insisted I move in with her for the rest of my pregnancy, so I took her up on the offer and worked as much as I could as my belly grew over the next several months. I saved as much money as I could, for the baby, and for what I knew I would one day decide to do.
I planted a garden and when I wasn’t outside, I cooked and baked, and cared for my mom as my nesting instincts took over.
I studied herbal medicine and naturopathy during the evenings when I wasn’t working, and enrolled in several online courses, allowing my longing for the jungle to fuel my obsession for knowledge on how to treat illness and injury with the plant life found there.
My mom watched on, warily, knowing what I had in my mind, but said nothing.
I was thankful. I wasn’t yet ready to share the ways I wrestled with the decision.
I’d calculated how much money I would need to make the trip and how long it would take to save, but all that planning was deemed unnecessary when a letter arrived with the senders name: M.
Morales. I tore it open to find a cashiers check for ten thousand dollars and a note written in a hasty scrawl.
Thank you for saving my life on the airplane.
I laughed out loud. You just never know how things are going to turn out.
My contractions started around midnight and once they hit five minutes apart, Mom drove me to the birthing center.
I danced and swayed my hips, remembering the night Jahnu held me in his arms at Stahgan and Talula’s wedding.
I let the shower pelt my naked body remembering the rainstorm we had been caught in and the night we spent together in the cave.
I think that’s when I first realized I loved him.
When he told me he’d lived a life of loss.
When he told me the story about his mother coming to him as a child and telling him grace will come to you.
It was that instant, as I moved into transition and finally felt ready to push, that I knew what I would name my daughter.
She came quickly after only a few minutes of pushing from a squat position in the shower, and I grabbed her with both hands.The midwives allowed me to deliver my own baby and bring her to my chest. My tears mixed with the rivulets of water still falling from the spout.
I wept over the fuzzy black hair as she screamed her announcement of life. I felt an overwhelming gratitude that she was healthy and mine.
Mother and daughter.
I never knew the expanse of my own heart until I looked into her eyes, eyes so much like her father’s, sharp and dark with a glint that made me think God had chosen the light from a distant star to fashion them.
I can’t believe I ever lived without her.
I took her to Jonathan’s graveside, and there I released the last of what held me hostage to this old life.
I released my guilt, my responsibility for his death, and the pain I’d carried all those years.
I didn’t need it anymore. It hadn’t kept me strong like I thought.
It had kept me stagnant, stuck, trying to pay penance for something I was never meant to pay.
I guess, in a way, God had answered my desperate prayer on the rooftop all those years ago.
I had found my way, and it was leading me back to Jahnu.
Of course, I was nervous. It had been three years and I had no idea what had happened since I left. Doubts spewed from my mind like volcanic blasts. Would he even still want me? Would he want his daughter?
We had only known each other about a month, and half of that was spent arguing our different viewpoints. He had been pretty angry with me when he found out I was engaged to Greg. But I loved him and I wanted to be with him, and felt a responsibility for our daughter to know her father.
Through her, desire and duty had finally found a way to coexist.
The announcement that we were nearing our destination broke me from my thoughts, and I fastened the seat belt around us both.
Had I traveled all this way, completely rearranged my life for the past three years, just to be rejected by him? The thought left a sickening hole in the pit of my stomach while the screech and jolt of the landing gear, and my daughter’s vise-like grip around my neck, didn’t help.
We deplaned and rode a taxi to our hotel among the busy city of Gordon, Port Moresby. I spent the next several days procuring transportation to the island and paid a guide to take us up into the highlands. We still had days of travel to go, and we were tired already.
I dropped our bags on the white comforter with a sigh, and my little travel partner crawled across the bedspread with a delighted squeal.
With each leg of the journey completed, I felt more trepidation that my carefully laid plans and hope for the future would crumble at my feet, but quickly reminded myself of what I’d learned through this whole journey.
Life was unpredictable and things happen that we can’t control, but the outcome isn’t up to me.
My job was simply to trust in a God I now knew played an active role in my life and take the next step.