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  “He was different than the boys I’d been hanging out with. They were still kids. Sam was older. More mature. On our third date, he asked me to marry him. I said yes. I wasn’t sure if it was right, but it’s like they say—a drowning person isn’t picky about which lifeboat she climbs into. I wasn’t really sure about anything at the time except that I liked him. And if I was going to get married, I thought that marrying someone older would be safer.

  “I didn’t know until two days before our wedding that Sam had already been married once before. I guess his ex was a pretty strong-willed woman, and he couldn’t take it, so he had the marriage annulled six weeks after their wedding. I found out later that he’d told Claire that his next wife would be someone younger. Someone who would obey him. I guess that’s why he married me. I was pretty submissive. I did whatever he told me to do.

  “So we got married. Our wedding day was the happiest day of my life. I was so hopeful. Then, on our honeymoon, Sam told me to stop using birth control. He said he wanted a baby right away. He didn’t so much tell me he wanted one, as he demanded one—as if my feelings on the matter were irrelevant. We had never even discussed children before then. I told him that I didn’t think I was old enough to have a baby. I still felt like a kid myself. The truth is, I didn’t even know if I wanted one. I didn’t want anyone to have to live a life like mine.

  “But Sam was older than me and he said he didn’t want to be an old man when his kids were in high school. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t ready. But Sam didn’t care what I thought. He had this stupid line he’d heard somewhere—‘they’re not your feelings, they’re your failings.’ He just got meaner every time I refused. We started fighting about it almost all the time. I couldn’t stand it. It was like we had become my parents.

  “Then everything came to a climax. After months of fighting, Sam gave me an ultimatum. He said if I wouldn’t have his baby, he would find someone who would. He gave me until his birthday to make up my mind.”

  As Pamela spoke I realized that in spite of all the times I’d seen McKale’s father, I really didn’t know him. To me he was a laid-back, easygoing guy, who worked a lot and listened to vinyl records when he wasn’t working, which was partially why McKale had always been with me. I wasn’t sure that I believed everything that Pamela was saying, but it was clear to me that she did.

  “Sam said that he would leave you?” I asked.

  Pamela’s eyes teared up. She nodded. “More than once. I was devastated. I don’t even think it was about the baby anymore; it was about controlling me. He was good at punishing me. At first he was passive-aggressive. He would go days without speaking to me. I was always more needy than him, so after a day I would be begging him to talk to me—to love me. Then he began treating me like a child. One night he said he was going to spank me. I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. He made me go over his knee and he spanked me until I cried. It was so humiliating. I felt like a child again.”

  Pamela suddenly started crying and I noticed that the diners at the other table were looking at us. I waited for Pamela to gain her composure. As we sat there, the counter bell rang. The woman at the counter said in a bright voice, “Your order’s up.”

  Pamela was dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin. “I’ll get that,” I said. I walked up to the counter, got our tray, and brought it back to the table.

  By the time I was seated, Pamela had settled some. “Do you want to eat or go on?” she asked.

  “Go on,” I said. “So why didn’t you just leave him?”

  “Would you have left your wife?” she asked.

  “McKale wasn’t abusive.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know why. I didn’t really think of him as abusive. At least not then. To me, abuse was when you had bruises and broken bones, not just a broken heart.” She looked at me. “I don’t know. I guess you just have to go through it to understand. When people are in abusive situations, they measure things in contrasts. As much as Sam hurt me, leaving him would be even more painful. Besides, part of me always felt that I deserved to be treated poorly. It’s what I knew. I was always trying to earn somebody’s love.

  “The thing is, I knew he would win. I knew, in the end, I would have to do what he said.

  “I spent the next few days talking myself into it—telling myself what a good idea it was to have a baby and how great it would be to have a family. Or I’d tell myself, maybe once the baby came I’d feel differently, or what if I couldn’t even get pregnant and all this pain was for nothing? I finally decided that giving in would be my birthday present to him.

  “I knew that it was wrong—that I wasn’t even close to being ready to be a mother. But there was nowhere else to go.

  “On Sam’s birthday I got up and made him breakfast and brought it out on a tray. Underneath his coffee cup I put a note that said, ‘YES.’

  “He looked up at me with this triumphant smile and said, ‘Then let’s get started.’ ”

  Pamela was shaking her head. “Of course I got pregnant right away with McKale. I don’t get it. People pray and beg God for a baby and never have one, and here I am hoping I won’t get pregnant and I’m pregnant immediately.

  “I was terrified. Sam just kept telling me that everything would be fine—that being a mother was a natural part of womanhood.” Pamela grimaced. “As if he knew anything about being a woman.” She looked into my eyes. “No matter what they say, it’s not always a natural thing—at least not for everyone. After she was born I remember sitting in bed holding this beautiful little baby and thinking that I was supposed to be feeling something magical and wondering what was wrong with me. I never should have had a baby until I was ready. It wasn’t fair to McKale. It wasn’t fair to me.”

  Pamela wiped her eyes. “I felt insanely guilty that I didn’t connect with her. Truthfully, I resented her. And I hated myself for resenting her.

  “Of course, I couldn’t tell Sam any of this. I tried once and he turned on me so fiercely, I was afraid he was going to hurt me.” Growing up, I had seen Sam blow up a few times so I knew he was capable of extreme rage. “He told me that I was just selfish.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  Pamela bowed her head a little. “I told him he was right.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while. She was spent, and I wasn’t sure what to say. After a while she said, “Do you mind if I eat something?”

  I realized that she probably hadn’t eaten much for several days. “No. Of course not.”

  We both ate. Pamela wolfed down her sandwich, looking slightly embarrassed to be eating so quickly. When she’d finished the sandwich, she started on the soup, first with a spoon, then lifting the bowl. She must have been starving, I thought.

  When she had finished everything she apologized. “I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten for a while.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I should have let you eat. Would you like something else? Some pie?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “Shall I continue?”

  “Please,” I said.

  She looked down, collecting her thoughts. Her forehead furrowed. “Before I had McKale I was working as an office manager at a plumbing supply store. I had quit when McKale was born, but we struggled on just Sam’s income, so when she started school, I went back to work.

  “One day this really handsome man came in. Jeremy. He was a plumber but he could have been a model. I was having one of those really hard days when it was all I could do not to burst into tears. He asked if I was all right, and I started to cry. He was really sweet. He asked if I needed to talk to someone and offered to meet me after work for a coffee. I told him thank you, but I was married and he backed off.

  “But it wasn’t the last I saw of him. He became a regular customer and would come in several times a week. He would bring me a little box of chocolate cordials every time he came to sweeten my day. I began looking forward to his visits.

  “One day Jeremy came in about lunchtime. As he waited for his
order to be filled, we started in on our usual chat when he asked if I wanted to get something to eat. It was the right time, or wrong time, for him to ask. Sam and I had just had another big blowup that morning.” Pamela paused and her voice softened. “I said yes.

  “We ended up at his condo. It was only the beginning. We started meeting every week. Jeremy was single and had a great business, so he had a lot of money and was always buying me jewelry and clothes. I couldn’t bring them home, not that Sam would have noticed. Sam was busy trying to get his insurance business off the ground so he worked late almost every night. He rarely called me during the day.

  “After a year of our affair, Jeremy asked me to leave Sam and marry him. Sam and I had only grown more distant, so, honestly, Jeremy’s proposal sounded great. Except there was one hitch. He said that he didn’t want to be tied down to a kid. I understood that. I mean, I felt the same way. I had gotten married and pregnant so young that I’d never had the chance to see the world.

  “I know it sounds awful.” She looked into my eyes. “It is awful. I considered it. But I couldn’t do it. McKale was only seven. I couldn’t just leave her.

  “Jeremy said he understood. He said that that was what he really loved about me, that I had a good heart—but he loved me so intensely, that if our relationship wasn’t going anywhere, it would be best if we stopped seeing each other.

  “He stopped calling me. He still came in to the store, but he wouldn’t speak to me. It was agonizing. I was so in love with him. I wanted to be with him more than anything.

  “At home, things with Sam just got worse. He never outright called me an awful mother, at least not then, but I knew he was thinking it. Maybe it was because I was thinking it.

  “Then, one day, I went to pick McKale up from her babysitter and McKale said, ‘I don’t want to go home with you.’ The babysitter was really embarrassed. She said, ‘You don’t mean that.’ McKale said, ‘Yes I do. I don’t like her.’ ”

  Pamela’s eyes welled up again. “I know kids say dumb things, but it broke me. Sam hated me. Now McKale didn’t want me. I cried all night. The next day I called Jeremy from work and begged him to take me back. I said I’d do whatever he wanted if he’d just take me back.

  “He came and got me. I didn’t go home after work. I just went straight to his place. I didn’t even pick up McKale.

  “Of course the babysitter was frantic. She called Sam to see if I’d been in an accident or something.” Pamela wiped her eyes. “Or something . . . I got home that night after ten. McKale was in bed. Sam was waiting for me. He screamed at me for more than an hour. He said he had to cancel an important business meeting with a new client to pick up McKale. He told me that I was the most irresponsible mother on the planet—a horrible mother and wife.

  “That was the final straw. I told him I was leaving. He said, ‘You can’t leave us.’

  “I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ I went to our room, threw my things in a suitcase, and walked out to my car. Then I realized I hadn’t even looked in on McKale. I desperately wanted to see her. But what would I say? Sam wouldn’t have let me in anyway.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I never said good-bye.” She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose into a paper napkin. “Jeremy and I were married a week after the divorce went through. We traveled. I told myself I was happy. But of course the marriage didn’t work. When you have an affair with someone, the affair itself becomes the core of the relationship. The secret of the affair fuels the passion and the excitement. But once it’s legitimized, it’s just reality like everything else. Less than two years later, Jeremy cheated on me. I wasn’t really surprised. It’s like they say, ‘If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you.’ ”

  Pamela sighed deeply. “Jeremy wasn’t a good man. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, I mean, he was a cheater and he wanted me to leave my child. What more did I need to know? I guess I figured he was just like me.”

  “Did you ever consider going back to McKale?” I asked.

  “All the time. For weeks I’d skip lunch so I could drive to McKale’s school and watch her play at recess. I wanted to go back home, but the only way I could have gone back to Sam was on my knees. And he would have kept me there for the rest of my life. Maybe that’s what I deserved, but I knew I couldn’t do it. And what would that have taught my daughter?

  “I eventually moved to Colorado to start a new life. But you can’t run away from yourself. I married again in Colorado. That only lasted twenty-nine months. James. He left me too. He sent me an email to let me know he’d moved on.” She laughed cynically. “I really know how to pick them, don’t I?”

  I frowned.

  “After that, I grew hard. I convinced myself that real love doesn’t exist and all men are pigs. But it was a lie. Real love does exist. You and McKale had it. It just didn’t exist for me.”

  Pamela was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “At least something good came out of my last marriage.” She reached into her purse and brought out her cell phone. She pushed a key, then held the phone up for me to see. On the screen was a picture of a young lady maybe sixteen or seventeen years of age. She was pretty, with big brown eyes, long brown hair, and freckles. She looked a lot like McKale did at that age.

  “McKale has a sister?” I asked.

  Pamela nodded. “Her name is Hadley.”

  I took the phone and stared. “She looks just like her.” I handed back the phone. “What was it like when she was born?”

  “It was the way it should have been. The way it should have been for McKale.”

  “Was Hadley at the funeral?”

  “No. She didn’t even know about McKale. I thought it would be too confusing to her. But after the funeral, I told her.”

  “How did she respond?”

  “She wasn’t as surprised as I thought she’d be. She said she knew I had had another baby. I don’t know how she knew that. But she thought I had given her up for adoption or aborted her. She was really upset that I hadn’t told her about McKale. She had always wanted a sister.”

  “I can’t believe McKale has a sister.” At that moment there were a lot of different emotions swimming in my head, but anger wasn’t one of them. My rage for her was gone—I just wasn’t sure what had replaced it. Pity? Understanding? Maybe even sympathy. After a moment I said, “What do you want from me?”

  She looked down at the table for a long time. When she finally looked up again her eyes were filled with tears. “Grace,” she said softly.

  “Grace?” I frowned. “Grace isn’t mine to give. The one who needs to forgive you is gone.”

  “I just thought . . . ” She exhaled. “When I saw you at the funeral . . . when I met you, I knew that you and McKale were one. I thought—I felt—that if you could find a way to forgive me then it would be the same as McKale forgiving me. And maybe I could find peace.” She looked into my eyes. “And maybe you could too.”

  “What makes you think I don’t have peace?” I asked.

  “Because you can’t hate and have peace.”

  I thought over her words. When I finally spoke I shook my head. “I don’t know, Pamela.”

  She looked back down, closing her eyes to conceal her pain, though tears stole through the corners of her eyes. It pained me to add to all she’d been through.

  After a moment I said, “This is just a lot to process. It’s been a long day. I need to sleep on it.”

  She nodded understandingly. “We can go back to the motel.”

  I looked at her for a moment, then pushed my chair back from the table and stood. “Can I get you something else to eat? You could take it back to your room.”

  She shook her head as she stood. “No. I’m okay,” she said softly.

  We walked silently together back to the motel. I saw Pamela to her door. She inserted her room key, but instead of opening the door, turned to me. “Whatever you decide, thank you for listening. You have no idea how much it helps. Especially knowing that my girl
found someone who truly loved her.” She opened her door and stepped inside.

  “Pamela.”

  She looked back at me.

  “I’m sorry that you went through what you did.”

  She smiled sadly. “Thank you. Good night, Alan.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  She shut her door, and I went back to my room. I was emotionally exhausted. I just wanted to go to bed, but I hadn’t washed my clothes in days and the motel had a tiny Laundromat. I gathered my clothes and put them in the washer, then went back to my room. I watched television until it was time to transfer my clothes to the dryer. Then I returned to my room and the television. Finally, at eleven, I returned to the Laundromat and gathered up all my things.

  Back in my room, I threw everything on the dresser, then turned out the lights and climbed into bed. Only then, staring into the darkness, did I allow my mind to return to Pamela and the evening’s conversation. “What do I do, McKale?” I said aloud. “What do you want me to do?”

  I fell asleep with those words on my lips.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  My father used to say, “Pity is

  just a poor man’s empathy.”

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  I’m not one to ascribe religious significance to psychological or natural phenomenon. I roll my eyes with incredulity when someone claims a higher power found him a parking spot in front of the local Wal-Mart or a potato resembles Jesus or the Virgin Mother—as if anyone has any idea what either of them look like.

  Nor have I ever given much credence to the supernatural nature of dreams. I suppose that my beliefs follow the lines of mainstream psychology—that dreams are just repressed thoughts that slip out at night, like teenagers after their parents are asleep. Having said this, there was something so singularly powerful and peculiar about the dream I had that night that I couldn’t help but wonder about its source. I’ll leave it to you to determine its origin. As for me, it changed my heart.