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“I’ll accept that, Clara,” John said as he took a sip from his coffee. His hand was shaking as he placed the mug back down on the table. We sat in silence for a while before he said, “I remember seeing you in the registration line at Wellmington. I knew you were the one for me right then and there. Remember, we were both with our parents?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I didn’t have the nerve to say anything to you, until I left registration. I searched for you all over campus and then by the luck of the draw we ended up in the same English class. When we started studying together, I waited until you were ready to move me from the friend zone into the romantic zone. I waited for you then and it seems like I’ve waited a lifetime for this moment.”
John stood up and walked toward me. I got up from my chair and moved toward the sink. “That sounds all lovey dovey and cute, except you skipped a major part of our love story. The part where you left me and married another woman.”
John’s expression went from pleading to sorrow. He moved closer to me as if the close proximity would alleviate his sorrow. However, I had no intention of making him feel better. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said as he reached for my hand.
I glared at him in all seriousness. “If you touch me, you will walk away with one less limb than you came here with.”
“Damn it, Clara! What do you want me to do? Do you want me to just go back to Miami and act like magic didn’t flow between us last night? Like seeing you didn’t dig up feelings I’ve tried to bury for so long?”
“Throw some dirt on ‘em and keep ‘em buried, that’s what I want you to do. I want you to leave and not care, the same way you didn’t care when you left me with child.”
All expression left John’s face, which immediately turned pale. His breathing deepened as he clutched his chest as if to manually keep his heart beating. Finally, the moment had come for him to live through the agony that never let me go. I silently reveled in every minute of his suffering. “You were pregnant, Clara?” he asked once he gained a semblance of composure.
“I was going to tell you the day you came to my house and told me you were moving away. But after I saw how easy it was for you to walk out of my life – our lives – I didn’t have the nerve to tell you. There I was at that university on my parent’s last dime, money they worked their entire lives to save, pregnant with a bastard child. I had no choice but to scrape and scrub, so I could get an abortion.”
The agonizing thought of walking into that rusty abortion house rushed back to me and hugged me like a Grizzly. John wrapped an arm around me and touched my stomach, as if the simple act would channel him into the soul of our lost child. I was too pained to push him away. Memories of my first pregnancy always brought me to my knees.
“I should’ve never left you, Clara,” John said, as his eyes filled with tears that dared to fall.
I stared off into space as yesteryear’s feelings of abandonment crushed my heart, all over again. “Aborting our child was the hardest decision I ever made, but I was under so much pressure. When I walked into that makeshift clinic and asked for Ms. Maggie, I knew my life would forever be altered. It still haunts me today, when I wonder what our child would have looked like, what he or she would wear, or where they would work.”
While thinking about my first child, John continued to hold me and I didn’t resist. I accepted the temporary comfort in his arms. For once, I had someone to lean on as I shared the way I felt about my first child, whose bright smile never saw the light of day. The incomplete feeling I’d lived with since that day never stopped haunting me, and besides Ms. Maggie, I never told a soul.
Many nights I cried myself to sleep as I wondered if our precious baby would have been a boy or girl. My heart ached for the loss of my child. It also ached because the man who implanted his seed deep within me walked away as if I and his unborn child meant nothing.
I was determined to finish college, when I left that clinic devoid of the precious human life we’d conceived. I didn’t even think about dating after John. I just buried my head in the books and finished at the top of my class with a degree in communications.
The thought of all I endured alone made me retract from the hold John had on me. The pain had been my comforter. I vowed to never let another man hurt me like John did and until I met Destiny’s father, Weldyn, I’d never gotten close to the same hurt.
Weldyn tried his damndest to break me with his razor sharp tongue, his constant degrading words and cheating ways. He never raised his hands to hit me, but the way he looked at me and talked to me made me embrace being single. I had two strikes on love and I didn’t intend to give anyone a third chance not to love me.
However, as much as he tried, Weldyn never took me as low as I was the day I walked out of that abortion clinic without my child and without the love that created it.
“If only you knew what I went through, you wouldn’t have the nerve to stand here in my face asking for forgiveness,” I said to John.
“Clara, I didn’t know you were pregnant. If I had known my child was growing inside of you, there would’ve been nothing anyone would have been able to say me to keep me away, including you. I would have stayed with you and I would have raised our child as a Turner. There is no doubt in my mind about that. You should have trusted me enough to know that.”
“But yet, I wasn’t enough for you to stay?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes you did. You said it with your actions when you left me.”
“I didn’t know you were with child.”
“John, that shouldn’t have mattered.”
“It matters. I never would’ve left you to make the decision about our child alone. I take care of my responsibilities. I always have. I don’t like knowing that you felt you had no one to turn to. In fact, I broke up with you because I wanted you to find someone who could be there for you while I was away.”
“It’s easy to say you wouldn’t have left me alone now that you’re not faced with the situation. What I know is your parents didn’t want you falling in love with a black girl, so they yanked you back to the front of the bus and into the land of the privileged.”
“My father thought sending me to Yale would put me in a better position
to run our business.”
