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I had a moment of peace and acceptance. This was almost over, and I knew I could do it. I chose to do this on my own.
“Okay.” I cried softly. “Okay.” My knees came up; my legs parted; and as I felt the next wave of pain come, I pushed. I pushed with everything I had in me. With all my love, all my anger, all my fear. With every emotion alive in my body. Tears ran down my cheeks. My eyes were pinched closed. The pain was so intense that I was mostly numb. My back arched; my head titled back; and I groaned only slightly. Not dramatically the way women do in movies and television.
And then, after all that, I felt immediate relief. My body was empty. My groans were replaced by the sound of a baby crying. I kept my eyes pressed closed. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted them to take her away immediately.
She continued to cry, and every instinct in my body wanted to take her in my arms. Soothe her. Hold her. Kiss her. Tell her, “It’s going to be okay; Mommy is here.”
“Do you want to see her?” I heard the nurse ask me.
I shook my head no, my eyes still pressed closed. I was sobbing because I could feel my heart longing for the baby who was crying for me.
“Oh no, I missed the whole thing!” Kelley was beside me suddenly.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to her.
I felt her hand on my forehead. “Rach, she’s beautiful. I think you should see her.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at Kelley. “I can’t.”
“I think you should, Rachel. It’s the only way to know.” It was the only way to know if placing my baby for adoption was the right decision.
I knew she was right, and in that moment, I hated her for it. I turned my head slowly toward the sound of the crying baby, and I saw her there in the nurse’s grip as she cleaned her. She was wrinkly with a head full of hair, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course, she would have a head full of hair. J.R. had more hair than I could have ever hoped for.
“Do you want to hold her?” the nurse asked me.
“It’s the only way to know for sure that placing her with another family is the right thing to do.” Kelley said to me again.
The nurse brought the baby to me. This beautiful baby had spent the last nine months growing inside of me. Every kick, every flutter, every hiccup—this was her, and I couldn’t believe that I was finally meeting her in person. Face to face.
I took her tiny body in my arms, pushed back the blanket from her cheeks, and gazed into her face. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was looking up at me with bright blue eyes, grateful to finally be meeting me in person, too. My eyes were locked into hers, and I knew then that she was the most beautiful person I had ever laid eyes on.
Tears ran down my cheeks, and I put my finger into her little hand.
“Hey there, little girl,” I whispered.
Her fingers wrapped around mine. Her lips moved back and forth, and I was immediately in love. I knew that I couldn’t give her away. All of the planning that went before this didn’t matter anymore. She was mine, and I was hers. She was my Knox Rose.
18
Present
It’s two a.m. We’re still sitting on the couch together. Still talking. We’re catching up, and I forgot how much I enjoyed just sitting with him. We used to talk a lot. Hours on end, just sitting and talking. The problem is that we never talked about the things that mattered. We never talked about my mother, and he never talked about his parents. We avoided discussions about the bad and only talked about the happy things—music, food, movies, books. All of the things that didn’t really matter.
As I think back on who we were, we were too perfect to be real. Hopelessly in love. Oblivious to life, really. It was as though we had created our own reality. A glorious reality, but it wasn’t real.
I look at him now, sitting on the other end of the couch. He’s wearing an old t-shirt and loose sweatpants, and his feet are bare. His hair is hanging well beyond his shoulders. His beard is fuller around his chin and above his lips, but it stretches from ear to ear. He smiles. He laughs. His blue eyes are kind tonight, but I remember how angry they were just yesterday.
I wonder if we can be repaired. I’m aware of how much distrust I caused, but I think that maybe we could be fixed. No matter how unreal our reality was years ago, there is one constant. I still love him.
“Answer this one question for me,” says J.R. He cuts his eyes at me, and there’s a sound of hesitation to his curiosity. “Did you date anyone?”
He’s already asked me this, but maybe he didn’t believe me. I think about the one and only date I have ever been on since I left J.R. Kelley kind of forced me into it after Knox was born. She said it was for my own good. I tried to like the guy. I even tried to make myself believe he was handsome, but the truth is that he couldn’t match up to J.R. No one ever would. After that night, I concluded that it was impossible for me to date because I was still relentlessly in love with a man who stole my heart years ago on my twenty-first birthday.
“No,” I answer. “I went out with someone once. Not because I wanted to.”
He hangs his head a little. “I tried to date, too,” he admits. “But no one was you.”
We sit quietly for a few minutes, and I imagine that we’re both picturing each other out with other people. It makes me sick to think about J.R. with another woman. It was something I tried not to think about too much while I was gone.
