Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

might’ve fallen in love with her the first time I saw her,” he said. “There were all the girls in high school, and there was Sally.”
    “She was that beautiful?”
    “She was. And all these years, I never once, I could never figure out what she saw in me. But she said she loved me, too. I used to run to meet her after one class, just to walk her to the next. Or we’d go to the library together. Never my house. Never hers. My father, he had a bit of a problem, well, an elephant of a problem with booze. You’d never know what you were going to find if you went to my house. And Sally’s mother was a little crazy, I think. She sat in church half the day, every day. She scared the shit out of Sally not only about boys, but about everything. So we never went there. We never had much time at all. If Sally got home more than ten, fifteen minutes late, she’d have hell to pay. But then the senior class trip was coming up, to Lauderdale. We’d have time together. It seemed, it seemed like . . .“
    “Sally’s mother let her go?”
    “She did. We couldn’t believe it, but she did. She had this big thing about shame. Sally told her all the kids were going, she’d be the only one if she didn’t, and there were three chaperones, she said, teachers. They’d be watching every minute. Her mother said she’d have to pay for half of it, out of her babysitting money, and Sally agreed, she said she would and her mother signed.”
    “So you both went? And what happened?”
    “The teachers, the chaperones, they didn’t much care what we did. They were doing their own thing. Anyway, we were seniors, a lot of us eighteen already, and in a few months we’d be out of the school and out of their lives. They just didn’t pay a lot of attention.”
    “And?”
    “We left, me and Sally. We just wanted to be alone. That’s all we ever wanted, just to be together with no one else there. I’d been working weekends and sometimes after school, and she’d been babysitting. We had a little money with us. We took a bus and went down to the Keys and we found this motel along this strip of land, across the road from the water just south of Long Key, and we stayed there two days, two nights, just the two of us. It was a dumpy little place, just these little wooden cabins, no restaurant, no pool, not much of anything. But it was the most wonderful. . .“
    Jim took off his work boots and stuffed his socks into his shoes. He stood and offered a hand to help me up. I followed him to the hard, wet sand, and we stood there letting the foamy, ice-cold water rush around our bare feet, neither of us saying anything.
    “And then what happened when you got back?”
    “At first, it was just like it had been before. I’d walk her to her classes. We’d meet in study hall or the cafeteria. I’d wait for her after school and walk her partway home.” He looked at me. “Not close enough for her mother to see us if she was looking out the window.” He turned his face back toward the ocean. “Sometimes we came here, when the beach was empty. But it wasn’t the same, not like it was down there.”
    “And then what happened?”
    “She came and told me she was pregnant.”
    “And what did you say when she told you?”
    “I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been in my whole entire life. I was living with my parents. I didn’t have a dime. I had no way to make a living, to support her and a kid. And she was fifteen and a half. I could have gone to jail for what I did. I just wanted it to be not true. I wanted . . .“
    A whistling sound came from deep in Jim’s chest, the noise an animal might make after the hunter found his mark. I reached for his hand and he let me take it. “God help me, I wanted her to go away, to disappear.”
    “So you questioned the baby’s paternity?”
    “I did. I asked her whose it was.”
    “It was a long time ago,” I said. “You were, what, seventeen, eighteen? Just a kid. You were terrified. You made a mistake.”
    “She was . . .“ . you should have seen her face when I said that. As soon as I did, I knew I’d done the stupidest thing I’d ever done in all my life, but the words were out there, and a minute later the bell rang and she was gone.”
    “And you were still scared?”
    “Terrified. But I waited for her outside of the school, where we’d always met. I figured, we’d have to work it out somehow. Only she didn’t show. I didn’t know it yet, but it was already too late.