The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(69)



“No!” Abigail screamed. “That’s impossible! You love me!” She whirled to face him, but by then he had turned his eyes toward the window.

“Yes,” he answered, “God forgive me, but I do.”

“Look at me!” she screamed, “Damn you, look at me! Tell me how you could do such a thing. I trusted you. I gave you everything I had to give.” As she spoke, he continued to stare into the blackness of night, a night so cold that a latticework of ice crusted the inside of the windowpane. “How,” she sobbed, “can you do this? Leave me? Leave our baby?”

“I’ve no desire to leave you, Abigail. We can go on as we always have. I love you but I can’t marry you.”

“What about the baby? Do you want your baby to be born a bastard?”

“Of course, that’s not what I want.” He walked across the room and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “it’s early in the pregnancy; you could do something. The child in your stomach is not formed yet, it has no eyes, no brain, no feeling, why, it’s barely more than a seed. Get rid of it and we’ll go on as we always have, just the two of us, in love with each other.”

“Get rid of it!” she screamed and broke loose from his grip. “Never! Never in a hundred thousand years! I would sooner die than harm my baby!”

“Well, have it. Then, give it up. Let somebody else adopt it.”

“No! Never! This is my baby and I’m going to –”

“Abigail! I love you but I cannot marry you. I cannot!”

“Then don’t!” she screamed. Abigail grabbed hold of a spring coat hanging in the hall closet, the first her hand touched upon, then she ran from the apartment.

Abigail stumbled along the staircase in a blinding haze of tears. Halfway down she missed a step and would have tumbled all the way to the landing, had she not been clinging to the banister. When she ran from the apartment with her bedroom slippers still on her feet, she’d thought only of escape – were it possible, she would have willed herself to vanish, disappear into the blackness of night and drift off to another place where she could pretend the baby’s father, her husband, had died a tragic death. As it was, all she could do was run – run away from the shame of a baby called it.

It, not son or daughter, not baby, just it – a thing to get rid of. The woman in New York was a wife, those babies were sons, but this baby was it. Get rid of it. Give it away.

As soon as Abigail stepped onto the sidewalk her foot skidded on a patch of ice and she went down hard; her back hit the frozen ground with such force that it set her ears to ringing and created a dizziness which made her forget where she was going. When she felt a sharp pain shoot across her stomach, she remembered the need to run, so she pushed herself up and continued moving forward, sliding each foot up a bit and steadying it before daring another move. Never had there been a night black as this, no moon, no streetlights, window after window dark, nothing but a faint candle glow in some distant building. She inched along the walkway until she caught the smell of the bridal path that cut through the park; she then made her way across the path and stepped into the frozen grass. Walking in the grass was easier, it was icy cold, it brushed against her ankles and made her shinbones shiver, but it was not as slick and treacherous as the sidewalk.

Once she had turned into the park Abigail started to feel an ache in her back and her legs grew so heavy, they had to be pushed along with lumbering lunges. Streams of tears had frozen upon her face and turned the skin raw. She was cold to the very core of her bones. She wanted to go home, crawl into her own warm bed, pull the comforter up over her head and hide for a month, maybe two months, maybe a year. But, she couldn’t – not with John there. Abigail headed for the one place she could go – Gloria’s apartment. It was only five minutes away if she cut across the park, ten at the most. She’d curl up in the rocking chair beside Belinda’s crib and breathe in the sweet smell of a baby girl. In the morning she’d go home, after John had gone back to his wife and sons in New York.

How could he think she’d give this baby away, Abigail asked herself. How could he possibly think she’d consider such a thing? He said the baby wasn’t formed yet, but he was wrong, he had to be wrong. She’d seen the baby in her dreams – a sweet little girl, dark-haired like him. A thought suddenly shivered down Abigail’s spine, a thought more bone-chilling than the wind. What if John, like her father, wanted only boy babies? What if he could tell by the look in her eyes that this baby was a girl? Was that why he wanted her to get rid of the baby? “God have mercy!” Abigail screamed in a voice so shrill that it caused the ice to splinter and fall from the branches. As her cry echoed across the sky Abigail could hear the sound of her father saying he’d sooner have a three-legged pig than another girl baby.

Lost in the blackness of thought and night Abigail turned herself around and wandered in circles. On any given day she could have walked the path from her apartment to Gloria’s blindfolded, she would have listened for the sound of traffic, sensed direction by the sun on her back, touched her feet down upon a stretch of flagstones and been there in less than ten minutes. But on this night, she’d walked for what seemed hours, at times losing sight of the bridal path, then finding it again but uncertain which way to turn. Her feet, she believed, were frozen and it was probably only a matter of minutes until the toes would start to drop off one by one. When she became too weary to walk a single step further, Abigail sat beneath a tree and prayed for morning. She cradled her stomach in her arms and promised baby Livonia that she would always be loved.

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