Months ago, when the crocuses were just beginning to break through the dirt and the air smelled new, Diana made the trip from Boston to visit us for the day. Unlike her previous visits, which had been filled with trips to a museum or to the theater in Providence, this occasion was clouded by sorrow.
Owen and I sat unnaturally upright on our chairs, picking at our fingernails and clearing our throats nervously. Diana hunched over the kitchen table and held her forehead in her hands.
Her husband had killed himself and no one knew what to say.
I imagined Paul's kind face, his eyes that always seemed to be in the process of forgiving the world for what it had done to him. Despite his chronic depression, he had been deliberately friendly to me, as if he'd sensed how hard I tried to please his wife and wanted me to know that he understood how she could be.
But then the image of his face exploded in my mind, splitting open and spilling his bloody brains out onto the shiny mall floor. How many people had watched his body tumble downward and break?
Diana's shoulders shuddered. I pushed back my chair and retrieved an afghan quilt from the parlor, returning to drape it around her huddled body. I kept my hands on her shoulders for a moment and pressed tenderly, trying to communicate something I didn't have the words for.
I was sorry for her.
I was sorry Paul had decided to lean over the railing in the atrium of the busiest mall in the greater Boston area.
I was sorry that we were seeing Diana at her worst, devastated, when she usually took such pains to hide any hint of vulnerability, even from her family. I could never tell her how sorry I felt.
Diana had raised Owen in the tradition of the casually upper-middle-class Bostonian bourgeoisie, which meant that they never discussed the specifics of their wealth, used "to summer" as a verb when talking about their second home on Nantucket, and consistently performed a certain type of perfection. A month before, Diana would have been gravely insulted at the suggestion that her son's college choice hadn't been competitive enough, or that the finger sandwiches at her garden party were a tad dry. It had taken many years for her to bounce back, in her own estimation, from her divorce when Owen's dad left. With all the layers of reputation upkeep, her day-to-day existence just seemed exhausting to me.
I did not envy her the charade, which was complicated further by her devout Catholicism. I had been raised Catholic, as well – "culturally" Catholic, my parents liked to say, since we only went to mass on Christmas and Easter. Diana, on the other hand, only wore dresses with pockets because she needed somewhere to stash her rosary beads. She prayed often and publicly, reciting the rhythmic lines as her fingers moved over and over the beads.
Maybe saying those prayers felt like acknowledging all the terrible things she had to pretend weren't real the rest of the time.
She'd held a wake for Paul, of course. But the casket had been closed. I'd been relieved about that; even when a death isn't as messy as Paul's, I've always found the Catholic tradition of displaying family members' dead bodies to be disturbing.
We all wait in line for a chance to stare down into the dead person's waxy face, their skin yanked impossibly taut across the various holes in a human skull. We even kneel down to get right up close. Then we have to walk past a receiving line of the deceased's immediate family to look into their horrified eyes and tell them how sorry we are for their loss. The whole ordeal doesn't feel like the best way to mourn.
It had been two weeks since the funeral and clearly, Diana wasn't yet ready to smile for the sake of being polite. Soon, her obvious loneliness would start making other people uncomfortable and she would, I imagined, do her best to suppress it.
But not yet.
She was dressed neatly in a black Talbots suit, but she wore her sadness like a shroud.
It was hard for me to feel the depth of her tragedy, though, while I was so preoccupied with my own. Owen and I had decided not to tell her about the pregnancy. In the state of Rhode Island, I could make the decision to have an abortion up until the point I was 24 weeks along. (When you're pregnant, you have to think of everything in terms of weeks.) That gave me until the end of May to officially make the decision, but I knew in my gut that it was what I wanted to do.
What if the baby looked nothing like me and everything like its father? What if it had the rapist's eyes? How was I supposed to feed, clothe, and love that child? It just didn't seem possible.
I leaned against the kitchen island, most of my weight on my elbow, watching my mother-in-law nibble on the edge of her banana bread. When she'd said she was coming to visit because she "couldn't be alone right now," I'd wanted to prepare a nice lunch. But I was on a writing deadline, so we were doing our best to enjoy the extra loaf of banana bread Owen had picked up at the church bake sale last weekend. That was when Owen still went to church.
He had gotten up to grab himself a beer from the refrigerator and now he leaned behind me to grab a bottle opener out of the drawer. "Mom, do you want anything else to drink while I'm up?" he asked.
And in the exact moment that she glanced up to answer his question, just as her red-rimmed eyes landed on him, Owen placed his hand lightly on my lower belly in that subconscious and possessive way men sometimes do. It was the first time he'd made that gesture since I'd told him I was pregnant, and it surprised me. I hadn't known he felt protective of this fetus.
I raised my eyebrows.
So did Diana.
"What was that?" she asked, her voice jumping an octave.
Owen yanked his hand away too quickly, answering her question.
But she needed to be sure. "What about Julie?" she asked, a gentle smile starting to play on her lips. My stomach churned. She thought she was going to be a grandmother and I dreaded telling her the truth. "You didn't ask Julie if she wants a drink."
Owen looked at me apologetically; there was nothing to be done. I shook my head slightly and shrugged, but I felt like screaming. I decided to rip the Band-Aid off quickly, before Diana's head started to fill with fantasies of her life as the grandmother to a joyful baby. She was already suffering so much today.
"Diana," I began, briefly locking eyes with Owen to let him know that I would be the one to break the news here. "Diana, I was raped. A little over two months ago. I will be okay, everything will be okay, but he... I got pregnant from it. I'm pregnant with the rapist's baby."
When I heard myself saying those words in that order, it didn't seem like I was describing a real situation. I felt like I was a character in a soap opera. A soap opera whose writers had gone on strike.
Diana's eyes widened and she let out a long sigh of air. Then she said in a measured voice, "Julie, I am so sorry that happened to you." She stood and came toward me, her arms outstretched to hug me. "Honey, I am so, so sorry." Over her shoulder, Owen stared at me intensely, wondering if I would continue or if that was going to be all I told her.
When Diana finally pulled away and returned to her chair, I took a deep breath. There was more. "And I'm going to have an abortion," I said.
She didn't respond.
I kept talking, but it felt impossible to meet her stare now. "Owen and I will start a family of our own soon, we promise, but not like this. I want to have Owen's child."
Diana cleared her throat. Then she kept her voice low and steady. "The answer is no," she said.
"No?" I repeated back to her, dumbfounded.
"No, our family will never forgive you if you murder this baby," she said.
I stared at her. It sounded terrible when she said it out loud like that, but I'd always known she felt that way about abortion. Everyone in my family felt that way about abortion.
"Mom, she was raped," Owen said quietly.
"Yes, she said that, thank you, Owen." Diana's voice was cruelly saccharine. "And it seems as if you take her word for it."
I was literally speechless. Her implication was clear, but I knew that no matter what my reaction was, she would somehow construe it as proving my guilt. I examined Diana's face for some sign of solidarity.
But my mother-in-law's face was that of a woman who had somehow made it six decades without meeting a rape victim she couldn't find a way to blame when she needed to. More importantly, I saw in her face that whatever respect she had maintained for my life was now secondary to what she felt for the blob of cells in my uterus, put there by a rapist.
Thankfully, Owen spoke up.
"Mom, that is out of line," he said. "Yes. I believe her."
Then he continued: "I think you're right about the abortion, though."
It was as though a thick, concrete wall went up between us as he finished saying those words. On this of all things, however unjustly, he had taken his mother's side – and I was alone over here.
I was worse than alone, though. I was invaded.