Day 10

And that’s how the rest of my pregnancy went, I was well and healthy with the exception of a little morning sickness and I was hooked on John Collins. I took every opportunity to sneak out and meet him for sex. It didn’t matter what lie I had to tell or how far I had to drive. I was as addicted to him as the crack whores that worked the bad part of Biloxi were to their crack rocks. I loved him fiercely.

As a result I turned even more inwardly. I stopped hanging out with my friends and had no desire to be friendly with my coworkers. Most of the time I was just marking time until I could see John again and have him hold me in his arms. For the first time in my life I felt deeply loved and I blossomed under that feeling.

Cynthia Rose still tried to talk me out of my relationship but I was having none of that. I would point out to her that my life was everything it could be, I was getting high grades in college, on the verge of graduating with my Masters degree in psychology and I was in love. What more could I ask. She kept saying again and again that once the baby arrived he would dump me like used shoes.

That was the strange part to me, this pregnancy. While I felt more energy and in better health than ever before I felt no emotional attachment to the baby growing in my own body. It was more like I was temporarily harboring a parasite that was scheduled for surgical removal soon enough. When people at school and work asked me when I was getting married I’d set parrot off the lie I’d come up with to explain my pregnancy, I said I was being a surrogate mother for my eldest sister since she was infertile and desperately wanted kids. No one had to know that I didn’t have an older sister, they knew I came from a huge fundamentalist Christian family so the lie was accepted as the truth.

During that year I could feel that my siblings and myself were drifting farther and farther apart. I started seeing less and less of Cynthia Rose as my weekends with John and Annie became more frequent.

Cynthia had left the man she lived with and moved on to someone else while she’d personally taken on a more glossy sex pot look. Clothes that showed off her body every more with deep cleavage and that hugged her curves like Saran Wrap. She’d also blonded her hair to platinum and grown out her nails to dangerous lengths. In early spring she showed up at one of our brunches with bandages on her nose and a scarily large bustline, shrugging off my worried enquiries with a remark that all the top dancers had plastic surgery. To me she now looked every bit the wanton hooker my parents had dubbed her on their last visit.

Jake was involved himself with his lover. And he’d changed, turning from a handsome and earnest looking young man to something out of GQ magazine, groomed to within an inch of his life. He too looked like a stranger to me.

Every time I saw them I was more shocked by the changes that had taken place in them personally and wondered sometimes if I’d changed as much. Annie had restyled me to more of an elegant classic look and the t shirts and shorts were largely banished for the expensive clothing she bought me. I felt like I was going through a metamorphosis myself personally.

Looking back on that year I wonder how Annie could have possibly missed the signs that her husband and I had fallen in love, that we were having regular wild sex with each other. But she acted like she always did on my weekends there, like a nurturing big sister taking care of her younger sibling. Soon I was there every single weekend.

As the birth drew near I remember thinking that the arrangements they’d made sounded a little weird. From the earliest days of my pregnancy I’d been going to a doctor in Biloxi, who sent them reports on my health, how the gestation was progressing but Annie insisted that we go with having a local mid wife deliver the baby in their home. They wanted me to pack up and move in with them the final two weeks of my pregnancy. I felt odd about all of this but said yes, after all, my own mother had home births attended to only by a midwife and I had been studying to be a midwife. It was the natural way after all.

Another warning bell should have sounded when during one of my late night trysts with John in a motel halfway between his home and Biloxi he mentioned that they would be wanting me to give them another baby, one of their own using John’s sperm. He told me that Annie was going to approach me about this on the very next weekend. As we lay there in each others arms, sweaty and tousled from sex, John asked me to consider being artifically inseminated to expand their family. “Sweetheart,” he’d whispered, “there’s nothing I’d love more than a baby that was yours and mine.”

I didn’t know if I should take him seriously or not but he mentioned a figure, even higher than what I was receiving for this baby and I found myself agreeing. I loved John and I would do anything to make him happy. The idea of carrying his baby was something I would gladly do for him. And it gave me an excuse to keep on seeing him. I would be in their household still for another year or so and I’d still have him as mine for a little while longer.

Sure enough the next weekend Annie broached the idea that at three months post partum she would like me to consider being artifically inseminated with John’s sperm so that they could have a child they had a biological link to. I hugged Annie and told her I thought it was a marvelous idea and I’d be happy to do it.

What I didn’t tell them is that it would put all of my plans in jeopardy. I’d originally been planning on finding a psychologist position in another state, somewhere with better beaches than Biloxi, somewhere more cosmopolitan, say Miami or even California. But I gladly scrapped those notions and decided to look around for my first job in Biloxi after all. I’m sure I could practice at the clinic I did my student practice at now.

As summer approached I graduated from graduate school and it was a sad day while it was proud. Neither of my siblings attended even as I’d sent the invitation and I knew I was probably the only one up there getting a sheepskin that didn’t have a parent present. I hadn’t invited Momma and Daddy because I was pretty big by that point, ready to pop, the only heavily pregnant one on the platform. Annie and John Collins came and afterwards took me to the nicest restaurant in Biloxi to celebrate.

The month between the end of school and the due birth of my baby I spent working at the clinic. Just as I’d figured they were happy to hire me on as a new psychologist, pregnancy or no, and were willing to give me nine weeks off for the birth of the baby.

But a few weeks later I was asked if I would consider transferring to their Bay St Louis office where they were extremely short handed. They wanted me to start in the fall. Bay St Louis was just a short jog down the road from Biloxi so I agreed since this would be after the arrival of my baby.

I found my new schedule of just working with no schooling much easier and the salary I made was big enough for me to start thinking about moving out of my cheap little rundown apartment, to start looking for something much nicer. I haunted the beachside rentals and condos of the Bay St Louis area.

One bright Saturday morning I’d delayed my trip to see the Collins because I had an appointment with a realtor in Bay St Louis when someone knocked on my front door. I opened it, thinking it was Roberta, who I hadn’t seen in a while or any one of my other neighbors I’d been friends with. Once the Collins came into my life I admit I had almost no time for friends or anything else.

But to my surprise my brother Benjamin and sister Sarah Rachel stood there looking uncomfortable in their long very modest clothing in the humid summer heat. As I was mentally trying to figure out how old they’d be now, something like twenty one and nineteen, they both looked shocked, white faced shocked and Benjamin gasped out, “They said you’d become apostate and sinful but,, but..” My brother’s voice trailed off, not knowing quite what to say in the face of obvious sin.

I know that they, like me, was taught that some sins were almost beyond redemption, fornication outside of wedlock was one of those. “Please tell me you’re married.” Sarah said. I shook my head no and said, “Quite frankly, this isn’t really any of your business. Now tell me what you’re doing here.”

Neither would step foot over my threshold and I knew it was because they both were afraid of being tainted by my sin. There was no telling what my parents had told all my siblings about Jake, Cynthia and I. So I did the only thing I could, I lead them towards the beach and we sat down together on the steps of the seawall.