Winner, Babee!

Day 30

A day early and hallelujah I'm very finished with this. Now back to my real novel

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I spent the rest of the month leading up to the birth of our last child in a state of weepy remembrance over Cynthia Rose. It colored a time when I should have been overjoyed, happily anticipating the birth of our son Daniel, into shadows and sadness. Afterwards I had a bout of post partum, spending a lot of my time wondering just how right the psychic had been.

This simple manila envelope came into my possession when I spoke at a meeting of professional women at the Four Seasons in Washington proper. I’d spoken to urge the listeners to donate to our foundation as well as volunteer and to raise awareness about our cause. Some of the monies we collected went to the families where the main wage earner was the missing adult and the rest went to provide necessary services for the families left behind that could not possibly afford them, such as counseling for those without health insurance coverage.

As I stood at that dais and looked out over the well heeled crowd of Washington professional women and told of my own personal involvement with NMAO I spotted a vaguely familiar man standing at the back of the ball room. He wasn’t part of the serving staff hustling around serving coffee and desserts nor was he part of the hotel staff. I could feel his eyes upon me and I wondered what he wanted.

After the dessert reception and all the different speakers he sought me out once the women who’d expressed an interest in helping the NMAO scattered and I sat alone at my table. When I looked up I recognized him at once, he was a little older, hair completely gray and he was starting to stoop. I wondered how old Sgt Sam Vocci was now and why he’d come all the way to Washington from Biloxi to see me. His face was unreadable but I knew it couldn’t have been good news.

I stood up and hugged Sgt Vocci, wordlessly, tearful, knowing what he was going to tell me. He sounded tearful himself as he whispered, “I’m so sorry.” When we broke apart he handed me this envelope, over sized and bulky and said gruffly, “Here. It’s all in here.” I held out the envelope, like it was a poisonous snake, like a bomb and stared at it, stared over at him, struck dumb. This was not how it was supposed to be.

Sam Vocci put one hand on my shoulder, a kindly touch and said softly, “Do you want me to hang around till you read it all or would you rather do this alone?” His voice jolted me out of my shock and I said, “Sam, I need to get back to my office and process this, look through the file but.. I might have questions about the material. Do you mind coming to my office and waiting in the ante room?”

He followed me in silence from the hotel and we walked over to the Metro station to ride the train to my NMAO office near Dupont Circle. I no longer clutched the envelope like it was deadly, now I grasped it like my entire life depended on it.

Once I sat down at my desk after telling the receptionist to get Sgt Vocci a coffee and to hold all my calls I sat here, stunned and afraid at the same time. I could sense in my spirit that the envelope held death, the aftermath of death, which led me to think about the twisted path my life and my sister’s life had taken after leaving home.

I hesitated, the longer I put off opening this the longer I had to get used to the finality of what really happened to Cynthia but suddenly I was seized by a desperation, more than anything else in this world I needed to know exactly what happened. I picked up carved giraffe wooden letter opener I’d bought on a trip to Kenya and in one swift movement I slit this thick envelope open and tipped the contents out on my leather desk blotter.

A jumble of things slid out, a womens slim wallet in faded leather still bearing traces of fingerprint dust, an autopsy report, photographs, so many photographs, some of crime scene and some from an autopsy and a sheath of paperwork.

There was no doubt who the wallet belonged to. It held a old faded drivers license that had expired nearly ten years ago. There was no money in it or credit cards but the photo section held pictures of my triplets as newborns, a wedding photo of Jude and I and pictures of Momma and Daddy and our family.

The first set of crime scene photographs were disturbing, a lady with blonde hair lay supine in a cheap hotel room and her skin was an unearthly sick shade of white. She had deep strangulation marks around her graceful neck and further photos showed that her hands had been crudely chopped off. Her face showed a peace that passed this world, whatever had happened to her she was in a place far beyond it. There was no terror or horror in her face.

It was undeniable that the photos of this dead body was my sister, Cynthia Rose, long dead, murdered by a trick from the looks of it. I read through the papers and yet as I cried a little bit what I felt mostly was relief, I think I’d known almost from the beginning that Cynthia was dead. Confirmation of that brought me some closure even as I was filled with horror at how she must have suffered towards the end.

After I pulled myself together I buzzed Doreen, the receptionist, and asked her to have Sgt Vocci come into my office. As he closed the door behind him and stood before my desk I looked up at him and said, “Thank you, at least I finally know. But I’m not sure I can make much sense of these reams of reports. Can you tell me what happened and how you found her?”

He sat down slowly and sighed, “It’s not a pretty picture and your sister, Cynthia, she was so beautiful, she could have done so many things with her life, but apparently, as best we can reconstruct, she chose to continue in her lifestyle with Brad. We don’t know if he had any involvement with this. The original reports seem to indicate that by that time Cynthia Rose and Brad Smith had parted ways, or not. I believe he was taking her all over the country to strip.
Once they left Seattle, they moved down to San Francisco, Los Angeles then on over to Reno. Your sister tended to dance at a place for a week, two weeks tops before they moved on. Both Brad and her changed their names on the circuit and your sister started wearing a red wig when she danced. I guess Brad didn’t want them to be found because there were outstanding federal charges hanging over him. Brad didn’t tend to stay in a place too long before he met your sister.

Those photographs, of the crime scene, are from about six weeks after your sister disappeared. They were taken at a cheap hotel in Baltimore’s notorious Block. Looked like a trick turned bad. Whoever did this horrible thing to your sister chopped off her hands and because there was no id and no way to fingerprint her the Baltimore PD had no way of knowing who she was, another Jane Doe. They ran artist renditions of her in the local news but no one came forward to claim that they knew her so the city buried her as a Jane Doe in the burial grounds they maintain for prisoners, the indigent and for people who die with no name, like your sister. I can take you to her remains if you’d like.”

I interrupt Sgt Vocci at this point, “Why do you have the wallet but no one could match Cynthia’s body with a name?”

“Because the wallet wasn’t discovered at the same time as the body. Your sister died in a run down hotel in the downtown area just off an area filled with strip clubs and prostitution and left only her clothes behind. They never found the hands and she had no distinguishing marks, tattoos and no obvious dental work. It was a dead end for the Baltimore police department until a month or so ago.

Large portions of the downtown area are now being gentrified in Baltimore Maryland. All those strip clubs and old hotels are sitting on land now worth major money and some of them have changed hands. That hotel was bought out by a major chain, who was completely redoing the rooms, gutting it and starting over. When the demolition crew removed the television from the room that Cynthia Rose died in they found a wallet hanging out of the back of the television, shoved back behind the set half in and half out of a loose panel on the back. They called the police, who realized that the photo of the lady in the license photograph matched their Jane Doe from nearly ten years ago. They ran Cynthia on the NCIC and here I am. We found her.”

“Thank you,” I sobbed out, suddenly glad this was all over with while knowing that breaking the news to my parents wasn’t going to be easy. I felt suddenly grateful for Jude too, he’d stuck by me for years while I’d searched, been my rock of stability, loved me beyond all reason.

Sgt Sam Vocci got up and smiled wistfully, “I promised you I wouldn’t give up and I didn’t”

As he stood there I picked up my office phone and dialed quickly before saying, “Momma, are you sitting down? They found Cynthia Rose.”

Day 29 (ONE MORE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

On a rainy and blustery April day, when the high winds scoured the sands from the beach and the waves lashed about violently Sgt Vocci showed up on our doorstep with the suitcase, handing it over to me and relaying their new information. The condo owner told the police that Brad had left them a forwarding address for Seattle, which turned out to be a strip joint near the Ballard section of Seattle. Seattle PD had arrested Cynthia Rose for prostitution and released her over five months before. The trail grew cold from there, no one knew where they went but now Sgt Vocci knew to start making inquiries at various strip clubs again. NCIC would show them when she was arrested again and he felt certain we’d get a hit, a real lead, soon enough.

But no more leads came in, it was as if the trail went cold at Seattle. Against Sgt Vocci’s advice I even flew to Seattle one blustery fall day and spend days searching the strip clubs and homeless shelters. At night I drove along the long strip of highway between Seattle and Tacoma where the local prostitutes plied their services. No one knew anything about Cynthia. Defeated and exhausted I returned home.

I’d stopped being depressed and now I was angry, horribly angry.

Calling Momma and Daddy to tell them that Cynthia was missing was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. Daddy’s terse, “I’m not surprised she came to a bad end” mixed with Momma’s hysterics still give me the chills when I think about it.

Watching me obsess over Cynthia’s disappearance combined with whatever my parents had told Hope Maria kept her on the straight and narrow when she was living with us. She quietly kept wearing her long denim skirts and button up blouses and kept her hours filled with either caring for the triplets or school. We never bonded as close friends in the way Cynthia Rose and I had. Sometimes I got the impression that in those days I frightened Hope Maria. I’m sure I came off as unbalanced many days.

But life moves on, while I heard occasionally from Sgt Vocci that they had no new leads but that detectives in the department were going over the case file again, nothing new turned up.

We moved in those ten years, much more than I would have liked, but in order for Jude to keep his career moving forward it was necessary. He seemed to get promotions every couple of years. Two years after Cynthia’s disappearance he was promoted to one of NASA’s facilities in Florida. I resisted going, I loved our home and didn’t want to sell it but mostly I didn’t want to somewhere else in case Cynthia Rose was still alive and decided to land on our doorstep. This idea, that Cynthia might try to contact me, through work, at my home, nagged at me, gave me sleepless nights and broke my heart. But what could I do, I’d promised in front of God and everyone to love, honor and obey so it was with a heavy heart we left Bay St Louis.

Immediately upon moving Jude broached the idea to me of having more children. He wanted a son or daughter of his own, that was his biologically. So in the middle of moving we started trying to get pregnant.

I hated Florida, there I was miserably pregnant in the insane heat and humidity more intense than anything Biloxi ever dished out, living in a rented house I didn’t particularly like that was a hard six block walk from the beach. I hadn’t been able to get a position immediately with any mental health clinic. I felt stuck in this place against my will. It didn’t help that I suffered from the worse morning sickness I’d ever had and that Jude worked long hours.

So I tried not to bug Sgt Vocci too often or complain to Jude much. I tried to settle into life in south Florida. After unsuccessfully trying to make friends among the largely uneducated housewives in our neighborhood I spent my days concentrating my attention on Seth, Jacob and Rachel and their different personalities.

Sometimes I did some digging on my own at the strip clubs and in the prostitution areas of our part of Florida, looking for any hint of Cynthia Rose, asking questions again only to find no one knew anything. Another repeat of Seattle.

Florida didn’t last long, less than a year, so heavily pregnant and wrangling toddlers I had to pack up so Jude could take his new promotion in Houston. Again I called everyone I could think of in the Biloxi area and left my new contact info on the million to one chance that Cynthia Rose reappeared and tried to contact me.

Houston was a breath of fresh air after the hot humid insularity I’d experienced in our small town in Florida. It was a booming large city, you could almost feel the pulsing vitality of this place. This time we bought a house again, not on the ocean since the beach was a good hour or so from the town of Houston, but in a nice newly built neighborhood surrounding a lake, not too far from the new airport.

But we didn’t have much time to unpack and get settled in before I went into labor and our daughter was born. I wanted to name her after my missing sister Cynthia but somehow it seemed a bit morbid so we named her Abigail Rose instead. Momma came down to help me and oohed and ahhed over our new house and how much the triplets had grown.

Immediately after the birth, two weeks or so, I started looking for a position as a psychologist in the town of Houston. After receiving quite a few offers quickly Jude asked me why I didn’t just hang out my own shingle and start treating patients on my own. He pointed out that by going out on my own I could write my own schedule and specialize in treating people who’d lost loved ones. “You have the compassion and personal experience to make it work,” he said, “use all you’ve gone through with your sister’s disappearance to work for you.”

And so I did, found a small office, made a few contacts at physicians offices and with the local police and human services agencies before hiring a receptionist and a housekeeper and starting to treat people who’d lost the people they loved. For the first time since leaving Bay St Louis I felt useful again, like I was doing something to contribute to the good of society instead of aimlessly drifting through my days in a haze of Barney, applesauce and endless laundry. Some women are meant to be stay at home mothers and some are not. I was not.

One of the women I was treating that lost a daughter in a very similar way to Cynthia Rose’s disappearance and during her treatment she started talking of her involvement with an organization dedicated to finding missing adults, the National Missing Adults Organization. She was involved with the local chapter and told me about how much attending helped her because she felt as though she wasn’t alone in it. Just knowing others had gone through the same experience helped her. That day I broke a rule good therapists never break, I told this patient, Pamela Geldmann about my sister’s disappearance and she convinced me to attend a meeting of the NMAO.

My first meeting at NMAO was eye opening and I plunged into a new cause with a fervent passion. After a few months I started attending the national events and throwing myself head first into the cause of finding the thousands of missing adults in our country. I added it as another part of my life, squeezing in the time between my work, my family and my still futile search for my sister Cynthia Rose.

When Jude was offered a high level bureaucrats position with NASA at their Washington DC office after a few years in Houston I was excited. Moving to the Greater DC area meant to me that I’d have even more time to devote to NMAO and their quest to find the missing. I already held a position on the national council so the move to DC would work on all levels for me.

My parents were thrilled with the move because it would put us a two and a half hour drive from their home.

The kids whined about it. Seth, Jacob and Rachel were now seven and Abigail Rose was four. The kids didn’t want to leave their friends but were excited to see their grandparents, the only grandparents they had considering Jude’s parents had passed away when he was in college.

In some very sick humor that the universe seemed all too eager to inflict upon me I discovered mere days before the move that I was pregnant again. Jude was overjoyed but I was a little less enthusiastic this time. I’d never intended to spend the years of my younger adulthood caring for babies and young children like I had as a teen.

But we went through with it all, I moved again with horrid morning sickness and we settled in an area of northern Virginia just over the DC line called Clarendon. The houses in our neighborhood were beautifully maintained classic homes from the thirties. We moved into a stone Cape Cod with five bedrooms within a ten block walk from the nearest Metro station. This house also had the virtue of a nice mother in law apartment over the garage that I immediately converted to my office.

When I wasn’t being a wife and mother and seeing new patients in my home office I could be found downtown helping out at the NMAO office, still hopeful that one day I’d know what happened to Cynthia Rose. As the organization gained media visibility I was asked to take on the part of speaking in public about the cause nearest my heart, and I appeared on news programs, conferences and talk shows drumming up support for our cause, stalking members of Congress to get legislation passed to allow for a freer exchange of information between law enforcement agencies.

During one appearance while I was in the last month of my pregnancy I’d been surprised at the talk show by a so-called psychic brought on by the host, who asked her what she could see had come of my sister. This woman, whom made me feel very uncomfortable, looked right at me and said on national television, “Your sister is dead, murdered and buried in a potters field.” At her words I fainted and I felt the flicker of hope in my heart for Cynthia’s whereabouts vanish.

I never appeared again on a talk show touting NMAO so rattled I’d been by this trick by the tv producers. From that point on I stuck with conferences and news programs, no more talk shows.

Day 28

But no matter how many times I knocked no one answered, there was no stray sound in there, no one scurrying about pretending not to be home. It was like knocking on the door of an empty tomb.

Once I got back down to my car I was trying desperately to remember the name of the import business and the strip joints Brad owned, perhaps she was at one of those. I drove to each place in turn but the business was abandoned, I could see through the front windows that everything was a dusty turmoil within. The office looked like it had be stripped of anything usable and left to rot months ago.

My luck at the exotic dancing clubs was only marginally better, at the first two I entered people said sure they knew Brad Smith and Cynthia Rose, but no one had seen either on them in a good couple of months.

The final club I visited was Brad’s biggest and fanciest and I stepped through the door into a world of darkness and degradation. Men sat around in various states, almost as though hypnotized while two women dancing naked and very suggestively together as though they were about to embark on a lesbian relationship. Chants of kiss, kiss kiss, rose from the watchers. The interior of this place was fancy but the action on the stage was part regular stripper act mixed with mostly semi porn action. ‘So classy, Brad..” I mumbled under my breath on the way to the bar.
The bartender told me that Brad had sold all three of his clubs several months back and he didn’t know anyone named Cynthia Rose. When I showed him the photograph I kept in my wallet he gasped and said, “Oh, you mean Tiffany Rockafella? She split, left Brad for another guy and ain’t been seen in these parts for a couple of months. Shame though, because the regulars keep asking for her.”

I left that smoke filled mirrored world with the wildest of suspicions running through my brain and decided that I would go to the main police station in town to file a missing persons report.

But the police were no more help that anyone at the strip clubs had been. The cop that took the report seemed almost reluctant to write it up. He said, “I’ll file this ma’am but the reality is that hookers run away from their pimps every day.”

At his statement I’d blown up, “My sister was not a hooker! How dare you make unfound accusations like that.”

Without a word he turned his computer screen towards me and I saw on the screen that my sister had a long list of arrests through the years for prostitution. It was akin to a spear through the heart, I knew that Cynthia had done exotic dancing for years but not that she sold herself. There were a few drug arrests scattered in for small amounts of pot but she’d never done more than a night of jail time.

I left the Biloxi police station feeling hopeless. No one was worried about a missing hooker and I wept in my car during the drive back to Bay St Louis, knowing that if she’d have been a suburban housewife or career woman it would be all over the news by now.

During the months to follow I took to sleeping for a few hours after everyone in the household had gone to bed, and getting up to cruise the closing strip clubs and casino shift changes, looking for someone that resembled my sister even slightly, a certain way of walking, the carriage of herself, but it was for nothing. I didn’t find her.

Jude tried many times to talk me out of it, pointing out that if Cynthia was still around anywhere in the country that she would eventually find a way to let me know. She’d call eventually. Jude believed she was just off somewhere with Brad having an adventure, perhaps stripping on that trip around the nation’s clubs she’d mentioned that Brad was pushing.

My worry for Cynthia and my obsession with finding her sent me spiraling down into a steep depression. All the things I’d put off dealing with, the death of John Collins and everything that happened, giving up my first baby, being cut off from my family for so long, it all caught up with me and I felt no joy in living. The only emotions I could feel were love for my children and Jude and the blackest emotional pain. I moved through my days on auto pilot and only allowed myself to break down once I got home. I stopped combing the areas underbelly for my sister and I believed her to be dead.

My only pleasures lay in the triplets and with Jude. I had come to deeply love Jude, just as he’d hoped I would. Many times when I took to our bed during this depression he sought to ease my feelings by making love to me. It was a temporary lift. Finally the day came when he insisted I go to one of my supervisors at work and ask to go into therapy myself before he took me down to the Biloxi police station to demand that they do something more.

So I spent my lunch hour several times a week in therapy with a senior therapist and went on anti depressants. It helped, I started to feel more normal and on an even keel even if my sadness over Cynthia Rose’s disappearance never really lifted.

That afternoon that Jude and I showed up at the police station to ask why looking for my sister seemed to have taken a back seat to other types of law enforcement also helped me deal with what was going on. Jude got into something of a hostile argument with the officious and bitter young black man who worked missing persons. The officer had snapped at him that they didn’t have the resources or the man power to chase down every hooker reported missing.

As their voices raised a middle aged man stepped out of a glass fronted office and stared curiously in the direction of the ruckus. He had wavy salt and pepper hair, a stocky build and eyes that looked like they were haunted by having viewed the horrors of this world behind his thick black glasses. He listened to the dispute somberly before cutting off further argument with a briskly spoken, “Detective Jones, in my office, now.”

Jude and I sat there for about ten minutes, unable to hear what was being said but watching through the glass as Det. Jones and this mystery supervisor were clearly arguing about something. Jones emerged and glumly left the office. The other man emerged and invited us into his office, saying he was personally going to be following up on our missing person report.

Cynthia had been missing six months now.

He introduced himself to us as Sergeant Sam Vocci and proceeded to tell us a great deal about the case that we didn’t know. Apparently Brad Smith had a number of aliases and the department had been trying to bust him for years. A year ago the FBI became involved because Brad Smith, real name Joseph Antonio Cosino and he wasn’t from Stamford, Connecticut as he claimed, but from Brooklyn, a product of the streets and almost certainly part of the Mafia. He had a string of arrests and some prison time for drugs and running prostitution operation along with other recent federal violations. He always masqueraded as a Waspy business man in the import business when he approached ladies to add to his stable of hookers.

He pulled no punches and gave us no false hope. He said about my sister’s whereabouts, “If she’s not dead somewhere then he may have sold her into slavery to the South Americans or to one of the Arab sultanates because he’s done that before. What I can do for you is to get search warrants and search that apartment and the businesses of his, we’ll put your sister’s photo, fingerprints and information onto the NCIC and then we wait. We’ll revisit the case every few weeks and work it from every angle but I must warn you that it might be likely that you’ll never know for sure what happened to her. Are you prepared for that possibility?”

Holding back tears I shook my head and said, “I’ve realized that it’s likely she’s dead somewhere and we’ll never know. But I need to know that this police dept has done all it can do before I can live with not knowing her fate.”

We shook hands on it and I found myself trusting this man, Sgt. Vocci. If Cynthia Rose was somewhere out there alive he would eventually find her.

The searches of the clubs and the business offices of Brad Smith turned up nothing. A dead end. But when the cops showed up at Bayswater Biltmore they’d found another man in residence, a man who claimed to be the real owner of the condo, saying he’d been subleasing it to Brad Smith while he was working overseas for a few years. The owner led them to the few possessions left behind by Brad and Cynthia he’d put aside in storage in the basement.

One of the things left behind was the cheap suitcase Cynthia Rose had come to Biloxi with and it held personal possessions from her past, her clothing from when she’d first arrived, long calico jumpers and modest blouses, a favored stuffed animal from childhood and her journals and books.

On a rainy and blustery April day, when the high winds scoured the sands from the beach and the waves lashed about violently Sgt Vocci showed up on our doorstep with the suitcase, handing it over to me and relaying their new information. The condo owner told the police that Brad had left them a forwarding address for Seattle, which turned out to be a strip joint near the Ballard section of Seattle. Seattle PD had arrested Cynthia Rose for prostitution and released her over five months before. The trail grew cold from there, no one knew where they went but now Sgt Vocci knew to start making inquiries at various strip clubs again. NCIC would show them when she was arrested again and he felt certain we’d get a hit, a real lead, soon enough.

Day 27

Home stretch, home stretch, just a few more days now!!
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I could see why Cynthia Rose was attracted to him, Brad Smith was a very handsome man, he looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of a men’s magazine like GQ. Blonde hair, cerulean blue eyes, that perpetual tan of the boys of summer. His jawline was regal and his face in perfect proportions. He was slim and muscular, I would bet beneath those expensive designer threads he wore he had a rippled six pack.

But to me all I saw was a snake slithering in the grass of Eden. He came off with an oily charm and when I looked at him I heard warning bells.

He said all the right things but I saw the way he looked around, like our nice home wasn’t good enough for him, his smug pride when he looked at Jude’s plump face, Jake’s average face and Daddy’s wrinkles and thought secretly that he was the handsomest guy in the joint.

But he made me the most uncomfortable with Cynthia Rose. When they sat together at dinner I picked up a note of menace in his few softly spoken words to her. Cynthia Rose looked directly down at the table top and blushed red. I was amazed because I’d thought with the life style Cynthia had lived in the past that she was beyond all embarrassment. I was wrong.

During dessert he tried to ingratiate himself with me by engaging me in conversation about the state’s new sweepingly ambitious mental health programs and how that was going to translate to less crimes and decreased poverty in the state of Mississippi. But I saw through his obvious facade. Cynthia cut me a look as if to say, “I’m sorry.”

Looking back at that dinner party makes me weep because if I had even an inkling of what was coming soon I would have never let Cynthia leave and I would have perhaps called the cops to removed Brad Smith. But you just never know when things are unfolding where they will lead. That was the last night I ever saw my sister.

Momma and Daddy went home the day after that dinner party, we saw them off to the airport and several days later my sister Hope Maria showed up, as naive and sheltered as I’d been, straight off the bus from Pennsylvania. We bought her a car and paid her the salary we would have given to a stranger and I was glad to have her in our home, reconnecting with another member of my family. I enjoyed her presence and her crazy sense of humor.

It was kind of a funny thought leaving my children in Hope’s care considering I had cared for her during her young years, changed her diaper many times and given her a bottle. Now she was returning the favor in my life through my children.

And we settled into life. Hope enrolled in seminary for night time classes, I went back to work thirty hours per week and Jude continued on at his position with NASA. We settled into a routine, the only thing changing was how much the babies grew.

It seemed every day they changed a little bit and I felt torn between Rachel, Seth and Jacob versus my job. Raising the triplets meant that I didn’t get much rest at home after work. The washer seemed to be constantly in use and many times both Jude and I had to get up together to get the diapering and feeding done in the middle of the night. Sometimes even with my sister Hope there to help out I felt like a zombie.

Because I was walking around in this state like a zombie I didn’t even realize at first that it had been a few weeks since I’d last talked to Cynthia Rose. One afternoon a client cancelled at the last second and I had a few free moments so I decided to give her a call.

When the phone was picked up after many rings it didn’t even sound like my sister on the other end. It sounded like the booze rattled too many cigarettes and late nights night owl croaking out a greeting immediately upon rising in mid afternoon. We talked for awhile and Cynthia told me that because Brad was even more short handed at the bars she was pulling more shifts.

Over the coming weeks whenever I spoke with Cynthia Rose she sounded even worse, sickly even. I kept asking her if things were alright between Brad and her but I always got the answer that he was wonderful and that they would be marrying after all this trouble with the clubs settled down.

Of course I never believed her and I let her know each time if she ever needed to get away she was welcome at my home. She could call me any time day or night.

When the call finally came I wasn’t really expecting it. I’d fallen asleep in the rocking chair in the babies room after having breast fed all three babies. Jude had stumbled into the nursery, sleep addled and hardly able to walk or talk. He mumbled out that Cynthia was on the phone for me and it was urgent.

I was instantly awake and I ran downstairs to talk to Cynthia without stealing any more of Jude’s precious sleep. But Cynthia was crying so hard I could barely make out what she was saying, something about how Brad had beaten her black and blue because she’d dared to refuse his request to go on the road. Brad had purchased interests in clubs nationwide, from Seattle to Key West and he expected her to dance in all of them. His scheme was to rotate his dancers around so that the clientele didn’t get bored with the same old dancers.

She’d gasped out, “There’s just so much you don’t know, Emily and I’m afraid to tell you.”

“Do you want me to come get you?” I asked anxiously, “Whatever it is, Cynthia, it’s easier to face if there are two of us. I would never presume to judge you on anything that you’ve done in the past. I’m your sister and I love you.”

“No, no,” she whispered, “I’ve already called a cab, I’ll come to you. Just make sure that the security personnel at the gate know not to let Brad in regardless of what he says. I’ll be there in about an hour because I need to pack first.”

“Leave your things and get out of there. Things are replaceable but you are not.” I urged frantically.

“I want to take my jewelry and some things I’ve had for years. Don’t worry, Brad left for his club across town to watch the late shift manager and he’ll probably be gone till dawn. I have plenty of time to get out of here” Cynthia said, sounding calmer already.

After I hung up the phone I’d made a pot of coffee and sat in front of the french doors watching the waves roll in and out, thinking about Cynthia and how much she’d changed through the years.

She never came. Close to dawn I got a phone call from her brightly saying that everything was good and I shouldn’t worry. Brad and her would be setting a date next week and she’d call me and let me know. That was the last phone call from my sister.

Several weeks past, no word. I was feeling scared for Cynthia Rose but heard nothing. She didn’t call and life went on in it’s endless cycle of diapering, feeding, sleeping and work. I worried but not unduly, this is always how it went with Cynthia and I, when things were going well, or at least average, she didn’t call much. But when things were not so great I heard from her a lot. I figured her silence meant she’d worked out whatever the problem had been with Brad. While I wanted her to dump Brad I knew that there was nothing I could say or do to make that happen. Cynthia would have to take the first essential step of breaking away.

When six weeks had passed without hearing from Cynthia I tried given her a call, first to her cell phone, which just rang and rang without either clicking over to voice mail or being answered. Very odd, I thought. When I rang her home phone it immediately clicked over to voice mail but the voice wasn’t someone I recognized saying that this number wasn’t available so please leave a message. Usually you got a recording of a bubbly Cynthia Rose telling callers that she and Brad were all tied up and to leave that message.

Not too weird and alarming but still, I knew at that moment something was very off without knowing why.

When another week passed and now Cynthia’s cell phone gave the message that the number was out of service combined with that strange voice on her home phone I started to worry. I took off work early one afternoon and drove into Biloxi to the apartment she shared with Brad Smith atop the Bayswater Biltmore.

I did not find what I’d been expecting at all. And it made me even more uneasy than before.

I remember how my ride up the elevator to the penthouse apartment Cynthia Rose lived in seemed to take an eternity instead of a moment or so. I had no eyes for the view from the rooftop lobby window across the wind swept beach. I was solely focused on assuring myself that my sister was alright.

Day 26

Finally he spoke to my father, in a deadly serious tone that brooked no argument. “Sir, I know it’s been a hardship on your family to be missing their mother, the glue that holds the family together but the needs here were more pressing. You may not know this but your daughter very nearly lost her life having your grandchildren. I’d think you’d have been glad that your wife was here to help out and to spend time with her daughter. Both of you will always be welcome in our home, but we do demand you treat our choices with the same respect we treated yours in your home.”

Daddy looked momentarily alarmed, looking from Jude to me and said, “Kitten, is that true?” I nodded yes, confirming Jude’s words. He sat down suddenly, like a man with the wind knocked from him and he grasped my hands while saying to Momma, “You never told me that.”

She hugged his shoulders and whispered, “I didn’t want to worry you, honey. I knew it was hard enough being apart all this time. I decided not to say anything unless, you know, the worst happened.. thankfully God was merciful and everything is alright now.”

While Daddy held my hands and said, “I’m so sorry. I just charged in here like an old fool because I was missing your mother so much. I never thought to consider what it’s been like here.”

“Daddy stay,” I urged, “just for a few days, here with Momma.”

He agreed, nodding mutely. I could see behind him that this made Momma very happy, she clapped her hands in a girlish joy.

“Will you at least see Jake and Cynthia Rose while you’re here. No matter what type of choices in life they’ve made they are your children. The Bible teaches forgiveness so can you not put your feelings about their paths aside to see them? I know they’d like to see you again.” I urged gently, as funny as it felt to be lecturing my father on what the Bible said.

Still holding my hands I could see he was now weeping, realizing that I’d come close to death had a profound affect on my father. He still didn’t speak, he nodded yes again and sobbed openly.

My mother sprang into action, hugging him tightly.

I’d thought at first that having both of my parents here for the additional two weeks they stayed would be strained and difficult, but it wasn’t. I realized that the real reason he’d come after my mother was indeed that he missed her. They’d never been apart more than two days before and here she had been staying with me for over five months. I saw now what a sacrifice it was on their marriage.

In my ignorance I’d always assumed their marriage was based on duty and guilt, guilt over the baby they aborted in high school. But as I spent time with both of them, time as an adult with life experienced I couldn’t have hoped to possess as a kid, I realized that they both were deeply in love with each other, that there was still considerable sexual energy between them. My parents completed each other in a way I’d never realized before.

Watching them I wondered if nearly thirty years into our marriage would Jude and I have this sort of love still between us. I envied them that love and hoped we would have that type of white hot flame still burning between us as the years went on.

And so yet again I summoned both of my siblings, Jake from south Florida and Cynthia Rose from nearby Biloxi to my home for a meeting with one of our parents.

Cynthia glumly agreed and didn’t bother taking offense when I asked her to dress conservatively and act at least slightly repentant for living with Brad. “I’m not stupid,” she’d said in a dull voice, making me wonder exactly what she’d been up to since I last saw her. “Brad and I are engaged. I’ll wear my engagement ring and even drag Brad with me. He owes me big time right now.”

When I called Jake he said to my request, “You know, this is why I’m starting to dread your phone calls lately. It was awkward enough with Momma but gay bashing homophobic Daddy? Impossible!”

“Please, Jake?” I’d plead, “Do this for me if you cannot do it for yourself. Besides you haven’t seen your new nephews and niece yet.”

“Okay, okay, you win,” he’d agreed finally, “But I’m doing this for you and to see your babies, not for Daddy.” A note of wistfulness crept into his voice as he added, “I would like to see Momma again before she leaves.”

We spent the two weeks that Dad was with us as we had been spending most of our time, simply living day by day. I took long walks on the beach with Dad and he accompanied me when I took the babies out for an afternoon walk on the sidewalks through our community. All of us gathered for dinner nightly. My parents spent a lot of time with each other or together with the babies.

I even took my father with me a few times to the clinic I worked at so he could get a sense of what I did for a living, perhaps even understand that what I did was help others struggling with a variety of issues. I had to attend a few meetings so I’d be up to speed when I returned in a few weeks. One afternoon I came out of a short meeting on changes in regulations on insurances to find my father nearly in tears. “These poor people.” he whispered, much affected by sitting here among the depressed and chemically addicted, “They need Jesus so much.”

“Yes,” I simply agreed, “but since many of them are so unwilling to accept Him into their lives then they need other kinds of help. That’s where the other therapists I work with and myself come into play. We help them deal with the stuff of their lives, Daddy.”

He looked up at me with a new level of understanding and said, “This is your mission field, isn’t it?”

I smiled, he finally got it. “Yes it is.”

On the ride home from the mental health clinic Daddy was uncharacteristically silent, staring out of the window at the landscape of knobby loblolly pines and palmetto plants mixed with occasional home or business. He finally spoke when we were nearly home, “Emily, I’ve decided to sent Hope Maria to you to help out with your babies. That way you won’t need to hire some outsider you don’t know if you can trust. Hope has her heart set on going to ministry school and being ordained. One of the schools she’s got all picked out is in Waveland, the next town over. They offer night classes, so she can help out with the babies while you and Jude work and go to school at night.”

I sighed in relief, knowing that by the offer my father was showing his approval of Jude and I, our life, our small family, as well as solving my biggest ongoing problem. a nanny or au pair for the babies. So far I’d interviewed ten people and my inner sense was that none of them was really right for the job. But I felt I had to tease my father just a little too. “So,” I said, “does that mean you’re no longer opposed to women in the pulpit, Daddy?”

He sighed, a long sad exhalation and said, “This world is a changing too much for me but I can find no direct scripture forbidding it in the Bible. It wouldn’t be my first choice for Hope Maria but I’ve learned the hard way, through you, through Cynthia Rose and Jake, that I must give each of you the space and freedom to be who you are in the Lord.”

I hoped he meant that because the weekend before they would be leaving was upcoming and we were hosting a dinner to which Jake, Cynthia Rose and Brad were invited. Jake was no longer with his Captain but he complained that he would have liked to have brought a special someone to my home had he been seriously involved. It was the only thing I was ashamed about the invitation, I’d told him not to bring a lover or partner. I just knew that Daddy couldn’t have handled a meeting under such circumstances.

Not that I or Jude objected. Our church taught that while the Bible frowns on homosexuality it wasn’t our place to judge or discriminate, we were to treat others from different walks the same, with love, the love Christ showed each of us, with out reservation or discrimination.

The dinner turned out to be awkward, my father wasn’t as far along in his ability to forgive and forget as I thought he had been. He treated Jake almost like a leper, unable to look him in the eyes, wincing upon hearing that Jake had a career as a graphic artist with a newspaper in south Florida, like it wasn’t a manly enough pursuit. He kept asking Jake what had been wrong with working on the fishing boats, not understanding that Jake, like I, had decided to give it a try working with what was his passion.

At best by the end of the evening an uneasy truce had been affected. Jake had spent most of his time with us holding one or another of the babies.

But I wasn’t so worried about Jake as I was Cynthia Rose by the end of the evening. Cynthia and Brad had turned up an hour late and Cynthia looked to be on the verge of tears even if she looked every bit the respectable lady that Momma thought she was. She slurred her words as though she was on some sort of drug and I noticed a new welt on her upper arm when she rolled up her sleeves to help Momma and I wash the dishes after dinner.

This was the first time Jude or I had met Brad and neither of us cared much for him. Watching him suck up to first my mother and later, my father, made me sick to my stomach. When the triplets were brought out he cast an eye towards them almost like he was busy calculating the financial worth three healthy white infants could bring on the adoption black market. He gave me the creeps in the worst way.

Day 25

I can barely remember any of this because I ended up in ICU after the medical team had a hard time stopping my bleeding. For some reason my uterus refused to contract as rapidly as it was supposed to and I came very close to bleeding out. I remember feeling lightheaded and a nurse checking me out only to discover I’d bled too much. After that things got every fuzzier and when I came to in ICU only to see Jude crying over me. He’d been shaken to the core by my turn for the worse.
When I came to he told me how many pints of whole blood I’d been given and that after different treatments and so much blood replacement my body had finally responded. But he’d been told if the bleeding didn’t stop they’d have to do an emergency hysterectomy.

Poor Jude had starting thinking he might lose me and he’d broken down. But he’d finally seen the babies and was happy to tell me that all three were healthy and as developed as could be expected. Looked Rachel might be developing jaundice but all three babies were stable.

My week in the hospital passed quickly between visits from friends and coworkers plus Momma and Jude stopping by several times a day. But on the day Cynthia Rose came to see me I was glad neither Momma or Jude were there, I could see as soon as she stepped into the room that while she was happy for me there was a great underlining sadness in her very posture. She was dressed more like her old self again, high heels, short hip hugging skirt and her hair was in a wild blonde mane suitable for a rock and roll music video.

When Cynthia Rose sat down in the chair next to my bed and pulled off her sunglasses I had to suppress a gasp. She sported a black eye poorly disguised by eye makeup. “Don’t” she said with a sigh, “Don’t ask me any about this.”

“Honey,” I said, on the verge of tears again, “How can I ignore that something monstrous is going on with you. Did Brad do this to you?”

She blinked back tears and said, “I can’t talk about it but I am dealing with this. Please trust me Emily. I’ll be alright. Please don’t tell Momma.”

We sat there and tried to pretend this was a regular normal visit, but the unspoken specter of what mysterious bad thing Cynthia Rose was dealing with made normality impossible. She gushed about the cuteness of her new nephews and niece and reacted in a shuddery grimace once I described what I’d been through physically in the last few days. Cynthia kept one eye on her watch, slipping out of well before Momma’s next visit.

I prayed silently for her as she left, wondering why the sudden change from ladylike demeanor and clothing back to the look of a stripper again. I had to believe that Brad had thrown her out and she went back to the only life as an adult she’d known, that involving exotic dancing in the casinos and the club circuit.

Who gave her that nasty black eye I didn’t know unless it was sustained in a battle with Brad. Perhaps things got out of control. I tried not to worry too much because I believed if the circumstances that Cynthia Rose found herself caught in were too bad she’d come to me for help.

Besides, even if it turned out that Cynthia Rose had left Brad and gone back to stripping at least I didn’t have to worry about her with Brad. I still had feelings of uneasiness without any real evidence over her relationship with Brad. And I knew she’d tell me what happened eventually. Cynthia Rose never could keep a secret or hold back her emotions very well.

Finally I was allowed to go home but I went without my babies. The hospital wouldn’t release any of them until they’d put on a bit more weight. So my days and nights revolved around either going into the hospital to breast feed them in the preemie nursery or pumping breast milk to give to the nursery to feed the babies when I wasn’t there.

But a month later the babies came home and we settled into life as a family. Thankfully Momma was there at first, I knew this was a hardship on her and daddy because they’d now been officially apart for the better part of over three months. Every week when Daddy called he begged Momma to tell him how much longer she would be away and she’d tell him she didn’t know how much longer it would be.

Her help was invaluable in the early days I was home with the babies. It seemed a strangely fitting thing that while I’d cared for many of my younger brothers and sisters from the time they were very small, she was caring for my three babies and I.

And I was so tired in those early days. I needed all the help I could get in order to try and recover enough to return to my job.

Towards the end of the first six weeks after we’d all come home from the hospital I started looking for an au pair, some girl going to night school who needed a chance to make money with free room and board, someone studying early childhood education or a related field. I’d interviewed a few people but hadn’t chosen anyone and I’d insisted that Momma sit in on the interview process because her input was important to me.

But instead of the two o’clock meeting with a new girl when the doorbell rang it was my father standing on the front steps.

“Daddy? What are you doing here?” I asked, feeling anxious, so far it had never been a good thing when he showed up at my home. I suspected he was there to take my mother home.

“Well, aren’t you going to invite your own father in and show me those grand babies?” he said with a smile.

I invited him in, stepping aside to allow him into my home but I felt very uneasy about Daddy’s sudden reappearance, remembering visits past.

And I had good reason to fear this visit because after he’d seen his first grandchildren and admired our beachfront home my father told us the real reason he’d flown to Bay St Louis, Mississippi. He’d come, just as I suspected, to bring my mother home. I was dismayed to listen to him pour on the guilt, see my mother’s face change from the joy and freedom she’d tasted here to a mask of duty, marital obedience and submission. Seemed some things just never changed.

While Daddy had accepted me back into the family fold and welcomed Jude in because we were now married and going to a Bible based church he made it clear he didn’t wish to see Cynthia Rose or Jake. To him they were both still dead. He was upset to find that Momma had seen both and been reconciled to both. Momma kept begging him not to judge Cynthia because she’d come out of her wild times and was now living a stable sedate life with her fiance, she would be respectable again soon.

I kept my mouth shut during all of this. Momma still hadn’t seen that Cynthia Rose had gone back to her old life. She hadn’t seen the revealing clothes, the tons of makeup, the high heels. On the days Cynthia had visited here after the babies came home she took care to dress conservatively again but I could see by the wildness in her eyes that something more was going on. She finally confided in me what is was.

She’d discovered that not only did Brad own an import business, he owned three local strip clubs, hard core clubs where the dancers stripped down completely nude. I recognized the name of the clubs, they had a bad reputation for drugs and some in Biloxi alleged that they were mere fronts for prostitution and drug trade. When the biggest club had been short handed recently Brad had insisted that Cynthia Rose return to her dancing roots and pull a nightly shift at the club until they hired more dancers. She’d resisted, they’d had a furious row and he’d hit her.

I wasn’t about to let either of my parents know that Cynthia Rose had gone back to stripping and that her fiance had started to abuse her if she didn’t go along with his plans.

The day I found out I’d done everything in my power to beg her to leave him, even offering to allow her to move in with us until she figured out her next move. She turned it all down, saying that Brad was under a lot of pressure from his various businesses and he was a sweetheart most of the time. He had been so sweet to her after hitting her just that once and he’d promised he’d never raise a hand to her ever again.

It was so hard for me not to put on my psychologist’s hat and tell her that truthfully once they start with the physical abuse it never stops. I simply offered my support, a sympathetic ear and somewhere to stay if things got worse.

But as Momma resisted going home quite so soon, Daddy let her know that he feared her being in the grasp of our worldly influence so much. “Martha,” he said, “I can see you’ve changed more than I would have liked during this trip and it makes me question just how good an influence our own daughter is.”

I’d remained silent until that point and I could well see a vein angrily throbbing in Jude’s now somber face. He was restraining himself as much as I had been.

Day 24

That day Jake never told me exactly what it was that he was thinking about and I couldn’t imagine the horror that he was speaking of. It wasn’t until many months later that he told me he was pretty sure that Cynthia Rose’s beau was involved in the illegal drug trade or prostitution, both of them sometimes euphemistically referred to as the ‘import’ business.

That night in bed Jude and I discussed the meeting, how it had gone and how happy we both were that my mother had a chance to make up with my siblings. I told him of Jake’s mysterious words but he didn’t have any more clue than I what they meant.

The next couple of months after the party drug out. Time seemed to slow down. Every day I became less and less comfortable as I was now the size of a baby elephant. Jude kept telling me how beautiful I was but I just wanted the birth over with. I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, I couldn’t seem to really get comfortable no matter how I tossed and turned. Breathing became difficult as the babies grew and pressed up against my lungs and I lost the ability to do much more than waddle a few feet before becoming out of breath.

Momma drove me back and forth from the doctors offices in September, where they started giving me shots to help mature the babies lungs so they could be safely delivered soon. One of the little boys had stopped growing as rapidly as his brother and sister so I knew I would be soon induced.

For me that was the frightening part on so many levels. I’d never been hospitalized in my life. I had somehow managed to stay healthy up until this point and avoid those places. Something about staying in that sterile environment did not appeal to me. I wished that I could have had the triplets at home with a midwife again.

But the biggest fears I had were for the babies themselves. Triplets almost never make it to the end of the pregnancy, most of the time they had to be delivered anywhere from 22 weeks to 30 weeks. My doctor kept telling me I should consider myself lucky that I was delivering at 29 weeks as it gave the babies a much greater chance to be born normal and healthy.

An even greater part of me wanted this to just simply be over. I wanted my body back and I wanted to get the long painful hell that was childbirth behind me as quickly as possible. There were so many things I missed doing, from running on the beach to making love. Jude and I still hadn’t consummated our marriage because I’d been prohibited from sex since a couple of weeks before we married. I looked forward to being well enough to finally make love to my new husband.

I found myself very attracted to him, feeling a deep type of love and commitment to him I had never experienced before, certainly not with John.

The strangest part for me was that I rarely thought about John Collins. There I had been so deeply in love with him and now he was mostly banished from my thoughts. Looking back I think I must have subconsciously tried to repress memories of him just to be able to get through my coming ordeal.

When I did think about him it was like I imagined getting socked in the gut by a heavy weight fighter would be. My eyes filled with tears, I couldn’t catch my breath and I sagged down to my knees, overcome with the horror that had happened, that the man who’s babies I carried and had loved deeply had killed himself.

I could keep it under control most of the time but every now and again something would happen, I’d hear a song that reminded me of John, or I’d see a man from a distance that reminded me of John and down I’d go for awhile. Years later I’d find myself unable to move past this, stuck in a depression that I’d have to work through. My mind locked his memory away much of the time.

The last time it happened my mother and I were out on the beach. She didn’t swim as much as my pregnancy got closer to the end, she hovered a lot. So in the past I’d been able to hide my distress from her when I did think about John. That day I couldn’t hide and she asked me directly, “Are you thinking about him?”

I’d played dumb and gasped out, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” and she’d told me that Cynthia Rose had told here everything. I wanted to throw up, or drag my larger self into the waters of the Gulf and swim off. I was ashamed beyond measure. I knew Momma and Cynthia had started to become close again but I never dreamed she’d spill all my secrets.

But at this point I didn’t know that my Momma had secrets of her own, about her and Daddy in high school. So knowing that Momma knew how I’d violated many of the rules of polite society was hard for me to take then.

But I didn’t run off into the ocean, I just started crying, unable to still my gasps and moans. Momma crushed me to her and said softly, “Don’t, don’t..All of us, even Daddy and I, have things we’d been involved in that weren’t right yet we still did them. I’m not going to judge you for your actions because I’ve never walked in your shoes but I know I have had enough heartache in my life to at least be able to sympathize with what you must be going through inside.”

I couldn’t shake it that day. Momma helped me up and I leaned heavily on her as we went back into the house. I took to my bed and cried most of the afternoon before finally falling asleep in the late afternoon. By the time Jude got home and I’d arisen for dinner I’d finally managed to shake my distress off.

But the next morning when Momma went out to get milk I’d called Cynthia and laid into her for telling our mother the complete circumstances of my life. She’d been apologetic and told me again and again that I should know by now how Momma was, able to see through things and worm secrets out of us. I’d forgotten about that, my mother’s ability to instinctively know when one of us was lying about something and her gentle prodding to get to the truth of the matter. We both cried during that phone call but ultimately the shared bond of what we’d jointly experienced and our sisterhood was strong enough to strip away any ill feelings between us.

I was able during that phone call to probe her a bit about her relationship with Brad. Momma had finally met the mysterious Brad and her only comment on him was that Cynthia Rose could do better than Brad, which we found very confusing considering Brad and Cynthia lived in some of the most luxurious digs in all of Biloxi and he was a supposedly a wealthy businessman.

Cynthia Rose cried that day, told me that while things weren’t perfect with Brad he was her best chance of having the life she wanted. I tried to get her to open up what was wrong but she just said she couldn’t burden me in my state with her own problems. I made her promise to come see me soon.

The scheduled day came during my thirty second week of pregnancy for me to check into the hospital to have my labor induced and I was a nervous wreck. Logically I knew I was going into the best place for the triplets to have a fighting chance but my own disquiet over being in a hospital for the first time made it a frightening day for me.

But everyone couldn’t have been nicer, and eventually I was settled into a labor and delivery suite and hooked up to machinery. My ob gyn had seen in my blood pressure how my nerves were playing up and given me a small dose of something to calm my nerves. I was feeling relaxed for the first time in six weeks. Until that moment I didn’t realize just how much tension I’d been carrying for so long now.

Things went much quicker than my first labor and delivery, the drugs they gave me caused my labor to happen rapidly and a mere six hours after checking in I gave birth to a three pound twelve ounce boy we named Seth, a three pound ten ounce son dubbed Jacob and lastly, a three pound two ounce daughter, our precious Rachel. All three were whisked away to the neonatal ICU to be checked out before we had much of a chance to hold them. They were so tiny, that is what I remembered thinking the most.

But my birth experience in the hospital was so very different than giving birth to Emmie with a midwife at the Collins home. First of all they gave me an epidural, which meant I felt almost no pain in comparison to my first birth. And here every possible need was anticipated.

Both my mother and Jude were with me the entire time and both couldn’t do enough for me. Jude was even more excited than I was to finally have the babies here and after their birth he kept ringing up to NICU to see when he would be able to see them again and if he could hold his babies at some point.

Day 23

Man, even the hand I had carpel tunnel surgery in is aching. I don't think I'm cut out to be a writer...

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Time slowed down for me, I slept in late, rarely got fully dressed and mostly lolled from bed to sofa to chaise lounge. Occasionally I stirred myself to walk down to the beach with a folding lounge chair and watch Momma enjoy the surf. On the hottest days I joined her in the water, not swimming or moving around vigorously, more sitting in the cool water and allowing the tide to surge around my ever increasing girth.

Somehow I even managed to get my mother out of that travesty of a swimsuit she had been donning for years now, a zippered neck to crotch double layer garment that was like an elbow to ankle leotard sewn into a loose nearly floor length house dress. I think she realized how cumbersome what she’d been wearing was and ended up swimming in a pair of men’s surfer shorts and t shirt, realizing that it didn’t have to be floor length to be modest. Partially I think she made the change because when she and I were on the beach the occasional person would ask her if she was Mormon or Moslem, not understanding the purpose of the long baggy swimming garment. She did dress more up to date now so it was truly time to ditch that special swim wear of hers. Not to mention it had initially been quite costly but after twenty years it was a stretched out, much worn and bleached by salt water and chlorine wreck.

Momma spoiled me, keeping the house spotless and cooking huge meals for just her, I and Jude. Many evenings we played board games or watched movies. Momma couldn’t get enough of the many movies for rental.

During that long summer I relaxed and enjoyed the only time in my entire life I wasn’t working madly, either taking care of my brothers and sisters, or going to school or on my career. I’d never had leisure time like this before and I made the most of it, reading just for sheer enjoyment, not because I had to write a paper or because I had research due. Momma taught me how to knit that summer and I made a blanket for each of the babies.

As much as I was enjoying being a pampered only child in many ways part of me was afraid that any day now either Cynthia Rose would pop in unannounced or she would called up and angrily demand a meeting with Momma. But she didn’t, we talked that summer quite a lot but she was careful to time her visits to my home when she knew Momma would be gone for several hours.

I worried for Cynthia Rose. She was still madly in love with the man she’d given up stripping for but she worried me still. There were shadows under eyes, dark circles that told me that as modestly as she dressed now and no matter how over the moon she seemed with this new man something wasn’t quite right.

She told me she’d been learning how to do the books at his office but she didn’t seem very happy about being gainfully employed. Cynthia Rose complained that working in a straight job didn’t pay as well as taking off her clothes for a living had but her man, Brad, was everything she ever wanted. She’d do whatever he wanted her to do.

I had to think that at least she’d stopped with the drinking, hanging around the casino, plastic surgery and seemed almost like her old self again. If this Brad got my sister to forgo these things perhaps he wasn’t as bad as I thought he’d be.

One day in late June I heard Momma come back from shopping just as I was finishing up my phone call to Cynthia Rose. I heard Momma moving around downstairs, carrying bags into the kitchen, cabinet doors opening and closing, the refrigerator being filled with items so I tried to complete the conversation. But I wasn’t quite quick enough, Momma stuck her head into my room, listened for a moment or so until I hung up. She stood there, gazing at me with a sad look on her face for awhile before asking, “Was that Cynthia Rose?”

All the troubles I’d gotten into in the past grew out of the lies I’d told, even with the best of intentions so I told her the truth, “Yes, that was Cynthia. She and I usually try to talk a couple of times a week and sometimes she visits when you’re not here.”

Momma sat down suddenly on the edge of my bed and took my hand. I noticed for the first time that she was almost crying. She said softly, “I’d like to see her again, if you think that’s alright. I know I said some harsh things to her the last time we met but I’d like to see my baby again, her and Jake. Could you arrange for her and Jake, if he’s around, to come here sometime?”

I smiled at my mother, feeling her worry and fear as I reached up to smooth back her long hair from her face. She’d taken to not putting her hair up in a ponytail or bun every morning. Now she combed the shimmering brown waves back and wore it down. The update in clothing and hair took ages off her appearance. I was glad for her.

“Of course I will,” I said, “in fact, I think it might be a good idea. I know Jake and Cynthia Rose have missed you mightily. I’ll arrange it.”

A few weeks later they came, both of them. I’d had Jude help me don clothing that wasn’t a nightgown or a beach throw that day and Momma had cooked some of our childhood favorites for all of us to eat.

When they arrived I think Momma was the most surprised by the changes in my brother Jake. In the ensuing years of working on a fishing boat before going back to school to study art Jake had grown even taller and more muscular. The clean cut young man who had left her house was now a handsome man in great shape, someone that could easily be mistaken for a male model. His flashing white smile and vivid blue eyes set in a deeply tanned face just reinforced this change. Momma took one look at him and wrapped her arms around him, crying happy tears and calling him her baby.

I had already prepared Momma for the news that Jake was still gay and he had been living happily with an older man for a long time now. But I’d been quite surprised with my mother’s response. I’d expected her to start talking about abominations and sin but she’d blinked and said mildly, “Emily, I’ve learned not to judge others for their choices I don’t agree with. It is God’s job to convict and convince, not mine. That’s what the years I went without contact from my eldest three children taught me. I swore to God if He was gracious enough to allow me to see all of you again I would learn not to be as judgmental.”

Cynthia Rose showed up a few minutes later. I was surprised to see that she didn’t bring Brad with her and I asked her where Mr. Wonderful was. We’d been trying to meet him for a few months now but Cynthia always had a logical excuse as to why he couldn’t make it. Today he was out at a meeting of local business men, she said he had told her to tell the rest of us how sorry he was he had not been able to meet our family yet. Some day soon.

And I had to give Cynthia Rose credit. If she had been dressing less like a stripper and more like a young lady lately, today she’d outdone herself. She was wearing a beautiful floral print dress with just a hint of makeup. Matching low heeled pumps, purse and pearls completed the look.

“Cynthia Rose!” my mother had said excitedly, “look at you! You’re so elegant, so pretty.” before she leapt forward to hug my sister and cry over her too.

The day was filled with laughter and tears as everyone made the supreme effort to let old sins and petty hurts stay long buried. Momma got the opportunity to catch up with each of them and made Cynthia Rose promise to go shopping with her one day soon. I could see on the faces of all three just how much this reconciliation meant deep inside. I was glad I could be part of it, help it come about.

The only unpleasant bit of the day came when Jude took my mother and Cynthia up to look at the nursery Momma and he had been working on and left me alone with Jake.

Jake cornered me in the family room and immediately wanted to know what on earth our sister had done to her body and face. He couldn’t get over the change in her. I told him he should consider himself lucky because it seemed now that Cynthia had managed to pull it all together. Between the time he left the area and now Cynthia had extensive plastic surgery to resemble some sort of ultimate stripper but now she had stopped all that nonsense and seemed more stable.

“Have you even met this Brad she keeps talking about?” he asked, real concern distorting his handsome features.

“No,” I said, “I keep asking to meet him, offering to have them over for dinner but I keep getting excuses. Should I be worried?”

Jake poured himself another glass of wine, walked over to the french doors leading to the sands and stood for a minute, “Well, let’s just say I knew some unsavory characters in Biloxi that claimed to be in the import business but were actually in another sort of business, just as illegal.”

“What?” I asked innocently.

He frowned, “Nothing, forget I ever said anything. I don’t.. think it is likely.. but, just forget it.”

Day 22

After I’d dismissed both of them I’d gotten up from my small office and walked, rather waddled towards the biggest of the conference rooms in this sunny modern office building. I could feel the curious eyes on my back from my coworkers, several of them stood together in buzzing knots, hushing only when I came into view. I have to wonder who is waiting for me that they would be so interesting in.

Slipping open the thick oaken door and rapidly closing it behind me I’m surprised to see Annie Collins standing by the far window, dressed chicly in all black, black dress, black gloves, black hat with a veil. All black in the oppressive heat of summer. Even more surprising she held Emmie, now nearly a year old and dressed in a frilly dress in a dark floral print and black patent leather shoes. Annie looked like she’d been crying beneath that black veiled hat I noticed when I got closer.

While I wonder what she wants I know whatever it is cannot be good. And I say, “Annie, what is it?”

Before I can get the words completely out of my mouth Annie crumbles, sitting down suddenly in a nearby chair as she clutches Emmie so hard that the little girl cries as hard as her momma is. I pull up a nearby chair and clutch her hand, realizing no matter what good and bad has passed between us we’re still bound together by this child.

Annie was shaking and trying futilely to get a hold of her emotions. She put the baby down floor and said out in great hoarse sobs, “I don’t know if you’ve heard yet but several weeks ago John was arrested and I moved home to my parents with Emmie. He bonded out yesterday, went back to our house and put a gun to his head.. Just like that he killed himself.”

Even though my love for John was long over I was pole axed by her pronouncement and burst out in tears myself. For one long terrible moment we clung together, hugging each other in the face of this calamity, tears intermingling. We had both loved him and once upon a time we’d been friends.

Eventually she disentangled from me and wiped her eyes, saying, “We’re burying him tomorrow. a small ceremony with family only. I know you loved him so I wanted to invite you to come and say goodbye to him too..”

I still clutched her hand and I said to Annie, “I don’t think that would be good for me or my babies. I said my goodbyes to John a long time ago. Annie, what are we going to do about this? Are you going to fight me for custody?”

Annie reached down to pick up a crying Emmie from the soft carpeted floor and she said quietly, “No, I don’t the triplets. I don’t want them around me because every day I’ll look at them and see John. You’ve said a few times recently that you’d changed your mind. Are you still wanting to keep all of them?”

Plunking a fresh tissue from a nearby box I dabbed at her tears. One big advantage of working at a mental health facility is everywhere you turned around there was a big box of tissues. This place had seen many tears, ours that day would certainly not be the first or the last shed in this place.

“I’ve developed maternal feelings for the first time in my life,” I explained to Annie, “and I knew a few months ago that I couldn’t willingly give up the three of them. Oh yes, I want them.”

She grasped my hand hard and said in tone indicating she was near tears again, “I also came to say ‘thank you’ to you. Having Emmie in my life has given me the greatest joy I’ve ever know. I wanted to come say that to you in person because things haven’t been right between us for a long time now. I did, do, value your friendship and I love you for given me this child. I promise you I’ll raise her to be a worthy individual and love her more than anything else on this planet. Just please don’t take her from me.”

I hugged her again, choking back my own tears and said, “Just like you cannot have any reminders of John around in the form of his children I just don’t feel that essential bond with Emmie. She’s beautiful and you’ve done a fantastic job as her mother. I couldn’t rip her away from the only stability and mother she’s known even if I wanted her. She is your daughter now.”

Eventually Emmie drifted off to sleep as Annie and I laughed and cried while sharing our memories of John and our mutual friendship. Before she left she promised to stay in touch to let me know how Emmie was and she slipped me several new photos of Emmie. I knew in my heart this was very probably a goodbye but I pretended to believe her. I walked her as far as the elevator, my arm tenderly around her shoulder, not envying her future and the press that were probably stalking out her home.

I got some strange stares and a few people ventured to ask if I was alright as I walked back to my office and I gave a short untruthful explanation that Annie was my sister, her husband had died suddenly and she could not take care of the babies I’d been carrying as a surrogate for her. That I was going to have to keep the babies. I figured sooner or later it would come out that I didn’t give up the triplets and John’s death provided me with a convenient excuse to break the news.

How Jude heard the news of John Collin’s suicide I didn’t know. He must have been reading the daily paper. But he showed up at my office mid afternoon wanting to know if I knew and how I was coping with the news. I told him of my meeting with Annie Collins and how she would not contest us raising the triplets. I could see the look of pride on his face when I told him that we were going to be able to list him as the father on the birth certificate, no one needed to know he wasn’t the actual biological father now.

He wanted me to go home but I assured him I was able enough to finish out my last day at work for four or five months. But I told him I wanted to take one last moonlit stroll on the beach away from the eyes and ears of my momma before tomorrows first day of enforced rest.

During the last hour of work before we shut the doors for the day the staff surprised me with a small party including a cake and a few small presents since this was the last time I’d be in for some months. I was touched that they’d organized this for me.

By the time I got home that night I was worn out, bone tired from the emotional rollercoaster I’d been riding all day. I was looking forward to resting till the birth. Because I’d not thought until recently about keeping the babies we had no nursery planned so I was trying to coordinate that all from catalogs and local stores. I also had a pile of books to read and training materials to stay current in my field.

I don’t know if Momma picked up on the fact that Jude and I were preoccupied with other thoughts over dinner but if she did she never showed it. She happily chattered on about the beauty of the beaches and water, the thrill of going swimming for the first time in years and how much fun she’d been having putting our newly expanded household in order.

It wasn’t until well after dinner that Jude and I were able to slip away from Momma and talk on the beach as we walked. I savored the feeling of the sugar white sands under my feet and the muscles of my legs burning from the walk, it might be a long time before I had a chance to walk like this again on the beach.

I simply told Jude every nuance of my visit from Annie and how while I was heartbroken for her and Emmie that John was dead, not to mention how much I felt hurt that he’d died, his death solved a number of problems, namely there would be no one to protest keeping the triplets. Annie didn’t want them so they were ours. That night we dared to actually start picking out names for the two boys and one girl I carried.

We rinsed off the sand from our feet and headed into the living room only to find my momma up late watching something forbidden in her household, television. Not only was she watching Jay Leno on a late night television talk show, she was eating a pint of ice cream, another rare indulgence in our home.

That night as we lay in bed both Jude and I had laughed at how quickly Momma had embraced the world and it’s temptations while staying in our home. I knew that Daddy probably wouldn’t be pleased if he knew but I also knew that for many years now my mother had put herself last and her children first. I liked the idea of her enjoying herself and that I could spoil her just a little bit. Daddy didn’t have to know and I knew first hand the power of memories of pleasant times and places you’d enjoyed could easily carry you through the daily and the mundane. Momma deserved this respite.

Day 21

I could even see why my mother seemed so out of it for much of our lives. All those pregnancies must have taken a toll on her health and sapped much of her strength.

On the two day drive from Biloxi to home I thought about all the great things I’d learned from them and all the gifts they’d given me that I’d never realized before. Jude drove my Prius because I could hardly squeeze behind the wheel now and I just sat back and looked out of the window, enjoying the scenery. We spent the night in Tennessee.

Our marriage was still unconsummated. Jude told me before he married me that sex wasn’t an option until after the birth because he would hate to cause something like me going into premature labor. I knew the chances of that weren’t very high but I honored his wishes and didn’t push the issue even though when we lay next to each other in the bed and indulged in kissing and other intimacies I could hardly stand it. Somehow I, the formerly frigid virgin, had developed a sexual appetite.

Once we crossed the border of Maryland into Pennsylvania I started getting more nervous than excited and it crossed my mind that my parents might not be thrilled to see their recently married daughter pregnant with triplets holding the last name of Greenburg.

I was surprised that the old house looked the same from the outside. Somehow I’d always imagined it would look smaller than in my memory. We drove up the long gravel driveway and I caught sight of my younger siblings outside playing, the youngest toddlers. But when the kids saw the car they ran into the house and I could hear their shouts of “Momma, Daddy, strangers here.”

Jude got out and helped me out of the car. just as My mother came to the back door and stared, taking a hard look at me as I got out of the passengers side. I’d taken care to dress modestly, no shorts and t shirt but no baggy calicos either. I had on a plain dark blue maternity dress and sandals. The dress would have been cute if I hadn’t have been baby elephant sized now at the end of my fourth month.

Her face seemed to crumple and she shouted, ‘Emily Ann!” as she ran out of the house to throw her arms around me. She sobbed and held me, “My baby, my baby..”

On the drive back to the local hotel I could hardly believe what had just happened. We’d been welcomed in with open arms. Both of my parents were happy to see me and my brothers and sisters had grown so much it was scary. There was even one brother I’d never met, born after I left home.

No one seemed thrown by the idea that I was now Emily Greenburg, psychologist but both of my parents seemed relieved to find out that Jude and I were both practicing Christians.

One of the biggest changes I noticed at the house was that my mother and sisters were no longer dressed as if it was pioneer times. True, they did still dress modestly, but now they were dressed in different things, such as denim skirts, stylish tailored button up shirts, polo shirts and a variety of shoes from earth shoes to penny loafers. Still no stilettos or jeans, but still it was forward progress.

My mother confided in me about the changes on the second day, she told me that after that last visit from Biloxi, being so shocked to see how far from their teachings that Jake, Cynthia and I had strayed that they realized it would be better to give every child some smaller measures of freedom instead of having them rebel once they left the family nest. I found out of my now nineteen brothers and sisters that seven of us were gone from home, either settled into a life or at school. Momma told me in hushed tones about how my sister Ellen Louise had refused to go to a Bible college and ended up winning a slot at Penn State, where she was now getting ready to graduate.

It was a long time before the topic turned to Cynthia Rose. I’d been showing Momma my wedding album, half winching expecting her to say something about the fact that I was so obviously pregnant but she didn’t. I’d already told her that I’d given the baby I’d been pregnant with before up for adoption and while I didn’t know what Benjamin and Sarah Rachel had said about their visit with me I can just imagine it wasn’t positive.

While Momma had looked through the album of pictures, exclaiming in delight seeing my beautiful condo that looked right out onto the beach, asking me who this or that person was in the photos I started getting very nervous. By the time she turned to the page of wedding photos she zeroed in on a bleached blonde head I knew all too well and asked, “Is that Cynthia Rose? It can’t be, but... it sort of looks like it is.”

I took one of Momma’s careworn hands in mine and said, “Yes, yes it is I’m sad to say. Cynthia Rose has been working as a dancer at one of the casinos, Momma. I think she’s had plastic surgery, in fact I’m certain one of her former male companions paid for her to have a breast enlargement and some work done on her face. I keep hoping she’ll settle down and I think it’s starting to happen now. She’s in love with someone that has been encouraging her to stop dancing and they live in one of the nicest high rise condos in Biloxi. She’s even taken to toning down her makeup and dress. They’re talking about getting married.”

What I don’t tell Momma is that this male companion of Cynthia Rose’s gives me the willies. He seems perfectly normal in every way but there is just something oily and dishonest about him. If you ask him what he does for a living he keeps talking about how he imports things from China for sale in the US, bringing shipments through the post of Gulfport, which doesn’t even make sense. It would make much more sense for his cargo to land in California somewhere and be shipped by rail or truck overland to be distributed. Something is seriously off about the man.

We ended up staying for four glorious days, while I was home I got to know my parents from an adult perspective and actually enjoy who they are. I also got to thank them for being my parents, for their forgiveness and we seemed closer than we’d all been in years. Even better they’d accepted Jude with joy, treating him as a treasured new member of the family.

By the end of our time there Momma started speaking longingly of going back to Biloxi to see the sea and to help me out during my confinement. Then the unexpected happened, Daddy told her to pack up and ride back to Mississippi with us, he’d buy her a plane ticket back after I’d had the triplets and was able to care for them and myself.

So she packed a small bag, kissed everyone goodbye and rode all the way back to Mississippi in the cramped back seat of my sub compact car. Even thought Momma had driven to southern Mississippi before with Daddy there was just something very different about her this time, a new freedom. I knew this was the first time in the thirty years Momma and Daddy had been married that she’d been completely without kids or Daddy away from home.

It was night when we pulled up in my numbered parking space by home but it didn’t matter to Momma, she still wanted to pull off her socks and shoes to wade in the warm salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It was midnight before we could get her to calm down enough to go to bed. She’d danced in the splashing surf of the ocean, like a person newly freed from their restraints.

While we’d been gone the construction crew hired by Jude had started the process of making our two condos into one large condo, cutting a large archway in the main wall between my living room and his. Since my condo had been the model home with upgraded appliances and fancier decoration we decided to keep my kitchen but cut another archway, strip his kitchen down to bare walls to turn it into a long galley dining room. One more arch cut in the upper hallway opened up the upstairs of from one smaller bedroom over the kitchen and one large one facing the living room with it’s own balcony to two large bedrooms and two smaller ones.

Momma was happy to be installed in Jude’s old bedroom and she helped move his things over into my bedroom, even putting them away. She loved her room, overlooking the ocean.

As Momma settled into her new digs I went back to work for a few more days to tie up all the loose ends. I was going into my fifth month now but my new doctor said all bed rest up until delivery. She wanted me to go as far over the sixth month mark as possible, triplets tended to come early and be tiny so it was essential I rest to make that happen.

On my last day of work something upsetting happened. I’d been just ending a session with a client I was transferring to another colleague, introducing the colleague and the client and going over a continuation of her treatment plan when I was buzzed that I had a visitor waiting for me in the big conference room.

Day 20 Nano

“Let me guess,” I ventured, “you came here thinking you were going to tag team brow beat me into having a selective reduction. Please think again because it’s not happening, in fact, I don’t want either one of you going into that examination room with me.”

“Those are my babies,” Annie growled at me, “I’m paying for them and you’re not stopping me.”

Jude moved closer to me, I could feel he was tense, ready for this confrontation. But I felt strong for the first time facing Annie and John and said simply, “Either the two of you leave, or I leave.”

“Annie, honey,” John said, dark brows raised nervously, “Let me talk to Emily for a sec. Get in the car. Please honey”

She almost sprinted away from us, long legs moving swiftly regardless that she wore high heels and a skirt. “She looks so much like you it’s scary, but she looks like a meaner you.” Jude whispered to me.

John approached, hands outreached to me and said in a sorrowful voice, “Emily, honey, I’m so sorry it had to be this way. Annie forced me to give you up but I still love you. Please, if you have any love left in your heart for me, go along with Annie’s request and let the doctor give us twins instead of triplets.”

He looked so miserable that for a millisecond I actually felt a little bit of pity for him. In the last few weeks I’d been reading in the papers about state senator Collins problems and knew that he had more pressing matters going on than trying to deal with me. But knowing that he had been deceiving me, using me just when it was convenient blotted out any compassion I might have felt..

“John,” I said simply and without rancor, “It’s over. All of it.”

The doctor told me there were just one problem with giving me the records, ‘They’re all in Annie Collins name. I was being forced to treat you as Annie Collins.”

Dr Parley hung his head sadly, “I suppose you think I’m a foolish old goat and you’re going to sue now.”

“No,” I said softly, “I think you’re still a doctor, a good doctor. I do appreciate the care you’ve given me. Just bring the records in and give them to me and no one has to know. If anyone pokes around for the them claim they’re misfiled or lost. We both know that John is in so much hot water right now that he’s in no position to hurt either of us.”

We got the records quickly and left. Jude had been silent through most of this and when he finally spoke he asked, “Why would your fertility clinic records be in Annie Collins name?”

I looked up from the file, I’d been reading the reports and looking at the test results, “Because it looks like they were planning a home birth again with a midwife. That was why it was so important to have a selective reduction, not as much risk factor for things to go horribly wrong. I think Annie had it planned I would deliver again with the same midwife at their home and they’d fake the birth certificates again by putting Annies name down instead of my own.”

Spying something in the file I pick it up and show it to Jude, “Look, can you make out the three different babies?” and I laugh.

Several days later I get a strongly worded registered letter from someone else in John’s law firm, indicating that if I do not go through with having these babies and turning them over to the care of John and Annie that I will be found in contempt of an oral agreement by a judge and they would make sure I was stripped of any custody.

I show the letter to Jude, knowing from the fresh allegations against John in today’s paper that this is mere saber rattling. I’m not the dumb naive little college girl I’d been when I met the Collins only about eighteen short months ago. This was a just a last attempt by John and Annie to control me.

“You know there is an easy way to deal with this, to make it go away and make it almost impossible for them to get custody..” Jude said after reading the letter.

“What is that?” I ask, wondering what he’s come up with now. Over the last six weeks he’d become the closest friend I’d ever had. He was a great kisser too and he didn’t try to control me. I was finding myself growing very fond of this sweet man.

“Marry me,” Jude says after dropping to one knee and grasping my hands.

My first urge is to laugh, laugh it off like the joke it strikes me that it has to be. But I see naked vulnerability in his dark eyes and I realize he actually means this. I don’t answer.

“It would almost guaranty that they don’t try to take your babies. Can you imagine the headlines? If John Collins tried to take his three children from a single former girlfriend the media might notice and then again, they might not. But it’s almost surely be negative press if he were to go after a married professional and try to claim her children were his and try to force a paternity test. Messy, nasty and something that he cannot afford now.” he continues on in this practical vein, “Besides, I make a good salary, around a hundred thousand before taxes. You keep saying you’re worried how you were going to raise three kids on your salary. You don’t make bad money but with our combined earning power it wouldn’t be as hard to make ends meet. You’re going to need help with the three babies and besides, you’re going to be on bedrest in a few weeks, who’s going to do your laundry and pay your electric bill.. plus.. I love you, Emily.”

I crouch down on the carpet next to him and say quietly, “Are you really sure that you’re fully committed to raise another man’s children like this? You want to get up and change diapers in the middle of the night? You forget I know what it’s like but you don’t.”

Jude confuses the issue by kissing me and I lose all train of thought, I just want the kiss to go on forever but eventually we come up for air and he says, “I’ve loved your babies as much as I’ve loved you from almost the first day I want a family. We could be a ready made family, knock out a few walls between our condos, remodel just a little bit and we’d even have more than enough room for two boys and a girl to grow up in.”

“You’ve really given this some thought, haven’t you?” I said

“It’s all I’ve thought about since about a week after you decided to call me your boyfriend. I knew for the last year I’ve lived here that I had to find a way to get your notice, but once we’ve been together I just knew that this was it for me. You have my heart.” Jude said, hugging me even tighter.

“I.. I don’t love you,” I confessed, “I mean, I love you as a friend and I’m starting to feel more for you each day but I don’t have that all encompassing thing I thought I’d feel for the man I’d marry.”

He smiled tenderly and kissed me again, “I know that, but I also think with time you’ll fall as hard for me as I have for you. You gotta admit what’s between us, it’s pretty spectacular. You’re just speeding up the inevitable and it’s going to solve the problem with the Collins.”

So I finally said yes. What else could I do? I cherished Jude dearly, I was physically attracted to him and he was right in pointing out that I really needed a partner to help me with the day to day of raising the babies.

We asked the minister from the church we attended to marry us on the beach the next weekend, applied for a marriage license and told our respective families. Jake and his partner decided to fly in from Key West and Cynthia Rose excitedly dragged me to a number of fancy maternity boutiques and wedding attire places to get a dress. “Great,” I’d griped, “I’ll be wearing a lace potato sack and look like a huge lace embellished ball, perfectly round.

But we found something of thin white cotton embroidered with white and pastels that had very little lace. The dress was beautiful, we had a small cake and I ordered a small spread from a caterer. Jude’s only living relative, an older sister and her grown children, couldn’t make it down from Minnesota on such short notice but a handful of people from his office and mine rounded out the numbers. For my witness I used my first real friend in Biloxi, Roberta. Even if we’d not seen as much of each other in the last year I still loved her dearly.

The wedding was simple but simply beautiful. Jude decorated our patios with simple potted plants and wedding decorations from an art supply house. He wore a simple white linen suit and we took off our shoes to exchange our vows on the beach. I smiled happily, thinking that as a girl I’d never dreamed that my Prince Charming would be a Jewish guy with a sweet smile and beautiful curls.

During our small reception Roberta approached me and apologized to me for getting me enmeshed with the Collins. “Did you see today’s paper?” she asked quietly, “The state police arrested John this morning.”

Poor John, I couldn’t help but feel that in some small measure he wasn’t entirely responsible for his crimes. I felt that probably Annie had exerted pressure on him over various things until they’d come to this scurrilous interlude. I feel sorry for him, sorrow and nothing else. Any love I felt for him was long gone now.

We took off right after the wedding for Pennsylvania because my new doctor, a nice lady with an office only a few miles from the condo, had given me a bed rest date of the next week. So this small window of time, between our wedding and when I was to stop working for awhile, was our only opportunity for Jude to meet my parents and for me to reconnect with them.

This pregnancy of mine had given me a gift, the gift that I now had enormous respect for them, for the first time I truly understood how much my mother had sacrificed to have and raise all of us kids. It couldn’t have been easy always standing up for their beliefs in every aspect of our lives in the face of a hostile world. I didn’t necessarily believe the same way as them but I wanted them to see that I hadn’t really turned out that badly. I was grateful to them for giving me life.