The reason
We sat on her porch steps. Just the two of us. Sterling took Christa back down to the sledding, and Clarice stood at the burn barrel watching us with her arms crossed, and Stuart kept the kids busy.
Charla held her mug and didn’t drink from it.
“There was a baby before Sterling,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Her name was Annie. I had her when I was twenty-one. Tobias and I were living in the little trailer out back, where the shop is now. She was five months old.” She stopped. “She went down for her nap one afternoon in March and she didn’t wake up.”
“Oh, Charla.”
“They called it crib death back then. The doctor in Delta said there was nothing anybody could have done. I didn’t believe him. I don’t think I’ve believed him one day since.”
I am a respiratory therapist. I have sat with mothers in that exact place. I know what it is. I know there is nothing anybody can say. So I didn’t try.
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“I had Sterling two years later,” she said. “And Clarice, and Stuart. And I loved them, I did. But I was so careful. Tobias used to say I held my babies like they were going to break. I wouldn’t let Stuart climb the cottonwood. I made Clarice wear a helmet on her bicycle when nobody wore helmets.”
She turned the mug in her hands.
“When you and Sterling started fostering, I was so proud of you. I was. But then you brought those two home, and the caseworker told Sterling at Thanksgiving that it might not be permanent. That the county was trying to send them back to their mother. Do you remember that?”
I remembered. Nineteen months of court dates and home visits and not knowing. Nineteen months of buying Christa shoes and wondering if somebody else would be the one to buy the next pair.
“I couldn’t do it,” Charla said. “I couldn’t hold that little girl and love her and have somebody come take her away. I’d already had a baby taken. I told myself I’d wait until it was certain. Just until it was certain.”
“It’s been certain for three years,” I said. Not mean. Just true.
“I know it.” She wiped her face with the back of her glove. “By then it was a habit. And I was ashamed of the habit, so I covered it. I’d say blood first, or just my four, because it was easier than saying I’m scared to death of loving a child I might lose. Do you understand? It was easier to be mean than to be scared.”
What I said
I wish I could tell you I said something wise.
What I said was, “She thinks she isn’t real to you, Charla. She told me so on the chairlift. She’s seven years old, and she’s decided it’s easier not to need you.”
Charla put her hand over her mouth.
“You took her ticket out of her hand in front of everybody,” I said. “She gave it right back. Do you know why she did that? Because she’s had things taken from her her whole life, and she has learned not to fight it. You taught her one more time that it’s true.”
“I know,” Charla whispered.
“I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m saying it because you need to know what it cost. Not me. Her.”
“I know,” she said again. “I have known since the second I did it. I stood at the bottom of that bunny hill all day watching her ski with her father, and I knew.”
“Then why didn’t you call?”
“Because Sterling said I had to say it to them.” She looked down at Christa in the snow. “And I didn’t know how to say it to a child without telling her about Annie. And I have never said Annie’s name out loud to anybody but Tobias. Not once in forty-seven years.”