Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [93]
In the end, I was so caught up with what was going on in my own life that I didn’t have the time or energy to be angry with my father. I had larger issues to confront. In early 2002, I began to suspect that I was pregnant. Terrified, I purchased four pregnancy tests during a shopping trip to St. George with my mother. I was still afraid to tell her what was happening in my marriage and hid them from her by having her wait in the car while I went inside to buy the groceries. As soon as I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom to learn my fate. Carefully, I read the instructions over and over. Each test was slightly different, and I was getting myself very confused. When the first one revealed a positive result, I moved on to the next, horrified to see a plus sign pop up again on the applicator’s screen. Unconvinced, I used all four tests and was momentarily heartened when one seemed to come up with a negative result. But upon rereading the directions, I realized that I had made a mistake and a sinking feeling took root in my stomach.
I sat frozen for a long time, staring at the four tests lined up along the linoleum of the bathroom floor. Two months earlier, one of the mothers in Fred’s home had shown a video to Lily and me explaining the facts of life and what happens to a woman’s body when she is pregnant. Now that video was my life. My fate had been decided for me again.
Disposing of the four tests, I kept the results to myself and went about my routine, never telling Allen that he was going to be a father. For weeks I kept my secret, contemplating how I was going to overcome this new hurdle and frightened by how it would affect my life. One night in the spring, I was awakened by a horrible pain in my abdomen and raced to the bathroom to vomit. I barely made it down the hall before I started throwing up, and I realized that blood was running down my leg. I honestly thought I was dying, that God was killing me for my disobedience to the prophet and Allen. The only place I could think to go was to my mother’s room, where she was asleep. I wanted desperately to wake her, but I was too scared I’d get her into trouble. She’d been warned to stay out of my business, and I knew that she’d need to abide by that directive.
I sat in the bathtub for nearly four hours, bleeding and cramping. I couldn’t bring myself to go to my mother—I couldn’t burden her. Finally, when the pain began to subside, I took a shower to clean myself up and figured out that I had lost the baby. My first thought was to call Kassandra and tell her what had happened, but I blamed myself for the miscarriage. At the time, I believed that miscarriages happened because God believed the mother was unworthy. I was sure that I had been punished for being wicked, and I didn’t want anyone else to know.
For the next four days, I could barely gather the strength to get out of bed, and I refused to mention a word to anyone about what had happened. All I wanted was to sleep forever. Kassandra stopped by several times and finally got fed up with my apparent laziness because I was in bed with no excuse. Despite her pleas to explain what was wrong, I couldn’t summon the words. All I could do was lie there in silence.
That winter, Uncle Fred eagerly informed Allen and me that we would be moving to a new home on church land, a two-bedroom trailer in a small trailer park across the state line in Colorado City, just next door to one of Audrey’s sons. The trailer would be Uncle Fred’s gift to us, and we