The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [26]
It was during one of her canoe trips that her baby decided to be born. Joe was not with her; he was working and would have been upset if he’d known she had gone off with her friends for a day on the Shenandoah. It was a weekend, and she didn’t see why she should have to stay home just because Joe had to work. Yet she knew better than to ask him if he minded. She simply went. She never would have gone if she’d known the baby would come six weeks early.
She was with three of her friends from high school: her best friend, Ellie, and two male friends who were simply that—friends. They were in two canoes, deep in the forest, battling a patch of white water, when the pains started. Quickly, Janine was bleeding, her terror mounting with each stab of pain.
They paddled to the riverbank, and Ellie stayed with her on a bed of leaves and moss, while the guys went for help. Ellie had no idea what to do, of course, and looking back on the event later, Janine barely remembered her friend’s presence. Instead, she remembered feeling completely alone, the trees a canopy of gold above her as she gasped from the pain and shivered in the October chill.
By the time the paramedics found her, she had delivered a stillborn baby boy, which Ellie had wrapped in her windbreaker.
The paramedics lifted Janine onto a stretcher and covered her with blankets.
“What the hell are you doing out here when you’re nearly eight months pregnant?” one of them asked her, as he rested a blanket on top of her.
She couldn’t answer, but she knew she deserved the hostile tone of the question. Once in the ambulance, she stared at the unmoving bundle where it rested in a clear plastic bassinet, and it was as if she were acknowledging for the first time that there had truly been a life inside her that she had taken for granted. A life she had, in effect, abused and neglected. She didn’t cry, at least not aloud, but tears washed over her cheek onto the stretcher.
Joe had been furious. He didn’t talk to her for weeks, and she’d felt alone and completely deserving of the isolation. She would mourn for that baby for the rest of her life. That had been her first true taste of guilt—a bitter, vile taste that was unfamiliar in her mouth. But it was not to be her last.
“Are you awake?”
She heard Joe’s voice in the darkness and drew herself back to the present.
“Yes.” She sat up straight, brushing tears from her cheeks. They were still in the car, somewhere on Beulah Road, and she saw the lights of the Meadowlark Gardens parking lot ahead of them. Leaning forward, she tried to make out the vehicles in the far corner of the lot.
“Looks like Gloria’s van,” Joe said. “And Rebecca and Steve’s Suburban. Your car. That’s it.”
They pulled into the lot, vast and dark in its emptiness, and drove to the corner. The four of them—Paula, Gloria, Rebecca and Steve—were sitting on small beach chairs set on the macadam. The Krafts’ two sons were no longer with them, and Charlotte had apparently gone home. Crushed bags and empty cups from Taco Bell littered the ground near the chairs.
Everyone stood up as Joe parked the car next to the Suburban.
“Any news?” Janine asked, as she got out of the car.
“Nothing,” Gloria said. “How about on your end? Did you see anything?”
“No clues,” Joe said. “But it was so dark up there, and the people working at the gas stations and restaurants are not the same people who were there this afternoon. So it was a little frustrating.”
“Plus, a lot of the shops and restaurants are closed,” Janine added.
“The police told us to go home and stay close to the phone,” Gloria said. “But we didn’t want to leave until you two got back.”
“Your parents called us a million times,” Rebecca said to Janine. “They’re so worried. You might want to give them a call.”
Rebecca and Steve no longer wore their wide, optimistic smiles. They looked a little ragged around