Steven James - The Knight

“Then after they’ve suctioned out the brains… the skull collapses and they… they can finally…” She felt dizzy, physically ill, and she couldn’t say the words. She just couldn’t.

Patrick drew her into his arms, and this time she let him. And then she felt Martha holding her too, her frail arm bent around her shoulder. And she was glad they were there.

But that was all she was glad about.

Tessa leaned her face against her stepfather’s chest.

And trembled as she cried.

I tried to comfort Tessa but had no idea what to say, so I just hugged her and told her that I loved her and tried to think of something, anything that I could do to help.

Moments passed.

My mother found a box of tissues for Tessa, and after a little while she began to control her breathing again.

Finally, she pulled away from me, wiped a handful of tissues across her face, and said softly, “I wish I never read it. The diary. I wish…”

“I’m so sorry, Tessa. If I’d known it would hurt you, I never would have given it to you. You have to believe me.”

She took a small breath. “I need to be alone.” Then she left for her room, and I thought she might slam the bedroom door, but instead I heard it close gently.

So gently that, in a way, it frightened me.

It wasn’t at all clear to me what to do-give her some space, or go to her, see if there was something more I could say.

In the past, Tessa had struggled with cutting as a way to cope, and although she’d mostly moved past it, I was concerned for her and I didn’t like the idea of standing here doing nothing.

I walked upstairs. Knocked softly on her door.

“Leave me alone.” I could tell that she was crying again.

My mother was climbing the stairs to join me.

“Please, Tessa,” I said.

“Just leave me alone. I want to be alone.”

I tried the doorknob. Locked. “C’mon. Unlock the door.”

“I’m OK. I just wanna be by myself.”

As I stood there trying to figure out how to solve things, my mother approached and whispered, “She needs some time, Patrick. Let her be for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready.”

“How do you know?” I kept my voice low enough so that Tessa wouldn’t hear. “Maybe I can-”

“Listen to your mother,” Tessa called from inside her bedroom.

I blinked.

Martha raised a gentle, knowing eyebrow.

“Did you hear me?” Tessa said.

“Yes.”

Knowingly, my mother patted my arm and then turned to leave.

“I guess I’ll be downstairs then,” I told Tessa through the door.

“In the kitchen. I won’t leave for the airport until you’re ready for me to go, OK?”

No response.

I stood in the hallway for a few more minutes, sorting through everything, then Tessa called through the wall, “Don’t lurk,” and I finally left to join my mother in the kitchen.

I looked at my watch.

As much as I wanted to stay and work through things with Tessa, I definitely needed to leave in the next twenty minutes if I was going to make my flight.

But that was no longer my priority.

Last night I’d told Cheyenne that Tessa meant the world to me. And now I realized how true that was.

I would stay here if I needed to. Even if I didn’t make it to the trial.

Still, I did feel a little guilty and conflicted, because even though I hadn’t known about Paul or the letter, one time while we were dating Christie had told me about her decision to abort her child.

Christie and I had been going out for about four months when she told me the story.

We were both single and in our midthirties and things were getting serious, so we’d finally decided to get everything on the table, see if there was anything in our respective pasts that would make the other person shy away from something long term.

And we chose to share those secrets on a hike in the Adirondacks on a crisp and cool Sunday afternoon in September.

We’d been hiking for a few hours, slowly revealing more and more intimate details from our lives, when I lost the trail and ended up spending nearly half an hour leading her aimlessly through the underbrush looking for it. Finally, I was so irritated at myself that I kicked a log. “OK. Here’s one: sometimes I can get impatient.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” I shoved a branch out of the way. Hard. It snapped back toward Christie, and thankfully she was far enough behind me so that it didn’t smack her in the face. “And moody.”

“Huh.” I couldn’t quite read her tone. “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”

Then I found something that might have been a trail, at least at one time, and it was leading vaguely in the direction we wanted to go, so I decided to give it a shot.

As we walked, I told her about the problems I’d had over the years getting along with my older brother, who owned a bait shop in Wisconsin and spent most of his time muskie fishing when he could have been doing something meaningful with his life.

“Well.” She stepped over a fallen tree lying across our path. “At least you’re not judgmental.”

“One of my few virtues.”

Then I admitted to a tendency of getting caught up a little too much in my work. Occasionally.

Once in a while.

And then, though it was a little embarrassing, I talked about dealing with some of the temptations all single guys face.

She listened quietly, asked a few questions, but didn’t act as if any of this was a big surprise. And then she told me about how she wasn’t really good with money and had built up almost twenty thousand dollars of credit card debt and how she hated housework and sometimes got panic attacks when she was really stressed.

The trail ended.

She’d tried to commit suicide twice in high school; she told me that too. And after a long pause, she added that she wasn’t able to have any more children.

Then we were both silent.

I got the impression she wasn’t finished sharing, so I waited for her to speak. After walking about a hundred meters she suggested we backtrack and as we turned around she said, “I never told you about when I was pregnant with Tessa. Maybe I should have.”

We came to an overlook, but she kept walking.

“I was nineteen when I found out I was expecting. I was scared and single, and I wasn’t in love with her father.” She paused, then added, “And I was ashamed too. My parents didn’t take sex outside of marriage lightly. At the time I didn’t understand their point of view. Since then, well…”

She didn’t need to elaborate; I knew she was a strong believer, a woman unashamed of her faith and her Lord, and from the very beginning of our relationship, she’d wanted us to remain, as she put it, “chaste.” I’d respected her convictions, although it hadn’t made for an easy couple of months.

“In any case”-she’d stopped hiking now and was looking at the way the trail curved to the east-“I took a long time to decide. But finally, I made an appointment at the clinic: 10:00 a.m. and I even arrived early.”

She was staring past me, toward a horizon that lay hidden and out of sight beyond the trees.

“While I was waiting, I started paging through the magazines that were piled on the table between the chairs and as I flipped through them, I started noticing all these ads for laundry detergent and Kool-Aid and vacations at Disneyland. And every ad seemed to have a child in it: holding up a dirty sock, drinking from a Dixie cup, riding down a water slide, but they didn’t seem like advertisements for those things anymore. They seemed like ads for kids.”

I listened quietly. Took her hand. She curled her fingers around mine.