Gwynne Forster - Fools Rush In

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To my husband, whose love and unfailing

support sustain me and enrich my life, and to

Karen Thomas, my editor, whose helpfulness,

competence and upbeat approach make writing a

pleasure and deadlines a less ominous thing.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Justine let the white vehicle take her weight as she stood alone at the edge of the crowd, staring at the gutted Falls Church, Virginia motel in which, hours earlier, her faithful and loving husband of four years had perished with his white mistress. Perspiration matted her hair even as she tightened her jacket against the early fall chill. Her dry, tearless eyes stung their sockets as she gazed at the burned-out ruin still ripe with the smell of singed carpet, incinerated furniture, odoriferous rubbish, and charred flesh. Shivers coursed through her at the sight of the smoke-darkened glass and fragmented windows. Blackened bricks that had once gleamed red in the sunlight mocked her with their message of gloom and death.

“They shore musta been busy,” a female voice declared, “if they was the only ones in there that couldn’t hear the fire alarm.”

“You tell it, girl,” another agreed.

The only love she had even known. Why couldn’t she cry? Echoes shouted at her from the black ruins that jeered contemptuously at her. “Love ya, Baby!” He said it that way every time he left her. “You be ready for me, Baby.” She opened the crumpled note that he’d left tacked to the refrigerator and read it again. “Sorry I couldn’t reach you at work, Baby, but the company’s got an emergency of gargantuan proportions, and I’m on my way to Boston to straighten things out. May take a couple of days, but I’ll call you. Explain it all when I get back. You be ready for me. Love ya, Baby. Your devoted husband, Kenneth.” Boston! And here he was, dead in a Falls Church, Virginia motel.

She looked up and stared in horror as men approached her wheeling gurneys carrying one long, black plastic bag and one shorter bag, each tied securely. Dazed, she would have touched the remains of her husband if an ambulance worker hadn’t jumped between her and the lifeless object. Her fist pummeled the man’s chest until he held her hands to restrain her and folded her shaking form to his body until she gained control. She looked at the note, read it again, shredded it into bits, and let the wind have it. Then she turned from the horrifying scene where Kenneth Montgomery had perished with his lover, rested her hand on her belly—distended with their eight-months-along unborn child—and walked away. Thirty-five minutes later as she drove the Ford Taurus home, the first pains of a premature birth began….

Justine’s screams awakened her, and she sprang forward in bed, tugging the sheet to her as though to protect herself, and gazed rapidly around her bedroom. It wasn’t a dream. If only it was. If only that morning had never been, and she could sleep through one night without reliving it exactly as it had occurred that awful day. For nearly twelve months, that scene had been her constant companion, filling her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night. She wiped the perspiration from her face with her left hand and shook her right fist.

“I won’t let you do this to me. I won’t let you destroy my faith in human beings. You with your goodness, your humanitarianism, and your love for the common man. You for whom I ruined my relationship with my father. You treacherous bastard. You robbed me of my child. You…

“My child. Why did I…?” She rested her head on her raised knees and folded her arms around them. What had she done? She jumped from the bed, got dressed, rushed to the social service department of the hospital in which she’d given birth, and paced in front of the door for an hour and a half until the workers arrived at nine.

Maybe if she said if often enough, they’d do something. “I want my child back. I was sick. You can’t do this to me.” Her screams reverberated through the social service department of Alexandria, Virginia’s Presidents Hospital. She tightened the woolen stole that she wore to ward off the September chill and leaned across the social worker’s desk, oblivious to the tears that wet the corners of her mouth.

“I…I’ll sue you. I’ll…”

“You signed the papers, Justine. You couldn’t stand the sight of that baby and it was our duty to protect her.”

“But I was sick, and you knew it.”

“You said you didn’t want the baby. We know you sustained an unusually deep postpartum psychosis; many women do. Some of them have killed their babies when the psychosis was a deep one like yours. We thought you’d never come out of it. A week ago, I’d have sworn you never would. Your refusal to look at the child, and your insistence that we do whatever the law allowed, left us no choice, but to do as you said. Your therapist agreed.”

She stormed out of the social service department and, nearly blinded by her tears, made her way to the maternity ward to find the doctor and nurse who had taken care of her when she developed an embolism following the birth.

“After about a week,” the nurse told her, “you became withdrawn, refused food, wouldn’t talk to anybody, and wouldn’t take the baby. You refused to take the baby with you when we discharged you. We had a conference with you and your therapist, and when the therapist asked you what you wanted us to do, you said, ‘Suit yourself.’ I’ve never known postpartum psychosis to last as long or to be as deep as what you’ve been experiencing. Look at you now. You’re a changed woman; I can see that. But it’s too late. We can’t help you.”

Nurse Jane Wilkerson watched Justine’s heavy steps as she left them. “What else could we all have done?” she asked the doctor who had joined her. “Every time she saw that child, she sank deeper into depression, screaming and crying like we were beating her. I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life.”

“Yeah. I don’t think many women could handle learning that her husband died in a tryst with a woman he’d had a steady affair with since before he met her, and especially not if she was eight months pregnant.”

“Are you saying…? You’re joking.”

“Wish I was. Alexandria’s a small town, and the upper middle-class African American community here is minuscule. Marian Iverson had been Kenneth Montgomery’s mistress for at least twelve years—since their college days, I’m told. Uninterrupted. Long before he met Justine. But he couldn’t marry a white woman and run for congress in that all-black district he claimed to represent. African-American women don’t seem able to hack that from us black guys; though, believe me, they take whoever they please.”