Page 19 of The Light Year

Barbie's eyes were wide as saucers; it had never occurred to her that pregnancy was anything other than a blessing between a married couple, and, as she thought about it then, she realized she wasn't even entirely clear about how it all happened.

"I need you to listen to me," Marion said gently, putting her hands on either side of Barbie's knees and looking right into her eyes. "It's a messy business for a lot of women, trying to remedy this particular situation, and there are doctors who can help, but it's very dangerous. Do you understand me?"

Barbie nodded, but inside her head, her mind was shouting: "No! No, I do not understand!"

"Okay, then I need you to just follow my lead. We're volunteers. We help women when they arrive. We comfort them, we listen, we don't ask questions, and we do not judge. We offer water or juice, we hold their hands before and after they see the doctor, and if someone isn't feeling well, we find her a place to liedown, and we put a washcloth to her forehead and tell her she's going to be alright. That's all we do, okay?"

Barbie felt that these tasks didn't seem to warrant the level of seriousness in her mother's eyes and tone, but she nodded again anyway. "Okay, Mama."

"We do not have to agree with the decisions that any other woman makes in her life, Barbara, but we do need to support them. Women are the backbones of one another's lives, and we only survive by leaning on each other and keeping each other's secrets. Do you understand?"

Barbie nodded again, and her mother patted her legs and then stood up, holding out her hands to pull Barbie up off the curb.

Marion walked around to the driver's window and rapped on it with her knuckles. Barbie watched her, loving this vision of her mother in oversized slacks and an oxford shirt, looking to the world like an impish, adventurous woman rather than a wealthy, worldly wife and mother.

"Etan," Marion said as he rolled down the window.

"Ma'am?"

"We'll be back here in three hours. You'll be here?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said, putting one jacket-clad elbow on the doorframe and putting his dark fingers to his forehead in a small salute. "I'll be here."

Marion tipped her head toward the street and beckoned for Barbie to follow, which she did.

That evening, Barbie learned more about being a woman than she had in the first fourteen years of her life. She saw women of every color, every social strata, and of every age and size come through the doors of the makeshift clinic where she and her mother volunteered. The first girl her own age who walked in, looking shy and scared and ashamed, had nearly thrown Barbie off course. She’d stared openly, wanting to knowhow and why a girl, who was clearly too young to be married, had come to see a doctor about pregnancy. Seeing Barbie's face, her mother had walked over and physically turned her away, pushing her towards a different room with a whispered admonishment: "We don't judge. Now, go help to restock the clean towels."

By the end of the night, Barbie had seen several women faint, three vomit, and had heard one wailing so loudly from behind a closed door that she'd turned to her mother in fear, only to receive a single shake of the head.

They left the clinic--which was really a makeshift space built behind a real doctor's office--looking and feeling exhausted. Barbie's hair was damp and stuck to her forehead, and her shirt had come untucked at some point, and now hung down nearly to her knees. In the parking lot of the church, Etan saw them coming and turned over the engine, idling with his headlights off as Barbie and Marion silently re-zipped one another into their dresses, then balled up the sweaty, blood-and-vomit stained clothing they'd worn all evening so they could shove it into the trunk.

Barbie’s mother slammed the trunk and smoothed down the front of her dress. “We’ll get home at the time I projected, and no one will be any the wiser about where we’ve been,” she said, lowering her chin and looking at Barbie to make sure she understood.

Barbie nodded and followed her mom into the backseat of the car.

Barbie slept all the way home, dreaming fitfully of crying women, of silent babies, of dead flowers, and of the girl her age who had disappeared behind the closed door of the doctor’s room and come out looking ashen.

“Mommy?” Huck asks Barbie in the middle of her reverie. His little legs are sticking out straight as he sits in the swing.Barbie is pushing him from behind. She walks around to the front of the swing so that he can see her face.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Mommy, I love you.” Huck smiles at her, and her heart melts. He’s the sweetest and cuddliest of her three boys, and she thanks her lucky stars nearly every day that she’s got him as her last baby. As Huck grows, she’ll miss the hallmarks of toddlerhood, of raising little ones, of kissing scraped knees and cutting crusts off sandwiches, but at least she’ll have the memories of falling asleep next to Huck on his tiny bed during afternoon naps. She’ll remember quiet days at the park, just the two of them, and, hopefully, he’ll remember those days, too, and grow up to defy the old adage about sons only being sons until they take a wife.

“I love you too, Hucky,” she says, reaching out and grabbing his tiny feet to stop his swinging. He gasps with delight at the quick halting of the movement. “I love you so, so, so much.”

It had come to her on different occasions over the years—that night she spent at the clinic with her mother—particularly as she learned what they’d truly had to do to the women she saw coming in and out of that nighttime clinic, and she’d wondered even more about their lives as she’d grown into her own. She’d wondered how they’d each come to be in a position where they felt the clinic was their best and only option, and each time she thought of them, she felt gratitude to have never been in that situation herself.

“Can we go home, Mommy?” Huck asks, looking tired as he rubs his eyes.

Barbie reaches down to pick up her three-year-old from the swing, and rather than set him on the ground, she holds him on her hip, savoring for just a moment that feeling of having a little one cuddle up to her neck and bury his face in the scent of his mother for comfort.

Barbie crosses the park with her purse over one shoulder and Huck’s head on the other, remembering how fortunate her life has been, despite the tragic way she’d lost her mother.

Marion Mackey had been so many things in her own life: college student, young wife, mother, scorned woman, passionate lover, community activist, feminist, alcoholic, and then, finally—nothing at all. Just a memory to those who’d loved her. But not to Barbie. To her own daughter, Marion had been a champion; someone who always did what she felt was right, and who did her best to pitch in where she was needed, even if no one ever knew about it.

The afternoon sunlight warms Barbie and Huck as they make their way across the grass to their parked car, and she smiles at the way her child feels in her arms. If she can impart to her own sons even half of what her mother had given to her, she will count herself a lucky woman. If she can let them know how important it is to be bold, to be brave, and to help others in the ways that their grandmother had, then that will be enough.

In that way, Barbie thinks, setting Huck on the backseat of the car and watching him lay on his side and pull his knees to his chest as he closes his eyes,in that way, my mother will live forever.

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