NATHAN
I can trace so much of my life back to a summer night when I was seventeen. Everything starts from then and links the years that follow, like one of those connect-the-dots pages you played with as a kid: Begin right here, draw a line to there, then another, then again. Sooner or later, an image emerges.
I’d recently finished my junior year of high school and was kicking around a few ideas on how to get out of Locksburg, a Central Pennsylvania backwater I’d wanted to flee ever since I was old enough to misspell its name. College was a possibility. The marines, a cheaper one. Either would work, as long as it got me away.
I had a nodding acquaintance with my classmates but no real friends among them. That’s not because of bad behavior on my part. The opposite was true: I was the only child of a sweet-spoken, disabled mother and a deacon father who together looked after a struggling church that was too poor to support a full-time priest. When I wasn’t doing schoolwork or house chores, I was at Saint Stanislaus, chipping melted wax from the candleholders or cementing the cracks that the bitter winters brought to the stone walls outside.
One Saturday night I was walking home from the church, head down, hands in pockets, when I turned a corner. LeeLee Roland was bounding down the steps of her house, ten yards away. She was a soon-to-be sophomore who stood out from the other girls at school. Even at fifteen, she was brazenly flirty to most every guy but me. I’d watch her with a side-eye, fascinated but wary, as she bounced along the high school halls.
“Hey, Nate!” she called, employing a nickname I didn’t use. I raised my chin and hid my surprise. We’d never spoken before, and I was a little amazed that she knew who I was.
“You going to the party too?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said, as if I knew which party that was.
“Yes, you are. I’m kidnapping you.”
She hooked a hand around my arm, and the breath left my lungs. To feel a girl touch me, even with just a friendly move, nearly froze me. That touch, combined with the warm June breeze, was instantly intoxicating, as if I’d swallowed an entire bottle of altar wine.
“Where is it?” I said, tamping down my voice in the hope of sounding somewhat cool.
“Tracy’s house,” LeeLee said. “Willow Street.”
I nodded a few times too many while piecing it together: Tracy Carson lived there, another girl I’d never spoken to. LeeLee and I walked two blocks then turned onto Willow.
“I’m … I’m not really sure I’m invited,” I said, entirely sure I wasn’t.
“She don’t care. Anyway, too late,” LeeLee said, and turned to walk up the steps of a house. She let go of my arm. I felt both real relief and deep disappointment.
LeeLee courtesy-knocked then pushed the door open. Inside, about fifteen people were circled around the dining room table, playing some kind of drinking game. All were familiar faces. In a town of about five thousand, you saw everyone at one time or another.
“Look who I found,” LeeLee told the group. They seemed indifferent. For that, I was grateful. Anything short of disdain was enough to make me half happy. Like any seventeen-year-old, I was perpetually confused and occasionally anxious, all while acting as confident as I could.
Forty-five minutes later, the number of people had nearly tripled, and the radio, blaring classic rock, had gotten turned up twice as loud. I’d taken a place against a wall, nursing a can of lukewarm Keystone Light and watching the games that no one asked me to join. After finishing my beer, I acted as if the can were full, bringing it to my lips time and again. LeeLee had gone to the kitchen and brought me the beer when we’d arrived. She’d since disappeared upstairs with a pack of other girls.
I debated leaving. No one would notice.
I eyed the door.
Any time up until then had been pivotal, of course. What if I had stayed at church a few extra minutes and never saw LeeLee? Or what if I had taken another route home? But when I look back, that moment seems the most decisive, the last real instant when something could have changed. Had I walked out that door then, how many lives would have been different?
Instead, I decided to hang around the party for a little longer. I wandered into the kitchen and took another can from the fridge, hoping no one would notice or yell at me or say I had to pay.
When I went back to my spot at the wall, LeeLee had returned.
“Hey!” she said. “I was wondering where you were.”
I showed her the beer.
“Finish it,” she said.
“Why?”
“This place is lame,” she said, not caring who heard. “Let’s get out of here.”
We passed the can back and forth until we emptied it, then left. I imagined that everyone was watching us go. Maybe someone might gossip about me later—a delicious notion for a guy whom surely no one at school ever thought about.
LeeLee took my hand when we reached the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to make of it and didn’t question her when she led me into a nearby patch of woods, where we sat on a fallen tree trunk.
“Gettin’ chilly,” she said, and leaned against me. I put an arm around her.
“You don’t say much,” she said.
I had no response other than a shrug.
“See!” she said, and nudged me.
She smiled.
With no other prelude, we were kissing.
I didn’t try to stop her when she unzipped my pants and reached inside. I didn’t have the words. I didn’t know if I wanted her to stop anyway. Within a minute her shorts were down, and she was on top of me. To hold out, I soon moved her below, then slowed. That extended my efforts for at least two minutes until we finished. Then we lay there on the ground.
“That was good,” she whispered after a while.
“Yeah,” I said, because I had to say something.
* * *
I pined over LeeLee each day that summer, and scanned the streets whenever I was out in Locksburg. When my parents and I went on a three-week church retreat, I called our home number often to check the machine, in case LeeLee had left a message. I debated endlessly about whether to call her, some days convincing myself that she wouldn’t want to talk to me, other days swearing that she was probably waiting for me to make a move. Then in August she knocked on my front door. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw her.
“Hey.”
“Hey. You alone?”
“Yeah. My mom and dad are at the church.”
“Anybody else here?”
“No.”
“Can I come in?”
I opened the door. She came inside, then stopped in the middle of the living room and turned to face me.
“I’m pregnant.”
Dry words caught in my throat, while terror and anguish and fear swirled in my gut. I can feel the echoes of those emotions still. They sometimes creep into my dreams and wake me with remnants of the panic I felt at that moment.
When I could finally speak, I asked LeeLee every question twice: if she had had sex with anyone else (“No! I’m not some slut—I was drunk! It’s your fault too!”) and if she was sure (“I had my cousin buy two pregnancy tests for me. Both came back positive.”).
“So what do we do?”
“My cousin said I could use her ID. She can take me to Philly for an abortion.”
“Good. Yeah. Good. OK,” I said, clutching hold of her answer like it was a life raft. We could salvage this without my parents knowing.
“It’s expensive,” LeeLee said.
“How much?”
“My cousin would have to take two days off work. Then there’s the drive to Philly. We were thinking, she could tell my mom that we were going to a concert there, so we’d need to stay in a hotel. Then, you know, the doctor’s bill. She thinks almost a thousand. For everything.”
“Do you have it?”
“I got like sixty bucks. That’s why I’m here. I would have gone already if I had the money. How much do you have?”
The balance of my bank account had only recently topped a hundred dollars.
“When are you going to Philly?”
“Next weekend, if I can get the money. If not, I dunno.”
“I’ll get it,” I promised her. “Make the appointment.”
* * *
Over the next few days, I lived in torment, staying up late into the nights to devise ways to get a thousand dollars. None of my plans had a chance of coming together. By Wednesday I was desperate. Theft, which I’d dismissed from the start, became the only option. Anything from the church wouldn’t be easy to sell. That brought my thoughts to my mother’s wedding ring.
She kept it in a small wooden box on her dresser.
I took the ring, promising myself I’d get it back to her soon, though I had no concrete plan for doing so. Then I borrowed my dad’s car and drove forty miles to Harrisburg, where a pawnbroker offered me three hundred dollars. I took the ring and turned to leave.
“Wait,” he called. “How much you need?”
“A thousand.”
He huffed.
I reached for the door.
“I can do seven fifty,” he said.
I shook my head.
“OK, come back here,” he said when my hand was on the door handle.
* * *
A week later LeeLee had gone and returned from Philadelphia. When I called her, she said, “Yeah, it’s done.”
Three sentences later, she said, “Don’t call me again, OK?”
* * *
My father tapped on my bedroom door a few nights later.
“Have you been in our room lately?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
“Cleaning up, maybe?”
“No.”
“Your mother’s very concerned. She can’t find her wedding ring.”
“Did she, like, lose it while shopping or something?”
“She doesn’t wear it except on special occasions.”
“Oh.”
“I had it appraised at ten thousand dollars for our homeowner’s insurance. But it’s not the money. My father gave it to me, to give to her. It was my mother’s.”
“She probably dropped it somewhere.”
“Let’s help her look, though.”
“Now?”
“No. It’s too late. But tomorrow. In the light.”
“I will.”
I tried to get back to the book I was pretending to read, but he remained in the doorway.
“You feeling OK? I’ve heard you up at nights sometimes.”
“I’m good.”
“You can tell me anything, you know. I would never judge you.”
“Yeah. I know that.”
He turned to leave, then stopped and turned around.
“Nathan. You didn’t see the ring at all?”
I knew what it took for him to ask me that question. He never spoke when a motion or a sound would serve just as well. In these words were expectations of trust, and truth. Ideals he lived by, and encouraged me to honor too.
“No,” I said.
The next day I scoured the house with my mother: dumping out the vacuum bag, reaching between furniture cushions. She’d lost her leg at the knee in a car accident when she was twelve and limped with the prosthetic, so I was the one who climbed up on chairs to peer onto shelves.
I acted like I was seriously searching, even when there were tears in my eyes.
Copyright © 2023 by Ken Jaworowski