"When you get to Laytonville, before the tears and the fare-thee-wells, for a moment, stand real still and you'll feel me moving on." --Indigo Girls, Let Me Go Easy
The Indigo Girls were on the radio that morning, as they had been for what seemed like every goddamn morning that you got into your best friend Jennifer's car. It was 1990, you were 17, and there were two weeks left in your pregnancy, which had already stretched on for what seemed like forever.
"I think I'm going to name her Indigo," you told Jennifer as her car pulled into St. Catherine's Maternity Clinic. "I swear, she's gonna come out knowing the words to this fucking song." You were careless with language in the way that 17 –year-olds are. They were just sounds, just groups of letters that shocked parents (not that yours did any parenting), teachers and nuns. You were nine months pregnant and in a Catholic high school. You had hair to your ass, Southern Belle down to a science, and a disturbingly large knowledge of firearms. Shock was your forte. You waddled and Jennifer walked across the huge parking lot (why was the parking lot to a fucking maternity clinic so long anyway?) and into the waiting room chairs of uncomfortable orange plastic.
It wasn't a regular appointment, but you didn't tell Jennifer that. She would tell everyone. Word travelled too fast in a small town. You hadn't felt the baby move in forty-eight excruciatingly long hours, and that worried you.
You'd gotten pregnant for only one reason: to get out of Darnell. At sixteen, you were sick of sleeping in other peoples' houses in order to avoid getting the shit beaten out of you, so you let your brother Nate's friend Ethan fuck you once a month, behind the church, after Catechism, until one month your period never came and you were kicked out, which is when you moved in with Jennifer and devised a plan. You and she would move to New Orleans after the baby was born and give it up for adoption, and then finish school. It seemed like the perfect plan until one day when you were six months pregnant, you were sitting in Religious Education, listening to Sister Mary Elizabeth drone on and on when all of a sudden, the baby did a back flip and you realized that it wasn't just some escape plan, it was a baby, and you began to love it, terrifyingly enough. You chose not to tell anyone, instead kept up your devil-may-care attitude and acted like every other seventeen-year-old girl in Darnell.
A fat, red-haired nurse called your name and you struggled to your feet.
"Jenn, stay here." You waddled behind the nurse into an examination room, where a dark-haired, pretty doctor listened to your questions, nodded, sighed, and wheeled you down for a sonogram.
When you woke up hours later, they put the baby in your arms, stiff and limp at the same time, and bizarrely cold. You named her Indigo, just like you said you would, and her lips matched it. You wondered why you couldn't cry as they took her away, as they made you sign her birth, then death, certificates, as they lowered her body into the ground.
At the funeral, a friend of your father's gave you a hundred dollar bill, and as soon as the funeral was over, you took it to the courthouse and changed your last name to Duquesne, like your mother's. Then you snuck through your bedroom window at your parents' house and took everything you thought you might need and took off to the bus station with a scholarship to Tulane University.
Forty-eight hours later, twelve days after the last time you sat in a waiting-room orange plastic chair, you sat in a bus station in New Orleans, backwards, with your head pressed to the filthy Plexiglas of the window, when the Indigo Girls came on the radio, simultaneous to a young couple walking by, holding hands, pushing a baby carriage.
"I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains…there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fi-ine."
That was the last time in your entire life that you cried, sitting in an unsanitary orange chair in a bus station in New Orleans with your head pressed to the glass as the Indigo Girls sang hopefully, cheerfully, and a happy couple walked past, their future filled with hope.
Author's Note:
The song quoted in the text is "Closer To Fine", by the Indigo Girls, which was inexplicably, hugely, popular in 1991, at least in my area. The song in the header is from "Rarities".