“She had already had the abortion by the time she bumped into me. We were both waiting for our separate planes at the Chicago airport.”

I calmed down a minute and tried to regain my composure. “Well, she could have been lying to you. You don’t know if she was telling the truth. Did she tell you not to say anything to me about it?”

“Of course she told me not to say anything.”

“So why are you telling me now?” I asked.

“So you’ll know that this can happen to anybody, including you. So stop judging me; you and Mom.”

She still could have been making the whole thing up. I just didn’t know what to think anymore. But I knew I was sorry about making that phone call to her. Then I wondered if our mother knew anything about Andrea.

“Did you tell Mom about this?” I asked my sister.

“No, I did not. Mom would have immediately told you and called that girl back up and everything. It would have been a big mess. And like I said, she had already had the abortion, so all of that energy would have been expended for nothing.”

She was probably right about that. But it all left me speechless.

Juanita repeated, “So, like I said, this situation can happen to anybody, including you. And if the girl asks me why I finally decided to tell you, I’ll tell her the same thing, somebody had to prove to my big brother that his ass is not invincible, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Damn!

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? I hung up the phone with my sister and was stunned. Things began to add up so quickly in my mind that I could feel a headache coming on. Andrea’s miscarriage, was that my baby? Was the dream in the bathroom about losing my baby? Did Corey know about that? And why was I thinking about it as “my baby” if it never happened and I didn’t want it to happen? What was my mind telling me? Was I feeling subconsciously guilty about it? Would I have allowed it to happen had Andrea told me? What was on my mind?

I just stood there in the middle of my living room with the phone in my hand.

“Shit!” I cursed myself. “I don’t need this shit right now.”

Things were going just great in my life. The sane thing to do would be to ignore it. Like my sister said, if Andrea had already gone through with an abortion, then what was the use in sweating it? The insane conclusion was to start a witch hunt until I tracked down the witch. And guess what conclusion I came to?

I called my sister back while searching my cluttered desk of business cards and phone books for Corey Sanders’s number. He had been the first one to bring Andrea back up and plant her unsettling seed in my mind. But first I wanted to see if my sister still had any contacts for her.