The second day alone in the house was worse than the first. They watched TV again, but they ran out of things to talk about. because they had nothing to say to each other but because didn't want to talk. They wanted to kiss.

It was just before noon when they started kissing on the livingroom sofa, and sometime after one before they looked at the clock.

They'd gone farther than they'd wanted to, farther 96 REUNION.

than Elizabeth had dreamed of going. But they hadn't given in to their feelings entirely.

Elizabeth went home that night and stared at the mirror. She was so mad at herself she spat at her reflection. No wonder her mother had warned her about boys. Not because of what a boy would do if she ever got close to one. But because of what she herself was capable of.

She swore when she went to bed that she was finished lying to her parents, finished sneaking off to share an afternoon alone with John in an empty house.

She even prayed about it, begging God to forgive her for the awful person she'd become and asking him to give her strength.

In later years Elizabeth had used the lessons she learned that week as a teaching tool for her own children. "God doesn't want you to be stronger than temptation," she'd told each of her five kids at one time or another. "He wants you to be smarter than it." She'd show them the verse in Scripture that advised people to flee temptation, not stick around and try to bargain with it.

But that summer Elizabeth had figured she could bargain just a bit longer. The next day she couldn't stop herself. She was rattling off another lie, getting on her bike, and riding off to meet John before she remembered even a single promise she'd made to herself the night before.

This time, John didn't turn on the television. He took her to his bedroom and showed her a stack of letters his father had written to his mother while he was fighting in World War II.

"He was a true hero, John," Elizabeth said after she'd read most of them. "His love for your mother was amazing."

"Yes." John stacked the letters back ,in a box and closed the lid. "That's the way I want to love my wife someday, with all my heart and mind and soul."

Elizabeth was suddenly nervous, sitting there on the edge of John's bed. She recalled the way she'd felt the day before, the contempt she had for herself after the compromises she'd made with John. "Let's go back to the TV room."

97.

i'k i n g s b u r y s m a I I y John agreed easily, and she relaxed some. He wasn't trying to seduce her, wasn't trying to put her in an uncomfortable situation. He just wanted to share something about his past with her.

They returned to the TV room, but nothing was on. For a while they played cards, but then he took her hand and told her how much he'd miss her once school started. "I'll be busy. Second year med school is tough. I'll be lucky if I can meet you at the library once a week."

"At least we'll have that time."

Elizabeth knew what was happening, their words fell and they started kissing again. Only this time, they couldn't bring themselves to find a voice of reason the shouts of temptation.

Elizabeth remembered the ways she convinced her-afternoon. I'm going to marry him one day, anyway...

the difference if we have this time together?... We'll be apart enough, right? Besides... we'll stop before it's too late; I know will.

of it, every word, was a lie.

could no sooner stop themselves from giving in com-that afternoon than they could stop breathing. They had they could outwit temptation, but they were wrong. evening when she got home, she was sure the truth was all over her face. She wasn't a virgin anymore, and she imagine ever showing her face to John Baxter again.

next day she didn't meet him, couldn't let him see her the she had become: cheap and easy and completely without up at the store,John came to her house.

on the door and when her father answered, he in-himself as a friend of Elizabeth's.

the conversation as she sat, terrified, at the end of Whatever John was doing, things would never be the with her parents. The strangest part of all was that 98 REUNION.

Elizabeth wasn't sure whether to run for her life or dart into the next room and throw her arms around John's neck.

John explained to her parents that he had met Elizabeth at a school function and fallen in love with her. Then he said the thing that stopped Elizabeth's heart in its place. "I'd like to ask your permission to marry her."

Her mother was the first person to speak. "My daughter has said nothing about you, Mr. Baxter. I'm sure this is all some kind of mistake. She's been told not to talk to boys, and especially not young men like you-"

"Wait a minute."

Elizabeth cringed. The voice belonged to her father, a man who made her motherlook lenient.

Her father's voice filled the room. "Have you put my daughter in a compromising position?"

A compromising position? Elizabeth buried her head in her hands. Don't say it, John... don't say it... don't tell them.

He didn't. Instead he only insisted that he'd fallen in love with her and he wanted to marry her. In the end, her father threw him out of the house before Elizabeth could say hello or even see him.

That night her father told her she was never to spend time with John Baxter again. "You're a college girl, Elizabeth. You need to focus on your studies."

The next day Elizabeth left the house on her bike without ask ing. She planned to call John as soon as she got to the store, but she didn't have to. He was already there waiting for her. She fell into his arms, climbed into his car, and went with him back to the house where he lived. This time they both knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

John had told her several times in the decades since then that his actions were completely wrong, beyond reason. But without her parents' permission, he could hardly, marry her. And with out marriage, he had no idea how they'd ever love each other the way they were desperate to love each other.

99.

kingsbury smalley Back then John hadn't been a believer. His father had talked about having a strong faith, a belief in Jesus Christ, but not his mother. Until the day she died, she blamed God for taking her husband, for leaving her son without a father.

John fell somewhere in the middle.

The faith of his father had intrigued him, but he couldn't remember ever attending a church service or reading a Bible. All of that changed the day early that semester when Elizabeth called with the news.

She was pregnant and terrified.

"Where are you?" John's voice shook with fear. "I'll come get you.

Elizabeth. We'll run off and get married on our own." "No! We can't do that, John. My parents would disown me.

how would we live?"

"I could... I could quit school and get a job at the market. I work two jobs, three jobs, if I had to."

"No,John." The tears had come then. "Listen to yourself! You want to be a doctor. That's your dream. I know we'll be together you know it, too. But we need my parents' help. They'll let us get married and let you move in here with me. You can go to med school, and I'll stay in class until the baby comes. They'll have to understand."

no. You can't tell them."

Elizabeth struggled to find the words. Ever since getting the test at the campus clinic, she'd walked around in a fog. She felt dead as she said, "That's exactly what I'm going to do. I'll tell them I'm pregnant and that we want to get. married: Then I'll call you and tell you what they said."

Elizabeth felt certain her parents had. wanted to kill her that afternoon. They were horrified, disgusted, and embarrassed they said as much.

"What will my church friends think young lady?" Her mother kept her distance, as if maybe promiscuity; even her pregnancy, might be contagious. Mom this isn't about you. I fell in love, and I want to marry 100 REUNION.

John. He wants to marry me; he told you that when he came by that day."

Her father stood, then, and made a pronouncement. There would be no wedding, no son-in-law moving in with them to flaunt the fact that he'd gotten their virgin daughter pregnant.

"You will go away to a girls home in Indiana. I heard about it through a friend at work." Her father glared at her. "You will have the baby, then return to Ann Arbor and get on With your classes. At that point, all of us will carry on as if none of this foolery ever happened in the first place."

"Foolery?" Elizabeth shrieked at her father. "I love John Baxter, Daddy. I want to marry him, and I want to have his baby."

"Stop it!" Her father had never raised a hand to her, but in that moment he did; He stopped short of slapping her, but his face was red, and his voice shook with rage. "You'll go away, have the .. the child." He spat the word child, as if it tasted poisonous on his tongue. "You'll give the baby up for adoption, come home, and forget the entire incident ever happened."

"It's my baby, Daddy. I don't want to give it up!"

"Then the two of you will be homeless together. I will not have you raising that man's child in this house."

By the end of the evening, Elizabeth had agreed to her father's plan. Not because she wanted to but because she had no strength left to fight him, and no option that seemed workable on its own.

That night she called John and told him their relationship was over. She had no choice but to do what her parents wanted, nowhere else to turn. John tried to discourage her, but he had no viable options either.

In the end, they both agreed the solution was a terrible one. But it was also their only one. She left the following week and spent nine months at the girls home. Though it was the worst season in her life, something wonderful came of it. She found a relationship with Jesus.

Prior to her time in Indiana, Elizabeth had only borrowed her 101 kingsbury sma[ley beliefs from her parents. Theirs was a stuffy, legalistic faith and never one that Elizabeth owned deep in her heart. But those lonely months, missing John and knowing she'd made the wrong choice by leaving, she had no one but God to turn to. , She wasn't allowed phone calls out, and John wasn't allowed to call her. But he wrote, and once in a while one of the women who ran the place would sneak one of his letters to her instead of ripping it up, as her parents had instructed them to do with any Di.letters from John Baxter.

In his letters,John expressed a similar revelation. "I've discovered peace I never knew before," he told her. "Whatever we do when this is over, Elizabeth, we must always put God first. We were wrong for being together the way we were, but I was wrong of all. Jesus wants me to know him before I can love you way you deserve to be loved."

i! Eli.zabeth bore a healthy baby boy. He had blond hair and his muscular frame. Elizabeth was allowed to hold him for one hour before he was taken away. She wanted desperately for John to let him hear his son's soft cries, to describe for the way he looked with his beautiful skin and clear blue eyes.

she wasn't allowed, so she memorized his face, his features, his newborn cry.

Memorized all of it so she could tell John about him when they saw each other again. Then she prayed for the baby, begging God to give him a loving home with love. If it be your will, Lord, let me meet him one day. God..."

they took him from her arms, Elizabeth wept for the day. The ache of losing him was so strong she thought she might die from the pain. Two months later, when she was at least physically recovered-she was sent home. Her parents tried to seem happy about her return, but want anything else from them.

ged in the time she'd been gone, grown closer to parents. Somewhere out in the world 102 was a little boy who belonged to her and John, a child she would never get to raise or hold or love. A child who would never know her. And all because her parents hadn't wanted their church friends to see their daughter pregnant.

The entire situation was a tragedy, and Elizabeth didn't wait one hour after returning home before calling John. They met at the library and found a quiet alcove where they could be alone, away from the curious glances of other students. Elizabeth had disappeared, after all. And now it was late July and she'd showed up again. Anyone who knew them could do the math and figure out what had happened.

Alone in the library that day, John held her and wiped away her tears and listened as she told him about the baby. John still had a lot of schooling to finish, but he'd gotten permission from the family he lived with so he could marry Elizabeth and have her live with him there, at least until he finished school.

And that's exactly what they did.

In a ceremony attended by very few people, and avoided by her parents, John and Elizabeth were married on August 22, 1968, a little over a year after they'd met, On their first night as husband and wife, they prayed that God would always be at the center of their marriage. And they asked him to help them never again think of the blond, blue-eyed boy they'd given up.

For most of the next four years they kept to their bargain. Then in 1972 after they'd found a small place of their own near the university-they had Brooke. In the hospital after delivering her, Elizabeth said just one thing, one thing that told both of them she never forgot the baby she gave away. "I'm glad it's a girl."

"Me too."

"Because a boy would remind me of everything I gave up." Sometime after Brooke was born, Elizabeth's parents found them, They apologized for what they'd done, and the two families made peace. But Elizabeth knew they would never understand the price she'd paid for their lack of compassion.

103.

king,bury malley The years passed, and girl after girl after girl came into the Baxter family.

Elizabeth figured God wasn't going to give them a boy. He'd already done that, and she'd given him up. In the recesses of her heart, in a place she never shared with anyone, not even John, she wondered if maybe God was withholding a boy from them as his way of punishing her, reminding her that what she'd done was wrong.

But in 1980 she delivered Luke, their fifth and final child. A boy who looked exactly like the child she'd given birth to while at the girls home in Indiana. In the hospital Elizabeth held him out for John to see. "Now you know, John." He gave her a blank look. "Now I know what?"

"Now you know what we gave away. The baby I had all those years ago looked exactly like this one."

From the beginning, they felt Luke was a special blessing from God. Not that each of the girls wasn't special. They were. Luke seemed to fill the aching places in both their hearts, the that still longed for the son they'd given up, the places that still wondered where he was and how he was doing.

They settled in Bloomington when John took a job at the hospital there. Only once did they ask themselves if they'd taken a job in Indiana hoping that somehow they'd find son they gave up. It was strange, really. Of all the places they could live in the United States, only Indiana felt like home, so there had to be something to their thoughts.

Luke's birth, they had an easier time keeping their and only rarely did the subject of their firstborn son come up. They agreed that their children didn't need to know the past-how rough a start their parents had as a couple, had a brother out there somewhere who knew nothing of them. Not telling them had been a good choice-one Elizabeth and wavered from, The adoption had been closed. None of the children would have the right or the ability to find their brother. Better to believe he hadn't existed at all, to con 104.

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vince themselves never to look back at that time in their lives. Nice to imagine that God had placed him in exactly the home he was supposed to be placed, to believe that-he hadn't ever been theirs but the other couple's.

Still, there were times when Elizabeth was eighteen again, when she could feel that baby boy in her arms, see his expres sion, his eyes, and know that the longing in her heart would never go away completely. Times when she could feel that woman taking her baby from her arms, sense the immediate sep aration, see her turn her back and walk out of the room, and- "Stop!" Elizabeth sat straight up in bed, her heart racing, chest heaving.

"Bring him back here! He's mine, bring him back right now!"

John was awake instantly. He sat up and put his arm around her shoulders.

"Honey... shhh. You're dreaming."

Her eyes darted around the room, searching for the door. "Get him, John, before it's too late."

John took hold ofher arm and gave her a soft shake. "Eliza beth, wake up. You're dreaming, honey."

She blinked and slowly she felt herself ease back against the headboard. John was right. It had all been only a dream, a walk through time that led her back to the place where it all hap pened, to the moment when they took her baby from her.

And even now hours before a cancer surgery that could sig nal her season of death it felt like no time at all had passed. He was out there somewhere, wasn't he? The baby she'd given up. Closed adoption or not, there had to be a way to find him. Or a way for him to find her.

Elizabeth remembered all the work they'd done in the early nineties, back when she'd fought cancer the first time. They'd tracked down every loose thread, every connection, every per son who might've known something about the adoption.

Every door had led to a dead end, and they promised each other they'd never waste their time on such futility again.