4 A Prayer Answered

The Monday after Barbie told Gwendolyn she was a lesbian, Bailey Foster arrived at Bayner Genetics to find a yellow Post-It note stuck to her computer monitor. “See me” was all it said, but Bailey knew it was from Gwendolyn Bayner. Only Gwendolyn would have written a note that so presumptuously assumed the recipient would know its author.

Bailey went to her lab partner’s desk and found a note identical to her own. In her fashion, Susan Griffin was late. As the smartest geneticist in the company, it was her prerogative. She was two years younger than Bailey, only twenty-five, but she seemed to have twice the intelligence. Other employees were always coming to her with questions, and she could usually answer them off the top of her head. She’d entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at sixteen on full scholarship. Five years later, she’d not only graduated with a doctorate in bioengineering and genetics but also had managed to earn a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Susan Griffin owed her success to a horrid childhood. She’d kept secret the details of just how horrid it had been until one night when it all just burst out of her like a festering boil finally erupting. Susan Griffin was not one to easily share her feelings.

As Bailey waited for Suze to arrive, her thoughts returned to that night.

They were at the CATUG Pub, celebrating Suze’s promotion. They were seated in a secluded booth in a dark corner at the rear of the joint, which sold deep fried food and three hundred different brands of beer. Suze had had too many Newcastles. The table was littered with bottles. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she had begun to cry…

“Oh, sweetie!” Bailey said. “Don’t cry! We’re celebrating!”

She moved to Suze’s side of the booth in an effort to comfort her.

“It was awful, Foster.”

“Tell me, Suze.”

And then Susan Griffin told her story, the whole awful mess of it. It was the first and last time she would ever speak of it, but it came out of her then like water from a open hydrant.

“Even before I began menstruating, my father – that cocksucker! – started to abuse me. The first time was when I was barely ten. I’d forgotten to get a towel before taking a shower one night, so I called out to my mom. This fuck comes in with a Barney towel and holds it out to me like he’s my boyfriend at the beach. I can see that towel now, the big purple dinosaur dancing and smiling under the words ‘I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family...’”

“Jesus,” Bailey whispered.

“I was so embarrassed! I tried to grab it from him, but he wouldn’t let it go. He said he wanted to help me dry off like when I was a little girl. I told him no and stayed behind the shower curtain, but he got mad and ripped the curtain down, exposing me.

“He’d been drinking, of course. They were always drinking. I could smell the bourbon on his breath. He screamed at me, ‘You don’t say no to your father!’ Then he pulled me by the arm and wrapped the towel around me like a mummy and hugged me tight so I couldn’t move. I screamed for my mother, but he said, ‘She’s passed out, sweetie. It’s after eight o’clock.’ He was always calling me sweetie, but it was more a threat than anything else.

“I started crying so hard I could barely breathe, but I didn’t fight him. He probably would have hurt me if I had. As it turned out, he merely petted me. My nonexistent breasts, my little snatch, my butt. He told me I was beautiful and then grabbed my hand and made me touch his crotch. He was wearing pajama bottoms with no underwear. He was always walking around the house half naked. I could feel his penis start to grow as he forced my hand to touch it. Then all of a sudden he left, saying, ‘If you tell your mother, I swear to God I’ll strangle you dead like a stray cat.’

“After that, he started sneaking into my bedroom after my mother passed out for the night. He would finger me and then stick his finger in his mouth and make an mmmm sound. When he first starting doing it, I didn’t lubricate. I was too young. So he would jerk off next to me on the bed and shoot his semen into a paper towel. It was so my mom wouldn’t find his semen on my sheets I guess, although she never would. I did my own laundry as soon as I was able to. It was either that or walk around in dirty clothes all the time.

“When I was twelve or so, I started to get wet. I swear to God I didn’t want to! It just happened! And that’s when he started raping me. It was right then that I vowed to do well in school so I could graduate early and get a scholarship and get the hell away to college. That’s why I’m so smart, Foster. I had to be smart.”

“Didn’t your mother know what was going on? Why didn’t she tell him to stop?” Bailey said.

“I think she knew, but she was just as afraid of him as I was. Her answer was to save herself, to just keep drinking until she passed out and the pain was gone.”

“Oh, Suze, I’m so sorry!”

Now they were both crying.

“I’m not done,” Suze said.

She took a gulp of the brown ale.

“Once he started raping me he couldn’t stop. He usually did it four or five times a week. If I was bleeding, he raped me anally. Usually he used a rubber, but sometimes he didn’t. So of course I wound up pregnant. I was fifteen. I told him I’d stopped bleeding and he gave me some money to go have an abortion. I took the money and told him I would, but I never did. I was a good Catholic girl, and I was afraid of making God angry. So instead I just started eating like a pig. I was so hungry anyway. I got really fat to hide the bump. He never knew. Can you believe that? Fucking drunk asshole never knew he was raping his pregnant daughter.

“Anyway, I read a lot about having babies and put together a gym bag full of supplies for when the time came. Towels, string, sharp scissors, stuff like that. And some bus tokens. I carried that gym bag everywhere. As it turned out, my water broke late one night after both of them were passed out drunk. Thank God. I climbed out of my bedroom window and waddled to the park near our house. There was a baseball field there. It had concrete dugouts with wooden benches, metal roofs, and cement floors. I laid a towel out on the floor of one of the dugouts and had my baby right there. Christ I was scared! But it didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would. I think I might have passed out once or twice.

“I cleaned up its little face by spitting on a facecloth and sticking Q-Tips up its tiny nostrils. Then I tied some string around the cord and snipped it. I was not crying at all. I was focused on my plan. It was quite a mess, as you can imagine. Right away the baby started nursing and after a few minutes it fell fast asleep, and I did too.

“When I woke up, it was raining. The drops were beating so loud on the metal roof at first I thought someone was beating on it with a bat. The baby just kept sleeping, though. I wrapped him in a towel and put him in the gym bag and zipped it up halfway so he could breathe. I looked around and saw the mess on the towel and the concrete. I gathered it up and threw the whole thing in an old trash barrel. Then the rain really started coming down hard and blowing sideways, right into the dugout. It was washing the blood away, which was good, but it was also soaking me and the baby.”

Now Bailey was sobbing and saying “Oh Suze, oh Suze...” She kept hugging her friend, but she needed it more than Suze. Suze was on a roll.

“I took the baby in the gym bag and walked to a bus stop, as I had planned. There was a shelter there that kept us out of the rain. The bus showed up pretty fast anyway, and I got on. I went to the back of the bus, left the gym bag with the baby still inside it on the floor, and got off at the next stop. I used the back doors so the bus driver wouldn’t notice I’d forgotten the bag.”

“Do you know what happened to the baby?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah. The next day I saw a story in the newspaper. It said some people who got on the bus after me found the baby when it woke up and started to cry. As it turned out, the bus driver and his wife had been trying to have a baby for years, but couldn’t. The woman’s gyno had told her she was barren, so they’d begun praying for a baby. They thought my baby was an answer to their prayers.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I actually keep a copy of the newspaper story in my purse. You want to see it?”

“Sure.”

Suze slipped a hand into her purse and pulled out a newspaper story that had been laminated in plastic. She handed it to Bailey, who pulled a couple candles together so there would be enough light to read by.

City Bus Driver’s Prayer for Child Answered

by Philip Carey, Sentinel Staff Writer

The prayers of an Orlando couple who learned three years ago they could not bear children were answered Tuesday morning.

William Chambers, 37, a city bus driver for the past 10 years, said a male baby was discovered inside a zip-up gym bag on the floor at the back of his bus at about 6:30 AM by passengers who heard the newborn begin to cry.

One of the passengers was Shirley Banks, 67, who usually sits in the back of the bus on her way to her job as a daycare worker at St. John’s Christian Center.

“We saw that old bag and thought someone had just left it behind accidentally like they sometimes do,” Banks said. “Then we heard that little precious start to wail. He must have been asleep, I guess, and woke up hungry. Tiny as he was, he sure could scream! I lifted him out of the bag and noticed the child was only a few hours old. He still had a lot of the cheese on him and the cord was still attached and fresh.”

Chambers and his wife, Loretta, 35, were told in 1997 that they could not have children. Since then, Chambers said, they’ve been going to church every Sunday and praying that God would somehow give them a child.

“We’re not wealthy people,” Chambers said. “We could not afford to adopt. So we turned to the Lord. We left it in His hands.”

Banks, a grandmother of six, said after she discovered the infant she immediately brought it to the front of the bus and told Chambers to stop somewhere to get something to feed the newborn.

“Willie was speechless, I’ll tell you that,” Banks said. “He just did what I said without saying a word.”

Chambers pulled the big bus into the parking lot of a drug store. The store was not yet open, but when the insistent Banks kept banging on the glass doors a manager opened up and, after hearing the story, donated a bottle kit, several cans of formula, diapers and other supplies.

“It’s not too often you get to participate in a miracle,” said the manager, John Harrington, 54. “I was honored to do it. I feel like the Lord sent that bus to my Walgreens for a reason. There was no way I was going to turn them away.”

Banks carried the bag full of supplies back to the bus, took a seat at the front and began to feed the child.

“He drank about half a bottle and then was fast asleep again,” she said.

Determined to get his regular passengers to work as usual, Chambers drove the bus until 10 AM with Banks cradling the baby in the first-row seat.

“I had to keep telling him to keep his eyes on the road,” Banks laughed. “Even so, I’m not sure he could see so well. He was crying and thanking Jesus and singing hymns the whole way. He’s a tender man, Mr. Chambers is. A good Christian man.”

Officials with the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services said an effort would be made to find the child’s mother. If she can not be found, the baby will be given to Chambers, they said. Chambers said he does not know who might have left the baby behind.

“I think I remember a young girl who got on the bus at about 6 AM. She was my very first passenger, and soaking wet. But she got off almost as soon as she got on. I don’t remember if she was carrying anything.”

Chambers said he is sure the baby is an answer to his prayers.

“I have a deep feeling in my soul that this child is a gift from God. Some kind soul was led to leave her baby on my bus by the very hand of the Lord.”

Orlando Police urged the baby’s mother to contact them as soon as possible if she wants the child returned to her.

“We have young mothers leave their babies at fire stations about a dozen times a year, because they’ve heard that’s what they should do,” said Captain William Coyne. “I guess this young mother was led to do something else.”

Bailey Foster snapped out of her daydream. She wiped a tear from her eye and poured a cup of coffee. She took the coffee to the third-floor window of the lab and gazed out at the parking lot entrance below. Finally, she saw her partner’s sky blue Toyota Prius pull into the lot. She glanced at her watch. Thirty minutes late. Early, for Suze.

After a few minutes, Suze Griffin strolled into the lab. She wore a simple white tee-shirt, jeans and blocky Dr. Martens on her feet. Her hair was jet black and cut in an Audrey Hepburn pixie. 

“Hey Foster,” Suze said, dropping her backpack on the floor and slipping on a white lab coat. “Happy fuckin’ Monday.” 

Bailey handed her one of the Post-It notes. 

“Gwendolyn?” Suze asked. 

“Who else?” 

“Motherfucker!” Suze said. “Any idea what she wants?” 

“None.” 

“OK, let’s go. Making her wait isn’t going to make her less crazy.” 

Bailey grabbed a legal pad in case she needed to take notes. Then she and Suze made their way up to Gwendolyn’s office on the top floor. 

The secretary announced them and they immediately went in. Gwendolyn had been waiting for them. Her office was kept remarkably cold. The bookcases lining the walls were full of technical books and journals, many of them left behind by her dead parents. Bailey and Suze were sure Gwendolyn had never opened them, and even if she had wouldn’t have understood a word. On the plush beige carpet lay a stuffed alligator that had been given to Gwendolyn by a customer grateful to have someone work on their child’s rare disease. It had huge yellowed teeth and looked remarkably real, as if it might come to life at any moment and eat them all.

Gwendolyn’s desk was the size of a large door. On one corner of it, to Gwendolyn’s left as she sat behind it, stood a three-foot-tall model of DNA. The desk was otherwise a perfectly empty sea of walnut. 

“Good morning girls!” Gwendolyn said. “Please make yourselves comfortable.” 

She gestured to the two leather chairs that faced her desk – the same chairs in which the appreciative Stanley and Margaret Johnson had turned to jelly eleven years earlier. (Despite Stanley Johnson’s consistent contributions of nearly two million American dollars a year, little progress had been made on the Batten Disease project. Their son, Ben, was now a fifteen-year-old invalid whose care alone consumed more than one-hundred-thousand dollars a year.)

Bailey took the chair to Gwendolyn’s right. She sat demurely with the legal pad in her lap. Suze slouched in the other chair, hooking her left knee over its arm. Gwendolyn bristled at the obvious disrespect, but her experience with her daughter helped her conceal her objection. 

“First,” Gwendolyn began, “I want to tell you both that I think you are doing a fantastic job. I hear nothing but good things about you. So I want to give you both ten-percent raises, effective immediately.” 

Suze adjusted her position so that she was sitting properly in the chair. Neither she nor Bailey looked at one another, but they could tell what the other was thinking, which was: What the hell is she up to? 

“Thank you, Ms. Bayner,” Bailey said. “That’s very generous of you.” 

“Not at all, Ms. Foster. You deserve it. I only wish it could be more. And that’s the reason I’ve asked to see you this morning.” 

Now Suze was sitting on the edge of the leather chair. 

“Word around the office says the two of you are gay,” Gwendolyn said.

“That shouldn’t...” Bailey began, but Suze interrupted. 

“Let the woman talk, honey! She obviously doesn’t care. She just gave us raises!”

“Quite right, Ms. Griffin. I do not care about your personal lives except so far as they make you uniquely suited for a special project I have in mind.” 

Oh, Jesus, Suze thought. Don’t tell me she wants us to find a cure for being gay.

Gwendolyn continued. 

“First, let me say I am prepared to devote a healthy slice of Bayner’s assets to this project. A very healthy slice. A slice so large you will undoubtedly be able to use whatever resources you need.” 

Suze said, “This must be very important to you, Ms. Bayner.” 

“It is. But before I tell you what it is, I want to stress that I have nothing against gay people. Some of my best friends are gay people. The waiters at Chez Paris are all gay, and they’re all delightful! But I wonder about the poor people who discover that they’re gay and are not OK with it. Maybe they’re already married and have a gaggle of children running around. You know? Can you imagine?”

“I guess that could be a problem,” Suze said, although she wasn’t really sure why it might be. 

Bailey shot her lab partner an astonished look as Gwendolyn continued. 

“Anyway, I’d like to see if we can figure out a way to help these folks, you know, make them normal again, so to speak, so they won’t have these unnatural desires to wrestle with. I’m particularly interested in helping lesbians who have perhaps not lost their natural desire to become mothers but can’t bring themselves to have sex with a man. I find that to be a dreadful shame, since the primary purpose of a woman is to be a mother.” 

Finally, Bailey had heard enough. 

“Ms. Bayner, with all due respect, we work on diseases. I do not consider being a lesbian a disease. It is a natural state of being.” 

Suze spoke up before Gwendolyn could respond. 

“But Foster, I think you’d have to agree that it’s unnatural for a living creature not to have offspring. The primary purpose of all organisms is to propagate the species.” 

Bailey looked at Suze with amazement and said, “Homosexuality is common in the animal kingdom. You know that! Fifteen hundred different species practice it: Lions, whales, dolphins, crabs. Even worms. And a very close relative of humans: dwarf chimpanzees.” 

“Simply a random mutation,” Suze said, “and one that will never catch on in earnest since it would drive the species to extinction.” 

“How, then, do you explain black-headed gulls?” Bailey countered. “They’re lesbians, but they get males to fertilize their eggs. There’s even evidence that they’re better parents than heterosexual gulls.” 

Gwendolyn interrupted the debate. 

“Girls! Girls! I’m sure all of this is very interesting, but here’s the bottom line. I am willing to spend whatever it takes to discover what makes a woman a lesbian and then reverse it. Whatever it takes. Are you in? If you’re not, I’ll happily ask someone else.” 

Suze stood up and reached across the large desk to shake Gwendolyn’s heavily jeweled hand, which was soft as bread dough.

“We’ll be happy to do it, Ms. Bayner. Thank you for the opportunity. Come along, Foster.” 

Suze grabbed Bailey by the arm and led her out of Gwendolyn’s office. On their way back to the lab, Bailey scolded her. “Why would you agree to such a stupid project?” she said.

“It’s no more stupid than anything else we’ve worked on, Foster. And did you hear what she said? We can have whatever it takes.” 

“Yeah, but a lesbian gene? Be serious! You’re the lesbian, not me! Why do you not find this nonsense as objectionable as I do?” 

“I have no intention of looking for a lesbian gene, Foster.” Suze said. 

“What are we going to do then?” 

“You’ll see,” Suze said. “You’ll see.”