As the summer waned, Bridget and Dave drifted apart. She snapped at him one day for being too negative about the future, and said she had no intention of hanging around in Bellevue for the “rest of her life.”

“For once, I didn’t have an answer,” he said.

They weren’t together any longer, but they kept in regular touch. Bridget dated other guys for a while, but not seriously. She lived for a time in a halfway house and told Dave she had a caseworker who couldn’t seem to help her. “She thinks my problems are unsolvable,” Bridget said. She found the halfway house “awful,” and told him in a disbelieving voice that she had met actual prostitutes for the first time in her life.

“I just listened to her,” Dave said. “We were still both so messed up that getting regular jobs didn’t really occur to us. She felt there was no way she could do it anyway without having someplace to stay. She thought the hookers at the shelter were scary. She didn’t like their lingo or their humor.”

Bridget seemed to be growing more desperate. She told Dave that she had encountered a man at Seattle Center who followed her. He thought she was a prostitute and propositioned her, and she had blurted, “Twenty bucks,” and he’d said “Okay.” But then he bought her a hamburger and they talked and she got scared and didn’t want to go through with it.

“He took pity on her, and didn’t make her do anything, but I could see that she was at least getting acclimated to the idea. I made a sick joke that twenty bucks was too cheap and she should ask at least forty,” Dave recalled with regret.

The chasm between them grew after Bridget came to his house one day when his new girlfriend was there. He knew he had mentioned the other young woman too many times. After the two girls actually met, he never saw Bridget again.

“I introduced them and Bridget was polite, but I could see it shook her up. And then she left. I guess that as long as she didn’t actually meet this person, it was safer for us and our illusion of ‘twoness’ where there was just her and me against a backdrop of everything else.”

Dave got heavier into drugs, and he was too involved with his own life and problems to keep very close track of Bridget. Sometimes a mutual friend would let him know what she was doing. He heard she was living in a motel on Aurora Avenue with someone named Ray. Before Dave knew it, almost two years had passed and he hadn’t really seen her. He was with someone else, writing songs and working at minimum wages.

Although Bridget had told Dave that she wasn’t welcome at her parents’ house, that wasn’t really the way it was. She had been living at the Bellevue house she grew up in for three months in late 1981.

Bridget was determined to get her GED and she, too, had gone to Renton’s continuation school. There, she had met the man named Ray. They made an oddly matched couple; she was much taller than Ray, a very small man, whose father was something of an entrepreneur in restaurants and clubs. She was pregnant, again, and due to have the baby between Christmas and New Year’s.

She and her mother discussed what she should do. The Meehans weren’t impressed at all by Ray. He had punched Bridget while she was pregnant and broken her ribs. The couple often argued, split up, and went back together. His father was a nice man, but Ray was spoiled, unfaithful, and a drug user. Even so, Bridget said she didn’t want to give her baby up for adoption. But she could not come up with a plan for keeping it and supporting it.

“What are you going to do with a baby?” her mother asked imploringly. “How can you take care if it?”

At seventeen, Bridget hadn’t changed that much from the days when she hid cats in her room. “But I really want it,” she would answer.

Dennis, who was home for Christmas vacation from college, remembered his sister then. It would be one of his final memories. For most of her pregnancy, she barely showed, but she was close to term in December and she was “very pregnant and awkward.” She had always been so slender, strong, and agile that it seemed strange to see her that way. He agreed with his parents and siblings that she was in no position to try to raise a newborn. Ray couldn’t be counted on.

In the end, Bridget probably made the right choice, the unselfish choice, for her baby. She knew she couldn’t take care of herself, much less a baby. She decided she would give it up for adoption.

On Christmas day, Bridget, her mother, and her brother, Dennis, went to Providence Hospital. Her family was with her as she gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named Steven. Dennis took pictures of Steven, and they memorized his face. They all loved the infant, but they had no other choice.

Ray’s father paid the hospital bill at Providence. For her own reasons, Bridget chose to tell her friends that her baby had died right after being born. On New Year’s Eve, Dave received a phone call and he recognized Bridget’s voice instantly, even though he heard only a bone-chilling wail that became a high-pitched shriek or maybe hysterical laughter. And then she hung up.

He would always believe that her call was a cry for help after her baby “died,” but he didn’t know where she was or how to reach her. Bridget was now at least two intermediaries removed from him, and he had heard she and the man she lived with were doing harder drugs.

In actual fact, Bridget didn’t do drugs during her pregnancy, and it’s possible that she never used again. But she felt so empty after Steven was given up for adoption, and said she was going to move back with Ray despite all the discussions she had with her mother. In an unusual reversal of stances, it was Bridget who said that she “needed a man in her life,” and her mother, caught up in the new philosophy of Women’s Lib, who argued that Bridget was smart and strong and didn’t need to settle for any man who came along. She didn’t need Ray or anyone else. She had earned her GED and she could go to college and be whoever she wanted to be.

But Bridget waffled, even though she stayed in her parents’ home until the end of January 1982, and they hoped that maybe she would remain with them until she really got on her feet. Tragically, she moved back with Ray in early February, and they continued their migrating lifestyle—from motel to motel.

All of them missed the baby, even though they knew they had made the right decision. Dennis Meehan was reading a Seattle paper ten days after Steven was born and he came across an article about a foster family who had taken in dozens of children, even adopting children who were disabled. The mom held a baby in her lap, and he recognized Steven, who looked happy and healthy and safe.

Dennis called his mother over and showed her the article, saying, “Look, Steven’s on his way—he’s okay!”

Bridget conceived again within a month to six weeks. Again, it was Ray’s baby, and, again, she was living a lifestyle where she couldn’t care for a child. Still, she called home regularly.

Bridget and Ray moved to Chehalis, Washington—eighty-two miles south of Seattle—to stay with a friend of Ray’s. Ray himself had no visible means of support.

In May 1982, Mary Bridget Meehan turned eighteen. She was legally an adult, but she was still lost, no matter how many hands were held out trying to rescue her, and she carried within her another life that would need love and care. She visited a clinic in Chehalis for a pregnancy test on June 8, 1982. According to the doctor there, her baby was due on November 27. She never returned to the clinic, although she did reach out to a battered women’s shelter, where she complained that Ray was hitting her again.

The couple moved back to Seattle, and Ray’s father, who owned a nightclub, paid for their lodging frequently. Once again Bridget was very pregnant and Ray’s father worried about her. She and Ray stayed at a motel on the highway and then at the Economy Inn, and finally at the Western Six. In some ways, she was the same Mary Bridget that she’d been as a little girl. She smuggled three cats and a dog into their room, hoping the manager wouldn’t find out.