Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Epilogue

Carmen finally believes Marcus that he isn't Thomas's biological father. There's no way to question what the hidden camera captured the night of their Christmas party: it wasn't him who carried me out to the shed.

Then my death hits her hard. For days, she doesn't eat, unable to think about anything but how cruel she was to me during my pregnancy. Now that she knows that I didn't sleep with her husband, her heart is gripped with pain about the way we left things.

It doesn't have to be that way.

I find her hiding in their master bathroom, which I recognize from when Marcus gave me a bath there, washing away the evidence against whomever of his friends had raped me. It is also where he kneeled in my vomit, held my chin in his hands, and asked, "What can I do? What do you need?" with a tenderness that I cannot reconcile.

Now, Carmen hunches next to the toilet, but she isn't throwing up. She is cowering from that same man, whose heavy footsteps I hear stomping up the stairs. Marcus is getting closer quickly, but he still has to cross the hallway and make it through the bedroom. Carmen is waiting here, hoping – after Marcus breaks down the door or tears it off its hinges or whatever he plans to do – that the sight of his terrified wife wedged into the gap between the toilet and the edge of the bathtub, her hands raised defensively against him, will be enough to shame him out of hurting her.

I crouch beside Carmen and wrap her in my arms, putting myself between her body and the doorway as Marcus's footsteps approach, thudding heavily across the bedroom carpet now. Carmen's arms collapse from their protective pose and she seems to lean against me. She feels me there, I'm sure of it. We both stare at the door, waiting as Marcus gets closer and closer, his footsteps finally stopping at the threshold.

The air pulses with silence.

Then the door slams inward forcefully as if it has been unlocked all along. There is Marcus, standing in the new space, exposed. His hands are clenched in fists at his sides and his eyes, beady with anger, are not frozen on the bathroom door that has just swung open on its own.

Instead he's staring at us. His mouth falls open and he doesn't come any farther into the bathroom, where we are huddled on the floor. He seems rooted to the ground. Maybe Carmen's original impulse was correct, and seeing his wife pathetically hiding from him behind the toilet is enough to stop him in his violent tracks.

Or maybe he sees me there, too, just for a moment.

It doesn't matter, because he doesn't hurt her again, and that night she moves out to become a mother in some other way.

She will never speak about any of it, or about anything else again, with Donny.

*

Across the frozen grass, in the yellow glow of the kitchen light, Diana stands at the sink and gazes out the window. She is holding a soapy dish beneath the faucet and absentmindedly moves a sponge across its surface. The whole room aches with her loneliness.

I can't believe I didn't notice it before.

I don't know how to approach her or what to say to make any of it bearable for her. So I stand just behind her and focus on trying to fill the room with the gratitude I feel. Almost immediately, Diana stops washing the dish and catches her breath. For a moment, she doesn't move; then she exhales slowly and I feel assured that she will be able to understand what I want her to understand:

Her presence there has saved Thomas and allowed Owen to be a father. She lost Paul, her own beloved husband, less than a year ago, yet she has put her own sorrow aside to take care of her grieving son and the child he has chosen to raise. I am deeply thankful for what she is doing, what she will continue to do for the rest of her life, taking care of the people who need me.

Something stirs on the other side of the fireplace. I leave Diana and move into the parlor to investigate the noise. There, hunched forward in the rocking chair with his forearms resting on his knees and his head lowered, is Owen.

He came back.

Diana must have reassured him that all the strange occurrences that had driven him away – evidence of my lingering presence in the house – had stopped happening. And so he came back to be Thomas's father.

Sadie is curled up against Daisy's side on the davenport beside the fire; she must be visiting for the weekend. Both she and the dog are sleeping peacefully under the afghan blanket. She breathes a sleepy little sigh and I recognize it as the sound that brought me into this room just a moment before.

I lean down to kiss her forehead.

The baby, dozing in his portable bed beside the rocking chair, squirms a bit in his swaddle. He doesn't scream when he sees me - and his eyes glisten with a smile, so I know he does see me here.

It's not fair or right that Thomas will never know his mother beyond this brief time. But it has been just long enough for him to feel the weight of my hand resting on his chest before waking, to hear my voice in his tiny ear. Over the past few months, in his own way, Thomas has been letting me go. His eyes flutter closed again and he sighs deeply, falling back into sleep.

I turn to Owen, who leans over his lap with intention, eyes clenched shut and brow furrowed. His lips move silently around familiar words. "Thy will be done on Earth..." His voice cracks. "On Earth as it is in Heaven."

He is trying to pray.

I shouldn't have to say goodbye to him. None of this is fair or right. But the last time Owen saw me, I was standing right here in the middle of the parlor, bleeding from the wound in my abdomen that I had just discovered. I told myself I'd fallen on a grilling fork. It must have been horrifying for him to see me standing there rambling about the shed, holding the gaping wound where they'd removed Thomas from my body.

I feel compelled to leave him with something better than that.

I watch him for a moment longer and an idea comes to me. I will do this now, while he is praying, so that he will always have something to hold onto.

I want Owen and Thomas to have what I didn't, of course: A long life free of any further tragedies. But what I want has nothing to do with how Thomas's life began or how their lives will turn out in the end. At least I know they felt me near them in these days before I let go.

But now it's time.

So I sit down on the ottoman facing my husband and gently wrap my hands around his. Owen's lips stop moving abruptly but he doesn't move.

Breathe in together. And out together.

I wait.

"There you are, Juju Bear," he finally whispers, as if it's a year ago and he has simply caught me zoning out in the middle of an everyday conversation. But he doesn't look up. His gaze is focused on our hands, which are clasped together over his lap.

I lean in toward him and press my face right up against his, so that his tears dampen my own cheek and remind me, for the last time, what it feels like to cry. I tell him that he is an extraordinary man and father, and that my life was made more beautiful because I spent so much of it with him.

As for my death, Owen doesn't know what it has been like for me since we rushed to the hospital that day in the middle of the summer, and he cannot know. But I tell him something that will give him comfort: "All the nightmares, all the fear I have always had of what that moment would be like, just before - when there would be nothing left to do but wait for death to come - I never had to experience that, Babe. I never knew I was dying." I stop and wait for him to look up into my eyes.

Everything I've ever known to be true about love looks back at me from his face.

"So you see? There was nothing to be afraid of." I wrap him in the warmth of my voice and hold him there, so that he will never forget what this feels like. "There is nothing to be afraid of." I press his hands between mine, sending all the comfort I can muster into his broken heart. Whatever else he believes in, whether or not he remembers how to pray, now he knows that he can believe in this, right now, and now, and now.

And in the next moment, when I will be nowhere to be found, he will still have our story to believe in. I leave it behind when I go. It becomes one of the hundreds of stories that groan through that old home and all others, pressing against the floorboards and whispering across the hearths, reminding the living of what they are and everything they have to lose.