The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

by Trisha Telep

Sam kissed her, and she kissed him back. There were five days of hell and desperation and yearning and despair in that kiss.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered, and pulled away from her. But he wasn’t leaving. He took her hand and led her towards the ladder up to the tree house, and she beat him to it. She launched herself up to the platform, through the door and onto the futon that had been there since he designed and built the place.

  He was right behind her. They didn’t talk. It was as if he knew he was a dream, as if he understood that this was all going to go away. For that moment, they were solid and real, and with only whispered “I love you”s, they undressed, and took each other — two starving people presented with one last banquet before a forced march into the desert of the rest of their lives.

  Making love with him was what it had always been: wild, unexpected, an adventure. But this time, the desperation was so clear, the knowledge that it was the last time so poignant, that Sarah found herself weeping. When they were spent, she touched Sam’s face again and felt his tears wet on his cheeks.

  She lay beside him after, her hand on his belly, feeling him breathing. “It’s hell without you,” she said.

  “You should have let me go get them,” he whispered. “Then I would have died instead of you.”

  “I did let you,” she told him. “That’s why the boys and I are alone now. They would have been so much better off with you.”

  “The kids are with me. And they’re falling apart without you.”

  They lay in the dark, now turned to face each other. She could barely make out the planes of his face. “Sam,” she said carefully, “your funeral was today. I have your ashes in an urn at the base of our tree. You . . . aren’t real.”

  “The urn is there,” he said. “But the ashes are yours. I kept our promise. I brought you back here.”

  They sat up, and some stupid flicker of hope shivered to life in Sarah’s chest. “What is this, Sam?”

  “I don’t know.” He touched her shoulder, her breast, rubbed his thumb against her chin. “I don’t know. But if it means I get to keep you, I don’t care.”

  “How can it? How can it be anything but me losing my mind?”

  “I’ll be crazy if it means I get to keep you.”

  She smiled. It was the first time since the phone call from the hospital, and it was because that comment was so purely Sam.

  She looked out the tree-house window. Fog blocked her view of the house. “You think they’ll be all right?”

  He hugged her. “The doors are locked. I have the keys. The kids will be fine.”

  Sarah had the keys, too. They were in the pocket of her blue jeans, lying crumpled on the floor next to his.

  He was right. They would be fine.

  So they lay in each other’s arms, talking, laughing, happy, while the night passed them by.

  Sarah woke to sunrise peeking through the tree house’s east windows. Sam yawned and stretched. “I watched you sleeping for a while,” he said. “Just because I could.”

  Sarah nuzzled his chest and laughed. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep at all. But I haven’t been sleeping well since ...” She shook her head and touched him. “You’re still here. How?”

  He pressed a finger to her lips. “Don’t ask. Just accept this, whatever it is.”

  “How do we explain this to everyone?”

  “We’ll think of something.” He pulled her close. “I don’t know what, but something. The kids and your parents and your friends will be happy to have you back. They were devastated.”

  Yours were, she thought, not mine, but she didn’t say anything. It brought up events and images she needed to push from her mind.

  “I love you,” she told him. She was sombre again. She had sometimes taken him for granted. Had forgotten how wonderful he was. She had never realized how the world without him in it didn’t hold enough air. She would never take him for granted again.

  “They’re going to be up soon,” Sam said. “We should get back so they don’t wake up to an empty house. They have no idea how things have changed.”

  She sighed. “You’re right.” They rose and dressed, slowed a little by the fact that neither of them could keep from touching the other.

  When they climbed down the ladder, Sarah caught a glimpse of the urn on the ground, still half-hidden in fog.

  “Don’t look at that,” Sam said. “That isn’t us.”

  They turned towards the bridge, and the fog-wreathed shapes of the flowers on their many tripods confronted both of them, rows of monsters marching through the mist.

  Sarah said, “We’ll get rid of them.”

  Sam wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “The next few weeks are probably going to be rough,” he told her.

  She arched an eyebrow. “As rough as the next forty years would have been?”

  He laughed and kissed her. “Nothing could be that rough.”

  They clasped hands and smiled at each other, and stepped onto the bridge together . . .

  . . . and he was gone.

  He did not gradually fade, he did not dim or slip away from her with a warning. His hand was warm and strong and callused in hers, and then it was gone.

  Sarah faltered in mid-step, stumbled, and screamed, “Sam!”

  She turned back to the island to discover no Sam. The floral arrangements on their stands now stood in crisp detail, the urn lay toppled on its side where she had dropped it the night before. “Sam!” she shouted again. She ran back to the tree house and climbed into it. The futon was folded up the way they’d left it, with no sign that anyone had spent the night there. The hand-rubbed oak floor bore no forgotten article of his clothing or hers. There was nothing that had fallen into a corner, no sign that anything had changed.

  “Sam?” she whispered. “Come back.”

  But he did not.

  Her hands started to shake.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to go back down the ladder, to walk across the bridge again, and to unlock the back door and let herself into the house. She kept her shoulders straight and her chin up. She forced herself to breathe in and out slowly.

  One foot in front of the other. Up the stairs. Wake the boys. I can do this.

  I have to do this.

  I dreamed it. Or I hallucinated it.

  The flowers in the living room are real. The ashes in the urn are real.

  Last night wasn’t real.

  Sarah walked over the bridge every night for two months, knowing her one last perfect night with Sam had been a trick of her mind, but hoping against hope that it hadn’t been. Hope died hard.

  But it did die.

  She marked the moment of its death in her memory.

  “Up,” she told Jim, who was curled under his blankets, his head under the pillow, just one bare foot hanging over the side of the bed.

  Mike, who had been in the boys’ bathroom, came out and said, “He doesn’t want to go to school today. I don’t either.”

  Sarah said, “You have to. You know your dad wouldn’t have wanted the two of you to end up in trouble for skipping school.”

  And then Mike looked at her, eyes narrowed. “Are you all right?”

  “I haven’t been sleeping too well,” she told him.

  “You look . . . kind of sick, Mom. You need to eat more. And get some rest.”

  “I haven’t been eating much, either.”

  But it was more than that. When she saw the boys onto the bus, she stepped on the scale again, wanting the news to be good. But she was down eighteen pounds from the day Sam died, and it wasn’t just because she wasn’t eating. She was dizzy all the time, weak and queasy. She couldn’t eat: she could barely drink. She couldn’t stay awake. Her lower abdomen hurt and it was bloated. Her back hurt. Everything hurt.

  She’d tried to tell herself it was grief, but her symptoms kept getting worse.

  So she made the appointment with Dr Gruber and kept it. He was a family friend, and had been her doctor since she was in
her early teens. He’d watched her and Sam grow up. He’d attended the funeral. She had a pretty good idea what was going wrong, but he would help her figure out what to do.

  Ben Gruber looked at her over the top of her chart and said, “You told Beth you’re afraid you have ovarian cancer?” He studied her chart while she sat on the exam table.

  She nodded, unable to say those words aloud to him.

  “You’ve lost eighteen pounds in two months.” He shook his head. “Not good. But not unheard of after the death of a loved one.”

  “I know. But I’ve been eating. It’s just that everything comes back up. I can barely stomach broth.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “All the time during the day. Not much at night, though I’m exhausted even then. It’s just that. . . Sam’s gone, and at night, I hear everything.”

  She lay on the bench while he listened to her heart and lungs with a stethoscope.

  “You’ve been feeling like this for how long?”

  “Since Sam died.”

  “The vomiting and abdominal pain, too? The bloating?”

  “No, the vomiting and pain both started not long after the funeral. The bloating and the having to go to the bathroom all the time are more recent.” She said “Ouch,” as he pressed his fingers into her lower abdomen. “All the symptoms have been getting worse.”

  “You’ve already had blood drawn and we’ll screen that for cancer markers. Your ovaries aren’t enlarged,” he told her, “but I want to do an ultrasound of your uterus. It’s bigger than it should be. You might have fibroids. They’re not that unusual for a woman your age who’s had children. And you have no family history of cancer, Sarah.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “So don’t assume the worst.

  She nodded. She’d spent time on the internet researching symptoms. The only things she could figure out that it might be were ovarian or uterine cancer. But Dr Gruber was right. It was easy to assume the worst when diagnosing yourself on the internet. She would let him tell her.

  Beth, Dr Gruber’s nurse, came in to be present while he did the ultrasound. Sarah winced at the cold gel, and watched his face when he turned the screen away from her.

  Beth stood beside her. “Just relax,” she said. “And breathe.” Beth held Sarah’s hand, but she didn’t say, Everything will be OK.

  Because, Sarah thought, it wouldn’t. They could just look at her and see something was wrong, that she was dying.

  Sarah couldn’t see the screen, so she kept her eyes on Dr Gruber’s face, which was why she saw his fleeting expression of shock and dismay before he schooled his expression to the careful neutrality she guessed doctors practised in front of mirrors when no one was looking.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  His eyes were fixed on the screen, while his hand moved the ultrasound probe over her lower abdomen in tiny, tiny circles.

  “How bad?” she repeated.

  He didn’t look at her. “It’s not cancer,” he said softly. “And it’s not fibroids.”

  “It’s worse?” she whispered, still seeing that shocked expression that had flitted across his face, and wondering what could be worse than cancer.

  He still wouldn’t look at her, and her breath caught in her throat. Instead, he stared down at the floor. “You’re pregnant, Sarah.”

  She was so startled, she laughed out loud, and he turned to stare at her. “Pregnant?” She shook her head. “Twenty years you’ve been my doctor, and that’s the first funny thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  But he didn’t smile. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

  “Wait. You’re serious? You think I’m pregnant?”

  “I know you’re pregnant,” he told her. “I can see the heartbeat. I can see the baby. You’re about two months pregnant.”

  Dr Gruber kept one hand fixed firmly on her abdomen, and carefully turned the ultrasound around so Sarah could see the screen. She knew what to look for, and she didn’t need to have the baby pointed out to her. She could see the tiny heart beating, could see the blurry curved shape of the child within her.

  She was pregnant.

  He did a screen capture, took the ultrasound, and then handed her a towel to wipe the gel off her belly. “Thank you, Beth,” he said.

  Beth let go of Sarah’s hand, nodded and left.

  When the door closed behind her, Sarah stared at the picture Dr Gruber printed out, brow furrowed. “This is impossible. Sam had a vasectomy. And there has never been anyone but Sam.”

  She looked up to find him watching her, his expression distant. “I did the vasectomy,” he said. She heard the coldness in his voice. “This happened right when he died, Sarah. Could have been a few days before, could have been a few days after.”

  She sat up and pulled the paper examination gown down, not liking the tone in his voice or the flat disbelief in his eyes. “There has never — not once — been anyone but Sam. Not for any reason, not for one minute.”

  Dr Gruber looked at her. “Then how do you explain the pregnancy?”

  “You screwed up the vasectomy.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it.

  “A vasectomy that worked just fine for you two for . . . what, ten years? Vasectomies have sometimes reversed themselves,” he admitted. “But the odds of Sam’s doing so and of you getting pregnant at the exact time that he died, when there are so many simpler explanations ...”

  Her hands knotted into fists. “There are no simpler explanations. There are no other explanations at all. I fell in love with Sam in eighth grade. I never dated anyone else, I never kissed anyone else and I sure as hell never slept with anyone else. So unless you’re going to try to convince me that immaculate conception is more likely than a vasectomy reversal, or that people really do get pregnant off of public toilet seats, then we have one, and only one, theory to work with.”

  He dropped it, changed the subject. “Your third pregnancy was bad. It nearly killed you. This one could finish the job. You’ve had a recent trauma. You’re not handling this pregnancy well. You need to consider terminating. For your sake, and for the boys’ sake.”

  She slid carefully off the exam table, tucking the paper gown tight around her backside. “Thank you for letting me know that I’m not dying. And thank you for ruining the first good thing to happen to me since Sam died.”

  On the way home, she bought a pregnancy test, and she checked for herself. Yes, she had the ultrasound picture, but the blue stripe on the stick was the ritual. It was the way she should have found out.

  She still had her stick from Mike, she still had her stick from Jim — both carefully labelled with the names she’d called them when they were still unknowns. Aloisius. Bob. She still had the stick from the miscarried baby, too. Sam.

  She should never have put the baby’s real name on the stick. But they had found out early she was going to be a girl. They had decided to name her Samantha. And Sarah hadn’t been able to resist putting the real name on that stick.

  Now Sarah had a fourth blue stripe, and the stripe on the stick made the pregnancy more real than the ultrasound had.

  She was going to have a baby.

  She had to sit down, and not because she was queasy, or because she was exhausted. She had to think.

  There had never been anyone but Sam.

  And Sam had a vasectomy after they lost Samantha, and after Sarah nearly died, too.

  But ...

  But ...

  But ...

  She closed her eyes. She had one night she couldn’t explain. One night out of an entire lifetime where she was not sure what had really happened. The night of the funeral, up in the tree house, with fog thick on the island and Sam holding her in his arms, they had made love.

  She knew it hadn’t been real, except she was pregnant.

  And what if?

  What if, the day he’d talked her into him going to pick up the boys, she had prevailed and she had gone? What if, in that moment, something had twisted in the universe, so that both possibil
ities actually happened? In one, Sam lived. In one, she lived.

  It could have happened the same way after the miscarriage. In his “if, she’d had the surgery and had her tubes tied. In her “if, he’d had the vasectomy.

  And when he had died in her world, and she had died in his, something connected them together again, out on the island, beneath the tree. Some need, some desperation, some call between them.

  And now she faced being pregnant alone, knowing that the pregnancy could kill her. She was going to have to tell her mother and father, she was going to have to tell the boys, she was going to have to tell her friends. All of them were going to be horrified. They were going to point out that she had almost died last time.

  Her parents and Sam’s parents and her friends would worry about her, remembering the disaster of the last pregnancy. They would tell her to abort, to think of the boys and what would happen to them if they lost their mother too.

  They would have a point.

  But the baby was Sam’s baby.

  The last piece of him she had.

  She was keeping the baby. She would take vitamins and eat plenty of fruit and rest whenever she needed it and she would take care of herself and not do too much. She would let her family and friends do things for her, and for once she would not try to be Superwoman.

  Somewhere close enough that she had touched him, Sam was still alive. They were having a baby.

  And, oh God, she needed him.

  That night, she tucked the boys into bed and she locked up the house. She walked through the backyard, over the bridge and onto the island. The air was crisp with the first autumn chill, the flowers and their stands were gone, the urn sat at the base of the tree on the little pedestal she’d bought for it. She didn’t do more than glance at it.

  She leaned against the tree, her forehead to the rough bark, and she whispered, “Sam, I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t know how to reach you. But I’m here, and I need you. I need you so much.”

  She waited, but he didn’t come.

  She felt sick. The pregnancy, her fear and her need for him all weighed on her. She’d promised herself that she would stay all night if she had to. But she didn’t have the strength to spend all night leaning against a tree, and the cold was biting into her.