by R. R. Banks
"Did you know if it was a boy or girl?" she asked.
It seemed like an odd question, but after a beat, I realized why she asked it, what she thought had happened. She didn't yet realize that the loss was so much worse than she could have imagined. I realized that I needed to keep going. I needed to tell her the entire story, as much for myself as for her.
"Not then," I said. "It wasn't common then as it is now to find out what you’re having before the baby is born. We could have, but we decided that felt almost like cheating. We wanted to be introduced to our baby when it was born."
"Do you wish that you did?"
"Sometimes," I admitted.
"What did you want?"
"A boy," I said. "But I think that I only imagine having a boy because I didn't have any siblings and I didn't have any cousins and I didn't have a mother. Though I had women in my life, I was just more used to myself and my father. It just seems natural that I would have a son. But there was a little part of me that sometimes imagined having a daughter. I knew that if I ended up having a little girl that I would have loved her just as much."
"I think you would have made an amazing father for a little girl," she said.
I swallowed hard, trying to force down the emotion that was starting to build.
"My wife went into labor three days before her due date. She was decorating the Christmas tree. I remember thinking that somehow our baby knew what was happening and wanted to be a part of all the excitement. We had already been singing Christmas carols and reading books and telling stories. Maybe he was feeling left out and just decided he wanted to go ahead and come out and celebrate."
"He?" Veronica asked.
I nodded.
"She was amazing. I know I said that, but I can't think of a better word to describe her. It is completely genuine. I was amazed by her. She wasn't afraid. Not even for a minute. In fact, she spent the whole time trying to comfort me and make sure that I didn't feel scared of what was going on. She was totally calm like she was just absolutely sure that she could do this, like she was made to do it."
"She was," Veronica said.
I smiled, the memories bringing a hint of happiness through the pain. There are times when I needed to remind myself of that happiness. I had to remind myself of those moments before it all happened when everything seems to be going exactly as it was supposed to be.
"And she did," I said. "Just after sunrise our son was born. He was so beautiful. I never really understood what people meant when they said the babies were beautiful until that moment. Then I looked at him and was just blown away by him. He was so small and yet he had already changed the world so much. I held him for as long as they would let me. I would have just kept holding him. But then they came and told me that they needed to bring him to the nursery. If I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have let them take him. Then he was gone."
"Gone? What happened to him? Did he...?"
"No," I said, knowing what she was thinking. "He didn't die. He was taken from us. He was stolen from the nursery the night that he was born. He was there and we were told that everything was fine, that he was doing well and that my wife should be, too. But then when it was time for her to feed him, they went to get him and he was gone. The nurse said that his bassinet was empty. Just empty. Some of the nurses thought that he had been brought to us. Others thought that he might have gone for tests. Some thought that he might have been brought to another mother accidentally. They searched the entire maternity ward for him, but they didn't find him. Then there was chaos."
"Somebody just took him?" Veronica asked. "How is that possible?"
"There wasn't as much security then. Now there are all kinds of fail-safes put into place, but then the mother and the baby wore bracelets to identify them, but that was pretty much it. He was gone and nobody knew when it had happened. Because no one noticed that he wasn't there or thought that he had been taken somewhere by one of the nurses, nobody knew exactly how long he had been gone."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing. Everything. I remember running through the hospital and having security stop me because they didn't want me upsetting anyone else who was there, so I just ran out into the street. I ran up and down in front of the hospital and through the parking lot, hoping that somehow, I was going to see someone carrying my child away so I could take him back. Then the police came and I just sat there, staring. Not saying anything. I wasn't thinking clearly."
"How could you? What are you supposed to think or do in that situation?"
I shook my head.
"I didn't know. I still don't. I've asked myself a thousand times if there was something that I should have done differently. I should have stayed by the nursery rather than going back into the room. I should have demanded he be brought back earlier. I should have done something, anything that would have stopped it from happening or would have found him."
"There's nothing that you could have done," Veronica said.
Her voice sounded choked in her throat. I tried to concentrate on that sound, wanting to feel as though I was projecting the emotions onto her rather than having to feel them for myself while I told the story. If they crashed down on me again, I wouldn't be able to get through it and I had to. As excruciating as it was to tear the words from deep inside of me and force them out into the raw exposure of the air between us, it also felt cleansing in a way.
"They kept us in the hospital for one more day just like they would have anyway. They wanted to keep an eye on Ellery and make sure that she was recovering from the birth, then they sent us home. That was it. They packed up a kit for her that would help her cope with everything that happens after a woman delivers a baby and sent us on our way, just with empty arms. It felt completely bizarre watching her tend to herself without a baby to take care of. She would sit in the rocking chair in the nursery and press milk out into towels because it kept coming. The doctor told her to stop because the more that she did that, the more that her body would produce. She said that she did it because her breasts hurt when they were full and she needed the relief, but I knew that she did it because she wanted the milk to keep coming. She wanted to make sure that she was ready when our baby boy came home. He wouldn't know anything different, but she wanted to make sure that her body hadn't forgotten about him and that she could start taking care of him exactly as she would have."
"What happened to him?" Veronica asked.
The question sounded painful coming out of her as if she didn't really want to ask but had no control over it.
"The police searched," I said. "They investigated as much as they could. And we wanted to do everything that was in our capability to help, but they insisted on keeping us anonymous. They instructed us not to talk to anybody, including the media. When the story was on the news or written up in the newspaper, they didn't mention our names. I told them that they needed to. I told them that they needed to give as much information as possible to the public so that everybody could be looking. But the police said that mentioning our names would just call attention to our family, which would make people aware of our wealth. That would just make us the targets of false leads and people who would try to take advantage of us. They told us all these horror stories about kidnappings where the families were contacted by people pretending to have the children, but then when the money was delivered, there still wasn't any child. They said that keeping everything anonymous would be in our best interest because it would protect us and it would also ensure that any information that might be brought to the attention of the media or the police had a much higher chance of being authentic."
"That's why I didn't see anything about it," she said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
Veronica's cheeks flushed and I realized that she hadn't meant to say that.
"I did some research about you," she admitted. "That's how I found out about your wife."
I nodded slowly.
"And did you find out what happened to
her?" I asked, forcing my voice to stay as even as I could.
Veronica shook her head.
"No," she said. "The article just said that she died."
"Three weeks after our son was born, some hunters found a body. It had been ravaged, but they said that it looked like a newborn baby boy." I heard Veronica gasp, but I didn't react. I forced myself to forge ahead. "They said that it would take some time to find out what really happened. My wife just didn't have that much time left in her. She killed herself three days later. Less than a week after she was buried they confirmed that it wasn't him. It destroyed me in a way that I can't even tell you. I wanted nothing more than to be with her. But I could never bring myself to do the same. I felt like all of it was my fault and I didn't deserve the release of death. And even when I got close, I knew that I couldn't do it to her. The note that she left me pled with me to keep living. She said that she couldn't bear anymore, but that she knew that there was more for me and that I needed to find it. She wanted me to carry on."
"The note was with her?"
"No. I found the note first. That's why the bedroom still looks the way that it does. There were endless meetings with the police and investigators day after day. At first, she came with me to all of them. Then she missed a few. Then she stopped coming at all. That day she didn't want to go. She said that she just couldn't face another one. She didn't want to leave the house. If she was home, she didn't have to have anyone look at her. She didn't have to think about what she was saying or doing, she didn't have to wonder if her face looked a certain way and what anyone was thinking about how she was acting. She just wanted to be alone. Before I left, she told me she loved me and asked if I knew it. She wouldn't let me leave until I told her that I did. I kissed her and I left. When I got back, the house was so quiet. I realized that the staff wasn't here and I figured that maybe she was resting and they were taking the opportunity to run errands. I went to the bedroom, but she wasn't there. I was changing clothes when I found the note. She had hanged herself. I never went back in that room."
I stopped short of telling her more of what the note said or describing how or where I found Ellery. Those words were mine. They had been meant for me and I had held them inside of me since I read them, not sharing them with anyone. I had felt as ready as I ever had to tell Veronica what I had, but that was as far as I was willing to go. I didn't want to venture any further. I didn't want to have to see it again right then.
"Jude," Veronica said, the sound coming from her lips like a sob more than my name. "I'm so sorry. How could you survive that?"
"I almost didn't. There were so many times when I just wanted to give up and let myself die, but I couldn't. I had to stay. I had to do that for her. When I felt like I couldn't go any further, I had to remind myself that I was all that my son had left. If there was any chance that he might be alive, I wanted the opportunity to find him."
Chapter Eighteen
Veronica
I felt like I had just watched Jude crack himself open and reveal his innermost being to me. The pain that he was feeling was obvious, radiating off him toward me, and I wanted nothing more than to wrap myself around him and take that ache away from him. I wanted to soothe him and protect him, guarding him from whatever else might come to hurt him. The reality of the memories that I brought up and the agony that I caused him when I forced him to face the Christmas decorations again sat heavily on me and I felt like I was crushing beneath it, but I didn't want to let it. He had poured himself out to me and the only way that I could show him how valuable his honesty was to me was to do the same for him.
I sat the cup of coffee that had long-since gone cold on the tray that had been set up between us and stood. Stepping up in front of Jude, I loosened the blanket from around myself and eased the bottom of his shirt up to reveal my thigh.
"You once asked me where I got this scar," I said.
He nodded, lifting his hand to run his fingertips along the length of the scar. I had pulled away from him the first time that he touched the scar, but this time I stood still, allowing him to explore it. I didn't feel embarrassed anymore. It wasn't a sign of shame, but one of courage.
"You wouldn't tell me where you got it," he said.
"Do you still want to know?"
He looked up at me. His eyes were tinged with red and the years were more evident in them, but I could still see him there.
"Yes," he said.
I nodded and drew in a breath. I lowered the shirt back into place and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself before sitting on the bed beside him. I needed the closeness of his body. I needed to feel him near me when I sank backwards into memories that I had kept myself from revisiting for years. Not since I told Javi had I given anyone a glimpse into that night and, beyond my grandmother, he remained the only one who had heard the full story outside of who I could only remember as a sea of anonymous faces hovering above suits who held truth and future in their hands. Though I felt that I had told as much as I could to them, I knew that there were details that I hadn't shared with them. They were still lodged within me.
"I didn't always not have a family. I had parents and a sister. We were so close. One night we had been out bowling. It was a few days after my sister's birthday and she had had her birthday party with her friends, but my parents always insisted on us celebrating important days just as a family. They didn't want us to ever question how much they loved us or to not have memories of us all together when we grew up. Lessie chose bowling for our family outing weeks before her birthday and we had both been looking forward to it so much. I had even balled up a bunch of aluminum foil and rolled it at empty paper towel rolls to practice. I was so sure that that was going to be the night that I finally knocked over more than four pins."
"In one roll?"
"In total. I loved bowling, but I was terrible at it. I don't really remember bowling that night. I know that we went, and I know that we drank root beer floats. I can still see Lessie taking a huge sip of hers and smiling at me with the end of her nose smeared with ice cream. She was so beautiful. Everybody always talked about how different we looked because my hair was so dark and hers was pale blond. Everything about her was soft and light. She looked like an advertisement for an ice cream parlor in the fifties that night. I had convinced myself that one day I was going to grow up to look just like her. Somehow my hair was going to change color and I was going to have our father's pale complexion like her. The one thing about us that made us look like sisters was our eyes. She had the same blue eyes."
"The bowling alley was just a few blocks away and it was warm that night, so we had walked. Taking walks with my family was one of my favorite things to do. My parents would stroll along holding hands, smiling at each other like they had some little secret between them. They loved each other with absolutely everything that they had inside of them. I think that that's what made that night even harder."
"What happened?"
"We were walking home from the bowling alley and I thought I heard footsteps on the sidewalk behind us. I didn't say anything because I didn't want them to think that I was just being a baby who was afraid of the dark. I had convinced my parents to let me stay up with my sister during her birthday sleepover and watch the movie that they watched, and I didn't want them to know that even though it was a completely silly movie, it had terrified me. I knew that that would make them not want to let me stay up late anymore or keep me from watching movies. So, I just ignored them. Then I heard the footsteps get louder and realized that the rhythm wasn't even. There were too many steps for it be just one person."
"There were two?"
"Three," I said. I could still hear the sound of the footsteps in my ears and I steeled my mind against it. "I looked over at my father. I knew that he would make me feel better. He would tell us to move out of the way so that the people behind us, who were probably joggers, could go past, or he would turn around and recognize the people now getting close enough behind us that I could
hear the distinctiveness of their steps against the pattern of our own. What I hadn't noticed was that ours were getting faster. By the time that I looked at my father, we were almost running. Rather than looking relaxed, he looked terrified. His face was set and his eyes were wide. He was focused ahead of us, getting faster as we went. In an instant, he looked at me and told me to run."
"Did you?"
I nodded. I pulled the blanket closer, trying to ward off the chill that was starting to settle in on my body.
"I tried to. I could see our house. It was just ahead. I took off running toward it, then glanced over my shoulder to see if Lessie was with me. She wasn't and I paused to let her catch up. By the time that I started running again, I could hear muffled screaming and I instinctively knew that two of the men who had been behind us now had my parents. I heard my sister scream for me to run and I took off as fast as I could. But I didn't know what to do. All my life my parents had tried to instill in me what I should do if there was ever an emergency. Suddenly, though, all of that was gone. I couldn't remember anything that I was supposed to do. I didn't run for help. I didn't scream. I ran for my house. The doors were locked, but I knew that there was a key hidden. I got it and I went inside. I just left my family behind." I hung my head. "I should have done something. If I had gone to a neighbor's house right then, it would have stopped."