Light Through Fog

by Holly Lisle

  Light Through Fog

  by

  Holly Lisle

  “Can he still see us, Mama? Does he still miss us?”

  Sarah tried to keep breathing as she tucked the boys into bed. “Yes, Jim,” she whispered. “He’ll always be with us. I’ll leave the light on,” she added, and turned each of their nightstand lamps on low before she switched off the main light and stepped out into the hall. The feel of their hugs lingered around her neck.

  She had lost so much - more than she thought she would ever be able to bear. But she still had the boys.

  Sarah’s mother stood waiting at the top of the stairs. “They’re not ready. You’re not ready. Bring the boys and come back to our house. At least for a few more nights.”

  Sarah hugged her. “Mom, we’ll never be ready. But this is our life now. We have to start living it.”

  Her mother nodded. “I’m not sure how you’re making it through the day. And you know whenever you need your father and me, we’ll be there for you. We’re ... so proud of you.”

  Sarah watched her mother walk down the drive, get into her car, and back out. She stood in the doorway until the red glow of the tail lights faded away at the end of the block.

  And then she shuddered and went inside, locking the door behind her.

  She smelled flowers. Most of them would still be set out under the tree, but the funeral director and his crew had carried the indoor arrangements and plants into the house.

  Deepest Sympathies.

  In Remembrance of Sam.

  We love you, Sarah. You can count on us.

  You’re not alone.

  She had never seen so many flowers. Everyone had loved Sam, everyone knew him. He’d been a light in the town, someone who did well at everything but who brought everyone else with him in his triumphs.

  Including her.

  Everyone had loved Sam.

  She’d heard variations on the same theme from her friends and neighbours: as they put casseroles and baked goods into her fridge and her freezer; as they hugged her and wept; as they stood in the kitchen after the funeral and told stories about Sam and how wonderful he had been.

  For those short hours while the house was full, while people lingered, she’d thought, “I’ll be able to get through this.”

  But in the vacant rooms, the emptiness echoed. Sam was gone - he whom she had loved since the eighth grade - and this was her new life. She wanted to peek in on the boys. She wanted to cling to them. But Jim was twelve, almost as tall as Sam. Mike was ten, and already taller than her. Growing boys, soon to be grown. She had a few more years with them, and then they would move on to their own lives. She had friends; she had family. But she didn’t have Sam.

  She wished, when the drunk’s car jumped the median and came at him, that she had been in the driver’s seat. She could have been. She’d been going to pick up the boys from school and, at the last minute, he’d said he needed to run an errand so he would pick them up instead.

  He never made it to the school.

  She braved the living room and the flowers and plants, held her breath against the unwelcome sweetness in the air, and took Sam’s urn from the mantel.

  When darkness fell, when family and friends went home, when the boys went to sleep, the truth was that she was alone. But before she let herself sink back into the endless recrimination of how it could have been her and should have been her, she had a promise to keep.

  Sarah walked out of the back door, carrying Sam’s urn in her arms. She locked the door behind her, then walked through the tree-shadowed backyard, her arms dappled by the faint moonlight.

  She crossed over the stream that bisected the yard on the little wooden bridge Sam had built for her, and stepped onto their island. The tiny island in the tiny stream had been the reason the two of them had bought this piece of land and eventually built their house on it. The north point of the island was covered with the rest of the flowers from the funeral.

  On the island grew the tree under which they had first met, on an eighth-grade end-of-the-year picnic. It had to be 200 years old, a beautiful live oak with enormous spreading branches. Both had climbed the tree unaware of the other -they’d met in the upper branches.

  They’d known they were supposed to be together the moment they met. When after getting their bachelors’ degrees they got engaged, they bought the land and planned their future home there. They got married and moved into a tiny apartment, and Sam went on to graduate school in architecture. Sarah got a job as a draftsman for a local firm and supported the two of them.

  Built into those branches was the tree house Sam had designed and built for her as a belated wedding present (“because you never had one and you always wanted one”). It was his first solo architecture project. He modelled it on the small but exquisite cabins you find on yachts. He’d had friends help him build it on evenings and weekends, but he’d done all the woodwork himself. The result was art.

  They’d spent countless summer nights sleeping up there together, feeling the faint sway of the branches, hearing the rustle of the leaves. They’d played there, fought there, made love there. Mike and Jim had been conceived there, as well as the baby they’d lost.

  If she’d been forced to choose between living in the house they’d built together later or living in the tree house he’d created for her, she’d have picked the tree house. They’d promised each other that when one of them died, the survivor would place the other’s ashes beneath that tree. They’d thought they had another forty years before either of them would have to keep that promise.

  She put the urn on the ground and leaned against the oak’s rough bark. She’d cried when she identified him in the morgue, she’d cried when she met with the funeral director and she’d cried herself to sleep every night since his death. She had thought herself cried out.

  But she hadn’t been to the tree. Not until just that moment.

  The weight of everything they’d been to each other since the eighth grade hit her with full force; her knees gave way, and she collapsed. Sam’s death and her loss suddenly became terribly real. She sobbed and hugged herself. He was gone someplace where she couldn’t reach him, couldn’t find him, couldn’t hold him, and all she had left was ashes.

  “Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Oh, Sam, I still need you.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” she heard Sam’s voice ask, as if from the other side of the tree, “how could you leave me?”

  She froze. A fog had come up and somehow she hadn’t noticed. She rose on shaky legs and picked up the urn with Sam’s ashes in it. Had she actually heard anything? Was she wishing Sam’s voice into the air around her, or was her mind playing tricks on her? Or was someone there?

  She gripped the urn tighter, grateful it had a screw-on cap rather than a lid. If someone was there, she didn’t want to hit the trespasser and send Sam’s ashes flying.

  In the moon-illuminated fog, she could make out a shape kneeling by the tree. Familiar, that shape. She slipped closer, soundless. Or so she thought.

  “Who’s there?” He sounded exactly like Sam. He couldn’t be Sam, but oh, God, she would have thought she could have recognized Sam’s voice out of all the voices in the world. Was she just hearing what she wanted to hear?

  “Who are you?” she asked. Her voice quavered.

  The shape in the shadows froze. Like a deer in headlights, she thought.

  “You . . . sound like Sarah,” he said.

  “That’s because I am Sarah,” she said, “and you’re trespassing on private property. You need to leave. Now.”

  He stepped forwards, saying, “My wife died, and I don’t know who you are.”

  They saw each other’s faces at the same time as a gust of wind tattered the fog.

/>   The urn slipped from Sarah’s fingers and crashed to the ground. She heard the dull thud of something heavy hitting the ground by his feet too. She took a step towards him, not breathing - not daring to breathe - and reached out a hand to touch his cheek. It was warm. Rough with end-of-the-day stubble. Solid.

  In all the world, in all her life, there had only ever been him. She knew what was happening was impossible, but she also knew that this was Sam. Her Sam. Somehow . . . and she didn’t care how.

  Nor did he.

  He touched her hair, and his hand stroked it as it always had. She bowed her head and leaned into the pressure, willing the dream not to end, willing her confusion to stay because for that moment she had him again, even if she was hallucinating, even if she was going crazy.

  When he pulled her close and kissed her, she didn’t let herself ask questions. This was a gift. No matter how real it wasn’t, it was a gift. It was the goodbye she hadn’t got, the goodbye ripped from her by the telephone calls from the school where the boys wanted to know where she was, and from her RN friend Judy telling her that she needed to get to the hospital.

  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, w
ho 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?”