Through the Mist

by Ferrell, Cece

  Another near-sleepless night filled with regret, unease, and nausea that I’d tried to chalk up to anxiety had plagued me. I rolled over, considering getting out of bed to answer the door, when my stomach rolled and threatened to upend itself in protest.

  Maybe it wasn’t just anxiety causing my symptoms. I tried to count back to when they’d started, and realized that between my stomach issues, my fatigue, and the occasional bouts of vertigo, there was a really good chance I was sick.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming. Hold your damn horses,” I called out as I pulled on my favorite robe and shuffled through the house to the front door.

  “Fuck, Ros, you look like shit!” Jos exclaimed as soon as I opened the door. She swept by me and made her way to the living room.

  “Yeah, like I’ve been telling you, I’m not feeling well. I think I might actually be sick. I’m probably gonna have to suck it up and go to urgent care.” I plopped onto the other end of the sectional, pulled a throw blanket over myself and tried to find a comfortable position.

  “Dude, you’ve been saying you’re sick for the last month. I thought you were just trying to avoid me. What’s going on?”

  “I dunno, Jos. I think Dan and I have reached our limit. I don’t think there is any way for us to work through this.”

  There was an inexplicable sense of relief in admitting the truth that I had been hiding inside out loud.

  “No. I don’t mean between the two of you, though we will get back to that. I mean what are your symptoms? Why have you been so sick for the last month?”

  “Oh. I don’t know why. I thought it was just all the changes, the emotions of trying to salvage everything. Now I’m thinking it might be something serious. Maybe it’s IBS or something. I’ve been nauseous, I’ve thrown up a few times. I get dizzy here and there. I’ve been crazy exhausted.”

  “Maybe it’s morning sickness,” Jos joked. I tossed a pillow at her head.

  “You’d love that! There’s no way…”

  I laughed out before stopping myself. I thought about how long I’d been feeling off. Then I tried to remember when I last had my period. I’d been so caught up with the implosion of my marriage, the move back here, the therapy that I hadn’t even realized the last time I had my period was… over three fucking months ago. Before we left the island. Long after Dan and I had last slept together, but shortly before Archer and I had.

  But that wasn’t possible. He wasn’t even alive.

  Yeah, but you also didn’t think ghosts were possible. And you really didn’t think you could actually have sex with one.

  Fuck.

  I was going to be sick for sure. I got up and ran to the bathroom, barely able to contain the vomit until I reached the toilet. I emptied what little was in my stomach and slumped against the wall, my head resting on my bent knees.

  “So maybe your marriage isn’t over quite yet. Nothing brings a couple together like a baby, right?”

  I yanked my head back and looked over at Jos in the doorway, her eyes alight with humor and empathy.

  “Think Dan will be happy? You guys wanted kids, right? I know the timing is shitty, but—” She stopped mid-sentence as she assessed the look on my face, the guilt and shame that must be written all over me. “Rosalind. Whose baby is that?”

  My head dropped back to my knees and I took in a deep, painful breath. The weight of what I’d done, the consequences I’d been living with and the ones that I would now have to face, the secrets I’d been keeping from Josie crashed into me like a wave, threatening to pull me under and drown me in all the mistakes I’d made, all the pain I’d caused.

  “Not Dan’s,” was all I could manage to get out in a ghost of a voice that didn’t sound like mine.

  “What the fuck haven’t you been telling me?”

  She didn’t even try to hide the accusation and hurt. I knew it was finally time to be honest with Jos. Even if it meant she thought I was crazy. Even if it meant laying myself barer than I had ever been.

  “So much, Josie. So. Damn. Much. I don’t even know where to begin.” Even I could hear the agony and vulnerability in my voice.

  “Start at the beginning. Take your time.”

  “I met someone in Washington.”

  The words rushed out of me, my shoulders sagged as my spine relaxed, the weight of my secrets starting to lift off of my body. I looked up at her then, not at all surprised to see her jaw dropped open in shock, a million questions threatening to spill out, evident in the strain of her narrowed eyes. I continued before she could utter a single one of them.

  “Jos, I will tell you everything, I promise, but I need you to not say anything and just let me get this all out.”

  She snapped her jaw shut with an audible clicking of teeth and nodded her head, encouraging me to continue. I knew that I would need to get this out as quickly as possible if I stood any chance of her not interrupting me.

  “Remember when you came to visit and we did that research on the man who used to own the land the house was built on?”

  She nodded slowly, squinting, and I could almost hear her brain working to figure out what this information had to do with my cheating on Dan.

  “And you remember how you kept joking that all that weird shit happening in the house was him haunting me?”

  Another nod.

  “Well… it was. Him haunting me, that is. I know how this sounds, Jos, I do. But I promise, I’m not crazy and I’m not joking. Archer was haunting the house.”

  I stopped there. I couldn’t help but wish that the explaining was done, that all my secrets and truths were already laid bare.

  “He was lonely, and Dan was gone and I was lonely, and we began to spend time together. And, Jos? He was so amazing. Is so amazing. I fell in love with him, and then I left him. I left him there to spend an eternity. Alone.”

  It all hit me in that moment. The wave threatened to drown me where I sat. Every single emotion I’d been trying to deny and avoid, everything I’d spent the last three months trying to bury, it all came back, so much more painful than before.

  Instead of diminishing while I kept it all under wraps, the pain just multiplied, compounded to a level that now felt unbearable. How could one person hold all this pain inside their body? How could one person feel this much agony for the rest of their life? These questions kept running through my head, but it came up with no answers.

  “Okay, so you fell in love with a ghost. Pfft. That part I get. Well, I don’t get it, but I see what you’re saying. What I don’t get is what this has to do with the likely bun in your oven?”

  I broke then. At the gentleness in her voice, the lack of judgment. At the love all over her face, at the warmth in her smile. Sobs racked my body and I believed in that moment that the tears would never be exhausted, that tremors would persist until I ceased to exist in this body.

  “Shhh, shhh.” It was all Jos uttered, as she came to sit beside me and wrapped her arms around my body. Those words and the comfort of her embrace were all I needed.

  “We… we slept together. Don’t ask me how, neither of us could figure it out. But it happened. His body was real, solid. It felt like any living person would feel. And we slept together, and I cheated on Dan. We didn’t use a condom. Now I’m pregnant, and somehow, Archer is the father.” My body shook with the effort to breathe normally and get myself under control, and I managed to force out past my diminishing sobs.

  “Holy. Fuck. I know you didn’t want me to say anything, but those are the only words that seem appropriate right now. Holy fuck. Leave it to you to get knocked up by a fucking hot-ass ghost. You always were an overachiever.”

  A giggle escaped my mouth, and then another, and another until I couldn’t stop and my body was shaking from mirth rather than misery. Jos had given me the one thing I never expected to feel: comfort and hope.

  “So, what are you going to tell Dan?” she asked as our laughter subsided, bringing me back down to earth.

  “I don’t kno
w. Nothing?”

  “Dude, you guys are still living together, don’t you think he’ll start to notice the adorable little bump I’m sure you’re bound to get sooner than later?” Again, there was no judgment to the question.

  “Jos, I don’t want to tell him. I don’t think it’s going to work out. We’re at an impasse with therapy. He can’t get past what I did, he still wants the details I obviously can’t give him. Never mind that he’s just as guilty as I am.”

  “Maybe with more time?”

  I shook my head in defeat. “No. On top of all that he’s pretty much never home. You would think that all the discussions we’ve had about his career being a huge obstacle in our marital happiness would have brought about some change. But no, he’s gone more than ever. There isn’t an us and there hasn’t been for a while, and this should hurt so much more than it does.”

  There it was. The truth I had been avoiding for months, maybe even years. And it didn’t even hurt. It just felt like another fact, a foregone conclusion.

  “You’re going to leave him? Are you sure about this, Ros?” she asked, her arms still around me, stroking my arm.

  “I don’t know. I think we need to have a talk though and see where we go from there.”

  The last piece I had been holding in fell out of my mouth and into the weighted atmosphere of the room already too full of confessions and truths laid bare. I wanted to pack away all the emotions again, tie them up tight inside so that numbness could take the place of being torn apart by the aftermath of my choices and mistakes.

  I was beginning to realize though that if I had any chance of being whole again, of living a good, happy life, I had to feel everything that threatened to wreck me. I had to own it and deal with it, stop living the way I had for most of my life. I owed it to myself.

  I looked down and gently caressed my lower abdomen. Yes. I owed it to myself to put the work in and repair all the shattered pieces of myself. And I owed it to this sweet little miracle, this amazing little life that was growing inside of me.

  Thirty-Eight

  I flinched at the thundering sound of the front door slamming. It had been three hours since our appointment ended in screams and tears (screams on Dan’s part, tears on mine). Three hours since the end of what was very likely our final marriage counseling session.

  Dan hadn’t even come home the last three nights, ignored every single text message and voicemail and email I sent him, so I’d been thoroughly surprised when he walked into our therapy session. I had been fully expecting to go it alone.

  Regardless of what I had said to Jos nearly two months earlier, I was finding it difficult to pull the trigger on my marriage and walk away. A part of me still wanted to see if we could make things work, believed that we could make things work. We truly loved each other, and I’d always assumed that love would be enough to carry us through whatever storms we faced. Sadly, it looked like we had been in different boats the entire length of our relationship, barely grasping each other’s hands to stay connected.

  There was also the matter of the baby I was carrying that was definitely not Dan’s. Right after Jos left that day I’d called my OB/GYN and got in that week, where they’d confirmed that I was indeed about three months pregnant. (I also took the test to see if I had the cancer gene mutation and was relieved to discover that I wasn’t genetically predisposed.)

  Dan and I hadn’t been together physically for well over six months, so there was no denying that I was living a reality I never considered possible: pregnant with another man’s child. With a ghost’s child. I still had no answers for how that was even remotely possible, but at this point it didn’t matter, the damage was done.

  Seeing that tiny speck of a baby on the ultrasound screen had been surreal and beautiful, all at once. It was a sucker punch at first. I’d had it in the back of my mind that it might be possible for this all to have been a massive mistake. I expected them to move that probe through the warm jelly they glopped on my belly and to tell me there was nothing there at all, that their test had been wrong.

  The minute that little gummy bear in my womb had appeared on the monitor, the moment the rapid whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the heartbeat hit my ears, reality hit me like a freight train, panic and denials rising up in my throat. They were quickly replaced with an immense amount of love and a fierce desire to protect. I’d known then that this baby was going to reshape my entire world.

  “Ros, did you even hear a single word I just said?” Dan asked, the undertone of anger causing me to recoil.

  “No, I’m sorry. Can you please repeat it?”

  “No, I can’t. I’m done with this. Even when you’re here you’re not really here. Your mind is somewhere else. Is it with him? All these times you drift off, are you with him?” He paced the living room, hands gripping his beautiful hair, each word cutting me open.

  “Dan, no. I wish you would believe me, trust me.”

  We both paused for a moment, stuck in a stare-down, our wills, our wants, our feelings fighting against each other silently. Disbelief radiated off of him. Of course, it was too much to ask for him to trust me when I had betrayed him.

  Then I fully processed exactly what he had just said, and I couldn’t stop the anger that threatened to erupt, suddenly and with little warning. In the deluge of guilt I had been drowning in since that night with Archer, I kept forgetting that I wasn’t the only one who had fucked up. I wasn’t the only one who had betrayed our vows.

  “You have some fucking nerve, Dan. Some fucking nerve!” I shook my head in disgust, turned and stalked over to the window, unable to look at him without wanting to rip into him.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Rosalind?” His voice boomed out as he stalked toward me and stopped suddenly just a few feet away.

  “You know exactly what it means.” My voice was deadly quiet, the rage I had been suppressing for so long betrayed by the tremble I couldn’t hide.

  “No, I don’t!” He gripped my shoulders and the heat from his hands and body felt like acid burning through my skin. I spun away from him, then turned back to face him and knew this was it. The moment when everything imploded.

  “Dan, you can’t possibly be serious! Let’s just not mention the fact that you fucked someone else too, okay? Let’s just completely avoid that. How about we talk about the fact that you are never home? Ever. That this has been going on since we’ve been together. It’s no wonder we are where we are right now, we never even got a chance to build something solid and substantial because you were always gone from one project to the next!”

  “You knew that, Ros! When we first started dating, you fucking knew. You accepted it, said you were okay with what that would entail. For years you were fucking fine with it. And now all of a sudden everything is falling apart, and it’s my fault? I’m supposed to take all the blame?” The words seethed out.

  I opened my mouth to respond but then closed it with an audible snap. He was right. He was so damn right. He couldn’t shoulder all the blame in this. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.

  I was just as much to blame for his career creating a wedge in our relationship. His job, while a major issue, wasn’t the main one. It was our lack of communication. We’d never known how to communicate effectively, and it was obvious now that nearly five months of marriage counseling hadn’t changed that.

  “You’re right, Dan.” I slid down into the nearest chair and pulled my knees up to my chest. “You’re completely right. It’s not all your fault. Your job isn’t fully to blame. It hasn’t helped things, but it’s not the main issue. We’ve never been good at communicating. We both let your career become this third entity in our marriage. Those things we can change and fix with time and effort.”

  I paused, taking a deep breath and readying myself to say the inevitable. To finally tell him what I’d been thinking about for the last couple of months. Either he would respond well and we would continue to try, or things would go the way my gut was telling me the
y would, and one of us would be walking out of this forever.

  “Dan, we’ve been doing therapy for months now. You say you want to work it out, to get past this, but you spend even more time away from home than you did before and you’ve completely shut me out—”

  “Ros—” he cut in, trying to shut down whatever else I had planned to say.

  “No, you will not interrupt me. You will listen to what I have to ask and then we will talk about this, okay?”

  Dan sat down on the sofa across from me and curtly nodded his head.

  “I’ve been working at this and it just doesn’t feel like you’ve put in the same effort.” I held up my hand for him to stop as his eyes hardened and jaw set with indignation, his mouth opening to argue. “That isn’t a judgment or a placement of blame. It’s simply how I see it. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you’re just going through the motions right now. Do you even want to continue working on this with me? Do you even want to be married to me anymore?”

  My voice broke on the last question, and I shut up then and waited for him to answer the questions I’d never thought I would ask.

  I watched as different emotions passed over Dan’s face. As his jaw ticked with the tension of clenching his teeth to hold back the angry words dying to spill out. The amount of control he was exerting was impressive. And heartbreaking.

  How had we gotten to this place? I couldn’t help but ask myself that question for the millionth time, even though the answers were laid before us now.

  “Fuck, Ros,” he groaned out as his head fell back against the sofa. “Fuck.” I continued to give him the time and space he needed to figure out what he needed to say. “No. I don’t think I do. I just can’t get past what you did. And before you say anything, I know I fucked up too. But you haven’t given me any answers, and every time I close my eyes, I see you fucking another man. Every time I pass a man in the street who looks at you, I wonder if that could have been him. If that was the man who had his hands all over my wife. If that was the man who had been inside what was mine.”