* * *
I tugged on the string in our upstairs hallway closet, and the attic stairs crashed down dramatically in a cloud of gray dust. I coughed, stumbling out of the closet while batting at my eyes.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
I retreated into the safety of the bathroom and washed my hands in a foolish bid to remain clean. I studied myself in the mirror as the water ran cool over my palms. The bags under my eyes were still there, but they weren’t as dark, even compared to last week. I had been sleeping a bit better recently. With things having settled down, for the most part anyway, a slow, soft voice within me reminded me to get a move on and get on with life.
All in due time, I answered silently back.
I peeked out into the hallway. The dust had dissipated and now clung to the old hardwood floors in a thin film of gray. The attic stairs loomed ahead, beckoning.
Here goes nothing. The ladder wobbled precariously, but steadied as I climbed up. My head popped up into the attic and I surveyed the mess.
Boxes and boxes, some sealed and stacked while others were half-open, their contents pawed through haphazardly. Something made a skittering noise in the far distance, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were mice up here.
I climbed the last couple of rungs and stepped hesitantly against the floorboards. I adjusted my weight to one foot and bounced up twice to test their stability. The last thing I needed was to plunge through the ceiling and break a leg.
I circled the attic slowly, taking in my project. The concentration of boxes was mostly clustered around the entry hole. Knowing Dad, he’d probably shoved the boxes up there, without rhyme or reason, just for easy access. The junk around the fringes wasn’t so bad—some old broken furniture, plastic bins, sacks of garbage bags.
With a sigh, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and rolled up my sleeves, crashing down onto the floor, dragging the box closest to me and ripping the tape off. It was books. Of course. I kicked at it with my foot to push off to the left. That would be the book side.
Hours later, by the time I took my first break, the attic had grown musty and warm over the noonday sun. The air was a constant-flowing stream of dust and particles, and my eyes burned. I hadn’t made much of a dent in the sheer mountain of boxes, and I hadn’t found much to toss away. Most of the bigger boxes held books I knew Dad wanted to keep around, and I had spent my morning basically just pushing boxes from one side of the attic to the other.
I picked my way back to the entrance. I pushed a stack of boxes, three tall, to the far wall in order to get to the ladder back into the house.
The boxes were heavy. I strained against them, digging my heels into the floor and pushing with my shoulder. The topmost box wobbled threateningly, and with one hard shove of my shoulder, it fell over and spilled its contents all over a small hill of black plastic garbage bags. An angry cloud of dust billowed up, rolling over the surrounding area and straight into my face.
I sneezed, racking the back of my forearm over my watering eyes. I waved my open palm out in front of me, brushing aside the lingering puffs of grime that were still trying to work their way up my nose.
Grumbling, I sidestepped the now-lopsided stack of cardboard boxes and stooped down to scoop up the spilled contents. They were mostly picture frames and some linens.
Then I paused, my eyes trained on the blanket sprawled across the dusty black bags. The blanket was pink, with careful embroidery along the edges.
In one corner, the name Emma was spelled out in glittery thread along with a small heart.
Panic crawled up my throat as it dawned on me what this box was.
I remained there, frozen, unmoving, trapped in the moment. No. Please, no. I couldn’t handle this now. I couldn’t face this now.
I started to straighten up, taking a shaky step backwards. But a loud, crisp crack emanated from beneath my foot, and I jumped, twisting and looking down.
Picture frames were strewn out around me. Dusty, glass cracked on several of them, including the one I’d just stepped on.
I stared at my face. Young me. Pregnant me. In one, I was posed in front of our rosebushes and was giving a small smile with a hand over my swollen belly. Alistair had his arm around my shoulders and had placed his other hand to envelope mine, both of us hugging my stomach.
Our baby.
These were for our baby shower. We’d had it at seven months, in June, when Alistair was just back from school. Sandra had planned it, and it was an intimate backyard affair.
Nicolas had commissioned himself to take pictures of me through my pregnancy, and they were all there, still in the pink picture frames he’d bought to display for the shower.
Myself as my stomach got rounder and bigger.
A candid shot of me with my feet up, cradling a tub of ice cream. Frowning in my bedroom with my jeans pulled up to my knees, no longer suitable for my wide hips.
One of Alistair dangling a fast-food bag of fries over my head as I stood on my tiptoes, arm outstretched, trying to reach.
A printout of our last ultrasound, the grainy black-and-white shot circled with a heart.
My entire body shook as I pushed the edge of the box away from me in a bid to leave, but its contents tumbled out with the movement. Diapers, still in their packaging, from the diaper cake at the shower. Stuffed rabbits and bears I had cut the tags off of, ready for their owner once she came home. Baby clothes, clothes that were impossibly small and frail, sunken into the deep, dark box, cast off and forgotten for all these years in the shadows of the attic.
As Dad had sat in the hospital with me, Nicolas had packed up these baby clothes, all the picture frames and toys, all by himself. I was young when I had gotten pregnant, but Nicolas was even younger, barely out of middle school, when he had run out the house with me in his arms. I had struggled to keep my hands around his neck, but he’d pressed me hard against his chest. He had spoken to me in desperate tones. It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay. He’d sat in the back of the car as I bled all over him.
I’d never forget his face.
Nicolas had known he was watching his sister die.
And he kept saying, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.
He’d stroked my hair, patted my cheeks, fought to keep me awake. His hands stained red, the blood slowly drying.
* * *
“How was the cleaning today?”
After I had cried myself into a state of unresponsive stupor, I’d rolled myself across the attic floor and stumbled down the steps. The shower I had taken was so long, it was as if I was trying to drown myself standing upright.
My hair was still slightly damp and sticking to the back of my neck. Dad and I sat at the dining table, picking at the salad and pasta I had halfheartedly thrown together.
“I didn’t get much done. Sorry.”
“It’s alright, it’s a big job. No rush.”
I dragged my salad around my plate with my fork. The scraping of metal against porcelain rang out in the empty air. Just now, I realized just now empty this house was, how big, and how lonely.
No wonder Dad spent all his time at the clinic.
“Not hungry?” Dad’s eyes were worried.
“You know …” I trailed off. “Dust. Allergies.” I sniffed lightly to make my point, pointing to my nose with the end of the fork.
“Well, I have some masks in the garage if you need them. Don’t be breathing too much of that stuff in. I’m pretty sure we don’t have asbestos, but you can never be too careful.”
“Dad,” I said in a soft voice.
But Dad didn’t hear me, or he was continuing the conversation in his own head. “I can help you this weekend. I have Sunday afternoon free. With the two of us it’ll go faster.”
“Dad,” I pressed, my voice louder.
“Yeah?”
I swallowed, the painful lump of regret in my throat. I had never wanted to know before, but the question had gnawed at me all aftern
oon. It had been eating away at me, toxic and persistent, for as long as I could remember. Only now did I bother with wanting to know the answer. Because I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“Why didn’t she live?” My voice was tremulous and small, completely unsure.
There was a pause before a reaction, a held breath. My father’s expression of stricken surprise and confusion flashed before me before it mingled in with grief. And pity. And sadness.
Back then, the doctors had tried to explain to me how it had happened. All I knew was what had happened and I couldn’t handle the facts about how. I couldn’t bear to hear them. Dad had spoken to them in low voices and I’d squeezed my eyes shut and pretended it all didn’t exist.
“Did you find something up there?” His voice was agitated.
I shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “Pictures. Toys.”
Dad slammed a heavy palm against his forehead. “Geez,” he said under his breath. “I had been meaning to get rid of all that. I’m sorry, you weren’t supposed to ever see that stuff.”
I dropped my fork, far past maintaining the appearance of being okay. “What happened, Dad?”
Dad studied me for a moment, his expression one of mixed professional solemnity and paternal worry. It was a look I had seen him adopt many times before at the clinic. Only now, I was the recipient.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
He took a deep breath, his loud exhale shaking his entire body. “You had an incident of placental abruption—that’s when the placenta lining detaches from the uterus and bleeding occurs.”
Dad gave me a look as if to ask me if I wanted him to continue. I nodded.
“It was serious, a class three. You were bleeding severely and you went into maternal shock halfway to the hospital. We lost Emma, but we almost lost you too, Florence.
“There was nothing anyone could have done, nothing you could have done, and very little the doctors in Holland were equipped to do by the time you got there. We could only stabilize you. It was too traumatic. Emma … had already asphyxiated before we were able to get help.” Dad’s eyes were shiny with tears.
“Why? Why did that happen?”
“Bad luck. This is more common in pregnancies at the extreme ends of the age spectrum, and you were young. That could have been a contributing factor. The umbilical cord was shorter than average—that could have led to it as well. Your blood pressure was high at your last checkup, so that could have been the reason as well. But beyond our best guesses, we don’t know. It was just an accident.
“I blamed myself for a long time. Here I was, a doctor, and I couldn’t even save my own granddaughter, couldn’t prevent this happening to my own daughter.”
“Dad—”
Dad shook his head. “It ate me up inside for ages. There must have been signs. There must have been symptoms that I was too foolish, too busy to see. It tore me apart, the fact that I couldn’t do anything.”
Tears spotted my vision and I ran my knuckles beneath my watery eyes. “No … Dad, don’t say that.” My voice cracked.
“Kiddo, don’t cry.”
Dad got up from the opposite side of the table and slid into the seat next to me. He placed a palm over mine, sandwiching it against the table.
“It’s alright. That was the grief talking. And we’ve all dealt with our grief in our own ways,” he said as he circled an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.
We sat like that, just Dad and myself. It had been so long since he had held me like this, so simple, yet such an expression of fatherly care.
My tears dried and I rubbed my eyes against my shoulder, sniffling loudly.
“Maybe you should go see her,” Dad said gently, squeezing my fingers. “It’s beautiful there. Bill and Alistair planted a tree.”
I kept my eyes down, afraid that if I made eye contact, I’d see the truth in Dad’s eyes. Dad still wore his wedding ring, a fat and faded golden band around his left ring finger. “Have you gone?”
“Nicolas and I go together when he’s back home. I can’t do it by myself.”
So it was true. I was callous. I was a heartless jerk who had never seen her own daughter’s grave. The black hole in me yawned, stretching its boundaries of guilt.
Tears trickled from the corner of my eyes again. Past the point of caring, I let them fall.
“I messed up, Dad.”
“No,” he said gently, shaking my shoulders slightly. “You didn’t.”
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. I should have taken better care of myself during the pregnancy. I shouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeated, now more firmly, with a harder edge to his words.
But I continued, persistent in my blame. “Alistair and I never should have dated. If we’d never met, none of this would have happened. It was doomed from the start.”
Dad touched a finger against my chin. He lifted my gaze to meet his. “You and Alistair were in love. These things happen. No, it wasn’t ideal for a teenager to get pregnant, and yes, I did want to strangle him with my bare hands when I found out. I even ranted about it to Nicolas, and he offered to help me dispose of the body.” Dad smiled at that thought, and at his expression, I gave a short huff of a laugh through my tears. “But Bill and I talked it out. We had a plan. It would have made it all okay. Everything would have been okay.”
The parents had sat us down after my tearful confession at three months and told us our options. We could have aborted the baby (I sobbed harder when they offered that, so it was immediately scrapped), organized an adoption (Alistair’s face went tight and he said no), or Alistair and I could both graduate school and then move in together with the child.
Bill said in time he could build a small house on his property, and Alistair could either work in town or commute to Holland.
Bill had already purchased the lumber, planning to start shortly after the birth. Alistair and he had already plotted out a piece of land. Land that sat at the edge of our woods.
And then I lost her. The pink toys and the quilt Sandra made were cast off, stuffed into a box and hidden in the dark of an attic. The lumber sat on Blair Farms, forgotten, buried by the seasons.
We all tried to forget, myself more than others. Those memories gathered dust, thick and potent, but too thin to really erase the truth. The past was always just around the corner, just beyond my line of vision.
Most days I almost convinced myself that year was a vacuum. That I had still gone to senior prom. That I’d graduated with honors. That I’d signed yearbooks instead of post-baby-shower thank-you cards.
That I hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night to the most intense pains I’d ever experienced and pulled my blankets away to see a sea of my own blood.
That I hadn’t stumbled into the hallway, screaming for Nicolas and Dad, and watched the changes in their expressions when they registered the trail of red I left behind me.
That I hadn’t felt the seizing of my heart, the fading of my eyesight as I lost consciousness.
That Nicolas hadn’t begged me to stay awake, that he hadn’t begged me to stay with him. That he hadn’t cried tears I had never seen before, not even when Mom died.
And how hopeless I’d felt in the midst of it all. To stop Nicolas’s tears. To stop my Dad’s frantic yells. To stop my own pain.
That pain had been ongoing, had been continuing on for so long, it was all I knew. It had become me. And I couldn’t stop any of it.
“Losing Emma wasn’t the end of the world. Losing your mom wasn’t the end of the world. We survived. We tried our best and we loved them for as long as we were able to. That’s all that’s really important.”
My whole body was shaking. Tears were now streaming down my cheeks in earnest, and that distantly familiar sensation of crippling fear and terror seized. “I’m afraid, I’m scared that … I never loved Emma. That I was punished for no
t loving her enough, for not wanting her totally,” I whispered.
Dad wrapped his other arm around me and pulled me into a tight hug. I burrowed my face against his shoulder and he said, “You loved her in a very special way, a way you never felt before. You were terrified. You were young. It was okay to have felt overwhelmed.”
Dad squeezed me. “Losing her was no one’s fault. It’s the way the cards fell, that’s all.”
“I didn’t want her,” I whispered. “I was selfish.”
“But you didn’t abort the pregnancy. You felt regret. You felt anger and fear and grief. But you also felt love.”
I shook my head. “How do you know? How can you be so sure? That’s what everyone says, that I must have loved her. But all I felt then, and what I feel now, is just a dark hole.”
“Because we all loved you, and we loved Alistair and we loved Emma. Because you love me and Nicolas and Alistair and Sandra and Bill. You know love. And that little girl never knew more love, especially from her mama.
“You’re forgetting the journey. You’re forgetting the complexity of it all. All you recall is that final day, those twenty-four hours and your time in the hospital. But think hard, and you’ll recognize it’s not all that simple.
“Love is never simple. It’s not absolute and it’s not standard. You loved her in your own way.”
I pulled away from Dad’s hug, running the back of my forearm over my eyes. I sniffled. “Do you really think I’m so tied up in the past that I can’t look forward? Like what you said the other night?”
“I think that you’ve been running away for a long time. It’s about time you stopped looking back and start looking forward to the road ahead. You’ll see that you had company all long, people who love you and care for you. People who have been waiting for you to stop, so they could help shoulder the grief alongside you, because they understand it just as potently.”
At the question in my eyes, Dad gave me a small smile and nodded.
“Yes, even Alistair. Especially Alistair. Alistair, more than anyone. I know that for sure.”
The Beginning of Always Page 48