As Maria stumbled through the events of the past couple of days—from the meeting with her parents and Dr. Anderson, to the conversation with Dr. Johnstone in the courtyard, to the information about the man named George who’d known she’d come back—Henry’s skepticism seemed to only grow.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to trust this man, Maria. You should be thinking about getting out of the hospital, not adding more doctors to your treatment team.”
“Don’t you at least want to talk to him and find out what’s going on? He knew about things he couldn’t have known if he hadn’t come back from the future,” Maria said. “He knew about September eleventh.” Until she said the words out loud, it hadn’t occurred to her that Henry might not know what she was talking about. Had he gotten that far into the future? Did he even come from the same future? “Do you know about September eleventh?”
“I made it a few years past 2001.” Henry laughed, and when he winked, Maria could feel the blush creeping up her neck and into her cheeks. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to meet him, but I’m not talking to another psychiatrist until I’m out of the hospital. I’m not spending one more day in here than I have to.”
“Fair enough,” Maria replied. “But doesn’t it seem pretty coincidental that we’re all here in the same place at the same time?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Henry leaned forward as he spoke, his focus on Maria’s face so intense that she felt compelled to turn away from him. “I think I figured out how I know you. I think you must have been one of the people who was there with me between lives.”
“What do you mean, ‘between lives’?”
“When you left your last life,” Henry said. “Don’t you remember being with all your family and friends and learning about your purpose?”
Purpose.
There was that word again. Henry kept coming back to it, and as she tried to make sense of it, her thoughts kept mixing into the disharmony of the patients around them, until the muttering of voices and the scraping of chair legs and the cackling of laughter was like the deafening roar of a thousand beating wings drumming through her head. She couldn’t remember coming back, or any moments between this world and the last. She shrugged as her eyes ran over the sculpted edge of Henry’s jaw, but her mind was so unreliable and inaccessible that her head pounded from the effort of thinking.
“What purpose are you talking about?” she asked.
“The one I was brought back here to fulfill,” Henry replied. “The reason I need to get out of the hospital.”
God brought me back for a special purpose.
It didn’t take Sylvia long to come crashing back through Maria’s memory. Her dead patient was around every corner, taunting her with her ethereal presence. Was his purpose like Sylvia’s? Would it change his life forever? And why was he willing to do it? Maria could think of nothing that would force her to quit her husband and children.
“I don’t have a purpose,” she said.
“Of course you do.” Henry’s fingers fidgeted with the stitching on the armrest of the couch, his nail scraping against the fabric, before he leaned back in toward Maria. “The dreams,” he whispered. “The ones you had before you got here. They were telling you what to do.”
“How do you know about my dreams?”
“Because we all have them before we come back. That’s how we know what we were sent here to do.”
She held up her arm between them again.
“Mine were telling me to do this,” she said.
He laid his hand over her uninjured arm. It was such an innocent gesture, but the warmth of his skin filtered through the thin fabric of her shirt and there was a familiarity to his touch that made her long for more. A part of her knew that she should pull her arm away, that she shouldn’t find comfort in the touch of another man, but a larger part of her wanted him to keep his hand there, to wrap his arms around her and tell her that he’d take care of her, that he’d make this all go away.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure,” she replied, but as Henry pulled his hand away, Beth and Sylvia crept back in. Two unwanted guests who refused to be ignored, slinking through her subconscious mind until they found an opening, forcing her to remember what she’d tried so hard to forget. Beth’s lifeless body with the fresh bruises glowing through the darkness. The dirt falling onto her pale skin. The blood dripping from Maria’s wrists. Sylvia insisting there was but one purpose, one thing she’d been sent back to do.
And then her husband’s words.
May should be such a happy month, but I just can’t bring myself to smile in May.
How could she have been so blind? May 9, 1988. Just weeks before high school graduation.
“May.” The word came out of her mouth as barely a whisper, like a thought that hadn’t been breathed into life yet. A single, unreciprocated word floating above them.
“Is it May yet?” she said, biting her words off at the ends, almost choking on them, while Henry struggled to dodge the unwanted attention surrounding them.
“What?” He glanced at his wrist, at the empty spot where a watch had once been, and then back to the crowd of faces. “I think so.”
“She died in May of the year we graduated from high school.” The bile creeping up her throat burned as she swallowed it down and struggled to quell the nausea. “I have to find my husband.”
“Maria, look at me.” Henry drew himself closer, the warmth of his hands and the depth of his eyes fighting to pull her back to him, struggling to keep her from falling into the void. “Calm down,” he whispered. “The nurses are going to be here any minute if you don’t settle down.” His words were reaching her, but there was nothing he could say to save her. “What’s going on? Who died in May?”
The vise around her head tightened as she searched his eyes for absolution, as if he could give that to her. As if he’d known all along that she’d just been too self-absorbed to recognize her purpose.
“I know why I’m here, Henry.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
jenny
A STEADY HUM OF CRICKETS AND frogs filled the air as Hank and Jenny sat on the back porch, the creak of the swing harmonizing with the chorus. From their position, the shed was in full view, but Rachel had kept her promise to remain invisible. The manhunt had turned into a nationwide affair, but the police hadn’t been back to question them further, and the woman in the coma was still clinging to life. Jenny and Rachel had finally settled on a plan, but it was too risky to consider with Hank at home. It was too risky to consider at all, but Jenny had already promised she’d try.
A peaceful and comfortable silence bounced between her and her husband on the swing, tempting Jenny to keep her mouth shut, to leave the past in the past and pretend she’d never stumbled upon the secret in the closet, which had been gnawing at her since she’d found it. If she’d known how it would end, she would have shown more restraint, but hindsight would prove to be a cruel companion.
“Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if we’d never met?” she said, casting a glance toward the shed before pulling her eyes away, wondering if she would have fared the same as the woman lying on the concrete floor behind the clouded window.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if we’d never gotten together. Do you think you’d still be an oil rig worker, or would you have moved on to something else?”
“I don’t know,” Hank replied. “I can’t imagine us not being here, or not having Dean grow up in our home.” It was a forced effort when he pulled his gaze from the bayou and reached out for her hand. “Or not having you by my side.”
“But what if we had never met?” she said. “What do you think our lives would have been like?”
“I guess I would have been a lonely roughneck.”
It was a conversation that had no meaning to him. If she’d asked him to describe how he felt the first moment he held Dean, he’d have been a flood of emo
tions, but there was nothing in Hank’s life that was as meaningful as his son, not even her. They were a compatible couple, and at times she could believe that they were destined to be together, but it was doubtful whether their relationship would have survived without the glue of Dean to hold it together.
“I’m sure you would have met someone else,” she said, “and had kids of your own.”
“Of my own?”
It was an intentional jab, though she feigned ignorance and shrugged it away.
“What about you?” he said. “What do you think would have become of you and Dean if we’d never gotten together?”
His words were pointed and sharp, but she’d pushed him into it, this what-if conversation between husband and wife that never ended well. Hank was a man of immeasurable tolerance, but some lines in his life were not meant to be crossed, and his son was one of them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I would have been a single mom, or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
After all the rehearsing, she still didn’t know how to say it, how to tell her husband that he didn’t deserve to be the father of her son and that, no matter how much he’d given, it wasn’t enough. Now that he was sitting before her, it seemed gravely unfair to deny him what he’d earned, even if it was ill-gotten. “It’s not important,” she said. “I don’t even know why I brought it up.”
“Sometimes it’s best to leave the past in the past.” He pushed back with his legs and let the porch swing fall forward, the creaking of the rusted chain grating through Jenny’s thoughts and the words of David’s letter forcing their way back into her mind.
“But what if the past comes back?” she said. “Or if the past isn’t really what you thought it was?”
“It probably never is,” he replied. “I think most of us remember our pasts in very different lights. Even when we’ve gone through them together.”
Jenny envied her husband’s contentedness with life. It was almost physical, his confidence infusing the air around him like cologne. He never questioned his choices; he just made them and moved on. “I was going to say that if we never met, I probably would have tried to find David again. Just to make sure he didn’t want to be a part of his son’s life. Or mine.” They never talked about David. It never seemed appropriate, given what Hank had done for her, but as she stared at the side of her husband’s face, wondering what her life would have been like if the man next to her was David instead of him, she wished she hadn’t waited so long. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought you should know that.”
“No need to be sorry. It seems like a reasonable thing for a single mom to do.”
“It doesn’t upset you to hear that?”
“We all do what we have to do, Jen. If you think that would have been the best thing for you and Dean, knowing that he’d leave you in the end, then I guess that’s what you’d do. I’m glad you never had to make that decision.”
“No,” she said. “I never had to make that decision, did I?”
The translucent green of Hank’s eyes, once such clear proof of his honesty and integrity, faded into the muddled depths of a canopied, sun-starved forest, and Jenny couldn’t fathom what was lying inside them.
“When did you read it?” he said.
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged as he gave the swing another push, then he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I guess not.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? How could you lie to me for all those years?”
“I never really lied to you. It was always right there for you to see.”
“I wouldn’t say hidden in an old box in the closet is ‘right there.’”
“It’s not really just some old box, though, is it?” he said. “I’d call it more of a tribute to your ex-boyfriend that you tried to keep hidden from me, right under my nose, for the last twenty years.” He tilted his head to the side before he gave the swing another hefty push. “Kind of like your own little secret that you’ve been keeping from me.”
Jenny’s breath caught in her throat before she could speak. She had so many secrets stacked up, she wasn’t sure which one he was referring to, but she was confident that if he knew about the one in the shed, the police would have already been there by now.
“You can’t compare me keeping a box of memorabilia of my son’s biological father to you not telling me that he came back for us,” she finally replied. “It’s not quite the same thing, Hank.”
“He wasn’t coming back for you. I did you and Dean a favor by not giving that letter to you. I probably should have just gotten rid of it, but I figured if I left it in that bin and you found it and went back to him, well, then it was meant to be.”
“Unbelievable,” she said, as Hank gazed out over the bayou, his expression nothing more than indifference, maybe even boredom. She couldn’t imagine why she had thought he would care.
“You were in no position to make that decision. You had an infant son, no job, and this guy who you think you’re in love with comes back to ‘do the right thing.’ He’d have been gone again before Dean was even crawling.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make, Hank. David was coming back for his son, and you took that away from him.”
“I took nothing from him. Dean is my son, and he always has been. I gave that deadbeat exactly what he wanted: freedom from being tied down to a wife and a kid.” Hank’s voice crescendoed with each word, his body edging closer to Jenny’s, until she could feel his words speckling her skin. “You think that loser was coming back to rescue you? He had a momentary lapse of judgment, a moment of weakness, where he thought he could do it. But where is he now, Jen? He never even came back for you. He sent that letter to the home of the man who took responsibility for his mistake, and never even bothered to find you again, just to make sure you got the message. And you think he really wanted you and Dean back?”
By the time his words reached the apex and began their decrescendo, he was standing above her with a finger buried in his chest. “I’m the one who rescued you, Jen. I’m the one who stood by your side and took in your son. So fantasize about David all you want. Pretend he’s the self-sacrificing hero who unjustly lost his family. But you know just as well as I do, even if you won’t admit it, that he’s just some asshole who abandoned you and Dean.”
He stood motionless above her, his finger still digging into his own chest, their eyes fixed on each other, both blind to the scenery around them and deaf to the sounds of the bayou. She’d never imagined she’d see this side of Hank. She’d never known it existed. And while she knew he was right—David wouldn’t have lasted a season—she was furious that he had so frivolously tampered with her fate.
“Well,” she said, unable to contain her venom, “since we’re clearing the air, I’ve got my own secret to share with you.” Hank’s hand fell away from his chest as she slid off the swing to face him, and through the fading light of day she landed the final blow. “Do you want to know why we never had more kids, Hank? Do you want to know who made that decision? It was me. I thought it would be in your best interest for Dean to be your only child. You know, just like you thought Dean and me staying with you was in our best interest? Didn’t you ever wonder why I was so careful to never miss my ‘vitamins’?”
With her fingers still hooked into quotation marks, she slipped past him into the kitchen, relieved to have said it but ashamed at the same time, not sure which she felt more. The minute hand of the clock on the wall was tireless in its ticking, and when Hank finally entered, his eyes red and swollen, the green was again translucent.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For never giving you the option to go back to him.”
“Hank, that’s not what I—”
“No.” He raised his hands between them, the same weathered and calloused hands that had held their newborn son more than eighteen years earlier and had never once come down in anger. The same gentle hands that knew every inch of her body. “
I’m not saying this because I want your forgiveness. I can’t ask you to forgive me, when I don’t think I can ever forgive you for what you’ve done to me. I probably should have given you the option to decide, back then, but I’m glad I didn’t. I can’t imagine not having Dean in my life, and if I had to go back and do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
She knew he had more to say, she could feel it, but when his hands fell to his sides, there was only silence. There was no good-bye, no hug or kiss on the cheek, no last trip to the boat dock with her husband.
Had she known it would be the last time she ever saw him, she would have done it all differently, but her final memory of Hank was of a broken man with slumped shoulders and bloodshot eyes, slinking out the back door of their home, into the dusk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
maria
MARIA GASPED FOR AIR, HER LUNGS swallowing it down in gulps as the suffocating darkness faded away. Her oversize hospital pajamas were soaked with sweat and clinging to her skin when she pulled herself from the bed, and the doctor from Iowa was sitting in the chair by her side, battling with the glasses that were still slipping from his nose.
“Nightmares?” he said, dropping a copy of Time magazine onto the wooden desk. Maria’s trembling hands were still clutching her belly, and the bandage on her arm was beginning to unravel. She eased back down onto the edge of her bed, where a silhouette of sweat was stamped onto her bedsheet, and let her hands fall away. Dr. Johnstone wore the same wrinkled clothes he’d worn the day prior, and his hair still jutted out from his head in an impossible mess.
Maria tried to speak, but her tongue was thick and parched like she’d endured a night of heavy drinking, and a throbbing ache wound its way around her forehead, edging dangerously close to her temple and threatening to plunge into her left eye. She let her eyelids drift shut and her head fall into her hands.
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