A light rap on the door, another safety check from her parents, snuffed out the thoughts that had been frequenting her mind since she had returned from the hospital. By instinct, Maria pulled her sleeve down to cover her wrist.
“I’m fine,” she yelled toward the door. “Just going to the bathroom.”
“Maria?” Her mother peeked her head into the bedroom before stepping inside. “I wanted to return these to you,” she said, before reaching out and dropping the dog tag and the yellow paper into Maria’s hand. Maria closed her fingers around them, wishing she could give voice to the thoughts that were haunting her mind and the decision she was being forced to make. “What you told me in the hospital…” her mother continued. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to your father.”
“Of course not,” Maria replied. “I would never do that. And I don’t judge you. I hope you know that I would never judge you for that.”
“You don’t have to,” her mother whispered. “I’ve judged myself every hour of every day since I made that decision.”
“Don’t, Mom.” Maria’s hand drifted across her belly. She longed for the touch of the child she had almost let go, the child she had kept only because the memory of her mother’s grief had never deserted her. “That choice changed me in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“That man from the fair,” her mother said, glancing down at the dog tag and the paper in Maria’s hand. “What did he say to you? What did he want you to do?”
Maria thought about George’s unfaltering belief that she was supposed to have died the day she came back. She thought about the sacrifices he’d made in his life, the years he’d spent watching over her, the support he was willing to offer. She thought about what it would mean to her mother to hear that George was urging her to stay, that he was imploring her to make a decision that would bind her to this life forever.
“He wanted me to give up my life back home,” Maria said. “My husband and kids.”
She could only watch as her mother tried to balance her emotions, the weight of her sorrow like an anchor strong enough to drag them both under, and when the tears finally came, she didn’t try to stop them. She let them carry her back to her home in Mississippi, where she’d stood nine months pregnant and overwhelmed with life, unable to allow herself five minutes to cry, as if that would have made her weak. If she’d only known.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m so sorry to put this on you.” Their sobs were silent as they held each other, mother and daughter, each fighting her own battle, neither wanting to let the other go. Who else could understand the tragedy and the beauty of Maria’s journey if not her mother?
Maria stared at the yellow paper in her hand long after her mother had gone. She sat on the pink bedspread and listened to the birds chirping outside her window as if they had no idea how cruel the world around them could be. She’d been fighting for her release from the hospital for so long, but she hadn’t considered how overwhelming freedom would be. As she finally uncurled her fingers from around the dog tag and the yellow paper and watched them fall into the bottom drawer of her nightstand, the chime of the doorbell rang through the house.
Henry looked out of place standing on her front doorstep, wearing street clothes instead of pajamas, and boots instead of slippers, and Maria instinctively ran a hand through her hair, wishing she was dressed in something other than sweatpants and a sweatshirt. At least she’d brushed her teeth and put on a bra, an improvement from their last meeting.
“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” she said, tugging her sweatshirt sleeve over her scarred wrist.
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” Henry laughed. “I got your name and number for a reason.”
Maria could feel the heat spreading through her face, and she knew the blush that went with it was betraying her. There was an unexpected easiness to their company, a familiarity that had belonged only to her husband for the past fifteen years, and it didn’t seem to go unnoticed by Henry. When his eyes caught hold of hers, she couldn’t seem to pry them away.
“I really wanted to see you again,” he continued. “I was worried about you after our last conversation, and I never really got to say good-bye.”
So much had happened since that last conversation, hopeful revelations about where she’d come back from and a string of complexities about where she was going. She wondered if Henry would even believe her when she told him.
“Would you like to come inside?” she asked. “I have a lot to tell you.”
“I was hoping we could go for a walk. Maybe head over to Mulberry Park?”
The park was closer than she remembered. After promising her mother she’d be back before dinner, she and Henry strolled down to one of Maria’s favorite childhood parks. Like most things from her childhood, though, the picture was not as grand as her fading memory had painted it. She would have sworn the path they were walking, the one where she raced her banana-seat bicycle over thirty years earlier, had been paved when she was a child, but the gravel beneath their feet crunched as she and Henry ambled beside the sludge-filled pond. And hadn’t there once been ducks in that pond?
“I used to come here when I was child,” she said, as they approached a bench on the far side of the pond. Henry cleared off some leaves and dirt with his hand before offering the seat to her. Someone had raised him to be a gentleman. “It seemed so much bigger back then,” she continued. “Have you noticed that, since coming back? How things are not quite as impressive as they once seemed?”
“I think that happens when you get older,” he replied, sliding onto the bench beside her. “The world loses its magic.”
He was probably right. Age had a way of diminishing grandeur. She wondered at what point this park had lost its magic for her. If she’d visited it ten years ago, would it have looked the same? At what point would she have stopped seeing the flower-lined bicycle path and the ducks swimming in the pond?
“I’ve never been to this park,” Henry continued. “My dad and I moved here when I was seventeen. It was so many years ago now, and I feel like I’ve spent my life trying to forget this place.”
“Why did you want to forget it?”
“Bad memories. We moved here after my dad married my stepmom, and then he died of a heart attack less than a year later. I drove out of this town twenty-two years ago and swore I’d never come back.”
“I’m sorry,” Maria said. “Has that already happened? I mean, is your dad…”
“Yeah.” Henry didn’t make her finish the question. “He died a couple of weeks before I came back.”
“Is that why you were in the hospital?”
“I didn’t take it so well,” he said, scratching at his chin like a man who wore a beard. Maria tried to picture that man, scruffy and unshaven, maybe a baseball cap to cover his messy hair. She couldn’t see him in the clean-shaven boy with the close-cropped hair who sat by her side. “After the funeral, I broke into my dad’s liquor cabinet and almost died of alcohol poisoning. That’s when my stepmom had me committed.”
“So, you live with your stepmom?”
“For now,” he said. “She’s a good woman, and she’d let me stay if I needed to, but I’m going back home to the country soon. My dad left me his house and some money that he’d saved up. The last time I was here, I burned through all of it on drugs and booze and anything else I could get my hands on, in a matter of months.”
As Maria listened to his story, the blandness of her sheltered life sat like a flavorless bite of an unseasoned dish on her tongue. Besides some of her patients, she’d never known anyone who had a wild and self-destructive streak. Will had certainly never binged on drugs. He barely even drank alcohol, making Maria’s evening cocktails look indulgent.
“That sounds like a heck of a party,” she said. “Will I be invited this time?”
“You’re too late,” Henry laughed. “Party’s over. The money’s spoken for this time. It’s the reason I was
sent back.”
The echoes of their laughter faded over the pond, as the burdens they carried elbowed their way back in and choked out the energy around them. They were always lingering in the periphery, those constant reminders that their lives were not entirely their own. Henry was already resigned to it, confident in what needed to be done and willing to make whatever sacrifice needed to be made. Maria’s burden was hovering like an unbalanced seesaw: on one side was a family who was waiting for their mother’s return and on the other was a little girl who was waiting for death. It was an unfair game.
“You seem so comfortable here,” she said. “Like you’ve already accepted everything that you’ve been asked to do.”
“What other choice do I have? It’s not like I can go back home.”
“But what if you could? What if going back home was still an option?”
“What do you mean?”
It surprised her that he hadn’t considered it. Even if she’d died, Maria had to believe that getting herself back to her family would still be in the forefront of her mind. She envied Henry’s contentment. She’d never been one to play the hand she was dealt, even though life tended to give her the advantage of a stacked deck at every turn.
What if? What if? What if?
Always the same drive, followed by the same questions. What if I could be better? What if I could have more? What if I could do it my own way? All those questions had led her to a successful career, financial stability, and a four-bedroom, three-bath house in a beautiful neighborhood, with equally successful neighbors. But time was all that mattered now. Time she’d spent so focused on climbing the ladder that she’d forgotten the people who were waiting for her at the bottom: her family.
“I didn’t die,” Maria said. “My family is back there waiting for me, and that doctor from Iowa that I told you about says he can send me back to them.”
“But how could you come back if you didn’t die?”
Maria shrugged. She didn’t have the courage to repeat George’s words, that she was supposed to die in that other world but was just too stubborn to let go. On some level, she felt ashamed by that admission, as if she wasn’t brave enough or strong enough to do what she’d been sent back here to do.
“Something happened to me,” she said, unable to see past the door of the storage unit and unwilling to pry it open. “Maybe something that should have killed me, but I don’t know. I don’t remember any of it. I just know that I didn’t die, and he said he could send me back.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Maria could feel the little girl from her dreams tugging at her shirt and asking her the same question, wanting to know when she was coming to save her. She was waiting for an answer, too. Everyone around her was waiting for her to make a decision.
“It’s not so simple,” she said. “I was sent here to save my husband’s little sister, but if I go home, then I can’t do it. And, on the other hand, if I save her, then I can’t go home.”
It took Henry a moment to absorb the meaning of her words, and as she sat quietly beside him, she knew he understood their significance. It was a decision that would result not only in great sacrifice but also in the possibility of great reward. By the time he responded, the sun had dropped beneath the limbs of the tallest trees on the far side of the pond and the chill that had whispered through its branches met her on the bench below.
“I’d like to believe that I’d stay and do what I was sent here to do,” he said, pulling Maria’s attention from the trees. “But in reality, I don’t think I could pass up the chance to go back to my family.”
She hadn’t expected that from him and felt almost saddened by his words. She wanted him to tell her to stay. She wanted to believe that he would have chosen to stay, too, given the choice, which was ridiculous, because she was a married woman. Whatever flirtations had danced between them were sophomoric and meaningless, and getting back to her family was the only goal that should have been occupying her mind. She nodded her head in response, twisting an imaginary wedding band around her left ring finger. She no longer had a tan line around that finger or concerns about how she was ever going to get it off, with all the pregnancy weight she’d gained. All the foolish things she had worried about, and now she was almost willing to give up the life of a little girl to get them back.
“I feel selfish for saying this,” Henry said, interrupting her thoughts, “but I don’t want you to go back home.”
Maria could almost feel the warmth of his breath brushing across her skin when she turned to face him, to tell him that he shouldn’t say those things or feel those things, but as the distance between them closed, she wanted nothing more than to feel his lips against hers.
“I know you, Maria. I know you were there when I came back, because I feel like I’ve known you forever.”
As he leaned into her, the memory of her husband barreled over her with the crushing weight of a thousand elephants, and the vise that clamped around her head wasn’t too far behind, forcing her to pull herself from the bench.
“You don’t know me, Henry. I’m not this person you see here in front of you.” With her hands held wide, Maria glanced down at her seventeen-year-old body and stiffened with guilt for wanting to feel the touch of another man. “I’m a wife and a mother of two beautiful little girls, and I’m pregnant with a son who I hope will get the chance to be born.” She sank back down onto the bench beside him, dropping her hands into her lap and focusing on the scar that was peeking out from her sweatshirt. “And I’m a psychiatrist, of all things,” she said, holding up the grisly wound on her wrist for him to see. “A psychiatrist who somehow got locked up on a psych unit in a town that I haven’t lived in for over twenty years.”
Henry pulled himself to the edge of the bench, a response on the tip of his tongue as he distanced himself from her and studied her face like it was changing in front of his eyes. He glanced at his wrist as if he had somewhere to be, but there was no watch there to tell him if he was late. “You’re a psychiatrist?”
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” she said. “For a psychiatrist, I’m really not handling things too well.”
Henry didn’t respond. He watched her as the sun crept farther behind the trees across from the pond and night began to leach into the scenery around them, and for the first time, Maria wondered what her life might look like if Henry were the man beside her instead of Will. What would she become if she had to start all over again with a different man? Would she do it all the same? Would she choose such a demanding career? Would she choose to be a wife or a mother?
“I should probably get you home,” Henry said, taking another glance at his naked wrist. “I don’t want your parents to worry about you.”
They walked back mostly in silence, a few questions and comments thrown in to fill the void, while Maria bristled at Henry’s sudden remoteness. They talked about the chilly spring they were having, about her psychiatry practice, and about the town in Mississippi she’d left behind. He seemed very interested in Bienville, although he said he’d never heard of it.
“I’m not surprised,” Maria mumbled. “There’s really nothing there.”
Something had changed between them, something significant that she had somehow missed, and whatever warmth had enveloped them on the park bench by the pond had dissipated into the chilled air around them. By the time they got back to her front door, the sun had almost set.
“What will you do now?” he asked, walking her up the steps.
“I don’t know,” she replied, thinking about the little girl in Ohio whose life was ticking away minute by minute. “But I have to make a decision soon.”
Henry nodded before he held out his hand to her, and Maria reluctantly reached out to shake it, wondering what she’d done to deserve his sudden indifference. There was no good-bye hug, no promise to call or stop by in a few days. Before he turned to head back to the truck that was parked at the end of the walkway, Henry simply smiled and left her with
three words that hung in the air around them and whose meaning was both ominous and vague.
“I’m sorry, Maria.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE AMBER LIQUID CLUNG TO THE walls of the crystal decanter as Maria swirled it in gentle circles. She tilted the top back enough to catch the aroma—woody, pungent, and sweet. She could almost hear the ice cubes clanking together in her glass and feel the breeze on her skin as a rush of memories flooded her mind. She had acquired the taste for whiskey over endless evenings on the back patio of her home in Bienville, when her life was mundane and predictable, when she took for granted that her husband would always return.
She didn’t need to turn around to know that her father was standing at the doorway of the study. It was, after all, his study, and she’d been expecting him. Perhaps even waiting for him. She’d spent so little time in that room as a child, never expressly forbidden from entering but certainly not invited in. With its dark paneled walls and deep-cushioned leather sofas, it was the least familiar room in the house to her. It smelled of her father—woody, pungent, and sweet.
“The smell of whiskey always reminded me of you,” she said, not bothering to turn around, placing the decanter back on the mirrored tray beside the tumblers. “I didn’t realize it was whiskey until I was older, of course.”
When she faced her father, she was both surprised and comforted by his smile. She could see the man who would one day replace him beneath the facade of the man who stood before her. “I suppose that’s why I took a liking to it.”
“I don’t know whether to be proud or worried about a comment like that from my teenage daughter.” He stepped up next to her and glanced down at the decanter. “I guess I should have known better than to leave alcohol so easily available around the house.”
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