She Wouldn't Change a Thing

by Sarah Adlakha

  Jenny couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t focus on the leaves that were dancing at her feet or the wind that was biting at her skin. Her life was dependent on the man beside her, like he was an antidote. She’d already swallowed the poison, and only he could save her. But would he do it? And did she even deserve to be saved? She’d do it all again if she had to. Rachel’s crime was desperation, and she didn’t deserve to rot in prison for that.

  “It’s better for all of us if Rachel stays dead,” Will finally said, and Jenny could feel the moment his words reached her, like the chains had been severed. The air rushed back into her lungs and her blurred senses started to sharpen. Life would go on.

  “I’m grateful that you’re the kind of man who understands forgiveness,” she said. “I’m not sure I could do the same thing if I was in your situation.”

  “I don’t forgive Rachel,” he replied. “But Maria would have, and she would want me to do the same.”

  “I still don’t know if I could do it. Sometimes I can’t even get myself out of bed in the morning.” When she finally forced herself to look up at the man beside her, Jenny could see why his wife had fallen in love with him. She could see how Maria had chosen to spend her life with him, this man who was willing to let love rule over anger and desperation and spite. “How do you do it every day?” she asked. “How do you wake up and get your children fed and dressed and get yourself through work?”

  “Again,” he said, “I do it because my wife would have wanted me to.”

  “Do you really see her in your dreams? Because I don’t see my husband anywhere. I want to, but he never shows up. Do you think it’s because we didn’t love each other enough?”

  “The fact that you’re sad about not seeing your husband in your dreams leads me to believe that you loved each other plenty,” he said. “And, yes. I really do see my wife in my dreams.”

  “I thought maybe you were just saying those things for your kids.” Her eyes landed on the baby in his arms. He had woken from his nap and was gazing up at her with the indigo eyes of his father, stirring an instinct inside of her to pull him into her chest and wrap him in her own cloak of protection. She’d never felt that yearning for any child but her own.

  “Maybe you’re just not listening.”

  “Maybe,” Jenny muttered, hesitant to pull her eyes from the baby. “Or maybe I’m just too angry to hear him.”

  She was surprised when the words left her mouth. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much anger she was harboring. She was angry that she was being left behind, angry that she would have to pick up all the pieces of their life, and angry that she would have to forge ahead on her own.

  “Maybe that anger you’re feeling is really just grief,” Will said. “I felt the same way when Maria left, but now I choose to see what I’ve been given as a gift. To be able to see my children grow. To hold my newborn baby. How can I scorn my wife for leaving me behind, when I’ve been given these beautiful moments that were ripped away from her?” The wind whistled through the branches above their heads, sending a shower of leaves over them. A lone, flawless oak leaf landed on the baby’s chest. “Maria would never have chosen to leave,” he continued, as he watched Jenny pick up the leaf from his son’s chest and hold it between her fingers, turning it over in her hand, wondering at the randomness of it all.

  Maybe he was right. She missed her husband. In the beginning, she thought it was just the loneliness of an empty house that made her long for him, but as time went on and the intimate details of their life started surfacing at random moments, she knew it was him that she missed—the scent of his cologne, the rumble of his laughter, the flash of his smile. They never lingered. They were just flickers of memories, reminders that he wasn’t coming back, reminders that she was on her own this time. No one was coming to save her, and whatever dreams she had for an education or a career or a new start would again have to wait, because life had a way of rearranging priorities and motherhood would always come first.

  If he hadn’t died on that oil rig, Hank would have come home. Despite the lies and deceptions, she was certain he would have returned. They would have celebrated the birth of their new child and started over with diapers and day care and school bus schedules. They would have grown old together, sitting on the porch swing and watching the bayou, enduring the years that chipped away at their youth. They would have taken care of each other, and the regret that Jenny felt over the failures in her life, the undone tasks, would finally die with her in the bayou, even if it was some other woman’s home.

  “Hank wouldn’t have chosen to leave, either,” she whispered, before pulling herself from the bench and tugging her sweater over her belly. “Thank you.” She tucked the leaf into her pocket and captured in her mind the image of the man with the sapphire eyes, holding the baby who would stay in her memory forever. “I’ll listen more closely,” she said. “Maybe he’s been here all along.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  maria

  “YOU’RE A HARD MAN TO FIND.”

  Maria’s words knocked the fishing pole from Henry’s hands. It fell to the pier at his feet and almost bounced into the murky water below.

  “You’re here,” he said, cautious steps carrying him toward her, like she might vanish if his movements were too sudden. Maria watched him from the grass as the leaves of impossibly thick oak trees rustled above her head in the wind.

  “I’m here,” she said. Spanish moss draped from arching limbs in sheets of soft white, framing her into the scenery. If she’d dressed the part, she might have believed she’d just breezed into an antebellum fairy tale. “I didn’t know a swamp could be so beautiful.”

  “We’ll lose this tree in Hurricane Katrina.” Henry’s eyes followed her gaze up the trunk of the massive oak beside her. “And it’s a bayou,” he said with a wink, “not a swamp.”

  Maria shrugged her shoulders and smiled, watching Henry as he crossed the pier and stepped onto the grass.

  “I was hoping you’d show up one day,” he continued, joining Maria beneath the canopy of leaves. “How’d you find me?”

  “Google,” she joked.

  Henry laughed, the green of his eyes almost translucent against the glare of the sun. She hadn’t seen him since the spring, not since she’d said good-bye to her husband, but as the winter chill swirled around them, a spark of hope pricked at her skin. The wind whispered through the trees that dotted the bayou beyond the pier, and the waters, dark and mysterious, seemed to call to her as her feet padded over the uneven wooden planks.

  “I know this place,” she whispered, her memory coming through in flashes she couldn’t quite grasp, as her words floated away with the wind through the leaves. “I’ve been here before. I can feel it.”

  Henry stood beside her, his expression a mixture of delight and wonder as his T-shirt fluttered in the breeze, hinting at the hardened muscles beneath it.

  “Maybe you’re the woman in the bayou,” he said, edging closer to her. The slight tilt of his head softened the lines of his jaw as he studied her face. There was a secret dancing through his eyes.

  “The what?”

  “I’ve heard stories about you,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Once upon a time, Maria, this was your home.” She reached out to steady herself, suddenly dizzy as she stared down at the four-foot drop off the edge of the pier and wondered what was lurking in the depths of darkness below. Henry wrapped his arm around her waist, pressing his fingers into the small of her back as she gripped his shoulder.

  “Come here,” he said, taking her other hand in his and guiding her like a ballroom dancer to the other side of the pier. “This is the best seat in the house.”

  He eased her down onto the planks, where they sat side by side, their feet dangling over the water. Maria blushed when she felt his eyes on her.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to call or visit and find out how everything went
in Ohio, but I also wanted to give you some time.”

  “It was awful,” she said. “It was devastating and heartbreaking. But probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done.”

  “I’m proud of you. I know how hard that was.”

  “I know you do,” she said, and though she knew he’d suffered as much as anyone, she couldn’t talk about her family with him, because every time she thought about Will and her daughters and everything she’d lost, it was a battle just to keep going. There were times she had to remind herself to breathe and force herself to eat, not because she wanted to but because there were people around her begging her not to leave.

  The fishing pole that Henry had dropped when she arrived lay beside her, and if the sun’s glare hadn’t glinted on the metal plate fastened to its handle, Maria might have missed it. “Who’s Hank Fontaine?” she said, reading the words etched into the metal.

  “You’re looking at him,” he laughed, holding his arms out wide and winking back at her. “Henry James Fontaine the third. Otherwise known as Hank.”

  She leaned back and eyed him from head to toe, trying the word out in her mind. “You are so not a Hank.”

  “I so am a Hank,” he said. “You’re the only person who calls me Henry.”

  “But I don’t think I could ever call you Hank.”

  “It’s okay. I kind of like it that you call me Henry.”

  Those words, so familiar and painful, belonged to her husband. But this man was not Will. His smile was different; his hands were different; his mind was different. Everything about him was different, and as she watched him watching her, she knew there would never come a time when she wouldn’t compare him with her husband. It wasn’t fair. Every moment of her life would be spent trying to create new memories that could never compete with the ones she couldn’t leave behind.

  “I can’t stop thinking about them,” she said.

  “It’ll get better. I promise. Time will heal this.”

  “Will it?”

  “There will come a day when you’ll think about your family, Maria, and you’ll actually smile, because it won’t be the loss that you remember but the love. And you’ll tell me all about them. How you met your husband, how you fell in love, and how it felt to hold your children for the first time. I want to hear all of that.”

  “I don’t want to think about them,” she said. But everywhere she turned, they were there. Her daughters’ laughter. Her husband’s voice. It was constant and agonizing. Sometimes she would swear she could feel his hand on her back or his fingers in her hair, but when she turned around, he was never there. She couldn’t escape it. Every night they were waiting for her in her dreams.

  “You don’t have to keep running from them. You can live this life without them and still let their memories be a part of it.” Henry nodded to the water below their feet. “I can’t tell you how many hours I spent fishing out here with my son. When I came back last spring, I thought this spot would be too painful to visit, but it turns out I hardly ever leave it, because he’s almost always here with me. Sometimes I swear I can hear his voice when the wind blows just right through the trees.”

  “I’m glad that you have this,” Maria said, acutely aware that there was no going home for her, no seeing her children in flashes running through their home or hearing her husband’s voice floating in from the screened door of the back porch. “This was the house your father left you?”

  “My grandfather and his brothers built it over fifty years ago.” Henry kicked at the air beneath their feet. “Needs a little fixing up.”

  “Is that your plan for the spring? A fixer-upper?”

  “No.” He laughed as he glanced down at his hands and stilled his feet. “I’m going to college.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I never thought of college as being practical for someone like me,” he said. “But I think I understand it now. How an education can free up your life. Give you more options. I may not be able to get into one of those fancy schools that you’ll go to, but I can hit a community college nearby.”

  “That’s great, Henry.”

  “Well, you don’t seem like the kind of girl who’d marry an uneducated man.”

  Maria turned her face away from him as she laughed, trying to hide the blush that was sneaking into her cheeks. “We’re talking marriage already? You don’t think we’re moving a little fast? I never pictured myself being a teenage bride.”

  “I guess we can wait until you’re twenty. But we can’t move in together until we’re married.”

  “Really?” She laughed.

  “I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy, Maria. In fact, you don’t have to work at all, if you don’t want to. I mean, I don’t get the feeling you’d be happy without a career, but…”

  As he struggled to find the right words, Maria reached out for his hand and slipped her fingers between his. She’d never dated a man like Henry. She’d known men like him, of course, but she’d always considered them a threat to her independence, an obstacle to her becoming the woman she’d always envisioned herself to be.

  “I just want you to know that I’ll always take care of you, Maria.”

  She could feel the weight of his stare following the scar that wound its way out from beneath her shirt, and before she could pull her sleeve down to cover it, he eased it up and ran his fingers over the thick and angry skin. His touch was tender, and her skin tingled beneath it.

  “You don’t ever have to hide this from me.” The green of his eyes was like a beacon, a lighthouse illuminating her way home. “This is what made you who you are, and it will always remind me of your strength and the sacrifices you made.” His fingers followed the path of her arm, over her shoulder and around her jaw, before he brushed them across her cheek. “You’re beautiful, Maria.”

  “Beauty fades, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Not your kind of beauty,” he said, and though she ached to feel the warmth of his breath on her face and the heat of his skin against her own, when he pressed his lips into hers, she pushed him away.

  “I can’t.” She pulled herself to her feet, her eyes clenched, her husband and children refusing to abandon her thoughts. “I can’t get them out of my head.”

  “I understand,” he said, standing before her, patient and composed. “And I’ll wait as long as it takes, because you belong here, Maria.”

  She closed her eyes and tilted her head back to let the sun splash over her face, the music of the bayou blending together in a beautiful chorus that washed through her. “But I didn’t even know your name. How could I be your wife?”

  “This is your home,” he replied, and as Maria gazed out over the bayou, she wondered if he was right. It was certainly a place she could love, an ageless place where life meandered in stride with nature and time was of no concern. Sunlight sprinkled over his body as it filtered through the leaves, washing over his skin like a light rain. “And names aren’t important, Maria. It’s about our spirits, and yours has always been a part of this bayou.”

  She didn’t flinch when he reached his hand toward her face and gently ran his fingers over the side of her cheek. She leaned her head into the palm of his hand, embracing the warmth of his skin upon hers and learning the intricacies of his touch. It was nothing like her husband’s touch, nothing like the hands that had once held her, but there was a gentleness to them, despite the calluses and the graceless fingers. They were hands that had experienced life, had cradled a baby and caressed a woman, and as his fingers swept over Maria’s skin, gently traveling down the front of her neck, she knew that she would also become a part of their story.

  epilogue

  Please join us as we celebrate the life of Dr. Maria (Bethe) Fontaine, of Calebasse, Louisiana, formerly of Pine Creek, Alabama, who passed away on April 19, 2066, at the age of 95, surrounded by her loving family. She is preceded in death by her faithful husband, Dr. Henry James Fontaine III, and is survived by her two daughters, Elizabeth (Fontaine) Coll
ins and Georgia (Fontaine) Bruce, her sons-in-law, Anthony Collins and Samuel Bruce, her 5 grandchildren, and her 13 great-grandchildren. Dr. Fontaine and her husband founded the Fontaine Institute, a research and treatment center credited with advancing the diagnostic capabilities and scope of treatment for people with schizophrenia. She will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and community.

  ELIZABETH READ OVER THE NOTICE THAT she had cut from the newspaper two days earlier and sipped on a steaming mug of coffee. She was running late, as usual, but she couldn’t resist another flip through the keepsake trunk with her mother’s possessions. A faded snapshot of two young women was tucked into one of the sheaths, riddled with thumbtack holes and frayed around the edges. When she slipped her reading glasses on to get a better look, she saw that it was her mother and grandmother, young and beautiful, their arms draped around each other. They both wore beaming smiles and held old-fashioned tennis rackets in their hands.

  She tucked it back into the album before riffling through the rest of the pages. Near the end, she found a weathered envelope, yellowed with age, stamped with a return address of Toledo, Ohio. If only she weren’t so pressed for time. When she slid it back into the album, a tarnished silver necklace fell to the floor. It was a dog tag, one of the old necklaces soldiers used to wear before they were chipped. The engraving read “Foster, Philip V.” An old flame?

  With a quick glance at her watch, Elizabeth headed to the shower with her lukewarm cup of coffee. It was the day of her mother’s funeral, and while she repeated the eulogy in her head, she couldn’t help but remember her father’s funeral, five years earlier. The words her mother had spoken about him were far more eloquent than any she’d ever heard, and Elizabeth was certain hers would not compare.

  “You coming, Beth?” Tony’s voice boomed over the din of the shower. Her husband was the only reason she ever made it anywhere on time, though it was still a rare occurrence. As had been true of her mother, time had little meaning to Elizabeth. With her coffee gone and her shower done, she dressed in the new black pantsuit she’d bought just for the occasion. She knew she’d never wear it again; the memory of her mother’s death would be stitched into its fabric, impossible to wash away.