The Winter Before

by Karen Crompton

  “Holy shit!”

  Olivia’s unexpected exclamation echoed around the small waiting room and all eyes spun her way, including Abe’s, and Olivia stared back at him with her mouth hanging open, her swollen eyes fixed on him in a way that made him shift uncomfortably in his chair.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  But Olivia had lost the ability to speak. She stared back at Abe, her heart beating triple time. Disbelief and shock colored her vision so that she couldn’t see straight. It rolled off her in waves.

  How had she missed it?

  That’s what Mrs. Ackerman had been trying to tell them all along—she was sharing Isaac’s past with him, the largest, most significant part—and in doing so, she had brought Isaac and Olivia together in a way that no one could ever tear them apart.

  Except for death. Death would tear them apart.

  And Olivia didn’t have an answer for that.

  A doctor suddenly shouted at an intern as he pushed through the thick plastic flaps that separated the waiting area from the corridor, and a few medical personnel appeared out of nowhere.

  Olivia’s eyes flew to them, all thoughts of Abe left behind.

  The doctor stood in his scrubs and blue booties and he held up his hand before anyone could bombard him with questions. Olivia didn’t miss the urgency that stole across his face, or the way his eyes moved from side to side as he spoke.

  “Isaac has been taken to the OR, as you know,” he started, looking as tired and weary as everyone else in the room felt. “But there have been some complications. I’ll keep this simple. We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  “What happened?” asked Abe.

  “The surgery to repair his lung didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped. He’s lost a lot of blood. A terrible lot of blood.”

  Mr. Parker stood and walked over to Olivia, sitting beside her to place his hand on her trembling knee. “What does that mean for Isaac?”

  “He needs a blood transfusion. We keep most blood types in stock, but Isaac has a very rare blood type—O negative—and our supplies are dangerously low. As you can imagine, we’re only a small town hospital and we don’t have the facilities to keep such a large supply of blood in stock here on the premises.”

  “What about in Williamstown?” asked Abe. “Or Cedar Grove?” He cleared his throat as if he was drowning down a sob. “Could he be transported there? Saint Agatha’s is a bigger hospital. Maybe they can help him?”

  The doctor was shaking his head before Abe was even done talking. “No. We’ve considered all options. Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough time.”

  “So, what?”

  “Isaac’s best chance at survival is to stay here, continue with the operation. He needs blood though, and he needs blood now. I’m suggesting we give him the few bags of blood we do have in supply, but… well, in an ideal world what we need is blood donated by someone with the same blood type. Does he have a next of kin? Someone who could possibly be a match? Brothers? Sisters?”

  Olivia’s heart fell like a boulder plummeting over a cliff. Her throat was so clogged with grief she could barely speak.

  But she didn’t need to.

  The doctor had barely finished asking the question when Abe stood so quickly from his seat that it toppled over and his flat-cap fell to the floor behind him.

  “I’m O negative. Take mine.”

  Caroline Hathaway stared up at her husband as he nodded his head, unquestioning determination in his expression and his stance. “Darling, slow down. I’m sure it’s not that simple.”

  “Yes. It is that simple.”

  “How do you even know what blood type you are?”

  “I was in the Marines. They tell you that stuff when you enlist.”

  Abe ran his hands down his face, scrubbing his fingers over his scruffy five o’clock shadow. His mouth hardened into a thin line, and yet at the same time his eyes warmed as he looked down at his wife, winning and losing a thousand different arguments with himself.

  Part of Abe’s face was obscured by his looming shadow, others by his thoughts. But once the decision was made, there was no going back, so Abe touched Caroline’s face with the tips of his fingers—a gentle caress of her chin, her cheek, her quivering lips—knowing that what he was about to say next would change their lives in ways she would never imagine.

  “Caroline…”

  “Yes?”

  He met her gaze, starting and then stopping while he looked down at her.

  “Caroline, I’m O negative. I know that. And I know I have the same blood type as Isaac, because… I’m his father.”

  Isaac laid on the operating table in room 6D, knowing exactly where he was and why he was there. He could feel blood rushing through and from his body, and he watched the bright lights overhead as they tried to fix him.

  He wanted to stay. He really did. He wanted to stay for Olivia. He wanted to stay for the promises they’d made to one another, and he wanted to stay for the life they hadn’t even begun to live yet.

  But he was being pulled away and he could feel himself slipping.

  Toward what, he wasn’t quite sure. But it felt good. It felt safe and he knew it was time.

  His mother came toward him, and there were so many others as well. He could hear his pa’s gruff voice in the background, telling Becky to slow down and wait for him, and Isaac wanted to shake his head and smile. He wanted to smile and laugh and run quickly into their arms, but he wasn’t sure how to go about it.

  His legs felt as heavy as his heart, the anesthetic strapping him to the operating table, and his arms were so leaden he couldn’t lift his wrists because of all the tubes.

  The light suddenly grew brighter.

  And Isaac could hear things so clearly now that the white noise of the operating room—the beeping of machines, the grave voices of the surgeons that hovered over him—slowly slipped away and he felt like his senses were so heightened that he could hear a butterfly touch a petal, or perceive the sweet sound of a leaf landing on the softest grass.

  He’d told Olivia once that sometimes the world makes too much noise to hear properly. That people often miss out on so much because they aren’t really listening.

  But Isaac was listening.

  He listened intently.

  He didn’t need to strain. Not in the slightest. He knew the voice so well—it wobbled and shook, and there were a lot of sniffles, gasps, and of course there were tears—but Isaac could hear the voice like it was right there beside him, and not down the hallway, a dozen rooms away from him.

  He listened to a terrified man telling his wife of over twenty years how he’d kept the truth from her.

  He listened to the story of how he’d come to be.

  The doctors had left them alone in a sterile room, given them some privacy, so that now it was just Abe, Caroline and the cannula that was attached to a tube draining blood from Abe’s arm, prepping it for transfer.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”

  There was silence. Nothing but silence, and sniffling for a very long time and then Caroline spoke, her voice lifting in crescendo as if her face had been hidden in her hands and she had just now looked up.

  “I don’t need you to apologize to me, Abe. I just need you to explain. Please, tell me. Tell me the truth. Tell me what happened. Start from the very beginning and we’ll go from there.”

  Isaac heard Abe take a breath, and then another one and it was as big as the ocean and as powerful as the wind. “You know I was a marine, before we got married.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, before we met, I was stationed for training down in Louisiana back in the late 90s and we had a few weeks off over the holidays. So, a couple of the guys and I decided to go on a bit of a road trip. One of the boy’s parents had a farmhouse in northern Montana and we thought a week up there, a week of drinking, hunting and eating whatever the hell we wanted to, sounded like a dream come true. We threw our duffel bags
in the back of his truck, and headed north for what was going to be the trip of a lifetime.

  “On the second day, we stopped in Woodlake for a burger and to fill up with fuel and the plan was, we were going to hit the road again before nightfall. But a couple of the guys had a few too many beers with their burgers, and they decided to make a night of it instead.”

  “You were drunk?”

  “No, not drunk. But tipsy enough to not be thinking straight.”

  Caroline sighed loudly, her breath strangled by the tears she was trying to hold back.

  Abe spoke again. “The others were drunk though, rolling drunk by the time I got bored of their bullshitting stories and wandered off. I walked the streets of Woodlake by myself for a while, looking in shop fronts and just taking in the fresh mountain air. It’s a pretty little town and…”

  “Yes, I know. I live there, remember?”

  And there it was. A brief spark of bitterness. A taste of resentment that was completely out of character for Caroline. But it wasn’t unjustified and Isaac found himself sympathizing with her as he listened in on what really should have been a private conversation between a husband and his wife.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. I just… anyway, I ended up out front of the local cinema and there was a double feature playing. I walked inside, bought a ticket and sat in a seat by myself right up the back. Next thing I know there’s this pretty young woman, about my age, and she sits down a few seats away from me. I was in uniform, it attracts attention. I guess she was curious, and she got talking to me before the movie started.”

  “You had sex with a stranger in the movie theater?” Caroline’s perspective shifted, her voice sounded different, it grew louder and then fell softer, louder and then softer, as if she was suddenly on her feet and pacing around the room.

  “No, of course not!”

  “Where then?”

  “Will you let me finish?”

  “Fine. I can’t wait to hear how this ends!”

  “This was years before I met you. Please, remember that, sweetheart. Please?”

  Caroline didn’t say anything, but Isaac heard her huff and then he heard all the air collapse out of her seat.

  “Thank you. Now, like I was saying… this girl and I, her name was Becky, that’s all I knew at the time—and she only knew my first name too. She said that’s all she needed to know, and she made it pretty clear what she was looking for that night. She was very attractive, and more than willing, and so, after the movie was finished and everyone else left us in the fading light of the cinema, we kissed a little, we fooled around a bit more, and then she told me that she had a key to the honeymoon suite at the Forrester Motel. She worked there, apparently. I was up for it, she was more than keen, and so we went back to the motel like a pair of horny teenagers. One thing led to another and when I woke up the following morning, she was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. The boys and I were leaving town anyway, so I took it for what it was—just one night with a complete stranger—and we went our separate ways. Two weeks later, I went back to Louisiana to finish basic training and then, as you know, served three years for the US Marines down in Fort Lauderdale.

  “It wasn’t until about a year after our wedding that I read a newspaper article about a tragic house fire in Peak Valley, Montana. There was a photograph of the victim, Becky Stone, and her six-year-old son who’d survived the fire. I recognized her instantly, and I knew straight away, just by looking at him, that the boy was mine. The dates matched up, yes, but that face in the photograph was like looking straight at my father. They are the spitting image of each other and I had to find out for sure.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “No, I… I just didn’t tell you. That’s not exactly lying.”

  Isaac felt like running when he heard Caroline throw something. He heard the air rush from her lungs, and then he heard the wind behind her arm as she hurtled God-knows-what across the room.

  “No. You lied to me, Abe. You told me you were done with the heat down in Florida, and you wanted to move north to Montana for the snow. You told me you wanted a quiet life in the country and that opening a hardware store was something you’d dreamed of doing since you were a little boy.”

  “It wasn’t an entire lie.” Abe sounded desperate and Isaac listened on with a sharp pain in his side. “I do love the snow. And I do hate the heat. But yes, I wasn’t completely honest about my intentions when we moved interstate.”

  “How did you even know Isaac was in Woodlake? If the fire happened in Peak Valley, how did you know to find him in Woodlake?”

  “I read in the article that the boy had moved to Woodlake to live with his grandfather. I tracked them down, and I went to see them.”

  “You what?”

  Caroline’s voice was getting more high-pitched the more Abe spoke and Isaac wasn’t sure how much more he should hear.

  “I just wanted to talk to the man. To Sandor. I just wanted to know what his intentions were with the boy and if he didn’t want him, then… well, I don’t know what I planned on doing to be honest.

  “But when I drove down the driveway, I found the old man sitting on his front porch with the smallest kid I’d ever seen curled up on his lap. Isaac was all wrapped up in bandages, and he was crying. I could hear it all the way from the car.

  “Sandor was rocking him back and forth, trying to settle him down. I’m not sure if he was in pain, or if he just missed his mother, or maybe he was just scared? But he was completely lost—I could sense it, he was broken—and taking him away from the only family he had, uprooting his life even more than it already had been, just seemed cruel. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “And you know for certain that Isaac is your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not proud of myself, but… well, I stole some washing off Sandor’s clothesline a few weeks later, before the sun had come up and I figured they were both still in bed. There was a hair on the back of one of Isaac’s pajama tops and I had it tested at the medical center in Williamstown. 99.9%. The DNA don’t lie, Caroline.”

  It was really quiet for a few minutes and Isaac wondered if maybe they’d both left the room without him realizing, but then Caroline spoke in a voice so soft, so heavyhearted that Isaac knew they were still there, though he almost wished they weren’t.

  “That’s where the money went, didn’t it?”

  Abe took a deep breath, that to Isaac’s ears sounded like walls of rushing water closing in on them. “Yes.”

  “We were going to use that money for a deposit on the house. But… but you let me believe you gambled it away.” Her voice rose in frustration and hurt. “You let me believe all these years that you lost our entire life’s savings on a horse race, Abe! A goddamn horse race! I was so angry at you. I was so stunned that you would do something like that, and I spent hours awake at night wondering if you were still the same man I’d married.”

  “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but… but, I knew Sandor wouldn’t be able to afford all those medical bills. The operations that poor kid had over the years were never-ending. So, I had a bank cheque drawn up and I left it in Sandor’s mailbox. I assume he thought it was from the State, or something, because there was no mention of the money around town, and Isaac got what he needed. ”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, but… but he’s my son, Caroline. I had to do what was best for him.”

  “Your, son.” Caroline said the words softly, gently even. She pronounced each syllable slowly and carefully, as if that would somehow help her make sense of it all. “You’ll need to give me time, Abe.”

  “I understand.”

  A moment passed that was filled with nothing but strangled breaths, and tears that were filled with so much pain and regret, heavy like raindrops in the sand.

  “If you’d just told me about Isaac,” she finally said with a swipe of her
hand across her damp cheek. “Then we could have done it together. We could have helped Sandor raise him, and we could have loved him, and we could have watched him grow into the man he is today. Together.”

  Abe sighed sadly. “We did all those things. We just did them from the sidelines. We helped raise him, sweetheart. We really did. And I couldn’t have done any of it without you.”

  “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”

  “When we found out we couldn’t have children of our own, I couldn’t bring myself to talk to you about it. It would have broken your heart. And then the longer it went on, the easier it was to keep from you, and the harder it was to tell you the truth.”

  “This is all going to take some getting used to.”

  “But we will get used to it, yes?” Abe was pleading, desperate to know what his future held with the only woman he’d ever truly loved. “Together? Please, sweetheart. Tell me we’ll get through this together.”

  Caroline took her time, she mulled things over and she didn’t hurry. And Isaac was suddenly just as desperate to hear her answer as Abe was, but he’d run out of time.

  Moments passed that felt like years, and finally Isaac let go, letting himself finally slip into the abyss of the bottomless, endless, beautiful white effervescent light that had held him so securely in place up until then.

  Until he couldn’t hear anymore.

  Until he couldn’t see anymore, and the beautiful white light slowly faded to black.

  The last blood drained from Abe’s arm and a nurse hurried into the room when the buzzing sounded. Abe exhaled with an enormous sense of relief, and then he flinched when the nurse clamped the tube and removed the needle from the back of his hand.

  Caroline just needed a little time. That he could give her.

  But he wasn’t so sure about Isaac. Was it too late for him? Was Abe’s blood going to give him life, the same way it had all those years ago.

  Was there enough time?

  There was still so much of the story that was untold. The ending hadn’t been written yet. But it was a beautiful story and it deserved to be told. It deserved an ending worthy of the people who had played a part in it.