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I feel alone and isolated in my anger and sadness, and I’m really not sure which emotion outweighs the other. I touch her hands, her face, kiss her, and even though I know she’s gone, I tell her one last time, “I love you.”
Noah doesn’t say anything. He stares at the floor, his entire body shaking.
Noah tugs on my hand. “I can’t be here,” he says, his words so broken, so lost.
And then we leave and walk out those doors without her, on the same day we brought her into the world seven short years ago. How do you walk away from your baby? Where does that strength come from, knowing you’re never going to see them the moment you leave?
When we do leave, Mara’s clothes and blankets in a bag, we sit in silence in the truck as the sun rises over the parking lot. The heat, much like this pain, is suffocating with no relief. I worry about her lying in the hospital. Is she too hot? Too cold?
I reach for his hand on the steering wheel, my cries the only sound aside from Noah’s heavy breathing.
“Should we go pick up the kids?” I ask, needing to hold our children. I don’t know how we’re going to tell them, but the need to be near them is so strong. Maybe if I see them, this won’t hurt so bad.
I think about Mara lying in the morgue, and it haunts me. The vision of her tiny body on a table, cold, alone…. I cry into my palms, unable to hold it back any longer.
Without saying anything, Noah starts the truck and pulls out of the hospital. I pray it’s all a nightmare, and I’ll wake up from it and these last six months haven’t actually happened. I pray that Noah won’t shut me out completely. I pray we’re going to make it because, at this point, I don’t think I’m going to make it through the next minute, let alone a lifetime without her.
I fear walking into our home and knowing she will never run around tormenting Oliver, her gentleness with Hazel and her treating Sevi like her own personal baby doll or hear her cackling laugh and bright blue eyes as she hides from us when it was bath time.
How can we go on?
I don’t want to. I want my daughter, damn it. I want her healthy!
I want to die.
I want the pain to be over.
That pain,it’s still there. My therapist told me weeks after Mara’s death as I sat in her office with a newborn, that time heals all wounds. I think she lied because this gaping hole in my chest isn’t going away. It’s still there, open, bleeding out with the life I thought I would have when I married Noah. And nothing I do closes it.
I close the Journal, holding it to my chest, my memories of her so vivid and I sob, Noah beside me in our bed, his back to me. I don’t know if he’s sleeping, or if he hears my cries for comfort, but just like the night she left us, he ignores me, and I’m trapped in his suffocating silence. I remember the moments following Mara’s last breath, the way Noah stared at the wall, like now. We walked so blindly through the days following her death, swallowed by anger and resentment that she was gone, that we couldn’t talk to one another and even now, it’s impossible.
My eyes burn in the dryness of the air in the room, so I turn the ceiling fan off. I lie back, my eyes on the fan. I watch it circle slowly, each pass slower than the next until it slowly stops and silence follows.
I was right.
While her puzzle was completed that day, ours is forever missing the final piece.
Twenty-One
My Mother
(The hypocritical passive-aggressive overbearing type.)
The days followingNoah quitting his job fly by. After the BB incident, we didn’t go to dinner. Instead, Noah said he wasn’t in the mood and went to bed. A week later, we’ve barely seen one another now that Jason set him up with that shop and a place to work out of. He’s working fourteen-hour days now and is slammed with new clients.
It reminds me of the months following Mara’s death. He did everything possible not to be at the house and absolutely refused to step foot in her room. While he distanced himself from every memory, I used to sleep in Mara’s bed with Finley after she was born because I wanted her to feel closer to the sister she would never meet.
“Where’s Daddy today?” Hazel asks, slurping on her smoothie as we make our way back to the house.
After glancing at Kate beside me, I look in the rearview mirror. “At work, honey. He’ll be home later.”
“But I didn’t get to see him last night. He won’t miss my play, will he?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble, knowing Hazel can’t hear me but Kate can.
Kate whispers, “Ishe going to make it?”
“He’d better or I’m going to drag his ass from the shop,” I tell her, pulling out of the parking lot of the grocery store.