The Beginning of Always (63 page)

“Dad,” I said in a soft voice.

But Dad didn’t hear me, or he was continuing the conversation in his own head. “I can help you this weekend. I have Sunday afternoon free. With the two of us it’ll go faster.”

“Dad,” I pressed, my voice louder.

“Yeah?”

I swallowed, the painful lump of regret in my throat. I had never wanted to know before, but the question had gnawed at me all afternoon. It had been eating away at me, toxic and persistent, for as long as I could remember. Only now did I bother with wanting to know the answer. Because I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“Why didn’t she live?” My voice was tremulous and small, completely unsure.

There was a pause before a reaction, a held breath. My father’s expression of stricken surprise and confusion flashed before me before it mingled in with grief. And pity. And sadness.

Back then, the doctors had tried to explain to me how it had happened. All I knew was what had happened and I couldn’t handle the facts about how. I couldn’t bear to hear them. Dad had spoken to them in low voices and I’d squeezed my eyes shut and pretended it all didn’t exist.

“Did you find something up there?” His voice was agitated.

I shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “Pictures. Toys.”

Dad slammed a heavy palm against his forehead. “Geez,” he said under his breath. “I had been meaning to get rid of all that. I’m sorry, you weren’t supposed to ever see that stuff.”

I dropped my fork, far past maintaining the appearance of being okay. “What happened, Dad?”

Dad studied me for a moment, his expression one of mixed professional solemnity and paternal worry. It was a look I had seen him adopt many times before at the clinic. Only now, I was the recipient.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

He took a deep breath, his loud exhale shaking his entire body. “You had an incident of placental abruption—that’s when the placenta lining detaches from the uterus and bleeding occurs.”

Dad gave me a look as if to ask me if I wanted him to continue. I nodded.

“It was serious, a class three. You were bleeding severely and you went into maternal shock halfway to the hospital. We lost Emma, but we almost lost you too, Florence.

“There was nothing anyone could have done, nothing you could have done, and very little the doctors in Holland were equipped to do by the time you got there. We could only stabilize you. It was too traumatic. Emma … had already asphyxiated before we were able to get help.” Dad’s eyes were shiny with tears.

“Why? Why did that happen?”

“Bad luck. This is more common in pregnancies at the extreme ends of the age spectrum, and you were young. That could have been a contributing factor. The umbilical cord was shorter than average—that could have led to it as well. Your blood pressure was high at your last checkup, so that could have been the reason as well. But beyond our best guesses, we don’t know. It was just an accident.

“I blamed myself for a long time. Here I was, a doctor, and I couldn’t even save my own granddaughter, couldn’t prevent this happening to my own daughter.”

“Dad—”

Dad shook his head. “It ate me up inside for ages. There must have been signs. There must have been symptoms that I was too foolish, too busy to see. It tore me apart, the fact that I couldn’t do anything.”

Tears spotted my vision and I ran my knuckles beneath my watery eyes. “No … Dad, don’t say that.” My voice cracked.

“Kiddo, don’t cry.”

Dad got up from the opposite side of the table and slid into the seat next to me. He placed a palm over mine, sandwiching it against the table.

“It’s alright. That was the grief talking. And we’ve all dealt with our grief in our own ways,” he said as he circled an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.

We sat like that, just Dad and myself. It had been so long since he had held me like this, so simple, yet such an expression of fatherly care.

My tears dried and I rubbed my eyes against my shoulder, sniffling loudly.

“Maybe you should go see her,” Dad said gently, squeezing my fingers. “It’s beautiful there. Bill and Alistair planted a tree.”

I kept my eyes down, afraid that if I made eye contact, I’d see the truth in Dad’s eyes. Dad still wore his wedding ring, a fat and faded golden band around his left ring finger. “Have you gone?”

“Nicolas and I go together when he’s back home. I can’t do it by myself.”

So it was true. I was callous. I was a heartless jerk who had never seen her own daughter’s grave. The black hole in me yawned, stretching its boundaries of guilt.

Tears trickled from the corner of my eyes again. Past the point of caring, I let them fall.

“I messed up, Dad.”

“No,” he said gently, shaking my shoulders slightly. “You didn’t.”

I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. I should have taken better care of myself during the pregnancy. I shouldn’t have—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeated, now more firmly, with a harder edge to his words.

But I continued, persistent in my blame. “Alistair and I never should have dated. If we’d never met, none of this would have happened. It was doomed from the start.”

Dad touched a finger against my chin. He lifted my gaze to meet his. “You and Alistair were in love. These things happen. No, it wasn’t ideal for a teenager to get pregnant, and yes, I did want to strangle him with my bare hands when I found out. I even ranted about it to Nicolas, and he offered to help me dispose of the body.” Dad smiled at that thought, and at his expression, I gave a short huff of a laugh through my tears. “But Bill and I talked it out. We had a plan. It would have made it all okay. Everything would have been okay.”

The parents had sat us down after my tearful confession at three months and told us our options. We could have aborted the baby (I sobbed harder when they offered that, so it was immediately scrapped), organized an adoption (Alistair’s face went tight and he said no), or Alistair and I could both graduate school and then move in together with the child.

Bill said in time he could build a small house on his property, and Alistair could either work in town or commute to Holland.

Bill had already purchased the lumber, planning to start shortly after the birth. Alistair and he had already plotted out a piece of land. Land that sat at the edge of our woods.

And then I lost her. The pink toys and the quilt Sandra made were cast off, stuffed into a box and hidden in the dark of an attic. The lumber sat on Blair Farms, forgotten, buried by the seasons.

We all tried to forget, myself more than others. Those memories gathered dust, thick and potent, but too thin to really erase the truth. The past was always just around the corner, just beyond my line of vision.

Most days I almost convinced myself that year was a vacuum. That I had still gone to senior prom. That I’d graduated with honors. That I’d signed yearbooks instead of post-baby-shower thank-you cards.

That I hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night to the most intense pains I’d ever experienced and pulled my blankets away to see a sea of my own blood.

That I hadn’t stumbled into the hallway, screaming for Nicolas and Dad, and watched the changes in their expressions when they registered the trail of red I left behind me.

That I hadn’t felt the seizing of my heart, the fading of my eyesight as I lost consciousness.

That Nicolas hadn’t begged me to stay awake, that he hadn’t begged me to stay with him. That he hadn’t cried tears I had never seen before, not even when Mom died.

And how hopeless I’d felt in the midst of it all. To stop Nicolas’s tears. To stop my Dad’s frantic yells. To stop my own pain.

That pain had been ongoing, had been continuing on for so long, it was all I knew. It had become me. And I couldn’t stop any of it.

“Losing Emma wasn’t the end of the world. Losing your mom wasn’t the end of the world. We survived. We tried our best and we loved them for as long as we were able to. That’s all that’s really important.”

My whole body was shaking. Tears were now streaming down my cheeks in earnest, and that distantly familiar sensation of crippling fear and terror seized. “I’m afraid, I’m scared that … I never loved Emma. That I was punished for not loving her enough, for not wanting her totally,” I whispered.

Dad wrapped his other arm around me and pulled me into a tight hug. I burrowed my face against his shoulder and he said, “You loved her in a very special way, a way you never felt before. You were terrified. You were young. It was okay to have felt overwhelmed.”

Dad squeezed me. “Losing her was no one’s fault. It’s the way the cards fell, that’s all.”

“I didn’t want her,” I whispered. “I was selfish.”

“But you didn’t abort the pregnancy. You felt regret. You felt anger and fear and grief. But you also felt love.”

I shook my head. “How do you know? How can you be so sure? That’s what everyone says, that I must have loved her. But all I felt then, and what I feel now, is just a dark hole.”

“Because we all loved you, and we loved Alistair and we loved Emma. Because you love me and Nicolas and Alistair and Sandra and Bill. You know love. And that little girl never knew more love, especially from her mama.

“You’re forgetting the journey. You’re forgetting the complexity of it all. All you recall is that final day, those twenty-four hours and your time in the hospital. But think hard, and you’ll recognize it’s not all that simple.

“Love is never simple. It’s not absolute and it’s not standard. You loved her in your own way.”

I pulled away from Dad’s hug, running the back of my forearm over my eyes. I sniffled. “Do you really think I’m so tied up in the past that I can’t look forward? Like what you said the other night?”

“I think that you’ve been running away for a long time. It’s about time you stopped looking back and start looking forward to the road ahead. You’ll see that you had company all long, people who love you and care for you. People who have been waiting for you to stop, so they could help shoulder the grief alongside you, because they understand it just as potently.”

At the question in my eyes, Dad gave me a small smile and nodded.

“Yes, even Alistair. Especially Alistair. Alistair, more than anyone. I know that for sure.”

Chapter 37

Emma Grace Blair

And in His will is our peace.

Never forgotten.

T
he modest marble tombstone, with its milky stone and shimmering engraving, sparkled in the low sun. A breeze blew and my scarf fluttered in the wind, following the path of a few green leaves skittering across the path.

The cemetery was small. Quiet. Deserted. It didn’t take me long to find Emma’s plot. Dad offered to come with me, but I knew I needed to come alone.

I wanted to be brave, to apologize, to make amends. How, I had no idea.

I crashed down hard on my knees, the damp grass cutting into my exposed skin.

I stared at the tombstone, reading the words over and over again.

Grace. Sandra had asked for that name, had suggested it shyly to Alistair and me over dinner one night. It was beautiful. Her name was beautiful. Emma Grace Blair. She must have been beautiful. I’d refused to see her, couldn’t handle the idea of witnessing her small, limp body.

Regret so crippling singed my every nerve. I didn’t see my daughter. She’d died without her mother even knowing her face. And now, I wouldn’t ever be able to go back, to be brave, to be strong. I would live with this horrible knowledge for the rest of my life.

The tears flowed, hot and scalding, and despite the cold wind nipping stronger at my skin, I curled up in the wet grass and cried.

I cried because I had given up so hard and so fast, because I had been foolish and I had run instead of fighting. I’d thought only of myself and my pain and my sacrifices and my abandonment, and I had inflicted the same degree of pain on my daughter, abandoning her.

I sobbed for the knowledge of it all.

I didn’t know how long I was there, huddled in front of the grave, the air around me growing colder and colder, yet the tears didn’t stop. They just ran hotter and more desperately.

Then, a crunching sound of grass sounded behind me. I inhaled a hasty breath, quickly running my sleeves over my cheeks, fighting to will myself to stop crying.

I didn’t look up. With any luck, they’d walk past, both of us giving privacy in anonymity.

But the footsteps stalled, then halted. My body seized and I pressed my face deeper into my palms, not wanting anyone to see me, so broken and swollen in loss.

The person crouched next to me, their sides sharing mine. “There, there.” A gentle hand brushed my hair off my shoulder, the strands of hair sticking to my wet cheeks. Warm, pillowy arms enveloped me and pressed me against a soft form.

I glanced up, startled. “Mrs. Blair?”

The sight of her, that warm smile and spray of blond hair wound into a bun at the base of her neck, those familiar eyes that were always welcoming and soft and assuring, it crippled me even more. Guilt ravaged me all over again and the tears began again, even harder.