CHAPTER 32
ABI
All That Remains
I sit in the hard, cold emergency department chair. They pulled it up right beside my mother’s body so I could hold her cooling hand. I rub each of her thin fingers, one after the other, over and over, rinse and repeat. A well of tears is filling up in the bottom of my heart, but none of them are spilling out. It’s as though my tear ducts are seared shut. Maybe I’ve cried my last tear. Or maybe I’m simply too stunned, too devastated to process this enough to cry yet.
When we arrived, I knew by the look on the nurse’s face when she came to get me from the waiting room that I was too late. Sam came back with me, saw my mother’s lifeless body covered with a plain white sheet that stretched all the way to the chin, and he pulled me into his arms. I could feel the sympathy, the shared agony rolling off him in warm thick waves that cloaked me in a strength I didn’t feel until he touched me.
“I’m so sorry, Abi. I’m so, so sorry.” He murmured sweet things into my hair and I clung to him. Embarrassingly so, especially for a public place. For a few minutes, I couldn’t bring myself to let him go. I guess that’s always been my problem when it comes to Sam—letting go.
But finally, as though sensing my need for space, he unwrapped me from his arms and cupped my face. He kissed me softly on the lips then backed away to move toward the door. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
I nodded once and took the chair they’d provided next to my mother. I haven’t budged since. I have no idea how long ago that was.
I know I need to say goodbye, but I don’t know how. The events of the day, of the past months and years, play through my mind in a barrage of feelings that I can’t even make sense of. It’s like trying to find my way out of a briar patch when everything I touch pricks me and makes me bleed.
Carefully, as I stroke my mother’s fingers, I pick my way through the thicket until I can separate the good memories from the bad, and I pull those out, one by one.
“Do you remember that time you and Daddy took me to the carnival and I ate so much cotton candy my lips were blue for a week?”
I laugh, which is strange. That memory, for whatever reason, gives me great pleasure, though. Every time she and Daddy would look at me, they’d smile and shake their heads. We couldn’t figure out how to get that blue off. Turns out, it just took time and a lot of scrubbing.
“That was the best day.”
As if that one event triggers a release of some sort, other shared memories follow until everything is pouring out. All the things I haven’t been able to say to my mother over the last years because she had the mind of a child tumble from my lips in one long, uninterrupted purge. I tell her about Greg and I tell her about Sasha. I tell her about my leg and I tell her about coming back to Molly’s Knob. I tell her about Sam and Sara and Noelle, and I tell her how much I fell in love with them, even though I already loved Sam. I tell her that he was the love of my life, like I always knew he was.
“You were wrong, Momma. All those nights I cried myself to sleep when we first moved, the nights when you promised me I’d get over him, you were wrong. You said the pain eventually goes away, but that wasn’t true. It didn’t go away for you, and it’s never gone away for me either. Real love doesn’t just disappear. But I wish it did. I wish I could walk away from him, for his own good. But I can’t. I want to tell him I love him, that I always have, but if I tell him that, I’ll only hurt him again, and I can’t do that to him. Not now. Not after all that’s happened. You understand, Momma, don’t you?”
She doesn’t respond, of course. Even if she were alive, she wouldn’t respond. She would have no idea she ever knew the boy I’m talking about. In a way, my mother was all alone. In her mind, she had no one. Just nurses and orderlies and a woman who came to do her hair. Them and a veritable stranger who visited periodically, and brought her toys and gifts and occasionally called her Momma by accident.
Now I am all alone, too. I am all that remains. Everyone I had in the world is gone. My mother, my father, my child, and, for all intents and purposes, Sam. Although I could have a family again, I could have love again, it would be strained. It would be temporary. It would be a love tainted by the shadow of time, ticking away toward a painful, grotesque end. And it would end. Badly, and with nothing but pain for them. What kind of person would do that? What kind of person would subject someone else to that?
An awful one.
And I can’t be that person.
For me there is no hope.
Even as I feel the tug of the black hole, sucking me closer and closer to the oblivion it offers, Sam’s words play through my mind. They argue a different perspective, a different alternative.
I’m your hope, Abi. Hope in me.
I bow my head and press my eyes to the back of my mother’s hand. “If you could just tell me what to do, Momma. Just one more time. I need you.”
The tightness in my throat, my chest, my very soul, is nearly unbearable. I know she won’t help me. She can’t. She hasn’t been able to in a long, long time. But that doesn’t stop me from needing it so desperately.
A throat clears behind me, but I don’t raise my head. “Ma’am, the funeral home is here to get her. Would you mind signing for her belongings?”
I raise my head, but don’t look away from Momma’s face. It’s relaxed, calm, finally at peace. Although my heart is breaking for the millionth time, I’m glad for her sake that she’s not suffering anymore. Whether she knew it or not, her heart was broken, too. But not anymore. She’s with Daddy and her parents. And Sara. Maybe she will meet her and they can talk about me until I get there.
If I get there.
That old worry, the one that’s plagued me since I decided to take my own life, bubbles up, as do the questions. What if I don’t make it to heaven? Will God forgive the taking of one’s own life? Will He consider the circumstances or will they make no difference?
Anger boils beneath my skin, as it always does. I feel like a woman with no options and no answers. No help. No hope. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bitter, because I am. And I have been for many years. From the moment I left Sam, all the way up until Sasha was born, I was bitter. I had a brief reprieve during the short span of my daughter’s life, but with her death returned the bitterness, full force. From there, it only got worse.
Now, here I am with nothing and no one. And no hope of anything else.
The nurse returns with a bag and a piece of paper on a clipboard. I sign where she tells me to, and I take the bag she offers. Moments later, two men come into the room. I watch with stinging yet dry eyes as they transfer my mother onto a different kind of stretcher and zip her body up in a velvet bag the color of old blood. Each man nods as they wheel her past me, as they take her out of my life forever.
I stand and make my way out of the room. When I finally look up, I see Sam. He’s leaning against the wall directly across from where my mother was lying, probably watching me this whole time. I had no idea, so completely was my focus turned inward.
He pushes away from the yellow-gold concrete wall and comes to take my hand. Together, we walk in silence out of the hospital and across the lot to his truck. Night has fallen and the temperature has cooled. It seems to echo the darkness and the dank chill in my soul.
Opening the passenger door first, Sam helps me into the truck before walking around to take the wheel. Without a word, he starts the engine and drives us back to interstate.
After a few miles, I open the plastic bag I’ve been clutching. Momma’s things.
Her shoes are inside, as well as the sweater she always wore when she got cold. I hold it up to my nose, breathing in the last bit of her scent that’s clinging to the material. Still, my eyes remain dry.
It isn’t until I get to the very bottom of the bag that I get what I sought—one final word from my mother.
A cheap plastic bracelet lies curled up in one corner of the bag. I fish it out and hold it up to the bright glow of the navigation screen in the truck. It’s a string of shiny pink beads with flowers interspersed along its length. When I lay the bracelet across my wrist to fasten it, I see that there are letters on the backs of the flowers. There are seven of them, and I flip them all over until I can read what they say.
Seven letters and two words. That’s what it takes to break through a damn. That’s what it takes to shatter a wall. That’s what it takes to give a desperate heart what it needs—hope.
HOPE.
ABI.
She never knew my name after the accident.
She never recognized who I was after the accident.
She never seemed to realize we had a connection after the accident.
And yet…
Somewhere deep down, she never forgot me. I was etched onto her heart just as she was onto mine.
Just as Sam is. And just as I seem to be onto his heart.
With a strangled sound that signals the last bit of barrier crumbling away, my grief starts to spill over. I drop my face into my hands and I let it come.
I cry.
I cry for what I had and what’s been taken. I cry for what was and what will never be. I cry for the love I’ve lost and the love I was lucky enough to have. But most of all, I cry for the woman who, from beyond her death, gave her daughter what she needed tonight more than anything else in the world.
An answer.
A direction.
Some advice.
Hope.
Sam is giving me hope.
And my mother told me to take it.
I feel the truck slow and I hear the fine crunch of gravel as Sam pulls onto the shoulder. I see the brightness of the interior light snap on and then off just as quickly. Sam gets out and comes around to my side. The light flicks on again before I’m dragged from my seat and crushed against a hard chest.
Sam says nothing and neither do I. He just holds me and I just let him.
Minutes tick by. Maybe even hours. I don’t know because time stands still. For once in my life, the inevitable race toward death and loss is postponed. It’s put on hold. For this. For me. For her.
When I’m hoarse from sobbing and my legs don’t want to hold me, Sam lifts me back into the truck and drives me the rest of the way home. He holds my hand on the seat between us, never once letting it go.
At the cabin, he carries me inside and straight to the bedroom where he settles me on the mattress and stretches out beside me. I’m exhausted. Mentally, emotionally and, because of that, physically, but I manage to ask, “What about Noelle?”
“I told Mom I’d be home in the morning. Sleep, Abi.” He kisses the side of my neck and pulls me in tight against the curve of his body. “Sleep.”
“You should go,” I offer weakly, hoping against hope that he will stubbornly refuse.
And he does.
“I’m not going anywhere. Ever.”
I snuggle in to his warmth, feeling whole somehow with him pressed to my back. I drift off to sleep with the beat of his heart tapping at mine through the cage of my ribs, almost like he’s knock, knock, knocking to come inside.
Little do I know, sometime in the night, I let him in.