Chapter Seventeen

Jude

I didn't look into the nursery but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Veronica's expression as her eyes scanned it. I knew every detail of that room. I knew exactly what she was seeing as her eyes swept slowly over the space kept tightly protected from the world outside by blue and white curtains closed across the curved picture window that had once been my favorite feature of the room. I knew that she was seeing the crib that I had chosen and put together, the mobile hanging still over it. The changing table ready against the wall, piles of diapers with decades-old labels already in place on the shelf beneath the cushioned platform. The rocking chair positioned in the corner that had only ever rocked a child that was still curled safely within the belly of his mother. The shelves nearby.

Of course, there were books in this room. Books were the first thing that I had bought for him. Now those books were sitting on the shelf next to the rocking chair, so many of them with their pages never turned. Their stories have been intended for him and they were still locked inside, never heard, never read.

I knew that she could see the closet door on the far wall. Beyond that door, where she couldn't see, was filled with a wardrobe meticulously chosen in shades of cream and yellow and green. A sprinkling of blue for the hopes of a baby boy. Hints of pink in case of a princess. We didn't know which our baby would be.

Veronica looked back at me and I could see the pain etched on her face. She hurt for me even though she didn't understand what she was seeing. Still keeping my eyes averted, I reached into the nursery and turned the light off, closing the door and locking it as I had the bedroom. I tucked the key away in the compartment that I had designed into the light fixtures and reached for Veronica's hand. It felt strange, foreign in mine when I first touched it, but I held on. I didn't let the first compulsion that hit me cause me to let it go and walk away from her. Instead, I tightened my fingers around it and walked out of the hallway and back into the light of the rest of the house. I brought her back into the bedroom where I had set up fresh cups of coffee and another slice of the rich, creamy cake the cook had made for us. I had gone to get them when I got out of the shower and realized that she wasn't in the bedroom, but my taste for the dessert was gone now.

I sat down on the end of the bed and picked up one of the cups of coffee, swallowing a bitter mouthful as Veronica curled into a chair positioned opposite me. The air in the room was warm, but she reached out for the blanket that was draped across the back of the chair and wrapped herself in it before picking up her own cup. She glanced up at me over the white rim of the mug, then back down. I knew that she wanted more, but she didn't want to ask. It was up to me to offer it to her.

"My mother died when I was just a baby," I started. "But I didn't have much of a relationship with my father when I was growing up. I decided when I was still young that that wasn't going to be the type of life that I was going to have. I met my wife when I was a teenager. She was the first girl who I couldn't take my eyes away from. When I looked at her, it was like there was nothing else in the world. I knew from pictures that my father used to be with my mother all the time and he always looked so happy. I figured that she had to be able to make him think about nothing else for him to spend so much time with her. That meant that what I was feeling was love."

"Was it?"

I gave a short laugh.

"No." I shook my head, looking down at that dark coffee. "I barely knew her when I married her. But it became love." I looked back at Veronica. "It became a consuming type of love that was something I never knew could exist but knew I needed as soon as I felt it. We lived here after the wedding and this house became our entire world. In those early days, there was so much that we needed to find out about each other and learn about being married that we were all each other needed. After we learned each other, we didn't need anything else."

"Were you a professor then?" she asked.

"No. I hadn't started teaching yet. Actually, I didn't work."

"You didn't?"

She sounded shocked, but I couldn't blame her. She knew the side of me that was lost in my work, not the side that didn't want to waste a drop of sunlight or a moment of the stars on anything but living.

"No, I didn't. My father did everything he could to instill a really strong work ethic in me. Just like his father had done for him and his father had done before him, I was introduced into the workforce when I was still really young and it was made really clear to me that I wouldn't be able to inherit the estate unless I had put in what he considered a sufficient amount of work. I learned the family business and a few other things as well just to fill those days."

Veronica gave an unexpected giggle and I looked at her strangely.

"What's funny?" I asked.

"I just never thought of you as one of the privileged rich boys who didn't think that they should have to do anything."

"I don't," I said. "That's really not the case at all. I appreciate what my father did. I'm glad that he didn't just hand me everything. I knew that I had all this waiting for me, but what if I didn't? What if something had happened and all of it was just gone by the time that I was an adult? At least I would know how to find my footing again."

"Then I'm confused," she said.

"Just because I'm glad that I knew how to work doesn't mean that I wanted to. There's so much of life and I wanted all of it. I wanted to be able to see every moment of every day as mine. When I worked, such a big part of every day was carved out to belong to other people. They told me what to do and what to think and what to plan for the next minute. They made sure that I didn't have the opportunity to just be. And that's what I wanted. I just wanted to be. I guess you can't really understand that."

"I think I might understand more than you think I do," she said.

I nodded.

"So as soon as I had worked as much as my father said that I had to, I stopped. I already had everything that I needed and I had made connections that would ensure my family's empire continued to build even without me being directly involved in it. I had found Ellery by then and instead of just wanting my moments to belong to me, I wanted them to belong to her too. Every day I could come up with more to do than I had minutes to do it in, and she taught me that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Sometimes we would leave in the middle of the night and go on adventures and not come back until we felt like it. Other days we would do nothing but lie on the ground in the garden and feel the movement of the sun across the sky and try to sense the change in the way that the air smelled from the morning to the night. Ellery always would say then when things changed, they changed in an instant. Even when it seems gradual, it wasn't really. There would be one second when it was one way and then the next it was different. That meant that when you breathe, you had to breathe that breath like it was the only one you had because there would never be another one like it. When you breathed out, the world would be different than when you had drawn that air in. I tried to live my life that way."

"What happened?" she asked. "When did it change?"

"For a while, we were everything to each other and couldn't imagine anything that could be better. Then we started thinking that there might be more. I started thinking about my father and even though we hadn't had much of a relationship and he hadn't been anything like the parents that Ellery had, the older that I got, the more that I understood him and appreciated the role that he had had in my life. At the same time, I knew that I wanted to do things differently. We started talking about having a family and how incredible it would be to be able to see the world fresh and new again. We had already done so much. We had already experienced so much. The next adventure could be to do and see it all again through the eyes of a new life, then to do and to see even more. It didn't take long and when I found out that Ellery was pregnant... I can't even describe what it was like. I had thought about it so much and wanted it so much, and suddenly it was there. I was so in awe of her. She was standing there in front of me and she didn't look any different, but she was holding on to this incredible little secret. There was a new person within her, a person that only she knew then. That sense of amazement only grew the longer the baby did. She got rounder and I got more astonished. It was like suddenly I was the child and had totally forgotten where babies come from."

"Did you know if it was a boy or girl?" she asked.

It seemed like an odd question, but after a beat, I realized why she asked it, what she thought had happened. She didn't yet realize that the loss was so much worse than she could have imagined. I realized that I needed to keep going. I needed to tell her the entire story, as much for myself as for her.

"Not then," I said. "It wasn't common then as it is now to find out what you’re having before the baby is born. We could have, but we decided that felt almost like cheating. We wanted to be introduced to our baby when it was born."

"Do you wish that you did?"

"Sometimes," I admitted.

"What did you want?"

"A boy," I said. "But I think that I only imagine having a boy because I didn't have any siblings and I didn't have any cousins and I didn't have a mother. Though I had women in my life, I was just more used to myself and my father. It just seems natural that I would have a son. But there was a little part of me that sometimes imagined having a daughter. I knew that if I ended up having a little girl that I would have loved her just as much."

"I think you would have made an amazing father for a little girl," she said.

I swallowed hard, trying to force down the emotion that was starting to build.

"My wife went into labor three days before her due date. She was decorating the Christmas tree. I remember thinking that somehow our baby knew what was happening and wanted to be a part of all the excitement. We had already been singing Christmas carols and reading books and telling stories. Maybe he was feeling left out and just decided he wanted to go ahead and come out and celebrate."

"He?" Veronica asked.

I nodded.

"She was amazing. I know I said that, but I can't think of a better word to describe her. It is completely genuine. I was amazed by her. She wasn't afraid. Not even for a minute. In fact, she spent the whole time trying to comfort me and make sure that I didn't feel scared of what was going on. She was totally calm like she was just absolutely sure that she could do this, like she was made to do it."

"She was," Veronica said.

I smiled, the memories bringing a hint of happiness through the pain. There are times when I needed to remind myself of that happiness. I had to remind myself of those moments before it all happened when everything seems to be going exactly as it was supposed to be.

"And she did," I said. "Just after sunrise our son was born. He was so beautiful. I never really understood what people meant when they said the babies were beautiful until that moment. Then I looked at him and was just blown away by him. He was so small and yet he had already changed the world so much. I held him for as long as they would let me. I would have just kept holding him. But then they came and told me that they needed to bring him to the nursery. If I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have let them take him. Then he was gone."

"Gone? What happened to him? Did he...?"

"No," I said, knowing what she was thinking. "He didn't die. He was taken from us. He was stolen from the nursery the night that he was born. He was there and we were told that everything was fine, that he was doing well and that my wife should be, too. But then when it was time for her to feed him, they went to get him and he was gone. The nurse said that his bassinet was empty. Just empty. Some of the nurses thought that he had been brought to us. Others thought that he might have gone for tests. Some thought that he might have been brought to another mother accidentally. They searched the entire maternity ward for him, but they didn't find him. Then there was chaos."

"Somebody just took him?" Veronica asked. "How is that possible?"

"There wasn't as much security then. Now there are all kinds of fail-safes put into place, but then the mother and the baby wore bracelets to identify them, but that was pretty much it. He was gone and nobody knew when it had happened. Because no one noticed that he wasn't there or thought that he had been taken somewhere by one of the nurses, nobody knew exactly how long he had been gone."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. Everything. I remember running through the hospital and having security stop me because they didn't want me upsetting anyone else who was there, so I just ran out into the street. I ran up and down in front of the hospital and through the parking lot, hoping that somehow, I was going to see someone carrying my child away so I could take him back. Then the police came and I just sat there, staring. Not saying anything. I wasn't thinking clearly."

"How could you? What are you supposed to think or do in that situation?"

I shook my head.

"I didn't know. I still don't. I've asked myself a thousand times if there was something that I should have done differently. I should have stayed by the nursery rather than going back into the room. I should have demanded he be brought back earlier. I should have done something, anything that would have stopped it from happening or would have found him."

"There's nothing that you could have done," Veronica said.

Her voice sounded choked in her throat. I tried to concentrate on that sound, wanting to feel as though I was projecting the emotions onto her rather than having to feel them for myself while I told the story. If they crashed down on me again, I wouldn't be able to get through it and I had to. As excruciating as it was to tear the words from deep inside of me and force them out into the raw exposure of the air between us, it also felt cleansing in a way.

"They kept us in the hospital for one more day just like they would have anyway. They wanted to keep an eye on Ellery and make sure that she was recovering from the birth, then they sent us home. That was it. They packed up a kit for her that would help her cope with everything that happens after a woman delivers a baby and sent us on our way, just with empty arms. It felt completely bizarre watching her tend to herself without a baby to take care of. She would sit in the rocking chair in the nursery and press milk out into towels because it kept coming. The doctor told her to stop because the more that she did that, the more that her body would produce. She said that she did it because her breasts hurt when they were full and she needed the relief, but I knew that she did it because she wanted the milk to keep coming. She wanted to make sure that she was ready when our baby boy came home. He wouldn't know anything different, but she wanted to make sure that her body hadn't forgotten about him and that she could start taking care of him exactly as she would have."

"What happened to him?" Veronica asked.

The question sounded painful coming out of her as if she didn't really want to ask but had no control over it.

"The police searched," I said. "They investigated as much as they could. And we wanted to do everything that was in our capability to help, but they insisted on keeping us anonymous. They instructed us not to talk to anybody, including the media. When the story was on the news or written up in the newspaper, they didn't mention our names. I told them that they needed to. I told them that they needed to give as much information as possible to the public so that everybody could be looking. But the police said that mentioning our names would just call attention to our family, which would make people aware of our wealth. That would just make us the targets of false leads and people who would try to take advantage of us. They told us all these horror stories about kidnappings where the families were contacted by people pretending to have the children, but then when the money was delivered, there still wasn't any child. They said that keeping everything anonymous would be in our best interest because it would protect us and it would also ensure that any information that might be brought to the attention of the media or the police had a much higher chance of being authentic."

"That's why I didn't see anything about it," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Veronica's cheeks flushed and I realized that she hadn't meant to say that.

"I did some research about you," she admitted. "That's how I found out about your wife."

I nodded slowly.

"And did you find out what happened to her?" I asked, forcing my voice to stay as even as I could.

Veronica shook her head.

"No," she said. "The article just said that she died."

"Three weeks after our son was born, some hunters found a body. It had been ravaged, but they said that it looked like a newborn baby boy." I heard Veronica gasp, but I didn't react. I forced myself to forge ahead. "They said that it would take some time to find out what really happened. My wife just didn't have that much time left in her. She killed herself three days later. Less than a week after she was buried they confirmed that it wasn't him. It destroyed me in a way that I can't even tell you. I wanted nothing more than to be with her. But I could never bring myself to do the same. I felt like all of it was my fault and I didn't deserve the release of death. And even when I got close, I knew that I couldn't do it to her. The note that she left me pled with me to keep living. She said that she couldn't bear anymore, but that she knew that there was more for me and that I needed to find it. She wanted me to carry on."

"The note was with her?"

"No. I found the note first. That's why the bedroom still looks the way that it does. There were endless meetings with the police and investigators day after day. At first, she came with me to all of them. Then she missed a few. Then she stopped coming at all. That day she didn't want to go. She said that she just couldn't face another one. She didn't want to leave the house. If she was home, she didn't have to have anyone look at her. She didn't have to think about what she was saying or doing, she didn't have to wonder if her face looked a certain way and what anyone was thinking about how she was acting. She just wanted to be alone. Before I left, she told me she loved me and asked if I knew it. She wouldn't let me leave until I told her that I did. I kissed her and I left. When I got back, the house was so quiet. I realized that the staff wasn't here and I figured that maybe she was resting and they were taking the opportunity to run errands. I went to the bedroom, but she wasn't there. I was changing clothes when I found the note. She had hanged herself. I never went back in that room."

I stopped short of telling her more of what the note said or describing how or where I found Ellery. Those words were mine. They had been meant for me and I had held them inside of me since I read them, not sharing them with anyone. I had felt as ready as I ever had to tell Veronica what I had, but that was as far as I was willing to go. I didn't want to venture any further. I didn't want to have to see it again right then.

"Jude," Veronica said, the sound coming from her lips like a sob more than my name. "I'm so sorry. How could you survive that?"

"I almost didn't. There were so many times when I just wanted to give up and let myself die, but I couldn't. I had to stay. I had to do that for her. When I felt like I couldn't go any further, I had to remind myself that I was all that my son had left. If there was any chance that he might be alive, I wanted the opportunity to find him."