I know the baby isn’t mine.
I cupped my stomach like I often did, wondering what might have been.
I blinked back tears, the memories of the months surrounding the loss of my mother were a blur. Tav’s support lifted me up then, his willingness to drive me to first therapy appointments and then to my obstetrician made him a hero in my eyes. But I still couldn’t forget that one night. The night before I got the call that my mom had passed, Tav ordered our favorite takeout and held me on the couch while we watched an old romantic comedy on silent and talked about baby names.
We were deciding between Melody and Mason when he traced his lips down the underside of my arm, making love to me slowly as he dotted kisses along my jawline and temple.
I know the baby isn’t mine.
Had I made up the words? Had paranoia filled the holes in my memory with lies like the plaster between cracks? I didn’t think so. Was it possible?Maybe.
In the months since, I’d woken up to that one singular nightmare-memory so many times that my mind no longer distinguished reality from the frightening fiction.
The following morning was another Sunday I grew to hate.
My cell phone rattled us awake, our limbs tangled and the scent of us mingling when the officer in California informed me that my mother had been in an accident. Someone was required onsite to identify the victim.
Every memory after that one is hazy.
Tav arranged for the officer to talk to me over video call, and with his help I was able to confirm my own worst nightmare. The woman I loved, the only person who’d loved me enough to stay and raise me, was gone. A house fire, an unfortunate passing.
In the days following, we arranged for mom’s remains to be brought home, and exactly one week after her passing, we suffered another blow.
A first trimester miscarriage, the tiny star of hope left shining in our lives was snuffed in an instant. The therapist explained that trauma and post-traumatic stress can trigger spontaneous miscarriages. I was doubly distraught, their losses triggering in my mind a cascade of conflicting anxiety and emotion. Was I at fault for the death I was drowning in? My willingness to leave the house fizzled to nothing, my ability to focus deeply and single-mindedly on only one project at a time faltered as my codependent habits and unhealthy triggers fired day and night.
Tav was my rock, until the four days of the week he was gone. It was then he ordered regular deliveries from the market to our front step, a regular cleaning company to dust around me while I worked distractedly on my business. We shared takeout dinners together over video calls and he was the only reason I had in the world to smile. I looked forward to his calls, if he didn’t call to talk to me, no one would.
But still, I remembered that night.
I know the baby isn’t mine.
I’d given him no reason to think there’d ever been anyone else.Or had I?
I gnawed at my bottom lip.
The story I’ve told myself might be my downfall. Thememories.Or the nightmares.However I chose to see them, they haunted me. They kept me walking the hallways at night, or my eyes glued to a computer screen in a desperate bid to keep them at bay. I’d come to rely on Tav more than ever through the worst moments, but I’d come to wonder which fragments of my memory were real and which not. My days spent dreaming of him far outweighed the moments he was in my arms, now with my vague memories playing tricks, I struggled to wonder what of us was love and not the cobbled fragments of my imagination. So much of Tav and I was intense but sporadic, did one outweigh the other? Had the dreams for our future just been shattered irrevocably in one fell swoop? I’d been waiting to tell my mother in person about the arrival of her future grandchild, but she’d been taken before I could share the surprise. Had my own ability to be a mother been stolen from me in the same horrific way?
Tav rarely spoke of marriage after the loss of the baby.
I’d been grappling if his only reason for asking was because we were pregnant, and now that we weren’t, maybe that future had vanished too.
I rose out of bed and with the blanket wrapped around my chilled shoulders, I went to the window. Shadows played along the tall banks of powder, evergreen boughs heavy with sugary frosting-tipped leaves.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
“What was that?” Anxiety tightened like a ball in my throat.
I struggled to see through the spray of frost that clung to the window.
“Is someone there?”
I watched in silent horror as a man, shoulders hunched and snowshoes strapped to his feet, rushed away from the chalet.
Seventeen
I hope you’ve settled in. I have a few surprises for you. Don’t disappoint me.
I’ll be watching.
