I can no longer afford to pay for it. I haven’t been able to for months so that I’m in debt to the bank and the foreclosure threats have begun to arrive. The sign went in today, stuck there—forced into the nearly frozen ground—by the very same Realtor who sold us the home.
Oh, what she must think, looking at me now. How I’ve changed.
The Realtor didn’t look the least bit different to me, but I was changed, hardly the same woman I was when we first met, less than two years ago.
After she left, I sat myself on the tree swing and swayed, moving back and forth through the nippy winter air. I did it until my fingers were numb and I could no longer feel the sturdy rope beneath my hands.
This was the closest my child would ever come to a ride on this swing.
The bay was empty now, not a boat anywhere, and snow flurries fell on the dock, collecting like powdered sugar. There were birds in the trees, winter birds, cardinals and chickadees, but everyone else was gone, sunning themselves on one of those tropical islands where I only dreamed I might one day go.
The greenhouse door was frozen shut.
The flowers in the flower bed were dead.
I was still outside when I heard the doorbell ring, and thinking it was the Realtor—that she had an offeralready!—I left my post to see.
But it was not the Realtor.
Aaron stood before me, his chestnut hair getting peppered with soft powdery snow. His eyes had a forlorn look about them, sad. He wore a coat, his hands set in the pockets of it, and as I pulled the door to, he offered a simple smile.
“Aaron,” I said.
“Eden.”
I couldn’t bring myself to invite him inside, for the cottage was truly a mess, in a state of bedlam; I couldn’t bring myself to show him what had become of our home. And so I stepped outside, onto the porch, my hair also getting peppered with snow. I pulled the door closed behind me. My feet were bare, covered only in socks, and against the concrete, they grew cold. Aaron, ever-obliging Aaron, ever-unselfish Aaron, ever-benevolent Aaron, shimmied at once out of his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders, saying to me, “You’ll catch your death out here,” and beneath the weight of his hands—which lingered there on my shoulders, gently liberating strands of hair that were trapped under the heavy coat, warm hands tucking them behind my ear, pausing there—I softened like a stick of butter left on the table too long.
We said nothing.
But I could see in his eyes that I had been wrong. That Aaron wasn’t healed as I’d believed him to be the day I saw him through the chophouse windows. That he was only taped back together that day, a skimpy job at best, for the tape had come undone, it had lost its stick, and Aaron was once again broken, standing before me now, mere fragments of himself.
Oh, what have I done?
He hunched to my height, bending his knees ever so. He cupped his hands around my face—softly, delicately—as if those hands cradled an heirloom crystal vase, and I could see in Aaron’s eyes that what he held was, to him, something fragile, something magical, something irreplaceable and beyond compare.
That, to him, I was irreplaceable and beyond compare as I’d always been.
That, in all these months apart, that hadn’t changed for him.
His lips felt warm as he pressed them to mine, and there was nothing rushed about it, nothing presumptuous or brusque. “I want you back,” he whispered into my ear.
“I need you back.
“I miss you, Eden.
“I am nothing,” he said, “without you.”
I am nothing.
Was it just my imagination, or did the baby inside me kick?
I stepped back from Aaron, tugging on the ends of my sweater to make sure that tiny bulge was concealed. Inside me the baby—not Aaron’s baby, but the baby of some man I would never know—knew how to squint its eyes and to suck its thumb. Each day it grew bigger, arms and legs lengthening, organs and cells unfolding in my womb. It would come to be a person one day, a person perhaps with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, but never would I resent this child for the choices that I made.
Be careful what you wish for,the saying goes, but never would I harbor a grudge for all that I lost to have this baby. All that I will lose.
It might just come true.
I would have done anything for a baby. This I know without a shred of doubt.
