Ghosts and Our Shells

by The Author's Mighty Pen

As a child, Anna Smith survived a year in the Yorkshire Moors all on her own. At least that's what people said. She claimed she was abducted in the dead of night and held hostage on an island. No one believed her. Until someone came for her again. Until John Bates appeared. Until she realized it was all real.

22. Epilogue: Stories for Our Children

We left England.

Scandal will do that to you: force you out and away. It creeps into the quiet moments and destroys the little peace you have. It takes everything from you until you wonder if you're no more than the façade everyone else has built of you in their minds. If you're nothing but the person they believe you to be.

But, as we all knew, there was nothing left for me there. Nothing to gain from them for me. For us. Nothing left for us there.

So we left. Made the arrangements for John to take employment in the California logging industry through a connection at James's new bank and for me to write long-distance correspondence for Mr. Gregson. Then it was only a matter of finding the boat to get us there. The boat to take us to America. To the 'New World'.

And what a new world it would be for us. Especially when we realized my sickness was not because I could not bear the boat but because we carried a stowaway with us. One we gave a thousand names and none at all in the quiet of our cabin as our fingers stroked the barely perceptible bulge of my abdomen.

The miracle was that I could have a child at all. But there was a rather brilliant doctor in America who ensured we could. And soon, after settling temporarily in New York for the birth of our baby, we welcomed our child. Our little, perfect, beautiful Johnny Bates.

His father always complains that I should've given another name to our child but given the risks if we tried to have another, I didn't want to lose the chance. I wanted to forever keep in memory the name of the man I love. For one day he will die and leave me behind and all I'll have is the memory of him.

But here, in the wilds of the west, we still have one another. It is a quiet life away from the hustle and the bustle and the commotion we unintentionally caused back home. Away from the stories of me that followed my entire life until I chose to leave them behind. Away from those memories that I can now recall without fear but don't really feel like mine anymore. I'm not that person and I don't know if I know her anymore.

All that matters is that my family will never know her either. The person I became on that island and afterward is gone. A part of me still, in the depths of my mind building her own dwelling where she can finally rest, but not me anymore. Not even in the stories I still sell to Mr. Gregson's paper. She's a myth and a legend all her own and no longer mine.

It is a funny thing, when you consider where I was once. Jumping at shadows and refusing to sleep in the dark. Frightened of all of it.

Now I sleep peacefully beside the man who loved me then and until now. The man who'll love me forever. The man I love forever.

I sleep peacefully just down the hall from the rooms of our children. Only one of them has my blonde hair and his father's eyes but they're all ours. The others, orphans and lost boys, belong with us. Belong with those who were once lost too. Those we couldn't refuse for that would be to refuse ourselves.

I once thought myself a fool for daring to feel safe. Now I wonder what a fool I was for thinking I could never be happy. My ghosts are gone now and I am happy.