July, 17, 2007

The door to Sam's room stood closed. Mary preferred it that way. Closed it created the illusion that, behind it, Sam sat brooding, sequestered inside the way that he had for much of his early teens. It filtered the reality and allowed her to pretend. She was used to that. Most of the perfect fantasy that she had crafted for herself, most of her entire adult life, had been pretend, a game of playing house, just a facade built to obscure a darker reality that she had chosen to ignore.

It had been a game for high stakes, higher than she could have known, or even understood on May 2nd of '73, the day she had cast her first lot. She had still been more child than adult, her eyes on a future she craved, the love of her life, the physical embodiment of those dreams, dead in her arms. At that moment, all she could see was the pain, the loss. All she had felt was the fear of a life she didn't want lived all alone.

So she had gambled, her hopes against her fears in the balance, and at first it had felt like a win. John had revived in her arms, new life breathing into the possible future just as it did into his body. The path before them was clear, the obstacle of her father's objections having been neatly removed.

Of course, she hadn't allowed herself to see it that way. She'd mourned her parents, and her grief had been real. The secret relief that an inevitable complication in her plans had been conveniently disposed of was buried so deeply in her denial that she never showed it to even herself.

To leave the hunter's life behind required more than simply not hunting. It meant severing ties to friends and colleagues, in Mary's case, family. While she had, on that night, been filled with the unstoppable force of a young adult sure of her choice and determined to see it through come what may, the reality was, Samuel Campbell would never have allowed his only child to simply disappear out of his life. She herself would never have been able to maintain the determination over the long haul.

She had ached over the years, missing her parents in those pinnacle family moments. Births and holidays, anniversaries and graduations, every one of them was marred by the fact that Samuel and Deana had been conspicuous in their absence. They were dead, and in a way, that had made it easier. There had been no nagging voice telling her to swallow her pride and pick up a phone, no temptation to risk the fragile straw structure of her new life by striking the match of her past too near it. That door had been closed, not by her, but for her.

The game, however, had not ended that night. The fateful night that her future had resurrected had only been the first round. Inevitably, the sun had risen, bringing with it a new day, and new developments into a series of events over which she found herself with decreasing amounts of control.

In the light of day she'd found herself confronted with the reality of her parent's deaths, not the abstract pain of the loss and the slow progression of realizations of all the little things that would be different from then on, but the harsh reality that death comes with a to-do list.

Any young woman, suddenly alone in a world that had been unceremoniously knocked sideways, would have felt overwhelmed. For her, it had been two-fold. There had been not just the facade to maintain for the civilians, but the hunter's traditions to observe as well. It was more than she could do alone. She'd called her uncle, and of course he had come, just as she had known he would.

Together they'd watched as the flames of the pyres had consumed the bodies of Samuel and Deana Campbell. Two days later, Robert had looked on as Mary cried in John's arms at a funeral for two empty coffins. It was as close as she had ever come to allowing the two halves of her life to touch one another.

The choice of if and how to allow her parents into her life with John had been made for her. Her extended family, that had been another matter. If that tie were be severed, she would have to be the one to do it. When she had instinctively turned to Uncle Robert for help she hadn't really taken into account just how messy that was going to make things.

She'd made the call, and in so doing, had wagered again, her past against her future. She'd bet on her past, on her family, and again, it had felt like a win. Robert had come, been there for her in all the ways that a loving uncle should have been. The unpleasant chore of tying up all her parent's loose ends completed she then faced the new chore of informing the man who had dropped everything and come to help her of her intentions to leave hunting, and everything to do with it, behind her.

He'd listened, didn't try to dissuade her or argue with her. When he'd walked away it had been without a good-bye. In one of the first of what was going to become a long list of self-deceptions, she'd allowed herself to believe that no good-bye meant the relationship wasn't exactly ended. They just weren't going to see one another again. That wasn't the same thing at all, right? The question became one more thing to never think about, one more match to never strike too near the straw. It was one more door that would stay closed so that she wouldn't have to actually see what lay beyond it, no different really than the one before her now.

Hesitantly she reached out and let her palm rest against the hard surface. Eyes closed, head hanging, chest aching she tried to let the comfort of the fantasy quell the pain of the reality. As long as she didn't open that door, Sam, like Shrodinger's cat was fine. He was forever twelve years old, just inside, too immersed in Moby Dick or Windows 95 to be bothered with the outside world.

If only it worked. It had for years, so many rationalizations designed to train her perceptions to see the world she wished to see. They hadn't been lies exactly, more like the tooth fairy, fanciful alternatives to be accepted because they were more pleasant, and therefore, preferable to the truth. Now however, the stakes had gotten too high, much higher than she ever could have imagined as a heartbroken 19 year old forced into an unfair paradox of a choice.

Blinded as she had been by her youth, ten years had seemed like a long time, too long a time to ever actually pass. Brand new pain, harsh in its freshness had been so much more tangible, seemed so much more real than the abstract idea of a bill that felt like it would never actually come due.

The time had passed however, and as happens, with age and maturity, she had eventually become aware of its passage.

It had been her first pregnancy, heralding the beginning of a new phase of her life, that had churned that night up out of her buried memories along with the awareness that what had seemed like an eternity at the time was, in fact, half gone in the blink of an eye. She couldn't avoid that May 2nd of 1983 would eventually arrive, bringing her bill due. What, she wondered, might that mean, not just for her and John, but now, for their child? The result had been alternating foul moods and crying jags, which she'd blamed on pregnancy hormones.

Eventually, she'd reasoned out that she really hadn't agreed to anything that terrible, just permission to enter the house. It shouldn't be difficult at all the ensure that the house was empty on that day. When the time came, she would simply arrange for some sort of family trip and they would all be safely away when whatever was going to happen happened. It would be over, and she need never think about it again. Satisfied with her plan, she'd been able to enjoy the rest of her pregnancy, much to the dismay of her doctor who's remarked that he'd never seen a patient's mood actually improve in the third trimester.

Dean's birth had brought the joy of new motherhood and a lot of work, which coupled with the knowledge that she had a simple and effective plan of action, had proven sufficient to drive thoughts of the sword hanging over her back into the recesses of her mind where she kept everything that she never let herself think about.

Late autumn of '82, that was when it all fell apart. She was pregnant again, her second child due to arrive the second half of April. Hearing the news she had paled so sharply and suddenly that the doctor had insisted on retaking her vitals and testing for anemia.

She'd largely ignored the whole process, her mind too busy working over the fact that an extended outing and a brand new baby were not compatible concepts.

What followed was easily the most difficult time in her and John's marriage. The calendar running down on the fated day, her struggle to produce a way to deal with it kept her constantly on the edge of a temper, which only grew worse as the remaining months dwindled into weeks, and then days. She had to find a way to make it work, no two ways around it.

Sam, as it turned out, had no intention of making it easy. He missed his due date, and then stubbornly defied repeated "any day now" predictions until Mary had to begin to wonder if he was ever going to come out at all. The final week of April sped by, and a cold fear gripped her as she realized that her baby could actually be born on the dreaded day.

She couldn't even begin to speculate what that might mean. What predestined damnation might she have visited upon her child when she had been little more than a child herself? It had felt like a win...at the time. Now, ten years gone, seemingly so quickly, she finally understood the weight of her choice, the stakes of her wager.

The pains had woken her just prior to midnight on the 1st. Her worst fears were being realized. The birth had been terrible, the physical pain paling in comparison to her anxieties. Would the baby survive? Be disfigured? Something else too horrible to contemplate? It was the closest thing to Hell that she could imagine.

The first moment she saw Sam, his tiny faced scrunched up, howling at the world with a set of obviously healthy lungs, had been the happiest of her life. He was alive. Everything was in the right place. There were no horns, no tail, no odd ominous birthmark.

More than this, Mary had realized as she beamed at her brand new son in her arms, he had saved them. It was May 2nd and the house was empty, she and John here at the hospital, and Dean safely tucked away with a neighbor. All she had to do was was convince John not to return home until after midnight and it would all be over, for once and for all.

Except that it hadn't been. Any hunter worth their salt had heard of Cold Oak, knew its history and legends. As soon as she had heard that Sam's body had been found there she had known that something unearthly had been involved. No, not just something. She knew what it was. This was her final bill coming due. This was the big pot that she had lost by pushing her luck too far. It had never been her past against her future, her hopes against her fears. It had been John's life against Sam's.

"I'm so sorry." she whispered, her cheek pressed against the door, the door that hid that the room beyond was empty, and would remain so thereafter. She allowed herself a few tears before composing herself and pulling away to continue her trek down the hall.

She had packing to do. Uncle Robert was expecting her to call with an ETA. She still hadn't figured out how to explain what she planned to do to John. You don't get to hurt, she told herself sternly, not yet. You started this, you have to end it before anybody else you love has to pay the price for your mistake. Get the job finished. After that, then you get to mourn.