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Part Two
At first the tearing, desperate sense of loss of her child, wed to a dark loathing of that child's living father, had been almost too much to be borne. Her memories of the events immediately following the accident were already dimmed, though she still relived them in dreams, on those occasions when sleep could be found. In dreams she again came swimming up from the murk of unconsciousness, ripped herself free of Mammy's restraining embrace, hurled herself at Rhett as he staggered stricken from the room where their beloved child lay dead, screaming accusations at him before even the illusion of life and warmth had left the small body. She was in that moment quite literally insane, driven mad by a loss deeper than any she'd yet faced, and in her madness the only ease for the searing pain that drove her seemed to lie in finding a target and destroying it. What she saw, stumbling forward in a state even worse than her own, was not her husband or her friend or the father of her darling little girl, but a symbol of everything that had ever gone wrong in her world, the source of every moment of unhappiness, the cause of the almost unbearable hurt that tore her from the inside out. The monstrous unfairness of this was beyond her ability to comprehend at the time; and like any wounded animal, her only sense was the self-protective urge to strike. She struck not only with her small fists and scratching nails but, even more damagingly, with words more violent than any physical blow. She was left now with only the gist of those words (though she recalled them all quite vividly, in dreams) and the wistful desire to recall them, destroy them, rewind her life back to the moment before they were spoken. She wished she had remained unconscious. Sometimes she wished she had never awoken.
That first shredding grief had been followed by an equally disturbing sensation, that quiet loathing of Rhett. His reaction to her attack, while surely understandable and far from unprovoked, had fanned the spark of her anger into a small flame of hatred she had nourished to herself in the days that followed. He'd flung her away from him, the grief and sorrow he'd moments before wished only to share with her transformed into a consuming anger and loathing of his own, for the woman he saw no longer as his wife or the mother of their beloved daughter but some monster of selfishness and cruelty bent upon his destruction. He shoved her away and her back hit the wall across from the door to his sitting room, her hip banging into the edge of a mahogany whatnot with bruising force; and when she moved as if to raise her hands against him again, he lunged forward, face red and contorted, bellowing like an enraged bull. Fear of him cut momentarily through her fury and she too screamed, in fright and rage and a thousand other emotions impossibly entwined; and just as she would consciously forget the words she'd hurled at him, so would she forget the exact content of his words to her. The utter hatred and contempt in his face and manner, though; that she remembered.
On the third day after the accident she'd refused the laudanum-laced cup pressed into her hands and sent Mammy from her room, trying valiantly to pull herself together sufficiently to consider the situation and what needed to be done. The first thing that came to her mind, quite unbidden and shocking in its simplicity, was the thought: I wish Rhett was dead. Had any observer been present, the look on her face as this concept dawned would have seemed almost comical: the pale green eyes widening, the colour fading from formerly flushed cheeks, lips parting on a soundless O. Shaking her head slightly, she tried to clear the thought away, but there it was, right in the forefront of her consciousness, unwilling to budge: I wish Rhett was dead. I hate him. I wish he was dead, and Bonnie was still alive.
Horrified, she crossed herself, actually looking fearfully round the room as if afraid that God Himself might be somewhere nearby, listening. Over the years Rhett had inspired any number of reactions in her, some of which she would have identified as hatred at the time, but those white-hot sensations had been as nothing compared with the quiet intensity of this new feeling. It was accompanied by a bone-deep lethargy that crept over her, sapping her strength and stealing her vitality, a lethargy that had nothing at all to do with Dr. Meade's well-intentioned prescription and everything to do with the natural progression of grieving, though of course she did not know it. All she knew for certain was that her favourite child was dead, she hated her husband, and her life was taking on the dimensions of a nightmare from which she was desperate to awaken. In this situation as in every other she had ever faced, the only way out of it that she could envision was to shove blindly through it and go forward, and though she had barely the volition to rise from her bed she knew she must, so she rang again for Mammy and put her feet firmly on the floor.
Later that morning, she squared her shoulders, forced open Rhett's door, and informed him that she had made arrangements for Bonnie's funeral.