Emily's no longer exercising at night, and no longer using my body as an exercise apparatus, but I've caught her a few times in the middle of the night when she's escaped from our bed. I've found her in the den, fingering the fake IDs that Gil made for her. Like even though she said disappearing wasn't what she wanted, she's contemplating it now that she's actually trying to deal with what happened in October.
She's also taken to wearing a pair of my flannel pajama bottoms and one of my t-shirts to bed at night. She has an expansive maternity wardrobe from when she was pregnant with Rory, and that wardrobe includes a couple of nightgowns, but they've yet to make an appearance this time around. Perhaps Emily's deemed them too summery, since she was pregnant with Rory and needing maternity clothes in the spring and summer. Maybe those soft, sleeveless nightgowns are too chilly for January. Still, the inside temperature of our home doesn't really fluctuate much, summer or winter, so I think maybe there's another reason.
I haven't asked her why. I haven't told her that I miss those flowing nightgowns that I purchased for her, and how she looked wearing them when she was pregnant before. I haven't told her that one of my favorite memories of her previous pregnancy was the first night she put one of them on, took in the look on my face, laughed quietly and then bunched the material that rested against her thighs to her waist, straddled my hips and kissed me, still chuckling.
I search for the softness in her eyes and body that I used to know while she lays in bed in my nightclothes, a book in her lap, her back propped up against pillows, reading glasses perched on her nose and her hair typically pulled back.
She's come back to me a lot since the week before Christmas, since she finally told me the story about letting that little boy go in order to save herself. The stiffness is gone when I crawl into bed beside her and wrap my arms around her. Instead of her back going rigid, she cries now. She cries in my arms, and I understand it's a grieving process, tears that she'd held back for months.
I hold her and tell her I love her and let her cry, and eventually she tires, her puffy eyes drifting shut. I wipe the tears from her cheeks and kiss her damp eyelashes and wonder when it's going to end, when there's going to come the day that tears aren't part of her nightly routine.
"It's pregnancy hormones," she sometimes tells me. And maybe that's true. But it's also a deep, guilt-laden sadness that she just has to work through.
At least she's working through it with me now, instead of pushing me away.
Her body is changing faster this time around. At twenty weeks pregnant, she looks far larger than she did the last time. I cringe, thinking about the size of our son and how she's going to have to deliver him. Rory was relatively small, and that was difficult enough for her.
I can feel the baby kicking, which is also different; I didn't feel Rory until Emily was about twenty-one weeks pregnant. But I started feeling this baby move around inside Emily at a little over eighteen weeks, on New Year's Eve. His most active time seems to be at night, right after Emily has mellowed and fallen asleep after one of her crying spells. Almost like he's saying, "Hey, wake up. Remember something good, Mommy."
I have Emily's slightly pinker cheeks that remind me of her last pregnancy, and her slightly rounder face. I have the gentle curves of her body, and her relaxed frame sleeping beside me in bed every night. In that way, it's similar. But I don't have those nightgowns, which are right there in her drawer, washed and ready to go. And it's not the same type of softness in her disposition as it was the last time. This softness is more emotional exhaustion and less happiness. I'm wondering when the genuine happiness that can carry her not just through the day, but through our nights in bed as well, will come back.
Back in December, after I got home from LA, when the truth was out there, I took in the things I hadn't been paying attention to while I was so focused on what was going on with Emily. Things like the fact that after dinner together in the main house, Chris and my mother would often retire for the evening together, either in her apartment or his cabin. Sometimes they went their separate ways, because I imagine after decades of being alone, they still craved their own space. But more often than not, only one of our subproperties would have lights on in the evenings.
One night, after I tucked Leon into bed, I glanced out his window and saw the shadow of my mother and Chris dancing in the living room of her apartment, the gentle strums of music barely audible between our two living spaces.
"Does it bother you?" my mother asked me one day right around Christmas.
I shook my head immediately and she raised her eyebrows at me, knowing I wasn't being completely honest. The truth was, I'd considered Chris a good man who was on borrowed time from the day I met him, and he'd borrowed a lot of days since then - over two years.
"I'm worried you're going to get attached to him and he's going to die," I responded to her questioning gaze.
"We're both in our seventies. We're both going to die at some point, Derek. And I'm already attached to him. He makes me laugh. He does sweet things for me that make me smile. He's okay with me being a bed hog."
I cringed inwardly at those words, not particularly wanting that mental image, and my mother laughed. "Shit happens," said the woman who I'd rarely heard swear my entire life. "And good things happen," she continued. "It's our right in life to choose to let in the good for however long we can."
I looked at her, wondering how she could be so seemingly blase about her ordeal in October. "Emily had to let go of the baby in that house in order to save herself," I found myself whispering, just wanting to process it.
My compassionate mother teared up immediately. "If she did that, she didn't have a choice."
"I know," I said. "She didn't."
"You've made difficult decisions in the course of your career, where something or even someone was sacrificed for the greater good. You both have," she said while she wiped her eyes.
"I know. But never a baby, never like that," I whispered. "And she's so sad."
My mom nodded. "She's smiling more now, though. It's getting better. Count her smiles, Derek. Hold onto them. She saved me, and she saved herself and we're all still here. She's forty-seven years old and pregnant. She's probably scared about that, too. She's not talking to me like she used to, but she's smiling more. Give it time. She'll come back to us. How could she not?"
After that, I started counting Emily's smiles more during the day, and they were there. And her laughter was as well. At night, she might be letting loose a river of tears with me, but she was coming back to us during the day.
Counting her smiles made me realize the smiles that were missing in our house, and those were Leon's. He was more apprehensive about life now.
I set off to get to the root of what was on his mind. I spent a lot of one on one time with him on the weekends, sledding now that we finally had snow, having him help split firewood from an old tree that we had cut down in November, playing board games with him. He was tight-lipped for several days, and I finally just started throwing out guesses to see if he would take the bait.
"Are you worried because Mama is having a boy?" I asked today, trying to reach for any viable explanation that would get him talking. "You'll always be our son, you know. There will just be two sons in the household come spring. One will be a baby, and the other will be you. You'll always be our Leon, our first and oldest son, and we will always love you."
He stared at me, his cheeks red in the cold, a knit cap my mother made him for Christmas on his head, his arms laden with firewood, and his wide eyes filling with tears.
"I'm not worried about having a brother," he whispered, his lips quivering.
"Then what is it?" I asked while I busied myself with another stump of wood to cut so he didn't feel like I was staring at him.
I watched from the corner of my eyes as he trudged through the snow towards the back porch, walked up the steps and carefully stacked the wood in our pile there. I heard his feet coming back towards me a few minutes later. He stood to the side of me, outside of the circle I'd drawn in the snow to keep him outside of the area where my ax would be swinging.
"Mama cries a lot at night after I'm in bed. I've heard her. Why does she?" he asked tentatively.
I contemplated my response. "It was hard for her, going to try and find Nana, thinking you and Rory had almost been taken, asking you to lie about her being with us when she really wasn't."
"But she did find Nana?" he asked.
That had been a sticking point on a few occasions. We'd hedged around his questions about just how Emily had come back saying she hadn't found my mom, and then my mom appearing in a hospital a few hours later. We knew Leon needed to process things, but were afraid that telling him the truth would be asking him to hold more lies than he could handle on the shoulders of his slight body and sweet soul.
I stilled the motion of the ax in my hand, my shoulders burning and my body feeling good with the physical exertion. I turned to look at Leon, who was several inches taller than he was when we first brought him home, but still a couple years away from puberty. He was gangly; he was a lot like I was a few months shy of ten. His blue eyes stared at me, like he was searching for something.
It dawned on me in that moment that I was just about the same age as he was when my father was shot right in front of me and died in my arms. There was no escaping that reality, that truth. But I tried, I tried for my mother. I put masks up and pretended I was okay. And it lead me to no place good - just more secrets and lies.
"Yes. Mama found Nana and rescued her," I said to him, telling him the truth finally. "But she had to do a lot of things she wasn't really allowed to do anymore because she didn't work for Interpol or the FBI. And we didn't want to burden you with having to tell more lies."
Leon sank into the snow on his bottom. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, looking at me. "I knew she would. I knew she must have. She saved me."
I went and knelt before him, my denim-clad knees sinking into the snow. "Is that what you needed to know? That we would have saved you if you had been taken again?"
He shook his head, his eyes filled with tears that overflowed and dripped down his cheeks. "I know that. It's just that, if something like what happened in October happened again, and Rory and a new baby were both in the house, how would I ever carry both of them out of there? I couldn't," he sobbed.
It was in that moment that I truly contemplated the bag that was on the highest shelf in our den. A bag with cash in it, and new IDs for all of us. IDs I'd caught Emily fingering on a few occasions.
I couldn't tell Leon that nothing like that would ever happen again. The odds were slim, just because there was only so much evil in the world and it couldn't all be directed at a single family, but it wasn't impossible.
"You were so smart," I told him. "You were so strong, and we are so proud of you and thankful for you."
He nodded; we'd told him that countless times in the past couple of months.
"But that's our job, Leon," I continued. "It's our job to make sure things are safe enough so you don't have to worry about that. That's why our home alarms are better now. That's why we cut back a lot of our bushes and trees, so people can see what's going on in here from the street. I don't think anything like that will happen again, but if it does, I think you'll be just as strong and brave."
He looked at me. And looked. His wet eyes blinking at me, absorbing my words. And my heart was breaking.
Maybe we needed to go, to truly disappear, just so he didn't have to worry about and strategize how he would ever get two younger siblings out of our home should someone try to take them again.
I stood up and reached my hand towards him. I pulled him into the safety circle in the snow and handed him the ax. I didn't think he'd necessarily be able to cut the wood, but it was dry and not impossible. I hoped it. I hoped he'd have success.
I found the driest stump we had. I demonstrated how to use the ax. He did a few practice swings and then I nodded and stepped out of the circle. When his ax struck the piece of wood and became embedded, Leon smiled. It was probably sheer luck, but I didn't care. It was a smile on his face like I hadn't seen in a long time.
"See," I told him. "You can't do anything."
And he grinned wider.
It was later that afternoon when I sought out my mother again, while Rory was napping, and Emily, who had tired of wearing my sweaters and sweatshirts, was out getting some more appropriate maternity clothes for a winter pregnancy; when Leon was at Chris's cabin learning the ropes of chess. I didn't skirt around the issue; I needed to know.
"If we disappeared with new identities, would you come with us?" I asked her.
She looked at me and then turned back towards the stove to stir the beef stew she was making for dinner. After several seconds, she nodded. "Yes. I couldn't imagine my life without Rory and Leon. But why would we do something like that?"
"So we could all feel safe," I responded softly.
She shook her head and then turned towards me. "Your father was a good man and I loved him with my whole heart. He walked with you to the corner market one day, it was that simple. I was baking cupcakes for a school fundraiser with your sisters. He kissed me goodbye before he left and told me he would bring me home a treat, and then he winked at me and said, 'I love you'. I felt safe. I didn't feel any fear in that moment. I loved my life. You both walked out the front door, you practically running, with change from your birthday money rattling in your pocket. You came home and your father didn't."
I wasn't aware that I had tears in my eyes until my mother's warm hand brushed them from my cheek. "You can go to the end of the earth with new names and all the money in the world, but life happens, Derek. We all have to live the best way we can and make the choices we have to. I was mad at your father for a long time for intervening, thinking he'd have come home if he'd just gotten down on his knees and said nothing. And maybe that's true, but he also could have been struck by a car the next day. We never know and there are no guarantees. I had to learn that over the course of too many years, while you were suffering and your sisters moved emotionally away from me and I didn't have it in me to see it. That doesn't have to be Emily. She has someone who can make her remember, and he's standing right in front of me."
Her words rang in my ears all afternoon. They rang in my ears throughout dinner where Leon smiled a little more and told the story about using the ax for the first me. Rory was all giggles in her high chair while she attempted to use her little toddler fork with her right hand and ended up shoveling most of the food on her tray into her mouth with her left. My mother and Chris sat next to each other, and by the looks of their shoulder movements, they frequently held hands under the table. Her words were there when I kissed and tucked our children into bed tonight.
My head is spinning now in our quiet home. I brush my teeth and wash my face and hope that Emily maybe bought some maternity pajamas that are more appropriate for winter while she was out today, but when I open the bathroom door, she's there in the bed. Book in her lap. Hair pulled back in a sloppy, endearing bun. Purple reading glasses perched on her nose. And wearing an old Northwestern t-shirt of mine and a pair of my navy blue and green plaid pajama pants.
She smiles a little when she sees me, and puts her book aside. And just like every other night since I came home from LA and she told me down to minute details how she let go of that little boy in her hands and managed to swing her leg up onto a ledge of wood still standing in that house in England, I crawl in bed beside her and wrap her in my arms. And she she rests her head on my shoulder and sighs, and then the tears start.
It's like everything she's held in all day while pretending everything is normal comes crashing over her.
I hold her, but I don't just whisper hollow words of love.
"You forgot," I say, and she stills in my arms.
"What?" she asks.
This is the first true exchange of words that have happened on her nightly vigils of grief and guilt.
"Over two years ago, I told you what it was like for me so many years, knowing that not talking about what Carl Buford did to me lead to other kids being abused like I was. And you told me that we all just make the best decisions we possibly can with the deck of cards we're dealt. And that I did what I needed to do in order to survive, and there was no shame in that. You kissed my chest and my face and told me you loved me and that there was nothing in my behavior that was shameful. You told me I had to believe that in order to truly move forward."
Her heart is fluttering like a hummingbird's wings as her chest presses against my side and her arms tighten around me. She's silent for over a minute, and I kiss the top of her head, right on one of the gray hairs that are starting to sprout here and there, but not so significantly that she's resorted to dyeing yet. I don't care if she never does.
"Do you remember saying that?" I whisper.
"Yes," she finally breathes out against my chest.
"I know you're laying here thinking that it's not the same type of scenario, but it is. You thanked me over a month ago, for knowing how to find you. And I did, partially, that night. But I stopped a little short of truly finding you, afraid of saying anything while you've cried night after night, because I was so scared you'd close yourself off from me again. But finding you comes not just in acknowledging what you had to do in order to get home to us. It's in making you talk about it. Just like I finally got Leon to talk about what was bothering him today."
She raises her head up to look in my eyes, and I smile softly at her. I tell her word-for-word about my exchange with Leon. And then I tell her about my conversation with my mother.
"I know sometimes at night, you've been contemplating disappearing without wanting to say it, just to have a fresh start where you think you wouldn't have to work through everything that happened in England. We could go, Em. We could disappear, and if that's what you want to do, just say the word. But my mother made me remember that you can't run away from life. What's going to happen is going to happen."
I take a deep breath and smile sadly before continuing. "My father pushed me behind him when two men with guns barged into the little market near our house. He protected me on an outing that was supposed to be joyful, when all I wanted was to buy a Snickers and a cap gun with my birthday money. He had my mom's favorite ice cream in his hand, and he pushed me behind him with his other. And he was murdered when he tried to intervene. There was no stopping it, and there would be no stopping something like that if we stayed here, or we moved to Siberia. Life happens everywhere, and it's not always pleasant. Different identities and a fresh start guarantee nothing. We can only live and remember the good."
Her tears have dried up, but she hasn't stopped staring at me, her mouth partially open, her cheeks slightly pink, smelling like toothpaste and the lavender soap she uses.
I brush my fingers down her cheek. "We have to move forward, Em. We have to keep going. We have to really start living again without it being you pretending the best you can to be who you always were, and then falling apart in my arms every night. This is our home and our life and it's going to be a damned good one, even when shitty things beyond our control happen. We can make it."
She sinks her head back down on my shoulder and is silent, but still there are no more tears. She runs her fingers down my chest. "We went through hell together, and all I wanted was perfection when it was over. And we got that, and then it was gone. And I forgot to trust your love when things weren't perfect."
"Perfect doesn't happen in life. It might last for awhile, but it's not infinite, for anyone. What we have is really damned good, Em. You're an amazing, caring person, and you did the best you could given the situation, and I'm so grateful for you coming home and my mother being here. But we have to really move forward. That means getting through the sadness, and going through the rest of the process, even if it's anger and denial. But we can't be suspended in limbo forever. You're halfway through this pregnancy, and there's going to be a new baby here in just a handful of months. And I think he's trying to remind you of that, because when you cry and then finally fall asleep, he kicks up a storm."
I feel her breath wash across my chest in a huff of a laugh. "He's going to be a football player, like his Daddy." She pauses and then laughs again. "Or maybe a soccer player."
I laugh, because I have a deep aversion to the game of soccer, which I find boring, and she knows it. I press my lips more firmly to her head and smile against the warm of her scalp. "Or a soccer player," I respond. "Why don't you wear your maternity pajamas, Emily?" I ask quietly.
I feel her shrug her shoulders. "They haven't felt very much like me."
"OK," I breathe.
She lifts her head again and raises her eyebrows. "You've wanted me to wear them?" she asks.
I answer her with a small nod. "But it's okay. I like this look, too."
She shakes her head at me and smiles. My eyes track her body as she rolls away from me, gets out of bed and walks towards her dresser. I watch her with rapt longing as she flings my Northwestern t-shirt off and slides the flannel pants down her legs. I'd take her just like that, with her bikini panties that rest delicately below the swell of her stomach and nothing else, but when she pulls out one of those nightgowns - the light blue one - and slips it over her head and it settles over her body and the curve of her belly, I'm nearly breathless.
There's that soft vision of her again, the one that radiates contentment, the one that I felt might be lost forever. It's not like the nightgown is magic, but maybe the look on my face is. Because she stares at me and then she laughs lightly, sweetly, and shakes her head at me again.
"I forgot to remember that we're best when we're freely talking with each other, no matter what it is that needs to be said. I'm sorry," she says as she walks back towards me.
"It's okay. I kind of forgot myself. We had decades of hiding from our truths and only small bit of time where we were sharing everything with each other" I say, feeling better than I have in months as she slides the hem of the nightgown up her thighs and straddles my hips.
"This is what you've wanted?" she asks as she leans forward to kiss me, and I feel the swell of our baby press into my abdomen.
I nod. "Do you remember what it was like when you were pregnant with Rory?"
"Yes, but that Emily has felt very far away from me for the past few months, and it's exhausting trying to find her."
I run my fingers over the soft skin of her thighs. "She's right here, Em."
"I think maybe she is," she whispers as she kisses me.
I don't sleep much that night. She sleeps beside me and the puffy eyes are absent, and she looks almost content. Her soft shoulder peeks out of the nightgown and I graze my fingers over it.
We're not going anywhere physically. And she's going to really come back to us emotionally, and we are going to find our stride again, truly find it, even if it looks a little different. But maybe there's something we can do, something to make us feel a little more secure than the top-of-the-line system Central Security Group can provide us.
I'm thinking about a home Emily described for me, with a safe room and other bells and whistles you don't get with your average security company. I'm searching for a middle ground - staying here, but with tangible safety measures that can make both Emily and Leon feel more secure.
It's four o'clock in the morning when I creep out of bed and grab Emily's phone. I make my way downstairs and scroll through her contacts and call Gil. He says he can give us something better than what we have, something that provides us with a measure of security that goes beyond the norm, instead of six fake IDs that we're never going to use.
And when Emily wakes up a little after six o'clock in the morning when she hears Rory babbling over the baby monitor, I touch her cheek and she smiles at me. "Gil's coming," I tell her.
A/N - It's been a hellish couple of weeks for me. My dad's been having serious health issues again, and there was a huge falling out with my crazy ass mother. I think my next writing endeavor might just be a guidebook called "How to Divorce Your Crazy Mom (When She Lives a Mile Away From You) Without Going Insane."
So that's the difficult part, and the reason behind this chapter's delay.
Onward and upward!
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