Chapter 38 – March 1917 – Tried to please someone besides myself

The woods were poor company for the agonizing walk home, their quiet cover allowing for every extreme emotion to unfurl and fill the space. She should never have run up to that fire, should never have come back to this place.

He loved her? He loved her? What a stupid thing to say. What a ridiculous thing to tell her. What was she supposed to do with a confession like that now, when they so clearly could not be together? She had finally scraped at the edges of her part in the mine explosion, finally started to rationalize that it was not wholly her doing, and now he was rewriting the rest of their history, saturating Noah's final moments with even more treachery…

"Damn it!"

She stamped her foot and let her teary frustration echo out against the trees.

Then, breathing hard, she dropped to a crouch in the crackling leaves. Her hand came to her forehead, a vain attempt to smooth the knots from her tangled thoughts.

She wasn't really angry with him. Not for that. She was angry that everything he had said had burrowed underneath her skin and made her remember what it felt like to occupy that charged space with him again. She was angry that her heart had made her race to him before her mind could even name its fear. She was angry that there would never be a single thing she could do to erase the words Noah had read.

An hour later, all her self-deprecations and counterarguments had run their courses twice around and she gave up on finding any comfort or resolution in them. Confused as when she had begun, she put herself back on the road to Elizabeth's house.

"Oh, Abigail, thank goodness!"

Elizabeth rushed into her arms the moment she came through the door.

"What happened?"

Abigail looked at her blankly.

"What caused the explosion?" Elizabeth prompted.

"Oh yes," she answered, trying to shake off her fight with Henry. "Something ignited the oil and they had to use dynamite to stop it, but I didn't quite hear the explanation."

"Hear? Abigail, do you mean that you went up to the derricks? Is that where you ran off to? Bill said -"

"Oh goodness!" she pressed a hand to her brow. "I completely forgot about the café."

"The café is fine, all under control."

"And Clara?"

"Bill let her go up to spend time with Jesse," Elizabeth reassured her. Abigail nodded. Though her daughter-in-law hadn't been there for that first terrifying crash of earth, it could hardly have been easy hearing it today, and with Jesse going out to help.

"Abigail," Elizabeth led her to the sofa, "tell me what's going on."

"BOOM!" Jack said from the floor. Elizabeth shot him a warning look.

"Oh, Elizabeth, it's fine, he's just a boy. I'm not as delicate as all that," she said, glad that for once it was true. "But it was a difficult day. And not only because of the explosion. Henry and I…" she paused. "I guess you could say we fought. After the fire was put out. We said a lot of things to each other that we should have said years ago."

"Oh," Elizabeth frowned. She rubbed small circles into Abigail's back. "How are you feeling about that?"

A heavy sigh drew her back against the cushions as Elizabeth peered over her with concern. "I don't know. Too many different ways to make sense of any of it. Right now my head is just swimming with all the things I should have said to Noah and Peter."

Elizabeth comforted her again with a sad smile.

"I understand. No matter how long our loved ones are with us, it never seems to be enough. I don't know anyone who doesn't wish they could say 'I love you' one more time, even if they said it five hundred times before that. But do you know what I do? When I feel like that about Jack?" Elizabeth said. "I go and I tell him. I tell him one more time."

ooo

She pulled the coat tighter around her chest, carefully bending herself onto her knees before the gravestones. For a full day she had thought about what to say to them, but in the end she didn't know how to put a lifetime into words.

"Hey," she smiled. "Hi, my precious boy."

She let her hand slide slowly over the name. Peter Edward Stanton, she read silently, wishing it was his beautiful face she could run her hand over again. How could it be that it had been nearly seven years since she had held him when she could still see his sleeping face clear as day in her arms?

"We made a good one, Noah. How did we manage it, two stupid kids like us?"

She smirked at the ground in front of her, the fresh dirt she remembered so vividly now covered over with grass and fresh daffodils for yet another spring. The bouquet she brought joined them, blue wildflowers to complement the yellow. She sat for a while, breathing their scent through the light breeze.

"Do you remember that time we took Peter to the circus?" she asked suddenly, the picture forming in her mind. "He was five years old. He'd learned about elephants in school and didn't believe they were real. Oh, we spent so much money on that trip! And then we nearly missed the coach home because he wouldn't stop asking the trainer questions." She brightened at the memory of Peter's cherubic curiosity, far more endearing to her than to the trainer. "We stood there long enough I thought we'd have to buy an elephant and bring it home with us! And you know, sometimes I think we might have. Peter could always talk us into anything.

"Well… he could talk you into anything. I always had to be the practical one, even though I would have bought him seventeen elephants if I could. And I didn't mind it all the time, letting you dream. It made me happy to see you both light up. But it was tough too, the way the two of you always seemed to have a connection with each other that I couldn't crack.

"It was alright though, because I just wanted you both to be happy. And while I didn't always feel it, I believed that you wanted the same for me. And maybe that's why each one of us had our secrets the day of the accident. To protect each other. Everything might have been different if only we'd had a little more faith."

She shook her head and took her gaze from the stone, casting her eyes down.

"But I know I can't ask you for that.

"Because you did have faith in me, once. You trusted me when I made my marriage vows, and I let you down. You trusted me and Henry both with your life and we failed you. You trusted me with your child…" She stopped, the words breaking against the air.

"I'll come and sit here every day and tell you that I'm sorry. That I hope with all of my soul that in your final moments those reckless words you found didn't undo the other twenty years of our life together. Because no matter what any of it said, you and Peter were absolutely everything to me. And it kills me that there could have been even one second that either of you thought you weren't enough."

She laid her palms over both of their graves, praying for the strength she suddenly needed.

"But Noah, it's so hard…," she said, tears slipping down her cheeks. "It's so hard to explain how that could be true and not true at the same time.

"How do I explain that I miss you both so desperately and I would give the world to have you back… but that I'm also so proud of who I became when I was forced to be alone? That I want to bear every bit of my blame, but that I don't want to always be the one left behind to feel responsible? How do I explain that I want your forgiveness while resenting that I'm still here asking for your permission?"

She shut her eyes, catching her breath again.

"None of this is what I meant to say," she frowned. "But I think… I think it might be what I needed to say. As much as you need to hear that I loved you, you also deserve the honesty that I couldn't give to you back then. I'm sorry... I'm sorry that I didn't trust you with it."

The sun had dipped lower in the sky by the time she stood up, dirt and tears clinging to her skirt. She took a long, final look at the markers, her eyes running over them until she had memorized every curve and gradient. The image of her son came alive in her mind, eternally young, his dirty blond hair tumbling toward the glint in his eye, the cause of which was for him alone to know.

"I love you both. So much," she whispered. "Please believe me when I say that no matter what life looks like from here, that part never changes."

It wasn't goodbye; there could never be a goodbye. But something had left her and there was room again. Laying a kiss in her hand, she pressed it to Noah's name and then to Peter's, leaving her love to soak into the stone.