“I KNEW YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN TO me.”
The air was cool, but the bite that had cut through her skin the last time she found herself on the back patio of her home in Mississippi with a scotch glass in her hand was noticeably absent. Her husband’s voice, as clear as the features on his face, reached her with ease, but Maria could only watch in stunned silence, almost too afraid to breathe. She was home. Will was sitting by her side. Her children were upstairs in their bedrooms. But hope was a thief, and Maria knew how it preyed on its victims with visions of what could be, before ripping it all away.
“You’re not real, are you?” she said, pulling herself to the edge of the chair before glancing down at the ice cubes that clinked against the sides of the glass in her hand. She placed the drink on the table between them and wiped the moisture from her fingers. “And that’s not really scotch in there, is it?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be.” Will’s crooked smile was almost enough to break her, and the laughter that played through his words hinted at something mischievous. Did he know that she was coming home? Was he waiting for her?
“Will you disappear if I touch you?” Maria leaned in closer to him, cautious of her actions, certain that one wrong move would rip her away from him again.
“I guess you’ll just have to find out.”
She closed her eyes before she stretched her head toward him. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you,” she said, breathing out the words and reaching for the feel of his cheek with her lips.
A faint knocking swept through the air around them and severed the connection that was holding them together. Maria never got to feel the warmth of her husband’s skin. Instead, when she opened her eyes, they landed on the sliding glass door separating them from the inside of the house.
“Listen to me now, Maria.” Will pulled himself forward to the edge of the chair.
“What is that noise?” The knocking continued, growing louder by the moment, until even Will looked back at the glass door.
“Please, Maria. You have to listen to me.”
“Who’s banging on the glass?” When Maria stood, the maternity dress she wore fell past her knees, and the belly that had once filled it was gone. “What happened to the baby?” she asked, pulling at the baggy dress. “Did I lose him? What happened at the storage unit?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk about that later.” The knocking intensified as Will gestured for her to sit back down. “You have to go now, but there’s something I need you to do for me before you come back to us.”
“Of course,” Maria replied. “Anything.”
“I need you to find me in Ohio. There’s something you need to see.” The urgency in Will’s voice was so uncharacteristic of him that it gave Maria pause.
I can’t.
Those were the words she wanted to say, but how could she say no to her husband? After everything she’d put him through, how could she deny him this? She didn’t want to go to Ohio. She couldn’t risk the chance that she might see his little sister and be faced with the brutal truth of what her choice would cost. Did he know Beth was still alive? Did he know that Maria was choosing their family over her?
“Why can’t you show me now?” she asked. “Or when I get home?”
“I can’t, Maria. I’m so sorry. I know how hard it will be, but I need you to be the strong one.”
“But how will I find you,” she asked, almost unable to hear her voice over the sound of the banging. “And will you even know who I am?” Maria pulled herself from the chair again and walked to the back door, peering into the darkness. The knocking was relentless, and the more she tried to block it out, the louder it became. “What is that noise?”
Will was gone when she turned back to him, his chair abandoned, as if he’d never even been there. But the banging wouldn’t cease.
It didn’t stop even after it pulled her from sleep, away from her home and her husband and everything she wanted to go back to. It was just past midnight, and when Maria dragged herself from under the pink comforter and peered out the window, the eyes that penetrated the darkness, watching her from the depths of night, were instantly familiar. She slid the window open to a chilled breeze.
“What are you doing here, Henry?”
“I need to talk to you.” His hands gripped the ledge of the windowsill as if he intended to pull himself inside. Maria’s eyes worked their way from his hands to the muscles that twitched beneath his T-shirt, and she blushed when he caught her studying the details of his body.
“At midnight?” She stood with her arms crossed, ashamed that she could notice another man just moments after leaving her husband. Henry had a pull on her that she couldn’t deny. Maybe it was the trauma that had bonded them, the agonizing sacrifices they’d been asked to make, the unbearable circumstances they’d shared.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I can explain it to you, if we could talk for a minute.”
Before long, Maria found herself in the passenger seat of Henry’s pickup truck, sitting in the gravel lot beside the park with the sludge-filled pond. When he cut the engine, an intrusive silence enveloped them, made more obvious by the blackness of the night. Maria stared into it, listening to the frogs calling to each other and feeling Henry’s eyes upon her, curious as to what he saw. Was she beautiful to him? Was she broken? Was she hopeless? It shouldn’t have mattered, but for some reason it did, and when he reached his hand over the center console and laid it on her arm, the intimacy of it urged her to pull away. It was the warmth of his skin that stopped her, though. Or maybe it was the sorrow in his eyes. They were so honest. They were beautiful and penetrating but sad, and when he turned his body to face her and pressed his hand gently into her arm, she could almost feel his loss.
“My husband visited me tonight,” Maria finally said. “In a dream.”
“Was it a good visit?”
“I guess.” Maria shrugged, her gaze stuck on the insects buzzing around the light of the lamppost, as if they couldn’t see what happened to their friends who ventured too close. “But he asked me to do something that I don’t think I can do.”
Henry didn’t press her for details. He didn’t ask her to elaborate or explain what she meant. He knew she would continue when she was ready. He was living his own nightmare and facing his own ghosts, and he understood the worth of patience.
“He wants me to find him here in this life. He says he has something to show me.”
“Did he say what it was?”
“No,” she replied. “But I’m afraid to find him, because I might end up seeing his sister.”
“The one you’re supposed to save?”
Maria nodded. She didn’t want to elaborate. She didn’t want to explain to Henry how she’d lied to her husband when he’d asked her to stay away from the storage unit, and how she was already considering lying to him again.
“She only has a couple of days to live,” she said. “And I’m going home tomorrow.”
“You can’t, Maria.” She’d forgotten Henry’s hand was still draped across her arm, until his fingers gently brushed across her skin. “You’re not supposed to go home.”
“Why not?”
“I know who you are,” he continued. “I figured it out yesterday when we were at the park and you told me about your family in Bienville, and your job as a psychiatrist, and your son who hadn’t been born…” He paused, and she could see that he was struggling to continue, that he wasn’t sure how to force the next words out. “You’re Maria Forssmann.”
“How do you…” As her two worlds collided, Maria couldn’t still her mind. It was spinning with people and places and names, and she couldn’t remember which Maria she was supposed to be. When she finally found her voice, it sounded distant and hollow. “How do you know that name?”
“The whole country knew that name,” he said. “They held all-night vigils and sent hand-drawn cards to your family and watched your story on the news, night after night. I prayed for you. And Rachel, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were right. You didn’t die. You’re stuck in a coma because Rachel shot you.”
His words spiraled through the air before they hit her, the blow crushing and unyielding, and the deafening blast from the hypnosis ricocheted through her ears until she could no longer hear the words that fell from her mouth.
“No, she didn’t … She wouldn’t…” Her voice rose until it pierced through her own ears and she was screaming at Henry. “Why would you say something like that? You’re a liar!”
“I’m not lying to you,” he said. “Rachel Tillman shot you at some kind of storage unit, and then she ran.”
Maria couldn’t still her mind. It jumped from image to image, flashing back to the hypnosis with Dr. Johnstone. 307. Her storage unit number. The key in her hand.
“I’m so sorry.” Henry reached for her, but she pushed him away, desperate to distance herself from him and frantic to escape his message.
“Don’t touch me!”
She managed to get the door open just moments before she vomited on the ground below, then stumbled from the car on legs that could barely hold her. She ran, as fast and as far as those legs could take her, but Henry was close behind, and when his arms wrapped around her waist, she gave up her fight. She sank to the ground and sobbed, begging him to take it back. But Henry could no more take back her past than he could change her future, and while she had no memory of the events that he swore took place, she somehow knew they were true.
“You can’t be right,” she sobbed. “Rachel would never do something like that, and she didn’t even have a gun. She hated guns.”
I’m sorry, Maria. I thought it would end differently.
Sylvia had tried to save her, but Maria wasn’t her purpose. She’d done everything she could to keep her away from Rachel and the storage unit, but nothing was going to change Maria’s fate. Henry was right. She could feel it. The image was hazy, but the smells and the sounds were a part of her, so visceral and real that it was futile to deny any of it. Rachel shot her, but even as she knew that to be true, she also knew that Rachel wouldn’t have shot her. Not Rachel.
“I have to go back,” she said, pulling herself up from the ground. “I have to take care of this.”
“You can’t.” Henry stood up beside her, shaking his head and trying to reach out for the hand she kept pulling away. “You weren’t supposed to survive that, Maria. You can’t go back there.”
“You said you would do the same thing if you had the choice, that you’d go back to your family, too.”
“I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t realize that you were supposed to die that day.”
“But I didn’t die,” she said. “And there must be a reason for that.” George was trying to force his way into her thoughts, but she was doing her best to block him out: Some people just don’t know how to let go.
The image of the flat sheets tucked around her body from the hypnosis session and the baggy maternity dress she’d worn in the dream just moments earlier were fresh in her mind, forcing her to confront the constant fear for her unborn son that she’d carried throughout her entire pregnancy. And now this: a gunshot wound. He couldn’t possibly have survived it.”My son,” she whispered.
“Blaise.”
The name hung in the darkness between them, and Maria was certain she’d misheard Henry, until he continued. “Blaise Forssmann.”
“How could you know that name? I never told anyone.”
The grief stabbed at her like a thousand pointed daggers as she thought about the journal in her nightstand drawer and the way her husband must have wept as he sat on the edge of their bed, reading through its pages of hopes and dreams and fears that she held for their children—Charlotte and Emily and Blaise. The two daughters who were already living and thriving and the son who had yet to be born. She should have been there with him. Did he have to bury their son alone?
“They saved him,” Henry said, and when she reached out to steady herself, certain she was about to hit the ground, his arms were there waiting to catch her.
“My son survived? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure. The whole country was cheering for your miracle baby.”
“He’s alive,” she whispered, thankful that someone with the power to spare her son had been listening that day as she’d been wheeled down the hospital corridor, begging for his life. She was grateful for that mercy. Of all the people her husband had buried in his life, at least his son wouldn’t be one of them.
“I have to go back,” she said. “My son needs his mother.”
“He’ll have a mother, Maria. This time he’ll be born to a family that will love him just like you do.”
She could only hear George’s words as Henry tried to convince her of all the things the old man couldn’t: that her children would be born with or without her, that there was no ownership in the universe, that it was time for her to let them go. But he would have no better luck than George, because she didn’t have the strength or the courage to close the loophole that had been left open for her.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I won’t let them be torn apart like that.”
“There’s a reason things happened the way they did, a reason Rachel shot you, and as difficult as this is to hear, it was your fate to die in that storage unit.”
“That might be true,” Maria said. “And there might come a time when Rachel shoots me in a life where I can’t hang on, but it doesn’t have to be this one.”
“This isn’t just about you dying there, Maria. This is about you making the decision to do what you were sent here to do. About fulfilling your purpose. If you let that little girl die, whether you return to your family or not, you’ll have to live with those consequences for eternity.”
“Why do you care about my eternity? What difference does it make to you if I stay or go back to my family? I’m not seventeen-year-old Maria Bethe. I’m thirty-nine-year-old Maria Forssmann. I’m a wife and a mother, and that will never change.”
“I didn’t just come here to tell you about Rachel.” His eyes danced between shades of green as Maria watched him beneath the glow of a streetlight. A stillness settled between them, comfortable and familiar, as if they’d done this before. As if they’d once stood beneath a darkened sky, seeing each other so clearly that they could anticipate every thought and word and movement. “I remembered your story from seeing you on the news, but that’s not how I really know you. You were there with me, Maria, when I came back. I know you were.”
She was surprised at the comfort she took from his words, surprised that she didn’t want their story to end there, and while she didn’t know who she would see in eternity when she eventually came back from death, she hoped Henry would be there. She would miss him when she left. She’d miss the way he checked his wrist even though he never wore a watch, the way he scratched at his chin but couldn’t grow a beard, and the way he comforted her with his touch even though his hands were rough and calloused.
“I’m sorry, Henry. But I can’t choose you over my family.”
“I’m not asking you to choose me. I’m asking you to do what you were sent here to do, because I care about you and I know how much you’ll suffer if you don’t.”
She was defenseless against his words. She’d been ready to argue with him about how she couldn’t abandon her family over some juvenile flirtations and butterflies, but Henry wasn’t the kind of boy who would ask that of her. He may have felt the butterflies, but he wasn’t an eighteen-year-old boy who was tasting love for the first time. He was a man, who understood the enormity of what he was asking, and he was a man who cared about her eternity.
“You’re probably right,” she said. “I probably am destined to suffer for the choices I’m making today. But I’m okay with that if I can get my family back, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about not being able to stop me. You’re a good man, Henry, and I hope you’re right. I hope we do have a life together someday.”