JUNE 20 / 8 AM

Eli Hardy

I WAS AWAKE contemplating a run for the first time since Alice’s death when the phone rang. It was early and my mood lightened as I walked over to pick it up from beside the bed where I’d left it charging. The thought of hearing Ophelia’s voice made me hopeful. I’d woken up with my thoughts on her. My dreams had been sweet instead of the nightmare that had once plagued me every time I closed my eyes. She was solely to thank for that even if she didn’t know it.

The Atlanta phone number that lit up my screen made all the peace vanish as quickly as it had come. In its place came the heaviness that I tried so hard to push back into a dark corner and forget. The number I had deleted from my contacts months ago, but it was burned into my memory. I recognized it. I’d seen it so many times over the past six months.

That part of my life was over. I had closed the connection. Ended all attempts at trying to understand. There was nothing that could make the truth easier. None of it had been real. It had been a façade and, in the end, taken the only real thing it had given me. My son.

I ended the call without answering, dropped the phone on the bed this time just as quickly as I had picked it up wanting to get away from the memory. The need to run was now clawing at me in a way it never had. Walking back to the closet, I grabbed the running shorts that had been neglected for so long. Once I had run daily for fitness but the need to run from the demons that I would never be free from pushed me now. The phone call reminding me of what I’d never forget. Choices I could never go back and change.

I’d come to rely on Ophelia to keep me from getting lost in the horror that haunted me. Ophelia couldn’t always be here when the memories came. She made me feel centered and I was depending on her presence more and more every day. It was unfair to her. I had to find my own salvation from the past. Being with her shouldn’t be based on her easing the pain. I was using her, and I had to find a way to stop. Relying on someone else to cope with anything was unhealthy. The more I told myself this, the deeper my need for her grew.

The phone rang again. I didn’t move, standing still, unable to look in the direction of the phone I listened to each ring waiting for it to end. When the last ring faded, I exhaled. I didn’t go check the number. I didn’t want to see it. Grabbing my running shoes, I put them on and laced them tightly. Before I was finished with this task, the chime alerting me to a voicemail broke the silence. The pounding in my head began. It was a familiar reaction. I inhaled deeply and exhaled preparing for the sorrow to pull at me.

When only the bearable ache lingered inside me at the memory, I took another deep breath. It was confusing and almost relieving. My panic had been a habit. Seeing any reminder from my past had always triggered so many emotions I’d expected it to take over like it always had. This time the power of it was weak. The struggle to breathe hadn’t plagued me. I was standing here in my room alone and I was normal.

Walking over to the phone, confused by the ability to suddenly handle something that normally triggered the pain, I felt stronger. Able to face the memory. No longer hiding from it all but accepting it. I picked up my phone and pressed the voicemail notification. Putting it to my ear, I heard the familiar voice I expected.

“It’s Annie, but you know that. I have some things of Alice’s you might want . . . and Eli, there is something you also need to see. I can’t make you talk to me. But you need to see this and see the truth. Hating her won’t change the past. She paid for it all with her death. Shit. Whatever. Just call me back.”

I stood there after the message had ended. Annie was Alice’s older sister. Their voices so similar yet that was where their similarities ended. Annie was a dependable, stable, hard-working single mom, who didn’t let her childhood affect the person she had become. It had made her determined and not a victim.

Alice had been the beauty of the two, yet she’d chosen a much different path. One that appeared exciting and colorful yet had been a tragedy wrapped in a shiny package. I’d been fooled by it as had so many. The memory of having to identify her body in the hospital morgue no longer caused me the agonizing grief it should. She had been my wife. Losing her should have been something that would always carry sorrow. But it wasn’t sorrow I felt toward Alice’s memory. It was anger. Her lies, her choices, her selfish and reckless behavior had taken not just her life but that of our child’s. My world had been ripped apart the night I was handed the tiny little boy barely developed wrapped in a blanket with eyes that would never open to this world. They’d tried to save him when they knew Alice wasn’t going to survive but it had been too soon for him. He wasn’t ready. All the work the doctors and nurses had done couldn’t make his body ready to face life outside of the womb. He’d been gone before he entered it.

My gran had always said that secrets never were the winners at hide and seek. It had taken me years to figure out what she meant by that. But when Alice’s secrets had no longer had a hiding place those words of my gran’s suddenly were very clear. In death, you can’t cover up the lies left in your wake. They have a way of unraveling and bursting free to damage everyone in their path.

The man driving the car that had crashed fatally that night killing him on impact and Alice a few hours later was her high school boyfriend. The text messages on her phone revealed a life Alice lived I had never known. Sex so twisted it sickened me and drug use I’d been too fucking naïve to recognize. The things she’d exposed our son to, I would never know. She hadn’t even given him a chance. The drugs he’d been exposed to while in her womb were very likely the reason he was underdeveloped for twenty-six weeks.

I’d spent hours researching babies who had been born that early and survived. Trying to find a reason why my son hadn’t. Any reason other than the fact his mother had failed him. I had so much to hate her for I wanted to be able to forgive her for something if not everything. In the end, that had been a futile task. It had been me I realized that I hated. Because I hadn’t seen the warnings. I hadn’t saved our son.

I wouldn’t call Annie back. We had said all there was to say to one another the weeks after Alice’s death. Annie thought her sister had paid the price for her sins with her life, but I disagreed. She didn’t suffer the heart-wrenching sorrow of losing our child. She hadn’t held the lifeless infant in her arms and saw his ending before he ever had a beginning. She hadn’t faced her sins. She’d escaped all the repercussions for them. I’d been left here to find a way to live through each unraveling of her demented lifestyle. It had been me that was continuously punched in the gut with one truth after another. Each one growing more horrible as the last.

I hadn’t gone to Alice’s funeral. I hadn’t allowed our son to be buried with his mother. Annie was the only family Alice had other than me. She had fought me on it but not hard and not long. She knew there was no point. I wouldn’t budge and, in the end, I refused her calls. I didn’t even know who had gone to my wife’s funeral and to this day I didn’t care. Her life had not been one to memorialize.

Alice had failed our child and he deserved more than being buried with a woman who had never protected him. He was pure where she was tarnished even deeper than I had realized. The ugliness that she had allowed to control her in this life had taken her in death and I wanted my son to be in a safe place. It was the only thing I had left to do for him. At that time, it made sense. It was the only way I could see them lower him into the ground. Knowing she was nowhere near him.

I hadn’t taken any of Alice’s things when I left the apartment we had shared. I’d moved into hers when we had married, leaving things in mine due to the year lease on the place. Grate had been going to sublease it for his girlfriend but that never had time to take place. I’d been back before the ink had been dry on our marriage certificate.

Alice had entered my world like a force of nature. I’d never known anyone like her, and I had thought what we had was the love others searched for. She was always laughing and smiling. I had been drawn to that the first night I met her. In the end, she had been a master manipulator and I had been the idiot who believed she was real. The warning in Annie’s words the night we ran off to Vegas to get married were possibly the only truths I’d been given from either of them. I hadn’t listened. Believed as Alice had told me so many times that her sister was always jealous of her. She didn’t want to see her happy because she was miserable. It had been easy to believe because I wanted it to be true. Alice was pregnant with my child and marrying her had been the next step. Even if there was doubt trying to edge its way in, I had forced it out just like I had chosen not to believe Annie’s warning.

Remembering was easier I realized as I stood there letting it all replay like a movie reel in my mind. I had worked so hard at forgetting. Not allowing it to resurface, afraid of the darkness that always came to pull me under. There was the ache that would never go when I remembered the son I had lost. I wanted that memory and I held onto that pain. Some sorrow was meant to stay. The hatred I held for Alice was what I didn’t want to allow to control me anymore. Holding onto that kind of anger and hate kept you from living.

“I loved a woman that didn’t exist,” I said aloud, needing to hear the words. Admitting it and accepting it was like a weight lifted from my shoulders. Forgiving her might never come but letting go of the memory of what I thought she was made the emptiness inside me fade away. The love I’d had for Alice was never real because I hadn’t known the woman she truly was. My inability to think about her, about the past had kept me from accepting it for what it was. A freedom came with letting Alice go. The last words Annie had said to me was, “Alice had been chasing death since we were kids.” I had hated her for so many things but hating a woman who was damaged since childhood was pointless. It had been me who ignored the truth.

I opened the drawer beside my bed. The box I had placed in there had been unopened since I placed the items inside of it six months ago. I’d bought the small slender cedar box at an antique store two days after leaving Sea Breeze. During the first days of my journey while I was trying to figure out what I wanted in life, I had stopped in little towns that intrigued me. Diners, coffee shops, and unique stores that caught my attention filled that first week for me and kept me moving farther away. I had traveled through four states before slowly turning and heading back east until I ended my journey only hours from where it began.

The box had been my first purchase on that trip. I had walked through the store so full of items from my childhood. It had made me homesick and I wondered more than once while examining toys, lunch boxes, and even china that my gran had if I was doing the right thing.

Then I’d seen this box. The words SPREAD YOUR WINGS had been engraved on the top of the box. As if fate had been trying to talk to me and remind me why I was out here on the road, I repeated the words several times then knew I had to buy the box. Back then I’d been a dreamer and believed it had been words meant for me.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I opened the box and did nothing else. The photo that sat on top of the papers folded neatly inside still filled me with regret and sorrow. But I knew that was okay. Losing a child wasn’t easy and if the pain didn’t come with his memory then what kind of man was I? I held onto the way seeing his small face made me feel. It was all I had of him. All I would ever have of him. I didn’t touch the photo but simply studied the small face. That night forever marked me. Holding him had made me realize I had never truly experienced real heartbreak. But more than that, he taught me about unconditional love even though he never took his first breath.

Gently, I closed the lid and placed the box back inside the drawer beside the bed where I had always kept it no matter where I lived. However, this time I couldn’t close the drawer. I’d been unable to look at the box and face the reality of the contents for so long yet now the thought of putting him away bothered me. I took the box back out and placed it on the nightstand instead. Hiding his memory never made it fade. I never wanted to forget him.

With one long look at the box, I stood and went to run.