Cora set the newspaper down on the desk and leaned back in her chair. Her gaze turned almost automatically out the window resting on the clapboards of the Cooper house just visible through the dense shrouding of trees. She sat for the longest time, unmoving except for her left hand that ran over the page of her open Bible. The motion of her hand was slight and rhythmic. Her lips were moving, repeating the verse almost exactly as it was printed on the page beneath her fingertips. Someone watching might have thought she was in a trance
When her neck became stiff and she was too uncomfortable to sit anymore, she pushed the chair back and stood. Picking up the folded newspaper, she read it again, over and over, until the words blurred on the page and became unreadable.
Nick was dead, the obituary said. A car accident. She lifted her eyes again and looked out the window. Rage was coursing through her brain and body but the fleshy face remained slack, expressionless.
The sun was going down and the light that came into the room was steadily dimming. Cora hardly noticed. She began to pace across the oriental carpet, her movements quick and precise. The gray cotton knit dress swished against her thick knees with each movement. When she reached the wall, she turned abruptly, like a swimmer doing laps, almost pushing off and going in the opposite direction. There were no complete thoughts going through her mind, only fragments of sentences, words and raw emotion.
She stopped suddenly, mid-pace, her eyes narrowing to slits. As she stood there, in the middle of that room on the second floor of her home, she suddenly felt overcome with grief. It wasn’t so much the loss her of son that she was grieving. She’d lost him long ago, though she always held a hope that she would get him back. No, it was more than that. Each loss in her life had compounded with those before it, growing and growing, never leaving her, never receding. She carried them with her always like a large sack of stones on her back. This stone was perhaps the largest and the heaviest. Adding this to her already unwieldy burden might be her undoing. This sensation caused her to sink, almost without knowing, against the wall. She placed her back against the smooth surface and sunk down on her haunches, her hands moved across her face and through her hair.
“No. No. No,” she whispered over and over.
She had already suffered enough losses. Starting with her mother and her brother. Her mother. She had been such a small woman, not even five feet tall. Hardly a woman at all in Cora’s mind, more of an elf or maybe a sprite. Something mystical and not quite real.
As a small child Cora would stare at her from her bedroom window, bundled in her coat, walking the perimeter of the grounds in the evening, with no purpose or destination, just to escape the house for a while, so isolated, so alone, so afraid. Cora wasn’t sure how she could have known that her mother was afraid. Maybe she didn’t know, maybe it was just an assumption. Cora wasn’t certain which memories were real and which she’d conjured up to keep their relationship alive. It had all blurred together with the passing of time.
Cora had been told that her mother had a hard time birthing her. The woman that used to clean the house said she could hear her mother’s screams clear out in the woods. She lost a lot of blood but she lived and Cora lived. When she was four years old her mother died trying to give birth a second time. Cora had replayed her memory of that day through her mind so many times over the years it had worn a permanent groove in her brain. The slightest thing would set the memories in motion like a train headed down a track. Once they started they couldn’t be stopped. As the images ran through Cora’s mind, she rocked slightly, her back hitting the wall with each movement.
She heard her mother’s screams; saw her lying in the bed, her legs open, the bedclothes cast aside, the women around her, taking turns soothing her mother with their voices and their touch, begging Cora’s father to take her to the hospital. She heard his steadfast refusal. All Monroes had been born in this house, this one would be no different, he’d said. Then he had walked away. Finally it was over. The vivid memory left with Cora was that of her mother, of her in that bed, her mouth slightly open, her face a colorless white. A small bloody form lay across her chest. The baby, her brother, had been stillborn.
Later that night, as she lay in bed in a fetal position, one of the women came to her room to tell her that her mother was gone. The woman was kind and her voice was soft as she told Cora everything she needed to know about life, death and babies. Cora soaked her pillow with endless tears, feeling abandoned and scared. Her father came to her later, pacing back and forth near where she lay, but didn’t so much as look at her. He ranted about having been denied a son. He spoke loudly and harshly about the woman who had died, as if she had no connection to him, as if he barely knew her, as if her body was not in the other room, the warmth still in her limbs.
That day, she decided she would never, ever have a baby, not the way her mother had. She would not carry the baby of a man she despised. Her son Nick had been born twenty-five years later of a completely different kind of relationship. But now he was gone.
The last in the long line of Monroes and Whitfields was gone. He’d thrown it all away. The money, the property, his place in society. His future. He’d given it all up when he disappeared that afternoon fourteen years ago. He’d just walked out, choosing instead a meager existence, scrimping and borrowing for an education, a home. Cora felt her grief subside for a moment and something even worse took its place. Panic. Panic tinged with despair and hatred. Nick had taken something away with him that afternoon. Something more than just his small sack of clothes. He had taken something with him that could destroy her, could destroy everything.
For fourteen years she had waited and wondered when it might come back to haunt her. She always thought he would use it in a moment of anger to rip her life to shreds. But he hadn’t. Ironic that it was now, after his death that this should be happening. Cora’s eyes darted back and forth across the room like a metronome, fear fixed on her doughy features. Would he have given something so important to this wife he’d left behind, she wondered.
“Not now. I’ve come too far for this.” Her head shook at the thought.
Then she raised herself up from the floor effortlessly like a string was attached to the top of her skull, controlling her movements. This girl, this wife, was the last link to a past that finally needed to die. Cora placed the paper down onto the desk and ran her hand over the grainy photograph of her son’s face.
Nick’s wife was out there somewhere. Cora just had to find her.