As a young girl, I remembered questioning my dad about the four bedridden grandparents in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. My youthful body and active mind couldn’t grasp the concept of living in bed, eating nothing but boiled cabbage, and wearing only threadbare nightgowns—not to mention staring at the same three faces all day long. Like usual, I’d asked far more questions than my father was willing to construct answers for. An ironic exchange, considering only a few years later, he would choose a similar path after his fall.
But unlike my father, I refused to give up on life the way he had.
With shaky arms, I shoved the hundred-pound comforter off my weary body and found my footing on the icy floor below. As cold seeped into my bones, I repeated the mantra I’d been saying to myself since deciding to go in to work tomorrow morning. “Just one day at a time.”
Gail had advised me—numerous times—to use my three personal days and two of my stored-up sick days and take the week off. But I couldn’t do that to my students. They didn’t deserve a bedridden-by-choice teacher. They deserved the Miss Bailey before the call. The naïve first-grade teacher ignorant of soul-crushing computer glitches that stole children from the hearts of the mothers who loved them.
I’d give anything to be her again.
And yet, even as I thought it, shame descended over me like a storm cloud. Wishing I could be her again meant never having laid eyes on Noah’s sweet face. Never knowing the hope of motherhood to come. Is that really what I want?
Too afraid to wait for the answer, I headed for the shower and tried to will energy into my body. I needed to see what condition today’s sub had left my classroom in and read through any notes before I showed up to school tomorrow morning.
I’d never been a fan of coming to Brighton at night. It was too dark, too cold, too empty without the children who gave it purpose. Though I’d only been absent from this place for two school days, I felt like a foreigner visiting an unknown land the moment I entered the shadowy lobby and switched on the main lights.
At least there was nobody here to give me an awkward hope-you’re-feeling-better pat on the shoulder—or worse, a probing stare while asking about the symptoms of my rumored flu bug. I knew Mrs. Pendleton and Jenna would never break my confidence about the truth of my absence to the staff, but even still, I simply didn’t have the energy to answer twenty questions about body chills and fevers or be told which homeopathic tincture I should take the next time a virus tried to take me down. All I wanted—needed—was time in my classroom with my kids so I could forget everything having to do with babies. Or adoption. Or shattered future dreams.
Tomorrow morning couldn’t come soon enough.
I shoved my key into the glass office door and sailed past the secretary’s desk. It was a blessing not to have to stop for chitchat with Diana about all the social happenings at Brighton before I could gather the sub’s notes from my mailbox. But as I rounded the corner to the mail station wall, my eyes wouldn’t believe the sight in front of them. My box, the second from the left on the top row, was stuffed to overflowing. I grabbed an empty box from the stack near the copy machine and began scooping get-well-soon cards, letters, and drawings—so many precious drawings—into it. Unfolding one such piece of art, my chest knocked twice at the smiley-face balloons colored across the page with the words Feel Better! scrawled along the bottom in red crayon.
Still in search of the sub notes, I spotted a small blue gift bag smashed in the back of the four-by-ten rectangle. I tugged it out, a mixture of dread and anticipation causing my fingers to trip over themselves as I freed the package and pried it open. With a single peek under the tissue paper, my heart lurched to a stop.
A plush blue-and-green T-Rex stared up at me with big oval eyes.
I pinched the red tag around his neck to read the words penned there.
How could I resist?
—Joshua
Joshua bought Noah a present. I clutched the dinosaur to my chest as tears climbed my throat, creating the first fracture in my carefully constructed dam of denial. Days of bottled-up emotion now threatened the integrity of a structure that only a few minutes before had felt solid and secure.
A single tear trailed the length of my cheek and dripped off my chin. And then another rolled down after it.
Stop it. Don’t do this here. Not now.
But my chastisement was immediately combated with the recycling of Gail’s compassionate rebuke. “You need time to grieve, Lauren. Your heart grew attached to a little boy it believed would become your son . . . and now it needs time to let that same little boy go. Be gentle with yourself.”
Only, I didn’t want to be gentle with myself.
I wanted to be a mother. I wanted Noah.
And right now . . . I desperately wanted to sleep.
In less than ten minutes, I scribbled out a new lesson plan for tomorrow’s sub, left a message on the school district’s sub line, attached a note for Diana, and hoofed it out of the office.
Back to the parking lot.
Back to my townhouse.
Back to my bed.
As it turned out, I’d been unfair to criticize Charlie’s relatives. Because sometimes going back to bed was the only option a broken heart could handle.