My foot got stuck in the stupid pumpkin’s mouth. I shook it off and stumbled back with the momentum, landing hard on my ass and sliding down the hill myself only to beat the orange head to the roadside. I lay panting for a moment, covered in blotches of pumpkin guts and mountains of regret.
“What else can go wrong?” I asked the universe, shutting my eyes. “How ’bout you make something right for once?”
I popped one eye open and put my head up then to the sound of the sweetest, softest melody emanating from the house. Even the massacred pumpkin on the road beside me had no idea who was playing the piano inside, because the driveway was empty. Vicki wouldn’t be home for at least another ten minutes. There was no one else here but me and Ara, so that sound, which was no stereo, could be nothing other than the skilled, heartfelt playing of my beloved wife.
I got to my feet, slipping on pumpkin entrails, and tripped my way up to the house. The music was louder in here, and with each step I took toward the den, my heart beat harder. She was in there—the girl I’d been waiting for. My wife. My Ara. But as she started singing, I stopped dead. I recognized the song—an old one from maybe twenty or more years ago—and as the notes weaved through the air and struck me in the chest, it was her voice that hurt me the most. It had matured, if that was possible—lost that timid and sweet shyness—making it powerful and bold, as I imagined my Ara’s voice should have been.
And I guess, without all the hurt that had altered her from such a young age, she never had and most likely never would lack the confidence to be everything she could be; to be the best version of herself; to unleash her talents to their full potential.
As the actual words of the song filtered into my ears, past the new sound of her voice, I studied the meaning, realizing it wasn’t my Ara sitting at that piano after all. It was another very hurt, very lonely version of her. One I had isolated and shut out because she couldn’t love me. Shut out because she made mistakes—messed up. I felt like a shithead then, aching from my throat to my stomach as I recalled the title of the song and applied all that meaning to her new life. I knew the title was Fallen, but I couldn’t get the artist, so I pulled out my phone to Shazam it. I’d need to listen to this later—study it—try to understand this girl through the music she connected to.
Until now, I thought she was shallow and immature, but she clearly went a lot deeper than I could comprehend. And she clearly needed a friend—maybe the kind of friend I couldn’t be because I loved her too much. The kind Cal couldn’t be because he’d also encouraged her to love me.
I wanted to hold her more now than I ever had before, and as I gathered my heart off the floor and placed my hand against the door, a weathered one caught my arm. My eyes landed on Vicki’s face and she shook her head, jerking it then to the front door, so I followed.
We stopped at the base of the porch steps, the sound of Ara’s song leeching out into the street like magic. I just wanted to go back up there and listen, surround myself in the beautiful music and, once and for all, point out that my Ara was still in there—buried deeply, trying to break free.
“What’s going on, Vicki. Why wouldn’t you let me see her?”
“She can’t know that any of us have seen her play—”
“Why?”
“Ask yourself first why she denied that she could,” she said.
“I… I have no idea why.”
“David, sit down,” she demanded, in the impatient tone of a fed-up mother, walking to the step to take a seat. I followed, but my own patience was growing thin. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for some time, but there hasn’t really been a moment without a house of immortal ears.”
“Talk about what?”
“Ara,” she said boldly. “I’m convinced now that she’s separated herself from the version of her that suffered all the tragedy of death and losing all memory. This is obvious by the way she refers to herself as two separate people: you may have noticed she says ‘your wife’ or the ‘other Ara’.”
“Yes, and?” I studied her eyes for a moment, instinctually trying to read her thoughts, but remembering at the last second, I no longer had that power. “She hates being pushed into things she hasn’t chosen. We all know this, Vicki—”
“That’s not what it is, David. It goes deeper than that, and by making that comment, it tells me you didn’t listen to anything I just said.”
“Then enlighten me, please,” I muttered.
“Forgetting everything, learning not only how to be a person again but all about the world, the people, the history, that in itself can be very traumatizing, and I know you have no real concept of that because no one could possibly imagine what it’s like to wake up one day and know nothing. But, for Ara, she finds it incredibly painful that she doesn’t remember her own past. World history, she can learn, but a lifetime of experiences and lessons is a greater loss—”
“She doesn’t seem to care that much.”
“But she does. Can’t you see that?”
I shook my head, trying to think of one time that was obvious.
“She doesn’t want to be Ara because, by blaming her past self for what happened, it puts her outside of the pain, gives her someone to hate rather than to feel helpless herself and angry about what’s happened to her.”
I nodded, beginning to understand.
“She won’t admit when she feels things Ara felt or can do things Ara did, because she needs us all to see her as a new person.”
“Okay, I listened to what you said, but I still don’t understand why she needs to be a whole new person. Two people in one, maybe, but why shut Ara off altogether? She—”
“Like I said, this new Ara is an illusion she’s created for herself, so she doesn’t have to suffer so much. It all happened to the other Ara, you see, not her,” Vicki said, and it all suddenly made so much sense.
“So that’s why she holds so tightly to this old-Ara bullshit?”
Vicki nodded.
“So my Ara’s still in there? She’s just trapping her until she can cope?”
“In some ways yes, and in others no. What you have to understand here is that she struggled to cope when she first woke and had to recover from the burns and the cuts. She won’t remember that part, most likely—the pain—but her deep subconscious mind will. As her mind began to learn about this new world, it knew only pain. It’s a big world and a lot to take in, which is the reason toddlers are so prone to meltdowns—sometimes the reason babies cry. It’s hard. It’s over-stimulating. And her way of coping has been to avoid trying to remember. When she does, and she gets nothing, she feels upset, frustrated, so again, her mind’s way of avoiding the frustration is to separate herself from the girl with a past.”
“Right. So it removes all responsibility from her,” I said. “She doesn’t have to care about me, because she isn’t my wife. She doesn’t have to take on my pain, our pain, because this didn’t happen to her. It happened to the other girl.”
“Yes. But it’s not to avoid responsibility, David. It’s to cope with or to, perhaps, downplay the severity of her own disconnection to what she’s trying to recall.”
I sat frozen as that sunk in. I’d been looking at this version of her as an imposter myself, because I was looking for my Ara. Not my changed Ara. “So she hasn’t changed, per se?” I confirmed. “She’s pushing her past away?”
“Right, because as soon as she accepts herself as the Ara from the past, she has to accept that loss. And not only that, she has to accept the pain she suffered in recovery. At the moment, she probably denies that too—can shut herself off from it because she’s lying to herself.”
I covered my brow, feeling my heart sink. “What have I done?”
“You haven’t done anything—”
“No, I have. I’ve pressured her. Too much—”
“You have made matters a little worse than if you’d just listened to us all and stepped back from her—”
“I just didn’t realize.”
“I know.” She patted my knee. “But now I’m certain about what’s going on with her, you need to learn to love this version of her, and when she feels safe and loved, when she has a foundation of support that she can trust—and be sure that we won’t leave her falling as soon as she does—she will let herself start to believe that she is the same person she was when she died. We may have to accept that she doesn’t have the same feelings, but you need to make her feel safe to do that. You need to let her know, reinforce it every day, that she still has a friend in you, and a family, if she does decide that her heart has changed.”
“And what will I do if she does? How will I—”
“You will move on. You will take the blessing of still having all those memories, of having had more years with her than some people get with their spouse, and you will leave her be. She doesn’t owe you anything, David. Because you don’t own her.”
I dug my hands into the front of my hair and squeezed tightly. “It’s just not fair—any of it.”
“I know. But I would be willing to bet it is ten times more unfair for her. She lost everything too, David. She lost you, her children, her independence, dignity. She has a lot more to whine about than you do. Just be thankful her heart is big enough to stay and be a mother to your children when she barely knows them at all.”
“They’re her kids too. Nothing could keep her away, so don’t pretend it’s got anything to do with her big heart.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Love is something that grows, even with a child. It grows while you carry them in your womb, or for a stepparent, it grows as you get to know them, as you go through trials with them. It does not happen overnight for any parent and she is doing a tremendous job making it seem like she loved those kids all their lives. You have to give that girl some credit and stop hating her because she won’t love you.”
At first, I felt very put in my place, but after I got up and walked away, my feet dragging until I reached the beachfront jetty, I realized a few things: Vicki was right, for one. I had been selfish this entire time. I hadn’t been compassionate toward Ara even half as much as I should have, and I knew I’d pressured her to love me from the beginning, begged her with my eyes every time she looked at me. Of course she was going to reject that. Not because she’s willful but because it really is a bit creepy for a guy to look at a girl that way on first meeting.
My love for her is profound, and without our past as a platform, I could see how I would be overbearing. She wouldn’t really know what to do with that love or how to react to it. After all, she’d never been loved before by anyone except Falcon. A brotherly love. So she couldn’t possibly know what lengths a person would go to for another, or why. She couldn’t possibly know that, no matter what she did wrong, no matter how angry I was with her—for anything—I would always be here for her, even if I told her to get out. And I made matters worse by pushing her away that night we fought. I had looked at her with hatred, told her never to be a part of my life again because of the way she felt, and then I left. And she didn’t see me.
What had that done to her already stilted notion of love? To then be cast aside by Mike when she came to return my jacket. Shut out. Barred until she could come back with new eyes for me.
What we’d basically done is tell her she is not welcome unless she wants to love me.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to go back a few months in the past and alter the course of things. I did this. I pushed her away by trying to force her to be what I needed.
I loved her. I missed her while she was dead. I couldn’t live without her.
And I made her life hell lately by not seeing that it wasn’t about me.