A kaleidoscope of that final moment with him raced through her brain. His smile she loved, the striking blue of his eyes, warm with love and happiness; his hand on her shoulder. Sara squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t block the remembrance of his grip tightening painfully, and then jerking away, as though something wrenched him from her. The shouts ripped from his lips. The fear on his face. But not for him; for her. Always for her.
She found it strange the way she remembered it all; as though she had watched it from afar and her eyes had seen him and nothing else. Nothing but him had registered. Which made it that much more terrible. Because that’s what she remembered, what she relived, every single day.
Him.
In fine detail.
Dying.
***
“You have to move on.”
Sara looked at her clasped hands. “I can’t.”
“You have to. It’s not a matter of can or will; it’s have to.”
“He’ll come back.”
“He won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
Sara pressed her lips together and watched her fingers go white in her lap. “This is all a dream.”
“This is reality. He’s gone, you’re not. Live, Sara.”
“He’s not gone, not really.”
“Yes. He is.”
She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling. “No.”
“He wouldn’t want this.”
The tears, her ever-present companion, showed themselves. “I know,” she whispered.
“It’s been over a year.”
Her eyelids slowly closed against the pain those words evoked. One year. Had it been so long? Had it been so short?
“I know.”
“Sara.”
She stopped rocking in her chair, and then wondered how long she’d been rocking without knowing it.
“Sara.”
Her eyes opened. Sara jumped to her feet and looked around the room. It was empty. Her house was empty, like it should be, like it always was. She frowned and rubbed her forehead. It pounded. Her hands shook. It was happening again. Not again. She was losing her mind; she had to be losing her mind. There was no one there. On top of everything else, she was mad. But if she was insane, she wouldn’t realize it, right? So maybe she was okay.
The phone rang and she jumped. Sara grabbed it from the wall.
Please be whoever was just talking to me, please don’t let that all be in my head. We were talking on the phone and the phone disconnected and I sat down to wait for you to call again.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Walker?”
Sara squeezed her eyes shut and mutely shook her head. You‘re not who I wanted to be calling me; who my sanity needs to be calling me.
“Hi,” she managed to get out. She sank into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Is everything okay?”
“Of course.”
“You haven’t visited in a long time.”
“I’ve…I’ve been busy,” she lied, holding the phone so tight against her ear it hurt.
“You missed your last two appointments.”
“Yeah, sorry, I was working.”
A pause. “On your artwork?”
“Yes.” Sara’s eyes slid to the right. There was a door there, and beyond that door, was her career, dusty with disuse. She hurriedly looked away, as if by looking in that direction she was announcing the massive untruth.
“And how is it coming along?”
“Great.”
“What are you working on?”
Her leg shook a frenzied beat as her teeth gnawed on the skin around her thumb. “Uh…listen, Doc, I gotta go.”
“Can we set up a time to meet?”
“I don’t—”
“It’s imperative that I see you. You have to know this.”
Her shoulders slumped. A whispered, “I know,” left her.
“How’s Tuesday, the 29th? At ten in the morning.”
Tuesday, when was it Tuesday the 29th? What day was today? Sara massaged a circle into the middle of her forehead. Tuesday the 29th. Only a little over three weeks away. It was too soon. Panic seized ahold of her. That Tuesday was too soon.
“Sara?”
“Yes?”
“Great. See you then.”
No! Sara’s mouth opened, but there was no point in arguing when all that would hear her was a dial tone. She hung up the phone. She’d been acknowledging that she was listening, not that she was agreeing to see him, and she knew he knew that.
She lurched to her feet. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t go there, couldn’t see him, couldn’t talk to him. Sara couldn’t even look at him. No. She’d been putting it off for so long and he knew it. But it was too soon. She wasn’t ready. Sara would never be ready.
***
Sara had been an only child. She’d grown up in a big house in Iowa with a loving mother and father who both passed away far too soon from this world. They’d tried for years to conceive and had given up when Sara came into the picture. Older than they’d thought they’d be as first time parents, they’d done all the activities parents decades younger than them would have and more. They didn’t want Sara to miss out on anything. They didn’t want her childhood to be lacking in any way. Her throat tightened and Sara leaned back on the couch, rubbing her face, wiping her stinging eyes.
Her mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father an electrician. Jim Cunningham had a heart attack at the age of sixty-one; one he didn’t recover from. Darcy Cunningham died not long after; months only, at the age of fifty-nine. The doctors said she had a stroke, but Sara knew what she’d really died from; a broken heart. They were both seemingly healthy, both taken from Sara when she was only twenty.
It had been hard to accept one of their deaths, but both of them had been smothering. She literally hadn’t been able to breathe for short amounts of time for weeks after her mother’s passing. Sara had had to force air into her lungs when all she’d wanted to do was not breathe. Breathing had hurt. Breathing had meant she’d lived while her parents no longer did. It was like her body had wanted to stop living because it couldn’t deal with the pain of losing them.
Sara had thrown herself into her schooling and her artwork and lived, but not like before, never the same as she’d lived before their deaths. She’d existed in a numb state for months. Sara closed her eyes. It was nothing like what she felt now. It hurt whether she breathed or not. And the one thing that stung the most was knowing her parents’ love had been so true and pure that one had not been able to live without the other, and yet, here she sat, without her love, still living, still breathing.
Though she’d kept to herself after her parents died, scared to give her heart to someone who could leave her as they had; scared to love; scared to be happy, he had pushed past her fears and into her heart and she hadn’t had a chance to be scared before he’d already owned her. She’d loved him and then she’d lost him. No matter how many times Sara loved, she lost.
She lurched to her feet, going still until a wave of dizziness passed. Only it didn’t. It amplified. Sara slumped back to the couch, wondering if she was going to pass out. Twice in her life she’d lost consciousness; both times when death had come calling to tear her world apart. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any of Sara left to disintegrate. It was all leaving her, fading away, becoming lost as she lost everything that had ever meant anything to her; as she lost herself.
Sara clearly remembered how it happened; that third time death had stolen from her, though that was one of things she would like to fade away. It began with cramps, then blood, then the reality that had to be a lie and wasn’t. She remembered him holding her, crying with her, his grip painful, his arms the only thing keeping her upright. Sara remembered the hollowness, the disbelief, the hope that somehow, it was wrong, and somehow, everything was still okay. Then the blackness as consciousness left her and still the blackness when consciousness returned. The pain in her stomach, the pain in her heart; the pain that had never fully left her.