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Over the next weeks, Elaina fell in love with Marisol with an intensity she couldn’t control. There was no option. No ability to take her usual step back. Her daughter was alive inside her. With her every second. Growing beneath her heart. Living off her very breath.
She lay in the dark in her room, scared to death. Knowing that something could happen to the baby or to her at any time. And yet...she lay there smiling, too.
She’d never known love could feel so...good in an all-encompassing way. That happiness could flourish in a way that made it stronger than anything fear could dish out.
Or maybe she had. When she’d been a kid. But she had blocked the best memories of the good feeling in order to survive after her parents had been taken from her.
She’d been an immature college sophomore all alone in the world with a life insurance policy that would barely keep her in school. If she worked, too.
The hard work had been good for her. She didn’t begrudge it.
And she didn’t begrudge working to help put Peter through medical school, either. There were a lot of times she’d wanted to stay home when he needed to go out. Times she’d have gone to the beach on a Saturday and he’d needed the stimulation of a game or hiking. She’d have liked colored lights on their Christmas tree. To own a home, even if it was a smaller starter home.
So many, many things she’d wished for back then. If she’d ever been able to choose, to have her way over his when they didn’t agree...
Something Greg insisted on giving her even when she wasn’t cognizant enough to ask for it.
A couple of weeks after her late-night talk with Greg, Elaina was on her way to the grocery store on Saturday when she made a detour. She’d left Greg at home in the shed, working on crib spindles. He’d mastered the four legs to Wood’s satisfaction and her onetime brother-in-law, ex-husband and family member had promoted him to spindle maker.
Peter was still occupying a portion of her mind. She couldn’t make a move without him there, in her thoughts. And so, almost in desperation, she went to see him. It had been over a year since she’d visited his grave.
She didn’t have so much a conscious thought that she didn’t want to go as a resistance inside her to being there. Still, her car took the turns by rote. She knew where to turn without any thought to where she was. In the first year after the accident, she’d had Wood bring her to the cemetery. Just as he’d brought her from the hospital in a wheelchair to attend Peter’s funeral.
And the years after that...she’d gone on her own. Sometimes twice in a day. But with weeks in between visits.
Trying to find herself in their togetherness, and in not being a part of him.
To take honest accountability.
To grieve.
That day, though, she wasn’t sure why she was there. Just that she had to be.
She’d told Greg their secret.
And as she parked, walked the short distance on the cement sidewalk and then through the grass to his grave, Elaina kept her hands in the pockets of her long black cardigan sweater, not caring about the recently watered grass wetting the bottoms of her jeans or the tips of her toes exposed by her sandals. She hadn’t dressed for a trek across the lawn.
She’d asked for the placement of one of the cemetery’s little cement benches across from the headstone years before. Sat down on the cold stone.
And still didn’t know why she was there.
To introduce him to Marisol? Tell him that she was having a baby girl? And that it wasn’t his?
That she was glad it was Greg’s? And that, while she would have never meant to hurt him, she wasn’t sorry she was glad that Greg was her baby’s father?
Time passed. She had no idea how much. Memories of her years with Peter played out. Some were great, some were not. From pleasure to tension, peace to stress, happy and not so much. The time, on the anniversary of her parents’ deaths, he’d brought her a beautiful frame full of pictures with her and them, to remind her of all the good that had come before.
The love that existed still...just like her love and Peter’s would never leave.
She needed to get that frame out. To hang it on a wall in her home. Marisol should know her grandparents.
“I didn’t want to divorce you...” The words came out. She hadn’t been thinking them. Yet, there they were, falling at Peter’s feet. Bones that were beneath the ground, but still there.
“I never would have.” The truth was there.
And what if she’d met Greg at the hospital with her husband still alive, in the same way she had after Peter’s death?
She might have been attracted to Greg—seemed pretty doubtful that whatever was between them wouldn’t have been there—but she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t have acted on it.
