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"Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans' suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort others"
—C. S. Lewis
Quincy
Seven years earlier…
* * *
I stood in the darkened room. My hands strangling the side of the empty white cot bed. My eyes searched the pale blue sheets with the grey elephants. Although it was too dark for me to make out all the detail, I knew exactly what those sheets looked like. I’d memorised the random pattern in which the elephants rotated. Trunk up, trunk down, trunk to the left and trunk to the right. And then every other run had the trunk up elephant half faded. At the time I thought it was cute, even though he’d wanted to return them. I liked that it made the cot look lived in and cosy. Even if it had never had a baby in it.
The dark blue grey sky looked clear, bathing the room in a solitary and cold midnight tinge. I knew that I should’ve stopped going in that room. I knew that it would make me relive every moment of that god-awful day. I kept going over the weeks before it in my head, analysing everything I’d done. Because I must have done something wrong.
How had this happened? Why me?
I’d done everything right. I’d followed every rule. Down to every miniscule detail.
I’d cooked everything to within an inch of its life. My yolks had been hard. The fish had been the bare minimum. No Sushi. No alcohol. No cigarettes.
So why me? Why my baby?
My life felt like a sick game. I wasn’t ready to do it again. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want this baby, I wanted the one I’d held in my arms. My little boy. The one who never got to feel my love but had taken it all with him.
I had nothing left to give. I was an emotionally barren waste land. I was a sinking ship in the middle of a cold dark ocean. Although there were other ships around me, there was nothing that could be done, unless I dragged them down with me.
I could feel him watching me. I knew he was stood there with his sorry guilt and useless apologies, and I knew what was coming. He often stood just outside the room. It was like there was some invisible barrier keeping him out. Until tonight.
His shadow on the floor grew shorter as he came closer. Physically.
Things had changed.
The funny thing about things changing is that unlike what people told you, you can’t always go back. Sometimes things change, and they don’t make things better. Change doesn’t always equate to good.
I’d changed, and he’d changed, and it hadn’t made us better. It hadn’t made us stronger. It hadn’t brought us together.
I hated change. I hated it because it had offered me so much. It had promised me a future I didn’t even know I’d wanted so badly until it was put in front of me.
It hadn’t delivered.
“Quincy.”
I squeezed the soft wood harder. My rings digging into it. I could hear the grain of the wood wince as the metal gauged it.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
I swallowed back the scream that was trying to claw out of my chest.
He couldn’t do this anymore. I didn’t want him to do it any more either.
“I know.”
“I can’t watch you do this to yourself.”
“That’s ok.”
“This person. You. You’re just not who I fell in love with anymore.”
No Shit.
“I don’t know who you are.”
I’m the mother who never got to mother her child. I’m the mother who was robbed in plain sight.
“I’ve packed a bag...”
“I know.”
“I can’t stay in this house any more. I don’t know what to do with all the silence and weeping.” His soft voice wavered. He was hurting too. I knew that, but he’d been happy to pretend that life simply went on.
It didn’t.
He’d packed up all the other baby stuff. The steriliser was gone from next to the coffee machine. The bottles weren’t next to the glasses. The Moses basket wasn’t next to the bed. The baby toiletries weren’t on the edge of the bath. This room was all that was left.
“I wish I was enough to bring you back. I’ve tried every way I know how. I tried loving you more but that wasn’t enough either. I wi
sh I was strong enough to just watch and wait for you to deal with it all. It’s been almost a year, Quincy.”
“I know.” I’d counted all 287 days since I’d held our boy. My boy. I’d scratched all 274 days into the tally in my chest since I’d buried him in the dirt.
“You won’t even talk to me.”
My eyes searched the quiet and picturesque London street outside. The Georgian townhouses and their window boxes. The flowers had been replaced with winter shrubbery.
“Goodbye Quincy, let me know when you’re ready to say more than I know or that’s ok, because it’s not. You’re not okay. I don’t think you want to be either.” I saw his arm raise toward me in his shadow and I stepped farther away. He sighed, defeated, “I’ll be at mum’s.”
He left. He didn’t wait for a reply. Good, because I had nothing to say. I didn’t want to talk to him. I had tried, but he never actually listened.
I didn’t want him anymore.
He’d used my baby to excuse his failings and his sins.
