Chapter 44
A round me, the world slips into shades of gray.
Perhaps it’s just the fading sun no longer able to reach us, having fallen too far below the horizon.
Or the fact that the clouds have shifted overhead to obscure not only the moonlight, but the stars.
But even the darkness has a grayish tint to it, a lack of potency.
The sounds of the forest go quiet, muffled in my ears.
The night I found John’s body, the agony had been piercing.
This is nothing like that. Whatever within my being provides me with the ability to feel, affords me the sensations of love, anger, joy, betrayal, whatever that part of me was, it left my body with my son.
And now that he’s gone, it’s just as absent.
A life that never belonged to me flashes before my eyes.
A stolen future replaced with a counterfeit memory.
Malia nursing my son when he cries out in hunger.
The Sister rocking him to sleep, closing his eyelids with the tendrils of her shadows.
Moments that should have been mine and his, replaced by the Sister.
I watch the alternate realities play out side by side, light erased by its dark twin. There is no version of events where Michael holds his nephew for the first time. There is no version of events where he comes up with a nickname for my child. One that I never would have come up with myself.
There is no moment where Nolan and I perform the naming ritual. My son will be given a name by the Sister, but I will never know my child’s name, the cadence of sounds to which he turns his head.
I watch my nameless child grow up before me, his first steps not toward me, but toward a swath of shadows. Will he stumble toward her open-armed, or will the terror of her cause him to shrink away?
What will the first words he speaks be? Will he call the Sister “Mama”?
He’ll scrape his knee for the first time, and though the Sister will be unable to heal the wound with her magic, the curse preventing her, it hurts all the worse to think that it might be her hands that patch him up.
My mind skips forward to his wedding day, the moment he discovers his upbringing has been a lie, a ruse, a trap. But I don’t let myself think of that one. If I do, I won’t make it out of this forest.
The Sister was not simply taunting me when she told me of the bedtime stories she would recite to him.
I would have told him the stories from the books that John and I read growing up.
I would have told him about the uncle he never got to meet.
I would have told him tales of adventure and how the world came together against all odds so that he could be born.
That is not the story he will learn.
She will tell him of a mother who gave him up for her own happiness. And the worst part of it is, she won’t even have to lie.
Something shifts in the corner of my vision. It takes me a moment to realize it’s my husband.
I’d forgotten he was standing there.
I turn and watch him. He’s staring at the spot where the Sister disappeared. Where our son disappeared.
I can see it in his eyes, how he’s recounting to himself every detail of our son’s face.
Did he even get a glimpse? Now that I consider it, I wonder if Nolan was even granted the chance to see him.
Our boy had been wrapped up in the Sister’s arms by the time Nolan came to us.
Charlie had been the one to take our boy away from Malia.
Does he know that our son possesses his dark head of hair?
“Nolan, I’m so—” I stop myself, unable to even bring myself to say “sorry.” It seems like a child’s word, something petulant. The word that’s supposed to get you out of trouble. A word that asks for forgiveness—but how can I ask forgiveness from my husband after bartering away his only child?
It seems cruel, selfish to do so.
He turns to me, his features stricken. Then his eyes widen when he beholds me.
“Darling, you’re pale,” he says. And as I try to stand, I collapse, my legs no longer able to hold me up. Though I’m not sure if it’s that they don’t have the strength, or that they simply lack the will. Perhaps they’ve decided that now that my son’s gone, they no longer have a purpose.
Why move me from place to place, if not to comfort my child while I rock him in my arms? Why advance, if every step forward is further away from the spot where I last held my boy?
Nolan catches me before I hit the ground, my entire body quaking in his arms.
“I did this,” I say. “I did this.” And there’s no forgetting it.
Nolan pulls me tight, his fists clutching the fabric of the shirt at my back.
“Charlie,” I say. “Nolan, I killed Charlie.”
“She’s not dead,” says Nolan. “Or she wasn’t when I left her. Maddox stayed behind to tend to her.”
My heart threatens to feel a bit of relief, but I don’t let it—not when I don’t deserve even that respite. If Charlie lives, I will not allow myself to feel happiness over it. It’s the least I can offer her.
The most I can pay.
Even if I wanted to, even if I felt I deserved that much, there’s no part of me that believes, even if Charlie is alive for the moment, that she will stay that way.
Not after the wound I caused, the blood I saw ballooning in the water.
There’s no telling how long her face was beneath the surface, either.
“We can still help her,” says Nolan.
I don’t nod. I don’t react at all. If my husband needs to believe that, if he needs to focus all his attention on saving Charlie because he cannot bear what we just lost, who am I to take that moment of relief away from him, when I’ve already taken everything else?
“Come on,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulders and hauling me to my feet.
“You should go on ahead,” I say. “You can get there—you can get to her faster if you’re not carrying me.”
Nolan doesn’t answer, other than to walk forward, his arm still securely around my waist.
We stumble through the lightless forest, silent other than Nolan’s heaving. Occasionally, an awful strangled sound escapes his throat, and I get the sense that he’s sobbing quietly, not wanting me to hear.
He should let me hear, though. Shouldn’t let me escape any of the consequences for what I’ve done, or what I’ve taken from him.
I just simply don’t have the energy to tell him as much.
When we reach the edge of the forest, the sound of the waves cuts, just barely, through the fog of my mind. The waves—and a voice, deep and desperate.
“Come on now. You’re going to be okay,” says Maddox, his bulky form coming into view at the edge of the water.
He’s huddled over a slumped figure. “I’m not going to let you die.
You can’t die. Not while you’re still mad at me,” he says, a twinge of a joke in his voice, caught by a sob.
“I’m serious, Charlie. You don’t get to punish me for eternity.
If you would just tell me what you want to hear, I would say it.
Please, Charlie, just wake up so you can tell me what you want me to say.
If you don’t wake up, you’ll never get to see how distraught I am right now.
Surely you would find that enjoyable, at least.”
Maddox’s voice gets higher-pitched, struggling to maintain its levity. There’s part of me that wonders if by the time Nolan and I reach their spot on the beach, Charlie will have been long gone. If Maddox is simply in denial, coaxing a corpse.
And as we reach them, the clouds shift in the sky—just enough for a hint of moonlight to splay across Charlie’s chest. It is rising and falling, ever so faintly. In the cool of the night air, fog plumes, ascending above her open mouth.
Maddox has her on her back, and he’s pressing a cloth to her waist, though it’s already soaked in blood. Maddox’s chest is bare. I’m assuming that’s where the cloth came from. The bottom of his left trouser leg is ripped too.
“Nolan. Nolan, I need your shirt,” he says.
Nolan obliges, placing me on the ground and taking it off, handing it to Maddox. He uses it to try to staunch the bleeding.
Once again, I’m sure it’s no use. I’ve never seen a weapon as deadly as the one Charlie created with her own hands.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” says Maddox.
“It’s my fault. After Charlie left with the baby, I had that woman pinned to the ground.
But then these shadows appeared. They wrapped around my waist and pulled me off of the woman.
By the time they’d let me go, she’d run off.
We have to hunt that woman down. Make her pay.
She talked a big game, like she had no intention of hurting us, and then she goes and does this.
What was she thinking, shooting when Charlie was holding the baby?—”
He stops himself, then looks up at us, locking eyes onto both of our empty hands.
“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry. Where did she go? I’ll get him back.” He looks feverish. Is speaking like someone who has been under a fever for too long.
Nolan just shakes his head ever so slightly.
Maddox nods, the motion even harder to detect.
“If we can get Charlie back to the cottage,” says Nolan, “she can rest there. There’s a healer in town, about a mile north of the cottage. I can go there immediately and retrieve him.”
“No,” says Maddox. “No, I’ll go.”
He glances at Charlie and doesn’t finish his sentence.
It’s written all over his face—he can’t bear to watch her die.
But his words soon pivot, like a small bird darting back and forth on the beach to escape the incoming waves.
“No, I’ll carry her back to the cottage,” says Maddox.
“Wendy, you can come with me too. I’ll watch after both of them,” he says to Nolan, “if you’ll just go to find the healer. It’ll be quicker that way.”
Nolan pauses, not answering, and then Maddox looks back and forth between us.
“No. No, of course not,” Maddox says. “I’ll go to the healer. You two don’t need to be apart right now. Nolan, can you carry Charlie back?”
Nolan nods, then looks at me. “Do you think you can walk?”
No, is what my body screams. No, the only place I want to walk is directly into the ocean. The water itself looks so inviting. As if I could collapse into it and the waves would sweep me away, carrying me from this dreadful shore forever. In a world of tumult, the ocean whispers words of peace.
But then I look down at Charlie, at the sweat beading on her brow mixed with the salt water.
The fact that Charlie is barely holding on to life is the only thing keeping me holding on to mine.
I will deal with my pain when this is over—when Charlie has either recovered or passed on to the next life.
But I cannot let my grief keep my friend from getting the care she deserves.
Not after what she sacrificed for me. For my son.
“Yes. I can walk,” I say.
Nolan nods, then carefully takes his hand away from my waist. He squats down and carefully picks up Charlie, mindful to keep the wadded shirt pressed to her abdomen.
It’s odd, seeing Charlie limp in my husband’s arms, her usually lively face, drained of anything resembling life at all. Her light brown cheeks have paled, sapped of color, and her dark black hair, usually so silky, falls in matted strings.
Maddox takes one last look at her, looking conflicted. Then he nods, as if steeling himself, and races off toward the northwest. I imagine he plans to cut through the woods, making a straight line for town.
Nolan and I stumble back to the cottage that was supposed to be our home.
All the while, I keep my palm on my friend’s chest.
It’s all I can do for her, make sure she’s being touched should she take her last breath.