Chapter Twenty-Four
Found Family—when the protagonists create deeper bonds with their chosen community than they had with their family, and these bonds help the protagonists to heal.
I’ve done my best to recover from the earlier upset, and I’m ready to lose myself in Nathan. I had my word count to hit—several days of it—and admittedly, I throw myself into it a little bit more vehemently than maybe I need to.
I need the distraction. When I’m done in the office, I walk outside, wrapping my arms around myself. Alice, Lydia, Gladys, and Elise are sitting in the courtyard.
Alice looks at me, her eyes kind and soft. And I stop.
I want Nathan. But something makes me linger at the courtyard.
“Join us,” Alice says.
I hesitate, then ultimately open the gate and head into the swimming pool area.
I can tell she’s acting with caution but that she wants to ask if I’m okay. Suddenly, I feel ... tired. Tired of holding my secrets in. Tired of carrying the weight of all this. Like it’s something I’m ashamed of. It’s not that. I’m not ashamed; it’s just that sharing hasn’t made it go away. If anything, it feels closer to the surface. I’m not broken, but ...
Nathan understands grief. He wasn’t thrown off by my reaction to it.
He didn’t think it was odd that this many years later I’m still affected.
I’m searching for something, and I don’t even know what it is. So I sit down.
“How did the rest of rehearsal go?” I ask.
“Fine once we got the camel settled down,” Alice says, smiling. “I love that I can still experience new things even at ninety-five. That’s a gift if you ask me. Though I’d like my next new experiences to include fewer barnyard animals.”
“Is a camel a barnyard animal, really?” Lydia asks.
“It depends on where the barnyard is, I think,” Gladys says in a sage tone.
Alice looks at me with those laser-focused eyes. She doesn’t want to put me on the spot, and I know that. For some reason, right now I don’t feel on the spot. I feel safe.
“It’s okay,” I say to Alice. “You can ask me.”
The others in the group look at Alice and me intensely.
“Amelia,” Alice says, in the most gentle tone I’ve ever heard from her. “Did you lose a baby?”
I nod. Wordlessly.
“I recognized that look on your face,” she says softly. “It was the same one I saw looking back at me in the mirror after I lost my little girl.”
Her little girl.
“Alice . . . I didn’t know.”
Alice does something I don’t expect. She smiles. “Oh, it’s amazing to think, it’s been so many years. So many I don’t count up how old she would have been.” She lets out a gentle sigh. “Because there is no would have or could have , only what is . I do think, though, about how long I’ve loved her.”
My heart feels sore.
Elise reaches across and grabs hold of my wrist, squeezing me tightly. She doesn’t ask me why I didn’t tell her. I don’t know why I thought she would. Instead, she just holds on to me.
“It happened before I came here,” I say. I tell them the story. About how the pregnancy was unexpected but I wanted it more than anything in the world.
About my pink nursery.
“I named her Emma.” My voice breaks. “It’s a beautiful name.” I look at Elise, and I feel something fracture in my chest.
I haven’t said her name like that since I got here. Then after I’d been there a year, I met Elise, and I wanted her to be my best friend. She had the prettiest little girl with the same name as the one I’d lost.
It felt wrong, to make it a sad thing.
I didn’t want to make it a sad thing.
I didn’t want my life to be sad.
I feel exhausted and angry. I don’t understand why I have to deal with this. I never do this. I never get angry. About my terrible mother, my fucking awful ex-boyfriend. About the baby I lost that I wanted so much. More than I wanted him.
I feel it, so deep, so real, so hot and destructive.
Anger.
Anger because I have had to deal with so damned much. Anger, because I didn’t know how else to handle it but to lock it away inside me.
I wipe tears away from my cheeks. “It just feels so pointless,” I say. “I wanted to leave it behind. Because I don’t want to carry it with me anymore. If I can’t carry my baby, why ...”
I break then. I didn’t do it when I told Nathan. I do now. As these women, who have been so good to me, who have done things for me that my own mother never did, hold me. They all put their hands on me, and let my sorrow fill the silence.
When the wave subsides, Gladys finally speaks, her sharp brown eyes sparkling. “I lost two pregnancies before I had my son. You feel so alone sometimes when those things happen. Ashamed.”
Alice nods. “Yes. Especially in our time. Women were supposed to be mothers. I failed at that. It made me useless for a long time. I didn’t want to feel different , I didn’t want to be different. What was the point, after all?” She sits in silence for a moment. “But I am . I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So I listen. I’m hungry. Hungry for the wisdom of women. I wonder, for the very first time, if maybe that was why Christopher could never really understand.
Because I carried that baby. Because I was the one who had to give birth and come home with empty arms.
The person I would’ve wanted to talk to, my own mother, wouldn’t be there for me. I hadn’t even told her.
So I’m desperate now. For this woman to look at me and tell me I can be okay. She understands. She knows.
To sit with someone else who knows is the most healing thing I never knew I needed.
“It changed me,” Alice says. “For a long time I resisted that. I wanted to pretend like none of it happened. I went to the hospital thinking I would come home with a child, and instead I lost my dreams. I wanted to forget. I wanted to go back to being myself.” She lifts her shoulders, as if she’s shrugging off a weight. “I couldn’t. It wasn’t until I realized that I could keep her with me, and I could let it hurt, and I could let it heal, that I actually began to find myself again. I’ve had a beautiful life. That loss ... It wasn’t beautiful. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t think loss like that is meant to be . I don’t think terrible things are so easily explained. Her life was real, a momentary thing. It was up to me what I decided to do with that love I had for her. I decided ... slowly, over the course of time, that I could let that love be a gift. That I could remember it well.”
I thought of how she had taken the baby from me. How she could hold her when I couldn’t.
“We never had children,” Alice says. “Not after that. Though, we had such a wonderful marriage, Amelia. Filled with so much love. I don’t dwell on what isn’t. But I remember .”
Gladys seems to consider Alice’s words before she looks at me again. “A child is a promise of a whole world,” she says. “When you lose a pregnancy, a child, you lose that world. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.”
That truth settles deep inside me.
My Emma’s life is an unwritten story, but I can still write her into mine. The truth of what loving her means to me will underlie every syllable, every sentence. How can it not?
It matters .
She matters.
So do I. The loss I felt, the way I grieved and am still grieving. It matters.
I feel surrounded by this wisdom, held close by it. By these different experiences of motherhood. Elise, who has her Emma. Gladys, who had loss before her son. Alice, who found joy in a different world than she’d first dreamed for herself.
This, I realize, is something I was missing.
Sitting with women and asking them how they live. How they love. In spite of everything.
Because of everything.
I am in awe of the fierce strength in these women.
It makes me see a strength in myself I haven’t seen before. It makes me see the real truth of what Elise and I were talking about earlier, that life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable.
And we keep going, until we find more happiness. However it looks.
Looking at Lydia, Gladys, and Alice is looking at loss. Of all different kinds. They’re all widows now.
I realize now I’m not simply looking at loss. I’m looking at lives well lived.
Well loved.
I look around and realize that while I tried to leave things behind, I didn’t leave everything behind. I brought the pink with me. I brought that hope.
I lost the world where I would watch my Emma grow.
My love of her, the hope of her, came to this new world with me.
Everything that’s ever healed me, hurt me, shaped me has come to this world with me.
When I’m a mighty oak, like Alice, I’ll be shaped by all of it.
It’s my pain, which means it’s up to me to try to decide what to do with it.
For a child that never breathed.
She changed me, and I’m glad she did.
This experience changed me. Maybe when I’m older, I’ll hold someone else’s baby with ease the way Alice did. Maybe someday I’ll hold my own like Gladys.
Maybe someday I’ll sit in this courtyard with a young woman experiencing this same loss and I’ll hold her hand and speak with the confidence of time.
What I’m certain of, for the first time since everything fell apart, is that I’ll be happy.
Truly happy. Because the lines on these women’s faces are not all from tears.
They have smiled, and they still do. After loss. After hardship.
Alice is an oak.
Because of the love in her life, but the loss in it as well. It isn’t an easy thing; it isn’t a simple thing. It is only doing the very hardest work, it is only being willing to take the next step forward when you cannot see where it’s taking you. It’s letting your face smile again so it can make new lines that are forged by happiness and not just sorrow.
I can do that. I can.
I realize I’ve been missing something all along. I thought I left my grief behind.
I brought it with me, and I tucked it away. I kept it hidden so I could keep it safe, because I didn’t know what my life would look like without carrying my daughter in that way, but I can do it in a different way.
I can do it like Alice. Who had to let herself be changed.
I can do it and not stay in the same place. I don’t have to leave her behind entirely to find happiness. That’s been the lesson of the last few weeks. I’m learning how to be. This new version of myself, not a fake one. Not one who was born the day I walked into Rancho Encanto. Not the woman I was in LA either, or the girl I was in Bakersfield.
I know what it costs to hope now. To strive for happiness. It is so much heavier, but I imagine when I was younger. When I hadn’t lost anything. I’ve been afraid to imagine my future. Now I’m not. Someday I’ll be like Alice. I’ll look at a young woman, and I’ll know. I’ll have the right words for her. Maybe that’s the only gift I have right now. The hope that someday I will be able to do for someone else what Alice did for me. I’ll take that hope.
That healing. It makes sense in this moment. This village I’ve created.
Part of me aches, knowing I do still hope I can have that fairy-tale happy ending.
But part of me feels like it can rest. Because this is a happy ending. If it’s all I ever have, it’s a pretty damned good life.
A good world.
I dragged myself here. Wounded. Bleeding. Exhausted.
I’ve been afraid to start this new chapter. I’ve let the page stay blank for far too long. I was scared of what it would look like to start writing Amelia again. This changed version of me who won’t be able to keep the subtext of grief out of this new chapter. Maybe out of all the chapters after.
I feel different about it now. I feel an acceptance of it. More than that, I feel ready to start. To see where it takes me, how it changes me, who I become.
My life doesn’t have to be a blank page.
It’s time for me to start writing my own story.