Chapter Thirty-Two
Wake, sleep, wake, sleep, dream, wake, hold your eyes open with your fingertips, you need to stay awake.
Every day was a punishment. Sleep should have offered some relief, but it was worse.
Unfathomably worse. In her dreams, Cordelia was alive, thriving, growing stronger by the day.
And then she would wake, and Cordelia was gone.
The first time it happened, she threw up all over the white duvet she’d laid beside the empty crib.
The second time, her stomach was too empty to produce anything but bile—thick, green mucus staining the comforter she’d only halfheartedly tried to clean.
The third time, she couldn’t breathe. Later, a doctor would call it a panic attack.
One emergency room visit, two Xanax, and a morphine drip later, her heart was still racing.
It felt like the blood was trying to escape just as it had once before; as if it, too, wanted to end the torture.
She slept less than she had when Cordelia was a newborn, pushing the limits of the human body while at the edges of what a mind can endure. Very few memories stuck in that hellscape. But she remembered some things.
A cool hand on her forehead.
Gentle words in her ears.
Warm arms around her shaking shoulders.
Poppy moved in and did not leave. She washed vomit out of Rose’s hair, cooked elaborate meals Rose would not eat, held her when she succumbed to snippets of sleep, and would not leave her side no matter how loud she screamed when she woke up.
Landon must have been somewhere. She knew he had to be somewhere. He had been there when the doctor said the words that had changed their world forever.
Epidural hematoma.
More commonly known as a brain bleed. There had just been too much blood. That blood had pooled too fast, putting too much pressure on her skull, compressing her brain until she was no longer Cordelia. Too much blood, Rose thought. Too fast. Like mother, like daughter.
Landon had been there, a stoic statue to contrast her wild, scattered, wailing grief, when Poppy had delivered them both home from the hospital. Then he’d descended to the basement and hadn’t returned.
There was a piece of her that cried out for him, the only other person on earth who could understand her pain. Any minute now, she knew, it would be his cool hand on her forehead, his gentle words in her ear, his warm arms around her shaking shoulders.
Day after day, he did not come.
Day after day, she lay on the ground next to the empty crib. Wake, sleep, dream, wake, sleep, dream, hold your eyes open with your fingertips. Day after day, and the pain did not ease.
Until Rose was not sure how many days she had left in her.
The nursery was decorated with photographs.
It was something their friends had joked about—the self-indulgence of it all—but the criticism had not fazed Landon and Rose.
Cordelia’s first bath, first tooth, first Halloween; Cordelia napping on Rose’s shoulder, spitting up her first taste of spinach, snuggling into the folds of her father’s flannel—they were all there, layered on the wall in thin gold frames.
She knew she should have asked Poppy to take the pictures down.
But they were so beautiful. In each image, Landon had frozen time at just the right moment.
Rose stood and ran her fingers down the photograph nearest to her hand, strumming her daughter’s round cheeks like a guitar.
They hurt, so much, those pictures. Rose doubled over with the pain of it, retching up the nothing in her stomach.
Her vision blurred and the siren’s song found her.
This time, she was not tied to the mast.
What would it feel like, the voice asked, not to belong to these photographs?
To take them in like a woman wandering a gallery, a woman who sees a beautiful child, nothing more.
What would it feel like, the voice asked, to forget?
Not to remember the weight of her in your arms, the sound of her voice.
To be nothing but empty space and endless possibility. Could you live then?
When Poppy knocked on the nursery door, she must have seen the certainty in Rose’s eyes. Because when Rose told Poppy her plan, she didn’t ask a single question. All she said was, “Let me help you.”