by Kelly Rimmer
I regretted it as soon as I said it, but I was far too proud to apologize, especially when Patrick didn’t even flinch. Instead, he scanned the notes on the bed, then scooped one up and waved it toward me.
“This letter alone would be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to prove that you arranged an abortion for her. She died alone at the hands of strangers, and you made that happen. Maybe you should pay the price.”
We were getting nowhere, and things would only escalate if we kept speaking from our pain. I took a step back and tried to take a deep breath.
“This is absurd. I’m going to go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow—”
“Maryanne,” Patrick said suddenly. His hand dropped to his side, taking the note with it. I glanced at him warily.
“What?”
“I don’t care where you go, but you will leave this house tonight, or I will call the police and have you removed.”
Patrick held all of the cards, and we both knew it. I had no idea how seriously the police would take a note like this, but I couldn’t risk him trying to get Grace’s case reopened.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered.
“I...” He broke off, then ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Don’t you understand? How could I just carry on with you—letting you take her place in my life...in our lives...when you did this to her?”
We fell into silence after that. I didn’t know how to make things right, but I was still sure there would be a way I could. We both needed time to think it through.
“I’ll go,” I said heavily. “Just for tonight.”
I glanced back at him, and Patrick nodded, but his gaze was on the notes scattered all over his bed.
* * *
I told Mrs. Hills that Patrick and I had quarreled, and she made up the sofa. I stretched out and closed my eyes, but I slept very poorly. Somehow I knew Patrick wasn’t sleeping, either.
Even so, I eventually talked myself around to hope that night. I wondered if Patrick’s fury was rooted in guilt and shame, just as mine had been. Grace probably had revealed a depth of pain he wasn’t aware of in those notes. I just hoped I’d get the chance to sit him down and to talk it all through in the cold light of the new morning.
“You’ll see,” Mrs. Hills said sagely as we nursed cups of coffee as the sun rose. “Young love is always volatile, but today you two will sort this out and everything will be fine.”
“I hope so,” I said. I knew our situation seemed simpler to her than it really was, but she was probably right. Patrick and I were both quick to anger sometimes, and as passionate as we were about one another, we also could be impulsive and temperamental.
There was a quiet rap on the glass in the back door, and I turned my head sharply to see Patrick standing there. As I feared, he looked so weary, but the exhaustion and sadness on his face renewed my hope. A man doesn’t sit up all night torturing himself over a woman he doesn’t love.
I flashed Mrs. Hills a knowing smile and almost ran to the back door.
I expected him to embrace me when I stepped outside. I actually expected an apology and a plea for a fresh attempt at a conversation, but what I found was something different. Patrick stood among a collection of boxes and bags that I immediately knew contained my possessions. My heart sank all the way to my toes.
“We can get past this—” I started to say as my vision blurred with hot tears.
“I won’t go to the police. But you need to do something for me in return.” He sighed heavily, then pleaded with me, “Maryanne, I need you to go quietly.”
The idea of it was unbearable. To leave was already too much to ask, but to leave quietly? Without even saying goodbye to the children I’d come to love as my own?
“But I need to say goodbye to them—”
“You’re not their fucking mother, Maryanne!” he snapped. I flinched as if he’d slapped me. He sucked in a sharp breath, then whispered fiercely, “Even if I could forgive the secrecy and the lies, I can’t get around this one simple fact—you knew the truth about what happened to Grace that day, and you kept it to yourself. Who knows? If you’d gone to the police right away, maybe she’d still be here.”
“But...honestly, Patrick, I thought she’d come back, and then I was so scared—” I was weeping now, barely resisting the urge to throw myself at him and to cling to him so he couldn’t walk away. It wasn’t just us he was tearing to pieces—it was our family, and I couldn’t bear it.
“Last night you accused me of murdering my wife,” Patrick said suddenly.
“I was angry—”
“And I accused you of murdering your sister.”
“Patrick—”
“We can’t just ignore this,” Patrick said, his voice breaking. “Maybe we did the wrong thing all along, just pretending it never happened. But now that we know what we know, we can’t just carry on, Mary. We have to go our separate ways.”
He turned around then, and walked back across the front lawns and into the house.
* * *
I was far too stubborn to give up that easily, and I lingered at Mrs. Hills’s house for several days. I got up early and watched out the window to see what he was doing with the children when he went to work. I was startled to see him loading all four sleepy children into the back of the car each day, and them disappearing down the street. After two days I had Mrs. Hills go to Patrick’s house to ask him what he was doing for childcare. She returned with the news that he had temporarily arranged for the wives of the work crew to watch the children while he worked.
“He’s still so upset, Maryanne,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but this isn’t something he’s going to get over quickly. I think you should consider looking for somewhere else to stay until you sort this out with him.”
It was the last thing in the world I wanted, and so I resisted for another day. But the weekend was coming, and when Mrs. Hills pointed out that it was only a matter of time before the children came for a visit and saw me, I finally realized I had no option but to look into temporary accommodation elsewhere. With very little money on hand, there was only one place I could go.
“Maryanne?” My mother gasped when she opened her front door and found me and my meager belongings on the doorstep. “But—”
“I just need to stay a few days, maybe a week,” I blurted.
She stared at me, mouth agape, then peered around me toward the drive.
“But where is Patrick? Where are the children?”
It was my turn to look at her incredulously.
“You actually thought I would bring them for a visit after what you tried to do?”
Mother’s nostrils flared.
“I had their best interests at heart.”
“No. You and Father were grieving and you felt guilty about how you’d cut yourselves off from Grace, and you tried to alleviate that guilt by taking her children. That wasn’t fair. Patrick is a good man, and he was and is doing the very best he could with them.”
“If that’s true,” Mother said slowly, “then what on earth are you doing on my doorstep today?”
To my horror, I felt hot tears in my eyes, and then the sobs just would not be suppressed. I hadn’t cried on my Mother’s shoulder since I was tiny, but even her stiff, perfunctory hug only reminded me of the children. Of Beth...sweet little Beth...who would surely be wondering where her “Mommy” was. Who was hugging her? Who was wiping away her tears? I resisted that job in the beginning, but I’d come to treasure it.
“Mother, I don’t have anywhere else to go. But I swear to God, if you and Father try to disrupt that man’s life again, that’ll be it—I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Did you marry him?” Mother asked, and that’s when I remembered that I’d never actually gotten around to send
ing her the photo of our wedding day. Life had moved on so fast.
“I married him,” I whispered miserably. “And then we fell in love. But...we’ve had a falling out, and I can’t go home until he calls for me.”
I moved back into my family home that day, shifting my things into my old bedroom. To their credit, my parents didn’t ask too many questions about Patrick; they simply allowed me to shift back into their lives as if we’d never argued. After a few days, Mother even opened up to me.
“What happened with Patrick after we lost Grace was my fault, not Father’s,” she admitted. “I wanted those children for myself. I was grieving and miserable, and I thought they’d offer me a distraction. It wasn’t right, and I promise you, I’ll never do it again.”
“But...why, Mother? Why distance yourself from Grace like that when she needed you, then try to take the children as soon as she was gone?”
Mother stared into her teacup as she whispered, “I visited her a lot after she had Timmy, but I just couldn’t stand to see her like that. It reminded me of what happened when you girls were born.” She looked up at me, cheeks flushing. “I never wanted you to know. But... I had to stay in the hospital for a long time after I had you.”
“After you had Grace, you mean. I know you had the hysterectomy—”
“No, Maryanne. After you were born. I...” She cleared her throat, then looked at the table. “I tried to harm myself. It was the strangest thing—it was as if I’d lost my mind, and then I took too many pills and...the housekeeper found me, luckily. We weren’t going to have any more children, but then Grace came along, and it seemed I couldn’t handle her, either.”
“Mother,” I whispered, looking at her in horror. “Are you saying you were depressed after Grace and I were born?”
“Depressed? No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I can barely remember either of you before your first birthday. They said the electroshock therapy would probably damage my memories of that time, but it was more than that, I think.” She stared at her lap, her expression pinched. “I wasn’t just sad. I could barely function. I just wanted to be...gone. I was completely broken. Hopelessly broken.”
“But maybe Gracie felt like she was broken, too, Mother,” I whispered thickly.
“Father and I agreed we’d never tell you girls what happened. Heavens, he went to great lengths to hide what I’d done from our friends and family so I had at least a chance of coming back to normal life one day. And I suppose, when Tim came along, I couldn’t bear to even consider the possibility that Grace was suffering like I had. It was easier to blame Patrick...easier to blame her for choosing that life, especially after I tried to help her leave him.” Mother gave me a sad look. “It was a test, you see. I thought if she was as mentally unwell as I had been, she’d rush to come here for a rest. So perhaps she wasn’t going through what I went through,” Mother said, and for a moment she looked almost hopeful, but it passed quickly and her expression soon sank again. “Or perhaps she was, and I just underestimated her loyalty to him.”
Mother rose from the kitchen table to walk, as if on autopilot, toward the medicine cabinet. She withdrew her little bottle of pills, swallowed one dry, then looked back to me.
“It’s a good thing you don’t want children, I think,” she whispered, gnawing anxiously on her bottom lip. “I can’t even tell you how frightening it is when your own mind turns against you. I really should go to bed now.”
“Mother,” I said as she went to leave the room. She glanced back at me uncertainly. “Do you think that maybe it wasn’t your fault that you got sick after you had us? That maybe it was something biological?”
“The psychiatrist told me that it was just nervous tension. He said that I was simply too sensitive...simply too anxious. That’s why they gave me the hysterectomy.”
She then wandered out of the kitchen, leaving me with the feeling that I understood her, perhaps for the first time in my life.
* * *
I waited around for days hoping to hear from Patrick, and after a week, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I called Mrs. Hills and asked how he was doing.
“They’re moving, Maryanne.”
“What? Where would they go?”
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me. But he doesn’t look good at all. Now, you know I don’t like to stick my nose into other people’s business—” I’d have struggled not to snort, if it all wasn’t so awful “—but if you were planning on trying to convince him to see sense, you’d best be doing it quickly.”
I knew that by nine o’clock, the children would all be deeply asleep. That had been our magic hour, the time when the world rested and Patrick and I were alone. I was sick with dismay when I arrived at the house and glanced through the front window to see moving boxes in the living room, and then somehow felt even sicker as I approached the front door—uncertain about how I might be received. I knocked quietly, and then I walked to sit on the chair on the porch. Patrick opened the door, peered outside, and bathed only in the light from inside the house, I watched his expression shift.
There was frustration. Weariness. And then, to my surprise, an undeniable shame. For just a moment that shame gave me hope.
“Give me just a minute,” he said heavily.
Patrick walked back inside, then came to sit on the porch chair beside me, leaving a gap between us that felt like an ocean. In his hands he held a folded piece of paper, but he made no move to offer it to me. Instead, he drew in a deep breath, and stared out at the road that ran past the house as he spoke.
“Grace was right about so many things...she was so much smarter than she knew. She said that I had been running from responsibility for my whole life. She said that I was a child in a man’s body. I’ve read those notes so many times over this past week, and I finally understand just how badly I let her down.”
“You were young...”
“Don’t make excuses for me! You and your family do not get to pass judgment on me, and you sure as hell don’t get to absolve me.” He was frustrated, but so much more self-contained than he had been when we argued the previous week. Patrick drew in a deep breath, then glanced at me. For a moment he seemed to hesitate and I rushed to plead with him, feeling a delicious hint of hope that I might still change his mind.
“Please, Patrick... I love you. I love them. Please don’t make me leave.”
“You lied to me for two years. How could I build a life with you based on a foundation like that?” he whispered brokenly. “I’m absolutely certain that we’ve both made mistakes, and perhaps we temporarily outran the consequences, but we both have to pay for those sins now. Your penance is that you have to live with what you did, and you have to live without your sister and my family.” A sob broke in my throat, and he turned away, his face set in a mask of agony. “And I have to be the man I couldn’t be for Grace. I have to do it for my kids and for myself. And I have to do it without you, because that’s my penance.”
He passed me the note, then. Our fingers brushed, and I felt a shiver along my arm. Maybe I knew that was the last time I’d feel his skin against mine.
“What’s this?” I whispered through my tears.
“It’s the last note. The one where she talks about the...” He swallowed, then finished with obvious difficulty, “This is the note where she talks about you arranging the abortion.”
I looked at him in shock.
“But why would you give this to me?”
Patrick looked back to the road.
“You need to read it. You need to face what you did to her.” He sounded furious, but then he choked up, and he glanced at me, his gaze swimming in tears. “I’m so angry with you. I’m so hurt that you let things get as far as they did with this secret between us. But God help me, I love you, Maryanne. I want you to go back to the life you were meant to live, and not waste the rest of your years worrying that some note is about to
bring it all down around you. And...her other notes were about how I’d let her down. This one...this is the only one that wasn’t about me. It just feels right to give it to you.”
We sat in silence for a while. I held the folded piece of paper between my palms, my fingers interlinked around it. Locking my hands together was the only way I could stop myself from reaching for him.
“How will you juggle it all?” I asked him eventually.
“I’ll manage,” he said. It was a calm statement of fact, and it was a promise I was instantly certain he’d keep.
“But where will you even go?”
“That isn’t your problem anymore.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I choked, tears finally spilling over onto my cheeks. “Are the children okay?”
“They are grieving their mother,” he whispered miserably. “Just as I should have made them do in the first place.”
Beth
1996
“I remember how it felt when you hugged me,” I choke out, eyes suddenly brimming with tears as Maryanne finishes her story. “I remember how safe I felt. How you smelled so beautiful. How you read me so many stories and let me sleep in your bed when I was scared.”
“Sweet girl,” Maryanne whispers unevenly, “I remember those moments, too. How could I forget them? I’ve done some extraordinary things in my life, but those times with you are some of my very best memories.”
We’ve been talking for hours. Maryanne got up at one point to make a call back to her office to tell them she was taking the afternoon off, then returned to the table. She talked until her voice was hoarse, and then she kept on talking while I fed Noah and we walked to the restroom so I could change him. Now we’re walking around campus to stretch our legs.
And she’s right here. She’s real, and she’s alive, and it’s not too late.
“Could you really have been charged?” I ask her when I’ve composed myself.
“Who knows?” she sighs. “Abortion was a felony offense, and people had been jailed for arranging them. I’m not sure how much an unsigned letter would have counted as evidence in a court of law, but the climate was so hysterically antichoice at the time, I may well have faced serious consequences, especially since Grace died during the procedure. At the very least, the letter might have ruined my academic career, and without your family, that’s all I had left.”
