The Moment Between

by Nicole Baart

  Though it seemed insensitive somehow, Abigail couldn’t help but grin.

  “And there’s something about Jesus . . .” Hailey said it so softly that Abigail almost missed the words. “He knows what it means to suffer. He knows. And I can’t help but trust him. He says, ‘Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’” She paused so long that Abigail was sure she couldn’t continue. But then, into the darkness Hailey breathed a desire so weighted with longing it seemed directed heavenward. “I want to rest.”

  Something in Abigail’s chest collapsed. I can give you rest, she thought. I try. But she wasn’t what Hailey was looking for and she knew it. “Why do you believe him?” she asked, jealous of her sister’s blind faith, maybe even jealous of the object of Hailey’s faith, and yet pricked with a spreading ache she hadn’t planned on and felt powerless to control. It tingled through her veins. It made her numb.

  “I believe because I have to trust that who I am, what I’m living through isn’t an accident. I have to trust that I am loved unconditionally. That there is a plan for my life. Otherwise . . .”

  The caution hung in the air.

  It jarred Abigail to the bone. She felt a tremor from her head to her toes, and she tightened her grip on Hailey. Though she wanted to say something, nothing felt right. Her quick answers rang trite in her mind, and she couldn’t bring herself to utter something that was only patent fluff. Abigail wanted to affirm her sister’s conviction, but she couldn’t quite get past her anger at the same God who had made Hailey the way she was. And she had no idea what to do with the person of Jesus, this suffering savior. This God and man who understood, who offered rest.

  The tears that were suddenly hot and insistent in the corners of her eyes were unexpected. Abigail tried to swallow but couldn’t. She tried to clear her throat, but eighteen years of emotion clogged the narrow space. What else could she do? Abigail raised herself on her elbow and kissed her sister’s perfect cheek in benediction. In love.

  †

  Hailey left again a few months later. And came home. Then disappeared shortly after that. By the time she was twenty, she no longer lived under Lou’s roof for more than the occasional couch crash that happened only because she was between boyfriends or currently out of favor with her friends. She worked a succession of different jobs that ranged from secretarial to questionable—Abigail once caught her in a Hooters T-shirt. And Hailey learned that the men who bought her drinks when she was eighteen would buy her a dress when she was twenty. Or let her borrow their car or bankroll a few months’ rent. She stayed in sporadic contact with Abigail, but their communication was usually borne out of Hailey’s need for quick cash and only necessary when she was in one of her infrequent and short-lived slumps.

  It was a five-year spiral that cycled from hope to despair, from celestial highs to ruinous lows. Sometimes things were more or less good, and Abigail heard of or even met her sister’s ever-changing lovers. Sometimes things were horrible, and neither Lou nor Abigail heard from Hailey for months. Those were long weeks filled with fear and a horrifying sense of premature loss. Once Abigail went so far as to jot down notes for Hailey’s funeral.

  But all that changed around Christmastime when Hailey was twenty-five. She started calling Abigail daily; she even dropped by Johnson, McNally & Bennett, where she charmed Abigail’s coworkers to the point of infatuation. She stopped dabbling in whatever depressants and stimulants she normally used to dampen the dry heat of her own tumultuous emotions. And though it shocked Abigail, Hailey made an appointment with a psychologist and actually showed up at the scheduled time.

  When Hailey breezed into the Four Seasons Manor Home for Christmas dinner, Abigail knew that something significant had shifted. The young woman smiled, captivated the nurses, and hugged her father. Then she pulled Abigail aside and whispered with a twinkle in her eye, “Remember what I told you? all those years ago? about the incredible guy and the kids? the life I was created for?”

  “Yes,” Abigail said slowly, searching her sister’s eyes for the fever of intoxication, the betraying twitch that would tell her Hailey was not in her right mind. It wasn’t there.

  “I found him,” she cried. “I found him and he’s perfect and everything is going to change.”

  Abigail felt a cold sweat prickle between her shoulder blades; her palms went clammy. She held her breath.

  Hailey didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she laughed. “His name is Tyler.”

  For those first few agonizing weeks after Hailey died, I visited Lou every day. I went when I knew he’d be confined to bed, finished with his daily regimen of three square meals, rec time in his wheelchair, and an early evening dose of Jeopardy! By the time I slipped through his door, he was always reclining in bed, the blankets tucked neatly beneath his limp arms, and his head centered on the hard pillow as if he had measured it to make sure each ear was perfectly equidistant from the squared edges. He didn’t turn when I came in, but his gaze flicked in the direction of the door, and I knew that he expected me.

  We never did much. We just sat there in each other’s presence and fixed our eyes, unseeing, on the glinting light of the television suspended from the corner near the ceiling. Every once in a while I felt brave enough to attempt a conversation of sorts, but Lou grunted away my feeble efforts and I stopped trying. Strange as it sounds, I think I just wanted to be near him, even though it seemed he didn’t want to be near me.

  But one day I walked into Lou’s room at the Four Seasons, and he responded very differently to me than all those times before.

  I had been cleaning at Hailey’s apartment, boxing and sorting the last of her things, and I worked up a decent sweat running up and down the stairs from her rooms to my car. As I prepared to descend the steps one last time, I glanced in the box I was holding and noticed one of Hailey’s silk scarves poking out from between the folded flaps. I yanked the lemony cream swath of fabric out of the box and hastily folded it into a misshapen triangle. Then I swept the damp tendrils of hair from my face and neck and wrapped the makeshift bandana around my head, tying it at the nape of my neck as if I were some sweet housewife from the 1950s instead of an unattached career woman in the throes of watching her life disintegrate.

  When I arrived at the Four Seasons an hour later to check in on Lou, it hadn’t crossed my mind to remove the lovely scarf.

  The look on his face when I walked through the door should have been enough to alert me that something was not as it should be. Though his eyes were fixed on the TV, when I rapped on the doorframe, he gave me his usual courtesy of a passing glance. But this time, as Lou began to look away, he spun back toward me with more than just his eyes—his whole body shifted to take me in as I stood outlined in the frame of the doorway.

  “What?” I asked, doing a self-conscious once-over to make sure that everything was in place. Was I dirty? Had I lost a button?

  But Lou wasn’t staring at me in disdain; he was drinking me in with thirsty, longing eyefuls. “I love it when you wear your hair back,” he told me, his voice low with a mixture of transparent pain and thinly veiled hope.

  Mystified, I lifted a hand to my hair and felt it. The scarf. Realization hit me at the same time as panic—Lou thought I was Hailey. The milky yellow bandana hid my dark hair and fell like a long ponytail across one shoulder. Standing in the half-light between the bright hallway and his dim room, I must have appeared like an unexpected angel. Lou was certainly looking at me as if I was one.

  I didn’t know what to do. Lou didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but he was on the brink of eighty-three and he had lived a long and strenuous life. His mind was clear for the most part, but this wasn’t the first time he had become confused. Sometimes he called me by the name of the nurse on duty or complained that Melody had forgotten again that he hated margarine: “Is it too much to ask for a little real butter?” Whenever he mixed something up, I would just give him a bland nod and ignore it.

  This, however, was way be
yond my experience. What was I supposed to do? Whip off the scarf and tell him that I was Abigail, not Hailey? Or should I go along with it? pretend to be my sister so that he could have a brief moment of peace? Maybe I could just tell him I loved him and disappear. Maybe he’d think I was an apparition, a dream.

  “Come here,” Lou said before I had a chance to formulate a plan. He held out his hand to me.

  I stepped forward because his face was flushed with happiness. The dark line of his usually furrowed brow was smooth and relaxed. And his lips were

  parted in a smile that made him look young again, like the father of my youth. How could I not go to him?

  When Lou caught my hand, he pulled me toward him as if he was reeling me in. He looked up at me, taking in my features with hopeful eyes, his eyebrows knitting when he saw the dark shimmer of my brown eyes, then absorbing the golden sweep of fabric that was not hair . . . and I watched as he relived her death by degrees.

  “Abby?” he whispered, anguished.

  “Yeah, Dad. It’s me.” Though I expected him to turn away, I put my free hand over his and held it tight. “I’m sorry.”

  But my father didn’t turn from me this time. He knew she was gone, knew it was me, but instead of putting my sister between us, Lou tugged me down. We were nose to nose for the briefest of seconds, and in his eyes I could see the recognition that we shared this grief. We bore it silently and alone, but we bore the same sorrow.

  Then Lou crushed me against his chest, wrapping his arms around me and sobbing until I had no choice but to let my tears join his. We stayed like that for a long while, holding each other and mourning for her.

  When he was finally able to talk, Lou murmured against the scarf that still covered my hair, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back.

  “I just want to know why.”

  Sitting up reluctantly, I passed the back of my hand across my cheeks, beneath my nose. I sniffed. “She was sick.”

  “My little girl didn’t do this on her own,” Lou insisted, hitting the blankets with his fist. “Someone did this to her. Someone made her believe that she couldn’t go on. If I were a younger man . . .”

  The threat hung in the air between us, for I knew that my father would move heaven and earth to avenge his daughter’s death, even if there was nothing to avenge. Even if she had just succumbed to her illness like we always feared she would.

  But I knew there was more to it than that. There had to be. And because he had held me, because he realized that I was Abigail and he had still chosen to fold me in his arms, I knew what I had to do.

  I picked up his hand and kissed it, sealing a promise that he didn’t even know I had made.

  XVI

  Though Eli wanted to accompany Abigail back to the trailer, she insisted on walking alone. Her unexpected nighttime encounter had been far more powerful and perplexing than she ever imagined an experience could be. She felt shell-shocked, dizzy, and spent, and she needed time to process what had happened.

  “Take the flashlight at least,” Eli told her. He handed her a heavy silver Maglite that could have easily passed for a billy club. Winking at her, he said, “Don’t worry. You’ll only need it for the light.”

  “What about you? How will you get back?”

  Eli swept his palm across the flame of the candle, nearly snuffing it out. “I’ll light my path the old-fashioned way.”

  “Just don’t start a fire.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I’ll be fine.”

  Abigail left him to clean up the remnants of their symbolic meal and made her way back to the dark entrance. At the wall she paused, tempted to take one last look over her shoulder at the table, the bread, and the wine. She wanted to preserve the memory in her mind, tuck it into some exclusive vault where she could easily retrieve it later for careful examination. But she didn’t, because in some incomprehensible way, she hoped for more. This is the first, she thought, but maybe it doesn’t have to be the last.

  The world outside the winery was still; there wasn’t even a breath of breeze in the leaves of the vines that spread around Abigail. But above her, the heavens were a dynamic, living thing. Though the meteor shower had slowed, there was still an unnatural profusion of diamond light that fell around her in intermittent bursts. Abigail breathed deeply, taking it in, and couldn’t suppress the feeling that the evening was a gift, a reprieve from everything that had brought

  her to Revell in the first place. She lingered on the way between the buildings of Thompson Hills and her little home.

  By the time Abigail arrived at the trailer, she was nearly vibrating in anticipation. It occurred to her as she walked that the Bible she had taken from the hotel in Everett was still tucked in her attaché. She felt a delicious ripple of interest; it startled her, but it wasn’t unwelcome because for the first time since she had stolen the book, she was actually curious to hold it and flip through the pages.

  The attaché was hidden behind the driver’s seat of the antiquated motor home, slid in the small space between the seat back and the bench of the kitchenette booth. Abigail yanked it out and scooted onto the bench. She clicked off the flashlight and turned on the lamp that sat on the counter. True to his word, the first day that Abigail spent in the Navigator, Tyler ran an extension cord from the outlet beside Eli’s cement patio and snaked it through a small tear in the kitchen window screen. He even duct taped the opening so that no bugs could sneak through the hole.

  When a warm circle of light bathed the inside of the trailer in a soft, yellow glow, Abigail couldn’t help but think about Tyler. She sat immobile for a while and probed the thought with careful fingers. She outlined her emotions in tentative, cautious strokes. The acute and wrenching ache that she usually felt when she took the time to truly focus on Tyler was gone, and in its place was an emptiness that made her wonder if she could understand the phantom pain of an amputee. What had been so agonizing was now only the bitter memory of something terrible but absent. Was she capable of letting go? Was one sacred encounter enough to change everything?

  It was complicated, and Abigail wasn’t sure she was ready to answer those questions. So she put them aside and focused on the bag in front of her. Unzipping the long pocket, she reached blindly for the hard edges of the Gideons’ inadvertent gift. Instead of finding the book, her hand swept across the flat line of a forgotten manila envelope. She tensed, remembering.

  It shouldn’t have been a big deal, even when Abigail pulled it out of her Florida mailbox over two months ago. After all, she knew what the autopsy report would say. Though it was very obvious to her how Hailey had died, an autopsy was standard procedure when the cause of death was even marginally unclear. All the same, Abigail had no desire to read the report and come face-to-face with those cold, hard facts. It made everything so final.

  But now, with the taste of the bread and wine still lingering on her tongue, Abigail felt capable of looking inside. She took the envelope and laid it on the table in front of her. “Give me strength,” she whispered, prayerlike.

  Sliding her finger under a corner of the thick paper, Abigail broke the gummy seal and pulled out the packet that was waiting inside. The front page bore the official seal of the Office of the Medical Examiner of Bluegrass County, Florida. As she removed the thick paper clip holding the document together, she glanced over the first few lines. She noted the Jonathan P. Berkowitz Forensic Center logo and Hailey’s full name and case number as well as official dates, signatures, and the embossed stamp of a notary public.

  She sighed heavily. So far, so good. She could do this.

  The second page had only a few lines, but they were hard ones to read. Hailey’s name and case number appeared again, followed by two short, boldfaced paragraphs: Cause of Death and Manner of Death. Abigail was able to read overdose, self-inflicted, and suicide before she had to rip her eyes from the page. She removed the sheet from the pile and placed it facedown with unsteady hands.

  The
re were at least half a dozen more pages to flip through and a glance told Abigail that these were chock-full of typed information. She had made it this far; maybe two pages were enough for tonight. Maybe the power of what she had experienced was enough to get her through those pages and nothing more. Two pages today, two more tomorrow, and so on until the entire file had been examined. Then she could burn the whole document. Abigail longed to let the flame from Eli’s candle lick the edges of these hateful papers. But they were lying in front of her right now, and she couldn’t ignore them any more than she could forget that Hailey had died.

  With trembling fingers, Abigail flipped through the pages. Though she tried not to read anything too closely, she noticed the headings: History, Autopsy, Evidence of Medical Intervention. On the next page there were Clothing, External Appearance, and Internal Examination. Then Heart, Kidneys, and Gastrointestinal Tract. Neck Organs, Head, Histology, Toxicology . . . The titles went on and on, cataloging every little thing about Hailey Anne Bennett in death.

  Single words like temporal, parietal, and occipital swam off the page and made an indelible mark on Abigail’s consciousness, and the numbers followed by ounces and pounds stood out simply because they were different. Everything had been measured and weighed, recorded as carefully as the length, weight, and head circumference of a newborn baby. Hailey was reduced to several pages filled with numbers and notations, most of which meant nothing to Abigail.

  Though she could sweep over most of the categories, for some reason her eyes alighted on a short paragraph beginning with reproductive systems. Did they leave no stone unturned? Abigail was about to flip to the final page when a phrase from the unanticipated section jumped off the paper and strangled her: gravid uterus at 8–10 weeks gestation. Gestation? She tore through the rest of the paragraph and found, fetal length, .90 inches and fetal weight, .075 ounces.