While immersed in my imagination, I jumped in alarm at the touch on my left arm.
Brady stood there, sadder than before, so thin he looked as if he were a victim of starvation, his eyes sunken in his head. He looked angry. I had never seen my baby angry before. He had been a happy, pleasant child, quick to laughter, joy bubbling out of him like it came from an inner fountain of happiness.
“Brady, what’s wrong? What’s happened to you?” If he was a ghost then there was life after death and following that conclusion there was a supreme being somewhere because there was a soul. How could a child suffer anything after death? How could any god allow it? Confusion filled my mind. I liked logic. I liked to write realistically and give fiction life, not just words, but life, real life, logical life, one a reader could believe. This apparition appearing before me was not logical in any afterlife I could imagine.
“I’m going away,” he said softly.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m alone so I’m going away,” he repeated, giving no further explanation.
I reached for him, but he blinked and then he was gone.
I sat stunned and unhappy. The novel writing no longer mattered. It was all foolish and made up stuff; it didn’t mean anything. The world meant something. What I could see, hear, taste, and touch. If Brady’s ghost was real what did it mean that he was shrinking, turning gray, wasting away? What was after this life that it would take a little child and do it more harm than ever done to it on earth?
I took up my notebook and pencil, my little knife, and I hurried into the house. I had a few Valium left from months before, and I needed one. I needed two.
#
Brady woke me in the night, hovering over my face, his nose almost touching mine. I was startled and quickly wide awake. “What?”
He gestured I follow him. He moved away across the floor, gliding in the shadows. I slipped from bed careful not to disturb or wake Grant.
Brady was moving into the small bathroom. I followed. He said, “Close the door.”
He did not sound two years old; he sounded like an older boy, maybe closer to twelve. I closed the door and turned to him. He was a shell of himself. He was not substantial. I could see through his body to the wall behind him. He was smaller yet, and thinner, emaciated, almost a skeleton.
I dropped to my knees and held out my arms, my heart hurting in my chest.
He shook his head. He pointed to the bathtub and the little pearl-handled knife lying there. I had left it on the night stand. How it came to be here was a mystery.
“Come with me.”
I knew exactly what he wanted me to do with the knife. Had that been my fascination all along? Had the knife called to me, whispering of peace?
“Brady, I can’t. I’ll…I’ll see you again one day. None of us live forever. But your Daddy needs me. We’re going to start a family again…”
The disdain on his face was not childlike. “No more babies!” he hissed.
“But…”
“You let me die. You should have been there. You should have put out the fire. It’s your fault.”
These accusations that I had heaped upon myself were now coming from my child’s ghostly lips. I stood accused and knew it was only right. Now I did want to die. I wanted to run a warm bath, undress and slide into the water. I wanted to take the little sharp knife and slit my wrists with clinical precision and let my blood color the water red. I would be comforted not to have to think of my loss again.
Brady’s form began to change. It was if he were morphing, being pulled all out of arrangement, his legs elongating, his arms enlarging with odd bulges, his torso rising, thinning out. His eyes blazed with blame. Then he had no eyes at all as they melted into the cheeks and the cheeks into the neck and the neck into the body. This ghost thing became something other than Brady’s ghost. It told me what it was. I am you, it intoned gravely. But that was in my head. I said it to myself and this thing, this supernatural evil that had been hiding inside me, festering and growing into a life on its own, simply whispered my own thoughts. The guilt I harbored had taken life and come into the light for me to see. It first came as Brady, in order to keep me from being afraid. It had never been my child, my baby. He had never run across the floor or hugged my knees, never spoken to me or looked upon me with love. This thing was here for a feast of blood, my blood. It demanded it. I had given it life so that it could make me take mine.
I tore my gaze from the horrid apparition and got to my feet. I slowly moved to the bathtub as the bad thing backed away. I turned on the taps. I sank onto the side of the tub while it filled, holding the knife in my hands. I knew if I looked the apparition would be gone. It had accomplished its mission.
#
Grant heard the water running and woke to stumble to the bathroom. He found me naked in the tub, the knife at my wrist. I hadn’t yet been able to make the first cut. He grabbed the weapon, splashing water all over the floor. He stood looking down at me in wonder. “What are you doing? My god, what were you about to do?”
If I told him the truth he wouldn’t believe it. Guilt was not an entity, not in Grant’s world, not in anyone’s world, only in mine.
He helped me from the tub and dried me with a towel the way he used to dry Brady after a bath. He found my bathrobe and helped me slip in my arms. He tied the sash at my waist and then stepped back.
“We have to do something about this,” he said.
I couldn’t look Grant in the eyes. I was too forlorn that again I had failed to do what was right.
The next day I lied to the psychiatrist, but he was not fooled. “I wasn’t going to slit my wrists. My husband’s just over anxious about me, over protective. He got the wrong impression. It was the middle of the night.”
“What made you take a bath in the middle of the night?”
I shrugged. “I woke up and thought a hot bath might make me sleepy again.”
“And why did you have a knife in the bathtub with you if you meant yourself no harm?”
I tried making up a lie, but it sounded lame to my own ears. I said the knife had just been there, on the tub edge, and I had opened it just before Grant came into the bathroom. He misinterpreted the whole scene, that’s all.
With Grant’s signature, the psychiatrist called for orderlies from the hospital to take me to the psychiatric ward. I protested weakly all the way. I knew the doctor had to do this if he thought I’d do myself harm, but I didn’t belong in lock up, stuck away in some padded cell.
It turned out it wasn’t a padded cell. I’d probably gotten that idea from the movies. It was a private room with everything stripped from it save a bed and sheets. There was a sink on the wall and a door leading to a toilet and shower. The soap bar looked new, but it was small as hotel soap. The door leading to the hall and freedom was locked. The window had a wire screen.
I saw nothing I could use to make a quick end of myself. This was antiseptic and empty, one version of Hell. I couldn’t stay here. Then I glanced overhead at a white boxed fluorescent light. I hauled the bed over to the center of the floor, stood on it, and took down the light cover, dropping it to the mattress. I clicked one of the fluorescent tubes out of the sockets and brought it down. Sitting on the side of the bed, holding the long white tube, I scanned the room for cameras. I didn’t see any. They thought I was safe in here.
They were wrong.
#
I floated just above the bed in that beautiful black space where I had once gone to die. This time I would stay. I looked down at my arms and saw my bandaged wrists. I had cut them with the tube glass from the overhead light. I guess they had found me, but not in time. I wanted to shout it. Not in time!
I shut my eyes, floating, moving away from the bed, the room, the hospital, the planet. It sat off in the universe, mixed with the other celestial worlds and stars and gas giants. I was not there.
I was here and content. No breath. No reason for it. Only darkness.
“M
ama?”
I heard his voice and my eyes opened. Brady was here too, I found him at last, my poor baby, my lost baby. I tried to raise myself to a sitting position, but I felt paralyzed on my back, floating in the dark with nothing beneath my body.
“Brady?”
He came into view. He floated just above me and to the left. He was ethereally beautiful. His skin glowed, his face shone, his gaze was loving. This was not the conjured child who wore the mantle of my guilt. This was my real child, the one dead, but not gone. “Oh, baby, you’re so beautiful.”
“You can’t stay here,” he said. “It’s not your time.”
“I am staying, I have to stay. I can’t go back to that life without you. I can’t live with it.”
“It was Eddie, Mama. He swung around in the chair. We didn’t know the wire was wrapping around it until it sparked. The wallpaper caught fire. We tried to put it out, but we couldn’t.”
I hadn’t known these details. It was still my fault, wasn’t it?
“It’s not, Mama.” He said this as if he had heard my thoughts. He was crying, tears spilling down his baby cheeks. “It’s nobody’s fault, Mama. It was just my time. I couldn’t stay in that world. I had to go. Some of us go away when we’re little. Some when we are big and grown and old.”
“You didn’t have to go! I could have saved you, I should have saved you!”
“No one could have saved me. I belong here.”
I began to fall, drifting at first, and then plunging. I fell away from Brady out of the darkness, calling to him as I had called in the belly of the fire, “BRADY, BRADY, BRADY!”
“Not your fault…” he called, his voice fading just as the dark grew light and I opened my eyes in the hospital bed.
How many times was I to die and come back? Grant sat in a chair near the bed, his head resting on his fist, and he was asleep. He had kept vigil, waiting for my return. I studied his face. For a young man he looked weathered and burdened. His shoulders were slumped, his legs splayed out before him. He had lost Brady and his one solace, his one tie to life, was that he had kept me. Now I had tried to leave him in a permanent way with an ultimate and final betrayal.
“Grant?”
He opened his eyes, lifting his head. I saw the love in his eyes, the sadness, and the forgiveness. He had known how I suffered and that I hadn’t been well. He had done all he could to make me happy. He wanted to start a new life and give me more children to love.
He came to the bed and put his big hands on my face, cupping it and lifting it to his kiss. “Baby,” he said in a whisper.
I let Brady go. I could do it now that I had seen he was all right, that he was whole and safe. I let the guilt monster go, having no need of it any longer. I had this life to live. I hadn’t any right to end it before it was my time, just as my little boy explained.
Years later, when I finally published novels, and spent most of my days storytelling and living in imaginary worlds, I often felt Brady somewhere nearby, just a breath away. I couldn’t see him, hear him, smell or touch him, but he was there.
He would always be there…waiting. Just as both science and religion claimed—nothing in all the universe was ever lost. The good molecules and atoms that made up my boy would go on forever.
And I knew this: One day we would all go with him.
THE END
Thank you for reading. If you liked these stories, please leave a short review. You can find more stories and novels by Billie Sue Mosiman at her Kindle Store. Her blog is The Peculiar Life of a Writer.
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