Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 30 - Empty

Though she fit once more into her original sixteen-year-old body, wearing it like an old suit, with thin bony arms, a sharp angular jawline, and a face void of wrinkles, Olivia felt empty. Emanating from her womb like an unrelenting cramp forcing her to curl over in anguish, Olivia’s prayers that the pain would subside were endless.  

In this current body, this old body that was new again, no children had yet come to bear. This was the body she had before meeting and marrying David and the subsequent years when they struggled — and they so very much struggled — to conceive. This was the body before the twins miraculously came into being after years of prayers and waiting and they had nestled in her very self, shared her very same food, and taken in her same oxygen.  

In this warped carnival mirror reflection of her life, the actual moment in which either of her children had been conceived had not yet come to pass. It would be years from this relived moment before Mark and Rosie would form within her, or exit out of her to nurse on her breasts and fall asleep in her arms.

Could they be conceived again? It seemed impossible.  Even if she could recall the exact moment of their conception — right down to the day and hour, minute and second — with the fragile ecosystem of nearly 200 million sperm all vying for dominance and final union with one single egg, the odds weren’t just stacked against her, they were toppling upon her very identity and all she knew.  At this moment, she was no longer a mother, though in her heart she most certainly was that and more.  

In her heart, she’d birthed them. Yet now they simply failed to exist. It was as if they were nothing more than daydreams and this new reality a nightmare.  

On the television, a man with a huge mane of dark, wet, curly hair was interviewing Whitney Houston. She was repeatedly vowing that she’d never touch drugs again.  Would not abuse herself this time.  Would not leave her children in anguish again this time.  But even Whitney must realize that her daughter did not yet exist in this world, either.  Yet this did not seem to concern her.    

Others long dead now found new life in the spotlight, as well. They offered endless platitudes about second chances, acting as if their lives had never ended and now could just continue as if nothing supernatural had occurred.

Olivia had seen only one other person on the news the night before who seemed even remotely as grief-stricken as she was over the loss of an entire generation, but especially over her own two children.     

With each passing hour, despair wrapped more tightly around Olivia. It smothered her like a soaked woolen blanket, even more than it had in the aftermath of David’s sudden death, which to her mind had happened just days before. The grief from that event still clung to her like dew.

Had she lost her mind, perhaps? The thought didn’t seem so extraordinary.  Who could believe that all of this was real? Surely in the wake of David’s tragic death, something had merely slipped in her mind and landed her in this place that couldn’t exist, yet apparently did.

But on the television, there was an endless fascination with those who had died and were somehow brought back.

“Do you think you saw heaven?” one anchor seemed to ask every person to whom he spoke. 

“I honestly don’t know,” most of them answered.  “I don’t even recall my death, let alone what happened after. I just know other people keep telling me I was dead.” 

Another claimed to have not only met God but convinced Him to send back all of the recently deceased so they might vindicate themselves.  

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

Whatever happened afterward, they had died, just as David died. Yet here they were again.  If their lives had ended, and they were back, then what of David?  Why had she not heard from him?

Olivia’s nose was stuffed from crying, right up into her sinuses.   Down the hall, her mother Grace was still sleeping. At one point she heard her father amble out the back door, letting the screen door creak and slam as he always did before heading to his barn to crank up the tractor or tinker with one broken thing or another.  

The sun had finally filled the morning sky, breaking through in surprisingly vibrant pinks and orange and early morning yellow, ending what felt like an unending night of oppressive darkness, of dialing the phone hundreds of times, receiving only busy signals, and watching television reports as if they were train wrecks that demanded attention.  Oliva had been unable to look away from the horror, though throughout the night she desperately wanted to.

On the kitchen counter were the keys to her father’s truck. She thought for a moment of leaving right then for North Carolina.  However, the home David grew up in was not the home in which his family lived when they met during college.  He’d spontaneously driven her past the house ages ago when they’d first started dating, jumping off the highway at an exit she couldn’t now recall, and veering down side streets and back roads she’d never seen before or since. He drove down one road after another until they emptied onto a small cluster of homes that almost popped out of nowhere.

This old house of theirs was yellow, a small ranch home lined with vibrant thick shrubbery around the perimeter.  That’s all she could remember. Why would she need to remember the location of his childhood home?  Why should she have been required to recall that? And yet now she would give anything if she could just get in her father’s truck and drive across the country to that house where her husband may be waiting — alive once again.

But now, after a nighttime of crying and desperately needing to hear David’s voice — needing to hear it even more than after the kayak incident, more than ever before — fury mounted up within her. Why couldn’t she remember that exit David took all those years before? Why couldn’t she remember the side streets that lead to that yellow house? Why hadn’t she treasured every single moment from before all of this confusion? How could she have treated their leisurely drive that day, when David was attempting to share a long past part of his life and the memories and events that accompanied it, with no more concern than for a passing breeze?

Now all she wanted was to see that house again, and to knock on the front door, and for David to appear and take her into his arms and to kiss his lips and for him to assure her that the emptiness in her womb and her heart and her very soul would be filled again that very day.

Olivia picked up the phone once again and began to dial.