Atropa Belladonna (Book 2)

Chapter 1

Summer 1950

I always thought of it as funeral weather. The stillness as a soul leaves this earth. It is both morbid and definite. Someone you love will never return. The silence absorbs everything else as if you screamed your loved one's name and waited in the black infinity for them to answer back, knowing they never would.

That Saturday morning it was just the same. I couldn't move or speak, despite that scream that was tearing me inside. "Mary!" On that bleak day, the sky was gray with billowing clouds that dropped flecks of rain here and there. Not powerful enough to take on meaning. Not a deluge. My mind flipped through memories. The freshly dug grave revealed rich, black soil. I saw Mary's hands sifting through the dirt, finding bugs for Charlie to keep in little baby food jar terrariums. His rapt attention and her careful transfer into his tiny hands. "What are you going to name this one, darling?" She had a special loving voice that was all his. She indulged him for hours as they collected insects, decided on names and filled jars with soil, leaves, pebbles or twigs. "Henry." Charlie had whispered. He looked up at her with his sea blue eyes. His face serious.

"All right. We'd better get Henry the worm into his new house."

Charlie's hand was in mine and it was sweaty and warm. He kept tugging on mine. He wanted me to tell him when Mary would come home. I couldn't do it again. I looked down at him and put a finger to my lips, "shh." I bent down to his level "Mommy will talk to you when they are done with the service." I whispered with my black-gloved hand cupped around his ear. He pouted and silent tears fell from his eyes. I felt guilty for teaching him to swallow his pain. To learn to weep alone and store it all up somewhere else. I should have lifted him up and kissed his cheek. Let him cry into my shoulder, rubbed his back. He was only four years old. I couldn't. That had become Mary's job. I loved Charlie and believed I was a good mother but my capacity for emotion had diminished after the asylum.

"Don't call it that," Carmen would correct me. "Just say the hospital. If you have to say anything." She had become so critical of me. It seemed the more I withdrew into my sadness or pain the more she would try to jolt me back into the person she remembered me being. She couldn't see that person had been just a girl. A girl who had suffered losses, yes, but couldn't see that up ahead I would come to know that life is a series of losses. Maybe she couldn't see that because that hadn't been her fate. But it was mine. My parents, My husband, Mary. Perhaps worst—it's hard to say because each loss seemed like the worst and the end. Perhaps, the most devastating was having been so close to losing everything I loved. To have been taken away despite being very happy and secure in the world I had made for myself. To lose my son for a month. To be held in a dark hospital, tortured with the threat of them destroying me. Not in figurative terms but in real absolute terms. I very well could have been one of the women taken into the back operating rooms. One of the women who's brains had been cut into taking their very soul, making them inhuman impostors moving around a dark hell.

"Eve?" Carmen's gloved hand touched my arm. She was holding Charlie despite her own brood of children hanging on her, crying partly from hunger and partly from the shock of losing one of their favorite aunts. Mary was one of the most loving women I'd ever know. Carmen must have seen that it was worse for Charlie. He had grown up with Mary as his grandmother. When we moved to Bend with no place else to go, without hesitation Mary adopted me as her daughter and when Charlie was born, he was her grandson. Mary and Frank, knowing us for such a short time and not as blood relatives, took us in as family. Frank had held Charlie throughout the night he was born while I was still under the effects of the drugs I'd been given during labor. Frank had sat and rocked my baby in the dim light of the kitchen. As soon as I woke they brought him to me and shared in my awe and joy. Frank and I were close. I respected and loved him, but it was never like my relationship with Mary. I'd never known anyone like her. I trusted her love completely without a consideration that she could be taken from me too. That was how it had been, how I vowed that day in the cemetery it would never be again: every time I loved someone, I was so naive to believe they was mine. They wouldn't be taken away. Perhaps, I even believed that this person I loved was going to raise me from the darkness that lurked around every corner I approached. There was no one left who loved me. It was such a desolate feeling, so lonely. I didn't want it to happen again, but how could I control anything? Up ahead of the loss, was the melancholy. It scared me. It had happened twice. A darkness full of so much physical pain. When Nick was killed in the war, I couldn't get out of bed. Weeks turned to months and almost a year passed without being able to leave the house. Then, Jeff appeared in my life. It was a miracle. He elevated me. Lifted me out of the darkness. Perhaps it was another kind of hell, a more seductive serpent than then my attraction to death's grip. It was meant to turn out bad. That's the sin a woman pays for an affair with a married man.