Ghost Not Forgotten

XI: Then

I didn't want to push. I didn't want to face it.

But I did. And I cried the entire time.

She was so tiny. No bigger than a football and so scrawny. She had fingernails. She had eyes and ears. She was so complete, I could see she was a she.

But she was also gray. Cold. Still. As we lay on the floor, as I watched her – lifeless and so small – I withered. I felt something being sucked from me, like the air was pulled from my lungs, the blood from my heart, the bones from my skin.

I laid there for hours, catatonic, staring and wondering why. Why was this happening? Had I done this to her? Was this what I got for being so lost? Was this what I got for being so stupid?

I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't even know this could happen. And in that moment, for the first and only time, I wondered about taking my life.

Instead, I cried myself to sleep. Not long after that, I cleaned up. I moved like I was nothing, not human, not a force, not a breeze. I was nothing, felt nothing, as I wrapped my dead child in my softest towel and laid her gently on my bed. I was nothing as I bleached my sheets and the bathroom floor. As I washed the blood from my legs and got dressed. As I got rid of the afterbirth. As I carried my little bundle out of my house and around the outskirts of town so no one would see me.

It was dusk by the time I made it to Burty Shellman's field, hiding myself in the trees lining his section of the crick. It was the furthest away I could get from his barn, his house, him or anyone. I stared at the barn in the distance. I could almost hear the voices of giggling teenagers from the loft up high. I could almost see Bennet peek his head out to breathe in the night air.

I almost saw it, but I didn't.

I was nothing as I dug up the soft dirt beneath a tree, between two tall strong roots standing like walls against the cruel nature. The crick bubbled at my side as I ripped through the tinier roots and stones, worms and mud. I lined the deep hole with thick leaves and grass, keeping it clean and dry.

I put my little bundle, wrapped tightly in my favorite fluffy towel, into that hole. I was nothing as I pushed the dirt back over her, gently packing it down into a little mound.

I stood up and I stepped back, staring at the mound and wondering if this had all been a dream.

Then I was back in my room, mud still on my shoes, curled up on my freshly bleached sheets. Mama was still at work, and I was perfectly alone.

My body hurt in so many ways, but my soul was crushed. As a million thoughts went through my pounding head – as I lay there, so scared, so confused, so destroyed with guilt and pain, all I wanted was Bennet.

Of all the people in the world, he was the one I needed in this, the lowest moment of my entire life. I would've trusted him. He would've been there, holding me tight and telling me it would get better, even if that was all a lie.

But I didn't have him anymore. He was dead and gone. All I had left of him were memories and daydreams. I wanted him so bad that pictures began popping up in my head, becoming clear through all the ache and fog.

First it was Bennet and me leaning over a cradle to watch the baby sleep. Then it was Bennet with a toddler on his shoulders. Then it was Bennet and me chasing her through the backyard as she giggled and stumbled clumsily on her fat little legs. Breathless from laughing so hard, we called out for her, "Julianna!"

Before Bennet vanished, when I would do my silly little girly daydreams of our perfect future, I decided our first kid would be a little girl and we would call her Julianna, my favorite name in the entire world.

I was so pleased with myself when I realized how pretty of a name Julianna Malene was.

I had decided early on in my daydreams that my little Julianna would have my red hair and not only Bennet's eyes but his smile too. Sometimes, I could almost feel how her tiny hand would wrap around my thumb, or how her little lips would feel on my cheek.

They were all fantasies I had forgotten until that moment. Not once during my fog, when my baby was just a twinge in my stomach, did I recall these beautiful pictures. Not once.

Because if I had, I might have snapped out of it. Maybe. I'd like to think I would, anyway. I'd like to think I would've gotten my head on straight in time. Maybe if I had, the day's events would not have played out the way they did. Maybe I would've ended up being a 16-year-old mother raising her baby on her own. I wouldn't have gotten my fantasies of Bennet and me and baby as the perfect family, but at least I would have her.

At least I would know that I hadn't caused her end.

From there, I cried so hard my eyes swelled shut. I slept for almost two days. My mama thought I had the flu. In the weeks that passed, as I slowly healed physically, I somehow buried everything. Mama's greatest lesson to me was to get over things, push them away and keep moving, because what use is it to wallow? You only weaken if you wallow and then people begin to wonder and suspect and pity you, and there was nothing worse to my mama than being pitied. She had no patience for it, and she expected me to be the same way.

At times it was easier than I thought it would be. I was so sick of feeling, so sick of being overwhelmed with grief and pain, I took her advice. I buried it all and I buried it deep, somehow going through the motions and eventually getting used to it. If I had to break down, I did it when I was alone, where no one could ask questions.

Suffer in silence, mama would say. Don't burden others with your problems. And I did it. I went on and people continued not to question my depression, my darker days. They soon told me I should get over it, move on. He was gone and I had to keep living.

God knows how I kept everything to myself all those years. Della asked me a few times if there was anything I needed to tell her. Stanley too. They were the only ones. I somehow lied to them so well, they eventually forgot their suspicions. And I guess me not ending up with a baby made it easy for them to let go too.

God knows how I didn't lose my mind. When I got older, sometimes I would wonder how I hadn't crumbled. How had I, a dumb and messed up 16-year-old, gone on pretending as if nothing had happened? How had I hidden how broken I was?

To this day I wonder if I'm not part stone.

I never went back to that tree by the crick. Some days, early on, I was dying to, still wondering if it hadn't all just been a horrible nightmare. Some days I wanted to go as a way to beat myself up, to remind myself of what I might have done. As I grew a little older, as I was able to wonder if it hadn't been me but just nature's way of telling me I was not meant for motherhood, I refused to torture myself anymore.

As more years went by, as I became old enough to be a mother and wasn't, I thought about my little bundle and imagined it was another scared little girl who buried her dead baby by a creek. Whoever that girl was, it wasn't me anymore, and I couldn't stand the memory. Slowly, I got to the point where I'd hardly think of her. I think I actually forgot about her for a while.

Then he showed up and with him he brought her memory. I thought about her more than I had thought about her in years – the pain and the shame came back just as fresh. The wound opened again.

It had me wondering what shape her sad little grave was in. Maybe it had sunk into the sloppy mud of the crick or flattened to become one with the earth. Maybe some nice thick green country grass had grown over it. Maybe there wasn't any sign left of what was under that dirt, between those two tall roots. Maybe she had completely disappeared.

I didn't want to know. I couldn't bear to know.

So I didn't go back.