Page 129 of Your Soul to Keep

Of all the things I could have asked her, there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Why? Why do you keep them in your bag? Don’t you want to preserve them?”

She patted my cheek and smiled, the first she’d ever given me. “Love was never meant to be preserved. Spend it, Shae. Spend it all.”

Long after she left, I remained sitting at the kitchen table, the bits and pieces of her letters repeating over and over in my head along with her final words.

“I. Regret. Nothing.”

Flattening the palms of my hands on the table, I pushed myself up and climbed the stairs. On my knees, I pulled the box from beneath my bed for the third time in as many weeks and lifted the lid.

Folded over the top lay the three embroidered baby blankets I’d shown Gabe. One by one, I pulled them out and this time, with no witness, I held each to my face.

They didn’t smell like baby. They didn’t smell like anything, not even the baby detergent I washed them in when my hope was still new. I folded each of them with their embroidered initials facing upward and laid them down over my lap.

Three tiny onesies came next. Never worn but worn thin from nights clutched in my hands while I wept the loss. I should have passed them on to someone else, but I couldn’t bear to part with them. I could no longer remember which one was meant for which baby.

Next, I flipped through the stack of shower invitations I never sent. Addressed to all the friends who walked away when I lost my sense of fun, they no longer held the same importance. I had new friends, now. Real friends. I set the invites to the side. These could go.

Positive pregnancy tests, two of them false, lay at the bottom of the box. I’d been loathe to let them go, not knowing which was real and which was false, but I was done with grasping at straws. I sat them on the stack of invites.

Last, encased in plastic, a single faded ultrasound picture of what looked like a bean. I cradled it in my hand, remembering the days I’d carried it in my wallet, taking it out to look at it so often it began to fade.

I’d had it laminated.

My little bean.

This, along with the hollow in my chest, was all I had left.

I stared at it the way I had back then and let the tears fall.

Once upon a time, I’d loved Gary. Those days were long past, and those feelings long dead. But echoes of my hope and loss remained.

And those kids I coveted? They carried his DNA, the same genetics that made up the children I lost. But it wasn’t his kids I wanted; it was mine I longed for.

And those children were not replaceable.

The grief I carried with me, that unspent love, lived on as a beautiful testament to the brief time I carried them inside me.

To rid myself of that grief was to forget.

And I didn’t want to forget.

But perhaps I could let go.

And step inside a new story.

I picked up the phone.

35

Three Days

Myhandsshaking,Ipressed call.

He answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he demanded harshly.

“Home.”

He scoffed.

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