Page 9 of Bae

“All right, they’re in the garage. Under lock and key.”

It sounded like something we’d have done in high school, and then my mother would have lectured us afterward. We were grown-ass men now. With responsibilities. We didn’t do that kind of thing. It was beneath us.

They keep torturing your wife.

The thought was like a drop kick to my nads. “Don’t get rid of your stash just yet,” I told him.

His eyes flickered with surprise. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Good, because I had a bad feeling the stalkerazzi weren’t either.

Rimmel

Her name was Evie.

The meaning of her name waslife.

It seemed appropriate somehow to give our daughter the name of something she wouldn’t have. Evie never took her first breath. I never saw her eyes that surely matched her daddy’s. I never got to hold her…

But she was a life.

My life.

Our life.

A life that never would be.

After I lost her, so much was unbearable, most of all the way people referred to her, the way they would whisper in hushed tones when they thought I couldn’t hear.

She lost it.

That baby would have been gorgeous.

It. That baby. Would have.

No.

Evie. Ours. Is.

It didn’t matter that we’d never get to hold her. I felt the crushing weight of her absence; I felt the hollowed-out core in my body where she used to grow. Empty. Lifeless.

How did I reconcile what was with what would never be? How did I let people know even though she technically never lived, she still existed and would never cease? I’d known loss. I’d known death.

This was so much worse.

Life goes on. That’s what people said anyway. And in a sense, they were all right. Life did go on. Minutes passed, hours ticked by, and days dragged. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

The pain of losing her didn’t dull. I learned to live with the stinging reminders every single day so they weren’t as sharp as before.

Even though the pain dulled, the memory didn’t. The blur of that day was still agonizingly vivid. It didn’t even matter I was checked out for most of it, because even the emotions of events I suppressed haunted me.

Something else took over where the sharpest pain resided. Desperation. Almost total-consuming thought.

Wondering.

What if? Why? When? Again?

What if I’d never lost her? What if she was a bundle in my arms right now?

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