Page 105 of Season of Gifts

“I knew she’d be the last.”Mother dabbed at her eyes with her knuckles.“They had to take everything when they took her.”

Four lost daughters.No words could heal that loss.Alice inched closer and folded her arms around Mother’s shoulders.“It wasn’t your fault.”

Mother’s quiet sniff carried a hint of amusement as she nestled into Alice’s hold.“Women know instinctively the wound that men take years to comprehend.”

Henry would understand.But he might’ve come by that understanding along a hard road.

When Alice had been six, Ollie had been three.Being impatient with her was a given.She’d attach herself to Alice the minute Alice got home from school.She’d chatter nonstop.When Alice got up for a snack, Ollie scribbled with her crayons on Alice’s worksheets.The crying and shouting, the stomping off in fury, the screeching for help—Mooo-ommm, she’s doing it again!—it could all have never existed.

Not having her little sister.A yawning chasm teetered beneath her.Henry might be standing at that edge again now, revisiting the past.Imagining a different life.A sibling couldn’t be boxed up and forgotten, packed away in some dusty corner of the mind.

Regardless of when she talked to Henry about her own confrontation with family history, she would tell Ollie in the morning.Her sister shouldn’t have to wait.

“Thank you, darling.”Mother patted Alice’s back and lifted her head from Alice’s shoulder.The hug slipped away, replaced by two pairs of clasped hands between them.“I spent weeks in this bedroom recovering from the surgery.”Mother flashed her teeth, more grimace than smile.“But the emotional wound didn’t heal.It scarred over and festered like an abscess.”

“That must have been incredibly difficult, to be in mourning and in pain and still trying to be there for Henry and his brother.”Henry knew how to lance pain like that.He’d helped her realize how much the past influenced her behavior now—and how she could change that.He’d encouraged Jay to get into therapy.He’d taken the classes in college to be an art therapist but never become one.

Because he’d been accumulating knowledge to heal his own pain.Once he’d gained his peace, he’d been determined to give it to others.And he’d found a joy in dominance, in taking charge of everyone else’s needs, of their pain and pleasure.But with his mom’s illness, the past had collided with the future.He’d tried to take on too much by himself.At least Jay would be helping him sleep tonight.

In a nightgown, with her hair down, Mother shrank into a form less imposing than her daytime self.Less confident, with regret etched in her face.“I wish I could say I handled the situation better.”

Watching his mom’s recovery would have left a mark on Henry, too.Even if he’d been too young to be a health aide then, he would have seen things.“Did you have help?A therapist?”

A genuine laugh bolted out before Mother tucked her lips tight.She smoothed Alice’s hair, her fingers neat and precise.“I forget how young you are.This was the eighties; a lost child wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about then.We had two boys, and my husband was content with that.To him, closing the door was…” Her gaze drifted across the room; Alice glanced over her shoulder, but the dresser was no more than an outline in the darkness.A shadow on top might be a portrait.“If not simple or easy, then at least logical.Efficient.Acceptable.”

The brutal logic stung like a frosty morning hitting her lungs.Things had been that way with Dad, too.That first year, Mom had reminded them almost every day not to talk about what went on at home.Not to gossip at school, like injury and illness were something shameful to be hidden.“It’s strange, the things we get used to.”

“I couldn’t.”The heaviness in Mother’s eyes matched Henry’s when he’d greeted them last night.“Couldn’t reconcile myself to it, even when I had Henry’s sweet company.”She chafed her hands, twisting them around each other.“I grew bitter inside, thinking only of what I lacked, of the little girl who wasn’t at my breast, of the three before her lost before their due dates even arrived.She was—” A quiet hitch stopped her; she blinked rapidly, shaking her head.“She was so perfect, Alice.Not a thing looked wrong with her, but she never took a breath.”

Substitutes couldn’t replace what her mother-in-law had lost.But Mother’s welcoming embrace—not just Alice and Jay but Ollie and Nat, too—that had to be part of healing.They needed a mom in the way she ached to be needed.“It’s not fair.I’m sorry that time together was stolen from you.”

Stolen from Henry, too.Losing a sibling must’ve amped up his fears of losing his mom.Panic came with tunnel vision, crawling forward on hands and knees in the dark, missing every other possibility because the mind clung to one strategy even when it wasn’t working.

Mother nodded softly, absentmindedly.“Henry turned seven at the beginning of March.We’d thrown a party for his first-grade class.He seemed so…” She idly stroked the quilt, her gaze fixed and distant.“So grown up.His brother had been about that age when he started pulling away, outgrew needing his mother.And Henry and my father were close; I knew Father would look after him, shape him into the man he would become.”

The icy chill had never left.It pulsed in waves with her heartbeat.Tingled in the tips of her fingers.Henry had lost more than a sister.“You felt like you didn’t have a purpose.”

“No one needed me, or so I thought.”A wry smile accompanied Mother’s gentle scoff.She met Alice’s eyes for an instant, no more.“I’d hoarded the pain pills from the surgery.”

Orange-tinted bottles with their press-and-twist caps.Always on the side table, always within reach of Dad’s hand.

“I expected Lina would come back from running errands.I didn’t know she meant to pick Henry up from school first.I didn’t know he would come running into the house looking for me.”

“You tried…” The words refused to come.Henry.Seven years old.Maybe carrying the backpack with his initials that Jay had placed in their new bedroom.Running to tell his mother something amazing he’d learned in class.“And he saw you.”

Mother’s slow nod landed with a sick thud in Alice’s gut.

“Lina told me afterward how they’d found me.Lying on the floor beside my chair in the conservatory.Henry shouting 911 as she ran for the phone.”The tears flowed, but Mother’s voice remained crisp and clear, a self-indictment loaded with decades of regret.“How he draped his tiny jacket around me and clung to me.Begged me not to leave, not to go and find the lost babies without him.”

They’d been standing in the kitchen, and he’d known.He’d looked at Jay, and so calmly, so gently, he’d asked if Jay had been the one to find Mrs.Eickhoff.Because Henry knew that face.He knew those slumped shoulders, those distant eyes, the immense fear of so much loss.The more favorable outcome had been his mother.

Chapter fifty-six

Henry

Henryoughttobefeeling elation.Years of patience and effort from himself and from Jay, and more recently from Alice, had been necessary to bring Jay to such a monumental breakthrough.Clear-eyed comfort with restraints?The sweet boy he’d rescued so long ago was reclaiming his desires.He’d shattered the prison of memory restraining him.The moment deserved celebration.

But elation hung in a glass sphere, a bright bauble surrounded by the noxious dread, the rolling fog that consumed so much of Henry now.He could lay his hands on the smooth surface, stroke the sleek angles of Jay’s back and hips, but nothing he touched made contact.The sensation existed, yet the feeling of it lay out of reach.

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