Midnight Mass (Camren)

CHAPTER 13

LAST CHAPTER 🥹

It had been two weeks since the surgery. Two weeks since our short-lived joy had disappeared in a haze of blood and pain. I had been a mother. Now I wasn't anymore. The feeling was surreal and vacating, like movers had come in the night and relocated all of my emotions and my perceptions, and had left me with nothing instead.

It was how I felt after Millie's death, but on steroids. Times a thousand. In fact, the only other time I remember feeling this gutted was after Taylor's death. And this time it came pre-loaded with something else. Something extra.

Guilt.

Because this was my punishment. How could it not be? How could I have ever thought that a wife, a family, would be things I could have after what I'd done? After the calling I'd abandoned?

No. God was punishing me. Like Bathsheba and David's infant after David had Uriah murdered, God had taken my child as payment for my sins. I deserved this pain, I supposed. I'd earned it with every sigh and moan and rustle of the sheets, and since I'd been so resolutely unrepentant, God had exacted his pound of flesh another way. With ounces of blood and a blighted joy. With just one black and white glimpse of the gummy bear baby that would never be part of our lives.

But why did Camila have to suffer too? My prayers swung wildly from anger to bargaining to pleading and back to angry again.

Please.

Please not this.

Why this?

How fucking dare You?

How fucking could You?

My wife had become a woman I barely recognized. She took time away from work. She stopped reading, she stopped listening to Christmas music, and she sat by the window staring at the graveyard for hours. I could barely coax her to bed at night and into the shower in the mornings. Even though the semester was finished and I could stay home with her all day, it wasn't at all like we were in the same house together. Her mind—her soul—was somewhere else, wandering through the snowy cemetery maybe or reliving the same terrible memories in that linoleum-floored hospital room.

Please.

Please not this.

Please don't take my lamb's sparkle and spirit too.

I can't lose her. I can't.

I realized that in Kansas City, I had washed her and cradled her in order to win her trust. Now I had to do all of those same things simply to connect her to reality.

That spiral again. The same steps but with different meanings. The same actions but with different consequences. Maybe it was my penance, my duty, but I didn't care for her out of guilt—although the guilt hovered elsewhere. I cared for her because I loved her.

Camila was depressed. Her doctor prescribed her medicine, and for once, the way she was raised helped—she had no stigmas about psychotropic drugs after growing up around rich women swilling Xanax and Ambien with their chardonnay.

A few more days passed. I made her move from the chair to the couch, which was closer to the fireplace, and I began reading books to her, finishing the Galbraith mystery and moving on to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while I snuggled her on the couch. I heard her laughing at a couple parts, small little jerks of her ribs, and I kept reading as if I hadn't heard, feeling like a woman who's encountered a wild animal in the woods. I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that she'd laughed, but oh my fucking God, she'd laughed. I hadn't realized how much I craved that sound until it had been gone from my life, and now here it was, creeping slowly around the edges of our home, crouching low by the fire to see if it was safe to come back.