Alice had been the beauty of the two, yet she’d chosen a much different path. One that appeared exciting and colorful yet had been a tragedy wrapped in a shiny package. I’d been fooled by it as had so many. The memory of having to identify her body in the hospital morgue no longer caused me the agonizing grief it should. She had been my wife. Losing her should have been something that would always carry sorrow. But it wasn’t sorrow I felt toward Alice’s memory. It was anger. Her lies, her choices, her selfish and reckless behavior had taken not just her life but that of our child’s. My world had been ripped apart the night I was handed the tiny little boy barely developed wrapped in a blanket with eyes that would never open to this world. They’d tried to save him when they knew Alice wasn’t going to survive but it had been too soon for him. He wasn’t ready. All the work the doctors and nurses had done couldn’t make his body ready to face life outside of the womb. He’d been gone before he entered it.
My gran had always said that secrets never were the winners at hide and seek. It had taken me years to figure out what she meant by that. But when Alice’s secrets had no longer had a hiding place those words of my gran’s suddenly were very clear. In death, you can’t cover up the lies left in your wake. They have a way of unraveling and bursting free to damage everyone in their path.
The man driving the car that had crashed fatally that night killing him on impact and Alice a few hours later was her high school boyfriend. The text messages on her phone revealed a life Alice lived I had never known. Sex so twisted it sickened me and drug use I’d been too fucking naïve to recognize. The things she’d exposed our son to, I would never know. She hadn’t even given him a chance. The drugs he’d been exposed to while in her womb were very likely the reason he was underdeveloped for twenty-six weeks.
I’d spent hours researching babies who had been born that early and survived. Trying to find a reason why my son hadn’t. Any reason other than the fact his mother had failed him. I had so much to hate her for I wanted to be able to forgive her for something if not everything. In the end, that had been a futile task. It had been me I realized that I hated. Because I hadn’t seen the warnings. I hadn’t saved our son.
I wouldn’t call Annie back. We had said all there was to say to one another the weeks after Alice’s death. Annie thought her sister had paid the price for her sins with her life, but I disagreed. She didn’t suffer the heart-wrenching sorrow of losing our child. She hadn’t held the lifeless infant in her arms and saw his ending before he ever had a beginning. She hadn’t faced her sins. She’d escaped all the repercussions for them. I’d been left here to find a way to live through each unraveling of her demented lifestyle. It had been me that was continuously punched in the gut with one truth after another. Each one growing more horrible as the last.
I hadn’t gone to Alice’s funeral. I hadn’t allowed our son to be buried with his mother. Annie was the only family Alice had other than me. She had fought me on it but not hard and not long. She knew there was no point. I wouldn’t budge and, in the end, I refused her calls. I didn’t even know who had gone to my wife’s funeral and to this day I didn’t care. Her life had not been one to memorialize.
Alice had failed our child and he deserved more than being buried with a woman who had never protected him. He was pure where she was tarnished even deeper than I had realized. The ugliness that she had allowed to control her in this life had taken her in death and I wanted my son to be in a safe place. It was the only thing I had left to do for him. At that time, it made sense. It was the only way I could see them lower him into the ground. Knowing she was nowhere near him.
I hadn’t taken any of Alice’s things when I left the apartment we had shared. I’d moved into hers when we had married, leaving things in mine due to the year lease on the place. Grate had been going to sublease it for his girlfriend but that never had time to take place. I’d been back before the ink had been dry on our marriage certificate.