The doctor waved over some nurses and together they released me from the restraints and sat me up.
“Oh . . . Bobby,” I cried, as if he could hear me. This should have been good news. But this was all wrong. We were supposed to be celebrating this together. Planning our lives around this blessing. Instead, I hadn't even fully comprehended the news of his loss. He didn't feel gone. I felt like I could get in my car and drive to the lake house and he would be waiting there for me with a smile on his face. And I would jump into his arms and tell him I had a surprise. And we would laugh and then cry tears of joy.
But I was in a hospital bed, and Bobby was lying in a morgue with two holes in his back. He left with all the good parts of me. I was just a shell. How could I do this alone? How could I raise our child? How could I live a million lives for us when I didn't even want to live this one any longer?
I finally caught my breath, which only allowed me to sob. “He's not dead. He's not dead.” I chanted to myself. I believed once before he was, and he showed up at my door. And when I first saw him I told him he should have stayed dead. Now, I would give anything for him to come back to me.
Bobby beat death to see me again. To tell me he never left. That he never stopped thinking about me. That I was what brought him back. If I brought him back once, I hoped my tears could do it again.
I slumped back into the bed. I didn't want to hear anymore. I didn't want to speak. I just wanted to soak in this despair. This pain that connected me to him. I wrapped my arms around my stomach, to the only living part of Bobby in this world, hugging myself and the life inside of me. I hoped wherever Bobby was he could feel me hugging him, willing him to return.
But people don't come back from the dead once. And they sure as hell don't come back twice.
For two nights I cried. I cried more than I thought a person could cry. It felt like I could flood the lake with my tears for Bobby.
My sister sat there for most of the day and didn't say a word. There was nothing she could say. I didn't care yet about Stan or Rory. The sorrow was so all-encompassing that it stole all the space inside of me. There was no room yet for anger or vengeance.
Just sorrow.
Sorrow so deep it was like a mirror reflecting on another mirror. Infinite. Boundless. Endless. Sorrow that hurt my bones. Gripped at my heart with angry claws. Wrung my stomach into misshaped knots. Made my eyes raw.
It took my breath away at random moments. There were times when I thought I might suffocate, like Bobby stole the air right out of my chest when he left this world.
I had no room to even love the life inside of me. Because I gave all my love to Bobby; I left it with him, soaked in his blood in that parking lot.
People try to separate emotional anguish and physical pain as if they are different. But anyone who has ever experienced a loss this tragic understands you feel that pain everywhere. You carry it with you in every cell. It's invisible. There are no cuts or bruises. But every breath aches. Everything hurts.
The nurses gave me mild sedatives, but whenever I woke, I couldn't take my first breath without weeping. Even they pitied me. When my sister had to leave at night, one of them came and stroked my hair as I sobbed Bobby's name over and over. Throughout the night, I begged for him to come back, but each morning, I woke up and he was still gone. That gentle gesture from a stranger, I am convinced, kept my heart beating, because I was sure this grief would eventually stop it. I didn't think the heart could survive a hurt this strong.
But underneath all the pain, something started to stir. It was so minuscule—A speck of strength compared to the monolith of devastation. It was Bobby. Inside of me. He did find a way to live. And he needed me to keep him alive. He said he would never leave me and he kept his promise.
I would get to see him again in eight months. I owed it to him to be strong and carry on his memory through our child.
So that morning, when my sister came, I decided to stop crying, at least for a while.
“Do they have Stan?” I asked.
She sat up in her chair, becoming overly attentive to my voice. “Yes.”
“And Rory?”
“The police have him too. They found his car at a bar a few towns over, where a bunch of people had seen him with Barbie. The police want to speak to you, but I told them you weren't ready.”
“I am now. I want that coward to pay for shooting Bobby in the back. And . . .” I didn't know what I wanted for Rory. I knew his brother's death due to his cowardly actions would be a level of incomprehensible hell.
“Okay. Well, I'll call them later. It's a mess, Lilly, and I think you should take it easy. The doctor says you need a lot of rest. With the bleeding so early on, you have to be cautious.”
“I'm not worried about this baby,” I said stubbornly. “She's got Bobby in her.”
“She?” Julia asked.
“She,” I confirmed.
Julia nodded in concession. I don't why I always referred to the unborn child as her. But I had a certainty from the start. Maybe Bobby whispered it to me in my dreams. I think that’s why I was also sure she would be alright.
“What about mom?”
“She's with dad. He can't travel, but she's been driving me crazy, calling the hotel every night.”
“Is she mad?”
“Mad?” Julia rubbed her furrowed brow, exasperated. “God Lilly, we're past mad. Mom's devastated. She was close to their parents and we just lost them a few years ago. And now? This whole thing is just . . .” she shook her head, and looked out the window, biting her lip to hold her composure.
I watched my sister, sometimes as hard as stone, grow weary. And I felt compelled to ask her about the thing we silently agreed to never discuss. The thing that never happened. “Julia?”
“Mmmhmm,” she replied, keeping her eyes affixed on the window.
“When you walked in on us before the wedding...why did you...why didn't you stop me from marrying Rory?”
She shook her head subtly and sighed mercifully. “Lilly, Bobby was a playboy. He wasn't serious. You were young and naive. I thought you were testing the waters. Getting a taste of the other Lightly boy. The one who everyone wanted a taste of. Growing up the way you three did, I thought it was only natural you might have been curious . . . Bobby back then, he would have broken your heart. He would have ruined you. He wasn’t ready to share a life with someone. Rory made sense. He was the safe bet. He was ready to settle down. He had the job and the plans. He would take care of you.”
Never had the safe bet been more dangerous.
She leaned forward, making sure to get her plea across. At some point, I think she stopped trying to convince me, and was trying to justify her actions to herself, knowing she was complicit in helping her little sister weave the grandest of lies.
“You never said you didn't want to. It was your decision to make, not mine. It was my job to get you down the aisle. There was no time to work out wedding jitters or curiosity. It was my job to make the decision to leave hard. If you wanted it, I mean really wanted it, it shouldn't have been so easy to stop you. Making a mistake shouldn't be so easy.”
“Oh Julia,” I said ruefully, “making the mistake is the easy part.”
She shook her head, and sat back in her chair, the conviction in her earlier defense dissipating into despair. “I didn't know,” she whispered under her breath.
I let out a thin sigh. “Julia, it was serious . . . me and Bobby. It was so much more than a little fling.”
She swallowed hard, and looked me in the eyes. “So tell me.”
Julia and I never talked about boys or crushes. Never bonded over such things as some sisters do. She married when I was fourteen. And she went away to school when I was about eight. For the first time, I was able to share the story of the love of my life. Turn this dirty little secret into my truth. To speak of Bobby proudly and without shame or manufactured contempt. Tell the story to someone who knew him and wouldn’t judge him just based on one decision. It was agonizing, but it also made me feel Bobby's presence. When I had to stop, I stopped. When I had to cry, I cried. Sometimes she did, too. I got to see a side of my sister I had missed all these years.