THE POWER OF THREE (12 page)

             
“With me.
Come with me.”

             
Did he mean I should die to be with him? I almost had. I had tried to die to join him. Now Grant and I had talked about having a baby and starting our family anew. One baby or a dozen babies would never replace Brady, never! But we had to move on or we’d fall apart. We wanted children. We longed to be parents again and to have a family. How could I turn my back on the one person who loved me most and make him suffer another loss?

             
“I can’t come with you, baby. I have to stay here with Daddy.”

             
He pushed back from my embrace and scowled. “You don’t love me!”

             
It was the worst thing he might have said to me. It was a killing blow. “Of course I love you! I’ll always love you.”

             
He vanished and was no more. I sank back on my heels and stared into the empty room. I stood and began to pace the small house from kitchenette to living room and back. I opened the back door and hurried down to the pier, just to be away from where I’d just held my son in my arms.

             
Hadn’t I? Was my mind making it all up? That’s what Grant and the psychiatrist thought. It was two against one, good odds I was hallucinating.

             
“I didn’t do it!” I screamed across the canal at the wall of jungle. “It’s not my fault!”

             
Saying it didn’t mean I believed it. I could have gotten up sooner. I shouldn’t have been asleep with children in the house. Grant usually woke me before he left for work and this one time he hadn’t. Still, it was me who shouldered this blame alone. I could have prevented it all.

             
The thought of my dying, of taking my own life, wasn’t a scary idea. I knew what waited after the last breath. It was a big black nowhere that gave the soul surcease from pain and suffering.
So fear didn’t sway me.
It was how betrayed Grant would feel, how he would have to struggle, alone this time, to get over losing both his son and his wife. We were the repository of his love. If I left him that way, I would be committing a grave sin.

             
Still, it was Shakespeare who said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Was it nobler to be, to live? Was it nobler to not be, to pass out of this life?

             
Who needed me most, the dead or the living? The solution lay in my hands. The dead child was young and alone. The living man was adult and might manage…

             
I couldn’t think this way, leaning into the darkness that could snatch me into its depths if I let it. We are all liable for our actions, even the least of them, I thought, and taking that lethal action was against all my principles. It was one thing to wish to die, to try to die during a trauma
and a heartbreaking loss, but to consider it during a time of good health when life was only finally beginning to mean something again was another thing entirely.
 
I had been right to deny Brady his wish. I knew I had.

             
Still…I missed him so much. It was like an emptiness in me that would never be filled, a piece of me lost…
a darkness
in me growing.

             
“I want to start that family,” I told Grant in bed that night. He turned, holding me tenderly.

             
“Are you sure it’s not too soon?”

             
I didn’t answer. I moved closer, wrapping my arms around him, and we made love while the Florida moon rose, shining through the windows to cover our bed in silver.

             
#

             
I noticed I had picked up a fascination with one bright little object. I began carrying around a pearl-handled pocketknife my brother had given me years before. It was a pretty thing, the way light glanced off the pearl and the stainless steel blade when I turned it in the light. I had taken it from my purse, where I usually carried it, and slipped it into the pockets of my clothes. If what I was wearing had no pocket, I carried the knife around in my hand, keeping it warm. It lay beside me on the pier while I wrote. I sometimes used it to sharpen my pencils. I put it on the seat cushion of the chair when I read. I lay it on the counter when I cooked, using it to slice tomatoes and to peel cucumbers.

             
It’s handy to have around
, I told myself, meditating on the little knife, admiring it.

             
Back on the pier with my notebook I began a story that involved the knife.

             
It was small, a ladies’ pocketknife, decorated with pearl on the handle. The shaft was four inches, hardly enough to be thought deadly.
 

             
I liked suspense novels and was beginning one of my own. I didn’t know yet what the knife meant in the story or how it would be used, but it was interesting. Day after day I wrote on, following the physical object of the knife wherever it went and as it was owned by this person, and then that one. The last character to own it, a shady female wearing a trench coat and stiletto heels, found it on a park bench. She would use it for murder.

             
I might be able to sell this novel, I thought. I haven’t read a story where a knife comes into different people’s lives and affects each one in some way until it becomes the property of a killer. This is great!

             
I was so caught up in writing the story that most days I didn’t even think about Brady until it was bed time and I closed my eyes on the day. Then he came into my thoughts, staying until I fell into restless slumber.

             
I returned to my writing.
She picked up the knife from the bench, admiring it
. (My killer would be female!)
She could use this. It was no good for stabbing, but might work excellent for carving…
 

             
While immersed in my imagination, I jumped in alarm at the touch on my left arm.

             
Brady stood there, sadder than before, so thin he looked as if he were a victim of starvation, his eyes sunken in his head. He looked angry. I had never seen my baby angry before. He had been a happy, pleasant child, quick to laughter, joy bubbling out of him like it came from an inner fountain of happiness.

             
“Brady, what’s wrong? What’s happened to you?” If he was a ghost then there was life after death and following that conclusion there was a supreme being somewhere because there was a soul. How could a child suffer anything after death? How could any god allow it?
Confusion filled my mind. I liked logic. I liked to write realistically and give fiction life, not just words, but life, real life,
logical
life, one a reader could believe. This apparition appearing before me was not logical in any afterlife I could imagine.

             
“I’m going away,” he said softly.

             
“Where are you going?”

             
“I’m alone so I’m going away,” he repeated, giving no further explanation.

             
I reached for him, but he blinked and then he was gone.

             
I sat stunned and unhappy. The novel writing no longer mattered. It was all foolish and made up stuff; it didn’t mean anything. The world meant something. What I could see, hear, taste, and touch. If Brady’s ghost was real what did it mean that he was shrinking, turning gray, wasting away? What was after this life that it would take a little child and do it more harm than ever done to it on earth?

             
I took up my notebook and pencil, my little knife, and I hurried into the house. I had a few Valium left from months before, and I needed one. I needed two.

             
#

             
Brady woke me in the night, hovering over my face, his nose almost touching mine. I was startled and quickly wide awake. “What?”

             
He gestured I follow him. He moved away across the floor, gliding in the shadows. I slipped from bed careful not to disturb or wake Grant.

             
Brady was moving into the small bathroom. I followed. He said, “Close the door.”

             
He did not sound two years old; he sounded like an older boy, maybe closer to twelve. I closed the door and turned to him. He was a shell of himself. He was not substantial. I could see through his body to the wall behind him. He was smaller yet, and thinner, emaciated, almost a skeleton.

             
I dropped to my knees and held out my arms, my heart hurting in my chest.

             
He shook his head. He pointed to the bathtub and the little pearl-handled knife lying there. I had left it on the night stand. How it came to be here was a mystery.

             
“Come with me.”

             
I knew exactly what he wanted me to do with the knife. Had that been my fascination all along? Had the knife called to me, whispering of peace?

             
“Brady, I can’t. I’ll…I’ll see you again one day. None of us live forever. But your Daddy needs me. We’re going to start a family again…”

             
The disdain on his face was not childlike. “No more babies!” he hissed.

             
“But…”

             
“You let me die. You should have been there. You should have put out the fire. It’s your fault.”

             
These accusations that I had heaped upon myself were now coming from my child’s ghostly lips. I stood accused and knew it was only right. Now I did want to die. I wanted to run a warm bath, undress and slide into the water. I wanted to take the little sharp knife and slit my wrists with clinical precision and let my blood color the water red. I would be comforted not to have to think of my loss again.

             
Brady’s form began to change. It was if he were morphing, being pulled all out of arrangement, his legs elongating, his arms enlarging with odd bulges, his torso rising, thinning out. His eyes blazed with blame. Then he had no eyes at all as they melted into the cheeks and the cheeks into the neck and the neck into the body. This ghost thing became something other
than Brady’s ghost. It told me what it was.
I am you
, it intoned gravely. But that was in my head. I said it to myself and this thing, this supernatural evil that had been hiding inside me, festering and growing into a life on its own, simply whispered my own thoughts. The guilt I harbored had taken life and come into the light for me to see. It first came as Brady, in order to keep me from being afraid. It had never been my child, my baby. He had never run across the floor or hugged my knees, never spoken to me or looked upon me with love. This thing was here for a feast of blood, my blood. It demanded it. I had given it life so that it could make me take mine.

             
I tore my gaze from the horrid apparition and got to my feet. I slowly moved to the bathtub as the bad thing backed away. I turned on the taps. I sank onto the side of the tub while it filled, holding the knife in my hands. I knew if I looked the apparition would be gone. It had accomplished its mission.

             
#

             
Grant heard the water running and woke to stumble to the bathroom. He found me naked in the tub, the knife at my wrist. I hadn’t yet been able to make the first cut. He grabbed the weapon, splashing water all over the floor. He stood looking down at me in wonder. “What are you doing? My god, what were you about to do?”

             
If I told him the truth he wouldn’t believe it. Guilt was not an entity, not in Grant’s world, not in anyone’s world, only in mine.

             
He helped me from the tub and dried me with a towel the way he used to dry Brady after a bath. He found my bathrobe and helped me slip in my arms. He tied the sash at my waist and then stepped back.

             
“We have to do something about this,” he said.

             
I couldn’t look Grant in the eyes. I was too forlorn that again I had failed to do what was right.

             
The next day I lied to the psychiatrist, but he was not fooled. “I wasn’t going to slit my wrists. My husband’s just over anxious about me, over protective. He got the wrong impression. It
was
the middle of the night.”

             
“What made you take a bath in the middle of the night?”

             
I shrugged. “I woke up and thought a hot bath might make me sleepy again.”