Fear (Gone 5)

“And you have no idea what it was about?”

He shook his head slowly. He hesitated before he went on, and Connie knew there was something big coming. Something he was leery of telling her.

“My sons are in there,” Connie said.

“Sons? Plural?” He looked sharply at her. “I’ve only heard you talk about your boy Sam.”

She took a deep pull at the wine. “I want you to trust me,” she said. “So I’m telling you the truth. That’s how trust works. Right?”

“That’s what I hear,” he said dryly.

“I had twins. Sam and David. I guess I liked the biblical names back then.”

“Good strong names,” Darius said.

“They were fraternal, not identical. Sam was a few minutes older. He was the smaller one, though, by seven ounces.”

She started again and was surprised to find that her voice betrayed her with a wobble. She powered through it, determined not to get weepy. “I had postpartum depression. Pretty bad. You know what that is?”

He didn’t answer but she saw that he did not.

“Sometimes a woman, after she gives birth, her hormones go seriously off-kilter. I knew this. After all, I’m a nurse, although not much lately.”

“So there are pills and all,” Darius suggested.

“There are,” she confirmed. “And I kept it together. But early on I formed this … this fantasy, I suppose. That something was wrong with David.”

“Wrong?”

“Yes. Wrong. I don’t mean physically. He was a beautiful little baby. And smart. It was so strange, because I worried that I would prefer him to Sam because he was bigger and so alert and so beautiful.”

Darius set aside his now-empty beer. He popped another.

“Then the accident. The meteor.”

“Heard about that,” Darius said with interest. “Like, twenty years ago, though, wasn’t it?”

“Thirteen years ago.”

“Must have been something to see. A meteor smashes a nuclear power plant? People must have freaked.”

“You could say that,” Connie said dryly. “You know they still call Perdido Beach ‘fallout alley.’ Naturally they told us everything was fine.... Well, they didn’t tell me that. In fact, what they told me was that my husband, the father of my two little boys, was the only person killed.”

Darius sat up, tilting his head, and leaned in. “The fallout?”

“No, the actual impact. He never suffered. Never even knew what was coming. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Killed by a meteor.” Darius shook his head. Connie knew he had seen death in Afghanistan.

“After that the depression came back. Worse than ever. And with it this conviction, this powerful belief that there was something wrong with David. Something very, very wrong.”

The memory of those days swept over her, making it impossible to speak. The madness had been so real. What had begun as a symptom of postpartum depression came to be something like a psychotic symptom. Like there was a voice in her head, whispering, whispering that David was dangerous. That he was evil.

“I was afraid I might harm him,” Connie said.

“Harsh.”

“Yeah. Harsh. I loved him. But I was afraid of him. Afraid of what I would do to him. So.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I gave him up. He was adopted immediately. And for a long time he disappeared from my life. I gave all my attention to Sam and told myself I had done the right thing.”