“How are you holding up? Everyone helping you out?” he asked.
“Your parents and my parents aren’t speaking to me because they think I cheated on you, my friends have dumped me because they think I cheated on you and they suspect their own husbands.” She shrugged. “The boys have been wonderful though. And we’re fine, all three of us. I come out to talk to you every day. I can feel you here.”
“That’s because I am here. I do the same thing.”
She touched his arm. “Just knowing you’re here, that you’re alive, even if you can’t be with me all the time, has been enough to keep me going.” She laughed. “I sometimes wonder if we ever talk about the same things, or answer each other.”
“Of course we do. Sometimes I can almost hear you. When you could still climb into the tree house, you sat on the futon and talked to me. You always sat on the left?”
“That’s because you always sat on the right,” Sarah told him, and they looked at each other and smiled.
He held her hand. “Sometimes, when we’re sitting there, I reach out and take your hand,” he said.
“I can feel you.” She took a deep breath. “You know this is going to be the last night for a while,” she said, suddenly realizing the truth of that. “I can’t get into the tree house any more and, when the baby is born, I won’t be able to come out at night at all.”
“I’ll still come,” he said. “I’ll still light a light every night. If you can slip away even for a few minutes, I’ll be here.”
Sarah made it through labour and delivered a healthy baby girl. She did not name the baby Samantha. Samantha was her daughter, and alive, if not with her. Instead, she named their daughter Magie, which was German for “magic”.
Before she and the baby and the boys rode home in the taxi, she had the hospital do DNA tests on all three children. The results when she received them proved what she already knew: the baby was a full sibling to both boys - was hers and Sam’s. She photocopied the results and mailed them to her friends, to her parents, to Sam’s parents and to Dr Gruber, writing a note at the bottom of each: “DNA proof. The baby is mine and Sam’s. Don’t phone; don’t drop by. I just wanted you to know I was telling the truth.”
She raised her children, and loved them, and she watched every night for the light through fog.
When Magie was old enough, she took her and sat in the tree house while she fed her. And Sarah talked to Sam, and showed Magie pictures of the father who could not be with her, even though he loved her.
Magie grew, and the boys grew, and Sarah took pictures, and kept scrapbooks religiously. She shared them with Sam and, through his pictures, watched the Samantha she had yearned for and never known become a lovely woman.
When the boys went off to college and Magie was in school, Sarah took a painting course in watercolours and oils. She made a new friend, a woman a few years younger than her who hadn’t grown up in the same town, hadn’t gone to the same schools and didn’t know all the same people. The two of them shared outsiders’ lives, and enjoyed their camaraderie with each other. For Sarah, that one friendship, plus her children (and eventually her grandchildren) and Sam, made for a full life.
The children stayed in touch with both sets of grandparents, but there was no real closeness there. None of the four, her parents or Sam’s, ever apologized for doubting her, and she could never forget how they had abandoned her when she and the children needed them.
Sometimes, for no reason either Sam or Sarah was able to discern, they both made it through whatever barrier it was that separated them, and they rejoiced in the few hours they stole from the universe.
So the years passed.
So a lifetime passed.
One day Mike, grown and with children and grandchildren of his own, stopped by the house because no one had answered the phone all day. In one universe he found his mother sitting on the left side of the futon she had refused to let him and his siblings replace, her right hand stretched out as if she had been holding someone’s hand. She had taken her last breath some hours earlier. She was eighty-three. On the same day, behind a different door, in another “if, Mike found his father sitting on the right side of the futon, his left hand stretched out as if he had been holding someone’s hand. He was eighty-four.
Mike called his brother and sister, and he called an ambulance.
On the day of the funeral, the children and grandchildren and the great-grandchildren gathered on the little island, and mixed Sam’s and Sarah’s ashes into the same urn. It seemed the only right thing to do. Neither of them had ever loved anyone but the other.
They were not alone. They had never been alone.
Sam and Sarah, young again, reunited, held hands and watched the families they had created and raised together and apart. And when the island emptied, they smiled at each other. “On that side, this moment seemed like such a long wait,” Sarah said.
“I forgot how short that time truly is,” Sam said, and pulled her into his arms. “I forgot you would be here when I got here.”
“I forgot too,” she said. “Everything there is like light through fog. You only see a little, you only understand a little, and it isn’t until you cross the bridge that it all becomes clear.”
They walked over the bridge of light, their hands clasped.
This time, nothing separated them.
The Tuesday Enchantress
A Guardian Story