“I’m confused. I don’t know what to think.” I wipe tears from my eyes. He’s right. This is painful. Even without my memory of the miscarriages. “What if I never started to remember on my own? Would you have eventually told me?”
“I don’t know. Look, it’s not just the baby clothing. You need to see something else.” He reaches into the bottom of the box, hands me a folded sheet of pale blue stationery. “I swear you didn’t want me to say anything. This is why I didn’t tell you.” The letter reads, in my distinctive, bold handwriting from before the accident: Dear Jacob,
You have been here for me through all of the pain—a steady presence, the only person I can count on. I want more than anything to escape with you to Mystic Island. I want to forget everything. I’ll go with you, to be away. Don’t even mention the past. Don’t even mention the way my body has betrayed me. Don’t mention what is lost, ever again. Promise me. Cross your heart. I want to move forward from here.
Love,
Kyra
I drop the letter on the coffee table. My words slant across the page, clear and direct. He was only following my wishes. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I should’ve trusted you. It’s just . . . this is so hard. Seeing these little outfits . . .”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought out the box after all.”
“I’m glad you did.” I get up and go to the window. I need distance from the evidence, from the letter. The memory rises inside me. I wanted a girl. I wanted to show her the shells on the beach, sea stars, sea snails, bald eagles. Orcas, porpoises, migrating humpback whales. I wanted to be the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny. Every rite of passage would fill me with wonder—her first words, first steps, first laugh, and her first gold star in the first grade.
I turn around to face him. “You said there were reasons you didn’t tell me. More than one, then. More than the letter?”
He exhales, rubs his temples. “The dive. I didn’t tell you everything about the dive.”
“What about the dive?” My feet grow heavy, immovable, as if they’re cemented to the floor. “There was someone else drowning.”
“No, it was you.”
A beat of time passes, stretching into an eternity. “But you told me what happened. We were saved . . .”
“Did you ever think maybe you didn’t want to be saved?”
“What? That’s not even possible.”
When he looks at me, his eyes are tortured. “You swam away from me. You swam into the strongest current.”
“You’re saying I wanted to drown? That’s impossible. I’m not suicidal!” But in the fabric of my self-assurance, a tiny hole has been torn. Is there a version of me that wanted to die, under certain circumstances? Or at least to become oblivious?
“At first, I thought you had seen something spectacular. But you wanted to just take off and swim away . . . I went after you. I tried to save you. To get you to come back.”
“You’re saying I put you at risk. I put both of us at risk.” My heartbeat thrums louder and louder in my head.
“You didn’t intend to. But it happened. I went after you and you . . . ended up hitting your head. I managed to get us up onto the beach. If I hadn’t acted quickly . . . We both would have died.”
I want to say, You’re lying. It didn’t happen that way. I could not have put both of us at risk.
But I can’t say another word. My voice dies in my throat, and my body has turned to stone.
“He should’ve told you about the miscarriages,” Sylvia says. She has met me for an emergency session early in the morning. Her hair looks hastily combed, and she’s in jeans and a sweater and sneakers. Without makeup, her features look more angular, but her expression is soft and kind—and genuinely worried.
I was up most of the night. Jacob slept alone in his room, to give us each some space and time to think. “Even with my note and what he says happened on the dive?”
She taps her pencil on her notebook. “He kept something very important, very emotional, from you.”
“He was trying to protect me. I’m angry at him. At myself. For not trusting him, for writing that note in the first place. For pushing him too hard. But maybe he should’ve ignored my letter and shown me the baby clothes. Everything in that box. Maybe he should’ve had faith that I could handle the truth.”
“Kyra, a thought just occurred to me. I hate to play devil’s advocate, but are you sure he didn’t show you the box before?”
Her suggestion stuns me, and for a moment, I can’t speak. “I don’t think so,” I say finally. “If he had, he would’ve told me.”
“But he didn’t tell you about what really happened on the dive—at least, not until you confronted him about the miscarriages.”
The room feels suddenly cold. A thread is beginning to unravel in the cuff of my sweater sleeve. “That’s true. Now he’s saying I swam into the strongest current on purpose. But I can’t imagine that I did. I don’t get a sense that I was depressed . . . I’m guessing the miscarriages would’ve made me feel sad and hopeless, but . . .”