“Before we met.” She ran her hand over the surgical scar on his left knee. “The end of your budding hockey career when you were seventeen.”
“So much is the same,” he said. “I know you. My heart and soul know you, and you’re not some different Sarah. You’re you. Only . . .”
“Only in your world I’m dead, so I can’t really be your Sarah. And in my world you’re dead, so you can’t really be my Sam. I’ve been asking myself the same question you’re asking yourself. Am I cheating on you with you? Is being here with you wrong?”
He touched the wedding band on her finger. “I gave you that ring,” he said. “I promised to love and honour and cherish you until death parted us. And you’re right here, not dead. So am I. I meant it then, Sarah, and I mean it now. How might matter to your family, or mine, or to our friends, but I don’t give a damn about how. We found each other, we’re together the way we should be and I’ll do whatever I can to be with you as much as I can.”
When, hand in hand, they stepped onto the bridge together, he vanished again, and again her heart cried out.
But this time was different. This time she knew he’d been real. And if she was alone in her world, she still had him in their world, tiny as it was.
Her mother said, “You’re pregnant! How could you?” Her father turned away from her, shame and disgust on his face. Her friends, knowing about Sam’s vasectomy, asked her, “Who’s the father?” and eyed their own husbands with sudden distrust. She told them the truth and they didn’t believe her. When she refused to have an abortion, her parents stopped speaking to her and her friends suddenly had their cell phones turned off.
The boys were supportive, if a little stunned, when she told them.
Every night for five months, Sarah looked for the light in the tree house window, and every night it wasn’t there.
She took pictures of the boys, had them take pictures of her and her swelling belly, and she put the pictures into scrapbooks. She made no secret of the fact that she was storing the pictures in the tree house. “To keep them close to your dad,” she told the boys. When Sam came again, she wanted to be able to show him.
She didn’t tell them that.
She had a hard time with the pregnancy, but not as hard as she’d had with the baby she lost. She managed to gain a little weight.
She had never been so alone.
But she was sleeping nights. Sam was with her in spirit, and she went out to the tree and sat by the urn and talked to him. She told him about the boys. She knew that he was telling her about them and about Samantha, who in his world had lived.
Sometimes Mike and Jim went out and sat beside her while she talked. Sometimes one or the other would go out to the tree alone.
“He’s always with us,” she told them. “He will always love us.”
Sarah made it through the long days and the lonely nights. He was out there. He was with her. She did not doubt him, and she did not lose faith.
She was standing sideways at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes around the huge obstacle of her belly, when
she looked out the back window and saw the light in the tree house.
It was too early to send the boys to bed. It was, however, Friday night. She told them, “I’m going out to the tree house to talk to your dad for a while. You two can watch TV until midnight, and then go on to bed.” She looked them in the eye. “I’m counting on both of you.”
Mike hugged her. “We won’t let you down. Or Dad. You’re not alone, Mom.”
Jim nodded agreement.
She hugged them. “Thank you. Thanks for being people your dad and I can both be proud of.”
The boys locked up. She hurried out the door and across the bridge and into the fog. “Sam?” she called.
He burst out onto the balcony. “You’re here!”
“I am. But I can’t get up the ladder any more.”
“I’ll come down.”
He touched her belly, and held her as close as he could. The baby kicked him, and he said, “I knew you’d see the light tonight.”
“How?”
“I found all your scrapbooks. I was up there looking at pictures of you and the boys. They look just the same. But the hole where Samantha should be—” He pulled out his wallet and opened it and showed her pictures he had taken of the boys and Samantha. The boys were exactly the same. Samantha was beautiful.