She still had her stick from Mike, she still had her stick from Jim — both carefully labelled with the names she’d called them when they were still unknowns. Aloisius. Bob. She still had the stick from the miscarried baby, too. Sam.
She should never have put the baby’s real name on the stick. But they had found out early she was going to be a girl. They had decided to name her Samantha. And Sarah hadn’t been able to resist putting the real name on that stick.
Now Sarah had a fourth blue stripe, and the stripe on the stick made the pregnancy more real than the ultrasound had.
She was going to have a baby.
She had to sit down, and not because she was queasy, or because she was exhausted. She had to think.
There had never been anyone but Sam.
And Sam had a vasectomy after they lost Samantha, and after Sarah nearly died, too.
But ...
But ...
But ...
She closed her eyes. She had one night she couldn’t explain. One night out of an entire lifetime where she was not sure what had really happened. The night of the funeral, up in the tree house, with fog thick on the island and Sam holding her in his arms, they had made love.
She knew it hadn’t been real, except she was pregnant.
And what if?
What if, the day he’d talked her into him going to pick up the boys, she had prevailed and she had gone? What if, in that moment, something had twisted in the universe, so that both possibil
ities actually happened? In one, Sam lived. In one, she lived.
It could have happened the same way after the miscarriage. In his “if, she’d had the surgery and had her tubes tied. In her “if, he’d had the vasectomy.
And when he had died in her world, and she had died in his, something connected them together again, out on the island, beneath the tree. Some need, some desperation, some call between them.
And now she faced being pregnant alone, knowing that the pregnancy could kill her. She was going to have to tell her mother and father, she was going to have to tell the boys, she was going to have to tell her friends. All of them were going to be horrified. They were going to point out that she had almost died last time.
Her parents and Sam’s parents and her friends would worry about her, remembering the disaster of the last pregnancy. They would tell her to abort, to think of the boys and what would happen to them if they lost their mother too.
They would have a point.
But the baby was Sam’s baby.
The last piece of him she had.
She was keeping the baby. She would take vitamins and eat plenty of fruit and rest whenever she needed it and she would take care of herself and not do too much. She would let her family and friends do things for her, and for once she would not try to be Superwoman.
Somewhere close enough that she had touched him, Sam was still alive. They were having a baby.
And, oh God, she needed him.
That night, she tucked the boys into bed and she locked up the house. She walked through the backyard, over the bridge and onto the island. The air was crisp with the first autumn chill, the flowers and their stands were gone, the urn sat at the base of the tree on the little pedestal she’d bought for it. She didn’t do more than glance at it.
She leaned against the tree, her forehead to the rough bark, and she whispered, “Sam, I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t know how to reach you. But I’m here, and I need you. I need you so much.”
She waited, but he didn’t come.
She felt sick. The pregnancy, her fear and her need for him all weighed on her. She’d promised herself that she would stay all night if she had to. But she didn’t have the strength to spend all night leaning against a tree, and the cold was biting into her.
If she climbed into the tree house and he came, he wouldn’t know she was there.