(Today we welcome back Bill Tope,–who appeared earlier in a collaboration with Doug Hawley–for his first solo appearance on the Springs. The image is by our friend CJA)

Tommy’s voice was low-pitched and urgent as he murmured beseechingly to his wife. She didn’t respond. He gazed at her, strewn across their bed, her auburn tresses spilling over the pillow. She looked beautiful to him, despite the way she’d let herself go since the baby died. Tommy remembered that it had been only weeks, but the heartbreak seemed to stretch back as far as he could recall, years almost, owing to Rachel’s mental history.

The child they had waited for five years for had been stillborn and it still took his breath away to remember. Rachel had taken it especially hard. She felt as though she had let him down. He was forever telling her she hadn’t failed him. That sometimes, things just happened. She worried that it was because she had smoked occasionally during her pregnancy and had maybe one or two glasses of wine, late in her term. He told her she was mistaken.

“Baby,” he said, “you need to get up and take a shower. Brush your teeth and wash your hair.” It had been so long since she first became immersed in her grief.

“I can’t,” she said simply.

Tommy nodded. He understood that he would just have to be patient. What was it the priest had said? Time heals all wounds or some nonsense like that. But maybe it was true.

“Can I get you some fresh clothes, Rach?” he asked.

She sniffed her bed clothes and nodded. “I’m sorry I let myself go, Tommy,” she said in a small voice.

“It’s alright,” he told her. “You heal. Take whatever time you need I’ll be here for you.” Tommy slipped from the room and closed the door behind him. Thank goodness people had stopped dropping by to offer condolences. They meant well, he knew, but each time they tore the wound wider. It would just take time, he told himself again.

All their lives was wrapped up in just the two of them. Diagnosed years before with avoidant personality disorder, Rachel was inordinately shy, withdrawn and non-assertive. She had drifted from one unchallenging job to the next since her marriage to Tommy, four years before, at age 21.

“I quit my job today, Tommy,” she said one day.

“But why, Babe?” he’d asked. “You loved that job.”

Rachel had been employed at a nursery, caring for and selling plants. She adored all living things.

“Mrs. Dickinson,” she said, “told me I wasn’t doing a good job.”

When Tommy called her boss, she told Tommy that she had merely made suggestions to Rachel, regarding how she could make more sales.

“Rachel got very upset, Mr. Johnson,” said Dickinson. “It wasn’t even criticism, and she went all to pieces.”

Tommy explained about his wife’s diagnosed personality disorder and intense shyness and her boss seemed sympathetic. “Tell her to come back,” she said. “I’ll hire her again. She’s very good with the plants, but she gets her feelings hurt easily.”

But Rachel wouldn’t return to Plants R Us, saying she felt inadequate.

The first year of their marriage, at Tommy insistence, Rachel had seen a therapist, but the results were a mixed bag. Dr. Fuller explained Rachel’s condition to Tommy, who attended the last session with her. The doctor said that based on his private talks with Rachel, he concluded that emotional abuse during her formative years and sexual trauma at 17 had led to her condition.

“She never told me about emotional abuse,” Tommy had said. “But, she almost never talks about her family.” She had told him about her rape as a teen. Intimacy between them had been touch and go.

Because of her associated depression, the therapist had prescribed some antidepressants, but they seemed to have little effect.

One day Rachel approached Tommy and placed her arms around his neck. She didn’t often show overt affection, thought Tommy.

“Tommy, I want a baby,” she’d said.

This was wonderful news, thought Tommy. “Are you sure, Rach?” He had begun to despair of ever starting a family.

“Of course,” she said, leaning in for a kiss. “It would make my life complete.”

Rachel’s therapist had retired, so Tommy consulted Rachel’s personal physician and asked what he thought.

“Could be the best thing for her,” declared the elderly doctor. “Might straighten her out.”

The pregnancy had gone well. Rachel seemed to have found a purpose for her existence. She stopped smoking for the most part, and drinking and getting high. She was attentive to her diet and got plenty of rest.

Then she lost the baby. In her seventh month, things went all wrong. Rachel felt sharp pains in her abdomen and began bleeding. Tommy called an ambulance and rode in the back of the vehicle on the way to the hospital.

“I’m with you, Babe,” he told her. “You’ll be alright.” But she wasn’t.

When Tommy asked her OB-GYN what had gone wrong, she said, “Mr. Johnson, there was no way to foresee what happened to Rachel. Sometimes there is no reason. Shit happens,” she said bluntly.

“I can’t wait till the baby’s born,” said Rachel dreamily from their bed several days later. She ran her hands over her belly.

Tommy stared at his wife. He had been warned by the doctor that he contacted over the web that Rachel’s reaction to her grief might be fantasy-prone personality or FPP, which she likened to maladaptive dreaming disorder, which she’d had as a teen, but with a difference.

“Your wife may not recognize what reality is and be able to tell it apart from the fantasy world that she creates. You really should seek professional help for your wife, Mr. Johnson, outside online resources.” Tommy agreed that he would.

But when Tommy brought the subject up with Rachel, she was resistent. “I’m getting better,” she claimed. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “I’ll get out of bed and take a shower and wash my hair and get dressed in clean clothes and you’ll see, I’ll be all better.”

Reluctantly, he agreed. And for a short while, Rachel was vastly improved, if not quite her old self. She fluttered around the house, busying herself dusting and mopping and so on. Tommy had to tell her to rest up, which she did.

Next day, she was again languishing in the bedroom, listless. She practically stopped eating. Tommy began to worry when she started losing weight. He entered the bedroom bearing a tray on which he brought her a toasted cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup, long her favorite. She promised she’d eat it, but when he returned an hour later, the meal sat untouched.

Tommy glanced at his cell phone and noted the date: Oct. 30. Today was the three-month anniversary of the loss of their child. He sighed. In all that time, almost nothing had changed. He had managed to get Rachel to bathe every few days, but otherwise she seemed little improved. She stayed in bed all day.

Tommy was replacing the vacuum sweeper in the hall closet when he heard a thump from behind the bedroom door. What had happened? he wondered wildly. Had Rachel fallen? He slammed the closet door and rushed to the bedroom, threw the door open.

“Rach?” he cried. She was nude and lying upon the floor, between the bed and the door. She had fallen out of bed. He knelt and lifted her back onto the mattress. She seemed weightless. What he saw horrified him: she was stick-thin. She had lost so much weight. She lay limply where he laid her on the surface of the bed. Tommy cradled her shoulders and held her close.

“God, Rachel, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it had gone this far.” She murmured into his shoulder and he jumped. “I’ll get help, Baby,” he promised, and gingerly laid her flat upon the mattress. Taking out his cell, he called 911 and got the operator, told her his name, address, what he could about his wife’s condition. The operator promised the EMTs would come straight out.

15 minutes later a loud knock sounded on the front door and Tommy rushed into the living room, swept open the door.

“Thank you, thank you,” he stammered, and led the first responders to the bedroom, answering their questions on the way.

“Wait here, Mr. Johnson,” said one of the men. “We’ll take it from here. Tommy waited outside the door. After a few seconds, the man who appeared to be in charge reemerged and asked Tommy, “where is she?”

Tommy’s eyes widened and he rushed into the bedroom and found the room empty.

“Could she have moved from this room?” asked the man.

Tommy collapsed on the neatly-made bed and stared vacantly around the room. The EMT was on his radio. After a moment’s conversation, he turned to the other emergenccy worker and explained, “Rachel Johnson died during childbirth three months ago.” He turned to Tommy. “That’s right, isn’t it, Mr.Johnson?”

Finally Tommy found his voice. “Yes, I guess it is.”

Meanwhile, the other first responder had fetched a collapsible gurney.

“Lie down, Mr. Johnson,” suggested the man. “We’ll take you to the hospital, get you some help.”

“Okay,” said Tommy, as he stretched out on the gurney, felt himself being strapped in. As the EMTs wheeled the gurney through the front door, Tommy felt the cool breeze of Autumn on his skin. “I need to leave a note for my wife,” he told the men.

“We’ll do it, Mr. Johnson,” said one of them.

“Okay,” said Tommy. “Thanks.”

Bill Tope

He tried to move as little as possible, shifting only enough to wrench free his right hand which the fall had left partially pinned underneath his backside. The pain in his left leg was excruciating, sending blinding white light pulsing behind his tightly closed eyes. The leg was grotesquely twisted and broken. He knew without looking that the fracture was compound and he could feel he was losing blood.

Opening his eyes and turning his head slowly he saw the sky above, darkening, the angle of the sun slanting very near to the horizon. There was perhaps an hour of light remaining. He wondered if that much life was left to him.

It began to snow, a sifting of fat listless flakes. Through the haze of pain his memory flashed on a snow globe his mother had long prized—tiny Currier and Ives Christmas carolers gathered beneath a street lamp, silent mouths open wide amid the swirling blizzard. He winced and let out a low moan, one that carried as much despair as agony.

The unyielding granite wall of the fissure pressed hard against the left side of his face. It was a cold reminder that in a heartbeat his life had pivoted irrevocably. Such an event was no longer either an abstraction or a fiction’s plot device  It was an errant step on a mountain trail he had traversed before, a small patch of friable rock. His footing lost, down he plunged, thirty feet  until trapped by the narrowing vee of the crack. And as he struggled to raise his right hand—almost surely broken—to brush the falling snowflakes away, he silently cursed his folly.

It was to have been a late-afternoon hike, just above the tree line for twilight pictures of the rising late-October moon, then down and home. He was no back country tenderfoot: he had made the trek before, more than once; but this time he allowed his judgment to be clouded by hubris. He would forego anything he did not deem vital. For such a short trip, this time he would take only a bottle of water, a handful of trail mix and a camera. Nothing more. The cell phone that could have been his salvation he had locked in the glove compartment of his Jeep a mile down the mountainside. There would be no rescue—there could be no rescue. His wife would not grow worried until well after sunset and it would be hours more before a search party found him. By then he would be gone, bled out or frozen.

So now, with each throbbing stab from his shattered leg, he could see before him with great clarity what most men are not privy to—the imminent coda of his life. In the crepuscular light he marked the snow’s quickening descent. He thought of his parents, relieved that neither of them was alive. His mother, especially, would have had her heart broken to know her son had died so young and in such circumstances, mortally injured and alone on a mountainside.

He was her first-born and she had idolized him as the pride of the family—from his glory days as a star athlete and student in high school through law school at Yale, marriage to a beautiful, intelligent woman, two great kids embarking on their own lives in the world, partner in a fine law firm, the respect of his peers. At the age of fifty, he’d had the world knocked.

All thrown away.

As his life ebbed with the light of the day he was brought through the pain to take stock of himself. Yes, there were his many successes, what the righteous among his parents’ church-going friends would term “blessings,” but he knew there was deep within him a singular, poisonous moment that he could neither erase nor atone for, a sin that ate at his core during his darkest hours of self-doubt and loathing. And he knew that he would soon leave this world with the stain still on his soul.

It was a beautiful, mild day in early September, one that brought a respite from the summer’s oppressiveness. He always remembered that clearly—the sunshine, the gentle breeze stirring through the branches of the big willows that flanked the family farmhouse. He was eleven years old, just home from school and ready to ride his bike up the road to the next farm to play baseball with the neighbor boys. His father was in the fields, his mother at the kitchen sink preparing the evening meal when he spotted the dog slowly trotting up the long gravel lane leading to the house. He’d never seen the animal before. It appeared to him to be a border collie, with mangy dark-brown fur, its head hung down and tongue out. As it angled off the driveway and up toward the front of the house, he leaned his bicycle against the wall of the garage and quickly followed.

His mother had also seen the dog and by the time he reached the porch, she was at front door trying to shoo it away.

But it wouldn’t go. It backed up a step or two with each wave and shout, then moved closer again. He could see by the dog’s matted, dusty coat that it was not someone’s indoor pet. His mother had brought with her a broom, opening the door enough to try to push the dog back and send it on its way. But it would not leave, instead sitting back on its skinny haunches and looking at his mother with pleading eyes. It was clear it was hungry—for a bit of food and a small measure of human kindness.

He called out to his mother to give him the broom, and when she handed it to him, he began to swat at the dog in an attempt to force it off the porch. Still, it would not go, bearing up under his swings, by circling around and beginning to whimper. For a reason he never fathomed, his mother found this amusing, chiding him to stop harassing the poor animal while snickering at the same time. This caused to well up within him a delight and he renewed his blows, turning the broom and using the handle to beat the dog. The poor creature’s distress, its pitiful yelps, only fueled his mother’s mirth and his inchoate fury. At length, after landing several hard blows, the dog retreated, ran off the porch and back down the driveway.

He handed the broom to his mother, who made a small show of her displeasure with him, but her insincerity was thinly veiled and he quietly reveled in the satisfaction his act—and her response—had given him.

The dog did not return,and through his youth he gave the episode no thought. But as he grew into manhood, it returned, shadowing his dark days, rising up to haunt his dreams.

Now, as cold and pain gripped him, he saw the creature again—hungry and tired and lonely, asking so little yet receiving only brutishness.

Why had he succumbed so readily to cruelty? Why?

Clouds had drifted over the moon as it edged past the lip of the crevice, casting down a dull ivory glow. The snow was falling heavily. No longer did he bother to brush it from his face but closed his eyes and wept.

Nick Young

(Image by Leila)