Dear Reader:
I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t want to share my pain—isn’t there already enough of it to wrap around the world a million times over? I should stifle it, bury it, let it kill me. I should swallow it. Wrap it up like a Christmas present and regift it to myself whenever I feel self-destructive.
It’s mine. I should keep it. But, here I am. Writing this.
Maybe I’m hoping someone will answer. I think I just hope I’m not alone.
Have you ever felt the loss of someone so deeply, it feels as though a piece of you has been carved out with a jagged, white-hot blade? Enough to infect you and drive you mad with fever, and ensure a wound that will never heal? A loss so acute, it reaches deeper than your broken heart and collapsing skeleton?
I think, sometimes, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to escape it… even if it meant never knowing them, never adoring them. The absence of them altogether is better than having had the privilege to love them, and lose them.
But the world doesn’t work that way. It spares no one. It offers no second chances, no do-overs.
Oh, but what if it did?
I read, once, an idea from Freud. Jeanette Winterson said, “Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.”
Reader. What if we could mend what we broke?
1997
There is coffee steaming, rain falling, and a letter on the counter.
It is a blank envelope, pockmarked by rain drops.
The coffee, just a millimeter away from touching his lips, splashes down his chin and onto his pale blue button-up as he pauses, considering the letter. He curses under his breath, but does not move to wipe the coffee away, and in the next second forgets that it happened. The steam curls lazily over the lip of the mug and rolls across his glasses, fogging his vision. His hand is steady as he sets the mug down.
The letter was left on his front step this morning, under the newspaper. He thought nothing of it.
He picks it up thoughtfully, studying it. It’s blank, beside his name. In rigid, hard lines, all caps, his name stares back at him.
Henry Diggory. And nothing else. No return address. Not the name of the sender. Not even his own address.
Curiosity drives him to open it. His fingers move swiftly, surely, as he opens the envelope. The steam of his coffee slowly coils around his hand, weaving across his skin.
Dear H, the letter says.
I don’t know why I’m writing this.
Henry reads the letter and comes back to this line. He reads it over again. Plain typeface. Such a simple sentence. It means nothing on its own, but in the context of the rest of the letter… his heart strangles his throat, and he reads it again.
I don’t know why I’m writing this. As a prayer, I suppose. A memorial. A tangible reminder that she lived and died, and someone is left to remember that, because someone loved her.
I loved her.
Let me start at the beginning.
You will meet a girl.
Henry’s eyes rake over the rest of the letter in a rush, pouring over the strange mix of words, and his heart settles back into his chest. He laughs when he reaches the end. This is a prank. It has to be. This letter—it’s a joke, written by someone seeking to spook him. What month is it? Halloween is almost two months away. Which of his friends, then, would play such a joke?
He laughs again, and Henry crushes the letter in his hand. He doesn’t have time for this. It’s a quiet morning, but it is the same quiet found at the center of a storm. The letter is amusing now, but nothing to linger on.
Henry leaves the letter resting in the bottom of his trash can and departs for work at the hospital. Today is his first day meeting patients. Today he will have a chance to see who his work is affecting. Today is more important than anything else.
*
The girl in the bed looks as all the other patients today have looked. She has hollowed cheeks. Her huge eyes appear even larger because they’re sunken deep into her face and surrounded by dark bruises, as if she hasn’t slept even once in her life. Her sallow, thin skin, which looks even sicklier in the harsh light of her room, is almost ghostly. And her thin mouth is drawn, cracked and dry… is vividly red with the remnants of the blood she vomited painted on her like lipstick. Air rasps past those lips in agonizing breaths.
Even so, she smiles.
And Henry, standing at the back of his group, pales, and thinks of the mysterious letter deposited into his possession. A prank, surely.
You will meet a girl, it said. She won’t seem special at first. She’s sick. Just like most people you’re going to spend your life with. She’s sick, and as far as you know, she’s not going to get better.
She has blue eyes.
You’re going to fall in love with her.
And she’s going to die.
Henry cannot look away from her. She’s sick, just like most people he plans to spend his life with.
Terminal, in fact.
He drags in a steadying breath and attempts to focus, but he cannot move his eyes from her face, which, even knocking on death’s door, is beautiful. She would turn traffic if she were well. She would make gods weep if they hadn’t already turned their backs on her.
She has blue eyes.
Henry finally focuses long enough to hear what his attending—and the patient’s care team leader--is saying.
“Mallory Vincenza has been with us for almost a year now. We’ve tried just about every treatment there is to try, and we’re at the end of the road, now. This is her gift to us. Letting us study her in the hopes of saving others with her illness.” Dr. Apollini turns to face the girl, and says, sincerely, clasping the girl’s thin hands in her own, “Thank you, Mallory. You are so brave.”
“Brave, desperate… Who knows--if there’s really--a difference when you’re dying?” Mallory says, and even her voice is dying. Mangled by illness and lack of sleep and fluid pooling in her lungs. Her eyes, marred by the black and purple shadows, are still lively, and well with tears. Her voice turns strangled by grief and fury, and something in Henry twists, but her words remain light. “But—if I die—maybe the food will—be better. Heaven food—should be better—than hospital food. Right?” She smiles.
None of them smile back.
Henry is crumbling. Disintegrating where he stands. Breathing and suffocating and wishing he were anywhere else in the world, looking at any girl but this one, with blue eyes desperately seeking out solace and finding none.
Her desperation escapes.
“But you said—you said--there’s a chance, right?” She sniffs, looking up at Dr. Apollini, and Dr. Apollini softens… something she is not known to do if rumors are to be believed.
“Miracles happen, Mallory,” she says, kindly. She squeezes Mallory’s hands and nods, repeating it, as if to assure herself. “Miracles can always happen.” She turns her head, then, and locks eyes with Henry, who can feel his heart trying to climb out of his throat. Her gaze tells him what her mouth cannot, not in front of Mallory.
Miracles are the stuff of fairy tales.
Mallory is going to die.
*
Henry races home in the pouring rain, and tears into his house without his briefcase, notes, or umbrella. Rain drips from his hair and lashes and suit onto his immaculate tile floors, but he doesn’t care. He lunges for the trash can and pulls from it the only thing in there.
The damn letter.
He takes it in his hands and attempts to undo the destruction he caused it earlier, desperately tries smoothing it with fumbling, shaking hands.
It tears, and he curses, but he staggers to the kitchen counter and uncrumples it as best he can against the flat surface. In his haste, he knocks over his still full coffee mug. It shatters on the floor, and the cold coffee and rainwater mix and become a diluted, irreversible mess, pooling around his shoes. He doesn’t care.
It’s funny, Henry. It’s twenty-eight years later and I still love her like it’s the day I met her. I can remember it so clearly. That first day. I know how impossible it seems, you know. I remember it feeling like a dream. How did you get there? You were in a classroom two months ago. You were learning of illnesses like hers from a textbook. Heritable, terminal diseases. Cancers. Autoimmune disorders. Terrible mixtures of the two. I know how it haunts you. I know how the pain of it, when you see it in person, nearly makes you come undone. I know, because a decade later, I still dream about those patients. I hear them weeping, begging for help in my sleep.
Henry wants to collapse. This was funny this morning. One of his colleagues. One of his colleagues was toying with him. One of his colleagues knew these things about him; what he was studying, why he was studying it.
But they couldn’t know the sick feeling that gripped him the second he shook the hands of Dr. Apollini’s patients. They couldn’t know how he felt as if he was shaking the hand of death itself.
And they couldn’t know her.
You live alone, right now. You live well. You don’t let anyone get close to you; you don’t even have a dog. You’ve seen the havoc that death can wreak upon the living. The heartbreak it leaves behind in the loved ones. You know all too intimately the pain of being the one left behind. I still miss our parents, even today. I know the pain is still worse for you back then. It gets better; but for now I know you fight the pain back every day.
Henry’s breathing turns labored. Black spots dance in his vision.
You won’t want to love her, because of that. You’ll try to resist her. But she’s going to tell you a joke, and you’re going to laugh, even though it’s a terrible joke.
All the blood in his body is pooled in his cheeks. He can feel the heat radiating from his face, and his numb legs threaten to crumple beneath him.
In the quiet of the ICU, only scribbling pens, Mallory’s ragged breathing, and the beeping of her monitors suggested life. Otherwise, silence had gripped them and not let go since Dr. Apollini left them. Mallory sat, waiting, patient. Her gown was open. Henry wandered back over to her, stethoscope and paperwork in hand.
With his stethoscope pressed to her chest, she sighed. Henry ignored her. She sighed again. Finally she asked,
“What do you call a fish with no eyes?”
He looked down at her from where his eyes had been trained on the clock, watching the seconds hand tick by in increments shorter than Mallory’s heartbeat. Mimicked her heavy exhale while he smiled. None of his colleagues offered to ask, so he did. “What?”
She grinned, and even with dried blood on the inside of her lips, his heart ached at the sight of it. “A fsh!”
He laughed.
You are never going to recover.
He crumples the paper again, crushing it in his hands and gasping. He contemplates tearing it to pieces, stares at it as if perhaps it is a sentient thing, sent to torture him. But the words within it stay there, and he tries to convince himself that it’s not true.
But he thinks of her smile, and he closes his eyes against the agony that tears through him knowing that that smile will be extinguished in a few short months.
He straightens the letter once more, breathing deeply the whole time.
It’s been eleven years. You’d think I would have moved on. That a girl you’re going to treat for six months wouldn’t have such a profound effect on your life. You’re going to know her for six months, and I’m going to spend the next decade searching for a cure for her.
The next line. The next line forces the world into stillness. The water and coffee pooling in the toe of his shoe. The water dripping from his hair onto the paper and turning it fragile between his fingers. None of it matters.
Four words.
And Henry sees an entire future unfold in front of him.
I found it, Henry.
Next time you see her… she’ll run her hands through her hair, as she always does. And you’ll see it—the scar on her wrist. When you do, you’ll have an idea. A simple thing, a thought. You’ll know it when it happens.
Watch closely. I’m giving you the answer.
It takes us almost a decade to find the link. Genetic engineering, modification, all of it—it’s a very precise science. One misstep, and you could ruin the person. You could kill them. Give them something worse. Destroy their family line. It took me too long to save her, but I’m telling you, now… I could have. Just watch. Look at the scar.
I don’t know what I’m doing now, Henry. The reason I wanted this cure is dead.
I wish you could save her.
Figure it out sooner, Henry. Please. Figure it out sooner.
*
Henry lays awake, staring at his ceiling fan, hands under his head. It is two in the morning. He hasn’t slept. He won’t. He can’t. The words in the letter stamped themselves behind his eyelids, and they’re all he sees when he closes them. On a loop in his mind, playing through his thoughts like echoing screams.
I wish you could save her.
Figure it out, Henry.
I’m giving you the answer.
Please.
She’s going to die.
He lurches upright, raking his hands through his hair and breathing shallowly, sucking air in through his teeth and expelling it in gasps. What is this? How did he get this letter? It can’t be real. It can’t be from the future. There’s no way. It is scientifically impossible. He, who has placed his faith in the tangible, the proven, the math… he knows this is an impossibility. The existence of this letter defies all laws of nature. It is not real.
But there’s no way anyone could know the intimate details contained within its contents besides him.
Henry reaches over to his bedside table and clicks on the lamp, and the low light illuminates the cream envelope, with the black ink stark upon it. Henry Diggory. The name has ceased to hold any meaning to him. They’re two words as foreign to him as the idea that he may save the life of the woman he can feel creeping into his heart, because a version of him in the future has already watched her die.
He fingers the letters etched there, lets the tips of them graze the ink-stained paper with a sort of reverent fear. And he frowns, as he studies them. They are familiar to him. Familiar in a way that is not because he has spent the last nine hours pouring over them, but something deeper than that.
He opens the drawer of the nightstand and withdraws a pen. He pulls the envelope closer to him, and slowly, deliberately, he writes his own name directly below the letters already there. All caps.
His breath shudders out in disbelief when he draws the pen away.
A mirror match.
I’m giving you the answer.
With trembling hands, Henry hides the letter away, and extinguishes the light. He lays back down.
And he does not sleep.
*
Mallory lays back on the bed at Dr. Apollini’s request. Dr. Apollini probes her belly. Her expression betrays nothing when Mallory winces in pain.
One of the other doctors stares, too. Mallory’s eyes fix on her. “It’s in my organs,” she says. The other doctor nods and says nothing. Mallory’s eyes roll to stare at the ceiling, and a single tear escapes her eye. She does not make a sound as she cries. No one says anything.
Henry swallows. A black hole opens inside him.
Dr. Apollini helps Mallory sit up again, and she tries to draw in a deeper breath than what her lungs are capable of—she pitches forward, a violent fit of coughing overwhelming her, and without thinking, Henry rushes to help her, grabbing a basin for her to spit the blood into.
Dr. Apollini pulls her hair back from her face, and one of Mallory’s hands reaches for the basin. Henry holds it in front of her, still staring at her, even as she shudders. Her other hand finds his, on the edge of the bed. Clings to it. Grips it as if holding onto him will keep her tethered to the earth.
The world tilts. Shifts. Henry’s eyes move from her pale face to her thin hand, wrapped around his, and the black hole inside him is dwarfed by a sun.
He can’t breathe. And he suddenly knows he will do whatever it takes to save her life.
Mallory sighs as the coughing subsides, spits one last time into the basin before her hand relaxes in his, and she settles back against her pillows. She offers a weak smile to Henry, and he finds he can’t help smiling in return. “Thanks, Doc,” she says, and the sun sears through him. Music. Angels singing. The gates of Heaven opening to him. She stares at him for a second, scanning the length of his torso with shrewd eyes before a faint smile curls her lips and she returns her gaze to his face. “You don’t—have coffee stains--on you—today. Good job.”
He chokes on his heart, feels his breath constrict and stifle itself behind his teeth. He tries to remember how to inhale.
She sighs again, closes her eyes, and lifts her hand to brush her hair behind her ear.
And he sees it. The scar.
And, slowly, an idea unfurls in his mind.
2002
Desperation is the catalyst for any scientific breakthrough. Henry might not have ever found a cure for his wife if he hadn’t been petrified by the idea of losing her.
Five months after he met her, he proposed a risky therapy. She was one of four people to undergo the treatment. The use of stem cells, manipulated genetic material, and genetic splicing had never been attempted all at once. The prospect of all three was… inconceivable to many. People called him a fool. They said he was cruel to try it on a dying woman; he should have let her go in peace.
But it worked.
The removal of the genetic sequence killing her, replaced with a complementary sequence taken from a fetus and bonded to her own strand of DNA using science he barely believed could exist… It worked. A year later, he married Mallory. Her cheeks glowed with life. When she smiled, it was not the smile of a ghost. When they kissed, he didn’t taste blood.
It’s been five years. Henry’s desperation has given way to a happiness he takes for granted. He doesn’t wake in the morning and thank God for sending him a letter. He doesn’t fall to his knees in worship when he watches her walk out of the shower, her dark hair still glistening with water. He fights with his wife the same way all couples fight. Her snoring forces him to the couch half the time. Angels don’t sing when she speaks. He grows annoyed every time she leaves the back door unlocked after she lets Bruce, their dog, out. When they kiss, it’s often in a rush with thoughts halfway somewhere else.
He is complacent and comfortable. And he burned the letter after she was well, so he has all but forgotten the miracle that he was gifted.
This morning, he steps outside into the rain, dashes down to the mailbox in bare feet. Mallory’s sister sent a package, and of course he can’t wait until the rain abates to retrieve it for her. He seizes all the contents in the mailbox blindly before flying back to the house, shaking the rain from his hair, and shuddering against the chills that wrack his spine.
“It wasn’t there, babe,” he calls up the stairs.
“Are you sure? She said it should be delivered today!”
His heart rate accelerates, but it’s not the sound of his wife’s voice floating down to him that affects the organ held captive between his ribs. It’s an envelope.
It has his name on it, in blocky letters. All caps.
He is suddenly twenty-five again, standing in his kitchen. Rain is falling. His coffee spills on his shirt. He reads a letter describing Mallory. He reads a letter that will change his life. Will change him. He is twenty-five, and his hand is unsteady as he carefully unseals the envelope with his name on it, in his handwriting.
Dear H, the letter says.
And he is on his knees with his face buried in his hands when Mallory finds him next.
Her hand on his shoulder is what rouses him, though her voice still sounds miles away when she says his name.
“Henry?” she asks, concern coloring the two syllables. “Are you okay, love?”
He looks up at her, vision swimming.
I am so sorry.
He seeks out her blue eyes like they are a lighthouse beckoning him to safety, but already he feels a storm swelling, not only outside of him, outside of his control, but within his body. The same panic that gripped him so unforgivingly in those early days of loving Mallory… it tightens like a vice around him, now, and reminds him that the past is never where we leave it. It is something we carry with us and feel the consequences of when we try to forget what we’ve done.
“Henry?” She’s on her knees now, palms cupping either side of his face, and tears are streaking down his cheeks. “What happened, baby? What is it? Talk to me. Did someone—did someone die?”
The concern isn’t for herself, yet. It’s not for him. She still thinks it’s related to his work.
Well, she isn’t wrong.
“Mallory,” he croaks, and then he can say no more. Because he realizes he cannot tell her. She’ll think he’s lost his mind. She’ll rush him to the doctor to be tested for illness himself. She’ll turn relentless in her crusade to prove him wrong. She will never believe what he wants to tell her, because it isn’t possible.
“What, Henry? What’s wrong?”
He clenches his eyes and shakes his head, once, violently, and pulls her into his chest. One arm clutches her to him, stroking her hair.
His other hand reaches for the letter, discarded on the floor beside her bare foot, and he crumbles it in his fist.
“Yes,” he says. “Someone died.”
*
He mentions the pregnancy test casually a week later. For him, it’s been a hellish week, filled with sleepless nights and a pressure in his chest that feels like a dam about to burst. For him, this single week has lasted a lifetime, and he found himself petrified every time he looked at his wife— Mallory, his whole world and heart, living and breathing because of him.
When he mentions it, she laughs. “Why would I take a pregnancy test?” she asks.
“Didn’t you say you forgot your birth control a couple days last month, when we took that weekend away in the mountains?”
“You’re paranoid,” she teases, but when they find themselves at the grocery store later, she pauses in the pharmacy section. She glances at him. “You’d be a great Daddy,” she says, and pink roses bloom in her cheeks as she seizes two boxes of tests and tosses them in the cart. He offers a small smile that feels like glass, brittle and sharp, on his lips.
He cannot breathe the entire drive home.
I am so sorry. I didn’t know.
He cannot breathe as she unloads the perishables, preps their dinner; he has never loathed carrots and celery so much as in this moment, carved to pieces beneath her deft fingers. His blood rushes in his ears even while he carries on in normal conversation with his wife. She laughs and he laughs with her, and his mind never leaves the letter, the pregnancy tests, the child he already knows grows in his wife’s belly.
She was beautiful, just like Mallory.
She was just like Mallory, Henry.
Dinner is too long, and not long enough. Their laughter warms him and reminds him to breathe, and he is terrified that this is the last time they will laugh like this together. He wants to cherish it, but he is already haunted by what has not yet happened.
“I should wait ‘til tomorrow morning,” she says, reluctantly, eyeing the solitary grocery bag still waiting on the bench in their entry way. Her hands scrub at the pan without instruction from her. Her mind is already flurrying ahead, thinking of babies, bouncing and laughing and snuggling her. He can see it in her eyes. Read it in her face as plainly as he has ever read every thought she’s had, for as long as he’s loved her. “They always say you should wait to test in the morning because that’s when your hormone levels are highest, right?”
She turns her eyes on him again, and he smiles even though he wants to weep. “You bought four tests. It can’t hurt to take one tonight.”
He cannot breathe while they wait. Three minutes. Three minutes is longer than a lifetime under the right circumstances.
But he already knows. He is hoping he’s wrong, again. But he knows he isn’t.
Her breath hitches when she sees the result, before he does. He closes his eyes. Just a second longer. He wants it to not be real for a second longer.
Her name was Hope.
“Oh, my god,” she whispers, and one hand finds his, and he opens his eyes to find her with her other hand over her mouth, staring at the test showing a positive result. “Oh, my god, Henry! We’re going to be parents!”
She throws her arms around his neck and her tears drip onto the collar of his shirt, and Henry’s heart turns to ash in his chest.
If you lost Mallory, they would call you a widower. If Hope lost you, lost Mallory, she would be called an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child, Henry. There is no word for that loss.
*
“Terminate?” she asks, shock at his request leaving the word devoid of inflection. It’s dead on her tongue, heavy. It falls between them like a bomb.
“Please,” Henry says.
“I don’t understand.” Mallory shakes her head and rises from the couch to face him. Henry braces his hands on the granite countertop and grips the edge of it so hard his knuckles turn stark, bleached white.
“We shouldn’t have this baby,” he says.
“Why?”
“Mallory,” he begs. “We don’t know what happened to your germline when we cured you. We don’t know what this genetic sequence—”
“You don’t know that anything is wrong with her! You don’t have any reason to think that something is wrong with her! Unless there’s something you’re not telling me. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Gone is the joy of knowing she is carrying a person who is half herself and half the person she loved most in the world. Gone is her smile. That smile that dripped with blood and beauty, and bewitched him the moment he saw it. The corners of her lips turn down, and her bottom lip quivers in a mixture of what he can imagine all too easily to be rage… and agony.
He remembers, now, a conversation they had on their second wedding anniversary, when she had appendicitis and all his old terror came flooding back while he watched her writhe in pain, features contorted in breathtaking misery. He remembers how after the surgery, he cried with relief at her bedside and confessed his fear of losing her. And he told her how proud he was of her, and how brave she was. He was confused, though, about the pain. He had seen her in the throes of death when they met, and she never flinched. But appendicitis brought forth her screams. She smiled and took his hand.
“Do you know why you never knew how much pain I was in?” she asked him.
“Why?”
“Because you made me so happy. I didn’t stop smiling around you because you drowned out the pain.”
She had hidden her pain from him, once. Because he brought her joy instead.
But now he is the cause of it. And she lays her wounded heart at his feet, battered by his words, and still she trusts him. Still, she is begging him. Do not ask her this.
“You don’t understand,” he whispers, and the betrayal flashes through her eyes like lightning, and her stricken look—as if he’d physically harmed her, lifted his hand against her and relished it—reverberates through him. Every ounce of her pain echoes in him tenfold.
When Hope dies… you will remember the moment you found out she was going to be yours.
I don’t know if seven years was too much to ask. Every second with her was stolen. For that we should be grateful, shouldn’t we? It should be the greatest honor of my life that I got to love her as long as I did.
But it feels like I did this, Henry. You and me. We did this.
We killed her.
“You don’t know,” he tries, and the words are acid on his tongue. He wishes he could swallow them. He wishes he could shove them to the back of his mind and forget them so easily as he did the first letter. But he knows, even if he hides the truth from himself, he will wake up choking on these words in a year, five years, seven years… he will wake up with these words settled like stones in his throat, damming his screams and his pleas and his prayers. He will think of these words while he watches his daughter die an excruciating death in slow motion, and he will hate himself for never saying them, and he will hate his wife for begging him not to.
So he says them now, even though forcing them from his mouth feels like a kind of death, anyway.
“I want you to terminate the pregnancy,” he whispers. “Please.”
Mallory stares at him, and tears well in her eyes. He forces himself to hold her gaze, even though the intensity of the accusations burning from her blue eyes is crippling. Her stare cuts him off at the knees, dismembers him inch by inch. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her voice eviscerates him.
“No.”
“Mallory,” he says, and a note of pleading enters his voice.
“I told you,” she says, even and soft. “I am not killing our child. Not when you won’t even give me a reason why I should.”
“I asked you to get an amnio!” he cries, and the words of the letter blur through his mind.
It is an arrogant thing, to think man has the same capabilities of a god. We tamper with the natural order of things and act surprised when the world corrects its course.
We are our own undoing.
“Why?” she demands, and her voice breaks. “Why should I have gotten one? What do you think is wrong with her? What are you not telling me?”
But he can’t answer. How can he?
Mallory stares at him, and the silence bellows between them. But Bruce is scratching at the back door, and Henry walks away with acid dripping down his throat, and Mallory sinks back onto the couch, and he listens to her cry from the back door. He walks outside as Bruce pelts past him. He lets the door close behind him.
Her sobs break through the door, and send him to his knees.
*
Dear H—
I am so sorry. I’m sorry I’m writing again. I’m sorry I have to. I’m sorry this nightmare never ends.
I know you saved her. Our future is so different because you did. I don’t know how you got the letter; maybe God was listening after all. Maybe the universe intervened. Maybe… maybe it was a miracle. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I know you saved her.
And I know it was a mistake, now.
It is an arrogant thing, to think man has the same capabilities of a god. We tamper with the natural order of things and act surprised when the world corrects its course.
We are our own undoing.
I am so sorry. I didn’t know.
We couldn’t have seen this coming. Maybe we should have. Maybe. But the treatment was so experimental. We were so desperate. Mallory was dying. What we did was the only way to save her. We couldn’t have known what the sequence would do to a child that didn’t even exist as an idea yet.
Her name was Hope. Mallory named her, of course. And it seemed fitting at the time. It still does. She was everything to us. She was our hope, our lives, our hearts.
She had blue eyes. She was beautiful, just like Mallory.
She was just like Mallory, Henry.
You get seven years with her. I almost envy you right now. You have all the hope. Maybe it’ll be different. Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe I’m wrong, and there will be another miracle. You haven’t watched her die yet. You haven’t watched her suffer with every breath. I envy you that.
When Hope dies… you will remember the moment you found out she was going to be yours.
I don’t know if seven years was too much to ask. Every second with her was stolen. For that we should be grateful, shouldn’t we? It should be the greatest honor of my life that I got to love her as long as I did.
But it feels like I did this, Henry. You and me. We did this.
We killed her.
If you lost Mallory, they would call you a widower. If Hope lost you, lost Mallory, she would be called an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child, Henry. There is no word for that loss.
Even now, I am reeling from it. Years removed from her death. This letter is broken and fragmented because I have never been whole since her death. Mallory never recovered. It’s been ten years since she died. It’s been a year since Mallory decided ten years was too many to live without her daughter.
I’m alone, now. I miss them so much. I know exactly why Mallory did what she did. I know why she left me. I have to be honest; death seems kinder.
I have to try again.
You have to listen to me.
*
She has blue eyes. He knows blue eyes hypnotize everyone. He also knows it’s just genetics. There’s nothing remarkable about someone with blue eyes; their genes just happened to come together in a way that allowed them to have that particular color.
But this girl, with this shade… they’re the color of the thin, gauzy line of the horizon at sunset, when the sky kisses the sea.
“Hope,” Mallory whispers, as Henry knew she would, tears still streaking down her face. “Her name is Hope.”
“Okay,” he whispers back, and then Hope screams. Not the healthy cry of a newborn, but the agonized shriek of a human in terrible, terrible pain. Mallory gasps, and the nurses swoop in, and the doctor, still between her legs, looks up in alarm.
“What’s wrong with her?” Mallory cries, and Henry can only watch, his body turning numb. His soul collapsing under the weight of what he’s done. They give answers he doesn’t hear, and Mallory screams for them to help her even as they rush Hope from the delivery room.
You think it’s sacrificing your honor. I know you do. I know, there’s a small part of you that still thinks scrapping it all is failure, giving in, giving up, ruining your career and reputation.
You’re not. You’re sacrificing your heart.
This, I need you to understand. She will not suffer. Because she will not exist.
*
He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Where to place them. If it will hurt her if he touches her.
They haven’t given a name to her disease. They don’t want to name it after her. Hope’s Disease. What a terrible name. A cruel joke. And of course, they don’t want to use their last name, because Diggory’s Disease is the mutation of a gene sequence… a mutation that cured a different disease.
The thing killing her has no name. But it’s very clear what it does. Attacks her central nervous system. Makes it so that anything but a near comatose state is intolerable because every level of stimuli induces pain that leaves her screaming for hours.
She is almost never awake. They almost never see her eyes.
Henry watches his daughter in her isolette. He does not make any effort to wipe away the tears rolling down his cheeks, nor does he touch the cold coffee that has sat beside him for hours. He does not glance at his sleeping wife, collapsed on the cot beside their daughter’s bed. Hope is the only thing in the world that exists to him. He tries to soak up every second with her, because he knows these seconds are limited. Every heartbeat is a crime against nature, and he is so grateful.
He watches her, and he composes a letter.
When he can bear the pain of his thoughts no longer, he lets them go. He welcomes a white noise quiet into his head, and he shuts out the rest of the world.
He rests his head on the wall of the isolette, near to her hand, and he listens to the slow beat of her heart on the monitor, and he stares at the inch of space between them.
He wishes he was brave enough to close it.
But he isn’t.
*
“She will not be alone!” Mallory screams, and the words shred through Henry like claws, like knives, like a weapon designed for him and him alone, tearing deepest into the parts of him that will not recover. “She will not be alone! Not like I was! Not while I’m her mother!”
“Mallory, please,” he begs her, even knowing it is a fruitless endeavor. “I’m not asking you to leave and stay gone. I’m asking you to go shower at our home, sleep in our bed for one night, take a walk in the park with Bruce! You have to leave this hospital, Mallory! This is killing you!”
“Of course it’s killing me!” she shrieks. “This is my daughter, Henry. My child. How is watching her suffer like this not killing you?”
Henry steps back, stunned. The blood drains from his face, and he watches the blood drain from Mallory’s, too. He watches the regret morph into defiance and then despair. He watches a vacant, bitter hopelessness finally settle onto her features, and she leans against the isolette, one hand half reaching toward the holes that would allow her to reach in and touch her daughter, which neither of them has ever used.
“I didn’t mean that,” she says, even though they both know she did. But Henry does not argue with her; he knows all her rage is born of pain. He knows, because his is, too.
Mallory traces aimless patterns on the plastic armor protecting their daughter from the rest of the world. She says nothing for long minutes, nor does Henry. But neither of them moves. It’s as if they can’t breathe. As if Hope’s disease has infected them. Attacked their nervous systems and set every pain receptor off.
It’s breathtaking, this level of agony.
“Before we met,” Mallory finally whispers, “there was a time where I died. I was clinically dead. For three minutes and thirty-four seconds, I didn’t have a heartbeat. And I remember because I was just… watching myself, laying in that hospital bed, totally emaciated. They had taken my mother from the room, so I was alone, aside from the doctors trying and failing to bring me back. I looked so small.” Her dancing fingers still, hovering over Hope’s face. Hope is so small. She is smaller than the length of Henry’s forearm and losing weight every day. A tear slides down the tip of Mallory’s nose. “And then there was nothing. It was like… Like someone had pulled all the blinds and turned out all the lights very suddenly, so I didn’t have time to adjust to the darkness. It felt like I was underwater. Floating. Cold. My hearing was muffled.
“When I came back, it was like coming up for air right when your lungs start to burst. Breaking the surface of a lake into brilliant sunshine. Simultaneously glorious and painful, panicked and grateful and confused, because it’s all too much. Dying is dark, and quiet… surviving is chaos. Survival is more painful than death.”
She lifts her eyes and pins Henry where he stands across the room from her. He could not run if he wanted to. The same eyes that drove him to action once upon a time now hold him in place like a gravestone carved screaming, frozen in time.
“This,” she chokes, “this is worse. Watching my daughter die in front of me is the tenth circle of hell, and I would trade every second of Hope’s suffering for a lifetime of my own.”
She sniffs and looks away from him. He swallows his heart—the fragments of it that are left.
And he lets her words slit his throat so that he cannot speak, even to defend himself. He doesn’t deserve to.
“You should have let me die.”
1997
Dear H, the letter says.
Do you ever wonder at other people’s stories? If you don’t, don’t worry. You will. You will look at people and wonder where they came from. What scars stitched them together into the lonesome creatures they’ve become. Which parts of their parents did they eviscerate to claim as their own? Which shard of their hearts came from their first loves? Which mangled words fall from their mouths when they beg someone not to break their already bleeding and broken hearts because of the poetry they exorcized from a stranger? You will ask yourself these questions. You will ask, because you will try to find the answers to your own soul, your own life, your own failings, through them.
You will wonder about others’ stories. Let me tell you yours.
You will meet a girl.
She has blue eyes.
*
Mallory has blue eyes. This day seems like a fever dream. He carries the letter in his pocket, clenching it between his fingers every few minutes while Dr. Apollini explains Mallory’s medical history—though he has it memorized, they all do, these students gathered in front of her; they’ve studied her case in a classroom and one of them will likely study her corpse--and explains that they’re looking for the genetic mutation that’s been killing her for her entire life.
“You guys—are—awful dour,” she says, when the doctors around him awkwardly shift their gazes away from her, even as she tries to smile at them encouragingly. Henry can’t look away. She fixes her dazzling eyes on him, and he forgets how to breathe. “Have you—heard of—Murphy’s—Law?” she asks him.
She is going to tell you a joke.
“Yes,” Henry says. “It’s the law that says if something can go wrong, it will.”
Mallory smiles, delighted, and nods. “Yeah. What—about—Cole’s Law?”
You’re going to laugh, even though it’s a terrible joke.
Henry shakes his head.
“It’s—thinly—sliced cab-bage!”
Her wheezing laugh sends her into stitches, and Henry cannot help laughing along with her, if only because she thinks herself hilarious. He doesn’t even care that Dr. Apollini narrows her eyes at him shrewdly, and quickly smiles when Mallory wipes a tear from her eye and looks to Dr. Apollini for her reaction. He doesn’t care that it really is a terrible joke.
Her laugh is his new favorite song.
You are never going to recover.
His smile slips from his face when she starts to cough, her shoulders shaking violently, blood flying from her lips. He rushes to help her.
“Thanks,” she whispers, as he pulls her short, choppy hair back from her face. She wipes her mouth and shudders, looks up at him. “Is that—- coffee— on your shirt?” she asks.
Henry glances down at himself, notices the spots on his blue shirt that she fixes her eyes upon, and he smiles.
“Yes,” he says.
She grins. “You’re— a mess.”
“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he counters, and Dr. Apollini snaps at him, but Mallory laughs again, and his heart soars.
And he can’t do what the letter asks of him.
Next time you see her, look away.
2025
When Henry wakes, he knows the world is the same as it was when he finally, blissfully drifted into oblivion. He knows, because before his eyes even open, an all-encompassing hollowness overwhelms him.
Strange, he finds it, even now, how grief can leave someone so empty, and still consume them. It becomes the only thing left of a person. Loss scoops out everything—leaves men as empty as Pandora’s box… but instead of hope remaining, it is grief. The grief is all he has left. It’s all he’s had for decades.
There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the letters that work and the ones that don’t. He’s tried. God knows he’s tried. He’s tried every combination of every genetic manipulation he could find. He’s tried every year since the one he met Mallory to the one Hope died—1997 to 2009. He has tried leaving envelopes on his windshield, on his own porch, in a box, at the hospital where he worked, at the hospital where Hope was born, at the hospital where she died. He’s even left them on Mallory’s grave, her death etched nine years to the day after Hope’s.
The first was a fluke. He hadn’t believed it would really work—writing down the details of her death and his ensuing endeavor to find a cure anyway was a means of catharsis. It was a drunken attempt to right the errors he had made so long ago, when he failed to save the woman he loved. He went to sleep resting his head on the desk where his laptop sat, where he had dictated the letter for over two hours. The letter was still in his hands, a murder confession and a suicide note. An empty bottle of his finest whiskey sat beside him.
But when he woke, the whiskey was gone, and so was the letter.
And Mallory was singing in the bedroom across the hall.
There were two timelines in his memory. He could remember his life without her. Without them. He remembered the fleeting triumph of finding a genetic combination that would have saved Mallory, only to be crushed seconds later by the realization that he could have saved her if he had only been smarter, been better, been faster. But it was over two decades later, and she was long dead, trapped six feet below the earth.
But he also had a new set of memories, somehow fresher than the others. He remembered finding the cure for her thanks to the letter. He remembered their marriage on a black beach, and her screaming laughter when the frigid ocean touched her toes. He remembered her pulling him into the water with her, and her satin dress floating on a wild sea when she kissed him like she didn’t care if they ran out of air. He remembered a decade’s worth of bad jokes. (Her popping into his office on a stressful day. “What kind of shoes does a ninja wear?” “I don’t have time, Mal—” “Sneakers.”) He remembered her favorite foods—salmon grilled in a garlic butter and seasoned with sea salt, with a side of roasted asparagus topped with butter, salt, and parmesan. He remembered the way her mouth moved against his… and the morning they found out they were pregnant, where the world stopped, and an entire universe of joy expanded out in front of them.
And he remembered when Hope was born, late that same year. It snowed that night. The world was a frozen wasteland, black and cruel. Her shrieks of depthless, dizzying pain left him and Mallory reeling.
It was Hope she sang to in the next room. It was the only year they had with her in their home. She was six.
She died the next spring.
It took Mallory nine years to work up the courage to chase her daughter into the afterlife. After everything she had been through, surviving without her child was the thing that killed her. Henry knew she never wanted to live a second longer than Hope; it was only out of a debt to him that she stayed as long as she did. She died the same day Hope did. Henry knew that. He was the only reason she lingered in a body that now felt like a prison to her.
She didn’t know, of course. He never told her about the letter that saved her life and damned Hope’s. He didn’t tell her about the hundreds he wrote between Hope’s death and Mallory’s suicide that he penned in hopes of breaching the laws of time and physics once more. He didn’t tell her that every failure was another reason why he drank. One more glass. One more bottle. She only knew her daughter was dead, and her husband was killing himself inch by slow inch.
It is 2025, and he is alone. He knows now that the only way to save Hope is to make sure she never existed. But he cannot ensure that… not without never meeting Mallory.
Never meeting Mallory is the only way he can save them both.
It is 2025, and Henry is drunk, and the pain of everything he has done and not done is more dizzying than the drink in his hand. He stares at his computer screen, and he wants to write the letter by hand, but his hand shakes. The pen smears across the paper like Mallory’s blood smeared across the tile of the bathroom wall when she reached for the door, in a last effort to say goodbye to him.
She never made it out of that room.
“Dear H,” he says.
*
Love is a great and terrible thing. Powerful, and capable of leaving a man crippled. It is the core of one’s strength and also their greatest, deepest weakness.
Loving them is the only worthwhile thing I have ever done. All that I’ve accomplished, all that I’ve done for others, has been in the name of loving them. More than my life. More than anything.
But I’m writing to tell you there is a place. It hovers between the past and the future. It’s a place where everything we endure seems as if it is happening in immediacy; it seems as if our experience of each moment is instant— every second follows the next in haste, in desperation, in certainty.
This place is a lie.
I no longer believe we exist on a linear timeline. There is no way forward. There is no “now” as we imagined it to be. There is everything, all at once.
So. Here we are. Trapped. Locked in a loop of loss, languishing in it all. Everything that has ever happened, everything that will happen, everything happening now. We are lost in it.
I am afraid… there is no way out.
1994
“This world is savage. Unforgiving. The hardships it inflicts will maim and cripple you, and still, the world will demand more from you with a smile painted on its bleeding mouth. You will give your soul for the lost causes, and you will lose them anyway. And when the next one comes, you will start cutting other pieces of yourself apart in offering to save them. This is your role in the world, and it is unkind. You will lose as much as you win. If you cannot face that reality, this is not the room for you.” Dr. Apollini looks around the room, and when none of the sober faces looking back at her alter, break, or shift away from her, she nods, satisfied. Henry knows her well enough to know it’s satisfaction that touches her. “Right,” she says, and stands, gathering her notes. “Let’s get going, then.”
The semester drags on. Every case is more heart-rending than the last.
Henry waits, with bated breath, for every case study Dr. Apollini brings them.
He recognizes hers before Dr. Apollini ever says her name.
“Mallory Vincenza—”
I found the mutated gene, Henry. You’ll save her life and change the world in one paper.
“—terminal—”
You might not believe me, but I can tell you more about her than Dr. Apollini ever could. She fell off the merry go round at preschool. Her best friend, Sandra, was pushing her.
“First discovered after an accident at her preschool—”
Do you trust me? I’m giving you the answer.
*
He turns in his dissertation on Mallory Vincenza’s disease twenty months later. The sequence that will cure her is included.
“How?” Dr. Apollini asks him. “How did you do in two years what my team has been attempting for over a decade?”
He smiles, and shrugs, and fingers the edge of the letter in his pocket. “Divine inspiration, maybe?” he suggests, and Dr. Apollini shakes her head in disbelief, and, to his incredulity, wraps him in a warm hug.
“You saved a life, Diggory. Countless lives.”
Henry swells with pride as she pulls away, but he holds his modesty close to him. “So she’s going to be okay?”
“More than okay. She is going to live a full and happy life because of you.”
Dr. Apollini squeezes his shoulder and leaves, and Henry watches her go. He will never meet Mallory, although she wrote a letter to thank him for his tireless work to find a way to cure her.
I can never thank you enough. You’ve given me a chance to have everything I’ve ever wanted.
He’d smiled at the joke she scrawled at the bottom.
P.S. she wrote, I don’t have much to give as thanks, but I do have jokes. Enjoy this one: Why couldn’t the clock be kept in jail? Because time was always running out!
*
Henry burns the letter when he gets home. Mallory Vincenza is alive. He saved her life. He gave her a future.
It doesn’t matter where it came from.
Dear Reader:
What if we could mend what we broke?
If everything that happened could be erased, or undone, or simply traded. The memories of the suffering are less painful than the actual suffering, surely. Take the agony, take the loss, take it all and live with it in your mind but not your home, if only you could have more. More time. More love. If you could change the ending… the pain before was just a nightmare.
But. But. But.
What if we couldn’t? What if it wasn’t?
2025
He has lived three lives.
It is raining outside. His coffee steams in front of him. He plays over his memories like they are at risk of turning to vapor if he does not pour over every second and relive them until they are all that he thinks about. If he stops, they will blur, warp, and fade. He will lose the things that mattered most to him all over again.
He is fifty-four. He is sitting at the desk where he wrote the first letter he ever read from himself. There are no pictures on his wall, because he never married Mallory… because she died twenty-eight years ago.
There is a version of reality where he was successful in saving both her and his daughter, he knows. He remembers his dissertation. But when he pulls the file up on his computer now, it is not written about Mallory Vincenza (Patient V). It is about the possibility of germline modification, and the ethical dilemma all geneticists are faced with if they are to start removing and adding genes. He has read it six times this morning, thinking each time will be different.
It does not change.
Mallory is dead, again, and he has found the cure for her, again. It sits upon his desk, the genetic sequence that could save her life.
He stares at it, and his eyes burn.
There is no way forward. There is no “now” as we imagined it to be. There is everything, all at once.
Henry reaches for the bottle of whiskey he keeps in the deep drawer at the bottom of his desk. He drafts a letter in his mind between swigs.
He could save her.
He could save her.
If he doesn’t write the letter he knows will save her life, he is killing her all over again. Her death is on his hands.
*
There are three lives swirling in his memory.
He drinks, because if he can’t banish them he can’t escape them. But they grow louder as he grows drunker. He writes a dozen different iterations of the letter he sent once, in another life. He spews promises and stories that sound like the ravings of a man mad with grief, clinging to stories he told himself to cope.
He is on his last glass and numb with horror. He is reading the letter he wants to send.
But he knows. He cannot save them.
Henry presses the bottle to his lips, gripping it around the neck as if it's his own and he is trying to strangle it. He swallows the warm liquid and lets it burn through his chest. Lets it burn out the pain.
He stands, sweeping all the letters to the floor. His coffee mug, still full, crashes to the ground with them. It spills across the pages. The paper with the cure scribed upon it is somewhere among them. He doesn’t care.
He pours the last of the liquor over the bent, crumpled, discarded sheafs. He leaves a trail from the fireplace behind his desk to the papers on the floor. He strikes a match.
The fireplace roars to life. He walks calmly out the door, closing it behind him.
There is no way out.
Reader.
How did we get here?
This is your love, your life, your loss. Your heart bleeding to death on the page. Can you let them go?
Or do you cling to them with bloody palms, shoulder their pain and yours, swallow the guilt and thank whatever god there is for every moment? Even if it was stolen time. Even if you knew how it was going to end. Even if you knew how much they’d hate you for not being able to let them go. For loving them too much to let them go.
Was it worth it? Every second, every blistered beat of your heart…was it worth it?
2025
When he wakes, he’s groggy. The remnants of his night of drinking throb through his skull, and the familiar fogginess of a blackout clouds his thoughts.
Henry looks around, taking in the blank walls of his office. He’s never been one for photos, really. His whole life has taken place in books, in hospitals, in computers. What does he have to put on the walls? Looking at them, now, though, a hollow ache pulses in his chest.
There is nothing to put on his walls because the only woman he has ever loved is dead. For twenty-eight years, she’s been dead.
And he has nothing to show for his life. If he were to die this second… it would be as if he never existed.
Henry lifts his hands to rake them through his hair.
A sheet of paper snags the button on the cuff of his shirt as he lifts his arms, and then slips free and flutters past the desk and to the floor, collapsing against his shoe. He frowns and sighs before bending to retrieve it. He returns it to the desk without looking at what he wrote upon it.
He leans back in his chair and thinks of Mallory. Nearly thirty years later, and he cannot forget her, and cannot move past her.
How does one live with themselves knowing they are the reason someone else could have lived, but didn’t? He could have saved her. He could have—
Henry’s mind flashes through the night before in a startling series of snapshots. Him, bent over his desk working feverishly on a new sequence.
Him, scrawling out codes and frantically crossing them out, only to repeat them in a slightly varying order.
Him, drinking a little deeper with every discarded paper.
Him, crying out and leaping to his feet in shock when he finds the one that will work. That would have worked.
Him, rejoicing for ten seconds before despair and guilt slam into him.
Him, finishing the bottle.
Henry stares, with wide eyes, at the paper laying face down on his desk. He does not move. He can’t. He’s sculpted marble. David, immortalized in fear. Carved into this chair, in this pose, unable to find the will or want to turn that paper over and see if his memory is intact, or if his mind is betraying him with false hope.
But there is one thought that burns out all the rest. It is the only thing that matters to him.
Could he have saved Mallory?
He reaches out, slowly. Turns the paper over with two fingers, treating it with all the care he would a bomb. He leans forward to read his own hasty scrawl.
He gasps, and clutches the edge of his desk for support.
*
With a quaking hand, he puts his pen to paper.
Dear H, he writes.
I don’t know why I’m writing this.
1997
It is raining. A mug of coffee steams on his countertop, and he ignores it. Because beside it, there is a letter. It is addressed to him, in all caps, with no stamp, and no return address.
Reader:
Maybe it was always meant to be this way.
Copyright © 2022. Holly Wright
All rights reserved. No portion of this story may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: h.a.wright@outlook.com