The Holding Place

Chapter 8

Abby….





Michael’s moment of truth is finally come. The past few days have been filled with despair for the both of us. Michael has done all he can to ignore the helpless little girl that has been conditioned to believe that it is better off not to exist to her father at all. Michael cannot hear me but that doesn’t stop me from shouting at him my frustrations and begging him to do something, anything, other than refuse to acknowledge that Norah does not exist to him.


I couldn’t see it before, how far Michael has fallen, when Claire was there raising Norah in my place. There is no hatred inside him for Norah. Whenever he gazes upon her, no matter how brief or prolonged, there is an alternation between sadness and nothing at all. It is when Michael feels nothing at all that terrifies me the most. I have known for years now that Claire was reaching her boiling point, the despair we both share so deeply at having to watch Michael slowly fray and fall apart at the seams. She never felt anger at him for turning a blind eye to the daughter, his last connection to me, but only felt a deep sadness almost too profound to define.


It was only inevitable that Claire chose to leave; perhaps she even waited too long. Her presence enabled her brother to live an existence that will no doubt leave nothing left of him in the end. He is starting to feel less and less and live in the past more and more. It terrifies me that he is living this way, forcing Norah to live this way.


I do not want him to forget me. I am his wife and my heart aches to be with him again. I would sacrifice everything and anything if it meant that I could be with him again in human form. I love him more than words could ever even try to convey and he feels the same for me. It is not only his grief that calls me back to him so often but his love for me as well.


So many dreams we had together that never had the chance to take root and come true. These dreams and sentiments have not crossed Michael’s mind in a long time. He’s lost the ability to remember or feel anything besides pain when his mind turns to me as it so often does. All the pictures of us have been removed from the walls and packed away somewhere in the attic. He will not allow anyone to touch the furniture that we picked out together. He still likes to feel my memory within the furnishing; he just cannot stand to see them within the happy images of the frames.


This ache inside of Michael to be a father to his daughter is crippling for him. It is something that he and I have spent years trying to understand. Every time gets within an arm’s reach of her something dark and unclear forces him to recoil and run away, a gag reflex that is impossible to ignore. I have glimpsed into the darkest depths of him and have failed to even find the slightest foreshadowing of an answer. It cannot be how much Norah favors me; the memory of my face is with him always.


He is afraid to lose her, to hurt her, the same way he thinks that he hurt and lost me. It is more than losing me that haunts Michael but the way that he lost me. The tense moments before he catches the flash of headlights has played through his mind continually like a broken record over the past four years and he forces me to watch it with him every time. More strongly than anything else that exists within him is the wish to be able to change those final moments, telling himself that the horrible things he shouted over and over at me through the miles was only his anger talking and not really himself.


It is the same thing my mother tried to tell me over and over again throughout the years of my childhood. My mother was the one that taught than underneath words of anger lies at least the inkling of the truth. It was no secret that Michael and I came from two completely different worlds. His childhood was one of privilege and mine was one of scavenge. I closed my mother out of my life to make sure that nobody in my future could ever find out just how different of a world I came from. It was Michael’s lack of understanding of where I came from and the childhood I was forced to endure that created the bumps in our marriage.


Even now I cannot find fault in Michael’s anger at never understanding me. He wanted to understand me, tried so hard to, but my past was a part of me I refused to reveal to him. He couldn’t understand my inability to appreciate the finer things in life that he showered upon me and my lack of impression at his successes at work. He didn’t understand the need in me to go out into the world and leave something of myself there. It was never his lack of effort, simply my lack of openness. Throughout so many battles between us I gnashed my teeth together and let him think that I was an ungrateful brat.


I buried the memories of my past at eighteen years old. My mother’s reception or lack thereof at my father’s death taught me that things once buried are always best left laid to rest. It hurt me to hide such a vital and formative part of me from him but I did it to protect the both of us. I didn’t want him to know how much my childhood damaged me and the extent of how much I hated my mother consumed me. I thought it unfair to lay upon him a burden that stopped being mine to carry the day I left home.


It never did stop being mine to carry, if anything time made it become more so. Even now I struggle to leave it behind me, desperate to rationalize that my childhood is something that cannot define me. I taught myself how to love without abandon. I forced myself to believe that I was stronger than what my mother made me out to believe and convinced myself it was success or death. Success or death. Those were the only options I ever gave myself. Suicide was something I contemplated something many times in between the years of leaving home and meeting Michael. The only thing I was ever grateful to my mother for during those years was making me a coward.


The blame Michael insists on carrying with him is gravely misplaced. He punishes more than just himself when he locks and loses himself in the past. Norah has grown up without him and now the pillar of her security is gone out of her life. She is confused by the sudden loss of her aunt and terrified of the man who she has left her with. Norah thinks there is something wrong with her, enough so that she cannot even be loved by her own father. It pierces me through to have to witness the world I left behind for her to grow up and fade away in.


I can do nothing for the people I love most in the world. Four years on and Michael still consumes himself with anger and blame, seeking neither solace or retribution at the bottom of a bottom but simply a quicker way to bring the painful memory of me flying back to him. It is unfair of me to even try to be angry at him for his self-destructive ways.  There is so much more I could have done to prevent the arguments that occurred within our marriage. He is my husband and had every right to be given the opportunity to know and understand the darkest parts of me.


My omissions to him hung over us like a dark cloud for the last two years of our marriage. Norah was an attempt to bring balance back to the passionate love we had at the beginning. She brought love back to us, bringing us incredible joy we didn’t even know was possible until we held her for the first time, but she wasn’t the answer. We loved her, utterly devoted to her but she wasn’t the answer I desperately hoped she would be. Michael still struggled to see inside of me and I bitterly resisted him all the way until the end.


There is nothing I haven’t tried yet in this frustrating existence of mine to try to show Michael how wrong he is to blame himself. I’m not angry at him but angry at my helplessness towards him. I scream at him, feel everything with him, visit him in his dreams, and yet I fail to find a door to open myself to him. I know there is a way in, the moment he saw me at my funeral is proof of it. It is nothing but torture being stuck here with him and I’m terrified this is how it will always be, just watching, being helpless to do anything at all.


Shutting out his mind to everything but a singular task in front of him is something that I always admired about Michael when I was still on Earth; he was always to get amazing amounts of work done that way. I no longer see it as an ability any longer but a part of him that further enables his detachment to things that pulls at the strings of his already broken heart. For him to simply take care of the basic needs of Norah he must force himself into a hollow blankness that only makes the small child retreat even farther into her fear of him. Witnessing him bathe and dress her was a heart-wrenching scene. I have never seen interactions with a child so cold and empty as Michael’s with his own daughter.


I want to scream and claw at him, let him know that he is not the only one who is hurting and falling apart. I want to kick and bite at him as if I am a small child, the size of my desperation to make him feel anything at all that great. I’m close to my breaking point, if I am not there already. I’m losing my sanity, at least what little of it the past four years have not eroded away. My worst fear is slowly but surely coming true. I’m losing the ability to feel anything but anger and sadness. I’m forgetting the very essence of my humanity. I’m becoming my mother.


Michael is supposed to be picking up Abby from daycare in a couple hours and at the rate he is attacking the bottle of scotch in his hand he will be in no condition to get behind the wheel. Never in the entire time I have known him has he ever driven drunk, always fiercely and starkly against it, due to losing a friend of his to a drunk driver in college. I imagine the waiting that Norah will be subjected to tonight, waiting for a father who has chosen to entertain the vices of his sorrow instead of his obligations to her. Something tells me that I should worry this time if Michael really will try to drive to go get her. There is a lot of things he has been doing as of late that is grossly out of character compared to the Michael I used to know.


I have been sitting at his side for the past two hours now inside of his now dank study. He refused to let Claire ever come in here and he hardly cleans it. Dust gathers thickly over the wood furniture and expensive cushions are now faded and worn from the neglect over the years. His liquor cabinet is always filled with his token scotches and whiskey’s; he always had a preference for the hard stuff.


For two hours he has done nothing but nurses a bottle and stares at the gold locket he gave me for our second anniversary containing one of our first snapshots taken together during our happy years. It is the locket that I had around my neck the day of the car accident. He keeps it hung around a large elephant paperweight I gave him while we were dating as a gag gift. He loved that paper weight, always telling me that I could never again beat that gift during my lifetime. 


“Oh Abby,” he sobs quietly to the locket in his hands, “I just don’t think I can go on like this anymore. I miss you more than anyone could possibly know or understand.”


I place my hand on his shoulder only for it to go right through him. This is the most he has ever hurt before and it terrifies me. I am no longer sure of his ability to think logically about his actions, the past few days acquainting me to a new side of him. He needs more than the love his family can give. He is standing on shaky ground. The question isn’t how hard he will fall but if he will be able to get back up.


My eyes perk wide when I see him open a small drawer hidden in his desk and draw something metal and cylindrical out. What he is holding is something I have forgotten completely about. It is the antique revolver his father presented to him when he graduated from business school. The gun is small and has a beautiful pearl handle. It was beautiful the first time my eyes laid upon it, Michael and I both observing it for long moments with deep awe. Now as he holds it in his hand it is dark and sinister.


He is lightly running his fingers over the short barrel, reveling in the cold feel of the metal. He once held the piece with great familiarity and confidence. Now there is a slight tremor in his hands and the feel is strange to him. His mind is making a stranger of himself. He doesn’t process what he is feeling, doesn’t stop to question the absurdity of the thoughts that have crossed his mind the past few days.


This person he has become tells him that there is no future for himself that Norah is better off without him, that he is so weak that he cannot even manage to be a father. A tear runs down his cheek as he stares at and considers the gun he holds in himself. His mind is clouded with his sorrow and it is refusing to let him think straight. He is actually considering taking his own life, a way he thinks will end his pain.


“Michael, don’t,” I say aloud, speaking only to the air around him. “This isn’t the answer; it won’t end your pain.”


I am screaming at him how wrong he is, how much ending his life with only lengthen and increase his suffering, frantically trying to make him aware of my presence. There is no way he can possibly hear me or sense me near him. It’s been like this for four years but something is different this time. I cannot stand here and allow him to do this. He isn’t ready for this yet, this existence that I’m cursed to endure, he isn’t strong enough. He isn’t…suddenly ice comes over me. The same ice I felt when…


“Now this is familiar,” Casey’s voice says from somewhere behind me. “Hmm, now where have I seen this before?”


She rubs her hand deliberately over her chin as if pondering a great philosophical question and her dark eyes brighten as she snaps her fingers together loudly. A sly smile crosses over her face as she adjusts her gaze to meet mine. There is something different about her. She isn’t wearing her glasses anymore and her hair is no longer a frizzed mess. She is still wearing the same clothes from last time. Her eyes are harder, her face older.


“Ah yes, this is exactly how I felt right before I died. All the thoughts of my life running through my head, all the reasons why I didn’t want to live.”


The staccato of her sudden bout of laughter unsettles and frightens me. There is no comprehension to the drive behind her strange behavior. She is laughing at a moment that almost mirrors her own demise. No sadness is ruminating from her. The only thing rolling off of her is an odd sense of satisfaction. As I look her straight in the eye my confusion at her behavior is starting to morph into revulsion and anger. I cannot even bring myself to say anything to her, only regard her incredulously. 


“Well don’t stop on account of me, Abby,” she says with a huge grin. “You’re so close. Just keep on doing what you were doing and pretend I’m not even here.”


“So close to what?” I question her suspiciously.


The grin disappears from her face and annoyance enters into her dark eyes. She puts her hands on her hips and apparates herself to only inches from my face. I try to move a step back from her but I’m frozen in place. The icy sensation is even stronger with the distance closed between us. She is making me feel small and weak. I cannot move any of my extremities and my green eyes are forced to bore feebly into hers.


“Why, solving Michael’s little problem, Abby,” she says evenly.


“I don’t know what you mean,” I reply, still unable to tear my gaze away.


She sighs and tilts her head to follow the exaggerated, sarcastic roll of her eyes. “I’m just here for the show. All that screaming and yelling you are doing.”


I fall back from her and am released from the hold she has over me. She is sitting on one of the red overstuffed chairs that face adjacent to Michael’s desk. She is making no attempt to hide the gleam of excited anticipation in her eyes. Red-hot anger courses through me as it dawns upon me what she is doing.


“You bitch,” I start to breathe but my focus is torn away when I hear the sound of a click coming from behind me.


“You won’t want to miss this Abby,” Casey says as she focuses her eyes on Michael.


I turn to face him and horror mangles my lips into a perfect O. He is cocking the antique revolver, slowly moving his hands to place the gun at his temple. Panic rips through me, powerful and overwhelming as I watch Michael’s body start to shake with sobs. His mind made is made up, his determination to find an ending resolute.


“God forgive me and take care of her,” he whispers, his finger resting against the trigger.


“Michael no!” I scream as I lunge myself towards him.


“Abby, no, don’t!” I hear a voice cry, sounding remarkably like Blaine’s.


I am right in front of Michael and I extend my hand towards the revolver that is pressed against his temple. He is shaking violently and sweat is pouring down his face. He begins to press down on the trigger, as he does his eyes widen in shock and surprise.


The cold of the metal is tangible as my hand swipes at the revolver, but not before I hear to deafening pop of the discharge and the warmth of red splattering against me. Michael’s limp body falls heavily against me. I only have time to look at him for one brief moment before I feel the blade of ice pierce through me.


“Abby…” A voice calls but it sounds so far away now. I cannot distinguish between female or male.