“The nurse called him after asking me.” The elderly man was retired, but he came in whenever a parent or parents lost a baby to stillbirth or neonatal complications and wanted a tangible memory of their child; in his faded blue eyes, Sarah had seen a father who’d once held his own silent baby. “Here.”
Abe brought the car to a stop near a grassy shoulder, and it was only then that she realized they’d entered the peaceful green of the cemetery. “Let me see,” he said, holding out his hand before she could become angry again at the fact her baby was here, under the cold earth.
She passed over the photos of her baby, her own gaze greedy on the images that were all she had of the son for whom she’d decorated a nursery, a son she’d dreamed of taking to school and playing with in the park. “He looks like he’s sleeping, doesn’t he?” Such a sweet, peaceful face.
“Yes.” Abe touched his finger to the image as if stroking her baby’s cheek. “How did you even carry him? He looks like a linebacker.”
Sarah laughed through her tears. “God, he used to kick so hard.” It was why she still found it so difficult to understand why he hadn’t made it. “They said he had defects in his organs, that he never formed right… but he looks perfect to me.” Would always be her strong Baby Boots.
“Definitely an Aaron,” Abe said, his hands careful with the prints and his eyes taking in the details she pointed out. “Playing football and getting all the girls. And maybe even being a little preppy. Just enough to have that bad-boy-pretending-to-be-good vibe that girls love.”
Sarah laughed again, so happy to hear her son’s name on someone else’s lips, hear an acknowledgement that Aaron had been born even if he’d never lived. Putting the photos away with care when Abe returned them, she took a deep breath, then directed him to the place where the babies lay, sleeping under the sheltering wings of a guardian angel.
She’d come here first thing this morning. Of course she had. She might not like seeing her child here, but she would never leave him alone. “Hey, baby boy,” she said, kneeling down to the lush green grass and straightening the furry blue-and-yellow dinosaur she’d gotten to keep him company. She didn’t leave flowers. Babies didn’t care about flowers. They liked toys and colorful balloons.
Sarah had brought him bright orange ones this morning, gently anchored the strings in the ground beside the small headstone. They bobbed in the breeze as Sarah sat and talked to her baby as she did at least once every week. Abe sat beside her, a big, quiet, patient presence. It was getting dark by the time she rose to her feet.
“Good night, Baby Boots,” she whispered before bending to press a kiss to Aaron’s headstone. “I hope you’re making mischief up in heaven.” That was the only way she could bear this—if she believed that her baby’s spirit had flown away and this gravestone was only a place for the living to grieve. He wasn’t here any longer.
“Good night, Aaron.”
Abe’s words made her lower lip quiver. “Thank you,” she said through the rawness inside her. “For treating him as if he existed.”
Abe put his arm around her shoulders. “He did.”
She didn’t shrug off his hold, instead soaking in his warmth, his strength. “Were you okay last year? On the anniversary of Tessie’s passing?” It had always been the worst time for him, and when the date had rolled around, she’d worried, watched the tabloids, only breathing a sigh of relief when she saw no mention of Abe indulging in self-destructive behavior.
“I hung out with the guys,” he told her now, “stayed the night at David’s place.” He stroked his thumb over her bare upper arm as he said, “I take her balloons too. She always loved chasing them.”
It was the first time he’d ever shared anything about how he mourned for his sister. “You visit her often?” Sarah knew Tessie had been laid to rest in Abe’s hometown of Chicago.
Less than a year later, Diane and Abe had buried Abe’s father beside her, the physically fit man dying of a sudden heart attack. “A broken heart,” Diane had said to Sarah one day. “These Bellamy men, when they love, they go all in. And my poor Gregory, he couldn’t survive losing his baby girl. It was the helplessness that got to him—not being able to fight her dragons for her, slay them.”
Like father, like son, Sarah had thought at the time, already starting to understand that Abe, too, was haunted by how helpless he’d been made by the disease that had taken his sister’s life.