Laura Miller - For All You Have Left

“Please,” I scream. “No.”

There are more of them now, pulling on me. I try to fight them off, but I lose.

I don’t know how much time has passed when I wake up on a stretcher in an ambulance, and the first thing I notice is that the backpack is gone. Where did it go? I take a deep breath and exhale every piece of joy in my soul. And immediately, the tears start streaming down my cheeks. And I cry, and I cry, until I just stop. I just stop crying.

“What is your name?” I hear the man beside me ask.

It’s not the first time he has asked me, but it is the first time I have actually heard it as a question.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asks again.

My eyes lift and I notice the bright shade of blue in the man’s eyes. Then, my gaze falls onto a silver pin the man is wearing on his shirt. I focus on it. It’s shiny. So shiny. I watch the man take the pin from near his collar and put it into my bloody hand. There’s so much blood. I don’t even know if it’s all mine.

“Your name,” he says again.

“Mrs. Amsel,” I whisper, still staring at the pin, now in my hand.

The warm liquid floods my eyes again, and I quickly force my eyelids shut. I caress the metal pin’s edges with my fingers inside the palm of my hand. I’m starting to feel numb. My whole body is starting to feel numb. I press one of the pin’s edges into my hand until I feel a sharp pain. Then, I take a deep breath and slowly force the air back through my lips.

* * *

My alarm is blaring some song from the top hits station on the radio. It’s so loud, it sounds like it’s right next to me. I lift my head and notice I’m still on the couch. Then immediately, I feel the sting of a night full of my lingering memories.

I force myself to sit up. The light is on above me, and the blinds are wide open, but on the other side of the patio doors, it’s dark. I take a second to rub my eyes before I slowly push myself up and stagger toward the song playing in my bedroom. When I get close enough, I throw my hand on top of the alarm, and instantly, the room grows silent again. I glance at the clock. There’s a big, bright green six on it. The little, mesmerizing glow in the dark room captures my full attention for a few seconds, until I snap out of it and fall onto the edge of my bed. Moments pass, and I just sit there and stare at the beige wall in front of me, trying to convince myself that someday the nightmare won’t haunt me. And then, suddenly, I remember Jorgen.

I don’t even bother changing out of the clothes I wore yesterday — the same clothes I fell asleep in. I charge to my door, push past it and plant my feet on Jorgen’s welcome mat.

I take a second to rally my courage. Then, I knock three times on the hard wood. A few moments disappear before I hear rustling on the other side. And all of a sudden, the knob turns and the door opens. He’s still wearing his jeans from yesterday, but his shirt is gone. I notice his abs and the muscles in his chest right before I charge into his apartment.

“What time is it?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’re talking about this.”

I hear him suck in a breath.

“Okay,” he concedes softly, turning away.

I watch him close the door and take a seat on one of his barstools, but I don’t sit down. I just stand.

“Jorgen.”

I wait until his eyes meet mine. And when they do, I continue.

“I was married. I was eighteen. It was right after graduation.”

I stop and try to gather some more courage to say the words that I’ve needed to say for a long time now.

“We had known each other since we were kids,” I go on. “He asked, and I said yes. I had dreamed about it since I was nine. I didn’t even have to think about it. Our parents didn’t know — until they found the marriage license after…”

Jorgen’s voice stops me.

“Ada, why don’t you go by your first name?”

I think my eyebrows instinctively collide. He sounds so calm now — as if he’s not mad anymore. But I don’t understand his question or maybe I just don’t understand why he’s asking it.

There’s dead silence for a long, agonizing minute. Then, I look into his eyes.

“I couldn’t…,” I start. “The last thing he — Andrew, my husband — said to me was my name and the words: I love you and forever. I couldn’t hear my name and not think of those words anymore.”

I try my hardest to fight back the tears.

“See,” I go on slowly, “we were on his bike, on our way home from getting married, and we didn’t make it home…he didn’t make it home.”

I watch Jorgen’s face grow pale, and it breaks my heart. I wish I knew what he was thinking.

“But Jorgen, that was a long time ago, and I…”

“Ada,” he says softly, stopping me again.

There’s a word on his lips, but nothing comes out. He finds my eyes, stays in them only a moment and then quickly sends his gaze to the floor.

“Ada, I was there that day.”

I think I stop breathing for a second.

“I couldn’t find an ID on you. You said your name was Mrs. Amsel.” His eyes lock in mine. “And you were looking at my pin of St. Michael, so I took it off, and I gave it to you. You still have the pin. It’s on your shelf.”

My heart is racing now. I’m trying with everything in me to calm it and to think — to just think, to put it all in order.

He looks down at the floor and then back up at me.

I don’t believe it. It can’t be. I would have known. I would have remembered. I would have remembered…

His eyes…

I look into Jorgen’s blue eyes, and then it hits me. Why didn’t I see it before?

Tears start to blurry my vision. I’m shaking my head. Images from that day, images of Andrew, images of the paramedic — Jorgen — are racing through my mind, and I feel as if I can’t breathe again. I feel as if my two lives are colliding and they shouldn’t be.

“I started to put it all together last night.” He shakes his head. “I mean I should have figured it all out before. Hell, I might have known it all along and just didn’t want to believe it — didn’t want to believe that you had suffered that much or that I had seen you suffer that much. I don’t know.”

There’s silence then. He doesn’t break it and neither do I for long, sad moments. I’m aware of every heartbeat in my chest. I’m conscious of every breath that passes over my lips and every blink of my eye. I’m consumed by the acts of purely living. I barely notice him get up and walk toward me. And suddenly, I feel his arms surrounding me, drawing me closer to him.

“Ada,” I hear him say, “I’m sorry. I should have listened to you yesterday.”

The tears are flooding my cheeks now. I try to respond, but the words just come out only as sobby resemblances of words instead.

“Ada, it’s okay,” he says, gently stroking my hair.

He was there. He was there. I repeat the little sentence over and over in my mind.

“Ada, I remembered your face, but I couldn’t, didn’t want to place it,” he whispers in a shaky voice.

I feel a gasp instinctively escape my lips.

He was there. He knows everything. He knew everything this whole time. Only until now, I guess, everything he had known was connected to some other life — some other face that wasn’t mine.

“Kevin was working with me that afternoon,” he continues, as if he’s remembering it all for the first time.

I take a second and swallow the lump in my throat.

“He remembered me,” I say, through my tears.

I feel his head nod above me.

“I never talked to him about it, but that must have been what he wanted to tell me,” he says.

I try to control the sobs and wipe away the tears.

“Jorgen,” I manage to get out. I pull away from him and find his eyes. “You have to know that I love you. I don’t want to live in my past anymore. I want to live in my present — with you. I don’t want to lose you.”

I lay my head against his chest again, and then I feel his arms squeeze tightly around me.

“I love you too, Ada,” I hear him whisper. “I’m yours. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. At his last word, the world falls away, and I feel my heart exploding — exploding with not only love for this man but appreciation for giving this tortured soul a second chance — a second life.

“I love you,” I say again, with everything I have left in me. “I love you so much.”

I go to the spot that’s etched into my memory — at the end, near the corner. There’s a big oak tree that sits on the other side of the fence. It shades the spot, and it seems only fitting. But when I see the piece of stone jetting up from the earth, I stop cold and just stare at it. I don’t know what else to do. Of anything I’ve ever done in my life, even more so than starting over in a tomorrow without him, this makes me the most terrified. That stone might as well be a ghost.

I stare at it a little longer. I don’t want to look at it, but I force myself to. It still doesn’t seem right that his name should be there, etched in rock under the words, Loving husband, son and brother. And it doesn’t seem right that there’s not much time between those two numbers. Eighteen years. Only eighteen, short, beautiful years. And I think about that little dash that separates those two years, and it’s hard to believe that our life fit into that little space — that all our moments, all our dreams, all our joys, all our laughter, all our tears and all our smiles are held within that little dash. I push back the warm tears as I try to rationalize it. It’s just not possible.

I force myself to walk closer to the stone. It feels like the frost-covered ground is more like wet concrete as my feet, little by little, struggle to take each step. But finally, I reach it, and I slowly kneel down so that I’m at eye level with the carved words. I glance at the dark gray indentions, then quickly turn away and stare at the frozen grass instead as my heart slams hard against my chest. Half of me is saying I can’t do this; I’m not strong enough. The other half says I must. So after a moment, I force my eyes back, and suddenly, I feel my hand moving toward the stone, and soon, my fingers are pressing against the indented letters that make up the word husband.

I’ve been here once — the day I said goodbye to him for the last time. But I’ve never seen the gray stone that bears his name. I finish moving my fingertips over the word, and then I follow the letters in his name, until my eyes fall to a spot below the dates where there’s an inscription. I had requested it be there, but I hadn’t thought about it since then until now. In small letters is the little quote that he might not have gone a day without saying: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I wanted it there because the quote is Andrew, because it says what he would say if he could. It says: Don’t cry for me. And now, everyone who passes by here — everyone who never had the chance to meet him — will know who he was.

The quote makes me smile, but it also forces another tear down my cheek. I wipe it away with the back of my hand and focus on another inscription below the quote. I run my fingertips over each letter in the words: Forever and a day. And when I get to the last letter, my head falls to my knees, and I try to control my heart as it grows ever heavy in my chest. He wrote the words in a tree; I had to make sure they were written in stone. And I had said those words that day — that last day with him — but I had whispered them, and I don’t think he could have heard me over the bike’s engine. I have replayed that moment in my head probably a million times now, but each time now, when I say the words, I shout them. I make sure he hears them.

I feel like sobbing, but I don’t. Instead, I sniffle, swallow the hurt in my throat and wipe my eyes again.

“Andrew,” I whisper.

I watch my breath freeze in the air, and I try to force back the flood of tears that I soon realize I can’t possibly stop from streaming down my cheeks. It’s been years since I’ve said his name out loud — as if he were right in front of me.

“You weren’t supposed to leave me,” I whisper.

I pause and force my lips up, but the smile quickly fades away.