“It is just a picture of my boy,” I whispered, tears blurring my vision.
“If you wanted to be his mother so badly, you can go mourn him somewhere else,” she said, pointing a manicured finger toward the dark, gravel driveway.
Outside, the wind didn’t sound like a natural breeze; it sounded like a jagged warning echoing through the trees of the Connecticut suburbs. The long walk toward the transport car felt like a sentence that had been written for me long before Terrence ever fell ill.
Mud clung to my shoes as I eventually reached the remote trailhead where the driver dropped me off in the middle of the night. Every branch that cracked in the darkness seemed to whisper the same cruel truth that I was no longer wanted by anyone left living.
By the time I reached the cabin, something deep inside my spirit had shifted away from simple sadness. I realized then that Brigitte hadn’t sent me to this wilderness to live out my remaining years in peace; she had sent me here to disappear and be forgotten.
The cabin was a wreck of cracked windows and damp walls, filled with a stale, metallic smell that clung to the back of my throat. I found a rusted cot and a broken wooden chair, surrounded by a silence so heavy it felt like it was pressing the air out of my lungs.
I sank to the dusty floor and clutched the one small photo I had managed to tuck into my pocket, and for the first time, my anger found a target. Losing a child is a unique kind of agony, but realizing he left you at the mercy of someone who despised you is a betrayal that burns differently.
“Why did you leave me with her, Terrence?” I asked the empty room, my voice disappearing into the shadows.
I stared at his face in the moonlight, feeling a dark urge to burn the picture just to stop the pain of looking at what I had lost. I wanted to punish him for his absence and punish myself for still being weak enough to let Brigitte break my heart.
However, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the only thing I had left, so I pressed the cold glass of the frame to my chest and sobbed until I was empty. When the morning light finally broke through the pines, the cold was lodged deep in my bones, but a new, harder resolve had taken root.