Stories That Got Us In: “Repeat Offense” by Haley Fullerton

How old must a child be to know what it looks like when a life ends?  

Esther had experienced too much loss in her own young life to be able to answer this question accurately. Had watched her mother bury a baby when she was just three. Two more before she was nine. At thirteen, it was her mother herself who returned to the earth. Esther, now irrevocably an only-child, shoveled the first few loads of dirt onto the faded pine casket offered to her on clearance from the funeral home on Elton Street. The director had become fond of her over the years. 

*** 

Adulthood collided with Esther early and unsparingly. The first time a man hit her she was seventeen. The first time she deserved it she was twenty. At twenty-one, she fell ill and fat and sad until she learned she was pregnant. This pleased the man and frightened Esther, but it kept her free from bruises. Five months in with barely a bump to show, but here was life. It was indisputable. Redemption, finally. 

She told the old woman at the grocery store who bagged produce and called her ‘dear.’ “Motherhood!” The white-haired clerk exclaimed, stuffing an eggplant into a plastic bag and tying a knot at the end. “My mother had eight children. Seven daughters and a son. I myself have five boys. Five! What a switch, don’t you think dear-y?” She smiled and shook her head, reminiscing on the coincidence of living. The happy accident of existence. 

*** 

When the day came, Esther lay in her hospital bed and thought of her mother, trying and failing and returning home each time with the same, lone child at her side. She remembered the clicking machines and the bright lights. Cups full of ice chips and bags of dripping liquids. Her mother’s splotchy, wheezing face. She was starting to get comfortable with the melancholy, with the way her mother squeezed her hand a bit tighter in the parking lot when they were finally discharged, getting to eat ice cream for dinner for the week while her mother slept the days away. 

Perhaps it was a bad omen. She should have known. How could she expect anything different? She was her mother’s daughter after all, in both the beautiful and the agonizing ways. When Esther’s baby was born without a heartbeat, it nearly stopped her own. There were no words, no expressions of emotion strong enough to capture the devastation she felt, bone-deep and paralyzing. She stared, dry-eyed and unblinking, listening to her own pulse, begging it to sputter and stall, to shortcircuit her brain and force this pain out through her clenched teeth and into the dead air. She was suffocating in this self-inflicted stillness, but she had felt loss before. She knew numbness burned less. 

On the day the man decided that her quiet felt like culpability, the bruises returned. Eventually, so did his yearning for children. “Try again?” He asked her as he kissed her split lip. She could still see her baby’s purple face when she closed her eyes. 

*** 

Esther’s second bump was much more prominent. This time around, she moved carefully, ate mindfully, chattering with the old woman at the grocer’s while she packed up more and more vegetables to bring home for dinner, her due date looming. She swore she even stepped lighter, quietly like a mouse, careful not to shake or wake the sleeping being within her. 

As the stress of the approaching birth grew, the man became agitated, yelled more. He began leaving fingerprints on Esther’s arms like a map of islands at sea. When he raised his fists, her hands reached for her middle, leaving the tender skin around her eyes ripe for contact, free to splotch and spread in browns and blues, two marks on an apple fallen from its branch. 

During her eighth month, Esther sat silently in the passenger seat as the man drove them home from a late-stage appointment with the doctor. “Things are progressing well,” the doctor had said. “But I fear you’re still on your feet too often, doing too much around the house.” This would not bode well with the man, Esther knew. He would feel insulted, perceive that the doctor was implying that he wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t loving her enough. 

Could you truly love someone you lay your hands on? She didn’t know. 

Defending the doctor was her first mistake. Reaching for the man was her second. He swatted her hand from the air, face flushed, eye twitching as the shouting began. The car rattled closer to the median through his fury. “You have nothing to say?” He roared, and when Esther froze, silent and shrinking into herself, he swung an elbow at her temple, the force of it knocking her head into the glass pane of the window with a dull thud as the car spun up onto its side. 

*** 

The staccato of machines and sensors lulled Esther from a long sleep, the scratch of the hospital blanket a familiar sensation. 

“She’s up,” Esther heard a young woman say, and it was not long after that Esther was told that the man was dead. “The damage from the crash was profound. Your recovery will be lengthy and arduous, but you’ll be okay,” they told her. “We are sorry to tell you that your baby did not make it.” 

Esther sat with this news for just a moment. She shifted her eyes from one doctor to another, the looks on their faces solemn and stupid and known. Suddenly, she let out a hyena’s laugh, tears and sweat and spit mixing down her round red face. She howled on this way for hours, her eyes wide, teeth bared, cackling and crying through a wicked grin, forgetting altogether the difference between anger and humor, love and fear and grief. Forgetting altogether where her weeping ended and the rest of the world began. Forgetting altogether the sound of her own name. 

*** 

“Esther?” A man asked her, approaching the café table at which she sat to hand her a pouch full of coins. “The barista said you left this at the counter.” She thanked him and invited him to sit, enticed by his kind smile and a potential remedy to her loneliness. He was fair-skinned and clean-shaven with thick, scholarly eyebrows and hands that moved gingerly through the pages of a newspaper. His name was Walter and he was new in town, an architect called in to collaborate on the local theater refurbishment. They spoke of his time working in New York, his hometown of Boston and her trips there with her mother as a child, Perhaps we’ve crossed paths before, the loss of his first wife, Esther’s accident a few years back, her subtle limp, and their mutual love for mystery novels and the water. He had a keen eye for art and the ornate, and he called Esther a jewel. They fell in love in two weeks. 

*** 

A year later, when John came, Esther held her breath, the scratch of the hospital blanket a painful memory. When John stayed, she thought that by some miracle, she had fooled God. This baby, their son, had ten small fingers and toes, eyes a deep blue like the ocean, and cheeks pink like dawn. There was no crippling silence upon delivery, no vacant apology from the doctor, no empty car seat on the drive home like all the times before. 

As he aged, Esther’s disbelief grew with him. There were still so many ways she could lose him. She had begged Walter to keep John home from school, but he was getting too old and too curious. “Part of living is understanding the risks and choosing to take them anyway,” Walter had told her on a night she felt particularly adrift. And so off he went into the world, her boy, the baby she—and her mother, once—had worked so hard for. 

When the call came from his teacher half-way through the class trip to the beach, Esther was half-dressed, curlers in her hair, face half-powdered for the ribbon-cutting at the theater this afternoon, Walter’s hard work finally finished. She rushed to the shoreline, knowing she shouldn’t but thinking anyway that it was only a matter of time. Things had been too good for her. Her son was too sweet, too healthy, too innocent. Her husband too gentle and present. Her life too stable.  

Something has happened to John.  

She knew this feeling. This unwanted embrace of the familiar. A beckoning so tragic it felt like home. The repossession of a gift not meant for her. She had been waiting for it, running from it, all her life. 

My God, she’d almost escaped it. 

But when she arrived at the beach, staring out into the crashing waves at all the places he might be, she almost didn’t see him run to her. In looking for his small body being pulled onto the sand, she almost missed him wrap his tiny hands around her leg. She searched his face for that pale, purple hue she knew all too well and instead saw his teary, cobalt eyes, sad but lively, his cheeks flushed pink like sunset, his forehead scratched from a fall on the rocky coastline, droplets of bright red blood dripping down his temple. Shaken, but safe.  

Today was not the day that she would lose him.