Born of Misery

“Do you have the key?” Charlotte asks me for the second time in ten minutes. She’s been nervous since we woke up this morning, jumpy and even more unsettled than usual. I can’t blame her. I haven’t been feeling great myself.

“It’s right here.” I take it out of my pocket and hold it in my palm, fist curling around it, feeling the smooth slide of metal over my skin. I just want to reassure myself that it’s real, and that it’s there.

“Are we going to do this, then?”

Charlotte bounces on the balls of her feet. The air around us turns to smoke as we breathe and the tip of her nose is pink with cold, despite the bulky winter coat she’s wearing. The hood is furry and tugged up around her face, though whether for warmth or anonymity I’m not sure.

“We better had.” I check the time in my phone quickly, and see that half an hour has already passed since we left the car. It’ll be another thirty minutes trudge back to where we parked, silent and heavy with the knowledge of what we’ve done, the guilt of being unable to take it back. 

I let Charlotte choose the box, and I almost wish I hadn’t. It’s painfully unfamiliar, a simple wooden crate with a stainless steel latch and keyhole. I feel callous and cruel burying Alex’s things in it, like packing away treasured memories into cardboard boxes. Tears sting my eyes and I blink them away so that Charlotte doesn’t catch me. They’d only turn to ice on my face.

“Alright?” Charlotte’s anxious voice spurs me into action. I flip the lid and place a small bundle of photographs at the bottom, tied together with a short piece of satin. There had been a neat, looping bow around them this morning, but the day has worn away at it and now it just sags, sad and tired.

I am in the top picture, and my own face stares back at me as I toss them away. There’s a frozen smile fixed to my face and my eyes are wide, almost manic with excitement. I’d tried to include a variety of photos, dating all the way back to when Alex and I first met, but that one was recent. That was taken only a few months ago, when we first found out I was pregnant. 

Next there’s Alex’s wallet, a raggedy thing, faux leather and full of holes that he was always losing coins to. I poke my thumb through one of them now and a tearful laugh bubbles up in my throat. He used to take me on cheap dates with that thing, would fish out a few notes and leave them on the table, scatter a few coins as a tip. The night he proposed to me, he reached for his wallet to pay the tab and the ring fell right onto the bar in front of me, spinning a little until it settled in front of me like a question, perfectly innocuous. I had cried that night too.

“April?” Charlotte hovers at my side again, palms outstretched. I dash away a few stray tears angrily and when I turn my face to her, I see that she’s holding a knife. The knife.

It’s only small. It should be harmless, held out in Charlotte’s hands like an offering. The blade glints in the light that filters through the canopy overhead, the edge sharp and serrated. It’s coated in a thick, viscous blood, sticky to the touch, and no matter how many times I showered afterwards, I can still feel it on me, like slipping into a warm bath.

“Yeah,” I reply, afraid that if I say any more I’ll vomit. “Let’s get this over with.”

I set the knife tenderly into the box, laying it on top of the photographs and the wallet. I don’t want to think about the way the blood will seep into the paper and stain my smiling face, the way it will dry over it’s years locked away in here and how it will never, ever come off. I can’t let myself imagine what my daughter will see when she first unlocks this box and finds what I’ve left for her. The thought alone makes me feel violently ill, and my head spins.

“Hey, careful.” Charlotte is at my side in seconds, an arm wrapped protectively around my waist, holding me up. “We can go now. C’mon, just cover it up and let’s get out of here.”

We’d dug the plot earlier, when we first arrived. This spot had seemed as nice as any, an empty stretch of mud and grass, shrouded with trees that stretch into the sky. There’s the faint gurgle of a stream nearby, and the constant twittering of bird song almost makes it peaceful. As I lower the box into the ground, I can’t help but feel that Alex would like this, that he wouldn’t mind his life being hidden away here.

Charlotte and I cover the box together, one shovel between us, kicking dirt over the top of it and smoothing it over so that it looks like we were never here. To my right there is a tree stump, cut off before it could ever really flourish, and I have carved a thin, jagged cross into the wood. It’s partially so that we can find this place again, when we come looking, but also because I don’t think I could go without leaving something behind, without marking the spot in some way. No one will leave flowers here, so this is as close as it’ll get. It isn’t good enough, but at least it’s something.

“When will we open it again, then?” Charlotte asks, one hand cupping my elbow as she leads me back towards the car. Every step that we take feels like a punch to the gut, and I know that I will never forget this place for as long as I live. I have left a part of me behind as well, sealed up in that box with the key on a chain round my neck, resting over my beating heart.

“Eighteen years,” I tell her, and rest a hand on the swell of my belly. “We’ll come back in eighteen years. When she’s old enough to understand. When she’s old enough to know the truth.”

Charlotte nods without a word. Throughout all of this, she never pushed, never did anything but support me, and that is a debt I’ll never be able to repay. 

I slip my hand into hers, and we make our way silently through the trees.