Twenty-One

But she was. When I awoke, I could tell that some time had passed. I was shivering and the sun was setting, so the light didn’t hurt my eyes quite so much. The infant had rolled away from me, and I saw her little form in the corner of the wagon, so close to falling away forever. She was tiny, and her little lips were blue from the cold, despite the warm blanket still wrapped firmly around her. Her arms were up and her hands wrapped around her own cheeks. And despite myself, I suddenly felt an intense fear that she was dead.

I tried to sit up, but again, my weakness overwhelmed me. I bit my lips until I tasted blood to prevent myself from blacking out again. An intense throbbing pulsed through me, emanating from the sensitive place between my legs, and I felt a warm trickle of fluid seep from me as I rolled over onto my side. I scooted to her, dragging myself with my arms, trying not to put weight on my sore stomach, unable to do much more than this. When I finally got to her, I reached out and touched her, and she opened her eyes and looked at me. She let out a small, breathless wail, her one way of telling me that she was cold and she needed me. I realized she must’ve been doing this for hours as I slept, uncaring and unfeeling, mere feet away from her. The thick wall of ice that I’d built up around my heart came crashing down.

I saw nothing of Chan’s monstrous features in her tiny face. She was all mine.

With a moan of regret, of guilt that would never cease engulfing me for the rest of my life, I reached out to her and brought her to my chest. I pulled us both across the hard floor of the wagon and propped myself up under the tarp, pulled the straps of my gown away and pressed her cold little body to my own, skin to skin. I prayed that it wasn’t too late for her to bond with me and know me as her mother. As I looked around, my view limited by the wrap-around tarp to the caravan directly behind me, I realized I was truly all she had in the world. The soldiers had seen her rolling around in the wagon, yet none of them had stopped to warm her or try to revive me.

I held her closer, crying into her wispy black hair, so much like Forrest’s, somehow. Would I ever see him again? Probably not. I had no idea where they’d taken him, and no one would tell me. But I had little Mayla to think about now, too.

She needed me, too.

I kissed her head as she latched onto my breast, nuzzling close to my warmth. I wrapped the thin blanket, now crusty with blood and fluid from her delivery, around us, folding us into each other, and whispered my apologies to her. “I’m so sorry,” I said, kissing her over and over again, mourning my neglect of my beautiful daughter and the absence of my son. I’d failed them both. “I’m sorry, Maia, I’m so sorry.”

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

And if the old crone was right? If Agatha could truly see into the spirit world and her prophecy hinting that this little soul was my dear Mayla, come back to me now as a daughter, then how appropriate it was, how beautifully and tragically synchronized- beginning her new life hearing the word she’d died whispering.