Never Alone

Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

The screen above Aideen's head flickered and dark silhouettes of furniture began appearing. She smiled, finding it humorous that her brain was jumbling up her senses, but then she pressed herself back against her seat as if she was being sucked into her chair. She clung to the armrests, her chipped nails digging into the material. She was slipping, images from her home flying by across the screen like lights at the stops of a subway train. They seemed to appear and then stretch, distorting and blending into each other.

Suddenly we could hear a woman's voice. "Mom?" Aideen called out. The voice grew more intense, with an angry tone that had the potential to slice any child deep. Aideen thrashed in the chair, as if trying desperately to get back out of this place, but it was too late.

"I can't do it again," her mother's voice shouted. "It's for the best, Colleen." Aideen's thoughts seemed to swim in her head as the image on the screen changed quickly, like a painting with dripping wet paint. The swirls of color she had been seeing began to take shape.

"My sister," Aideen said as her hands held on tighter to the chair frame. In the hallucination we could see her older sister, Colleen, crying as she sat at the kitchen table speaking to their mother. Aideen reached for Colleen, but her sister and mother couldn't see her.

"We are barely making it now." Her mother's voice sounded choked in a way that made Aideen's chest jump with her own cries. She looked back and forth between their weeping figures.

"It would have killed me to let her go, Mam. It will surely kill her, too." Colleen's voice, like their mother's, lilted with a thick Irish accent. "Please, don't make her do it." A deep red blush crawled up Aideen's face. Her hand flew to her mouth as she began to understand the conversation she was hearing.

My own thoughts were racing and spinning, trying to lock down the story playing out before us. What were they arguing about? I looked away from the screen at Aideen, her entire body shaking now as she cried out softly, "No. It's not true. No, Mom, no." She shook her head roughly, as if the speed at which she denied the whole thing would influence the truth she didn't want to see.

Flashes of barely caught conversations in her house, overheard whispers, and the image of a drawer full of paperwork in a language I couldn't read hit the screen so quickly they hurt my eyes.

The image shifted and it was as if a magnet began to pull us into Colleen's form; Aideen's viewpoint slid across the kitchen floor as quickly as it materialized beneath her, until suddenly she was sitting at the kitchen table with her mother—only she wasn't herself. We were now watching the story from her sister's eyes.

Colleen whispered, "She's mine. She's always been mine." She hissed desperately from between her teeth, "I'll tell her the truth." In the background there was the sound of a key turning in a lock and a door opening in another part of the house.

"Stop!" real-life Aideen shouted. "Don't come in. It's not true!"

"You will do no such thing, Colleen. You may have given birth to her, but I've raised her. I watched you struggle with that every day of her life and I won't make that mistake again. She needs to give that baby to a family that will love it, away from us. You've seen what life our choice has given you!" Her mother's voice revealed a truth Aideen must never have been told. "If you love her, do better by her than I did for you."

We watched and waited, and there was an audible collective gasp from our group when a very pregnant Aideen entered the kitchen. She wore a red backpack.

A deep sadness filled the world around me. I was drowning in it. There in the R2L meeting room with us, Aideen's shoulder's drooped, her hands no longer gripping the armrests of her chair. Her body shook with sobs as she tried to slow everything down. She couldn't escape that wound—a primal, festering wound carved into her chest the day her mother had given her up. I couldn't believe she'd never figured it out before, and I folded my arms around my stomach and bent forward, the shock of it all making me sick. How would she ever go on? Her entire life was a lie and I wanted everything to stop right that minute. She needed a second to get herself together. We could all hear her wailing, hollow and pained. It was a sound in the distance and yet I felt it within my own chest.

The world on the screen grew bright with light. So bright I turned away from it, closing my eyes and tucking in my chin. I opened them again quickly, needing to know what was happening. We were all invested now. Her trauma was our trauma and I couldn't imagine many things as heartbreaking as discovering the woman you thought was your mother was not. To have a relationship as a sibling with the person who had given birth to you must have felt so misleading and unsettling. The bright light transitioned to a warm glow.

Aideen, in the virtual-reality world, looked around her. She was at a hospital, in a tiny room on the maternity floor set aside for adoptive families. A poster hung on the wall, reassuring adoptive parents that they could handle it all. Image after image of parents holding babies born there and left with new families filled large collages hung above the cheap plastic chairs. Aideen quickly looked down to her feet. "Those are hershoes," she said, her hand reaching up to her heart. She cried out again when she realized whose body she was occupying in the hallucination, the painful sound shrill and cutting. "I couldn't look at her face. I couldn't do it. I was so ashamed." Tears streamed down her face as we all sat helpless in our seats, wanting to make it stop but not knowing how. "I saw the shoes when she came to my bedside. What kind of mother can't look at the woman who was going to raise my baby? What kind of mother?" She asked again, her voice hoarse from the tears and choking anguish.

Aideen closed her eyes. The screen above her went dark. When she opened them again, we saw a beautiful baby. Her fingers, in the body of the adoptive mother, stroked its head as the new eyes of that tiny little soul looked up into hers. Aideen smiled in her seat, her breathing slowing and her fisted hand letting go of her shirt to hold her heart as if she felt so much love she was afraid it would burst through her chest. The baby's small hand wrapped around her finger and gave a small squeeze. She turned and saw an expression of pure joy on her partner's face. She brushed at the tears running down her cheeks, only this time it didn't seem like sadness that was making the tears fall. This woman was happy.

This woman, this angel must have sat for hours as Aideen labored in the room down the hall. She looked over her shoulders and we saw a tired and anguished Aideen lying in the hospital bed as the doctor finished stitching her up.

"You're a mother." Shima's voice sounded from the chair beside Aideen's. It wasn't a question, but a statement made from understanding.

On-screen, the woman in the cute brown flats approached Aideen's hospital bed to thank her again and again for the gift she was giving her. Over and over again, fiercely, she used the same words Shima had just spoken: "You're a mother." But Aideen never acknowledged them.

"I couldn't hear them through all the blame and remorse. I couldn't hear them," real-life Aideen answered our unspoken questions. She hadn't heard them then, but she heard them now.

Once more the world on the screen shifted, the colors blending into each other. Aideen reached out to hold on to something or someone. She wanted to stay there and feel the contentment a little longer. Her hand stretched out before her and she clamped her eyes shut, trying to put the room back together in her mind.

Her eyes flew open and she was in her hospital bed, in her own body this time. She looked down to the small baby in her arms. She snuggled her close, breathing in her scent and feeling the softness of her new skin against her cheek. We could sense she didn't have much time. This crazy world inside her head moved too quickly. It shifted from one perspective to another in the blink of an eye. Aideen seemed to push out every other distraction and soaked up the feeling of holding her daughter. This must be the first time she'd seen her face.

"That night I knew that seeing you would only make it that much harder to let you go. I regretted it immediately." She was speaking softly, not paying any attention to the fact that we were still watching this experience on the screen. She spoke to the baby in her arms—her baby, the way any loving mother would.

Flashes of baby pictures and small items on a table lit up the screen. Tiny fingers on her skin and glances at a sleeping baby in a dark hospital room.

Her lips pressed a soft kiss to her daughter's forehead and she whispered, "I'll love you forever," as the world began to slip again. Her arms were empty, but I imagined her heart was full. She tipped her head back with her eyes closed and opened her arms wide, letting the medication pull her away.

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