After Forever Ends - Ramone Melodie (бесплатные книги полный формат TXT) 📗
I began to read all of his Early Childhood Development texts instead of studying my own.
I hadn’t said anything to Oliver, but I was beginning to wonder why we hadn’t baked any muffins yet. We’d been married for over four years without a single discussion about or use of any kind of birth control. It wasn’t as if we adhered to the rhythm method and we certainly spent a good amount of time playing at the stove. Let’s face it, in a house without electricity once the sun goes down there isn’t a whole lot else to do. I knew that a few of my classmates had had babies. Sandra was one of them, now living outside of Belfast with her husband and new son. She’d gotten married only the year before and had been pregnant before she said bang. I’d called and congratulated her after she sent me the photos of her child who looked, to be honest, sadly a bit like a small Bill Clinton. That set aside, I told her how lucky she was.
“Thank you, Sil! He’s magnificent! When are you and Oliver going to have one?”
“Oh,” I answered casually, “We’re going to finish school first, you know. We haven’t really thought very much about it.”
“Well, it hurts like hell,” She told me, “So you may as well wait.”
“I don’t envy that,” I told her with a forced laugh, but the truth be told, I was stone cold jealous. I had a head start on her in the baby department, after all. I wanted to know that there was life brewing in my womb. I wanted to feel a baby grow and move inside of me. Why Sandra? Why not me?
I was only twenty-two the year her son was born. I kept telling myself to stay calm. I was young! There was plenty of time to have loads of babies. But after I got my next period spot on time, I went to the doctor to discuss my apparent infertility. He told me he could run a few tests and that would tell him more, but I appeared perfectly normal and healthy. It might not be me at all, he said, perhaps Oliver had a low sperm count or maybe he was even sterile. Or it might be nothing at all and I just had to let nature do what it needed to do.
Nature doing what it needed to do was one thing, but the thought of Oliver being sterile seemed impossible. Oliver? I couldn’t imagine it. He was so capable, brimming with excitement and life all the time. Oliver was gentle and so full of love…he would be an excellent father…how could he not be able to make muffins? Nature might do its thing, but nature doing that to him would just wrong.
When my tests came back normal, I knew two things. I knew that I wanted muffins very badly and that there was no way I was going to mention anything about it to Oliver. Oliver was working himself weary between his job and his education. He had enough on his plate. If I told him I wanted a baby, he would do anything to give me one. He always gave me everything I wanted. If he found out he couldn’t, it would crush him. It would be the first time in his mind that he had failed at anything. He was under enough stress. I knew he couldn’t take it, not right then. And even if we managed to make a muffin, I wondered if having one would be enough alone to set him over the edge.
He never said much about our financial situation, but it was taking its toll on him. Oliver had grown up with money around him. He’d never wanted for much. After we’d gotten married, his parents had asked us to live with them and when we’d refused, they had repeatedly offered to help us. He absolutely would not let them. The day he allowed his dad to pay the taxes on the land for us, he swore it would never happen again.
“It’s not that much, Son,” Ed seemed a bit offended that Oliver didn’t understand he was happy to do it. “You can’t do everything on your own all the time.”
“Like hell I can’t!” Ollie insisted, “This is a onetime thing, Dad!”
Still, I knew being broke didn’t suit him. He hated every second of it. Oliver was used to getting up and going where he wanted and doing what he liked when he had the urge. I knew he felt stuck and he despised that feeling. Still, because of it, he channelled all of his focus on university so that he could get a degree as quickly as possible. Once he had that, he would work his way into a position where he had the two things he wanted most; freedom from owing anybody anything and money he had earned himself to prove that he never needed anything from anybody in the first place.
A baby could really put a damper on those kinds of plans, if not cause a complete derail. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea at all. I would never have wanted to do anything to make him unhappy. His smile and the sound of his laughter were what I lived for.
It struck me that I had never seen Oliver sad. Not once, not really. I wouldn’t do a thing to change that. Our situation was fine, I resolved. If nature decided it was going to be just him and me alone forever, I would be satisfied with that. My goodness, Oliver was enough on his own! Sometimes just being in the same room with him made me so cheerful I thought I could fly. After all the time we’d known each other the passion we shared had never waned. If anything, it had intensified. I wasn’t even sure that I could love a baby more than I loved him. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair to bring a child into our lives and have it be a third wheel. I had to consider that as well before I forced the issue and the poor little creature suffered because its mother couldn’t love it enough to see it past its father. And what if I couldn’t? What if I was a horrible mother and Oliver was a wonderful father? I was not threatened about him loving our child more than me, that muffin deserved for him to, but what if he loved me less for not being the parent I should have been? What if a muffin ruined it all?
Now, I knew I was just being daft. I knew I could and would love our muffin with all of my soul. How couldn’t I? Look at the recipe; a bit of me, a bit of Oliver, bake it in the oven and out comes a living, walking, talking, thinking and breathing creature that we had made together. How could I look at that little being and not realise it was muffin magic?
Magic. We had so much in our lives, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to see what we could make together? Magic was everywhere.
I found myself thinking often of the Lord and the Lady and their many boons. I was happy for them. For some reason, they were becoming more and more real in my mind and more and more present in my everyday life. I decided if I were hearing them, and I was quite certain I was not mad, that they had to be real. And even if they weren’t, I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
One day I took a plate of Turkish Delights out to the Faerie Circle and placed it in the centre, “I don’t know how much to give you or what you like, but I love these things, personally, and Oliver hates them. I think it would be selfish to eat them all myself, so I brought you about ten. If you fancy them, please enjoy them. I can bring more. If you don’t fancy them, I’m sorry. Please just leave them and I’ll bring you something else. Do you fancy Snickers? I know Oliver brings you Snickers, but I don’t want to if you’d prefer something else.”
Feeling a little foolish, I stepped backward away from the circle, “Congratulations on your newest little boon. I’ve been hearing you chatter. You sound so happy. Maybe someday Oliver and I will have a family together. I hope to. I’d really like that. I really would. But for now I suppose I’ll just be happy for you. Good bye.”
I picked some rosemary from the garden to use for our supper and poured some more birdseed into the feeder before I headed into the house. When I got in, I straightened up our tiny living room and went into the kitchen to cut some vegetables. I was chopping my heart out when I suddenly froze. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something appear on the countertop. Chills ran up and down my spine. “Did that really just happen?” I asked myself. Perhaps it had been there all along. But, no. I knew it had not been there when I had come in the room because I had taken the knife I was using right out of the drawer below where it now sat. I turned slowly toward it and I actually screamed.
