THE BURDEN OF LOVE by James Price

A desperate single mother considers the unthinkable.

The magazine had been a mistake. An impulse purchase that was better suited for a silly young girl than a woman in Marian’s situation. Maybe it was something about the cover that appealed to her. A beautiful bride looking coyly at the reader, one hand outstretched like she had conjured the stars that floated around her. As if everything could be changed with the wave of a hand. It would have been better as a mere flight of fancy, if she didn’t already know exactly what it would take to free her from her unending drudgery.

It wouldn’t be so difficult.

Ruby was in the cramped dining room adjacent to the kitchen, where Marian could keep an eye on her while she cleaned up after breakfast. She had tried to get her to sit at the kitchen table again, but it hadn’t gone well. Her daughter still wanted to sit at the little white table Frank had made for her, even though she had outgrown it years ago. After the struggle of bathing and dressing her this morning, Marian didn’t have the energy to fight her over yet another little thing. In the end, she had simply propped her up against the far wall, then placed the table over her ruined legs.

For her part, Ruby seemed perfectly happy there. Today she had decided to have a tea party, as if that were normal for a fourteen year old girl. Grinning widely, she poured an imaginary cup of tea and placed it on the other end of the table. The chair on that side was empty, without even a doll to simulate having a friend. Just another thing she had failed to do.

“Why don’t I get one of your dolls so you can have somebody to serve tea to?”

She tried to keep her voice light and upbeat, but Ruby only frowned.

“No, that’s Daddy’s seat.”

Not this again.

“We’ve talked about this, Ruby. Your daddy is dead. He died seven years ago.”

“It’s still his seat,” the girl insisted. “He’s still there.”

There wasn’t enough of your father left for the Navy to bother shipping his body back from the Pacific, she thought irritably, but she didn’t feel like starting up this old argument again. She didn’t feel like doing much of anything these days. What was the point? The doctors said Ruby would always mentally be a child, and that there was no way to reverse the polio that had rendered her unable to walk on her own. Marian had spent too much of her widow’s pension on doctors, only to be told the same thing every time.

Sometimes she saw herself as an old woman, having wasted her entire life on a daughter who would never understand how much she had sacrificed for her. A daughter who she would one day be too frail to care for. Ruby would probably end up a ward of the state, locked up in an institution somewhere. Lobotomized. Marian had seen what those places were like. The point wasn’t to make you happy or sane, but to render you docile and easy to manage. A part of her wondered if it would be a mercy to spare her daughter from such a fate, even when she knew it might be decades before it ever happened.

She rose from the kitchen table and opened the high cabinet, where there was still an old bottle of rat poison left over from an infestation a few years ago. It hadn’t been the first time she’d gone looking for it, but it was always in a passive, wistful way that made her feel guilty all the same. Maybe she’d take it down to look at today, just to see how much was left.

“Are you gonna make us some real tea, Mommy?” Ruby called from the other room. “For Daddy and me?”

It wouldn’t be so difficult. The girl wouldn’t question anything she gave her to drink, and tea was already bitter enough to disguise the taste. The girl. It was easier when she thought of Ruby as the girl and not her own daughter.

“L—let me see if I have any tea in here,” said Marian. “I’ll make you some.”

The bottle was on the top shelf, so she had to commandeer a kitchen chair to reach it. The glass felt cold in her hand as she plucked it off the shelf, as if the chill of death had already half escaped from it. She ought to have been the better woman and put it back and closed the cabinet. But then, a better woman would have thrown out the bottle the moment the temptation first struck. Instead, she set the bottle on the kitchen counter, then rummaged around in the other cabinets for some tea. It wasn’t something she drank very often, but she thought she probably had a box of tea bags somewhere. These days, the pantry was mostly stocked with instant or pre-made food. It was too exhausting to make meals from scratch with everything else she had to do, and Ruby didn’t notice the difference.

“Thank you, Mommy.”

Marian froze.

For years, she had tried to get Ruby to say please and thank you without prompting, but the girl had always seemed to forget. That she would remember it now unnerved her. It was as if she knew something was amiss.

“You’re—you’re welcome,” said Marian, not turning around. She didn’t want to see the look of dumb pleasure on her daughter’s face. Or the shrewder look that she irrationally feared had replaced it. Ruby couldn’t know. It simply was impossible. And yet.

She must just be tired. That was the only way she would have such an utterly insane thought. Ruby loved her father with the fervency that only someone who had been gone for years could ever hope to inspire. How could a flesh and blood mother compete with the simulacrum Ruby’s imagination had formed? It was absurd, being jealous of a phantom, but she felt it all the same.

—

There was a half-empty box of teabags stuffed behind some cans of creamed corn. She didn’t even remember buying them, but they had to have been back there at least a few years. Instant would have been better, but she’d take what she could get.

Ruby giggled, laughing at something known only to her. It struck Marian as strangely conspiratorial, as if she wasn’t supposed to hear. She put the box of tea on the countertop next to the stove and was about to fill the old copper kettle when she realized that something wasn’t quite right. The bottle wasn’t on the counter, or anywhere in sight, but she knew where she had laid it down. In her mind’s eye, she could see it casting a shadow on the green laminate. And yet, her mind imagined all sorts of things just as vividly. The beautiful house, the new husband with his neatly pressed suit and slicked back hair, the happy children who would one day grow up as Ruby never would. Maybe she hadn’t actually gotten it out after all.

Opening up the cabinet again, she stood on tiptoe and looked for the bottle. Nothing was there. Taking a chair from the kitchen table again, she stood on it and peered into the cabinet. From this angle, she could see the thin covering of dust that covered the top shelf, but no bottle. Instead, there was a faint indentation in the dust where the bottle had once been.

“What are you looking for, Mommy?” asked Ruby. “There’s the tea.”

“Sugar,” said Marian reflexively. “The bowl is empty.”

“But sugar doesn’t come in a bottle.”

She knows. I don’t know how, but she knows!

“Wh—who said anything about a bottle?” she asked with a nervous chuckle.

“Daddy did.”

“No. He didn’t say anything because he’s dead. Even you know that. Now just be quiet. Let me think.”

From her vantage point on the chair, she could see every bit of housework she had failed to do, from the dusty top of the bookcase to the floor that hadn’t been mopped in months. And there was Ruby, who had turned back to face the empty chair like someone was actually there. The only thing missing was what she had been looking for in the first place. The bottle.

Ruby giggled, a furtive, half-stifled sound that made her skin crawl.

She hadn’t lost her mind. Never. It had always been there, whole and perfectly, perfectly normal. There had been a misunderstanding, that was all. Hadn’t she been released after a week? They wouldn’t do that for an insane person, would they? The other women there screamed at all hours and banged their heads against the padded walls of their rooms. Marian had been quiet and polite and patient, even when she felt like screaming too. And in the end, she had been released, a model of sanity.

“Are you gonna make tea?” asked Ruby.

“No, not yet. I have to find something first.”

“But you said you would!”

“Later. I’ll make it later. Just pretend you have tea like you did before.”

Ruby’s eyes began to glisten. A tantrum was on the way. Good. It would remind her of everything she could be free of if she had the courage to finally take action. The girl (yes, that was the right thing to call her) screwed up her face and began to wail, but her mother paid her no mind. The neighbors were at work at this hour and couldn’t complain. Meanwhile, Marian would methodically search the house until she found what she needed.

Room by room she went, searching every logical place she could think of and many that made no logical sense at all. She thought her daughter’s wailing might distract her from her mission, but she found that she barely heard it. The kitchen. The dining room. The cramped little downstairs parlor where the two of them now slept. It wasn’t downstairs. She stood in the vestibule at the front of the house, looking up at the narrow stairs with their gauntlet of family photographs on each side of them. A strange reluctance suddenly took hold of her as she thought of all those eyes watching her ascend. His eyes, preserved here when the originals had long rotted away. He saw her. He knew what she planned to do.

No. He didn’t see anything. She wasn’t crazy, damn it. If she gave into that kind of thinking, she may as well check herself into a padded room for good. Maybe they’d put Ruby in there too. Mother and daughter, trapped together once more. And Daddy makes three.

How many times had she passed up and down those stairs? Each photograph, each face was as familiar to her as her own skin. Some of them she only knew through these fragile images. Most were of people she had once known and loved. But far too many were of him. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead as she made her way up the stairs. All eyes were on her. Their disapproval felt as tangible as a shroud. The sun shone brightly through the screen door, throwing her shadow ahead of her like a herald announcing her arrival. Other shadows stirred at the edge of her vision, but she didn’t dare look at them.

Something grasped at her, cold and clammy as a fish. Tearing herself from its grip, she rushed up the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. Whatever had grabbed at her, she didn’t want to see it. It was her mind that was broken, her mind that had started manifesting these horrors. Everything could have been imagined. Maybe there was no bottle after all. It would be better that way. But Ruby had mentioned a bottle. Had she imagined that conversation too?

It wasn’t until she reached the master bedroom that she realized that Ruby had gone silent. Even now, she felt the need to go downstairs to check on her. Foolish as that might be. She wasn’t a bad mother, was she? Hadn’t she done everything she could for fourteen long years? Maybe she really ought to be locked up after all. It was what she deserved for her selfishness. Her eye caught her own reflection in the vanity mirror. She looked fatigued and somewhat sallow. There was, however, something else in the mirror behind her; something that made her gasp in both relief and horror. She turned towards the night stand. There was the bottle, perched on the paperback she’d left up here months ago. For a moment, all she could do was stare at it in confusion. She hadn’t put it there. There was no doubt of that. She hadn’t been up here in days.

Daddy did–

No. She wouldn’t believe it, exhausted as she was. There was an explanation, if she could just sit down in silence long enough to think of it. Silence. That was what she needed. Silence, and rest. She picked up the bottle and opened it. It was a little over half full. Plenty for Ruby. Plenty for both of them, in fact. They could have a tea party, just as Ruby wanted. After all, how could she possibly escape after such a heinous crime? Even if the law didn’t catch her, her own madness would never let her rest.

The air grew colder. Marian’s flesh prickled, her faded summer dress no protection against the unnatural chill. A figure stood in the doorway, barely visible at first, and then slowly taking form as it moved into the room. A man’s form, broad shouldered and with the straight-backed posture of a sailor.

“Frank?”

The figure gave no sign of acknowledgement, but moved forward with a slow but unrelenting pace.

“Frank, please—”

Marian scrambled backward, striking the back of her leg against something with enough force that she lost her balance and fell backwards, hitting the wall with a cry of pain. The bedroom seemed both horribly small and hopelessly vast all at once. She tried to get up and make a run for the door, but it was as if her body no longer obeyed her. His face was visible now as he knelt down before her, pale as a death mask and filled with inexpressible sadness.

“Please,” she said, “you don’t know how it’s been—what it’s like to do this all alone.”

He reached out a ravaged hand and stroked her cheek with a touch as cold as winter.

“Get some rest,” he said gently. “I know you’re tired.”

Her vision blurred and then went dark.

—

Ruby sat at the little white table, trying to be good and quiet while she waited for Mommy and Daddy to come back. Daddy said there was no need to cry because he and Mommy would be back soon, so she had tried not to. She wasn’t sure how long it had been, but she needed to go pee and didn’t know how much longer she could hold it in.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Ruby called out for them, even though she knew she was supposed to be quiet. She couldn’t help it. Another creak came after a moment, and then a third. The steps were slow and clumsy, like how she used to walk back when her legs worked. She had to be good and quiet, just how Mommy wanted her to be. Sometimes she saw Mommy frown when she called for her, and so she tried not to say anything. She tried very hard, but sometimes she asked for things even when she knew it would make Mommy mad. It was so hard when she couldn’t get anything for herself. All she could do was ask.

The footsteps became steadier and a little more even. Daddy said he'd help her when he got back, once he put the tea things away. That didn't make any sense, though. He couldn’t do things like that anymore because he was dead. Mommy thought that meant you couldn’t come back, but even Mommy didn’t know everything. She hoped Mommy was using the stair railings as she came back down. If she slipped and fell, she might become a burden like Ruby was. She didn’t know what a burden was, but sometimes she heard Mommy call her that. She thought it might have something to do with your legs not working.

“Mommy?”

She couldn’t help herself. The word slipped out of her mouth before she remembered she had to be good. But Mommy was at the bottom of the stairs now. She looked different, but Ruby couldn’t say why. There was something about how she moved, an awkward stiffness, like how grandpa used to walk before he went away. Mommy’s face was slack, and her eyes were glassy like a doll’s. Ruby shrunk away from her without knowing why. With great effort, Mommy lowered herself onto the ground beside her. Ruby tried to pull away, but she was wedged tightly under the little table.

“I’m… so… sorry… Honey,” said Mommy, speaking each word as if she’d almost forgotten what they meant. “Shouldn't… have… left… you… alone…”

And then she smiled, a wistful smile just like Daddy’s was.