Mine, too. This stuff was so emotionally draining to write.My heart aches so bad right now for Michael & Maria.
Novy:
They'll definitely need each other, but I think it's safe to say Maria's going to pull away a little bit.I fear Maria's depression will make her pull away from Michael.
Claire:
Thank you. It's been a challenge to write, so I appreciate that.You've taken really difficult material and are writing it very effectively. It's dark yes, but it isn't overdone and so it works well.
Sundae:
This girl has gone through so much already in her young life. Michael and Maria have done a good job taking care of her, but bad things have managed to happen to her anyway.And Miley, I have no idea how she's feeling. Not only with the fact that she may be paralyzed, but how she's dealing with her sister's death.
Yes, the days of hoping that Alex can/will ever be redeemed are gone.And I hope that by the end of this fic, both Isabel and Alex go to jail and rot there. I rooted for Alex for so long in this fic, that he would come around, that he would make up for things, but now, he's shattered everything and I can't see a way out for him. Even if he got away with this crime, I hope the guilt makes him suffer to his soul.
lilah:
I have a new idea April. One that will allow you to keep expanding on your writing experiences and one that will keep me and so many others living in a happy Candy bubble. Do you remember the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books?? You got to a dilemma and you could choose how the story would progress. Here, I'll do an example
A black car is heading toward Michael and Maria's car! You can choose to 1. Have the car hit the family or 2. Swerve at the last second and the Guerin family is safe!
See now you can write both scenes....extra work but oh so rewarding!! lol
I loved those stories as a kid. At least you're keeping a sense of humor about all this. 
Thank you for the feedback!
In a side note: I have a job interview next week. Fingers crossed that something might actually come of it.
Part 90
Everyone was glad Maria had woken up, but everyone was worried about her, too. Tess really wanted to go see her best friend and talk to her, but Michael had come out of the room just long enough to tell them she needed some time before she saw anyone. A couple of hours passed, and they all just sat in the waiting room, weary, waiting for further instruction.
“Thanks, Dad,” Tess said when her father came back from the vending machine bearing salty goodness in the form of potato chips. He set them on her lap, and she opened the bag even though she wasn’t hungry. When he wasn’t looking, she passed the bag to Kyle, but he only ate a few.
“Well,” Sylvia said, breaking the silence, “it’s good that Maria’s awake. She and Michael can help each other through this better than we can.”
“It’s good,” Amy agreed, obviously impatiently awaiting sitting down at her daughter’s bedside. The minute Michael walked back into the waiting room, she sat up straighter and inquired, “How is she?”
Michael shook his head. “She’s not . . . she’s not doing so good.”
“What did you tell her?” his mother asked.
“Everything, except for Miley not being able to . . . you know.”
Tess sighed heavily, not surprised that Michael had taken it upon himself to take care of Maria like this. Kyle would have done the same for her.
“Can I go see her?” Amy asked.
“Uh . . . I don’t think she’s ready to see anyone else yet,” he answered slowly. “Sorry. You guys should go home for awhile, get some rest.
“Son, if anyone needs rest, it’s you,” his father pointed out.
“No, I’m alright,” he insisted. “Seriously, though, there’s nothing more you guys can do right now. Just take off, take a break from it all.
“But I wanna stay with you,” Sylvia protested.
“Mom, please . . .” He didn’t say it, but it seemed as though he were begging them to take care of themselves. Or maybe he was too exhausted to keep coming out here and telling them what was going on. Tess was willing to do whatever he wanted, even though she was concerned about Maria, too.
“He’s right, it’ll do us good,” Kyle agreed, rising to his feet. “You’re all welcome to stay with me and Tess if you want. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“I’ve got room at my place, too,” Marty offered.
“See? You can come back tomorrow,” Michael said, mainly to Sylvia and Amy, who still seemed reluctant to leave. “Maybe Maria will be up to seeing people by then.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
It was strange. The worse the pain got, the less Maria cried. It got to the point where crying took too much energy, and all she could do was sit there in her hospital bed, listening to the sounds of all the machines hooked up to her, imagining a life without Macy. Because that was what she was living now, a life without Macy. All her energy went towards imagining that.
It didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem possible.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Michael come back into the room. He looked exhausted, like he could collapse at any minute. He was trying to be strong, trying to take care of her, but his eyes were red and puffy, just like hers.
“I sent everyone home,” he said, “figured they could use a breather.”
She closed her eyes, trying to remember the last time she’d held Macy in her arms, the last time she’d seen her smile, the last thing she’d said to her. Why couldn’t she remember any of those things? It was all so important, and she couldn’t remember.
“They were all here, though,” Michael went on. “We’ve got a good family.”
Smaller family, she thought, touching her stomach with the arm that wasn’t encased in a cast. She’d gotten so big and round when she’d been pregnant with Macy, and she’d craved peanut butter. What would she have craved this time?
“Even your friend Lucinda stuck around for awhile,” Michael said, obviously hoping to get some sort of reaction out of her. “She seems nice.”
Maria opened her eyes again, wishing Miley would come running into the room with a big, goofy grin on her face. That would make her feel a little better. Just for a little while.
“I wanna go see her,” she said, her voice hoarse from crying.
He gave her a confused look. “What?”
“Miley.”
He reached down and touched her hair tenderly. “She’s sleeping.”
“I wanna go see her,” she repeated. Whether she was sleeping or not, she just needed to be close to the one child she had left.
It took some convincing, but Michael finally persuaded the nurses on duty to let Maria out of bed. They had to unhook her from all the machines and lift her into a wheelchair. She felt like she could walk, but when she tried to stand up, she felt a stabbing pain in her abdomen and the nurses told her to be careful because her stitches could tear. Screw stitches.
Miley slept as soundly in her hospital bed as she slept in her own bed at home. It was weird to see her lying on her back, though. She liked to sleep on her side, sometimes on her stomach. She had a few scrapes on her arms and face, and she was clutching her Hannah Montana Barbie doll tightly to her side. She looked like an angel.
“Was she scared?” Maria asked, reaching out to gently stroke the back of her hand. When Michael didn’t answer, she asked again. “Last night, was she scared?”
He stood behind her, resting one hand on her shoulder. “We both were,” he admitted. “She came through, though, called 911, just like we taught her.”
She frowned, disconcerted by the fact that her three year-old now had emergency phone call experience on her resume. It was a good thing that they’d taught her all about that, but she shouldn’t have ever had to use it. Ever. Or at least not when she was this young.
“Does she know about Macy?” she asked, wanting to be caught up on everything they’d discussed just so she knew what to say and what not to say to her.
“No,” Michael said. “I haven’t . . . I didn’t know how to tell her.”
“But we’ll have to.” They couldn’t keep it from her forever. Eventually she’d get curious and find out the truth. She already understood what death was; Michael had talked to her about it back when her grandmother had been battling cancer. Now she was going to get to live death, though.
Live death. That didn’t make much sense.
“Maria, I . . .” Michael trailed off and knelt down so that he was eye-level with her while she was in the wheelchair. He lifted her hand off of Miley’s and held it within his own. “There’s something else you should know.”
Her stomach clenched. This wasn’t good. She sensed that this wasn’t good.
“Miley’s not exactly out of the woods just yet.”
“What do you mean?” She couldn’t lose another child. It would kill her, too.
“She had a spinal injury,” he explained, his tone way too calm to accompany the words he was saying. “It was . . . pretty bad.”
“How bad?” She was no doctor by any means, but even she knew that spinal injuries could result in . . .
“She can’t feel her legs.”
That.
Maria looked back at Miley, staring at her legs beneath the blankets. They looked fine; they didn’t look deformed or amputated or anything. If they were there and they looked fine, why couldn’t she just feel them? Why did this have to happen, too, after everything else? “So . . . what, she’s, like, paralyzed or something?” She realized she sounded like a moron saying that, but she wasn’t going to believe it until she heard it.
“She’s alive,” Michael said. “That’s all that matters.”
“But she’s paralyzed.” That mattered, too, whether they wanted to admit it or not. “What if she never walks again? What if she never runs or dances? She loves to dance.” They’d been planning on getting her enrolled in a dance class, but if she couldn’t feel her legs, then she couldn’t move them, and if she couldn’t move them, then . . .
“She’ll dance again,” Michael promised. “We’ll do whatever we have to, seek out any specialist, pay for any surgery. She’s our daughter.”
“The only one we have left now,” she mumbled, feeling bad that she didn’t feel better that Miley was alive. But being alive like this . . . she knew paralyzed people could live happy, fulfilling lives, but she couldn’t help but feel like Miley’s life had been cut in half somehow.
“Where’s Macy?” she asked.
He just gave her a confused look.
“I wanna see her, too,” she said, determined. She wanted to look at her face again, even if she wasn’t looking back.
“Maria . . .” He shook his head and blinked back tears. “I don’t think you can.”
She knew what that meant. Either the doctors wouldn’t let them, or there was nothing left to see.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Yes, I finished examining your daughter’s . . . remains.” The coroner chose his words carefully, employing some of that bedside manner some doctors seemed to lack. “I thought it best to wait until your wife woke up to share my findings.”
Michael didn’t bother to correct him on the ‘wife’ thing, but that designation did lead Maria to look down at her left hand and notice for the first time that her engagement ring was gone. She whimpered and tried to peel back the cast.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll get a new one.” He rubbed her shoulder, trying to stay committed to the supportive boyfriend role, even though he felt like he could barely stand. “So what can you tell us?” he asked the coroner, hoping to get some solid answers.
“Well . . .” The coroner didn’t seem very eager to share his findings. “There wasn’t much to go on. Much of her, I mean.”
Michael fought the urge to throw up, and he could tell Maria was doing the same.
“This can’t be easy for a parent to hear,” the coroner said, “but you should be aware of it while you’re making funeral arrangements. She’s not . . . she’s just . . .”
“Bone,” Maria filled in.
“Yes.”
Michael tried to picture it, his beautiful, sweet, innocent little girl, reduced to only bone. He tried to picture it, and he immediately wished he hadn’t.
“She was burned beyond recognition,” the coroner went on. “What little comfort it may be, though, the incineration was not the cause of her death. My examination has led me to conclude that she died as a result of head trauma sustained from the accident itself. There were certain indentations on her skull consistent with that kind of death rather than . . . the other kind.”
Although the thought of her skull being indented was disgusting enough in itself, it was a hell of a lot better than the thought of her burning alive. “So she was . . . she was already dead by the time the car exploded?” Michael asked just to be certain he had it straight. “There was nothing I could’ve done to save her?”
“No,” the corner replied. “She likely died instantly and felt no pain.”
Michael breathed a sigh of relief. It was weird to be relieved over something like his daughter’s death, but the way she’d died . . . it was better. If there was such a thing as a better death, this was it. “Thank you,” he said, trying to dissolve the thoughts of her burning body from his mind. It was just a body. It wasn’t her. She’d already been gone. She’d already been gone for awhile.
“When you’re ready, there’s some paperwork I’ll need to go over with you,” the coroner said, backing out of the room as though he could sense they needed their time alone. “When you’re ready.”
Michael sat down on the side of her hospital bed, studying her face for some sort of reaction. But she looked just as disgusted as she had when they’d first started talking to the coroner.
“Well, that’s . . . that’s something,” he said. “At least we can be thankful for that.”
She looked at him as though he were crazy.
“Maria?”
“There’s nothing left of her,” she said. “What we bury won’t even look like her.”
“It doesn’t matter what we bury.”
“Of course it matters!” she cried. “She’s our daughter!”
“She’s not . . .” He trailed off, deciding it best to let it go. He’d had a bit more time to comprehend all of this than Maria had. When Maria had a little more time to think about it, she’d realize that what they put in the ground wasn’t really going to be Macy.
“Come on,” he said, standing back up. “You should get some sleep.” He bent down and hooked one arm around her waist, the other under her knees, trying to lift her up out of the wheelchair.
“I don’t wanna sleep,” she said, struggling against him. “I’ve been sleeping for twenty-four hours.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” He let go of her, content to let her do what she wanted right now. Besides, he was the last person to preach the importance of sleep, seeing as how he’d probably never get any again.
“I just wanna go back to Miley,” she said. “Please.”
He nodded, understanding. When they looked at Miley, they were looking at all that was left of their world.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Kyle rolled over in bed, wishing the brain had some kind of on/off switch. Like a light-switch. Something he could just flip when it was time to go to bed. He didn’t want to give that idea too much thought, though, because when he did, he started thinking about Macy’s on/off switch and how it was stuck in the off position forever.
“Tess?” he said, scanning the darkness of the bedroom for her. He didn’t feel her beside him, and there was no light coming from the bathroom. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, wondering what she’d have gotten up for. He climbed out of bed and headed downstairs, searching for her. “Tess?” Michael’s parents were asleep on the couch, so he tiptoed around in an effort to avoid waking them up. “Tess?” She definitely wasn’t there, so he went outside. Maybe she’d gone out there to clear her head.
When he stepped out on the porch, he looked over at Michael and Maria’s house and saw a light on upstairs. And since Michael and Maria obviously weren’t there, he had a feeling his missing wife was. He padded barefoot across both their front lawns and let himself inside. It felt . . . disturbing to be there. Because absolutely nothing was disturbed. It looked exactly the same as they’d left it when they’d gotten in the car the other night. Macy’s playpen was set up in the middle of the living room, and several of her toys were scattered about inside. It looked so empty without her, though. The entire house looked empty. Like a ghost house.
He went upstairs to Michael and Maria’s bedroom and found Tess there. She was sitting on the floor, looking at some items stashed under the bed. Toys.
“This is so sad,” she said without even glancing up at him. “They were hiding all sorts of birthday presents for Macy under their bed.” She held a purple pony in her hands, squeezing it gently. “She’ll never even get to turn a year old now.”
Kyle walked into the room, struck by the family picture on the nightstand. Michael, Maria, Miley, and Macy, back when she’d been only a few months old. They’d taken that picture outside on the front porch and sent it out in thank you notes for all the baby presents they’d received. He remembered because he’d been the one to take it.
“I haven’t even been able to go in the nursery yet,” Tess admitted as though that were something she should have already done.
“So don’t,” he suggested simply, sitting down beside her. Being around Macy’s things when there was no Macy anymore had to be a form of torture.
Tess set the pony back down in a sack and pushed the sack back underneath the bed. “I know it’s been a day already, but I still can’t wrap my mind around it,” she said, suddenly breaking down. “She’s gone. She’s really gone.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him, holding her as she cried all the tears she’d held in while at the hospital. He looked all around the room, not sure how Michael and Maria were going to manage to come back here and go on. But then again, they didn’t have much of a choice. They were still here, even though Macy wasn’t.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Her face. Her smile. Her laughter. The way she sometimes crawled around like a seal, dragging her back legs behind her because she didn’t feel like picking them up.
Michael jolted awake, shocked that he’d even fallen asleep. It took him a minute to realize the dream had been just that, a dream. He felt that sinking, depressed feeling a person always felt when they realized the dream would never come true.
He looked around, feeling a bit disoriented. He recognized Miley’s hospital room. She was still asleep, and the doctors had agreed to move Maria’s bed in there, too. She wasn’t sleeping.
“Hey,” he said, sitting up in the uncomfortable chair he’d just called a bed.
She took her eyes off Miley only long enough to ask, “What did you dream about?”
He didn’t want to tell her he’d been dreaming about Macy, so he shrugged and lied, “I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do.”
He sighed, supposing it wasn’t going to hurt any less if they didn’t talk about her. “Did you dream about her, too?” he asked, slowly standing up. His entire body ached, not because of the accident, but because of everything since.
“I didn’t sleep,” she informed him.
“Yeah, I didn’t think I would, but eventually your body catches up to you. You will.” He stood next to her hospital bed, wishing there was something more he could do, something more he could say.
She turned her head to gaze at Miley again and mumbled, “I kinda wish I’d never woken up.”
He frowned, not sure what she meant by that. Was she saying she would have rather died or . . . because that wasn’t an option. Although he understood the desire at that point. “I’m glad you did,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “It was hard, trying to deal with everything by myself.”
She grunted. “Don’t know how much help I’ll be.”
“No, it helps just being able to talk to you,” he assured her, “hearing you talk back. And you’ll feel a little better when you can talk to Miley.”
“I will?” She didn’t seem to believe that. “I’ll feel a little better once they catch the son of a bitch who did this.”
Michael nodded in agreement. “The detective said they’ll let us know right away if they do. If they do.” He rolled his eyes, fed up with how long the investigation was taking and how it was going nowhere. He wasn’t about to tell Maria Detective Rawley had wasted a whole lot of time already by investigating him, though. That would just stress her out even more, and she already had enough stress to deal with. They both did.
He sat beside her, staring down at her stomach, wondering if it was even appropriate to broach the one subject they hadn’t deal with at all, and against his better judgment, he straight-forwardly asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”
She looked up at him with something that seemed like regret in her eyes. Or maybe even shame. But before she could answer, there was a quick knock on their hospital door and Detective Rawley came into the room.
“Ms. DeLuca, it’s so good to see you awake,” he said, extending his hand for a shake. “I’m Detective Rawley.”
She didn’t bother to shake his hand, just studied him skeptically instead.
“He’s leading the . . . investigation,” Michael said, using that term loosely.
“Did you find the person who did this?” Maria demanded sharply.
The detective sighed. “No, not yet.”
“Then why aren’t you out there looking right now?”
“Well, I need to hear your account of what happened,” the detective explained, “just to see if we can generate any new leads.”
Michael rolled his eyes again. He probably just wanted to corroborate the existing account and rule Michael out as a suspect completely. Idiot.
“Fine,” she said impatiently. “What do you wanna know?”
But before they could get the questioning underway, Michael looked down and saw an alarming trail of blood between Maria’s legs, soaking into the sheets. “Maria . . .”
When she saw the same thing, her eyes widened in horror.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“I don’t get it. I thought she already lost the baby.”
Lost the baby, Maria thought, rolling the words around in her mind. Why did people keep saying it like that, lost the baby? It wasn’t like her car keys or her wallet, something that she’d just misplaced and might never find again; it was something that was taken from her. She hadn’t lost anything.
Her doctor, Dr. Port or whatever his name was, checked the ultrasound monitor, running the transducer all over her stomach. “She did, in the car crash.”
“So what the hell was this?” Michael asked angrily. He was the one asking all the questions, the one trying to make sure they got some answers. She didn’t need answers. Not really. Even though she didn’t know all there was to know about the human body and how it functioned, she knew enough to know exactly what had just happened. The abdominal pain she’d been feeling for awhile now had subsided, replaced by the dull ache of having a six-inch incision on her stomach, and she knew Dr. Port was using the ultrasound to check and make sure there was nothing left.
Nothing.
“I guess you could think of it as the end of the miscarriage,” the doctor explained, turning off the ultrasound screen once he’d had a good look. He wiped the gel off her stomach, trying his best not to look her in the eye. “It started the other night when the fetus technically died, but it wasn’t expelled until now. That’s what this was today, the expulsion from the body.”
Maria shivered. It all sounded so cold and technical. The fetus. The expulsion. The body.
“It’s difficult to deal with,” the doctor said, finally managing to look her in the eye. He looked genuinely sympathetic, even though he probably dealt with this kind of thing all the time. “There’s some literature I can recommend to help get you through it.”
Maria made a face. Literature? Two of her babies had just died, and he was recommending literature? She didn’t want to read anything; she didn’t want to do anything. She just wanted to go back to Miley’s room and wait for her to wake up, wait for the doctor to come in and run some tests to see if she could feel her legs again.
“You may feel some slight discomfort for the next few days, and we’ll keep monitoring you closely, but the worst is over now,” the doctor assured her.
Or it’s just beginning, she pondered. Sure, everything was cold and technical here in the hospital, but once they got home, nothing would be that way, and then it might be even harder to manage.
“So why exactly did she miscarry in the first place?” Michael asked.
She shifted uncomfortably, not because of the fleeing stomach pain but because of the way everything was being worded here. She hadn’t miscarried; the miscarriage had happened to her.
“Well, the risk is always highest during these first few months,” the doctor explained calmly. “Normally a car crash wouldn’t cause a miscarriage because the fetus is so well-protected by the amniotic sac and the amniotic fluid within that sac.”
“So why wasn’t he?” Maria finally jumped in, quickly correcting herself. “It.” She wasn’t sure if it would’ve been a boy or not, but she knew Michael would’ve loved a son.
“Well, you see, when you’re pregnant, your body already acts as a parent to the fetus, giving it all the resources it needs to grow big and strong,” the doctor said. “Nourishment, protection, development. But during the accident, you lost a significant amount of blood and in turn lost consciousness. When you showed up here at the hospital, the paramedics told us your heart had even stopped beating for a few seconds. You were effectively cut off from life, and because you were, so was your unborn child. It couldn’t access the resources it needed, and your body couldn’t sustain it when it was so busy trying to sustain you. That’s why you miscarried.”
“So . . .” She hesitated, trying to make sense of it. “So it’s my fault?”
“No,” he assured her quickly. “No, not at all. It was nothing you did wrong and nothing anyone here could have done better. Your injuries were just too severe. Even if you’d gotten here sooner, we’d likely still be having this same conversation.”
She didn’t believe that. There was always something she could have done better. Maybe if she and Michael had gotten married sooner, or maybe if she’d told him about the baby right when she’d found out . . . maybe something would’ve been different. Somehow.
“I’ll give you two some time,” Dr. Port said, quietly exiting the room.
Once she was alone with Michael, Maria sat up straighter, staring down at the space between her legs. There was no blood now. They’d cleaned her all up, changed all the sheets on her bed. But she still felt like she could see it. “So this was gonna happen no matter what?” she said, still reluctant to believe that. Nothing was inevitable and nothing was set in stone. They made choices that had ultimately led them to this, to all of this.
Before Michael could try to say something comforting, even though nothing could comfort her, they had more visitors. It was Tess and Kyle and Marty this time. Her mom and Michael’s parents had already come to visit her earlier that morning while Michael had been asleep. They all kept talking to her, and she didn’t know what to say to any of them.
“Hey,” Tess said, attempting to smile. “How are you?”
Why did everyone keep asking her that? Didn’t they realize there was no good answer to that question? “I miscarried,” she blurted, surprised by her inability to cry about it anymore.
“That’s what we heard,” Kyle said. “I’m so sorry.”
“No. Just now,” she said. “It was just now.”
They both looked at Michael. Maybe she wasn’t making sense to them. He looked too exhausted to explain it, though, so he just sat down in the bedside chair and rubbed his forehead, probably trying to stay strong for her. He wasn’t crying, either, but his eyes were watery a lot.
Maria did a mental search of her body, trying to locate any one emotion in that moment, but there were too many, and they were all blending together in a way that didn’t make sense. “I can’t feel . . . anything,” she said, because she was feeling everything all at once.
TBC . . .
-April
when you see it. Honestly, there are parts of this story that I don't think I could've written if I hadn't had that song playing in the background.