Magpie Tales#82

Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor uses another picture (below) for our starting point this week - Andrew Wyeth's "The Revenant" (1949)

Aftermath

   Time was they were called 'push-chairs'; modern marketing has them as 'strollers.' My sister's had been mine, handed on after years stowed in Dad's garage. I was eight years older than Julia and I earned pocket money cleaning it and then I was the one who insisted on pushing her on family walks or to Gran's or the shops with Mum when I wasn't at school and I wanted to tell everyone we saw that this was my little sister. When she grew out of it I think it went to charity. 

   This before the bad time, when Julia lost her pregnancy at three months and Zack and I separated, since when the stroller has haunted me, though it hasn't been so bad since Julia and I were reconciled. I mean, the dreams are not as frequent, and mostly only when I'm under the weather or it's my period.

   They begin with my bedroom door opening. I'll be awake enough to want not to dream, but I know the dream will happen anyway, and I hear myself or some disembodied voice saying "Who? Who?" I see the stroller coming in. First the single front wheel, then the seat part, the rear wheels, the push handle. The rain canopy is up, the occupant screened. My dreaming mind always hopes someone will be pushing it. No one ever is. The stroller trundles to the end of my bed and turns itself to me.  The duvet is unyielding. I cannot pull it up to screen myself. The dream will not let me not see.

   If it's Julia it's not so bad and I feel the relief even though she is tiny, like a two year old. She says nothing but holds out her adult baby hands as though imploring me not to hit her and doesn't hear me cry out that I won't ever again, hit you, hit you, ever again love, only come home. Come home, Joo.

   If it's Zack he glowers and hauls himself out of the seat and stands at the end of my bed and it would be funny if I wasn't dreaming to see a three foot tall husband carrying a toy panda called Sydney shouting how I'd enjoy having my lezza sister tucked up in there with me, wouldn't I; funny until he gets up onto the bed in his yellow babygro and tries to hold and kiss me.

   But mostly its the foetus, the homunculus that Julia conceived with Zack, that her womb shed too soon for him to live. My sister's blood stains the shawl the dream has dressed him in and his small skull lolls and his perfect hands flex and curl and the half formed lips form something that looks like Lu-cy, and then my own tears save me and I wake. Except sometimes I only dream I've woken, and the stroller is still there, empty and accusing and I shriek.

   Is all this because I blame myself? When I saw that I had married a child - oh yes, what Zack really wanted was a Mother he could get to sleep with - was it my aloofness that drove him to Julia? Was it her generous nature, nurtured by the loving Big Sister who pushed her stroller, that accepted him?

   Or that I might have become aunt to my sister's child by my husband, had not horror intervened? And now - is it that my ghosts are unquiet and will ever haunt the tormented part of me that was glad her baby died?