Molly's Heart

For Mom

__________________________________________________

“You’re still everywhere…”

She wandered through the house, touching photos, adjusting knickknacks; solemnly cataloging a lifetime of memories, stories, and love. It was the love that once filled their home she missed most of all.

The love that began so long ago, at a party on a distant day: the day they first met. ‘Memorial Day,’ she’d always insisted, while her husband chuckled lightly as he corrected, ‘No Molly, it was on the Fourth of July.’ They would then bicker back and forth for some time until he finally conceded, laughingly, that she was right: ‘it was the Fourth of July!’ Even in their arguments, there was love.

There was love between them the day she revealed they were (at last!) expecting their first child. ‘Molly!’ he cried, gaping at the origami stork she presented to him in the palm of her hand. ‘Does this mean…?!’ ‘Yes, Lou, yes!’ she giggled before leaping into his arms. They laughed and laughed, drunk from joy, for what felt like days.

Molly found it amusing, looking back on those days, how they ended up repeating this ritual for their three other children; how after each and every labor, he’d kiss her forehead and tell her she was beautiful.

He told her that often - ‘You are so beautiful,’ - even when she knew she wasn’t.

When her eyes were wet and red from all the tears of pain; when her face was rough and wrinkled, her lips drawn down into a hateful scowl. When she shrieked like a Harpy, during her many (many!) arguments with their sons; when her eyes became hollow and her skin so pale as she was rushed into emergency surgery; when her wrinkled hands still shook slightly following the surgery’s success.

‘You’re so beautiful, Molly. So beautiful…’

Suddenly she blinked and found herself before the bathroom mirror - her gray hair a scraggly nest on top of her head, her dark eyes lined with heavy bags. No, she was not beautiful - Louis wasn’t there to remind her she was.

“Besides, I don’t care,” Molly sighed to her reflection. “Grief makes ghouls of us all.”

It was a fact she was well acquainted with: after she and her sister lost their parents, and then after her sister lost her own sweet Gia…

Molly stepped back from the mirror and again considered her features. Though notoriously dissimilar from her sister’s, there was a look about her that was still somehow familiar. A pitifully empty look. One that Molly now understood only too well, because Lou was not with her to help chase away the memories.

Stealing herself away from the mirror, Molly at last wandered into the living room and slumped into her chair by the fireplace. She watched the clock in the corner of the room, patiently counting down the minutes until this day - this anniversary - would end. Waiting patiently for her youngest to arrive as he’d promised on the phone, and keep her from her grief.

“Because you’re the ghost now, Lou,” she muttered bitterly, as she stared at his portrait on the wall. “You’re the ghost now because you’re still everywhere…”

Suddenly, the lock of the front door clicked loudly and the hinges squealed softly as the door swung open. A voice, warm and familiar, called inside: “Mom? You home?”

“In here, Baby,” Molly answered, forcing her eyes away from the picture.

She watched as her youngest walked into the room and tried to blink away the fresh tears that burned her eyes. It was Lou - her heart - all over again, as young and as handsome as he had been that summer day so very long ago.

The tears rolled silently down her cheeks and, in an instant, he was at her side, and wrapped her gently in an embrace. She breathed in the smell of her son as she sobbed helplessly into his shoulders. His arms were warm and strong, just like his father’s.

‘You’re still everywhere…’