After Forever Ends (29 page)

For some reason I was able to accept that. Something inside of me didn‘t want him to tell me, not then. In the deepest part of me I knew I had lessons to learn.

Both of us were quiet. I watched him flip another page in his textbook and lift a glass of water to his lips. I whispered, “What does it all mean, Oliver?”

“I dunno,” He looked back up at me and smiled gently, “Love magic, I think. The Lady of the Wood says Love is the oldest and greatest of all the magic in the universe. I guess we wait and see. We’ll know in our time.”

We didn’t speak of it again for a very long while. Not for many, many years. In fact, we didn’t discuss it again until near the time when he left me.

Oliver and I both earned our four year university degrees respectively. Oliver had made up his mind about his future and was going to be a paediatrician. He had always known that he wanted to go into medicine. Oliver, you see, was a healer. It wasn’t anything he did by choice, it was just his way. He knew what to do and what to say to make people feel better when they were hurt or sad or frightened. Even when they were angry. He was drawn to children, always had been. Perhaps it was because of his kindness and his own refusal to never stop defending innocence and trust that led him to it, but he had made his decision to enter into paediatrics after a course in veterinary science where all he did was fiddle with poop. Bringing home two chicken sealed the resolution.

I was not very excited when he drew the cage from out of the truck, “Chickens?”

“Yeah,” He grinned, “I figured we’d grow them.”

“Grow chickens?”

“No, eggs.”

I stifled my laughter, but not my smile, “We’ll grow eggs?”

“Oh, you know what I mean!” He laughed at himself, “They’re hens. They’ll grow the eggs and we’ll steal them-like.”

“Oh, goody,” I teased, “And what’s next? You bringing home a cow?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“I don’t want a cow.”

“Why?”

“They stink.”

“So do chickens.”

“I never said I wanted chickens.”

“Oh, right then! Brilliant! No cow! Can I keep the chickens?”

I pretended to ponder the question. “They were free, weren’t they?

“They were!” He grinned proudly.

I wrapped my arms around him, “You may keep your chickens, Oliver.” I kissed him, as I always did when he arrived, “Welcome home.”

“Glad to be here, Love.”

That was the way every afternoon went more or less, except after that one I was knocking chickens off the porch with a broom most days. I hated those blasted chickens. All they did was run around clucking and depositing feathers and cack all around my garden and porch. The one didn’t even produce eggs, but neither Oliver nor I could work up the nerve to kill it and eat it. We invited the foxes in sometimes, but even they weren’t interested in that useless hen.

I was always home before Oliver since all my classes were in the morning. As a girl, I had been certain I wanted to go into some field of science as a career. I thought microbiology sounded fascinating, but after getting my Bachelors of Science, I started to wonder what I really wanted to do with my future. I was beginning to think that maybe I didn’t want a career and nothing else. After the talk Oliver and I had about the Lord and the Lady and their many boon, plus Oliver suddenly wanting to be a paediatrician, I thought maybe I wanted children, too.

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.

It was the plate I had just left in the garden.

I dropped my knife on the floor and ran out of that house. I jumped from the top step down to the ground and landed in the grass crouched down on my toes and on the tips of my fingers. I sprang up and I ran as fast as I could to that faerie circle. I skidded down the slope in my trainers and fell, landing on my bottom right before it.

My plate was gone. Sitting in its place were the pair of pink socks that I had lost the very first night I stayed at the cabin, neatly folded. I picked them up slowly with shaking hands and noticed something inside. I stuck my fingers in, felt around and drew whatever it was out of the fold.

“Holy shite,” I muttered with my hand over my mouth, “It’s true!”

“Silvia?” Oliver was calling from across the garden. I could see him coming out of the house, I‘d just missed his arrival, “Are you home, Love?”

“Oliver, come here!”

“There you are!” He wandered over and bent to kiss me. “What’s up, Sil? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“What are these?”

He took them from my hand and turned them over. “They’re keys…” He paused and drew in a deep breath, “Blimey, Sil! These are the keys I accused Alex of taking the night I chopped down the door! He swore he didn’t! He was all ticked off for me saying he did! Where’d you find them?”

I held up my socks and pointed into the circle. I was speechless.

“Did you leave them sweets?”

I nodded.

Oliver grinned, “I think you’ve met the Lord and Lady! They’ve been waiting for you to come to them, haven’t they? And I’d bet they like you, too, since they gave you back two things and not just the one!” He was beside himself. Smile splitting his face, he slapped his hands against his thighs and looked to the sky, letting loose a triumphant howl. Then he turned back to me, “Now do you believe?”

I looked around the garden, “Do I have a choice?”

Oliver took me in his arms, “Did you ever?”

No, I guess I didn’t really have a choice, especially not after that.

I learned to make candies after that day just so I could leave a variety of sweets in the circle for the Lord and the Lady. Oliver’s socks would come up missing still from time to time, but nothing of mine, not ever again until after the children arrived.

Time passes and so did another year for us. Sometimes life falls into a rut, even for the young who are living with elves. Oliver went to school during the day half the week and the other half of the week at night. He worked odd hours around his schedule, as did I. We didn’t see much of each other. It was lonely, really. I didn’t have much else to do but coursework, so semesters peeled by one after the next. I had my Masters of Science and Bachelors of Accounting degrees with no real motivation to apply either. When I was offered a grant for graduate school, the board of governors asked me what my intentions were for the future. I gave them the first answer that popped into my head, “Obviously, I have my Masters of Science and I intend on continuing with Microbiology. I’ll complete the program for Biophotonics…” Blah blah blah. My response was ultimately meaningless as I was losing interest in all of it. I was only going to school because Oliver wasn’t around and there wasn’t really anything else to do.