Wrong

The elevator lifted them into a collection of carpeted rooms. Helen hung back. He couldn't remember the room number. They were late. He looked for couples congregated around a campfire. Campfire? Table. He meant table. He craned his neck down corridors, into rooms. Helen padded behind him and there they were. He reached back and tugged  her inside.

They slipped into the two empty chairs waiting for them near the door, next to the single woman. She smiled warmly. He looked around. The too-tall table cut-off bodies, a circle of floating grins. Helen sighed. He wanted her hand. He wanted to say "Save us." He hadn't removed his sunglasses. Fine. They could watch themselves in his blue reflective lenses and wonder what lurked beneath.

Helen kicked his shin. He hadn't been listening. He focused. Ten couples. A red-headed couple—had he ever seen such a thing before—started, finished each other's sentences. He caught snippets, a pregnancy, brown-bleeding, but their baby held on. Were they pregnant? Still? What the hell?

The next couple. Four miscarriages. But this one took. Were they allowed to hope for a baby, now? The baby kicked vigorously. They didn't know what to think.

Oh, Jesus. The wrong support group. His fucking up never ended.  They all had babies in their bellies, fighting for life. He saw the still forms of his twins. Their mouths peculiarly open. He thought the lips moved. Did you see that?, he had called out. No one heard him.

He couldn't move. Helen made no movement to stand up either. The room spun up and up, pushed him toward the back of his seat, the wall. He'd talk. He'd say "Sorry, sorry."

But then Helen was speaking, "Our babies died," she said. "And my husband wouldn't hold them." The pain had become matter-of-factness. Chilling. The couples shuddered.

"Oh my," the single woman said, the leader. Monster, he caught, whispered from wife to husband. Monster.

"And now?" Helen continued. "I don't know. So weak. I wonder if the twins inherited his weakness. No. I know that's insane. But still—"

They curled away from Helen, he understood their recoils. A curse that might be catching, a blight brought into an already anxious room. Their very worst fear. They came to convince themselves they had done what they must to avoid such a Fate. What delusion. Nothing you could do, he should tell them, if he had the strength.

"Well?" the single woman, the leader or therapist, repeated. Silence. He realized then she'd been addressing him.

An answer. Is that what Helen, the world wanted? He didn't know. He could make one up. What did they want to hear? But instead came this.

"It's sick. To hold their dead bodies. They shouldn't ask that of anyone."

"I don't think—" The single woman, angry.

"Your wife—" A chorus from the couples. "How could you—"

And Helen. "I did ask it, Jack. I asked it of you. Do you still see them, Jack?"

"Yes. In the morning. The pond."

"And what are they like?

Such stillness in that room. Sacred. At its root, it meant "cut off." Helen  had entered that world, untouchable. He had fucked up and not entered it with her. He not only saw that now, but felt his betrayal deep in the marrow, how separate and inviolate she'd become. He hadn't gone there. Why? Did the answer lie in his own nursery? Did he have to go back? No. Excuses lay there.

"Your wife asked you a question."

He couldn't look at Helen or the floating faces absorbed now in what he'd done and left undone. He spoke. "What are they like? I don't know. I didn't hold them. So I don't know."

"No. You do know. I don’t. I held them—and now they're dead and you didn't so you get them, you see. So I need you to tell me, Jack. What are they like?"

Their twins reached for him, not her. They floated up away from the bedroom and toward the deck where he bent toward them in his own mist, the steam of coffee. He sat wrapped in a blanket, waiting, but they held their distance, at the tree line, emanating from the ice and the birches, their eyes the color of the deep spring—green as the leaves and grass and flowers. They wanted him and Helen was right, they were not dead yet.

"Well. Go after her."

Helen had slipped out. He toppled the chair, nearly upset the table, stumbled down flights and flights of stairs. Outside, a warm front had moved in. A fifty degree difference the radio predicted. He drove around Penn and didn't see her. When he arrived home, he found the house empty. He ran from room to room, twice, three times.

Then he was still. Out the window, he saw her, floating above the pond, twins and mother, together again. His reach for them, blocked by the pane, would never reach them. They floated further and further from the pond and earth, the space they left filled in with the nothingness of night.

Randall Brown is a teacher who lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife Meg, a cabaret singer, and their two children. He is a Pushcart nominee, a fiction editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, and on the editorial board of Philadelphia Stories. He holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University. His stories, poems, and essays have been published widely, with recent work appearing or forthcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Cairn, The Saint Ann's Review, and Connecticut Review.  He’s currently working on a short short collection, Mad To Live.