I never had time to anticipate just how difficult it would be. Re-training myself, I mean.

Learning not to reach for the formula mix every day at 6 when preparing my own food, forcing myself out the door when nobody was at home to watch her, reminding myself that I didn’t have to place my keys just out of her reach anymore. The hardest part though, by far, was sleeping through the night without being woken up by the cries of a baby that was no longer there.

Every night, at nine, twelve, three, and five, the same crying, the same screaming, the same wailing from my baby girl. The same urge to jump into action, to comfort the emptiness left behind in her crib.

My body recognized the sound before my mind did, as usual. I sat up, swung my legs over my sheets and made it halfway to the door before the rest of my senses caught up and gently pulled me back to my own bed. Every sense, except, it seems, my hearing. Her cries penetrated the walls as if they did not exist as a barrier, echoing through the doorway, ringing past my ears and directly into the part of my brain that still believed it was a mother. Louder now, ironically. Deafening.

It was a sickening thought, I know it was, but it was one I had every night: ‘At least, when she was alive, the screaming wasn’t as loud.’ As if that was the problem. As if the worst of the issue wasn’t that my baby was gone, but that I couldn’t get any sleep. I dipped the tips of my fingers beneath my pillow, and turned away from the noise, yet, like clockwork, the crying now only seemed to come from the other direction.

I failed as a mother.

Even when Lia was alive, I’d never taken the best care of her. I bought all the books, watched all the tutorials, consulted every friend I had who seemed to be thriving in their ‘parental role’, and still, I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t what my baby girl deserved. A lone tear burned its way down my cheek, and my hand slipped further under the pillow.

The cries were louder now. High, sharp, uneven but consistent. The feeling that my baby needed me rattled the bones beneath my skin, punishing me with a constant push towards the door, and a pull towards reality. Lia had left me because I was a bad mother. The tips of the fingers beneath my pillow met with something solid and smooth.

Maybe if she had been brought to life in a gentler way, maybe, if her conception hadn’t been a nameless aggressor stealing my life and soul from me, maybe I would have been the kind of mother that Lia needed. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I had always wanted kids, but never, never like that. I had never wanted Lia. But I tried, I tried my best to love her in the way a mother was supposed to. I suppose I hadn’t realized just how much of my life was reduced to that constant effort. Not having to try anymore felt unnatural, my thoughts felt hollow.

I caressed the smooth, metal shape beneath my pillow, softly, almost hesitantly, before my fingers curled around it of their own accord. Nothing else ever worked.

I got to my knees, my nightgown bunching and the spring of the mattress giving way to the new concentration of weight on my bed. I turned and faced the lone pillow my head had just been resting on.

The wailing was louder, the loudest it had ever been, and it was so close. It sounded as if it were coming from right in front of my face, as if she was in my head. I found that if I closed my eyes at this point, it was almost twice as effective. It was as if Lia was right there. Right in front of me. I wasn’t sure if I could handle that tonight. I kept my eyes open.

I pointed the gun at my pillow. It was unintentional at first, but the barrel seemed to point itself toward the single tear mark I’d made earlier on, but when I noticed, I lined it up and aimed at it properly. The crying was coming from the pillow. Exactly as I remembered it, not one bit different from the voice of my daughter, and that made it both infinitely easier and unfathomably harder to do.

Still, I pulled the trigger. The hammer of the revolver clicked, turning the empty chamber once. The gun hadn’t been loaded, of course, but it might as well have been. The resulting ‘click’ filled every crevice of the room with the last noise before a silence even more deafening than the wailing had been. The haunting sound of crying had finally, finally stopped. It always did, after I pulled the trigger. It took me right back to that night, the night when the gun had been loaded, and aimed not at a pillow, but into the crib where Lia had been wailing non-stop for more than the usual hour. Pulling the trigger then had silenced the noise too.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’d decided, I would turn myself in. I had only wanted one night of peaceful sleep first. One night turned into two, turned into three, turned into two weeks of the same routine. Maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I had known. If I’d known that even beyond the shallow grave in the garden, Lia would still never let me rest. Maybe I’d have sought more help. Maybe I’d have gotten used to it, eventually. Maybe, maybe, maybe.