"It is Los Angeles. It is 1949. Laura Brown is trying to lose herself."

She'll awake the next morning and her day will begin again. She'll hope Richie will nap so she has a chance to read. She'll count the pills in the bottle every night, but will always put them back. She'll keep on living, this shell of a woman.

Eight months later, the baby will come. Three years after that, she'll overdose on the pills she didn't put back one night. They'll pump her stomach; they'll keep her alive. Five years after that, she'll leave her husband and two children. She'll wake up Richie in the middle of the night and hold him, but there will be no tears. He'll eye her, not unkindly, and communicate without words his knowledge of her deception. She'll take nothing but a few clothes, and her book, which she has re-read nearly fifty times over the past three years. She'll move to Canada and try to make something of her life. She'll fail.

Fifteen years later, a drunk driver will kill her daughter. Ten years after that, her ex-husband will die of cancer. And nearly fifty years after she left, after she kissed her Richie goodbye, she'll return, an old woman, to see her baby boy. Her baby boy who will kill himself to rid the pain; who will succeed in the one thing she's obsessed over since he was four years old.

She'll visit his coffin, a closed casket, and wish she could she her guy one last time.

She won't cry.

[end]