“GO AWAY!” Marvin Hamill screamed as he sat up in his sleep. “LEAVE ME ALONE. I DIDN”T DO IT ON PURPOSE.” He had done this for the past 40 years.
Marvin Hamill had a secret. And Susan Hamill couldn’t pry it out. She had been married to him for two decades and never knew the source of his nightly nightmare. “No marriage should have secrets, particularly one like this,” she thought.
Marvin Hamill was a good man, a solid man. But a not particularly exceptional man. He was a member of the Third Baptist Church, a Vice Vice President of Fourth National Bank and the second-string catcher on his softball team. He’d fade into a tan-painted room if he walked into one. He was soft-rock in a punk-rock world. It was like something was holding him back. Something was haunting him.
But Susan loved him dearly. Except for the secret.
She looked at the clock again. 12:45 a.m. The room was as dark as bottle of India Ink, except for the red glow illuminating her husband’s twitching body.
He popped up again and started screaming, “NO!! GO AWAY!! QUIT HAUNTING ME.”
Susan started to turn on the light but she stared into the darkness at the end of the bed instead. It was hard to see anything but the blackness — but she swore she saw something at the end of the bed.
It was a faint flicker at first. But then is glowed brighter. The specter took shape — the shape of a little girl. She had long brown hair, brown eyes and a huge wound on her forehead. She might have been eight. The little girl looked at Susan sadly and put her finger to her blue lips.
Marvin was screaming louder now, “MAKE HER GO AWAY!”
The little girl walked over the Susan and held out her hand. Susan put her finger up to her heart. “Me,” she thought. The little girl nodded.
She led Susan from the bed into the walk-in closet. The little girl pointed to a pile of clothes in the corner. Susan got on her knees and dug through it. Her hand hit something solid.
It was a nondescript wooden box.
Susan’s hand shook as she opened. She didn’t know Marvin had a box like this. Inside of it was a yellowed newspaper article. Susan’s hand shook harder as she began to read it.
Jenny Woolworth, aged 8, died today after a tragic accident. Police report that she was accidentally hit with a baseball bat as she walked into the middle of a baseball game. The little boy who swung the bat’s name has been withheld due to him being a minor.
Susan looked up at the specter in front of her. She looked exactly like the little girl in the picture.
Tears streamed down Susan’s face. Her love, her Marvin, had been living a hellish nightmare of guilt for nearly 40 years.
The little girl motioned to Susan. They walked back to Marvin again and Susan kissed him on the forehead. Both stood in front of him. He screamed again. “NOOOO!!!!”
“Shhh,” Susan said. She took Marvin’s hand. “She has something to tell you.”
The little girl’s mouth began to slowly move. The sound she made was hard to describe. It sounded almost like harps and screeching. But what Marvin heard with his ears wasn’t what he heard in his head. The little girl continued with three simple words:
“I forgive you.”
Marvin Hamill crumpled into a pile of tears. Forty years of guilt flowed down his cheeks.
Susan said, “Honey, that’s what she has been trying to tell you for 40 years. She knew it was an accident.”
And on that dark October night, a wife and a little girl healed a broken man’s spirit.