"A Tribute To Laura"
She's gone now. And yet, we dream of seeing her just one more time. We long to hear her enchanting laugh, see her radiant face. Do you remember her in that lush green park on that beautiful June day? She was so young....so in love....as she married the "boy of her dreams".
But as she had searched so long for love, soon she searched for excitement, throbbing with the need for both. And then HE found her, the man who in the beginning was rough and aggressive, but who was to be woven forever into the rich tapestry of her life.
Not all the memories would be so precious. She would survive captivity at the hands of a powerful and threatening family. She would experience brief beloved moments with one brother, and savage and hideous hours with the other. Did she weep with fear and disgust as the mad and obsessed brother touched her unwilling young body? And yet....did she weep with joy when she held his son, HER son, in her arms?
She would, at last, find her way back home to Port Charles and that old Victorian house. She would return without her first born, her arms empty, her heart filled with a deep yearning for what might have been. But as the years went on, she searched less for excitement, and more for a quietness, a feeling of being safe.
There would be moments of agony as, without warning, her baby daughter would suffer a dangerous illness. And as life sometimes plays with us in the most devilish of ways, that near tragedy would give back to her the little lost boy who had grown into a man. She would struggle with her sensitive younger son as he lived his own struggles, wrestling with his parents' past, loathing them, loving them.
She would divorce her adventurous husband. And just when she was about to step away from the past and into the future, about to remarry the man who would always be "the love of her life", memories that she had suppressed for so long began to torment her....torturing her until she could not forget.
At first, she remembered only the sound of rain on an attic roof. She was cautious, not wanting to stir up old images, not wanting to look too far back into the distance, frightened of what she would learn if she dared to remember too much.
As she searched her mind, as she questioned those around her, she began to see a clearer picture of "that rainy night in The Old Attic", in the house where she had lived as a girl, a girl who was on the threshold of becoming a woman.
"Something is floating on the edge of my memory," she said to the man standing beside her on The Docks, as she looked up at a dark sky.
The man replied, softly, "I think we're getting pretty close to the end".
She exhaled a sigh of relief, believing that "the end" would be in learning the truth of what really happened on "that rainy night in The Attic"....and learning that, she could then put the disturbing memories to rest. Forever.
But the past would not leave her alone. It tugged at her, fighting for her attention, until she heard a sweet and pure voice whispering, deep inside her, "Do you want to remember?"
The woman who had believed once that she had escaped the pain of remembering found herself answering, "I want to know."
Against a backdrop of thunder, the voice that had belonged to the woman in another time told her, "Then you will. Tonight."
But she continued to resist, desperately trying to destroy her past. She murmured, "I'm going to leave The Attic. I'm going on with my life. I'm going to forget what happened."
That innocent voice would not give up. "You were a part of it. They tried to make you forget, but it came back. It always ill....you're hearing my voice because you want to know."
But she did NOT want to know, would not ALLOW herself to know. She did not want to relive that rainy night, remember the blood on her skirt. Nothing could have happened. Everyone told her that. The nurse. Her stepfather. Her first husband. Only "the voice" would not let her forget.
Suddenly, the woman is looking at herself. She is young and, yes, there IS blood....on her pretty flowered skirt. She screams, her face shocked. "She was coming toward me." Now she is silent for a second, before she continues, "She...she died. Here."
The voice is unrelenting. "Who killed her? Who killed her?"
Her head is pounding as each rumble of thunder shakes her very being. Then she turns and sees him....her stepfather. She grabs a large candlestick, swings it as perhaps she had swung an object before.
Suddenly, the man she is about to remarry bursts through the door. He looks down, horrified. And then they are gone. On the run....as they have been on the run so many other times.
But this time is different.
This is no adrenaline-pumping plan to save mankind from a deep freeze. This is a man trying to save the woman he loves, perhaps more than life itself.
He wonders, at times, if the venomous words spoken by Helena Cassadine so many years ago at their wedding ceremony, are now coming true.
Helena's words ring in his ears. "....A curse on you both!"
In the old barn, the man shakes his head to clear away those hateful words and looks down at the sleeping woman.
She awakens dazed and looks up at him. "Did my dad call yet?"
The man tells her, gently, "He's not going to call." He pauses for a second and continues, "You have to face the truth, sweetheart. He's dead."
The woman spits out the words as though they are choking her. "My father isn't dead."
Without warning, she begins to rock back and forth, striking her head against the old wooden wall of the barn, crying out through cracked lips, "No, no, no, no....."
He takes her trembling hands in his and says, "I brought you here so that we'd....we'd have a chance to be alone....and no one would find us, so you could remember...."
With enormous sadness in her eyes, she whispers, "I did a terrible thing."
Now her mind is crowded with images. Grisly, ghastly. And bloody. Oh, so bloody.
She wants to wait for the man to find a safe place for the both of them....a safe place where she can learn to forgive herself. But she knows she must go
back. Back to The Attic.
******************
He finds her there, in The Attic, surrounded by the shadows of death. She has put on that beautiful old wedding dress, now with the hand-sewn beads torn loose and falling to the floor. She tries to cover the stains with her shaking hands, tries to bring one of her luminous smiles to her lips.
"I'm getting married," she tells him. "And all the nightmares are over. And everything is going to be perfect from here on in."
She takes a step back, raising her skirt just a little, to reveal the black boots she had worn back in the old barn. "How do I look?" she asks.
"Like an angel," he replies.
"I love you," she says.
His heart aches as he recognizes that she is slipping away....from him....from herself.
His eyes are filled with tears, as he begins to say his "marriage vows" with no witnesses other than the dusty old trunks in the corner, a child's tricycle, some out-of-date hats fashioned from ribbons and lace.
"We are gathered here, my sweetheart and me, all the people who live in our hearts to pledge ourselves to each other....I love you more than I ever have....for richer, for poorer...." His voice catches as he continues, ".....in sickness and health, till death do us part. That is my solemn vow."
She tries, oh, how she tries to remember HER vows...."to have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, to....to.....oh....I can't remember the rest."
She looks at him, and for a second, there is a glimpse of the woman he loves, as she tells him, "I love your eyes....I'm....I'm supposed to make promises,
I
think." She tips her head to one side, and her voice become almost child-like.
"I forgot," she whispers.
He tells her, "No...you....you already made them....They were beautiful."
She is going. Can't he see it?
She is almost gone from him, but she smiles and asks, "....So now what do we do?"
His voice is gentle, "I now pronounce us husband and wife."
She begins to look around, this way and that, searching for them, searching for the past, searching for the people she had....the people she had....she can't form the word in her mind. She lowers her eyelashes and she has to be wondering, where did I go, what happened to me?
The man holds her hands, his grip so tight that his fingers ache, matching the ache in his heart. "Stay with me," he says. "Stay with me."
But she cannot. They will not let her stay with him even though he is pleading, "Let me help her."
The "boy of her dreams" takes her away to a sterile white hospital room, where, with a look of terror on her face, she wails, "I killed my own father."
As she falls deeper and deeper into her own world, she wonders, who are those two young men who say they are my sons, who is that man with the white hair and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes? She is fearful, anxious. "You're a bad man," she hisses.
A soft sad smile touches his lips. "We're Luke and Laura," he tells her. "We were meant to be."
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes dead, as her mind continues the lonely journey to the past.
Her past has beome her present. Her present will become her future.
She's gone now....but....
Laura is the face in the misty light,
Footsteps that you hear down the hall.
The laugh that floats on a summer night,
That you can never quite recall.......*
Oh, but you are wrong! We CAN recall. Her footsteps. Her face. Her laugh. Only SHE is gone. Not our memories.
