“Why didn’t you tell me your suspicions then?”
I breathed out through my mouth. “I was eighteen. We were arguing all the time and stressed out. I wasn’t sure how you would have felt about adding a baby to the mix. I was too scared to tell you.”
Something clicked for him, as he nodded. “I remember you being really nervous those last few days, and the focus around money.” He laughed bitterly. “I thought you were regretting going against your parents and were missing your creature comforts. Makes sense now, if you thought you were pregnant. So, you found out after?”
“I had an appointment with my ob-gyn the day that Charlie showed up. I was ten weeks at the time. I had planned to tell you, and I wanted you to tell me it was going to be okay. When I saw Charlie, I freaked out and thought the worst. I was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to handle a baby, a crumbling marriage. In the moment, it seemed easier to run away than deal.”
“What shitty timing for everything to blow up. Fuck! If I had known—”
I grabbed his hand. This wasn’t his fault. I had made a choice to leave. “How could you have known about her?”
“Her.” Stunned, Andrew slid down the wall, his arms holding his knees in an almost protective stance. “Girl,” he repeated hoarsely. “She was a girl.”
For a brief moment, an image of Andrew reading goodnight stories to a sleepy, dark-haired, dark-eyed little girl stained my mind. I swallowed hard.
“When did you um, when did—” Andrew dropped his head against the wall behind him, focusing intently on some point on my white ceiling. “How many months?”
“Four months. Seventeen weeks and two days. I started bleeding.” I hadn’t thought much of the stain on my underwear at first, but the cramping, the intensity of it, was not normal. My parents had found me doubled over in the driver’s seat of my car, shaking and in pain, and they drove me to the hospital.
“I couldn’t stop—I couldn’t—” The sob burst from me, and he jumped up. For half a second, I thought he was going to leave.
Then, I felt his arms around me as he picked me up to place me gently on his lap. His strong arms wrapped around me, as he whispered platitudes against my hair.
“It’s not going to be okay!” I whisper-yelled at him, my voice breaking in the middle.
Andrew’s arms tightened around me while he stayed silent. Now that I had started, I had to continue. He had to know what had happened to our baby girl. “The doctors had to do a—cleanup—after my body couldn’t …”
My tears flooded onto Andrew’s shoulders as I curled into him.
For months afterwards, I had done nothing but cry until there had been no more tears. I had found out the gender right before … And I had finally started to feel excitement about what was happening, hopeful about what the little girl could be. Until everything crashed.
I hadn’t cried in years.
Now, in Andrew’s arms, there was nothing that I could do to hold back the storm. The wound was raw and open and fresh, except this time, I was in Andrew’s arms, where I had wanted to be ten years ago. Where I had needed to be.
Chapter Fifteen
Tia
February 1, 2010 (never sent)
Andrew,
I opened up a package today from Harvard. Since I deferred last year, they have been sending me information periodically. I finally opened up one of their envelopes. They sent a letter asking me to confirm whether I am planning to attend in the fall. I have to let them know by May. I don’t know if I’ll be ready to make a decision by then.
I looked at the brochure they sent—the students all look so happy and excited. I’m not sure I fit in, yet I want to. I want to be that happy and excited one day. I’m just worried that I’ll need to forget her to achieve true happiness, and by wanting to be happy, am I betraying our daughter?
I still despise you … but I wish you were here with me.
Ting
Andrew held me in his arms, as I sobbed through his sweater. At some point, he took off his ruined sweater, and I continued to sob through his shirt. My tears weren’t dainty, ladylike tears that I could blot with a handkerchief. They were giant drops of pain that streaked the stupid mascara that I had put on earlier across my face, stung my irises from the soot of mascara falling into my eyes, and triggered a leaky nose. I was a nose-blowing, clown-looking, eyes-squinting puddle of muddle.
Poor, startled Andrew patted my back as I wailed into his neck, while continuously supplying me with tissues from a box he must have found during my daze.
This crying business was exhausting, as one moment, I was crying me a river, and the next moment, I woke up in bed.
In my pajamas, which I did not remember putting on. Nor did I remember getting into bed. Or cuddling with a warm male body. SPOONING ALERT!
In my revisionist mind, I made a quick dart out of bed, hair flowing sexily around my shoulders. In reality, I fell off the bed in a shower of blankets and pillows.
Thumpf.
The floor was hard. I definitely did not consider the impact of landing on the floor when I had the carpeting pulled out in favor of wood a few months earlier. Weakly, I made a lame attempt at getting up, but I was so discombobulated from last night’s events that I decided to stay sprawled on the floor while I regained my memory.
“Hey.”
Andrew’s head peeked over from the side of the bed, his hair wonderfully tousled, his eyes still groggy. A small smile lingered on his face as if it was the most natural thing to find me lying on the floor.
And … I regained my memory. Eyes wide, I whispered, “Hey.”
His hooded eyes skimmed over my body, which I tried to subtly rearrange into a more artful pose, except I didn’t know how, before landing on my face. “Oh shit.” And … he regained his memory too. He swung his legs over the bed to sit up, scrubbing his face with his hands.
I tensed, waiting for Andrew to say more. Last night had been selfishly all about me, and this morning, well, I was about to find out.
“Andrew, I’m sorry for what happened last night.”
“For which part?”
Wasn’t it obvious? “For crying everywhere.”
“Huh.” His eyes were quietly assessing, any remnants of sleep gone. I expected anger, hurt, frustration, something, anything. Instead, his voice was devoid of emotion.
I continued miserably, “I’m sorry about not telling you before. I thought about calling you while I was pregnant, but I was scared. After, what was the point of telling you something that wasn’t going to happen?”
In a furor of movement, Andrew moved off the bed to kneel next to me on the floor. His gray eyes blazed with anger, and his voice was disbelieving. “What was the point? We created a child together, and what would be the fucking point of telling me about her? You should have let me carry the pain with you. Fucking unbelievable, Tia.”
Unable to look at the scorn in his eyes, I flopped over onto my stomach, talking to the dark shadows underneath my bed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Andrew. I didn’t know what to do, and I was so scared of everything. It felt as if my life was breaking apart with you not being in it anymore, being in this weird limbo of not going to school, and then finding out about the baby … I didn’t know anyone going through this … especially after. Statistics say this is common, but at the time, I just felt so lonely. It felt like my burden to carry. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know who I was apologizing to or for what. I knew that the miscarriage wasn’t my fault, but sometimes, it was easy to forget.
Silent tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes. I thought I had cried everything out, but apparently, pain could always squeeze more emotions out. Today’s grief was quiet and weary, though no less gashing than the night before or the hundreds of nights and days before. It was an open wound that would never heal completely.
As I lay on my floor, with my eyes squeezed shut to hold the insistent guilt and agony in, Andrew said nothing. I could still sense him knee
ling beside me, and I could physically feel his eyes on me. But I had no idea what he was thinking.
Over me, I heard Andrew sigh as he laid a hand on my back, before immediately pulling away. Great, now he can’t even bear to touch me anymore.
Another stretched moment of silence.
To my back, I heard Andrew ask, “Can you please turn around? I want you to look at me when I say this.”
I thought about ignoring his request. Eventually, he would give up and defer this to another day, right? Or leave forever, while I wasted away on my hard, wooden floors?
And that was exactly the kind of scared, non-confrontational attitude that got me into this in the first place. Reluctantly, I rolled over, propping myself up on my arms to sit so I could be eye level with Andrew.
His handsome face was marred by a frown, as his eyebrows pulled together to create unhappy lines. He kept his hands studiously to himself, clenched into tight fists at his side. I could see the white of his knuckles and wished that I could soothe him.
“Okay, let me have it,” I whispered in defeat.
“I’m fucking pissed, Tia.”
I hung my head. It was too hard to look at him.
Cradling my face with both hands, he turned me back to look at him. “It’s not what I expected, and I’ll need time to process this, so I don’t know what I’ll end up feeling. What I do know right now is, I’m fucking mad.”
He paused, as if processing his thoughts as he spoke. “I’m mad that you didn’t tell me when you found out, or when you lost the baby—our baby. What a crazy, mind-blowing thing to think about… I’m mad that I might have never known if not for this crazy mess that we’re in.”
His thumb caressed my cheeks in direct contrast to his words. I wasn’t sure if he even realized what he was doing. But his words, oh his words were acute jabs of guilt.
More tears streamed down my face, blurring my vision. “I’m sorry, I am so sorry,” I repeated brokenly.
“What I’m most mad about is that I—” His voice wavered, and when he continued, it was filled with torment. “I’m mad that I wasn’t there. I’m so fucking pissed at myself.”
Startled, I blinked rapidly. “What? How could you have known if I didn’t tell you?”
“I don’t know. I regret not telling you about Charlie earlier. It seems so stupid not to have told you. At least I could have helped you while you were in the hospital. I should have called. I should have asked. I was too proud to ask for another chance when I had nothing to give you and selfishly worried about … I don’t know, being rejected. It was a shitty excuse for not keeping in touch.”
“Oh, Andrew,” I said softly, broken in a different way for him and his misplaced anger. I ached to touch him, to offer him comfort and to receive comfort from him. While a weight was lifted that he wasn’t hurling anger at me, the foundation that we had tentatively rebuilt shifted like sand.
This wasn’t light, casual talk between friends. This wasn’t lust-filled encounters. This was serious, heart-opening, and achingly intimate. We had crossed a fork in our relationship, and I couldn’t see the endpoint.
Andrew’s eyes stormy, he said fiercely, “It destroys me to think of you going through all of that. A baby doesn’t seem real, and losing a baby doesn’t seem real, but you bleeding—I can’t get that image out of my mind.”
He asked, “Does that make me an unfeeling bastard?”
“No!” I searched for the right words. “After it happened, I couldn’t process it for a long time. Eventually, I found a therapist. One thing that I learned through therapy is that there’s no one way or right one to grieve, and we need to give ourselves grace for how we handle it. It took me a long time to realize that the miscarriage wasn’t my fault, that I shouldn’t blame myself. Just like you shouldn’t blame yourself for not being there. Those circumstances were out of our control.”
As if he needed to touch me to reassure himself, Andrew yanked me into his lap. We stayed in each other’s arms in shared contemplative sorrow, the embrace far different from yesterday’s dam-breaking tear-fest. Both were so, so needed and ten years too late.
Lulled into a half-daze by the warmth of his arms and the buzz outside my windows of a city awakening on a Saturday morning, it took me a half-second before understanding that Andrew was speaking again.
“Can I ask what happened afterward?”
I knew instinctively the underlying question that he couldn’t voice yet. “I named her Joy. Joy Wang Parker.”
I felt him tense around me at that name, before nodding. “I like it.”
“It was kind of an ironic name, as I was really struggling at the time and for a long time afterward. However, I wanted so badly to believe that I would meet her again, that she wasn’t lost.” I took a shaky breath to calm my suddenly beating heart. Andrew squeezed me even tighter as if he could absorb this fresh wave of memories.
“Because Joy was technically a ‘miscarriage,’ many hospitals don’t give out birth certificates,” I continued, trying to focus on just the facts. “I couldn’t bear the thought of our daughter … My parents, for all of their flaws, understood that it mattered to me that she was considered real. They had someone make a birth certificate. Even though it’s not official, it’s meaningful to me. I’m thankful that they had the wherewithal to think to do so.”
“Me too,” Andrew said.
“Yeah, they were great. We planted a tree for her, so I would have a physical place to visit.” Bone-weary and no longer in control of my body, I sagged into Andrew.
He pulled back to look at me, defeated yet determined, looking as if he had aged a decade in the past few hours. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you or for her.”
My hand ran over the stubble shadowing his cheeks and chin, as my facial muscles tried to contort themselves into a small smile. “Thank you for not judging and for letting me ruin your shirt with my tears.”
“And my sweater, don’t forget,” he returned, with a small smile, though his eyes dulled with sadness. With a kiss against my cheek, he promised solemnly, “I’ll make it up to you about Joy, I swear. Whatever happens between us, I promise, you’ll never be alone again.”
Chapter Sixteen
Andrew
January 1, 2009 (never sent)
Ting Ting,
I’m not mailing this letter to you, which makes me feel brave enough to say: something has fundamentally changed for me this morning. As we counted down to midnight, in the crowd at your parents’ party, I had this inexplicable urge to kiss you. I didn’t of course. I was scared my stupid move would jeopardize our friendship, and that, I couldn’t bear.
You don’t see me in that way. I know that I shouldn’t be thinking about kissing you. However, now that I have this image of me kissing you, it’s all that I think about. Would you kiss me back? I ask for scientific purposes.
Yours,
Andrew
It was the oddest, longest, shortest, most awkward, most comfortable, stress-inducing, thrilling week of my life. If I had to write down a hundred reasons for why Tia had become so upset at Dan and Kat’s house, miscarriage still wouldn’t have made the list.
A week later, the shock that we—Tia and I—had created and lost a baby hadn’t worn off. I was still floored by the news, and struggled with where to begin to processing everything.
In the midst of my struggles, I acknowledged that, if I was this emotional after hearing about this loss ten years after it happened, I couldn’t imagine the depths that Tia must have sunk into. Even though she had only known she was pregnant for seven weeks before finding out that she had miscarried, she still had had seven weeks to build expectations, to bond and care for the child that she was nourishing. To have those expectations shatter, along with the physical trauma, coupled with the breakup of our marriage—I didn’t know how she had survived.
Clearly, Tia was remarkable.
And I was a bastard for not being there.
“Want another slice?” She da
ngled pizza in front of me. “I am stuffed. Luckily I changed into pajamas. I’m not sure I would have fit into my jeans.”
Grabbing the slice from her fingers, I told her, “You look beautiful.”
Red tinged her cheeks, as she smiled at me shyly.
Lucky indeed. She might have tossed them on for comfort, but I was enjoying my view of her bare legs uncovered by her pajama shorts. Let’s face it—I would have been checking her out in whatever she was wearing. Or not wearing.
We were once again in Tia’s apartment. It was much smaller than my place in Chicago and too cluttered. Despite that, in a short time, it now felt more like home to me than my own. Tia’s apartment had Tia…whereas mine looked like a staging for a house opening.
While we carefully ignored the subject of Joy, her specter hung around like a whisper. She was both a door and a bridge for us. Physically, I didn’t want to push until Tia indicated she was ready for more, even as the tension between us escalated. However, I had never felt this emotionally connected to Tia, and though I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, I suspected she felt the same. Her previous stiffness around me had relaxed, as if she was allowing herself to enjoy our time together.
Speaking of time together. “Today is Saturday, and tomorrow is Sunday.”
“Yes, Mr. Brilliant, and yesterday was Friday. Should we make a song so you can remember?” Tia teased, as she raised her feet to use my thighs as a footrest. I felt like cheering from the rooftop at this small external sign of her comfort with me.
“Ha ha, you think you’re so funny.”
“Why yes, I do. Funny, smart, nice, obviously a brilliant cook.” She gestured toward the soot-covered chicken in the kitchen.
I gave the air an exaggerated sniff. “If your day job falls through, you could open up a restaurant called Tia’s Smoky BBQ, where the music is great and the food is burnt. Hey!” My right hand reached over to grab the attacking mochi she lobbed over.
Give Love a Chai (Common Threads Book 2) Page 14