by Megan Walker
Ah. That would do it. I point to the chair across from me. “Have a seat.”
“You want me to join you sitting creepily in the dark?”
“Turn on the light if you want,” I say. “Just keep that flashlight out of my face.”
Ben flips on the light and turns off the flashlight. “What the hell are you doing in here? Not eating, I see.” That last part is said with no small amount of bitterness.
“No,” I say. “I was waiting up for you. Creepily. Like I’m your dad.”
Ben shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah, well. You’re not.”
“I’m aware. But I’m basically your brother, and that means I get to yell at you when you’ve earned it.”
Ben crosses his arms. He’s still not sitting down, and I really don’t want this to turn into another fight.
Then again, maybe I do. Maybe fighting isn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe it’s better than not saying things that need to be said.
“I’m pissed at you for the things you said about me being friends with Felix,” I say. “If you don’t want to hang out with him because of his religion, that’s fine. You pick your own friends. But if you think I would let someone into my life that would be awful to you—that hurts. I don’t think I’ve done anything to make you think that, and I hate that you’ve decided that’s who I am.”
Ben looks down at the floor. “I don’t think you would do that,” he says. “That’s why I was pissed about it.”
“Yeah, well, if Felix ever says anything derogatory about you or Wyatt or your marriage, he’s done, okay? I would never put up with that in my life, and I’m not abandoning you, either way. You’re my best friend, and that’s always how it’s going to be.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” He actually sounds like he means it.
Huh. If that’s all there was to it, I should have said that before.
But there’s more I want to say, I realize. More that needs to be said. “And I get that you’re annoyed about being told where to eat, but you need to respect my wife. You’re being a dick to her.”
Ben rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but Anna-Marie is like family, you know? I don’t think of her as someone I need to, like, respect.”
I smile. That probably says more about Ben’s family than anything. “I’m glad. But she feels disrespected, so could you just wear your damn pants when you’re in our house?”
Ben sighs, but it sounds more resigned than annoyed. “Yeah. I can do that.”
He’s still hugging himself, and he looks so sad and alone. I don’t want to leave it there.
“How are you feeling about Wyatt?” I ask.
“I miss him,” Ben says softly. “Like crazy.”
“Maybe you should tell him that.”
“I did.” He frowns at the floor, and I wonder if he’s trying to hold back tears. Or at least keep me from seeing them.
I take a deep breath. Ben may be angry at us for talking to Wyatt, but I’m willing to take that risk. “Anna-Marie had lunch with him.”
Ben looks up sharply. “Really? What did he say?”
“You’re not going to like this,” I say.
Ben’s shoulders sink, and he finally sits. He looks like he’s bracing for news of someone’s death.
“Wyatt said that he loves you, and he misses you, and he wants you to come home. But that you’ve never been willing to calmly talk to him about the baby thing, and he feels like you don’t care how he feels.”
“That’s not true,” Ben says, gripping his knees tightly. “Of course I care.”
“I know that,” I say. “But he doesn’t.”
“I tried to tell him.”
“I believe you.” I’ve been through enough marital fights to know that what I mean and what she hears aren’t always similar. “But you’re so scared he’s going to decide he wants a baby more than he wants you that you can’t stand to have a calm conversation with him about it. And because of that, he feels hurt, and like you don’t care about him.”
“He does want a baby more than he wants me.”
“Does he?” I ask him. “Or does he just want a husband who’s respectful of his feelings and listens without panicking and starting a fight? If he had that, would the baby thing be a deal breaker? Maybe it would be something you can work out?”
Ben shrugs helplessly. “I don’t think I can change. I don’t think I can give him what he needs. Even if I could calm down enough to have a conversation with him . . . I don’t know that I can ever want to have kids.”
“Okay,” I say. “That may be true. But can you fight through the fear enough to have a conversation with him where you’re open to working on it, without freaking out and shutting down?”
Ben thinks about that. He’s not being defensive, which is a huge step forward. “I want to. But I don’t know how.”
“I think,” I tell him, “that you should try writing a letter.”
Ben looks up at me like this idea is physically painful. “I know that’s a good idea. But I hate it.”
“In a letter, you can take the time to make sure you’re saying things the way you mean them. You could have Anna-Marie or me look it over, to make sure it’s coming across the way you want. You can type it up so it’s easy to make changes.”
Ben shakes his head. “No, Wyatt would like it better hand-written. He’ll want to picture me like Mr. Darcy, writing by candlelight with a quill.”
I smile. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“It’s a good idea,” Ben says again.
“But you’re terrified.”
He nods, his gaze dropping to the floor.
“Which is scarier? Being vulnerable or losing him?”
“Being vulnerable and then losing him,” Ben says. “They aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I feel him on that one. More than he knows. “It’s Wyatt, Ben.”
“I know,” he says quietly. Then he nods. “I’ll write the letter. I don’t know if I can give him what he needs from me, but I’ll try.”
“Good,” I say, and I get up and put a hand on his shoulder.
He gives me the ghost of a smile, and then he stumbles down the hall to our guest room, and I head back upstairs to join my wife.
Twenty-nine
Felix
I wake up in the morning later than usual, feeling like I’m hung over. My eyes are puffy from crying last night, in the dark where no one could see, and for a moment I panic. Rachel should have woken me up by now.
But Gabby came over last night. We didn’t talk; she just gave me a hug and told me she loved me and took the baby monitor. So possibly she hasn’t had any sleep, and possibly this has further cemented her own fear of ever having her own children—if that wasn’t already permanently cemented by the time she took Ty to that pumpkin patch and ended up in the Urgent Care getting corn from the corn pit extracted from her ear—but I appreciate her sacrifice.
I check my phone. I have a message from Dana telling me when she’s available to take the kids, but nothing from Jenna. Her phone is still sitting next to mine on the nightstand. It has only one message, from Alec, asking if she’s okay.
I burrow down under the covers. Jenna’s not here. She didn’t come home. I know this without even leaving the bedroom, because Gabby would have told me instantly. The kids have to be up by now, so she must be entertaining them downstairs, and I have this terrible, selfish urge to curl up here and refuse to move.
Jenna is gone, and she could be anywhere, and it’s because she’s sick and I missed it, and it’s my fault. I know that last part isn’t true, or at least, I accept that my therapist would tell me it isn’t. But it sure as hell feels like I was supposed to be the one to save her from this.
I lie still, and after a moment, I recognize this as a tactic I use when the cravings get bad. If I don’t move, I
can’t do drugs. But I have children downstairs, and while there is that ever-present murmur at the back of my mind that says all I’d need is one hit and all of this would seem better, that I’d be able to take the edge off and handle it—
I know I don’t want to. The call is there, but louder still is the fear that I might answer it and lose everything.
I’m not going to do that. Not today. My kids need me, Jenna needs me, I need me to stay present.
My therapist lately has been talking a lot about assessing the threat. It’s okay to want to use, she says, but how likely am I to actually do it? Am I thinking of places I can go to get drugs? Am I carrying cash, just in case? Am I lying about where I’m going, or why?
A pit settles in my chest. I’m not going anywhere today. I’m staying here with my kids, and if Dana takes them for a while, I’m still staying here, waiting for Jenna. Running blindly around LA when she could be anywhere won’t do anyone any good. And then what if I’m not here when she comes back?
Because she will come back. I believe that, in my bones. I have her kids; she’s not just going to disappear.
And when she does, I’m going to do everything in my power to work this out. But it doesn’t dull the ache of missing her, of worrying about her, of wondering what she’s going to do that she might torture herself over for years to come.
There’s a soft knock on the door. “Yeah?” I say.
Gabby cracks it open. “Felix? Ty and I made breakfast.”
I roll over in bed. “Thanks, Gabs. For watching them, I mean.”
Gabby slips into the room, hesitantly. “How are you doing?”
“Still clean,” I say.
Gabby nods. “Is it hard to stay that way?”
I think about that, and then shake my head. “No. Not right now, anyway.”
She comes over and sits down on the edge of the bed. “I’m so sorry, Felix. Are you ready to talk about it?”
I shrug. “I don’t know what to say. Josh told you that I think she’s depressed?”
“Yes,” Gabby says. “And she needs to be evaluated by a doctor to know for sure, but my hunch is that you’re right.”
“I think I have it, too. Not postpartum, obviously. But depression. I think it got really bad when I was away at Juilliard, and that’s why . . .”
Gabby nods. “That makes sense,” she says. “But you’ve been doing so much better.”
“Since I’ve been on the anti-depressants.”
“That’s right. I forgot about that.”
“Jenna and I, we were both swimming around in the same darkness. And then I left her there.” I close my eyes tightly against the pain of that last statement, fighting back the tears that threaten to start all over again.
I left her there.
Gabby reaches over and squeezes my hand. “If you hadn’t, you might not have figured it out. And now that you know, as soon as she comes back, she can get help.”
She’s right. She has to be right. “What kind of help is there?” I ask. “Besides the medication?”
“There’s lots of different kinds of medication, and different kinds of therapy.” She pauses. I know she was going to therapy for a while for her body image issues, and has told me it helped, so she clearly sees the benefit of it. “Don’t you think if you had depression your therapist would have noticed?”
I sink down under the covers. “I think she did,” I say quietly.
Gabby looks surprised. “What?”
I sigh. “She’s mentioned several times that there might be more to my down days than just cravings, that I was obviously in a dark place to begin with. I think she even used the word depression a couple of times, but I always figured there were reasons why I felt that way. I was alone and lost and unhappy just when I got to the part of my life that was supposed to be the most incredible, you know? And the heroin withdrawal is enough to give anyone bad days without a diagnosable disorder.”
Gabby nods. “I saw a girl a couple months ago who got diagnosed with severe asthma in her late thirties. She’d had it all her life, but she didn’t know, because she also had anxiety and the symptoms of an asthma attack are almost indistinguishable.”
Huh. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess I should have listened. She didn’t push it.” Like I didn’t push it with Jenna. Shit.
“I called some hospitals,” Gabby says. “No one had seen her.”
I take a sharp breath. That’s good, right? It means she isn’t hurt.
Or that no one has found her if she is. I swallow hard around a lump in my throat.
I think about how Jenna refused to see a therapist, how she shut down every time I brought it up. “Is it like addiction?” I ask. “Where they have to be ready, or the treatment doesn’t work, and they just relapse?”
Gabby considers that for a minute. “From what I understand, as long as they physically take the medication and show up to the therapy, they can improve. But it’s not like you get treatment and it’s fixed. It’s up and down, good days and bad days.”
I nod. “So it’s not like addiction. It’s more like recovery.”
“Yeah. I guess I never thought of it that way.”
“I didn’t know it had gotten this bad.” I tighten my fists around the comforter. “I feel like I should have known if it was bad enough that she felt like she had to run away.”
Gabby closes her eyes and sighs. I think she feels the same way, though with far less reason. “Where do you think she would have gone?”
“Josh asked me the same thing, and I don’t know. I need to call her parents, her friends, see if anyone’s heard anything.”
“Can I help with that?” Gabby asks.
I shake my head. “I need to do it myself. Especially her parents. If I don’t, that’ll just worry them more.”
They’re going to be terrified. Jenna ran off before, but not since she was a teenager, not since Rachel died.
“It’ll be okay, though,” Gabby says. “It’s a good thing you caught it, and now you know, and you can get her help.” She smiles, but I can tell she’s forcing it. “It’ll be okay. I know it will.”
I shake my head. “You don’t have to fix it, Gabs.”
Gabby makes a little whimpering sound. “But I wish I could.”
“Sometimes,” I say, “sometimes you have to sit with the pain.”
“Felix, I don’t think it’s a great idea for you to wallow in—”
“Not wallowing,” I say. “Just . . . accepting it. I’m terrified, and I’m hurt, and I’m angry, and I’m sad. Saying it’ll be okay doesn’t make that go away. Putting a needle in my arm doesn’t make it all go away. It’s still there, still waiting. And the only way to deal with it is to feel it. To let it be.”
It’s not just me I need to worry about, though. I can’t sit in my pain forever. I sit up and run a hand through my hair, gripping it tightly.
Please, I think. Please bring her back to me.
Last night, when I went to sleep, I prayed desperately for Jenna to come home safe. She’s still not here, and it would be tempting to feel like that means God didn’t hear me, that he didn’t answer. I understand why people want to believe that God controls every little thing that happens. It would be comforting to think that because Jenna and I were meant to find each other—and I know we were, I feel that in every part of me—that means I can’t lose her now.
I’ve felt things before when I pray. Mostly peace, and sometimes thoughts that seem a lot like inspiration. All I feel now is this deep melancholy longing—for Jenna, yes. But also for my kids. “I’m guessing my son is probably downstairs wondering where his mother is.”
Gabby nods. “I told him I was giving you guys a break this morning. But I can tell he’s getting suspicious.”
“Can you give me a few more minutes? I need to call Jenna’s parents, and then I’ll
come down and talk to him.”
“Of course. Take all the time you need.”
“Thanks,” I tell her, and I reach for my phone.
I can’t take all the time I need, though, because my children need me, and I’m going to have to explain to my son where his mother went in a way that doesn’t terrify him, but also isn’t a lie, or an oversimplification, because Ty can sniff those out like Rocket can sniff out a Twinkie.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then dial Jenna’s parents.
One thing at a time.
Thirty
Felix
I get off the phone with Jenna’s mom—who, understandably, is about to join Gabby in calling all the hospitals in the world and inquiring about that police report Josh made last night and generally freaking out. I’m starting to sweat, my eyes burning again, thinking about all the places Jenna could have spent the night and all the places she might be waking up this morning and the terrible pain she must be in, no matter where she is—
But Gabby’s right. I can feel the pain, but I can’t wallow. And while the difference was clear to me just a few minutes ago, it’s eluding me now, which means I need to keep moving until I can trust myself to stay out of those dark places again.
I head downstairs to find Ty. He’s wearing his Harry Potter pajamas and sitting at the table with a big glass of orange juice and eating a pancake that looks like an octopus. Gabby’s always been a fan of the Mickey Mouse pancakes my dad used to make—the only thing he can cook well—so I’m guessing they started there, and then Ty got creative.
“Hey, Dad,” he says. “Where’s Mom?” He’s looking at me warily, so I assume that even if Gabby didn’t tell him anything, he’s picked up no small amount of her nervous energy. Nothing gets by this kid, and I know better than to feed him a lie. He’ll see right through it, and only ask a million questions I don’t know how to answer.
He’s going to do that anyway, but at least this way, when I tell him I don’t know, I’ll be telling him the truth.
“I need to talk to you about that,” I say, pulling up a chair next to him. Gabby shoves a plate of pancakes at me and then mumbles something about checking on Rachel, but I’m pretty sure she’s just trying to give us some space.