Flying

by Megan Hart

  She waited for him to hang up on her for that one, but Matthew only made a low, disgusted noise. “Nice.”

  Stella gritted her teeth. “I needed you. I wouldn’t have called otherwise.”

  “I was busy, I’m sorry. I had the girls—”

  “And Caroline,” she said with a snarky laugh. “Don’t forget her. And I certainly wouldn’t know about busy, would I?”

  “You don’t get it,” Matthew said sharply. “You have one kid, and he’s a lot older. It’s a lot more complicated with two.”

  For a moment, the sheer arrogance and insult of what he’d said to her didn’t fully sink in. Stella pulled the phone from her ear to look at it before pressing it back to her head. She blinked rapidly, trying to form the right words, trying not to let her emotions run away with her. Trying not to simply lose her shit all over him.

  She failed.

  “I know what it’s like to have two children, Matthew. I know how hard it can be with two little ones, close in age. I know how complicated it is.”

  “Stella, oh, God. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I found his blanky in Tristan’s room,” Stella said in a low, numbed voice. “I was worried he’d taken up smoking, but instead I found out he’s been taking things from Gage’s room. I can’t go in that room, Matthew. Do you understand that? Do you understand what it’s like to walk past that closed door and be unable to open it because I cannot face the thought of packing away all his things? It’s been over ten years, and I can’t open that door because I’m somehow terrified that it will let out the smell of him. That everything will be gone. I can’t open the door, I can’t pack away his clothes and toys and furniture and make that room empty. And, yes, I know what fuckery that is. I know it’s not healthy. And I still can’t make myself do it, Matthew, because once I open that room I will have to let him go, and I can’t bear the thought of losing him all over again. So don’t you dare tell me smugly how I don’t understand what it’s like to deal with two. Don’t you dare whine to me about how anxious and stressful it is to deal with a hundred-degree fever. When you’ve held your child in your arms and prayed not for him to heal, but for him to finally just die so that he won’t hurt anymore...then maybe you’ll have one small, infinitesimal inkling of what it was like for me, and why I needed you last night. But you weren’t here. You are never here. I come to you, and you don’t ever come to me. I am there for every bitch and moan and hand-wringing emotional breakdown you ever have. And you were not there for me for one. Fucking. Night.”

  This time, when she disconnected, Matthew didn’t call back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Stella and Tristan weren’t completely estranged. She spoke with him on the phone or texted him. Once or twice a week she picked him up after school and took him to dinner before dropping him off at Jeff’s, but Tristan would not come home, and Stella didn’t ask him to.

  “He’s welcome here, you know that,” Cynthia told her on the phone. “I don’t know what happened, but...”

  This was the woman who opened her house to Stella’s son. The one who’d end up doing his laundry and making sure he got up for school, who would feed him and be there when he got home, because surely Jeff would not. “He likes his dad better.”

  Cynthia laughed softly. “I don’t know about that. Things will work out, Stella. I’m sure.”

  Stella wasn’t so convinced.

  The balance had shifted—where once Tristan’s home had been with Stella and he “visited” Jeff, now it was the opposite. It ate away at her, day after day. The gallons of milk in the fridge she kept buying automatically and had to toss because nobody drank them, the regular supply of hot water, the small extras in her bank account at the end of the month that normally would’ve gone to dinners out or Tristan’s spending cash. The silence. Everything she’d once imagined she’d adore once her son went off to college had now become her reality, and Stella far from loved it.

  It might’ve been easier if she had something to distract her, but that would’ve meant contacting Matthew and she was done with that. Maybe, she thought as she let herself into the dark kitchen and tossed her keys and coat onto the table, he was just as relieved to be done with her as she kept trying to convince herself she was.

  The trouble was, everything reminded her of him. She couldn’t share the funny joke she’d heard, or the new song she loved and played on repeat, or send him pictures of her food. Without Matthew, there was a giant gaping hole she kept falling into whenever she tried moving forward.

  Missing Tristan was different. She’d always known someday her son would move out and away; she hadn’t thought it would be so soon, or on such magnificently bad terms. But no matter how angry they’d been at each other, there was nothing that couldn’t be undone. Tristan would always be her boy.

  She waited for the urge to fly to hit her, but it didn’t.

  Another week passed, and one night in the shower, washing herself, Stella cupped her breasts in her hands and thumbed the nipples tight, waiting for arousal to find her. She slipped her fingers between her legs and sought the same thing, but all she found was numbness and disinterest.

  Another week.

  Another.

  The days got longer. The sun hotter. Her flowers bloomed, but Stella wilted.

  She unfriended Matthew on Connex. Deleted his number from her phone. There was nothing she could do about the message application but block him, and that felt unnecessarily antagonistic and stupid, especially since he wasn’t bothering to message her in the first place.

  He’d made her nothing, so she made him a stranger.

  She moved through her days without much drama. Work. Chores. She took Tristan to dinner or to the movies or shopping the few times she could convince him to let her. She still did not ask him to move home.

  She was alone, and it was more terrible than she’d ever imagined it to be, and yet there was a kind of pleasure in that pain of her solitude. Clarity in her thinking. Or maybe, Stella thought as she slipped into bed without a word from her son or her lover or anyone else, she was just numb.

  * * *

  She is still drunk and reeling when they wheel her into the E.R., but even without the liquor in her blood, Stella knows she would’ve been blurry and blinded by what happened. Blood has run into her eyes, and though she knows she’s crying harder than she ever has cried in her life, her vision will not clear. There’s pain, but it’s faint and far away, sectioned in parts of her body that no longer seem to even belong to her. She can’t feel her legs, and something in her brain tells her that’s probably a good thing.

  Stella’s throat is raw from screaming, but she reaches for Jeff. For Tristan. For Gage. Her boys were in the backseat. Jeff, driving. She remembers this but can’t make sense of it.

  “Ma’am. Do you know where you are?” Someone shines a light into her eyes; if she weren’t blinded already, she would have recoiled from the glare. “Do you know your name?”

  “Stella Andrews.” No. That is her maiden name, but she can’t remember what she should’ve said. “I think I was in an accident.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You were in a car accident. We’re taking you back now. Try not to struggle—”

  “My boys,” she cries. “Where are my boys?”

  “Your husband is already in an examination room.” It’s a man’s voice, rough but kind, and his hands are also rough but kind as they push her back onto the gurney or whatever it is.

  Stella can’t see, and the sounds are echoing and wavering. Her hands paddle at the air, struggling. Someone holds her down. The taste of eggnog coats her tongue, along with the taste of blood. She’s going to be sick. She’s going to pass out. The world spins, and Stella screams when someone straightens her legs and the pain is thick and wild and terrifying.

  “Whe
re are my sons? Where are my boys?”

  “Shh.” This voice, female, tries to be soothing. “They’re being taken care of.”

  That’s all Stella knows for a time, and when she comes back to herself, all the pain has fallen on her and the hangover has too. Her first thought is to struggle up from the blankets and sheets binding her so tightly to the bed, but she can’t manage to do more than work one hand free. The other is pinned by a needle and tubing attached to a plastic bag of some kind of clear fluid hanging from a hook. Her second thought is guilt and fear—she’s been unconscious, clearly, incapable of getting to her boys. She has failed them. Mama has always been there for every bump and bruise and bad dream.

  She needs to get to them.

  The nurse who comes at the call of her bell looks tired. She is not particularly kind, and her hands are calloused and rough on Stella’s when she pushes her back against the pillows. But her eyes are understanding. “Shh. Lie back. You’ve had a bad accident. You have stitches, and you need to be careful.”

  “My boys—”

  “Your younger son is at home with your husband.” The nurse tucks in the blankets again, checks the bag of fluids, smooths and straightens it.

  Relief floods Stella, but only for a moment. “And Gage?”

  The nurse looks Stella in the eye, and she will always be grateful for that honesty. “Your older son is in ICU with multiple injuries. He was operated on to relieve swelling in the brain, but he hasn’t regained consciousness yet.”

  Stella lets out a long, low cry and falls back against the pillows. “But he’s alive. Oh, thank God. He’s alive.”

  The nurse pats her, adjusts some things and leaves. Stella, against her will, sleeps. She wakes to pain. Throbbing, grinding, burning agony all through her in every part. Behind her eyes. Her throat and tongue so dry when she swallows it’s like rubbing a hand the wrong way on a fish’s scales.

  Time passes without her knowing how much or how long, only that it’s measured in the ebb and flow of pain. Later, she will discover it’s been three days since the accident before she’s allowed to get out of bed. Jeff and Tristan visit her in the hospital, Tristan bearing a tiny bandage on his precious forehead and Jeff without any signs of damage at all but the rings of sleeplessness beneath his eyes and the way he grips her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeff says, over and over, and Stella can’t begin to think what he’s apologizing for.

  She cannot begin to forgive him.

  When she’s allowed to see her son at last, she’s in a wheelchair with her bandages and stitches and the hanging bags of liquids and medicines. She’s not allowed to go into the room, and can’t see him through the observation window without struggling to her feet. The world tips and spins as she grips the windowsill hard enough to bend a nail; that small pain is nothing compared to the rest, and it won’t be until later when a blood blister forms that she even notices.

  Gage is very small among all the tubes and wires, and Stella looks at him for a long time without saying anything. Jeff is not beside her, not this first time, though later there will be times when they stand side by side and look through the glass without saying anything to each other. Without offering each other the comfort of their touch. Without even looking at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeff says every time he leaves her.

  She thinks he means because he’s going home to their soft bed, their warm sheets. She thinks it’s because she and Gage were injured and he was not. She thinks it might even be because it’s the only thing he can think of to say, maybe the only thing he thinks she wants to hear.

  “Stop,” she tells him finally, the day she is getting ready to go home and leave her son behind. “Stop saying you’re sorry.”

  And at home, in their bed, where Stella gingerly stretches out with a sigh at the comfort of the mattress, the quiet of the room, the ease in the ache of all her muscles, Jeff moves next to her and tries to hold her. The weight of his hand is more than annoyance, it’s pain on the remaining stitches that are soon to become scars. His breath is too hot. The way he shifts and shakes the bed when he moves makes her want to scream.

  “No,” she tells him when he tries to nuzzle against her.

  “I don’t want to do it,” he says, meaning he doesn’t want to make love. “I just want to—”

  “No,” Stella says again. If she could turn onto her side away from him, she would, but there’s still too much pain in the wound on her hip and belly. She stares at the dark ceiling and listens to the sound of her husband’s affront at this rejection, knowing she should have been kinder and incapable of finding anything to be kind with.

  He moves away from her in a shuffle of sheets, flinging himself onto his side and pulling the covers almost completely off her so that she has to sit up and rearrange them. This hurts too, stretching her rips and tears, but she supposes it’s less than whatever agony Jeff’s feeling at being rejected. And again, Stella searches herself for any scrap of kindness and is unable to find any. She lies back to stare at the darkness and listens for the telltale whistle-snort of Jeff’s snoring to tell her he’s fallen asleep.

  And then, only then, does she allow herself to weep.

  * * *

  She woke in the night to the sound of nothing.

  No soft hush-hush whisper of the respirator, no rattle gasp of breath from down the hall. Stella blinked against the darkness and the scald of sudden tears. Even in sleep, she always knew he was gone, but waking this way slammed the memory into her with the weight of a fist.

  She sat up in her bed, drawing her knees close. The covers tangled, making it hard at first, and she fought them. She didn’t want to weep, but there was no stopping it. And, at least at this grief, there was no shame. The tears welled up and out of her, the claws of the grief beast shredding her into pieces.

  Stella pressed her face to her knees, linking her fingers to the back of her head. Weeping, weeping, weeping. The empty house took her grief and swallowed it all.

  For so many years when the boys were small, she and Jeff had made love in whispers and sighs instead of shouts; for so many years Stella had given up to her sorrow in the same way, too mindful of her husband beside her in bed and her son down the hall to ever fully give in to it.

  But now she was alone, and there was nobody there to hear or judge her pain. Nobody to share it with either, and she’d grown accustomed to that. But somehow now it seemed worse than ever, not because she wasn’t used to it but because at least for a little while she’d had Matthew to turn to and now he was gone too.

  The pain of that loss was still fresh, still raw, but she’d get over it. She’d had her heart broken before, more than once. There would be another man. Probably a lot more, at least if she decided to start flying again. And if there weren’t, she’d had her share, hadn’t she? Men could be replaced.

  Her son never could.

  In the early days after the accident, confined to her bed with her own injuries, Stella had gone insane with trying to get to her boy. Tristan and Jeff had been treated and sent home. Jeff’s mom had come to stay and help take care of them. At six, Tristan was old enough to miss his mother and brother, but being taken care of by Granny made it seem more like a vacation than a hardship. Stella might have her issues with her mother-in-law, who meant well but could be overcautious and hovery, but that only made her feel better about knowing Tristan was in her care.

  It was knowing that she couldn’t get out of her bed and go to her son, who needed her. Nightmares of him crying woke her repeatedly, along with the pain of her injuries as well as the constant bustle and regular interruptions of the hospital, until Stella had gone hours without restful sleep. Psychotic from sleep deprivation and in agony, she’d broken down more than once, sobbing into her hands without anyone to help her. She’d wept so fiercely she’d vomited.

 
She kind of felt as though she could throw up now. Deep breaths calmed her, though they didn’t stop the burn of the tears. She swallowed hard, again and again, and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes in a vain attempt at getting herself to stop. And then she simply gave up to it, all the grief and sorrow, all the loss.

  Stella let it sweep her away.

  Shaking with it as if she’d been struck by fever, she curled in the blankets and clutched a pillow to her face. She screamed into it. Then louder. Hoarse and brutal, the scream shredded her throat and left her with the taste of blood. Yet she felt better when she’d done it, once, twice, again. Then more. Until finally, wrung out and slaughtered from the force of this grief that would never, never ease, never cease, Stella rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.

  She went down the hall to Gage’s room. She stood outside the door with her hand on the knob the way she had so many times before. But this time, with the darkness to shield her, to offer its comfort, she opened the door.

  Inside, the faint glow of his night-light illuminated the square shapes of dresser, desk and bed, and Stella stopped herself a few feet inside the door. It hadn’t occurred to her that the light would still be on. At eight, Gage had no longer been afraid of the dark, but both he and Tristan used the lights, which turned on automatically in darkness so they could find their way to the bathroom in the night. The one she used in her bathroom had never gone out in all these years, so it should’ve been no surprise to find this one still worked too. Now Stella stood in the middle of the room with the faint green glow casting shadows on everything.

  It might’ve been scary, that green light, but Stella remembered how it would’ve led her son safely around any obstacles that threatened him, and something lifted inside her. She thought about turning on the overhead light, but for now this was enough.

  Stella went to Gage’s bed. The mattress crinkled when she sat on it. The comforter and sheets, patterned with the faces and logos of his favorite cartoon show, had been expertly made up. Jeff’s mother would’ve been the one to do that, sometime before Gage had come home from the hospital. Margery had slept here and left it looking as though she never had.