by Sam Mariano
Instead of crying in front of him, especially when he was so angry at me, I held back the tears and closed my mouth, spinning on my heel and making a quick exit, practically running to my car, jamming the key in the ignition.
As the tears began to well up in my eyes, I hesitated, thinking maybe Derek would come out after me if I waited another second. Maybe he wouldn't want to leave things like that between us, and he would come walking out the front door. I would get out of my car and start walking toward him, and he would meet me halfway. We would hug, I would bury my face in his shoulder, and all would be forgiven.
But he never came.
I sat there for two minutes, and the door never opened.
Derek never came outside.
Nothing was forgiven.
And for some inexplicable reason, as I swallowed the lump in my throat and finally put my car in reverse, I had the feeling that nothing would ever be the same.
Chapter Seventeen-
Derek never called me that night.
I don't know why I expected him to when he had been so angry.
He didn't call the next day, either.
I had definitely expected him to calm down and see that he was the one being an asshole, but apparently my expectations were too high.
The time alone with no contact only caused me to stew in my own feelings, to journal, to reflect, and then –even though for once I didn't really want to—to go back and read my mother's journals.
When had I become addicted to Derek?
When had he become so bad for me?
When had he become Mike?
When had I become my mother?
There were so many questions, and I didn't have any of the answers. I spent the whole weekend waiting for Derek to call, refusing to call him, and basically studying my own journals and my mother's, trying to find the pages where we both must have gone off course.
My conclusion was that there had been no big moment for me, no red flag that should have gone up. Somehow, Derek had found a way to sneak into my heart, completely without my permission and before I could have noticed.
That's the only way I could have allowed myself to fall in love—that most hated and feared state of human emotion.
The one day –in my studying—that I did find myself pulled back to was the day that I found the letters from my mother in the copy of Wuthering Heights in Mike's bedroom. I had such clarity that day when I came home and wrote about it in my journal. At that time, I had not forgotten that love was a bad force, wreaking havoc on otherwise placid lives, turning otherwise intelligent women into big emotional lumps of stupid.
It wasn't a position I had applied for, that was for certain.
But somehow I must have lost my way, because as I stared at my phone for the 800,000th time that weekend, I was definitely filling the position of Big Emotional Lump of Stupid.
When I thought about everything without all the emotional implications, I felt completely disgusted with myself.
When I thought of seeing Kayla's car in his driveway, I felt an emotional mix of anger and guilt—guilt at not trusting him and at overreacting, anger at being lied to and yelled at when I couldn't have known any better.
I spent the whole weekend fighting the urge to call him and apologize, and the only reason I was able to stop myself was because I couldn't come up with a plausible excuse to apologize.
The only reason I could come up with for wanting to apologize was: "I love him, and I just want everything to be good again."
But apologizing wouldn't make Kayla un-pregnant, so it couldn't truly make things good again.
By the weekend's end, I felt a melancholy kind of acceptance that our situation was probably just going to suck for a little while, maybe until we figured out a way to successfully deal with it, or maybe until it got to be too much and one of us just gave up.
Even though I was losing self-respect for every moment that I tried to rationalize what I had become, I never intended to be the one to give up. I loved Derek, apparently more than I loved myself, and I just wanted more than anything for us to work out, to be together no matter how difficult it may be.
The clincher was Sunday night when I tossed and turned all night, and finally fell asleep only to have a completely terrifying and realistic dream in which I was driving down a dark road, not even understanding why I was on it, and all of a sudden I saw Kayla's car coming in my direction from the other lane. I couldn't control myself, I just got flushed with emotion and then my foot was pressing down on the accelerator, faster, faster, straight at Kayla's car. I realized, before I hit her, what I was doing, and I tried to stop—panicked, hit the brake, screamed.
I woke up before the collision, but in the moment before the dream ended I could see Kayla's horrified face through the windshield as my car came flying hastily toward hers, and the second before I jerked awake, I realized it wasn't Kayla in the car, it was Sarah.
I didn't go back to sleep after that, and it definitely wasn't a dream that makes you wake up to peaceful thoughts.
I was appalled.
When I first woke up, tense with fear from the incredibly realistic dream, I actually wished momentarily that I had someone to go crawl in bed with.
Someone to make the monster go away.
But only I could make the monster go away.
For just a moment, I didn't get out of bed. I lay awake in the dark of my bedroom, for the first time in years having a memory of when I was four years old, hiding under my covers at night and trying to sleep, knowing that the monster was there every night, and only morning would make it disappear. I could still remember that feeling of fear. I remembered lying in my bed, helpless to make it go away, hating it for making me so feel afraid.
When I was four, the monster was something I just had to live with.
It was 3:48 a.m. when I pulled myself out of bed, because I couldn't even try to go to sleep after that. I was haunted by the dream, by the feelings that it stirred within me. I went through the trailer turning on all the lights, refused to look out the windows, and absorbed myself in doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen. The dream had actually upset me so much that I couldn't even journal, because I didn't want to ever see what I had seen in that dream again.
I waited until 5:04 to go wake up Alex.
As consolation for waking him up at "the ass-crack of dawn," as he muttered at me, I made some breakfast.
We sat at the table in the dead silence of morning for a good ten minutes, cutting up French toast, listening to the sound of the knife grating across the porcelain surface of the plate, the only sound either of us made as we cut up our food.
"So, not to sound ungrateful about being cooked for or anything, but is there a reason you pulled me out of bed at this ungodly hour?" he finally asked me.
I had spent every second since 3:48 thinking about it, but I still couldn't find the words, so I just nodded.
"Are you okay?" he asked, a frown marring his brow as he froze for a second, fork suspended in the air.
I swallowed, trying to make the strange lump in my throat go away. I started to speak, but I felt my eyes begin to burn, so I stopped and nodded again.
"Are you sure?" he asked. "You really…don't look okay at all."
Since my only options were to speak or eat, I crammed some French toast into my mouth, buying myself a little bit more time.
Watching me, Alex allowed his fork to finish its journey to his mouth and he also took a bite, but his green eyes never left my face.
When I finished chewing I took a sip of orange juice, and, gathering my courage, said, "Did you mean what you said to me the other day?"
He blinked. "I'm…going to need you to be just a little more specific."
"When you told me that you would send me to an out-of-state school if that's what I needed to…get away—did you mean it?"
He slowly lowered his fork to his plate, and the moment seemed to hang in the air forever before he finally said, "Yes."
&
nbsp; Feeling at once relieved and depressed, I let out a small sigh and nodded. "I'd like…to take you up on that offer."
He didn't say anything, but just finally saying it aloud made tears well up in my eyes, tears that I didn't want to let fall.
At first, I didn't know what he was doing, but he suddenly stood up from the table and walked over to my side, gently pulling my arm to indicate for me to stand.
Confused, I stood up and just kind of watched him uncertainly.
Then he wrapped his arms around me and lightly pressed my head into his shoulder.
He was hugging me.
For all that I was trying to hold my composure, that seemed to break it, and before I had time to even comprehend that I was crying, I was sobbing violently into my dad's shoulder as he rubbed the back of my head and promised me everything would be all right.
I stayed home from school that day.
I didn't feel that I could handle facing Derek so soon, and Alex was off that day, so he suggested that I just skip that one day.
I didn't argue. I needed the day off.
Alex spent the day tiptoeing around me like I was a very breakable porcelain doll, but he was trying valiantly not to let me know it. I could tell he wanted to ask me about it, what had finally pushed me over the edge, but the dream was still too fresh, the fear and horror of it still too real. I wondered, in the brief moments that I let it cross my mind, if that was what my mother felt like when she drove head on at Sarah all those years before, sealing all of our fates. I couldn't think about it for long though, because just seeing that flash of Kayla's face and then Sarah's face, that moment of realization…it made me shudder, and I had to distance myself from the memory.
To Alex's credit, he seemed to know better than to ask.
While I played hooky that day, Alex and I sat together on the couch for hours watching Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, although I may never understand why Alex thought these would be good heartbreak/mourning movies.
It worked though. For those four hours, I didn't feel like crying.
It was approaching noon before he finally turned the television off and asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
I nodded my head and said kind of slowly, "Actually, I want you to tell me about her."
He hesitated. "Jamie?"
I nodded again. "Yeah. Tell me about the Jamie you knew."
A soft smile touched his lips, the first one of the morning, and he said, "Where do you want me to start?"
There were so many unanswered questions, so many things I didn't know about her, about him—about them. I didn't know where to begin.
"Did you really love her?" I asked after a pause.
I saw him tense just a little, but since I would be granted anything I wanted on that day of heartbreak for me, he managed to sigh a little and nod.
"I didn't realize how much until she was gone. That's how it usually works," he said, attempting to smile.
"Did she know?" I asked.
He shook his head, a gleam in his eye. "No. I'm sure she never knew. The only person she wanted love from was Mike, and…I wasn't very good at loving her. In another life, we would have been happy together; just not this one."
I nodded in understanding, thinking the same rules applied to me and Derek. Under different circumstances, we could have been so happy together.
"I don't even know what to ask," I admitted. "I want to know everything."
"There's plenty of time, kid," he assured me. "We've got many years to come. If you can't learn it all today, there's plenty of time to ask."
"Tell me how you knew about the book," I said.
"Wuthering Heights," he said. "Well, your mother was a very literary woman, as I'm sure you remember. She lived and breathed the written word."
I smiled at the memory of her reading to me and nodded. "I know."
"She fancied Mike her love story. Even when it got really bad, she hung on to those clichés—love is all you need; nothing worth having is ever easy; love only once; good things come to those who wait—you name it. The tortured love theme…she thought it was fitting, maybe even romantic since they were supposed to be at the end of their rough journey. Years she had waited, and finally he was going to be all hers. He was such a lazy piece of shit," Alex said, shaking his head. "He wouldn't expend his energy on her. He took what was easy…and he threw away two women who loved him more than life itself. I know that Sarah isn't the good guy in your version of the story—I still fully believe she got pregnant intentionally to trap him and it's been 19 years—but she loved him, and she didn't deserve to be jerked around either. Jamie certainly didn't. Technically, Jamie was the mistress, but… she loved him with all of her heart. To her, it wasn't an affair; it was true love and he just finally realized it."
"Were they having an affair long?" I asked. "I found the letter from my mom to Mike, but…I kind of got caught, so I didn't get to finish the letter. It said he was supposed to leave Sarah for Mom, but she said he was married…"
Alex nodded. "They reunited. Not intentionally, they just kind of ran into each other, but they had this…intense passion for one another that I really don't like to think about," he stated. "Jamie and Mike were addicted to each other—they couldn't be together, but they couldn't leave each other alone. And for some reason, they couldn't seem to figure out that pattern, and they were just as damn surprised every time they didn't work out as they were the time before." Alex sighed wearily. "Until the last time, that is. Jamie did finally figure it out, but…it robbed her of this…sparkle that she had, this innocence and optimism that she somehow hung onto through everything. Jamie invested everything in Mike. She gave him all of herself, and all of her hopes rested on him. That was her biggest mistake, Nicole. Never let your hopes and dreams rest on a man, because they aren't reliable."
I nodded. "I think I'm beginning to see that."
"So did she," he informed me. "He was married to Sarah that time, and it was hard for your mother to even accept that she had stooped so low, but it was for Mike, and she decided just to put all her chips on him one last time. He promised her he was going to leave Sarah and be with her. He told her that he loved her, and he had never actually told her that—I think maybe that's why she decided to trust him again. She wanted more than anything to believe him, Nicole. But your mother, for all her hopefulness, wasn't a stupid woman. He fell back into the same pattern he used to fall back into—he would always withdraw from her when he realized he wasn't going to follow through on his promise. Throughout the years when she would talk to me about him, every time she would cry. That was how I knew something was different the last time—when she talked to me about him, about the affair and her doubts about him actually leaving, she wasn't crying. It was like she had run out or something, and I guess she had—she had run out of tears and hope and everything else. She was drained. She let him hurt her more than anyone else in her whole life, but she couldn't stay away from him."
There was a long pause, and I wasn't sure that he was going to go on, because something changed in his face. His jaw was tight, his eyes cast toward the ground, and if I wouldn't have known any better, I would have thought he was going to cry.
"There's something…that I want to tell you, and you're probably going to…get very mad at me. I'll understand, believe me, because I've spent years…hating myself for it."
Dread formed in the pit of my stomach. "Okay…"
"I told you the last time was different," he said. "Your mother felt him withdraw and…I don't know what was different that time, but somehow…it was like she suddenly woke from a stupor, and she realized he was never going to follow through. She called me one night…it was actually the weekend before the accident, and she told me…"
Alex paused and cleared his throat, maintaining his composure. "She told me that she knew Mike wasn't going to leave Sarah, and she couldn't stand to be his mistress again. She told me
that she wanted so badly to walk away from him, to just put him behind her. But she wasn't strong enough. She told me that. Even though she knew she needed to walk away from him, she still loved him, and she couldn't walk away on her own. She asked me to help her. She said that… loving him was killing her, and she just needed a fresh start, a new life. Jamie finally realized that Mike would never be anything but bad for her, Nicole, and she came to me, and she begged me to help her leave him. She asked me if we could just take you and go away somewhere and never come back, because that was the only way she could…"
I was completely amazed as I watched my father cry for the first time in my life.
"Hey, don't do that," I said, moving closer to him on the couch, not knowing what to do. "It's okay."
He shook his head, looking irritated at his own lack of composure. "No, it's not okay. She needed me. She needed me to help her get away from him, and she even asked me for my help… and I let her down. I told her no, that she was being…overly dramatic. That was Saturday night, Nicole. She died Wednesday." He looked at me, his eyes tormented with years of guilt. "I could have saved her, but I told her no."
It was my turn to hug him. "You couldn't have known what was going to happen."
"I shouldn't have had to!" he told me vehemently. "She would still be alive today if I would have just put you guys in the car and taken her away like she asked me to, but I didn't take her seriously. She asked me for help, Nicole. Do you have any idea…how it feels to know that someone you love died, and you could have stopped it, but you didn't?"
"You didn't know," I told him quietly as I hugged him, and this time it was Alex who cried into my shoulder.
We stayed there on the couch for a couple minutes as he regained his composure and I absorbed the new information he had just passed on to me.
Apparently her journals weren't complete. Not only was there nothing in there about that part of the affair with Mike, but there was definitely nothing about turning to Alex, asking him to take her away, to escape Mike's hold on her.