by C. M. Albert
Life just wasn’t meant to nest in my body.
So, no. I wasn’t bent. I was all the way broken.
Chapter 1
Ryan
OLIVIA WAS MOST at peace when she slept. It’s when her face was the softest and she most resembled the woman I’d fallen in love with eight years ago. Back when we were Liv and Ry against the world. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d even called me that.
No—scratch that. I could.
It was the day she found out she was pregnant with our daughter. I was in the middle of a lecture when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I never answered a call during class. It’s why I had it on Do Not Disturb. The fact that the call still came through let me know the person had tried calling more than once and it was most likely an emergency.
“Excuse me,” I told my students as I stepped out of the lecture hall to answer Livy’s call.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, fear gripping my heart.
“Ry,” she whispered, her voice tender and sweet, “we’re pregnant.”
“What?” I ran a hand over the new beard I was sporting. I was still getting used to it then, so it was an unconscious habit. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!” she squealed. “When do you get home?”
“Well, I was supposed to have dinner with the department, but I’ll cancel. Of course, I’ll cancel. Do you want to go out and celebrate?”
“No,” she said, her voice lowering. “I want to stay in and celebrate.”
Relief flooded my heart. Other than for baby-making purposes, our sex life had become a little stale lately. The last few years had been about nothing more than trying to get pregnant and stay pregnant. Two miscarriages were enough to make even the strongest couple go through a dry spell. I was afraid to let hope take root, but Olivia’s excitement was contagious.
“I’m definitely cancelling dinner then,” I chuckled. “Want me to pick anything up on the way home?”
“No,” she said, breathily, the woman I’d first met here at the university finally coming back to me. “You’re all I want for dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. Get your cute ass home so we can celebrate, Ry.”
Maybe we lost the baby because of me. They say it’s bad luck to tell anyone before week twelve. We’d been through two other losses, so you’d think I’d be a seasoned pro at this kind of protocol by now. But no. My excitement got the best of me. The entire class noticed my changed demeanor when I walked back in, floating on cloud nine.
“Everything okay, Wells?” one of my students called out from the front row.
It was the one thing I let them do that other tenured professors didn’t. They all called me by my last name. I liked to keep my classes informal—I found students learned best when they weren’t terrified of their teacher.
“More than okay,” I said, beaming. “We’re having a baby!”
I wish I could take those words back now. Swallow them whole. I’d never told Olivia about it, either. I don’t know why exactly. I knew it wasn’t the reason Laelynn died. But our little flower of hope was still gone, and that moment haunted me every day since. The last thing I needed was for my wife to have yet another reason to push me away.
There was no more Liv and Ry. Just two broken people trying their best to hold things together—though these days, I wondered if there really were two of us trying to do that. Somedays, I felt as if I was the only one trying to figure out how in the hell to not just survive each day, but to heal and move on.
To make our way back to Liv and Ry again.
I knew, as I now watched her resting, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to get us back to that place again. I ran my fingers over a long strand of her hair, brushing it out of her face. I sometimes wondered what she dreamed about, but we didn’t talk about stuff like that anymore. Not for my lack of trying. I started to climb out of bed slowly, not wanting to wake her, when she grabbed my hand.
“Ryan?” She sat up, looking around like she’d forgotten where she was, and what her life was like these days. “I had the strangest dream,” she said, sinking back against her pillows.
I lay down with her, taking any opening I could get. “What happened?”
She curled against my side and rested her head on my chest. I held my breath. It had been so long since she’d touched me on her own. I didn’t want to jinx it or mess things up.
“I was being chased by an angry zebra across a field in the grasslands of Africa. The grass was growing taller and taller the closer he got, until I suddenly fell down a hole and through a long, dark tunnel. I couldn’t see a thing. When I landed, I was curled up inside of an ostrich egg, and there was another fetus inside with me. We were bloody and wet, but I felt safe. Until my teeth started falling out. Which freaked me out. So, I started punching the walls of the egg, trying to escape, when I suddenly saw a crack. A guy’s hand reached in and pulled me out. I thought it was you, but he didn’t really have a face. He just felt comfortable, somehow. My faceless savior. Who knows? Maybe it was my dad, because the next thing I knew I was sitting at Bev’s, eating an ice cream cone with my father, like I used to when I was younger. He picked up a smooth, flat stone and skipped it across the lake’s surface.
“Then he turned to me and said, ‘Livy, I don’t trust children. They’re here to replace us.’ That’s when I noticed he was really the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, and he was rusting on the bench right in front of me. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. So, I picked up a handful of stones and kept right on trying to skip them across the water. That’s when I realized I was wearing Dorothy’s checkered blue dress and sparkly red shoes—though they were really a pair of Converse high-tops I’d bedazzled. I heard something whimpering and looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight except for my fossilized father on the bench. But there was a basket sitting next to him, so I leaned over and peeked inside.”
“Do I even dare ask what you saw? I’m a little terrified at this point that a T. rex might’ve climbed out and eaten you or something.”
She actually giggled. My heart relaxed for the first time in months.
“No. It was the cutest puppy I’d ever seen. I think it was a terrier of some sort.”
“Let me guess? We’re going to look for puppies today?”
She sat up, using her elbow for support as she looked at me. There was the faintest sparkle of light in her pale blue eyes. That’s all I ever wanted. I would genetically engineer the perfect puppy and sit with the embryo until I’d Frankensteined the little bastard to life if that’s what it took to make Liv smile again.
“You mean it?”
I tugged at a strand of her warm, honey blond hair. “Would it make you happy?”
Her brows furrowed, and I worried I’d screwed up the moment once again. But her smile returned, and she nodded. “I really think it might help.”
“Then puppy shopping it is,” I said, ready to hop out of bed and shower.
She grabbed my hand again. This time, something old and familiar sparkled back at me from within her eyes. I didn’t dare hope I was reading her mood right. But she pulled me back into bed with her, and for the next hour, she finally let me in.
Chapter 2
Olivia
RY WAS ALWAYS so patient with me. Even in the early days—he was the holy, I was the wild. How we’d grown so distant over the past few years, I had no idea. I mean—I knew why, but I didn’t know how. Not when he’d been the air I breathed in the morning, the succulent breaks I’d taken in the afternoons, and the peace I drifted off to sleep with each evening.
Now, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t breathe, for god’s sake. But somewhere along the way, our grief had become my grief. Maybe it was the day he asked me if we could just move on. Slowly, surely, it was as if the hinges on my heart started to swing closed. Until one day, I couldn’t feel anymore. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to be Liv, much less Liv and Ry.
No one tells you that when you
become pregnant everything changes. Not only your body and your home as you prepare for the baby’s arrival, but your heart. Your very soul. It expands in a way you can’t imagine is possible. I mean, you are literally growing another human being inside your body. It only lives because you live. So, what happens when it dies?
Exactly. A part of me died, too.
After two miscarriages, I was beginning to doubt I would ever have a pregnancy that stuck. We were about to give up trying all together when our miracle baby, Laelynn, came along. Her pregnancy was different. I felt great the whole time. She was growing and hitting every milestone. We’d even decorated her nursery.
One day she was kicking inside of me, strong as can be. Then, slowly, the kicks grew less frequent, causing me to worry. I’ll never forget the day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time she’d kicked. That, suddenly, she wasn’t anymore.
Nothing has been right ever since.
And no matter how great Ryan is, he can never understand what it felt like to have to push her tiny, lifeless form from mine, knowing my body failed her. Of course I wanted to die, too.
I suffocated under the weight of an unspeakable grief the moment we got home and faced her empty nursery. I couldn’t even help Ryan as he disassembled her room, putting everything into storage so I didn’t have to be reminded that instead of coming home with us, we would have to bury her.
Soon, my grief morphed into self-loathing every time I looked in the mirror. I couldn’t pass by one without seeing the curve of my belly where she’d lived. Without feeling the hollow emptiness that was there now, or the full weight of my breasts that would never feed her. I felt like a complete and utter failure—blaming my body on my inability to give her the life she was meant to have.
Ryan still held hope that “maybe someday” we could try again. I wasn’t quite so sure. I’d gone on birth control so my body could take a break. I wasn’t sure if I could live with myself if we lost one more baby. There were some days I wish we’d never started trying. It was so good when it was just Liv and Ry. What I called “the before.”
But on my darkest days, there is the small, guilty wish that maybe if I hadn’t taken Ryan’s class, I never would’ve met him to begin with, which would’ve led me down a whole different path in life—maybe one without so much heartache.
So, when Ryan asked if I wanted to get a puppy—like the one I saw in my dream—something in me stirred. If I couldn’t give a human life, maybe I’d be better off with the four-legged variety. My stupid therapist had suggested the same thing a few weeks ago—said something about how animals help us heal. Well, I wasn’t getting a puppy to heal. I was getting a puppy to have something to do. To keep my mind off the fact that I would probably be introducing Laelynn to solids right now. Or how she would be crawling, so we’d have needed to install safety locks and baby gates. The Parents magazine email I’d gotten just yesterday was a stark reminder of the milestones we were missing with our daughter. Each time something like that was delivered to me, it felt like a knife to my chest. A constant reminder of our loss.
So, for the first time in weeks, I showered, dried my long hair, and then took the time to style it with my hot rollers. I even put on a little lip gloss and mascara. Instead of my usual yoga pants, I pulled on a pair of dark jeans, sandals, and a cute boho tank top.
“Whoa,” Ryan said, hearing me come down the stairs. We lived in a historic home in the city, so everything creaked in this house. I loved it.
“Liv, you look . . .” He stood, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “You look like Liv again.”
I knew what he meant. I felt like that woman again, just the tiniest bit. But a part of me wished he would’ve just let it go. Not said anything. I was tired of talking about everything all the time. Of making everything about that. Even if it was. The thing I didn’t want to examine too closely was the fact that outside of our loss, we didn’t have much to say these days. We didn’t have much to celebrate either. Or plan. Or dream about. It was just two lonely, broken people in a large, creaky historic home that Ryan bought me because it once seemed like the perfect family home. For our perfect family.
The myth of perfection was a bitch.
INSTEAD OF GOING to the shelter as I thought we would, Ryan surprised me when he drove out to the country instead. I didn’t ask questions because that required energy. Ryan was listening to NPR, so I opened my Kindle and browsed my selections. It had been too long since I’d read, even though it had once been my favorite pastime. The only problem is I wasn’t exactly in the mood for one of the rom-coms I’d normally read. I think I’d throw my fist through the car window if I had to read about some stupid chick’s “meet-cute” with the hunky barista who happened to live across the hall in her new apartment building. Gag.
The only thing that caught my eye was a dark romance that was based on a true story. Even if Ryan and I weren’t having much sex these days, it didn’t mean I didn’t think about it. Hell, that was one of the things that first drew us together like rabbits in heat.
“Whatcha reading?” he asked, glancing over at my Kindle.
I turned the device so he couldn’t see. “Nothing that interesting.”
He pulled off onto yet another country road. “Well, we’re almost there.”
“Where exactly is ‘there’?”
“It’s a surprise I really think you’re going to like,” he said, winking.
That wink had once done unspeakable things to my insides. Heck, it did something to all his students’ insides. I wasn’t stupid. He was a legend on campus—by far the hottest professor any of us had ever had. The youngest, too. There were only nine years between us, which seemed like nothing now. But when I was a twenty-three-year-old MBA student, and he was my thirty-two-year-old teacher, it had been quite the coup. Of course, we had to wait until I graduated before anyone could know we were officially dating. Even then, we acted as if we’d met outside of school. But everyone seemed to know it was a nudge (wink wink) story.
I glanced over at Ryan as he drove. Even at forty, he was still the most handsome man I’d ever laid eyes on. He had boyish good looks with dimples for days, dark brown hair, and a closely trimmed beard. On the rare occasions when he still wore his glasses, it was game over. He caught me looking at him, and his eyes warmed as they held mine.
The moment passed quickly, though, when we pulled onto a never-ending driveway in the middle of nowhere. “What are we doing here?”
“Patience, Livy.”
When we got out of the car, we were met with an enthusiastic greeting from a small, curly dog.
“Sandie!” a woman shouted from a small building behind the yellow farmhouse where we parked. “Come here, you silly girl.”
The dog did a couple circles, as if chasing her own tail, then darted back to her owner, a plump, older woman with brown, tight curls, much like her pet.
It was hard not to smile. The dog looked like a miniature dust mop. She was the sweetest toffee color, and her fur looked so soft, almost as if she were a stuffed animal of an actual dog. I glanced up at Ryan and he grinned, taking my hand as we made our way to a small barn.
“I’m Regina,” the woman said as we followed her through the double doors, “and these are Miss Sandie’s puppies.”
The woman moved aside to let Ryan and me see over the small enclosure, and my heart nearly melted. In the corner of the pen was a mountain of puppies, their fat tummies rising and falling as they slept. They were all different shades of tan, brown, or brown and white, so it was hard to tell where one puppy stopped and another started.
“I’ll leave you to look at them. Just give me a holler if you want to take one home.”
“We’re really here to get one?” I asked, looking up at my husband with hope.
“Well, if you make a connection with one, absolutely. Regina’s daughter works at the university, and she sent an email around to faculty a couple weeks ago, asking if anyone wanted a Cavapoo from her mom’
s new litter. I was thinking about getting you one as a surprise, but when you dreamed about it last night—well, I took that as a sign,” Ryan said. “Go on, get in there.”
I stepped over the small barrier and sat in the center of the ringed enclosure. A couple of the puppies yawned and stretched, shaking their bodies of sleep. One puppy stayed where it was, even as others got up and started jumping on my legs and trying to chew the beads on my sandals. I reached over to pet the sleeping one and found its fur incredibly soft. Something about the lone puppy tugged at my heart.
It finally did a full-body stretch, its arms and legs going out like Superman, with the most adorable yawn. Its perky ears lifted, and the puppy finally noticed me. I bent over, lifting it with both hands and bringing it to my chest. That’s when I noticed it was a boy dog, and he had an adorable patch of white fur running from his belly all the way up to his chin. Instead of acting crazy and jumping out of my arms or licking my face, he snuggled deeper against my chest, burying his head under my armpit and making me laugh.
I looked up at Ryan, my eyes full of love.
“Regina!” Ryan called out. “I think we found the one we want.”
The elderly woman joined us inside the barn again and clucked with approval. “Good choice! Stitch is the runt of the litter, so he’s a little quieter than the rest. But he’s the sweetest of the bunch if you ask me.”
“Why’d you name him Stitch?” I asked, running my fingers along his head and down his back. It was such a soothing gesture. I could see why dogs might be good, natural therapy.
“When he was first born, he was really tiny—and ugly,” she said. She held up two hands in surrender. “Sorry, but it’s true.”