A Missing Heart

by Shari J. Ryan

  “I can’t stand listening to him cry,” she says, as her voice calms from the cries she was emitting earlier.

  “Are you safe?” I ask her. It’s so cold, blunt, and to the goddamn truth, but Jesus, she hasn’t acted like this before and I’m scared for both of us—mostly her. It’s like something cracked within her, and she’s shattering from the inside out.

  “Am I safe?” she asks, pulling herself up by the windowsill. “Am I fucking safe?” Her question forms into laughter, and the lack of response is sadly answering my question. She’s shaking, her knees are bowed in toward one another and her skin is becoming paler by the second. Her eyes are bulging with tiny red veins and her chest is heaving harder and faster than it should. I can only assume she’s having a panic attack since I’m not sure what else could be happening.

  “What’s your doctor’s number, T?”

  “You’re not calling my goddamn doctor,” she says pleadingly, through weak breaths.

  “I’ll call 9-1-1 if I have to. You’re clearly in trouble right now, and God, I would do just about anything to help you, but you won’t even help yourself by telling me what the hell is going on.”

  “Don’t threaten me, AJ,” she warns.

  “Babe, this isn’t a threat.” I manage to calm Gavin down for a minute, so I place him in his crib and flip the mobile on to quiet him down. With my own shallow breaths not doing much to keep me composed, I force myself to relax for Gavin’s sake.

  I turn toward Tori, looking in her eyes, realizing she doesn’t look like the woman I know, and she hasn’t for quite some time. Through thick and thin. Through thick and thin. Closing the space between us, I wrap my arms around her and squeeze tightly. I don’t say a word; I just hold her.

  “I’m not okay,” she whispers.

  “I know, babe.”

  “I’m not okay in the way that I shouldn’t be here tonight,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” I can’t panic right now. I must stay calm, for her. For Gavin.

  “I want to hurt myself,” she continues in a whisper.

  Her words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Hurt herself? She’s never spoken like this. “Tell me why. What happened in the past week to make you snap?” I should be reacting to her words quicker than I am but dammit to fucking hell, I want to know what happened.

  “I broke. I’ve been barely holding it together for months. When I saw you holding Gavin in the hospital, you looked like your world was ending, like you’d give up one of your limbs to make him feel better. You looked the way I should have felt, and I felt nothing, AJ. Nothing. What mother doesn’t feel anything? I feel fucking nothing! Nothing!” She starts to cry, and the tears barrel down her cheeks again. Is that what this is? She doesn’t feel like she’s good enough to be his mother?

  “Why, Tori? Why do you feel this way? What’s making you think this?”

  “I don’t know how to love him. No one has ever loved me the way I’m supposed to love him.”

  “I love you, T. Your parents love you, so that’s not true,” I tell her. I still have a firm grip on her shoulders, hoping my words are doing something to calm her irrational thoughts.

  “Those people are not my parents, AJ.”

  “What?” I’m not sure my response came out in anything more than my breath, but suddenly the wind has been sucked from my lungs, and I’m not sure how I even form a sound. Of course they are her parents. Her dad walked her down the damn aisle at our wedding. Her mother cried happy tears that day. Tori speaks to her parents several times a week. Is she telling me a story or is she trying to come clean? I don’t know what to believe.

  “Just because they look like parents, doesn’t mean they’re mine,” she snarls.

  “So then, who are your parents?”

  Tori tears her arms out of my grip and uses the wall as leverage to move away from me. “I will hurt myself before I tell you or any of those pieces of crap who call themselves therapists.” She’s gripping at the roots of her hair as she paces back and forth between the crib and the window on the opposite side of the room. Instinctually, I feel the need to place myself between Gavin and Tori—a feeling I should never have to have about the woman who gave birth to our son, but I’ve never seen this side of her. I’m not sure she’s even aware of what she’s doing. I’ve never had a panic attack, but I think that’s what happens.

  “Please stop making threats,” I tell her calmly. “I thought your therapist knew everything about your past. Hours ago you told me you’ve had the same therapist since you were a kid.”

  “He doesn’t know the truth, AJ.”

  “Does he know he isn’t completely aware of the truth?” I ask calmly. Tori told me her therapist was a “she” earlier, so now I’m wondering if she even has a therapist. If she doesn’t, she needs one immediately. I clearly can’t give her the help she needs.

  “No.”

  “How can he not?” I press.

  “The same way you thought you were marrying a woman without incredible baggage. You were so quick to agree to asking no questions about our pasts. We were on the same page for two very different reasons, but we were on the same fucking page, AJ. The page that didn’t include children in our empty future plans.”

  Empty future plans? “How many times can you say this, T?”

  “As many times as it takes for you to understand how serious I was about it.”

  “I think I get it,” I tell her, feeling the sarcasm seep through my words.

  “No you don’t,” she says, stopping the action of pacing the room. Thankfully, during our back and forth discussion, Gavin fell back asleep.

  Tori leaves the room and heads downstairs to the kitchen. I’m surprised she doesn’t trip down the steps with the way she’s carrying herself. I can’t let her out of my sight now after the shit she’s said throughout the past hour. I won’t be able to sleep tonight because of her, not Gavin. She turns on all of the lights in the kitchen and tears open the cabinet high above the stove, pulling down a bottle of vodka. I’m trying to be easy going with stopping her actions. She’s never drunk before with a purpose so if she needs a drink, she can have it, if that means she’ll calm down.

  She reaches for a glass from the cabinet near the sink and pours the vodka into it, but I remain still, sitting and watching as a bystander. She’s drinking the cheapest vodka we have in the house and with nothing in it. She’s going to make herself sick.

  I lean back against the wall and watch her take a couple of sips. Her nose crinkles and her eyes squeeze shut. “Feel better?” I ask.

  “No,” she says coldly, as she opens another cabinet and pulls out a bottle of pills from the back of the bottom shelf. I’ve never seen these pills before. I’ve never really had a reason to go into that particular cabinet she’s in, since I thought it was full of crystal glasses we never use.

  “What is that?” I ask her, taking a couple of steps closer.

  “They were prescribed, don’t worry,” she says, quickly flashing the bottle in front of my face. I grab her wrist while she’s waving the pills in the air and steady my focus on the small print.

  “Why do you have—” Never mind. I can assume why she has a bottle of Valium. I keep my words to myself as she drops a pill into her hand. I remain silent as she chases it with the vodka, mostly because I’m in shock and don’t know what to say.

  I’ve never taken anything that strong before, but I can assume it works fairly quickly. “Do you need to see a doctor right now, Tori?”

  She finishes the glass of vodka instead of answering me, then slides down the side of the cabinet until she hits the ground. Folding her head into her arms, I watch her back rise and fall at a slow, steady pace, telling me she’s coming down from the panic attack, if that’s what this is.

  I sit down in front of her and wait for the next move. I close my eyes as I search my mind for any memory that might hint of her having issues like this. There was one time when her
mother called her, asking her to do something, and Tori started to cry really hard, which was not what I would have expected in response to someone asking a favor. She locked herself in the bedroom for the afternoon and night before she came out and asked me to let it go. I let it go. Then, although I sometimes forget about it, there is the sequence of events that took place the day we found out she was pregnant. I think I blocked it out on purpose.

  It felt like it came out of nowhere the morning it all went down. Tori woke up and left the house without saying goodbye. That was completely unlike her. Before that morning, I would be woken up by her fingertips stroking lines up and down my torso. She’d have her head on my chest, looking up at me with her beautiful eyes until I opened mine. Then she’d smile, the smile I fell head over heels for way quicker than I had ever fallen for a smile. But when I woke up alone, I knew something wasn’t right, even if we had only been dating a few months. I called her phone a number of times, but she must have had it off or pushed my calls right to voicemail. It must have been less than an hour before I heard the front door of my place open and close, followed by the bathroom door slamming shut. Less than five minutes later, that same door flew open and Tori ran out, left the house and didn’t come back for an entire week.

  When she finally came back, she informed me that she spent the week trying to get an abortion before anyone found out, but she was already past the point of time doctors would do unnecessary abortions. We had no clue she was pregnant until she was twenty-five weeks and her stomach started to grow. It was never a thought in either of our minds since we were being extra careful, sort of.

  I tried not to overreact when she told me what she had been trying to accomplish, but I failed at that. Someone else was trying to take a child away from me, and I lost it. I lost it like she lost it. We both fucking lost it. Then she mentioned the word adoption and it wasn’t pretty. I told her she could go away, and I’d take care of our baby. She seemed surprised by this, considering neither of us wanted kids. At first, I thought she was scared to tell me she was pregnant, for fear of my reaction, but as time passed, I realized it was never me she was afraid of. It took a week of fighting for her to give up the battle. I promised her marriage. I promised her a good life. I promised our family would be okay, and we’d grow to love the idea of having a child in our lives. I must have been pretty damn convincing, but I haven’t been able to fulfill those promises, because in order to do that, Tori would have had to ignore all the reasons she didn’t want kids—and apparently she can’t do that.

  Lost in my rationalization for her behavior, I didn’t see her hand reach up to the counter and grab the pill bottle. I didn’t see her pour more pills into her hand or mouth, but I hear a crash and open my eyes to see that the bottle is on the floor, broken, there are pills spilled out, and Tori’s collapsing heavily to the floor as if she were attached to a falling anchor. The glass of vodka falls from her grip, and she crumples into a loose ball right here, on the middle of the kitchen floor.

  I should have seen the signs. I should have done something about them. This is my fucking fault. I’ll probably never know what made her like this, because she’s likely going to die on this goddamn floor tonight. Shit! Where’s my phone?

  “Tori!” I leap across the floor, falling on top of her. “Tori, how many of those pills did you just take? Answer me, babe. Tori!” I press her eyelids up, finding nothing but the whites of her eyes. Jumping to my feet, I circle around the house wildly until I find my phone on the coffee table in the living room. With complete disbelief that I have to call an ambulance for her, I dial the number carefully, feeling like I’m asleep and stuck in some awful nightmare. The words coming out of my mouth are words I’ve never had to use before.

  “I think my wife overdosed on Valium. She said she wanted to hurt herself but I was watching her. I took my eyes off of her for less than a minute and—”

  “Sir,” the operator addresses me. “I need to ask you a couple of questions. Please state your full name and your address so we can send someone over.”

  “It’s uh, Fifty Lightside Lane in Parkett.”

  “Okay, please wait for a brief hold so I can get you to the Parkett Police Department.”

  The hold feels like more than a pause as I wait for someone to pick up.

  “Parkett Police Department,” a man answers.

  I explain once more what happened and the questions continue. “Okay, sir, can you give me your name and address?”

  “I repeat all of the information I gave a moment ago, waiting for more direction on how I can help her.

  “And which room in your house is she currently located in?”

  “The kitchen,” I answer, sitting down beside Tori. “Now what?” I ask.

  “AJ, I need you to stay calm. Can you tell me if she is conscious?”

  “No, she’s not. I can’t wake her up. I have a baby here. I don’t know what to do.” I’m panicking. I can’t do this to Gavin. I’ve watched what Hunter and Olive have gone through without a wife and a mother, and I’ll be damned if I put Gavin through the same pain.

  “Okay, can you tell me if she’s breathing?”

  I place my fingers in front of her nose, feeling a bit of air flowing. “Yes, she is. I’m not sure how well, though.”

  “That’s great. That’s good, we want her breathing right now. I need you to sit with her and continue to make sure she’s breathing. Help is on the way.”

  “Okay, I’m real worried about her,” I tell him.

  “Do you know what kind of pills she took, AJ?”

  I grab the bottle from the ground, spinning it around, trying to focus on the name again to make sure I read it right the first time. “Valium.”

  “Do you know how many she took?”

  “I didn’t know she had the prescription, and I don’t know how many pills were in the bottle. I took my eyes off of her for only a second.”

  “Okay, does she have a medical condition needing the Valium at the moment?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I tell him. I sound like I don’t know my wife. I’m questioning if I actually know Tori at all.

  I place the operator on speaker so I can send Hunter a text message, telling him I need help immediately—that I need him to come and stay with Gavin while I go to the hospital with Tori.

  “How is her breathing?” the operator asks.

  “She’s still breathing,” I tell him.

  “Okay good, you’re doing a great job, AJ.” Really? Because I pretty much feel like I’ve failed Tori and our family.

  Hunter is quick to respond, telling me he’ll be here in a few. Thankfully, he lives less than five minutes away, and he arrives before the ambulance does.

  During the long seconds it takes Hunter to walk inside and assess the scene, he takes me by the arm and pins me against the wall while I keep a grip on the phone pressed up to my ear. Hunter mouths to me, “This isn’t your fault, bro, she needs help.” The only thoughts going through my head are that this happened for a reason and this was her cry for help—the one I’ve ignored for too long.

  “The EMTs and Fire Department just pulled in,” I tell the operator.

  “Then I’m going to let you go now, AJ. Remain calm and good luck.”

  “Thank you,” I tell the dispatcher.

  The seconds between hanging up the phone and the paramedics rushing in through the front door, Hunter asks, “Where are Gavin’s antibiotics, and what time did he have them last?”

  “Six tonight and next to the bottle warmer,” I tell him, while dropping back down next to Tori, checking to see if she’s breathing for the tenth time in the ten minutes it’s taken the ambulance to get here. She is.

  As the paramedics make their way into the kitchen, everything seems to happen in slow motion as I’m pulled up to my feet and walked across the kitchen—my kitchen that’s being taken over by a number of paramedics, firemen, and police. An officer has his hand on my sho
ulder, and he’s asking me questions I can’t answer.

  “I wasn’t watching when she took the second dose of pills. I only saw her take the one and wash it down with vodka. I wasn’t paying attention for what seemed like less than a minute when I saw the pill container fall to the ground alongside of her.”

  “We were told you don’t how many pills were in the bottle to start with?” he asks.

  I feel like I’m staring through him when I say, “I didn’t know they were even in the cabinet up there.”

  The officer leaves my side to check through the cabinet I was pointing to and retrieves a few other bottles I was unaware of. “Has she had a drug problem before?” he asks.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Do you have a list of any medical conditions that might help us determine what caused this?”

  “She’s had something going on—she’s been down and kind of depressed. I’ve tried to make her get help but—she told me today she was getting help…I just don’t know how this happened.”

  “Okay,” the officer says. “We may have some more questions later, but I think it’s pretty clear what happened here.”

  While he’s talking to me, I’m watching the paramedics prop Tori up on a stretcher and administer some kind of injection. Silently, I follow them out the door. I keep my eyes on her pale, lifeless face the entire way to the hospital. I still love her, even through all of this. I really do. I just don’t know if she feels the same about me. There’s a sensation stirring in my gut that’s telling me she only sees me now as the person who ruined her life. Is that who I am—that person? Lots of people say they don’t want to have kids, but then have them and realize how much they needed them. Part of me thought that’s how it would end up for us, and it will end up that way for me but, it might only be me.

  “Her oxygen level is low and she’s only at forty beats per minute,” one of the paramedic states, before several of them start working around her.

  I’m scared to ask if she’s going to be okay, and yet, all I can think about is how Hunter must have felt during those moments right after he found out Ellie died. He loved Ellie like I’ll probably never love another person—not like I loved Cammy, at least. Tori has been in my life for less than two years and I love her, but our love has been tainted these past few months, and I should be feeling more than I am right this second. I’m scared for Gavin. My heart is breaking for him. I’ve tried so hard to make us a family—what I wanted us to be, and I don’t know if it will ever happen.