by Piper Lennox
“It means you left last time and you’re leaving now, and I should’ve seen this coming from a million miles away. That’s what it means.” He pushes his hands through his hair, breathing hard, eyes like glass with the liquor. “You didn’t change at all.”
“No, you want to know what the problem is here? You have changed.” I must be imagining the smell of the smoke now, all the way out here, after so much time.
“You’re distant,” I continue. “You put up these—these emotional walls, thinking that take-no-prisoners persona is so much better than how you were before. But it isn’t. Because, yeah, the old you? Kind of a pushover, even I’ll admit that. At least he was honest, though. Other than not admitting he liked me for, what, six years, the old Blake never blocked me out. He let me care about him.” I swipe my sleeve across my face and try to steady my voice, but can’t. “He wasn’t afraid to show he cared about me.”
“You know I care about you.”
“Then change back.” I take only one step towards him, but the tension multiples by twenty. The air feels charged, like the sky in summer just before the lightning cracks through all that gray space.
“And don’t just do it for me,” I add. “Hell, don’t even do it for yourself. Do it for that baby you’ll be bringing home in a couple weeks. Do it for your son.”
“God, shut the fuck up!” he shouts. His body’s like a rubber band snapping, just a blur of movement. I don’t even realize he’s grabbed the lamp on the end table and thrown it towards me, until I feel the breeze as it sails past, until I hear the ceramic base and glass bulb shatter on the wall behind me.
We’re in the eye of the storm here. It looks calm, and all is silent and still, but I know it’s just the middle. If I stay, there’ll be more.
I try to say goodbye as I leave, but can’t. The word stays on my lips the entire drive home, releasing as energy, not a noise, when I pull in the driveway and crumble, the rest of the storm finally passing over.
Twenty-Three
Blake
The sight of the broken lamp terrifies me.
It landed exactly where I aimed: the wall behind her, two feet to the right. I wasn’t trying to hit her.
But I did want to make her think I could. In that moment, I wanted to scare her. I wanted to scare her as badly as she was scaring me, with all the truth she kept throwing my way that I couldn’t handle.
I start to pick up the pieces but fall onto my hands and knees instead, puking up vodka.
At least your dad never got wasted and threw shit. He didn’t drive away the woman he loved.
A shard of glass from the bulb gets me, so thin it looked invisible. I crush it under my foot and accidentally smear my cut palm on the wall, already forgetting. The blood looks fake. Too red.
This is it. I’ve lost her.
My arms sweep the shelves, my books and figurines scattering across the floor. I break the other lamp. In my bedroom, I tip over the nightstands and shatter candles, the wax inside cool but pliable, sliced up in the slaughter.
No one could stop me from burning this place to the ground if it occurred to me—if I hadn’t already trashed it so badly that I can’t find my lighter.
I tear up the ticket stubs from our dates, in a bowl on my bureau, before picking up a notepad with doctors and birthing class numbers for Caitlin-Anne to call. It rips so easily. I let everything fall to the floor like confetti.
Then I grab the book of baby names I bought, the week the paternity test said it was mine, and that it was a boy. Something about it makes me pause, even as I’m gripping the cover and preparing to rip it free.
All along the pages, I’ve left sticky-note flags, color-coded. B names. Trendy names. Surnames as firsts. I flip through and watch the colors blur until my head hurts.
You did all this for a name, I think. For him.
I sit on my bed with the book open in my lap, reading but not thinking. My heart thunders in my ears, struggling under the weight of the alcohol and my stupid rampage.
My phone rings, somehow unscathed in the pile of glass and wax on the floor. I answer it without reading the screen. It has to be her.
“Hello?”
“Blake, it’s Jeannie. Are you on the way?”
“Wait, where?” I look at my phone and swipe to the notifications: eight texts and four missed calls, all from Caitlin-Anne. “What’s wrong?”
Jeannie makes a scoffing sound, which she does to me a lot. “She’s in labor!” she says, practically giddy. “So hurry up and get to the hospital, all right? We’ll see you then.”
She hangs up before me. I drop the phone on the bed, realizing too late that I held it in the wrong hand; my handprint is painted on the back of the case in bright red.
Mechanically, I clean the wound and bandage it, taking longer with the gauze than I have to.
“Do it for your son.” I study my reflection, drunk and pale, as the gauze wraps around my palm.
Mel
My key skitters all over the basement door’s lock. I can’t make my hands hold still.
Josh hears and opens it for me, his face annoyed and then, when he sees mine, worried. I step inside and practically fall against him.
It feels like hours before I stop crying. Josh signs off his video games, telling his online buddies he’ll catch them later, and puts on a kids’ movie for me, one we loved when we were little. It’s about trolls or leprechauns or something. I find it weird and unsettling that I can’t remember any of it.
“Blake and I got in a big fight,” I explain, when I can finally speak clearly. I leave out the part about Blake throwing the lamp, in case Josh decides to go all big-brother, overprotective, go-kick-the-guy’s-ass.
“Yeah?” He studies me, knowing there’s probably more to the story. “He still drinking?”
I nod.
Josh sighs and cracks open a soda, offering one to me. “You want my advice?” he asks. “Because I’ll only tell you if you really want it.”
“I do,” I say emphatically. Josh isn’t great at relationships—he tends to scare girls away with too much commitment, too soon—but he does give great advice, even if he doesn’t take it himself. Besides that, I’m desperate.
“If I were you,” he says, taking a long sip, “I’d give him an ultimatum. Either he quits drinking and goes to therapy, you know, finally deal with his grief and shit...or that’s it, you’re gone.”
“Gone,” I repeat, the reality of this choice hitting me square in the chest. The bubbles of my soda hurt when I swallow them down.
Josh watches my face carefully, then reaches out to deliver a soft punch to my shoulder. “Just my opinion,” he adds. “You know him better than me, obviously.”
No, I don’t, I think. He might as well be a stranger on the street, for all I know about him, now.
When I start to cry again, Josh rubs my back and passes me tissues, whispering that I’ll be all right, no matter what happens. I nod along, but don’t believe him.
Blake
“You the father?”
I blink hard in the lights of Caitlin-Anne’s delivery room. “Um...yes,” I manage, draining the last of my second energy drink to finish sobering up. I’ve fucked up a lot of things lately, and I’m sure I’ll fuck up plenty more before it’s over. But I won’t be drunk at the birth of my son.
The nurse updates me on Caitlin-Anne’s progress and the baby’s station, using a bunch of words I’ve heard but can’t process. It’s only when she tells Cait, “All right, as soon as the doctor gets here, we’ll get you to start pushing,” that I realize I made it just in time. It’s happening.
“Hey,” Cait says, gritting her teeth. “You smell like shit.”
I hold her hand and force a smile. “Yeah, sorry. But I’m here, right?”
The doctor, a man so old I can’t believe he’s still in medicine, hobbles in, washes and gloves up, and checks everything. “All right,” he tells Cait, “time to push.”
Thanks to an epidural, C
aitlin-Anne is fairly quiet and calm as she strains, pushing when the nurse and doctor tell her. When I ask how the contractions feel, if it hurts like they say in movies, she gives me a loopy, exhausted smile and says it’s “not too bad.” I wonder how many drugs they had to give her.
“Dad,” the nurse says, and it takes me a few extra seconds to realize she’s talking to me, “come down here and hold up this leg, while I hold the other, all right?”
I put my hand on the back of Caitlin-Anne’s knee, the way the nurse shows me. “You’re doing great,” I tell her, fighting every urge to look.
“Can you see his head yet?”
“Uh....” I glance down as quickly as I can and see...oh, God. A whole lot of stuff I wish I hadn’t.
“Yes,” the nurse answers for me. “He’s crowning.” She smiles, patting Cait’s leg. “He’s got a lot of hair.”
“Another push ought to get the head out,” the doctor says. “Go on and give us a good one this time, all right?”
I close my eyes. The smell of blood and antiseptic is making me dizzy; the fact my heart has chosen this exact moment to start its crazy racing—energy drinks probably weren’t the best choice—isn’t helping matters.
Without meaning to, I look down again...just in time to catch the doctor slicing into Caitlin-Anne’s skin with a scalpel. It’s a small incision, but it opens everything up enough for that hairy little head to pop out. A lot of blood comes with it.
The ground tilts underneath me. I feel my hand let go of Cait’s leg as my knees buckle.
When I wake up, I’m in a bed, a different room. A doctor leans over me. He looks like he just finished med school this morning.
I clear my throat. “I fainted?”
“You fainted.” He smiles, but I feel like it’s not genuine. “I’m Dr. Gunnar,” he says, shaking my hand, which has an IV tube snaking out of it. “You’re in the Cardiac unit.”
“What?” I try to sit up, but my chest hurts. Everything hurts, actually.
“Yep. Bad episode of tachycardia you had back there.” He licks his lips slowly, measuring his next words. “You have a large mass in your left ventricle, and a smaller one in the left chamber.”
“Mass,” I repeat, the word meaningless and then, suddenly, making horrible sense. “You mean, like...tumors?”
Dr. Gunnar nods and takes a breath. “We ran an EKG after you fainted, then a chest x-ray—”
“Cancer,” I blurt. What little drunkenness remained is wiped clean now. I’m completely, painfully lucid. Cancer.
Like my mom, I think. And it’s ruining my heart, like my dad. What a combination. Fifty-fifty, down the middle.
“Not necessarily. We won’t know until we do more tests.” He takes a pen out of his coat and clicks it. “Mind if I ask you a few questions, get some background info?”
“Um...yeah, that’s fine,” I stammer. I find the button on my bed railing and raise it until I can sit up, even though it kills. I look around. The room is just like the one my dad was in, so many times. Surrounded by the same machines. Maybe even in the same kind of pain.
“Has this ever happened before? The fainting, the rapid heart rate?”
“Once, at a concert. I figured it was just my asthma.” I remember the day of the estate sale, in the car with Mel. “And another time while sitting. The rapid heart rate’s been, uh...been going on a while.”
“How long?”
I think back. “Sixteen, seventeen? So five years or so.”
He whistles, but it’s almost sarcastic. “Why didn’t you see a doctor?”
I think of Mel again, the few times she witnessed it when I couldn’t escape fast enough, usually after sex. She’d lift her head off my chest and beg me to go. She even made an appointment for me once, which I skipped out of spite.
“Guess I was scared of getting bad news.” Behind him, through the window, the sky is so dark it looks purple. “When will I know?”
“We can do a CT scan and echocardiogram tonight, get you the results as early as tomorrow or the next day.”
“So you think it’s cancerous.”
He looks at me. “I didn’t say that.”
“One or two days is pretty fast if you thought it was benign.” My voice falters, but I lock my jaw and stare at the bumpy texture of the blanket. “No cancer, no rush.”
Dr. Gunnar clicks his pen and puts it back in his coat. “Let’s just wait and get the results, okay?” He pats my shoulder. “No need to worry you or your family until we know. Speaking of which, you want me to send them in?”
I snap out of my pity-stupor. “Send who in?”
“Your family,” he repeats, hitching his thumb towards the ceiling. “Your wife and son are up in the maternity ward, waiting for you. I can send her in, if you like.”
“No,” I say, too fast. “I mean, uh...let her rest, it’s fine.” I think a minute and bite my thumbnail. It’s still ragged from when I bit it the last time—sitting in the middle of my wrecked bedroom, flipping through the baby name book. I’m not even thinking about the fact he just called Caitlin-Anne my wife. I don’t have the energy to care.
“Does anyone else know about this?” I ask. “The heart stuff, the—the tumors?”
“Not yet.” He studies me. “Do you...not want anyone to know?”
“No,” I whisper. “Not till I get the tests back.”
And maybe, I think, not even then.
Mel
I wait two days. Letting his one call go to voicemail is the hardest fifteen seconds of my life.
Finally, the morning of the third day, I text him. “Can we talk?”
He doesn’t answer for a while. I try to distract myself with anything else, but keep checking my phone like I need it to breathe. Answer, I will him, telepathically. Just answer.
“At the hospital,” he writes. “Cait had the baby a couple days ago.”
Before I can offer my congratulations, he adds, “Yeah, we can talk. I’ll be home tonight.”
“Ok,” I write, and hit send right when I decide that tonight is too far away. I need to see him now. I need to know what he’ll pick—me, or his own mind, sabotaging his life from the inside out.
The maternity ward has a quiet, excited buzz about it. People are tired, but everyone smiles. I find Caitlin-Anne’s room and lift my hand to knock.
“She’s sleeping,” someone whispers, closing their hand over mine just before it makes contact.
Blake looks exhausted. His eyes are rimmed in deep purple, like bruises; his skin is as pale as fresh paper.
I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face, the sheer relief of seeing him again. I missed him so much. “Hi.”
We walk to the nursery. He points through the glass at a clear bassinet in the corner. Inside is a bundle with brown hair, poking out from under its hat. “That’s him,” he says. His smile is the first thing to give me real, solid hope in days. For him—for us.
“He’s perfect.” I touch the glass, my finger poised over the baby. “What’s his name?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
I smirk. “So it’s not little Brogan or Bourne Foster?”
He pulls a face. “No, thank God. We’re just trying to find one we both don’t totally despise.”
“And, uh...” I hesitate. “…the middle name?”
Instead of answering, he takes a breath and jams his hands in his pockets. “Why are you here, Mel?”
His question surprises me, but I hide it. “Just wanted to talk about the fight. Can we go somewhere?”
“We could’ve talked at my apartment, if you’d waited until tonight,” he points out. “I’ve got to stay here and sign some stuff, when the doctor arrives.”
“That’s okay. We can talk here.” My whole big speech flies out of my head. I feel flustered, but I inhale and hit the first bullet point. “The other night, when I said you should change...I meant it. I’m really worried about your drinking, and—and that you aren’t processing your dad’s
death in a healthy way.”
Heavy-lidded, he stares at his shoes on the linoleum. “Look, about the lamp…I’m really sorry.” His eyes lift to mine. They’re shining, and I wonder if it’s from tears, or more alcohol. “Sorrier than I can even begin to tell you. I feel like complete shit over it, which…which I totally deserve.”
“Thank you,” I say quietly, realizing this is the first real apology I’ve gotten from him, for anything. Ever.
Maybe he can change.
“There’s more,” I add, crossing my arms. It’s suddenly cold in the hall, colder than it should be with all the peaches and sage-greens, and the little squirming bundles on the other side of the window. “I told you that, for me to stay with you...you need to change back. And I meant, you know...stop drinking, get a therapist.”
I look at him. I stare into the blue of his eyes so intensely, he can’t possibly misunderstand my intentions: this is the most important question I’ll ever ask him. It determines everything.
“So,” I say, “will you?”
He chews the inside of his mouth and reaches out, touching my face gently. “If I don’t, you’ll leave? That’s what you’re telling me?”
My heart stutters, waiting. “Yes.”
Blake studies my face so long, I wonder if this is his answer: the tilt of his head and the softness of his eyes.
Until he says, “I’m sorry, Mellie.”
“What?” His hand drops from my face. He starts to walk away. “Blake, wait—”
“You asked,” he says, “and I answered. I won’t change, okay? I can’t. So...so maybe it’s better that you do leave. You deserve better.”
I reach out and grab his arm, making him turn. “What about your son? Doesn’t he deserve better?” My eyes well up again, but now I’m angry. Furious, actually. I really thought he’d say yes.
“You’d better go.” He frees his arm from my grasp.
“So you’re making me leave again, just like before,” I say, “only now it’s you who’s scared of things changing, not me. Even if the change would be better, you’re too afraid to even try. Is that it?”