The flight attendant interrupted my thoughts when she offered snacks and beverages. I declined for all of us. My hope was everyone would stay asleep, and I could just stay there with my thoughts for the rest of the flight. Maybe I could start opening some of those boxes I’d stored in my mind’s attic and start tossing the old crap to make room for new hope.
The night Will and I broke up the first time, we were sitting in his old Camaro on the same beach where he just recently vowed to live the rest of his life with, well, with someone else. His father had just passed away and he was feeling numb. Numb because he never really knew his father, but he’d always had a picture of him around the age of two and his dad sitting under an old oak tree framed in his bedroom. He never talked about his father much, but that night, he told me everything he knew. The man was an alcoholic, verbally abusive, and never wanted children, but he fell in lust with Will’s mother. She got pregnant, and he tried to do the right thing. Whatever it was for them, it only lasted about two years, and he left Will and his mother, saying goodbye just before heading to work one morning. He never came home that evening and, after five days, he called Will’s mother to let her know he was alive but not coming back. Will always said she never healed. He didn’t remember his father, and he never remembered his mother when his father was around, but he knew she never got over him or the way he left. She would often talk to herself as if he was still there. Will recalled a time, while we talked on the beach, when he was about ten years old when his mother was in the kitchen screaming when he got home from school. He thought someone was there with her, but he walked in for his usual after school oatmeal cookie, and she was screaming and throwing dishes. He silently walked out of the house and went to a neighbor’s house. After about an hour, he called her to tell her he had just gone to a friend’s house after school. She yelled at him for not coming home and told him to get home right away. As he walked down Sleepy Hallow Lane, he could see her walking to her car. When she saw him, she told him to get in the car. That night they ate at McDonald’s, words left unspoken, and bought new dishes at Montgomery Wards. When they got home, she told him to do his homework and get to bed. They never spoke of that day, and he assumed she never knew he saw her breaking every dish in the house that afternoon.
***
“My dad never wanted children. And my mother knew it. Dad had this…” He sat for what seemed like hours in silence.
“He had this what, Will?” I asked.
“Nothing, never mind.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, ever the caregiver, assuming he needed and wanted to be touched. He pulled himself away and hugged his car door.
“I wrote a poem that day after Mom broke all the dishes. It was called Dying Red Moon. ‘In the light of day, I saw her red, I saw her sway, the strength you took away left her dead, left her, a dying red moon. In the dark of night, I heard her cry, misty sobs and sighs from her bed, you left her, a dying red moon.’”
I was silent. It was breathtaking, but to think a ten year old boy wrote that, left me silent, with tears welling in my eyes. “Why dying red moon?” I asked.
Will, cranked his window down, looked out at the water, and said, “She wasn’t a whole beautiful moon anymore. It was like looking at something once strong, but only a piece of its former self. And she was angry. To me, she looked like a waning moon, but red, angry; Dying Red Moon.”
I didn’t know what to say. In the past hour I had learned so much about his family, secrets about his mother she didn’t even know, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d pulled away from me when I tried to touch him. Quiet settled in. I was tense, but Will seemed comfortable. He was always comfortable in tense situations. He was a dark young man, but his sense of humor showered everyone within twenty feet of him with such sunshine, he became almost blinding. I had learned in our relationship that it was his way of dealing with hardship. It was a big part of who he was, who he’d become, and evidently who was pushing his way out. The lost boy, forgotten and unloved by his father, blamed for love lost by his mother, was beginning to realize who he needed to be. Again, after a long period of silence, he turned to me. My heart sank. My heart either sank or jumped any time he looked at me. I was yearning for acceptance from him, and I needed to be reminded all the time of his deep love for me. He was always amazing at showing it to me, but I was still a needy nineteen year old girl. My heart jumped because he was so incredibly beautiful. Inside he was pure and gentle; outside, he had spiral curls down to his chin and a smile that never ended. When he spoke I was lifted simply by the sound of his voice. He could be tender or gruff. When he sang, his voice sounded deeper with an edge his talking voice didn’t possess, and I melted. My heart ached for him. He was reliving parts of his childhood he didn’t even remember. He was hurting and I couldn’t reach out and hold him, protect him and assure him that he was so amazingly wonderful; I couldn’t imagine simply breathing without him. When he spoke, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.
“I am just like him.” He paused for a minute. “I don’t want children. I can’t do to anyone what he did to me. I can’t do to you what he did to her.”
I was dumbstruck. What was he saying, what did he mean? He wasn’t like the man who left him so many years ago. He didn’t even know that man; didn’t know who he was, why he left, what made him tick. And why would he even say he didn’t want children? I felt confused. The car got hot; I didn’t even notice the tears running down my face until I felt chills running up my spine when he wiped them away.
“It’s only fair, Nikki. I can’t be with you. You’ve said over and over how much you love kids, and you want to be a mom. I can’t be a dad. I don’t want to be a dad. I’d be a horrible dad.”
I couldn’t breathe. I opened the car door and walked slowly, almost in a trance, to the shoreline and sat in the sand. The tide was rising, and I could feel the cool water hitting the backs of my legs. Will stayed in the car. I wasn’t sure how the night got so turned around. How did I fail? Where did I go wrong? He’d shared so much of his personal life with me. He’d shared things I never expected him to ever share with anyone – with me. How could he sit there and tell me he couldn’t be with me? What did he mean? My mind was going around and around in circles, my heart felt like it had stopped, and I didn’t think I could ever feel such and live through it again. I felt Will’s arms wrap around my shaking body. He was comforting me. We went there, to the beach, to talk about his dad. It was my place to comfort him in his hour of need, and there he was holding me while I cried and shook uncontrollably. Such care and comfort surely wouldn’t be offered if he were in fact leaving me. With his arms around my shoulders, I laid my head in the crook of his arm and let the heated tears fall. I couldn’t stop them, and I couldn’t find words to speak. More silence overtook us, and my sobbing began to subside. Will was running his fingers through my hair and whispering something about sorry and okay. I couldn’t hear his words. I lifted my head and looked up.
“WILL!” I exclaimed as I jumped up and out of his arms.
“Nikki, I’m sorry. I don’t know wha…” Will started.
I grabbed his hand and pulled it closer while using my other hand to point to the night sky. We could see the faint glow of the flame at the Seaford power plant, but above the flame, I saw a perfect half-moon. A red half-moon.
“Dying Red Moon.” Will simply said.
“It’s a sign, Will. It’s for you. For us. It’s your dad telling you he’s here now. Or it’s a sign letting us know we are meant…” I couldn’t finish. I didn’t want to be selfish and finish my thought, my desire to let him know we were meant to be together.
Will let go of my hand and walked a few steps down the beach and sat down. He’d pulled himself away from me again. I hugged myself; losing his body heat was taking its toll on my body. Suddenly I was shivering and cold and alone with a red half-moon hanging over me. I walked over to Will, instinctively, and put my arms around him kissing his back, then placin
g my cheek on his back as if to seal the kiss. I could feel his heart beating. A rhythm seemed to connect us. I couldn’t love this man any more than I did at that moment, the moment I first lost him.
***
Sitting on the plane, flying above clouds hovering above circles of grain drawn on the ground below, thinking of that night, I realized it was truly the night I had really lost Will. We got back together after, of course, but it was never the same. Both reconnections were short lived before I was reminded again and again that Will was certain he wasn’t the man I needed him to be. I resented the fact he’d made a choice for me.
Emily stirred next to me, Bella was sleeping with her head in Chris’ lap, and Chris was dozing with his head against the headrest. He eventually woke when they announced we were approaching Denver. But the kids still slept until the plane started to descend, and their ears began to pop. I grabbed their sippy cups, asked them to settle down comfortably in their seats and watch the clouds come up to us. The girls were suddenly wide awake and happy to be in an airplane high above the clouds. We were almost home. Part of my journey was complete. Either things would go back to the same, or I begin to grow again and change my life for the better. We just needed to make sure we were focused on our lives, our marriage, and I needed to leave the past in Virginia where it seemed to be happy living life without me.
Chapter Eight
We really had no choice but to dive back into life. Chris went back to work, with long hours and late night work from home. Leaving the weekends to a busy schedule where he would try to cram a week’s worth of house projects into two days, spend quality time with our children, and pay attention to me and our marriage. Eventually some of it was bound to slip. Our marriage and personal relationship was always first to go. We’d been in this cycle before. First we’d stop the morning and bedtime kisses. The flirting would gradually go away, and sex would, again, be nonexistent. Our girls were busy with the start of summer, play dates, play grounds, gymnastics, and swimming. The house fell apart every week and had to be put back together one piece at a time daily with a big weekend top to bottom cleaning. So went the weeks of summer. Fun at times, monotonous at others. And so was life. Day in and day out of cuteness from the girls. Bella was talking more. She’d started telling me she wanted to carry me, when she didn’t want to walk. One day those words, “I want to carry you,” would come out of her mouth as, “Carry me, Momma.” I was reminded more and more of just how precious these times were with my babies, and they were changing daily.
Will called every Friday. I found it pleasantly odd he’d get married and then still have a need to call me weekly. We’d always been close, talking weekly for years, but I had imagined our communications would slow down with his new marriage as it did with each new pregnancy I’d had. There had been times our weekly call felt scheduled and processed. I knew on Friday afternoon, my phone would ring and it would be Will with his usual greeting, “Hey, there, Sweet Nikki Jay, how’s my princess doing?”
I did force a major change in my life once we returned to Colorado. I decided the one thing I could do for my family was find time to take care of myself and do something I loved doing instead of living only around a revolving schedule of laundry and playdates. I had started painting again. My girls loved it, and I often did it with them because frankly, when else could I get time alone to paint? I’d stocked up on canvas and acrylics from the craft store, and I’d give the girls their own canvas with ideas of things to paint while I was set up on an easel near them doing one thing I used to do that made me feel complete and at peace. I was slowly redecorating our home with my own pieces and smaller canvases from the girls. Emily had outgrown Cinderella and had moved on to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. Her canvases usually consisted of someone resembling a girl in a pink dress in a forest with trees, blobs of flowers, and blobs of gray bunnies surrounding her. I had so many of those pink art pieces, I started numbering them and giving them away since Emily’s room was filled with them, and we had two in our living and dining rooms. Bella’s canvas usually looked something like a dark gray or brown Van Gogh blob with thick lines of paint, but with so many colors on top of one another they just turn into one large dark color. It was fun though, and I felt more and more like my old self creating something outside of meals and clean diapers.
Will called one random Tuesday morning in early November. The girls and I were outside painting when the phone rang.
“Hang, on, Bell Bell,” I said as I ran inside to grab the ringing phone. I was only slightly worried I’d come back to paint on every surface except for her canvas, but she’d been happily painting until she saw me moving toward the house. Then she suddenly needed me.
I knew it was Will after looking at the Caller ID. “Hey, Will, what’s up? How ya doing?”
He spoke softly and sounded tired. “Nikki Jay. Hey, babe. I just wanted to say hello to you, hear your voice. Whatcha doin’?”
“Will, are you okay?” I asked. It was Tuesday early afternoon in Virginia, so I didn’t think he could be drunk, but he was slurring his words, and his speech was incredibly slow.
“Yea, Princess, I’m A-OK! I’ve just had a cold or something, and I’m tired. But I was thinking of you today. I was going through some old things lying around the house. You know I have boxes of songs we wrote? Notebooks everywhere! It’s crazy. Man, we wrote a lot of music back in the day, girl. I wonder why we stopped.” I thought I heard a small chuckle. He knew why we stopped. We broke up. Life moved on without us.
“Will, I didn’t write much. I may have written a few lyrics, but you were the song writer, not me.” I walked back outside to the patio to see two happy children still painting on their own canvases. I was surprised to see Emily was not painting her usual princess motif. She was painting with green and brown. I smiled at them and sat down on a chair near the table where the girls were painting so I could keep a close eye on them. I wasn’t sure what was really going on with Will, but I wasn’t going to spend too much time away from my girls. I had grown to love our painting time together, and with winter coming soon, those outdoor painting days would be ending.
“Nikki Jay, do you remember when we drove up to Massachusetts? We were so young, with life ahead of us. We just got in the car and drove away. You stopped at a payphone outside of Washington and called your dad to tell him you’d be back in a few days. He was so mad, remember? But it was the best trip I think I’ve ever had. We saw things we’d never seen around here. How did that song go? ‘Find your road and drive til dawn?’” Will grew quiet, but I could hear guitar strings in the background. He was picking up his guitar.
“Neila Lees. Yes, I remember her. Didn’t we hear her in a bar up there or something?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take this walk down memory lane with Will, but I was sure my creativity for my canvas had vanished. I felt sad suddenly.
“Yep. The North Pole -or something like that-I think it was called,” Will said. He was tuning a guitar in the background. I wasn’t in the mood for a concert or a walk down some lane I hadn’t traveled in years.
“Will, what’s going on? What are you doing? I don’t remember the name of the bar. I remember Neila. I’ve listened to her a lot over the years. But why are you talking about all of this?” I watched Emily. She was painting a tree. I really wanted to sit with her and watch her paint, teach her technique, congratulate her for moving outside her normal theme.
“Oh, Nikki, I’m sorry. I guess I was just having a nostalgic moment and wanted to share it with you.” Will voiced seemed melancholy. “What are you doing right now, Nikki Jay?”
“Well, when the phone rang, I was outside painting with my girls. Bella is getting really good at mixing colors to make a sloppy gray, but Emily has really moved me this morning. She usually draws with her paintbrush a pink girl, a princess, and green stuff all around, grass, a forest, I guess. But today I see a tree. I think it’s a tree. And no pink at all. No princess. At all. Anyway, we were painting. Now I’m tal
king to you and watching them paint.”
“Go paint, Princess. I’m so glad to see you getting back into something that almost defined you for so long. I remember summers when you’d get up and paint by the water first thing in the morning before you even had breakfast. Please don’t stop. Go do it. And this time with your girls is so precious. I’m sorry, Nikki Jay, I’m sorry. I just got a little, I don’t know, excited to find some of these things here in these boxes. It’s been years since I’ve seen some of this stuff. But maybe one day we can take a walk down this lane again. Not today. I think I’m going to go take a nap. This is kicking my ass, Princess. This…cold.” Will hung up without even saying goodbye. I’d heard a few cracks in his voice as he was talking and wondered if he’d been crying. Looking at old memories staring him in the face could be tough, but he’s still a newlywed. I couldn’t imagine going through old things from that time in our lives and feeling such sadness.
I almost called Will back, but I was on track with moving forward in my life, not backward. I missed those days. I missed Will. But with six months having passed since his wedding, I was able to almost laugh at myself when I thought of how jealous I was during those days in Virginia. I never would have admitted it then, but I was certain jealousy was what I felt and why I focused so much on Will and Rebecca and their relationship. I was completely jealous someone else had won Will over, and he wanted to give her something he never gave me. And I was even able to tell myself those feelings were absolutely crazy. I had talked to Chris about it a bit but never admitted I was envious of Rebecca and her relationship with Will. I tried to focus my conversations with Chris on how hard it was going back home to aging family and friends. When I was away for so long, I noticed it so much more, and it was harder and harder to go back. Chris recommended we fly my sister, her kids, and my dad out for a visit the following spring, so I didn’t have to go back. I laughed. I could see the stress of adding five more people to our house, but then it couldn’t be much different than the four of us encroaching on Dad’s space. I told Chris I’d think about it. It would be a good way to share our lives with my family without the depressing views of an area I’d like to keep inside a little box in my head, unchanged.
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