The Five Stages of Falling in Love

by Rachel Higginson

  She was still getting her masters in counseling, so her schedule allowed her to stop by during the day and help me out. She was my saving grace in so many ways, but adult conversation was high on the list.

  “Abby left the house this morning without telling me. I found her swimming laps in the new neighbor’s pool.” My anger still simmered under the surface, but more than that, the fear of almost losing her was choking me and I could barely breathe through the panic.

  “Your sister is such a little fish,” Emma looked down at Lucy and giggled.

  “Don’t make jokes, Em. She’s only six. Anything could have happened to her and I didn’t even know she left the house!” I stared into the black depths of my coffee and sniffled back more frustrated tears.

  “Liz, you cannot keep blaming yourself for not being both parents. You are enough. You’re everything these kids need.” She smiled at me sympathetically and reached across to pat my hand. These were coping/comforting techniques she picked up from school and I found them mildly obnoxious.

  I pulled my hand away from my sister’s compassionate grip and looked at Lucy. She colored happily for the moment, but I knew this would be another picture added to the pile I was supposed to “keep for Daddy.” The daddy she was convinced was just vacationing to heaven. The daddy she was positive wouldn’t leave his family forever. The daddy that should be walking through the front door any moment.

  I wasn’t the only one struggling with denial.

  The cold hard truth was that I wasn’t enough. I had never been enough. My marriage was a partnership built on mutual love and shared responsibility. The house had run as smoothly as the chaos of four little ones would allow, but we ran it together.

  Grady had always been a doting father. He would get up early with the kids, make holidays, important days at school and birthdays so unbelievably special for them, and most of all, he met me halfway with discipline. He wasn’t a perfect man, and our marriage had been anything but.

  I knew that. I told myself that often because it was too easy to idealize our relationship into utopic perfection. And imagining our life as perfect was a straight spiral into the dismal abyss of despair. But life had been good- really, really good, and easier and happy.

  And now we were just barely surviving.

  “So what happened with Abby?” Emma prompted.

  “I couldn’t get her out of the pool. She was being difficult like usual. Finally the guy next door found us and lured her out with a Pop-tart. By then, we were late for school. I had to walk all the children inside and stop in the office to sign them in. I was so mad at her. Mad because she left the house without telling me, mad because she went swimming by herself and I can’t even think about the worst case scenario there, and mad because she made yet another morning difficult for me. I was so angry when I dropped her off in her classroom that I didn’t even hug her or tell her I loved her.” I was helpless to stop the tears that flowed freely down my flushed cheeks and dripped off my stubborn chin. “Now I have to wait until after school to see her. She has to go all day thinking I’m so mad at her that I don’t love her anymore. And I’m making myself sick over it.”

  Emma’s blue-gray gaze held mine, her own tears brimming at the corners. With equal parts conviction and concern, she promised, “Liz, you will see Abby again. You will get to hug her and tell her you love her. She’s going to be alright. She knows you love her. There’s not a doubt in her pretty red head.”

  I nodded, with my chin trembling and more tears falling. These were things I’d been trying to convince myself of all morning, but it helped when they came from someone else. Just because I lost one of the people I loved most in life, didn’t mean I was going to lose them all.

  At least I wanted to believe that. The hole in my chest argued differently.

  “Liz.” My sister stood up from the barstool and walked behind the long, tiled island to give me a tight hug. “You’re going to get through this. I know this is hard, but you are the strongest person I know. Grady would not have left you if he didn’t think you could handle this.”

  I hiccupped a big, ugly sob and bent my face into her neck. She smelled like lilac and vanilla and like my sister. We’d been sharing hugs like this since she was born.

  “Em,” was all I could sniffle. The pain was too acute, too shattering right now. I looked around the kitchen with watery eyes taking in all the careful details Grady had done himself with his own, rough hands.

  Before cancer, he had been a strong, smart, capable man that started his own construction company and built it into somewhat of a local empire. He went from working every job himself to having multiple crews and foremen. He built our house, brick by loving brick and designed the entire inside himself when we finally had enough money and enough good credit to leave the cracker box of an apartment we shared for the first years of our marriage.

  We had lived here for a little more than six years. Other than Blake, all of our kids were born into this home. We had gotten to know our neighbors as they each built around us and we had gotten our dream home, our forever home, when we were only twenty-six. We felt unbelievably blessed here when Grady was still healthy.

  Now I felt drowned in memories of him. His ghost haunted me from every room, and lingered over each piece of furniture and hand-touched detail. This place by the island was where he would kiss me each morning and take his travel cup of coffee from me on his way to work. The long, weathered sectional couch in the living room was where we would cuddle up each night and fight over my reality shows vs. Sports Center. Our backyard was devastated by memories of him grilling, teaching the kids to play catch and enjoying nice evening nights as a family around the fire pit.

  A consuming ache gripped at the center of my being and fractured my soul right down the middle. I felt the cracking intensely as it fissured out to each and every part of me, shattering my already broken spirit to pieces. Again.

  “What am I going to do?” I whispered, ignoring the concerned look from Lucy. “How am I going to survive this, Em?”

  Emma was bawling too by now. My hair was damp and matted from where her messy tears had fallen. But at my questions she straightened and cleared her throat. Using her mature voice again, she said, “First, you’re going to go take your run. I have to be back at the coffee shop by twelve to meet my study group so I don’t have a lot of time. And then… we will figure this out together, Lizbeth. You are not doing this alone.”

  “Okay,” I agreed with a pathetic nod. I could do that. I could run. It would help me feel better anyway. I could use the time alone and the time to focus on at least one coherent thought.

  “Mommy are you sad about daddy again?” Lucy asked, naïve, as any four-year-old would be.

  I nodded, unable and unwilling to show her exactly how deep the sorrow was rooted.

  “It’s okay to be sad, Mommy,” Lucy promised on a know-it-all whisper. “But don’t be sad all day. He only went on vacation. He wouldn’t leave us forever. He loves us too much.”

  The tears immediately started again and in that moment I instinctively knew this day was only going to get worse.

  Emma took that moment to ask, “Where’s Jace?”

  I listened for a second and heard only silence.

  So, I immediately panicked.

  Unlike Abby, there was no way Jace had left this house without sounding alarm bells or leaving clues to what he was trying to do. Jace, in all his two-year-old glory, still hadn’t mastered the fine art of turning a doorknob. But he was dangerously quiet and that never signaled good things.

  Emma and I raced through the kitchen and up the stairs. “He was playing in his room,” I panted as we careened down the hallway in search of him.

  His room was empty, and so was his brother’s. There was a chance he was in Lucy’s room, so we headed that way next.

  Then we heard the toilet flush. We changed paths and backtracked towards the kids’ bathroom, dread sending icicles of anxiety into every part of me. />
  There he was standing over the toilet looking down at a bowl filled to the brim with entire rolls of toilet paper. A mischievous smile played on his lips and he looked up at us with a giggle. His finger played with the flusher, as if he was getting ready to flush it again. Panic hazed my vision.

  “Jace, don’t even think about it,” I threatened in a low voice.

  Emma and I paused in the doorway, hands raised like he was a wild animal we were careful not to spook. He let out another devilish giggle and enthusiastically flushed the toilet.

  Emma and I leapt toward him, watching in horror as the bowl filled with water and all the sacrificed rolls sloshed around in their sogginess. I shuddered at the mess and started to cry again when the water reached the brim of the white, porcelain bowl and spilled over onto the tiled floor.

  My sister grabbed Jace so he wouldn’t get soaked and we all hopped back out of the way. Jace just kept giggling and the water just kept gushing onto the floor.

  My head fell into my hands and I moaned, “This is just not my day.”

  I thought Emma would agree with me, instead she said, “Go, Lizzy. Go run. I’ll clean this up.”

  “Emma, I cannot leave you with this mess. Are you kidding?”

  “You need the run,” she shrugged, but her face was contorted in disgust at the mess the bathroom had become in just a few short seconds. “I’ll have this cleaned up by the time you get back.”

  “I love you,” I whispered, still not able to get ahold of my emotions, but anxious for the opportunity to bale on this latest catastrophe. If I didn’t have to clean up just one of the many tragedies in my upside down life, it might be the difference between my sanity and a mental breakdown.

  “Go!” she ordered. “Before I change my mind.”

  And I obeyed. While she calmly chastised Jace on his destruction techniques, I slipped on my tennis shoes and bolted out the front door. I ran away from the mess in the bathroom, away from children I couldn’t control on my own and away from a house so saturated with memories of the man I loved, I couldn’t breathe with him so close.

  Chapter Three

  I rounded the corner and the house came back into view. We lived in a cul-de-sac on the edge of town. The homes were all relatively new and custom built. The trees had some time to grow but they didn’t tower over the houses like in the rest of town.

  Still, I loved our little neighborhood.

  The families were all sweet and lovely and we took care of each other.

  I couldn’t bring myself to move or to take my kids from their home. Even though there were times that I wanted to.

  Like right now.

  Looking up at white siding spotted with black shudders and boasting a bright red door, I saw my dream home. And I saw a lifetime of pain I would never recover from.

  Grady, where are you?

  I slowed my demanding pace to a measured walk. I told myself this was a cool down, but the truth whispered and echoed inside me. I could push my body to my limits when I ran, when I ran away from everything and everyone that needed me. But now that I was confronted with those same things, I couldn’t bring myself to face them again.

  As a mother, I had always felt this severe degree of failure. I had four kids. Four of them. Life was always crazy for us and I never felt like I was enough for all of my kids. Chaos ruled my parenting style, and because they were all two years apart, they were always in different stages of needs and demands.

  Now, without Grady by my side, I had never felt like more of a failure at anything. This wasn’t just a small failure either; this was the crash and burn kind of catastrophe that combusted into a million unrecognizable pieces.

  That was what I was doing to my children. I was the pilot of their plane of life and I was about to dive-bomb us into the middle of the ocean.

  “You all right?” A voice called me out of my silent pity party.

  I looked up to find Ben Tyler at his mailbox. I didn’t know how to feel about meeting him again, especially while I looked like this. Most of me still fizzled with anger about our altercation this morning. But there was this small part of me that felt extremely embarrassed that the only times he’d seen me were when I’d been in my underwear and braless tank top and now like this, sweaty, red-faced and panting.

  This guy had to think I was a complete nutcase.

  I tried to smile, but my worries, exhaustion and general bad attitude made it more of a grimace than a happy expression. “I’m fine. I just finished a run.”

  “I can see that.” His smirk was annoying.

  “Don’t you have a job?” The words fell out of my mouth before I could censor them. Oh, god, what was wrong with me?

  He chuckled at my rude question. He should probably snap at me and swear to himself never to talk to me again, but something told me this guy didn’t have it in him to hate people.

  Not even his bitchy neighbor.

  “I do,” he said. “I took a couple days off to get moved into the new place.”

  “Oh.” Well, obviously. I was an idiot.

  “Don’t you have a job?”

  I couldn’t tell if this was sarcasm or if he was genuinely curious. When he raised his eyebrows expectantly, I gave him an answer. “I’m a stay-at-home mom.”

  “Abby?”

  “And her three siblings.”

  “Wow,” he whistled. “Four of them? You don’t look like you have four kids.”

  Um… “Thanks.”

  “I heard about your husband,” he blurted suddenly.

  “What?” My voice was a whisper. I felt my bones become brittle and breakable as he grimaced with his knowledge of my grief.

  “I’m so sorry,” he gushed. “I don’t know why I said it like that. I just… I didn’t know how to bring it up. And I didn’t want you to feel like you had to explain it to me.”

  After staring at him for several silent seconds, I said, “I wouldn’t have felt like I needed to explain it to you.”

  He winced. “Liz, I’m sorry. The neighbor across the street shared your story and I just… I obviously have no tact.” He laughed bitterly at himself and I wanted to change the subject.

  I needed to change the subject.

  “Mrs. Mitchum. She has trouble minding her own business.”

  His dark eyes softened a little. “I noticed.” He rocked back on his heels, clearly putting his next sentence together in his head before he spoke it. I glanced up at my house and desperately wanted to escape there. Sure, five minutes ago, I’d dreaded walking through that door. Now, thanks to Ben Tyler, I couldn’t wait to get inside the safety of my own place.

  “Well, I guess, I’ll see you-”

  “If you need anything, you can always knock.” He took a step forward when he interrupted me. We stood just three feet apart, but I swear I could feel his aura or something. He radiated this energy that grated against my skin. I had no doubt that he was a successful person, and not just from the size of the house he’d bought. He had this charisma that poured off him. It annoyed the hell out of me, but I saw that in real life he could charm whomever he set his sights on.

  “Thanks,” I answered simply.

  “Seriously,” he emphasized. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Okay.”

  “And my pool!” His words came out almost desperately. I didn’t know if it was guilt pushing him into wanting to be friends with me or what, but it was getting to be a little much. “Any time you or your kids want to go swimming, the pool is yours.”

  I cleared my throat, “It’s going to get cold soon.”

  “Well, until then.”

  “Honestly, I have too many kids for that. I can’t watch them all. It’s too stressful.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders deflated some and I could tell he was disappointed with my answer.

  Clearly he had never taken kids under six swimming before. Sure, Abby was a freak of nature when it came to water sports, but Lucy and Jace weren’t even close to bei
ng water-ready. If I had someone else to go with me, it wouldn’t be so bad. I could split up the two littles and Grady could have helped me keep an eye on the two older ones. But I didn’t have Grady anymore, and I didn’t trust a complete stranger to help me keep my kids alive.

  Plus, it was just weird. We hadn’t known each other for twenty-four hours yet. I wished he’d stop forcing his friendship on me.

  “Liz, I have to go soon! Get your a-s-s in the shower now or you’re going to have to wait until Thursday before you can take one!” Emma’s voice called from the front porch. She held Jace on her hip and Lucy clung to her leg. Her wild blonde hair whipped around her face in the fall breeze.

  She looked like the well put-together mom I would never be.

  Of course, she wasn’t a full-time, single mom and therefore had time for things like hair appointments and manicures. Also, her body had not pushed four bowling balls out her vagina, so she had that going for her too.

  I snuck a glance at Ben to see him watching my sister intently. Yep, she did that to all men. Poor guy.

  “I’ll be right there!” I called back.

  It was too late; she’d noticed Ben and now her curiosity had gotten the better of her.

  “I guess I’ll see you around,” I said quickly to him in hopes I could escape before my sister wanted a formal introduction.

  “Mommy!” Lucy slammed into my thighs and wrapped her short arms around me. “You smell icky.”

  My face flushed with embarrassment. No doubt I smelled icky. Ben tossed his head back and let out a loud bark of laughter.

  “Thanks, Babe,” I grumbled.

  “You do smell icky, Sis,” Emma chuckled on her arrival.

  “That’s why I need that shower.”

  She ignored me, her sparkling eyes already on my new neighbor. “I’m Emma.” She smiled widely at him. Jace made a dive for me and I caught him before he tumbled out of Emma’s distracted arms.

  Ben reached out his hand and took her now empty one. “Ben Tyler.”