by Chloe Walsh
Dropping my head, I clenched my eyes shut, and pinched the bridge of my nose, desperately trying to keep it in. "She's…I…" I cleared my throat and then I cleared it again. "Help me," I finally said, barely more than whisper. "Please, help me."
"I'm on the way, little brother," I heard him say, tone thick with emotion.
****
Less than twenty minutes later, Kyle pulled into the driveway of my house in his truck. I waited on the porch steps and watched him as he killed the engine and climbed out.
Stalking towards me, looking disheveled with his tie undone and hanging around his neck, Kyle didn't stop until he had mounted the porch steps and had his arms around me.
Immediately, I tensed, unsure of what to do, but he continued to hug me, squeezing me tightly.
"Let it out," he told me, clutching the back of my shirt. "Get it out, buddy."
Slowly, I began to relax my posture.
Without my brains approval, my arms came around him and tears fell from my eyes.
"I'm fucked," I whispered, feeling more broken now than I ever had. "It's killing me," I added, clenching my eyes shut, feeling the burn as tears poured down my cheeks. "It won't stop."
"I know," he told me, continuing to hold me as I broke down right there on the porch steps of my house as my wife slipped further away from me.
"Losing a child," he whispered, "there's nothing like it. No words to describe the feeling." Sitting down on the porch beside me, he hooked his arms loosely around his knees. "Worst thing that ever happened to me." Brushing his hair off his brow, Kyle cleared his throat. "The feeling of being absolutely powerless. Watching the girl you love suffering and you can't fix it. You can't make it go away. You can't change a damn thing."
Shuddering, I nodded, mirroring his actions. Kyle got it.
"I would have done anything to take that pain away for Lee," he told me. "Back then, I wanted to take it all on my own shoulders. The grief, the anger, the fucking despair. But I couldn't." Sighing, he added, "Worst time of my life was watching that woman mourn a child I felt I could have protected better."
"Exactly," I choked out. "That's it. My wife doesn't let me touch her. We sleep in separate rooms. She's fading, Kyle. She is a shell of the woman I knew and I have no idea how to get her back."
"That's because she's gone," Kyle replied heavily. "That woman died along with your baby." Sighing, he added, "Now you have to put the pieces of what's left of her back together."
"What if a part of me died, too?" I confessed.
"I've no doubt that it did, little brother." Kyle knew how I was feeling.
He'd buried a child of his own.
He'd fought through the grieving process with his wife and came out the other side, but Teagan wasn't Lee.
She was a different person.
She was on the edge and I had no idea how to pull her back to me.
"The guilt," he continued. "It's almost paralyzing." He shook his head and looked out onto the lawn in front of us. "And all I remember thinking was that everything I had done before that moment didn't matter, and everything I would do after wouldn't be enough because I couldn't give her the one thing she wanted above all else. I couldn't bring back her baby."
"How did you…cope?"
Kyle sighed. "It wasn't easy," he told me. "But it was different for us." Turning to face me, he said, "I was an asshole back then, Noah. Lee would never say it, but I was." His blue eyes were full of self-loathing. "I wasn't with her when she lost it." Pausing, he sighed heavily and ran his hand through his hair. "I wasn't there for her, and that's something I will never forgive myself for."
"I feel that way," I admitted. "She went through all of it on her own." Clenching my fists shut, I forced myself to calm down. "I wasn't fucking there for her and it kills me."
"It doesn't go away," he said. "The guilt. It won't leave, but given the chance, you'll show that woman the world. You'll fill her world with babies and love and give her the best damn life you can provide. Show her every damn day just how much she means to you. You're going to fuck up. It's human nature. You're going to make her mad as hell and she's going to drive you batshit crazy, but at the end of the day, remember this; we only get one shot at this, Noah. There's only one life. And there's only one love. Lee is mine. Teagan is yours. What are you going to do with it?"
****
Teagan
I didn't want to wake up this morning. I was disappointed to feel the air in my lungs and feel the watery morning sun on my skin.
What kind of a person did that make me?
Ungrateful? Wasteful? Terrified?
Rolling onto my side, I curled up in a ball and cradled my empty stomach, the one that just a few weeks ago had housed my daughter.
It was hard enough to live through Einín's death without the papers sticking their nose in and giving the world their two cents worth.
It was everywhere.
Noah Messina's wife loses baby.
I didn't fucking lose her. She wasn’t something I'd forgotten to take with me and was going to find again. At least not in this lifetime.
She was stolen from me.
She was dead.
I didn't do my job and the whole world knew about it.
Time crawled by. Like a knife grazing an open wound, it was painful and slow.
I couldn't remember the last time I had slept. Like actually slept, without being woken by the imaginary cries of a dead baby.
I felt hollow inside. Like there was a gaping hole in my heart and everything that had once been in there was now bleeding on the floor. I was hemorrhaging in pain. My heartbreak was killing me. I didn’t feel hunger anymore. I was never thirsty.
All I felt was pain – this inexorable, all consuming feeling of horrendous pain and grief. It was so intense I couldn’t focus on anything but it.
Pain was now at the fore point of my mind. It was the focus of my every waking hour
Rolling onto my back, I sucked in a sharp breath when pain ricocheted through the center of my stomach. It was in that exact position I stayed until evening time.
By then, I forced myself to lower my feet to the floor and walk unsteadily to the bedroom window.
Drawing back the curtains, I sat on the window sill and looked out at the sun setting in the mountains.
A humming bird sang to its hearts content outside my bedroom window and I watched it for a while, feeling envious.
Darkness inside of my heart thickened as I watched the bird glide freely until my cheeks flushed red. It was so easy for that bird to fly away from its problems – to check out…
I was praying for an exit, hoping for a miracle that I knew would never come.
I remembered back to when mom lost the baby. It was right around the time dad started drinking heavily. I think I had been ten or eleven at the time. I could remember her lying on her bed, sobbing uncontrollably, and in the bath when she didn’t think I could hear her.
I remembered though.
My heart hurt at the thought.
My parents were never the same after losing their baby. I thought about me and Noah and an aching grew in my heart.
We weren't going to survive this.
I didn’t have the fight left in me to try.
I could hear so many voices in my head. In my ears. In my dreams. In my waking hours and in my nightmares.
I wanted to rip the walls apart.
I wanted to tear to skin from my bones.
I couldn't be here anymore – that was the only coherent thought I had when I walked into the ensuite bathroom and turned on the faucet in the bath.
The sound of the scaling water pelting off the cast iron rim of the bath caused my teeth to chatter. Wordlessly, I walked back into our bedroom and placed my dust covered iPod in the docking station before blasting the volume.
When I walked back into the bathroom, I wiped the condensation off the mirror before shedding my clothes.
Standing naked in front of the mirror, I glance
d at my reflection and swallowed a sob.
The scar on my stomach would never fade.
I would never be able to forget.
This pain will never leave me…
I didn't think much about what I was doing as I walked over to the bath tub and stepped inside. The scalding water did little to warm my frozen heart, assuring me that I was in fact dead on the inside.
Music was blasting in my ears.
A woman was singing about something better out there waiting for her, and for the first time in my life, my body moved in perfect harmony with my wishes.
Lowering myself into the water, I allowed it to encompass my body, covering my face, taking my breath.
Closing my eyes, I allowed my brain to surge up the image that had been haunting me every moment of every day since her death.
My baby.
Cold, blue.
Lifeless.
Under the ground.
Why should I be here when she wasn't?
****
Noah
After my talk with Kyle, I went back inside and started cleaning up.
The sound of water running broke through the silence of the house and I physically stopped what I was doing and listened.
Was this a sign?
One I had been waiting for?
Was she improving?
With the dustpan in my hands, I listened to that water running, and then the sound of music followed.
She was out of bed.
She was taking a bath.
This was good.
This was really good.
Then why did it feel so wrong?
Feeling uneasy, I continued to clean the house I already had in pristine condition.
My brain was throwing all kinds of red flags at me.
My intuition was screaming at me to go to her.
Without thinking twice about it, I raced through the foyer, taking the steps three at a time, desperate to reassure that part inside of me that was telling me something was terribly wrong.
Throwing open our bedroom door, I ran through our bedroom and into the ensuite. I felt a resounding sense of righteousness seconds before agony and fear clouded my thoughts.
Teagan lay beneath the water.
Steam was rising above the tub.
She wasn't moving.
She wasn't even trying to sit up.
She just lay in the tub with her hands at her sides and her body straight as a nail, lifelessly – hopelessly.
"Teagan," I roared, throwing myself towards her.
****
Chapter Twenty
Teagan
Death, blood and not so empty threats.
My mind was filled with images of blood and pain.
Death and stale smelling corpses.
I was surrounded by the people of my past.
All laughing and pointing.
Shaking my head, I moved to run, but couldn’t. I was frozen to the spot, bleeding from my womb, watching helplessly as Noah was shot in the shoulder over and over again.
I was screaming out for him and he couldn’t hear me.
He couldn’t see me.
Why wasn’t he coming for me?
Why wasn’t he saving me?
I was calling out his name, begging for him to come get me. The pain in my heart was smothering me. I couldn’t breathe through the pain.
Everything was moving so fast.
So impossibly fast.
And then everything just… stopped.
"You're back!" The little girl with the raven hair squealed in delight. Running towards me, she shone like the sun. "You really came back."
"I made a mistake leaving you," I told her, dropping to my knees just in time to catch her tiny body as she threw herself into my arms. "I won't ever leave you again."
"You shouldn’t be back here, Mommy," she told me, brown eyes suddenly sad. "They're not ready for you."
"Who?" I smiled the brightest smile I had at the child I just knew was the flesh of my flesh. "Who's not ready, sweet girl?"
"Is that Daddy?" she asked. Suddenly tears began to pour from her eyes.
"Don't you die on me, Thorn!" Noah's voice penetrated my dreams and I begged him to be quiet. To stop talking. To stop pulling me back from my baby. From where I wanted to be.
Shh, I begged him.
She needed me more.
I was drowning I realized, and it was an eerily peaceful feeling.
To just…stop.
"Daddy's really sad," she whispered, bottom lip wobbling.
"It's okay," I tried to assure her. "He understands."
"Don't you dare leave me, Thorn!" Noah's voice roared inside of my head once more, pulling me further away from where I needed to be. "Come on!"
I needed him to stop talking.
I needed him to let me go.
I was gone too far.
It was better this way.
"Go back, Mommy," she told me, backing away from me. "Go back and take care of my daddy."
"Don’t leave me," I sobbed brokenly on my hands and knees.
"I'll never leave you, silly," the little girl said with a smile. Stepping towards me once more, she placed her tiny hand on my heart and smiled. "I live in here now..."
"Breathe, Baby." The tiny hand I felt on my chest morphed into a man's and I jerked.
The man's touch pulled me away from our daughter and I found myself screaming… as water poured out of my mouth?
A sudden jolt to the chest sent shockwaves through me and my eyes flew open.
Spluttering water out of my throat, I tried to breathe but it burnt so badly.
Noah's arms around me were all I could feel.
His voice was all I could hear as I watched him slam his hands against my chest.
"How could do that?" he demanded, voice cracking with emotion. "How, Thorn? How could you be so damn selfish?" Grabbing me by the back of my neck he dragged me forward, slamming my body against his chest.
His heat was comforting.
His racing heart beat matched mine as we sat on the bathroom floor, hopeless.
"You could have died, Thorn!" he roared, eyes blazing. "Do you get it? You can't do that to me. You have to stay with me!"
"I can't," I spluttered. "It hurts too much."
"You don't get a choice in this, Thorn," Noah roared, chest heaving. "You take yourself out and you're taking me down with you. Is that what you want? You want to kill me?"
"No." I shook my head and cried. "Of course not."
"Well that's what you'll do," he choked out hoarsely. "If you kill you then you kill me, too!"
"I'm so tired, Noah," I replied in a dead tone. "I'm done."
"You're not done!" he shot back, furious. "You're not fucking leaving me." Shaking me, Noah grabbed my shoulders and dragged my body to his. "I'm not living if you're not living with me. We're a team, so don't fucking bail on me now, Thorn. Fight, baby. Come on, fight it with me."
"I can't," I sobbed. "It's too hard."
"You can," he argued. "You're my little badass. You can fight anything, baby. Even this." He touched his chest. " The pain? The hole in your heart? I feel it, too. It's gaping open, Teagan. But if you go..." He clutched the clothes covering his chest. "If you leave me then all of this will be for nothing. All of the blood. All of the pain and the loss. The fucking torture. It will have been for nothing. Don't make all this suffering be for nothing, Teagan. Please god, don't do this to me." Dropping his head to my stomach, he whispered, "You're the love of my life."
****
Noah
Half falling into the scalding hot water, I grabbed my wife's body and dragged her out of the water. My skin was burning; the water was beyond hot.
"Teagan," I roared, shaking her roughly, as I tried to climb out with her frail body in my arms. "Don't you dare! Don't you dare do this to me!"
I fell out of the tub and onto the tiles with my wife's lifeless body in my hands.
"Come on," I roared. "Teagan!" Sl
amming my hands against her chest, I breathed air into her lungs, all the while praying to a god I didn't believe in to save her.
No way. No fucking way was I losing her, too.
Shaking her harder than any female should be shaken, I slammed the palm of my hand against the skin covering her heart and blew the air from my lungs into hers.
Time stood still.
It crawled by.
Nothing was happening.
Panicking, I worked faster, harder, unyieldingly, in my attempt to bring my wife back from the cusp of death.
Checking her pulse for vital signs, I prayed to the god everyone talks about. The one I'd spent twenty-five years rejecting. Save her, I begged that god. Save her and I'll do anything.
And then I heard the most beautiful sound in the world.
The sound of a drowning victim's gargled cough just before they come back to life.
Relief flooded my veins as I watched my wife splutter mouthfuls of bathwater onto her chin.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Her body shook, but the best part of it all was the sound of her breathing.
The sound of her desperately dragging air into her lungs.
"Don't you do that to me again," I roared, eyes watering. "Do you hear me?"
She looked around her, eyes glazed but slowly coming into focus. When they landed on my face, she choked out a sob.
"How could you do that to me?" I demanded. "How could you be so damn selfish?"
"I'm sorry," she rasped.
"You want out that bad?" I roared. "Did you think of what that would do to me? Finding you in here?"
"Noah…"
"I can't Teagan. I can't take care of you like this." Kneeling in front of my wife, I dropped my head in shame. "You need help and I can't give it to you."
"I need it to be over."
"Well, tough fucking luck because it's not over. And you checking out won't make it end either, Teagan. This is death. This is grief. This is life. You checking out still leaves me with the pain. I am still here, Teagan. I am breaking, too, you know. You're not the only one who lost a child that night."