The Outside Child

by Tiffany L. Warren

  “He may take a few breaths when we take him off the ventilator,” Dr. Torres said. “That is normal. It doesn’t mean that he should go back on the equipment.”

  “Understood,” Chenille said.

  There was silence in the room after the hospital staff left. Brayden, Chenille, and the grandparents stared at the bed where Quincy’s tiny body remained still. He did not take any breaths when the machine was turned off. Like Marilyn had said, Quincy’s spirit was already gone.

  Chenille put Quincy’s tiny hand to her mouth and kissed it. Then she laid his arm across his chest. Brayden kissed his forehead.

  “Take me back to my room,” Chenille whispered.

  Brayden touched the back of the wheelchair, but Chenille shook her head.

  “Not you. Daddy, can you take me back?”

  Brayden stepped to one side as Kent wheeled Chenille out of the room. Brayden swallowed hard, trying to subdue the sobs that wanted to rack his body in two.

  “She’s just hurting right now,” Charlene said in a trembling voice, “but she needs you, Brayden.”

  Marilyn looked up from her grandson’s body. There was a hint of anger in her eyes, but not enough to overcome the sadness.

  “My son is also hurting, and he needs his wife, too.”

  Marilyn’s words were true. Brayden needed Chenille now more than he’d ever needed anything or anyone. But he feared that she was as far away from him as Quincy’s departed spirit.

  Brayden grieved the loss of them both.

  Chapter 50

  My son’s funeral is a damn circus. I didn’t plan any of it. Couldn’t. Marilyn took care of the entire freaking thing. She picked out the photos we would use. She chose the suit that they put on Quincy’s lifeless body. I’m not upset that she did it, either, but from the number of reporters and media here, it looks like she probably sent out press releases.

  We pull up to the church in a long white limo, the two of us, my parents, and Brayden’s parents. Under our heavy winter coats, we’re wearing blue—Quincy’s favorite color. He loved blue so much, because Brayden always wore blue. The Dallas Knights wore blue. My son never left the house without wearing something blue.

  As much as my son loved that color, you’d think the sky would cooperate. But no, it is a dark, dreary, gray January day. That color matches my mood.

  I haven’t cried again since we left the hospital, but I don’t feel any peace. I don’t feel anything. I’m just here. Maybe it has something to do with all the pain medication I’m on. That’s why I couldn’t help plan anything, really. I spend the majority of the day in a drug-induced blur. I’d rather things be blurry than clear these days.

  They gave me medicine to stop my body from producing Quincy’s milk, but I haven’t taken it yet, so my breasts feel like rocks beneath my dress. I pumped a bit before we left the house, so that should get me through the service and the burial.

  I’m not going to any repasts, parties, or anything else where they try to shove food down your throat and tell you everything is all right. Because that is a lie. Food doesn’t make anything all right. Especially the kind of food they give you at repasts. They call it comfort food.

  “Are you ready?” Brayden asks. “You don’t have to talk to the reporters. Just act like they’re not there.”

  “Why are they here?” I ask.

  “You know why they’re here,” Marilyn says. “You’re married to a celebrity. He is one of the most beloved men in Dallas. He brought the city two Super Bowls.”

  “They don’t know you’re leaving the team yet, do they? They wouldn’t love you so much then.”

  “He’s not leaving Dallas,” Marilyn says.

  I am surprised she doesn’t know. Marilyn usually knows our business before I do, especially when it comes to football.

  “I haven’t made a final decision about that, Chenille.”

  “You might as well go. It cost our son his life.”

  “Your anger . . .”

  Brayden’s daddy put a hand on his shoulder, and he relaxed. Yeah, he better. He doesn’t want to go there today. Blaming me today is not what he wants to do.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your adoring fans.”

  I slide my sunglasses onto my face and wait for the chauffeur to open the door. I still can’t walk without a walker, so they’ve got a wheelchair waiting for me. I stare at the ground as Brayden and my father lift me into the chair. I hear the crowd gasp when they see me, and I also hear the cameras flashing. I’ll be making the blogs this afternoon.

  Kara is waiting right inside the entrance to the church. I wish I was happy to see her. I’m not.

  Kara gives me a rough hug. I guess no one told her that three of my ribs are broken. She stops when I flinch.

  “Did I hurt you?” Kara asks.

  “A little, but I’m doped up, so I should be okay.”

  Kara hugs Brayden next and kisses his cheeks. She doesn’t know what happened on the day of the accident. All she knows is that I got into an accident on my way to breakfast with her. If she did know what Brayden did, she’d be punching him in the face and getting hauled out by security. I’ll tell her later when it’s safe, when the cameras aren’t around.

  Brayden pushes my wheelchair up to the front of the church. I don’t need to see my son’s lifeless body again. I’ve already said goodbye. But this is a thing that’s done. People go to the body and take one last look.

  Quincy doesn’t look the same. His skin is too dark. His mouth is turned downward when he was always smiling. He even looked like he was smiling in his sleep. That’s how I know his spirit is long gone. Quincy’s spirit smiled.

  I hear Brayden’s sobs behind me. He’s leaning into the wheelchair. I can feel the pressure of his two hundred thirty pounds bearing down on me. The chair is holding him up.

  Instead of a pew, the church has set up a row of chairs in the front, I guess to accommodate my wheelchair. Marilyn thinks of everything.

  I am glad Kara sits next to me in the church. Brayden is on one side, Kara’s on the other. He takes my hand in his, and I almost feel something. Then it goes away. I know he’s in pain, but I don’t care. His pain isn’t worse than mine.

  Brayden’s teammates are all wearing blue suits with turquoise shirts and white roses on their lapels. They’re all going to be pallbearers, even though Quincy’s casket is so tiny. So tiny that it doesn’t need all of them to carry him out.

  A body that small isn’t supposed to be in a casket.

  I don’t hear anything the preacher says. I mean, I hear noise, but I don’t comprehend any of it. The church choir, for some reason, is only singing upbeat music. Praise songs. They’re dancing and shouting like everybody’s about to get the Holy Ghost.

  I look down at the program in my lap. It says “Celebration of Life,” but my baby is no longer living, nor did he ever get to live, so what is it that we’re celebrating?

  The people who come to funerals just to get a show, to watch people cry and grieve, are getting a great performance from Brayden. He’s on his feet now, hands lifted toward the sky. The sound of his wails almost rises above the singing.

  His mother and some of the older women in the church surround Brayden. They rub his back, hand him tissues, and hold his hands while they pray for him. No one seems to care about my grief, except maybe Kara.

  I glance over my shoulder at my mother. She’s in bad shape, too, just as bad as Brayden. Unlike us, though, my father has his arm around my mother. He rocks her back and forth and dabs her eyes with tissues.

  I dab my own eyes.

  Some of the preacher’s words start to break through my haze and float down to my ears.

  He says, “We might have been caught off guard by young Quincy’s home going, but God wasn’t caught off guard. He was ready to welcome this young soul on home.”

  I think these words are supposed to be comforting, but they break me. A flood of tears flows from my eyes as I imagine my baby in heaven. I don’t w
ant him there. I want him with me.

  Kara hands me a pill and water. I shake my head at her and try to hand it back.

  “It’s just Valium. It’ll take the edge off, but you’ll still be awake,” she says.

  I hesitate before putting the pill in my mouth. I don’t want to get used to taking the edge off, but right now my legs won’t stop shaking, and my throat is raw from crying, so I take the medicine.

  I close my eyes, shiver, and wait for it to kick in. I still hear the preacher hollering at the top of his lungs. He’s preached himself into a frenzy now. I feel Brayden’s hand encircle mine. When I open my eyes, he’s seated again. He pulls my hand up to his mouth and kisses it, wetting my hand with his tears.

  Finally, I feel something for my husband. His pain is thick and heavy, maybe heavier than mine, because he doesn’t seem equipped for sadness. All of this crying and wailing seems alien to Brayden.

  The Valium starts to kick in right as the pallbearers, Brayden’s teammates, line up on either side of the tiny casket. Thank goodness for the medically induced mellow mood, because without it, I don’t know if I could watch them carry my son’s body out of the sanctuary.

  Brayden pushes my wheelchair behind the pallbearers, and again I feel his weight on the chair. Without the support of the wheelchair for balance Brayden might be crawling up the center aisle.

  The cemetery is only a mile or so away from the church, but the drive seems to take forever. There is an endless procession of cars behind us. There’s no way all those people fit inside the church.

  The car is silent outside of Brayden’s sniffs and whimpers. I doze in and out of sleep because . . . Valium plus my pain medication. I wish I’d taken two or three. Maybe I’d be able to sleep through the rest of the day.

  The car finally stops on the grass in front of a secluded plot in the cemetery. We must’ve purchased the celebrity special plot, so that our baby doesn’t have to decompose with regular folk.

  Hordes of people pile out of their cars, reporters included, to watch us put our baby in the ground. This really is too much for anyone. It’s against the natural order of things. Quincy should be burying me. But it seems he was never meant to be here long. God didn’t even give him a whole working heart. If it wasn’t for modern medicine he would’ve died before he was a month old.

  Dr. Benjamin is maybe here somewhere. I spied him at the church, but I don’t know if he made it over to the cemetery. I wonder if he thinks this is a waste of his handiwork, his and Dr. Panesh’s perfect trio of surgeries ruined by a car accident.

  The hollering preacher is praying now. Except he’s not hollering now. He’s barely speaking above a whisper. At first I struggle to hear him, then I give up. It doesn’t really matter what he says anyway. It won’t take the sting out of this for me.

  Nothing will.

  My dress is wet. I can feel the warm, sticky liquid under my coat. My body’s last-ditch effort to save my son. Trying to give him sustenance on his way into this hole in the earth.

  I ignore it. Let it run. Let it drench my clothes, drip down my feet, and into the ground. Let Quincy’s milk meet him in the afterlife. Isn’t that what the old people say about heaven? It’s like the promised land; flowing with milk and honey.

  They don’t lower the casket into the ground after the prayer. I guess they do that when the family is gone. Maybe it’s too much. I can see how that makes sense. It is too much.

  It’s just that in the movies, they lower it into the ground, and inevitably someone tries to jump in. That would be Brayden. I don’t want to see that. The bloggers would love it, though. Click bait.

  Someone else is pushing my wheelchair back to the limo. It’s not Brayden, because he has collapsed onto the ground. His teammates are helping him to his feet.

  “I sure hate we’re going through this, baby girl.”

  My daddy. I should’ve known that he would be the one taking care of me. He always takes care of me.

  “Me too, Daddy. I miss my baby so much.”

  Saying this out loud breaks me again. These sobs are loud, ugly, and painful. Daddy pushes the wheelchair quickly, getting me away from the prying eyes.

  Inside the limo, I hide behind the tinted windows. I go from feeling nothing to feeling everything all at once. I prefer the nothingness.

  I reach in my purse for a pain pill. I double the dose, close my eyes, and wait for sleep to steal the next few hours.

  Chapter 51

  It had been two weeks since the funeral, and Chenille still hadn’t said a word to Brayden. If it hadn’t been for Marilyn, who had decided to set up shop in their home, and not leave until her son was okay, Brayden would’ve been living in complete silence.

  He stared down at the breakfast in front of him. His mother’s apple pancakes. His favorite, because it was the only thing she cooked well. But his appetite had not yet returned, so he ate only because he knew that his body would suffer without food.

  “I took Chenille some breakfast. She neglected to thank me,” Marilyn said.

  “Mama, she’s not talking. I don’t think it has anything to do with you.”

  “I know what it has to do with. I understand losing a child. I had a miscarriage before we had you.”

  Brayden didn’t correct his mother or explain the difference between losing a toddler and an unborn child. One, because he had no idea how much his mother had grieved that loss. Two, maybe that would help her relate to Chenille instead of pushing her away.

  “I think she just blames herself for not strapping Quincy in that car seat,” Marilyn said. “And it is her fault. I know if she could go back in time she’d change that.”

  Brayden shook his head. He’d already told Marilyn the reason Chenille had forgotten. And he’d placed himself at the center of Chenille’s actions.

  “So have you decided what you’re going to do about this job offer in Portland?”

  Brayden couldn’t believe his mother had asked that question. Of course, he didn’t know. He’d just buried his son and hadn’t thought about what he might do for work. He hadn’t decided what he’d do tomorrow, or the next day. He was living one minute at a time.

  “I don’t know yet. I know that I can’t leave Chenille by herself. Not in this house, with all the reminders of Quincy.”

  “And what about you?” Marilyn asked. “You’ll heal by throwing yourself back into your work. I think you should go.”

  “Only if Chenille is coming, too. I wouldn’t leave her.”

  Marilyn gave an exasperated sigh. “I know. I raised the noblest son on the planet.”

  Brayden didn’t know quite how noble he was, when the thought at the forefront of his mind was how to get Chenille to make love to him. He was going crazy with need, and the baby oil in the shower was getting old.

  He knew Chenille’s pelvis wasn’t completely healed, but according to her doctor she was well enough for some contact.

  Brayden was almost ashamed for feeling this way. What kind of oaf would be thinking about sex with his wife when they’d just lost their son and she was healing from an accident? But he couldn’t help it. He wanted, no, needed her touch.

  “Thank you for breakfast, Mama. I’m about to go and check on Chenille.”

  “Bring her empty plate back downstairs. I’ll clean the kitchen, too.”

  Brayden couldn’t remember the last time she cleaned anything. That was a job for the staff she hired. Brayden figured she was just giving herself a reason to linger in their home. He didn’t mind. He was grateful for her presence.

  Brayden stood in front of the master bedroom door. It was closed. It was always closed. Chenille had made it clear that she didn’t want Brayden in bed with her, so he’d moved his residence to the man cave. But he wanted to go into his bedroom. He wanted to share the bed with his wife. They didn’t have to have sex. He just needed to feel her warmth and inhale her scent.

  He refused to knock on his bedroom door, although it felt as if he ought to. Instead, he
pushed the door open slowly, to give Chenille the opportunity to react, holler, or scream. Maybe she’d even throw something in his direction. Any of that was better than silence.

  Chenille said nothing as Brayden crossed the room. She looked straight through him when he stood at the foot of the bed. She pretended he was invisible.

  “You can’t do this forever,” Brayden said.

  She didn’t respond. Maybe she intended on doing this forever, because she sure wasn’t opening her mouth.

  “Chenille.”

  She stared straight ahead. Even her blinks looked angry. They were slow and deliberate. She pressed her eyes shut tightly and sprung them back open again, like she hoped he’d disappear in the time she took to close and open her eyes.

  Brayden walked over to the untouched breakfast plate and picked it up. Chenille had to be eating something, because she didn’t look like she was losing weight, but she never touched anything his mother brought.

  “These pancakes were good. You should’ve tried them,” Brayden said.

  She didn’t respond, except to turn her head and look at the window. The curtains were closed, making the room dark outside of the artificial light from the lamp.

  Brayden walked over and opened the curtains, letting sunlight spill in. Like a vampire, Chenille squinted and turned her face away.

  “You need to go outside. It’s really warm today. Too warm for January. In the fifties. Maybe the nurse can wheel you outside for a while.”

  Still, Chenille gave no response to his presence in the room.

  “You can’t just keep ignoring me, Chenille. I am your husband. We have to face this together.”

  Brayden liked to think that he sounded confident in his declaration. She couldn’t ignore him. He wouldn’t let her. But Chenille’s stubborn lack of acknowledgment spoke confidently, too. It said she could absolutely ignore him. Maybe even until the end of time.

  Chapter 52

  More than a month has passed since my son died. I still don’t have much energy for anything other than my physical therapy, which is kicking my entire ass. It’s not so much learning to walk again, but bearing the weight of walking. I really don’t need to walk. Where am I going anyway?