by R. K. Lilley
I rubbed my slightly rounded belly, closing my eyes.
I want this baby, I thought. It was the closest I’d ever come to a prayer.
Please, let me keep this baby.
I had never wanted anything more, not even Tristan’s love.
TRISTAN
Kenny dropped me off at the curb in front of my apartment building. I was fucked up in the extreme. I knew I’d be catching hell for it later, but at just that moment, I felt no pain, and getting a bit of grief seemed a small price to pay for blessed numbness.
I knew I’d missed some texts from Danika, but she was pissed at me again, our last conversation beginning and ending with her bitching at me for being unreliable, and that was more than I wanted to deal with at the moment.
It took me way too long to fish the keys to my apartment out of my pocket and fumble the lock open. I stumbled more than walked to my bedroom. I had just begun to unbutton my jeans, my eyes on the bed in the darkened room, when I realized that I wasn’t alone.
“Danika,” I called softly, not wanting to wake her if she was asleep. I didn’t want her to see me like this again, if I could help it.
I lay down beside her, still fully clothed, reaching a tentative hand out to find hers.
Her fingers were limp, her palm cold as I linked our fingers. I moved closer. Even shit-faced, my first instinct was to warm her up.
I slipped under the covers, hugging her to me. She was so deeply asleep that she didn’t so much as twitch.
Forgetting entirely that I’d been meaning not to wake her, I slipped my hand up her shirt, then ran it over her body, starting at one cool, rounded breast, over her belly, meeting resistance in the form of bunched up cloth as I tried to delve between her legs.
Impatient, I dug deeper into the swaths of fabric.
I tensed as I my seeking fingers touched something wet and cold.
My heart started pounding.
It was the loudest sound in that still as death room.
I stumbled back, sobering instantly, but becoming no less clumsy as I fumbled along the wall for the light switch, sheer panic setting in.
I’d taken the covers off her with my rough attentions, and so the first thing I saw was the blood.
So much blood.
My breath stuttered in my lungs as I moved back to her, my fingers trembling as I put them to her neck. My eyes closed in relief as I made out her faint pulse.
I swallowed hard as I glanced again at her lower body.
So much blood.
A thick towel bunched between her legs was soaked through with it. Underneath her, the bed was soaked with it.
So much blood. Too much blood.
I fumbled in my pocket, fishing out my phone. I didn’t remember dialing 911, or even speaking, and I didn’t know how long I held the phone to my ear even after it went dead.
I was terrified to move her, and so I huddled over her, trying to warm her up, pulling her baggy T-shirt down to cover as much of her lower body as I could manage.
I stroked her hair, and murmured reassurances in her ear. They were for my benefit alone, since she didn’t stir, didn’t so much as twitch under my reverent, soothing hands.
I’d never been so scared, abject terror making my limbs numb. I could hear my teeth chattering with it, tapping out a click-click-click noise that seemed to fill up the room.
Click-click-click.
I pulled the blanket up to her neck. I checked her pulse again.
Click-click-click.
Time slowed down, until it felt like I’d been waiting hours, and still she didn’t rouse.
Finally, the sound of the ambulance approaching, a fairly common sound in Vegas, and one I’d never been so relieved to hear before in my life, got me moving.
I made sure the front door was unlocked, reconsidered, and just left it open.
I was hovering over her when the paramedics came in. They were loud but efficient.
My eyes stayed glued to Danika, desperate for any sign of life from her.
She stirred as they moved her from the bed to a stretcher, her hands shifting over her taut belly.
My gut clenched. It could have been the state I’d been in walking in the door, or just plain shock, but it only occurred to me then that the baby was in danger. I’d been too singularly focused on the peril Danika was in to even consider it before.
No. My mind shied away from it, from either possibility. I couldn’t take that, not on top of everything else.
I’d been a flake lately, just letting too many things go, but this, this was too much. I couldn’t bear the thought.
I wanted our little family, needed it.
Danika roused in the ambulance. She cried and screamed and cursed as that little life bled out of her, but in the end, she was as helpless as I was.
Hours later, utterly defeated, she finally rested, with the help of some much needed painkillers.
I spent the longest night of my life in the St. Rose Dominican hospital, where we lost our baby.
I hadn’t thought that life would hand me another thing that could break me like Jared’s death had, but this did.
Jared’s loss had left a small hole in my heart that had been seeping slowly and steadily since his death, but this, this was a hemorrhage.
My mind focused, with morbid determination, on the things I could have done differently.
I sat in that hospital room, moving as close to a sleeping Danika as I could get, and went through every call I’d missed, every message I’d ignored. For hours, she’d reached out to me, but I hadn’t been there, and look what had happened. No woman should have to go through something like that alone. Her phone had died, I’d heard her mumbling to the paramedics earlier. She’d been stranded there, no help in sight.
No matter which way I turned that over in my brain, I was to blame.
I kept vigil over her prone figure through that long night and hated myself. It was a poison, that hate, and once it got in my bloodstream, it stayed there.
The abject horror of finding her the way I had, not knowing if she would live or die, the horror turning into pain at our loss, and finally, that pain turning into a quiet resolve.
What was I doing? What was I thinking? Did I have a right to keep this woman, this beautiful creature with her bright future, in my twisted disaster of a life? Was I strong enough to let her go?
I had no answers. Or at least none that I was willing to acknowledge just then. I had lost too much already.
When she finally woke, she barely looked at me. When I asked her how she was doing, she only closed her eyes, tears seeping out of her lowered lids.
Did she hate me now, too? I didn’t have the courage to ask.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I told her, clutching her hand and crying with her.
I was driving her home before she delivered the final blow, her whisper ragged with grief.
“It was a boy.”
I pulled the car over, my shoulders shaking. Her hand touched my arm, and I turned to her, sobbing into her neck.
“Jared Jeremiah Vega,” she said, her voice devastated.
Broken.
“Jeremiah for Jerry?” I finally found the strength to ask.
I felt her nodding against my cheek.
“It was the perfect name, Danika.”
She’d been crying silently, but now she began to sob. It came out of her in a great, heaving flood.
“This is all my fault,” she told me. “I fell down in the shower that morning, then just went on with my day, thinking everything would be fine. I should have gone straight to the hospital. Then none of this would have happened. We’d still be having our baby boy.”
I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t take that she was blaming herself for an accident. “No, no, no,” I whispered tenderly into her hair. “It’s not your fault. Don’t ever say that. I can’t bear it. It’s my fault. I should have been there.”
She protested, telling me it wasn’t, and I didn’t know if it was her tone o
r my conscience, but I didn’t believe her.
Tragedy never took its full chunk out of you right away. It always took a while to hit you head on, and sink in and for something substantial, some hint of the real feeling, the real reaction, to come to the surface, and this loss was not done taking its toll on us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DANIKA
After that, it was a slow motion free fall for us.
A quiet, helpless unraveling.
Some days I raged against it with every fiber of my being, but others…others I was as far gone as Tristan, and I didn’t even need to be drunk to get there.
So much had been torn apart with the miscarriage, so many little pieces of us that needed to be sewn back together. Only, there was hardly any thread left. Barely enough for one of us, and certainly not enough for both.
He was gone nearly all the time after that, it seemed. I had no one to comfort me, no one to share in the pain.
I never told Bev or Jerry what had happened. As far as they knew, I’d simply spent a few days at Tristan’s apartment. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I couldn’t make myself talk about it, and though Bev’s keen eyes told me that she knew that something was wrong, I never admitted it out loud.
I visited his apartment for one of his rare visits to town. He was supposed to be expecting me, but it was obvious that he wasn’t prepared when I walked into his bedroom.
I found him alone, lying back against his headboard. I could tell that he was wasted at a glance. With what, I couldn’t say, and didn’t ask.
The what of it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the cause. And the fact that he didn’t hide it from me, when he’d always put some filter on it before, for my sake.
I could tell that he’d just given up.
I didn’t blink. I didn’t look away from his bloodshot eyes, or his shaky hands as he lit a smoke, trying and failing to meet my eyes.
I took it all in, the brutal reality of it, my face wet with tears, my jaw trembling nearly as hard as my voice when I spoke. “What can I do? Tell me, and I’ll do it. Tell me how to help you.”
To save you, I thought.
He didn’t flinch. His sensitivity, his feelings for me, had just deteriorated that much, or he was just that high. It could have been either, or both. There was nothing in his voice when he spoke. Nothing at all, not even an echo of the things he should have been feeling in response to my pain. “You can’t. I can’t.”
“Well, someone has to. Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? Can’t you see what it’s doing to me? Don’t you care that it’s tearing me apart?”
“What do you want from me?” His voice, at least, was animated now.
“Everything!” I shouted, enraged, heartbroken. “Everything you promised, and everything I need. What I’m willing to give to you is what I want from you. Can’t you do that for me, Tristan? Isn’t there enough of you left?”
He just shook his head, his eyes drifting closed. I’d been as good as arguing with the bed.
He’d remember none of this in the morning.
But I remembered.
I remembered everything. I had no drugs to numb me, to make me forget. I couldn’t take that path.
I wouldn’t make it back.
And neither, perhaps, would Tristan.
I began to notice a gradual change in myself, as well. I was becoming less of myself, or rather, a different version of myself. I became less Danika, the strong young woman who worked hard to build a good future, and became more Dani, the waif of a girl I’d been when I was a kid, who could never get enough love, because she had never gotten any love at all.
I fell back into old patterns from my childhood, the patterns of an enabler.
Tristan was not my mother. Our relationship was, of course, dissimilar in nature, and he was a much more loving charge to me than my mother had ever been. But I was becoming who I’d been when I’d been in my mother’s care, or arguably, she mine. The first time this occurred to me, it made me so sick that I had to run to the bathroom and lose my dinner.
No, I thought. Please, no. I love him. He loves me. We can be good for each other. He just needs more time.
This sad little phrase became a mantra in my mind. I lived for what if and if only, and I became who I thought Tristan needed me to be, rather than so much as considering what I might need for myself. That was the debilitating power that he held over me, that I’d given him along with my heart.
I’d heard about depression, had suffered from different forms of it in my abused youth, but a crippling one overtook me after that.
The most despondent low that followed the most soaring high.
For the first time in my life, I began to fantasize about dying. Not ending my own life, necessarily, but about the peace of it, the tranquility.
It was a dark time for me. The blackest phase I’d ever experienced. My thoughts constantly took morbid, twisted turns.
I would look at ceiling fans, and see myself hanging from them. Every intersection while I drove to school was a potential end to all of my pain. A leftover handful of painkillers served a new purpose in my mind, suddenly.
I would fantasize about how life would go on without me, obsessively so. Perhaps my death would be the wake-up call he needed to get his act together. Perhaps he would miss me so much, he’d follow me to some better place, where the weight of life’s sorrows held less of a hold on our every waking thought. Jared would be there, and our barely formed child would have shape and life, and we could hold him and touch him, and call him by name, and things would be better.
Unfortunately, it took another tragedy to bring me out of that dark depression.
As though my own morbid thoughts had substance, the next blow seemed to come from my very own nightmares. What I had fixated on, Leticia had embraced.
To say Leticia hadn’t taken news of the miscarriage well was a gross understatement. In fact, she’d asked me not to come see her any more. I wasn’t even hurt by that. I was worried, a bit, because I knew she needed comfort, and was refusing it, but I had so little comfort to give anymore.
I left her in peace without a fight.
In hindsight, I should have fought, but I’ll never know if that would have changed anything.
We all make our own choices, and Leticia’s was impulsive and permanent.
Tristan was making a rare visit to my house, and at first my heart soared, thinking that he was finally ready to start getting better, and he was coming to me to help him.
One glance at his face when I opened the front door told me I was dead wrong.
I led him to my room without a word, sitting on the edge of my bed beside him. He clutched my hand, looking down at his lap, and I threw my other arm over his shoulders, rubbing soothingly.
I let the silence keep us company, never knowing what to say to him anymore. The miscarriage had taken so much of the fight out of him, and he’d already been through too many rounds before that, so there hadn’t been much fight left.
Finally, after an eternity, as I stroked his back, and rubbed his shoulders, and he shuddered under my hands, he began to speak.
I could barely make the words out at first. They were given to me in quiet mumbles, in gasping sobs.
“Oh no,” I whispered, as I began to piece it together.
I turned to him then, pulling him into my body, laying back and forcing him to lie on top of me. He didn’t put up a fight, all the while whispering about his mother, his poor mother, all alone when she’d ended her life at the bottom of a bottle of sleeping pills.
I comforted him. That was my job. But my initial reaction, my first gut-deep response was pure rage. How dare she? How could she be so selfish? How could she do this to my poor, dear Tristan?
It was such a permanent solution to her problems.
It was hard to fathom, hard to process.
Leticia had been a conflicted woman. And that about summed up my feelings for her.
/>
I loved her, and inside of real love, there was always room for forgiveness.
The way she’d treated Tristan had infuriated me, but I’d still felt for her. Always, even now.
In the end, that initial response was the most fleeting of things. More than anything else, I pitied her. We all had a breaking point, and life had landed too many solid blows for her to survive, too many tragedies for her poor mind to handle.
When I spoke at her funeral, it felt like the past repeating itself, though Tristan and I were the only attendees for this one.
Suicides were a touchy thing.
“I know she wasn’t perfect. I know well how flawed she was, but she was a loving woman. She loved with her whole heart, and when that whole heart was broken, she left us.”
I spoke directly to Tristan. “She loved you. I know she did. She was blinded by her grief, but I know that, in her lucid moments, she adored you, and felt pride that you were her son.
“I’m no authority on the universe. I know little about God, or the stars, or the afterlife, but I do know this: somewhere her soul still survives, watching over you. Somewhere they all survive. Jared, our son, your mother.
“My relationship with Leticia was brief but powerful. I felt like she loved me, no, I know she did, and it meant a lot to me. No matter how selfish it was, her death shouldn’t have more meaning than her life, so let’s remember her for the way that she loved, not the way that she died.”
Tristan met my stare and nodded, his eyes shiny, his jaw trembling. He was suffering, but I’d said the right thing. I was gratified, that even in the black cloud his mind had become, I could bring him some little bit of relief.
As terrible as the tragedy of Leticia had been, it served a desperate purpose for me, at least.
It was as though the fog had been lifted from my brain, and I could think again. I was still hurting, my heart still aching with all of the loss, but I began to attempt to live again.
To wake, to move, to try taking small steps in the right direction. I was alone in that path.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE