Chapter 13
“Christine, stop.”
Blood. So much blood. “I have to try. Let me try.”
“Fuck. Chrissy, stop. Please. You need to go.”
Didn’t he realize what was happening? “I’m not leaving. You’re going to be fine.”
“You need to run. We promised her we’d keep them safe. You’ll be okay. I’ll take care of Jessie.”
There was blood by Jessie too. More blood. Spattering the snow. Darkened by death. “She’s—”
“I know. I saw—she was next to me when it happened. I got the one who… I killed the man who shot her. We’ll make it all right. We have each other. It doesn’t hurt, Chrissy. Don’t worry.”
It had to hurt. How could it not hurt? “Thomas—”
“Don’t. I love you. That’s all you need to know.”
No. It wasn’t time. She hadn’t had enough time. With him, with their daughter, with anyone. “Tom, wait. Don’t go. I can’t do this alone. Stay and talk to me. Please. Tommy…”
*****
I shook myself awake, frightened by where the nightmare might take me next. I could hear Tom’s voice, as close as if he were whispering in my ear. The dreams were the same every time—I’d feel the wind, smell the cold, practically taste the blood—but the images were always blurry, as if my mind were trying to fill in blanks that had never existed. Or block them out. Most likely the latter.
They were still distressingly vivid.
Breathe. Deep breaths. In. Out. Alexander’s arm was draped around me, his nose buried in my hair. I couldn’t wake him up. He didn’t need to deal with this.
Escape. I needed to escape. I slid out from under him and into the bathroom, dragging my pillow behind me.
Breathe. It was the only way I could calm down. I just had to breathe. Count the breaths. Form a rhythm. I’d done it before and I could do it again, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dreamt like that. I’d hoped I’d moved on from the intensity, from the emotionally graphic bite of it all. I bit my fist. I couldn’t cry. It wasn’t right. I had to hold it in.
That didn’t work so I pressed my face into the pillow to muffle my cries. Dammit, I’d abandoned the house in Bryn Mawr, put all my things in storage, found a place I thought belonged to me alone, and I still couldn’t escape the specter of my dead husband.
There was a soft knock at the door. “Christine?”
Oh no. He was awake. I leapt forward from my knees to lock the door.
“I’m fine,” I called, the tone of my voice indicating I was anything but.
“You’re not.” His voice was calm. Soothing. Concerned. “You were screaming his name.”
I’d been calling out for Tom while sobbing in the bathroom hours after sharing an extremely gymnastic sexual experience with Alexander in my newly deflowered bed. Talk about being a lousy partner. How bad was it that I hadn’t even noticed what I was doing?
“I’m fine,” I repeated lamely.
“Please, Christine. Open the door.”
I bit my lip before responding. “It’s not important.”
Alexander knocked on the door again, louder this time. “It’s important and you know it. Please open the door. I need to know you’re okay.”
I’d never wanted to be alone so badly in my life. Why couldn’t he just leave me and my grief in peace? “Go away!” I yelled.
Silence on the other side of the door. I’d never yelled at him before. I rarely yelled at all since stony silence was so much more effective. I knew it was conduct worthy of an apology, but the words stuck in my throat.
I could do my best to convince myself that I’d been granted absolution for my sins. But in moments like this, when I was sitting on the floor of my immaculately white bathroom in the throes of a depressive episode so deep it felt like my body was literally ripping apart, I wondered if I was entitled to anything good. The doubt, the despair, the damned desolation… maybe my spiritual wounds were too deep to heal. And maybe I didn’t deserve the kind of person who would help me figure any of it out.
A long time passed, long enough that I assumed he’d gone back to bed or maybe even out of the condo entirely.
“Christine,” he whispered. “Please let me in. I can’t help you if you don’t let me in.”
“I can’t.”
He hit the wall next to the door, and when he spoke next, the gentility in his voice was gone. “You won’t. Let’s not kid ourselves here.” He rattled the handle on the door. “We can’t deal with this unless we talk about it.”
When had I given him any sign I wanted to talk about any of this? But I was afraid if I hesitated much longer, he’d find a way to break into the bathroom in some beta-turned-alpha attempt to fix my myriad problems. I unlocked the door, opening it an inch. “See, I’m fine. No big deal.”
He ran his hands over his scalp, pressing his forehead to the doorjamb. “It is a big deal and you know it! Why are you so determined to shut me down when I’m only trying to help you?”
I brushed past him into the bedroom. I’d been known to run hot and cold, but not a soul anywhere could match my ability for cool composure during the complete abandonment of reality. “You’re trying to blow this up into something it never was.”
“Look,” he said. “I don’t care that you say his name in your sleep. I don’t care that you still dream about him. I don’t care that you still love him.”
He had to stop talking about Tom. What gave him the right? “Stop,” I said.
“No. I don’t care, Christine. He was your husband. You loved him. You’ll always love him. I don’t intend to make you forget him. You seem perfectly capable of trying to block him out all by yourself. And as you’ve just demonstrated, you aren’t doing a very effective job.”
I gathered his clothes up off the floor and tossed them at him. “I think you should leave.”
He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything, shoving his legs one by one into his pants. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay and talk. I want to help you work through this. And by leaving I know I’m reinforcing your belief that no one in the world will ever care about you the way that your husband did. But I’ll be damned if I’ll stay here and share a bed with a woman who won’t acknowledge reality.”
Good. I could sleep by myself. It was more comfortable that way. “Fine,” I said, staring down at my feet.
I didn’t bother looking up until I heard the click of the door behind him.
Chapter 14
One day. Then two. Then three. Then four. He didn’t text. He didn’t call. He didn’t email. I’d blown it big time and didn’t quite know how to fix it. It was my job to reach out and apologize. I knew that. He’d only been trying to help. I knew that. Unfortunately, my actions were most often governed by the part of my brain that didn’t want to fess up and admit I’d been in the wrong.
“I feel like everyone’s been yelling at me lately,” I told Caroline, as we settled in for our biweekly tea party. She’d made a Boston Crème Pie. We vowed to finish the whole thing if we could.
“And you don’t even deserve it,” she said dryly. “Unless you do. Did you fuck up with Alex, Chrissy?”
“Royally.”
“How long has it been since you threw a wrench into your budding romance?”
“Four days.”
“And he hasn’t reached out?”
“Nope.”
She nodded sagely. “Yup. You done fucked up.”
“He’s too good for me.”
“With an attitude like that, yes. He probably is.”
“I yelled at him.”
“Apparently he yelled back.”
And how. “I have a lot of nightmares.”
“So do I.”
“I didn’t really warn Alex about them.”
“That seems like it can be remedied easily enough.”
“We had sex, I had a nightmare, I had a panic attack, I fled to my bathroom, locked the door, continued freaking out, and whil
e I was in some weird fugue state, I started screaming Tom’s name.”
“Well,” Caroline said. “That might take a little more work.”
I fiddled with my wedding band. “He tried to intercede, I yelled at him, he left.”
“And now you’re hoping it’ll fix itself.”
Pretty much. “I don’t know what to do. Or whether to do it. How can I ask this man to deal with all of my issues?”
“He knows what you’ve been through. And who you’ve been with. Why is it so hard for you to let him help you with it?”
Oh, where to begin. “It just is. I’m not sure he’s willing to share his life with another man.”
Caroline pursed her lips. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Chrissy. Way to go from zero to sixty with that hyperbolic statement. I’m sure that’s not the way he feels.”
How could he feel any other way? “Tom is everywhere. I’ve done my best to eliminate anything that triggers my grief, but it’s impossible to get rid of everything.”
“Nor should you.” She rubbed her hands together. “And I hardly think Alex expects you to forget Tom.”
“How could he not?”
“Thirty-five years is a long time,” Caroline mused. “Your hair has been, like, twelve different shades of blonde during that span.”
I let that slide. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
She looked at me as if I were quite daft. “I can’t believe I have to explain this to you.”
“Use small words,” I said. “I’ll try to keep up.”
She rolled up her sleeves, which meant we were in for the long haul. I probably should have taken a bathroom break before sitting down. “Jack doesn’t try to make me forget Nicky,” she said.
Which was true. Her first husband, Nicholas, the biological father of her children, had been killed in a car accident while she and I had been serving in Congress. Jack had placed one of their wedding photos in Caroline’s office when he renovated it. Still, now we were going to play the comparison game? Jack was a great husband. I’d admit that. He wouldn’t have been my first choice, but he suited Caroline well.
“You weren’t married as long as I was,” I countered.
“Let me finish,” she barked.
I waved my hand, not wanting to start an argument. “Finish, then.”
“He doesn’t pretend my scars don’t exist. He embraces them as part of who I am. You need a man who will love your scars. I think Alex can be that man, don’t you?”
We’d spent so much time talking about what had happened to her—what had happened to both of us—during those years when we were separated, and the knowledge I’d gleaned occasionally made me feel uncomfortable, if not unworthy to be in her presence. “I don’t have scars,” I whispered.
She gave me a look that usually preceded a lecture, and I braced myself. “Of course you do,” Caroline said. “You think all my scars are visible? Don’t downplay your trauma because you think mine is of greater magnitude.”
I could hardly compare what I had gone through to what she’d had to suffer. The fact that she was still living and breathing was nothing short of miraculous. “But it is.”
She sighed heavily. “We’re not here to rank our ordeals. We’ve always shared our burdens without judgment and I don’t expect that to change. Stop being disingenuous.”
“I’m not sure I’m being disingenuous so much as duplicitous but thank you for the vocabulary lesson.”
“You’re welcome.” She took my hands, squeezing them softly. “Your suffering isn’t outwardly obvious, but it exists. You wouldn’t be so beleaguered by nightmares if it didn’t. Even now you’re questioning decisions you’ve made, though you know you have damn good justifications for them. If you’ve found someone who loves you because of your scars and not in spite of them, you need to hold onto him for all he’s worth. And don’t dismiss him when he’s trying to help you.”
Was Alex that man? I hoped so. But if I didn’t know so, was that still good enough? “I feel like I’m expected to cast Tom aside, like I’m shedding an old layer of skin.”
“What a dreadful metaphor. Has Alex forgotten any of his past loves?”
“He was engaged once. They’re still friends.”
“See, then he hasn’t. Remembering old flames is some sort of way in which the world determines the honorableness of men. To the contrary, women are expected to place their current partner on the highest of pedestals. Society holds us to impossibly high standards and this is one of them.” She counted off on her fingers one by one. “Be a lady, except when you’re not. Tolerate sex, but don’t enjoy it too much or you cross over from virgin to slut. Love deeply, but never compare. Men are allowed concessions, are allowed to mourn the ‘good wife’ and make comparisons until the end of time. Women are expected to step up to the plate and be some man’s ‘good wife’ before the burial plot begins to grass over. It’s all part of the patriarchal bullshit that binds society together.”
I generally didn’t question her feminist analyses, but that sounded somewhat specious. “Are you serious?”
“Only partly. You’re welcome to join my misandrist coven. We meet every other Thursday to drink man tears and commiserate.”
Some of what she’d just said undoubtedly had merit. “Could you repeat that speech you just gave, but make it more palatable?”
To her credit, she didn’t roll her eyes at me. “You’ve lived a full life, Chrissy. As has he, less a decade or so. You can’t be expected to cut a huge chunk out of your identity and remain a whole person. You lost a husband. You lost a child. In some very harrowing circumstances. You couldn’t forget that if you tried.”
“How do I make it easier for him?”
“I’m of the belief that you don’t necessarily have to, but it’s the nice thing to do, so I’ll tell you how.”
“Then continue, wise one.”
“I shall disregard your sarcasm, as I know it is one of the few ways in which you demonstrate affection,” she said, before clearing her throat. “There’s no magic solution, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You handle it, knowing each day might present its own set of challenges. You make sure you tell the people around you how grateful you are for their help.”
Which she’d done, many times, for more than one tragedy and over the course of several years, exuding an easy, appreciative grace I wished I had. “Okay.”
“Jack embraces my past, revels in my present, and dreams of my future. That’s about all you can ask for in a partner, I think. If Alex is feeling some resentment, you need to talk about it. But I simply cannot believe that he expects you to forget Tom. Are you sure you aren’t manufacturing a problem that isn’t there?”
Was that something I did? I came to Caroline for hard truths but I didn’t have to like what I was told. “What do you mean?”
“You’re far too insecure for someone so nice.”
I chortled. “Caroline, if you’re going to try to build me up, don’t insult my intelligence at the same time.”
“You are nice. People just have to dig a little deeper to see it. But when they hit that mushy middle, you get scared. Don’t deny it.”
I wasn’t about to. “It was a lot easier for me to figure all of this out before I had all this extra political nonsense to go along with it.”
“Dating post-presidency has to be a bit of a drag.”
“And post… other things.”
“You’re feeling vulnerable,” she said. “That’s normal.”
“I don’t want to get comfortable. Or complacent. Because that means I’ll start to take everything for granted and let my guard down and it will be a complete disaster.”
“It doesn’t seem like a disaster to me,” Caroline said. “He’s trying to help you, Chrissy. Let him.”
“I’m trying. I just don’t seem to be very good at it.”
Caroline scooted closer to me. “It’s hard,” she said softly. “You miss Tom. And Jess. We all do.
But it’s especially painful for you in particular.”
It was so easy to be flippant and lighthearted one moment, then weighted down by grief the next. Suffering didn’t reach a magical end because you had a good day or two. “We lost a lot of good people.”
“Yesterday was Katie’s birthday,” Caroline said.
Kathleen Thalberg, her former press secretary and chief of staff, as well as one of her closest friends. She and another of Caroline’s staffers, Genevieve Whitcomb, had died at the hands of the Santos Administration. Both good eggs. Both gone.
“I think about Kathleen a lot,” I said. “I know she talked with Jessie quite a bit after she came out.”
“Sometimes I feel guilty for progressing so well when she and Jen aren’t here to share it with me.”
The conversation was getting much too blue. “Took a long time to get here, though. They’d be proud of you. So proud.”
“See, that’s why I know you’re not as tough as you look, Chrissy. You know how to love. You appreciate the love you see in others. And you know damn well how much it hurts when you lose it.” Caroline stared down at her hands. “If you do find love again, you take it. Even if you’re afraid of it. And once you get it, you never, ever let it go.” She wiped her eyes. “You’ve gone through enough melancholy, Chrissy. Let in the joy.” She reached for a box of tissues. “Dammit, now I’ve got to sob quietly. Or give you a hug. Or both.”
I opened my arms. “Both sounds good.”
*****
I called Alexander as soon as I left Caroline’s.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the instant he picked up.
“I know.”
Had he already moved on? Were we over? Did he need to tell me I was dumped in order to know I was dumped? “Are we okay?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are we? Are you?”
It would be so much easier to go back in time and change my behavior. But I couldn’t very well do that, could I? “Can we pretend the other night never happened?”
“No,” he said, his voice curt. “We can’t. And even if we could, we shouldn’t. You can’t brush this away or sweep it under the rug. It’s going to keep coming back again.”
Songbird (Bellator Saga Book 7) Page 20