Her shoulders seize up, and her eyes well, but she nods, seeming strong, steadfast. That’s my girl. My tough, badass, brave girl.
“I love you too. That’s all that matters, right? We’ll figure it all out somehow. As long as we’re together.”
“We will always be together,” I tell her, locking eyes with her, making sure she knows these words are the absolute truth. They are the foundation of how I live my life now. With her. With the certainty I have in this crazy love that we found in the most unlikely place. “Remember? Staying.”
“Staying,” she repeats, nodding. “Always.”
Then her hands slip up my shirt, and she runs her fingernails across my arrow tattoo. I rub her shoulder and bring my lips to kiss her heart and arrow. It’s like we’re sealing a promise. One that neither of us ever expected to make; not now, not like this.
But what choice do we have?
Somehow we manage through the rest of the day, and when her stomach rumbles in the evening, I laugh.
“Hungry much?”
“I guess so,” she says with a sheepish grin.
“Bet you didn’t know I am amazingly proficient at making grilled cheese sandwiches.”
Her eyes light up. “Ooh! I bet you didn’t know that’s my favorite kind of sandwich.”
I show off the extent of my skills in the kitchen, making her a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner, the melted cheddar drizzling over the crust of the bread.
She takes a bite and rolls her eyes in pleasure. “This is so good I’m going to call it the Cheesy Miracle.”
“That is an excellent name.”
I whip up a Cheesy Miracle for myself, and damn, it tastes good, and it’s almost enough—the dinner, and the banter—to make it seem like we are the same people we were this morning, or yesterday, or a week ago.
Almost.
But not quite.
Because as the hours turn into days, and the week ticks by, I start to feel uneasy, as if I’m living on borrowed time. Because that’s what we’re doing. We’re playing pretend, avoiding reality, talking about sandwiches and saying I love you so much we’re a broken record.
I want to live in this make-believe state forever and ever. But then time does what time does—it marches onward—and reality sets back in. The tape starts playing in my head, a highlight reel looped over and over, and I see myself at age fifteen with my baby brother, Will, dying in my arms when he was only three days old. His tiny chest, rising and falling for the last time. It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when he left this world. Everything had slowed, all his breaths, all his blood, and he slipped from life to death sometime as I held him, his tiny little body no longer working, his heart no longer pumping blood.
I didn’t even know him, and still, it hurt so damn much. It hurt like someone was shoveling out my heart, scooping out my organs, the metal edges grinding against my bones.
The aching, the awful aching emptiness of those days. Of that life. Of no one to talk about it with. I’ve worked so hard to move on: to live, to love. To not see death in front of my eyes every time someone says words like pregnancy or baby, but now it’s all I can see. It’s the picture I can’t stop looking at.
My mind starts to agitate like a washing machine stuck on an endless spin cycle, as I feel the hope and the happiness and the future draining out of me.
On the first day of her junior year of college, and my final semester, I walk her to campus. Her hand is in mine, and it feels so right to hold her hand, so I know—I fucking know—that I shouldn’t feel as if my blood is on speed. I try to settle my hyperdrive heart. I look down and see her fingers in mine, intertwined. See? It’s all fine, I tell myself. I can do this. I can manage. I can survive all my fears. I don’t have to be scared. We can keep doing what we’re doing.
I grip her hand tighter, needing the familiar, as we press past throngs of our fellow students returning to school, chattering about their summers away from New York, or their summers in New York, or the classes they took, and the jobs they tried on for size. A guy in a brown T-shirt has his arm draped over his dark-haired girlfriend and they turn the corner, debating whether to bestow six stars or seven to the movie they saw last night.
They’re not talking about the baby in her belly. The kid they’re going to have. The child they might lose.
My lungs are pinching, and it’s like my organs are being crammed into smaller-sized storage containers.
We reach the building where she has her creative writing class. “Go write something good about talking animals,” I say, and I flash a smile, trying to keep it light so she won’t know I’m withering inside.
“I always love writing about talking animals. Meet me after class?”
“Of course,” I say then I kiss her on the forehead, and she opens the door and disappears. When she’s gone, I slump against the wall and sink to the ground, my head resting on my knees.
My insides are threatening to pour out of me, to spill all sorts of fears, and that’s the last thing I want. I can’t handle that kind of mess right now. I clench my fists; I squeeze them tight. They’re a vise, holding in all the doubts that want to ensnare me. I picture the walls closing in, compacting this messy stew in my head.
Because I know how to shut down.
It is my greatest skill, it is the subject I’ve mastered, and the class I excel in. And, as I head off to my history seminar, it’s as if my veins have stopped pumping blood, and now there’s some kind of strange coolness flowing through them, as if the blood cells are made of blue liquid distance.
I don’t meet Harley after class. I don’t answer her calls. I send her a text telling her I forgot I’m meeting Jordan for lunch. I lie to her for the first time.
Then I do it again that night when she comes over after I return home from No Regrets. She tries to snuggle up close with me in bed, but I don’t want to be close to her, so I pretend I’m asleep. She wraps her arms tight around me, her warm little body against mine, and it’s almost enough for me to turn around and kiss her and tell her all the things I’m feeling, except I don’t want to feel anymore. Not a thing. Not for anyone.
Not at all.
Chapter Eight
Trey
There are five stages to grief: Denial. Bargaining. Depression. Anger. Acceptance.
I learned them all from Michele, my shrink. I went though some of them each time one of my three brothers died. I bypassed many of them.
But what the shrinks don’t tell you is that there is a sixth stage.
Faking it.
“Let’s break this down. Piece by piece, because that’s the only way to tackle something so big,” Michele says, folding her hands in her lap, taking my news so coolly, so calmly that I’d bet the house on her being on Xanax. How the hell else can you explain the fact that she’s not pulling out her hair, or sitting there with her jaw hanging down on the floor? She’s acting like this is all too normal. Have an emotion. Have a reaction. Fucking feel this with me.
Or don’t. Whatever. I don’t care. I can’t care. I don’t want to care.
“I need you to be straight with me right now, Trey.”
“Sure,” I say, settling into her couch. Her office, with its abstract paintings of red squares, yellow brushstrokes and blue lines, is my bomb shelter, safe from shrapnel. No bad news can hit me here. No one can touch me.
“I don’t want anything but the truth. Promise?”
“Got it,” I say, nodding.