What We Leave Behind (24 page)

In between the bouts of pain and hysteria, the medication and procedures, my mind wandered aimlessly to where I had been, where I had traveled, why San Francisco. My body writhed with a pain far more excruciating than the physical when it latched onto the notion that this was my penalty for enjoying my work, for feeling that moment of separation from my child. But there was something else weighing on my mind, something lurking in the distance. I knew a shadow was blocking out my memory of what caused me to veer so carelessly, because if there was one single thing I could be sure of in that hospital bed, it was that I was to blame for this.

It was almost three weeks before words would escape my mouth. Three weeks passed of watching Marty watch me with desperation in his eyes. I wasn’t afraid. Living with my loss would be my punishment. Death might have been a lesser sentence.

The doctors said I very well could have died, but I was hanging onto life by a short, delicate string. “I’m sorry,” Marty said to me, as if he could possibly take the blame for my wrongdoings. I knew what those two small words meant. He shook his head, tears rolling off his cheeks. I wouldn’t let it in, I wouldn’t hear of it. My hands reached for the protruding mound I hadn’t been able to touch since arriving in the hospital. The emptiness in my belly was there. My hand touched the folds of skin my fingers detested, vestiges of the baby I’d never hold, the child I would never know, that one moment snatched from me.

“He was beautiful.”

My mind clutched onto the words. I wanted to reach out and stroke my husband’s pale face and wipe the tears that had fallen down his cheeks, but my arms resisted, my hands lifeless.

“I did this,” I said.

They were the first words I uttered in almost a month’s time, the ownership for my crime. He reached for my face, swollen and tear stained, and I recoiled from his touch. My body grieved for its lost companion, and the writhing guilt that began at my unresponsive toes ended atop my throbbing head. I hated him for loving me. I hated that he wanted to be close to me, to touch me. He should have been angry. He should have been shouting and ranting, but he was not. If he would only punish me for my sin, I thought. I did not deserve his love. I did not deserve anyone’s love, but his eyes, however broken, told me not to push him away. And I saw the man he was, the one I had learned to love, and now he lost his son, our son. I had let him down.

The next few weeks were a blur. I was confined to the tiny bed with monitors and devices that I was told were correcting the damage, repairing the cracks. We all knew there was no medicine for the area of greatest damage, no device for the irreparable hole. Marty was with me every day, and every hour I was reminded, at the sight of him, of how I cost us, what I had done. I only smiled when they brought Ari to see me. For him, I would live again.

“What can I do?” Marty would ask. He would bring flowers, my favorite movies, write me beautiful cards, but it didn’t change anything, and eventually, he just stopped asking. I waited for his anger, for the recriminations and the accusations, but they never came. For the rest of our lives, I knew I would live with the belief that I have failed him, and he would know it. One day he would burst with hate toward me.

It was fitting that Marty arranged for me to come home from the hospital on Christmas Day. It had been six weeks, and I was ready to be home, eager to be near Ari again. Things were strained between Marty and me. We walked on eggshells around each other; or rather, he walked on the eggshells, as I was confined to bed. He was sensitive and kind and nurturing, yet I awaited the big blowup. There were times the heaviness of our loss felt an impossible burden, and I wanted to reach for him or hold him while we lay side by side in the bed we once shared together, but I dispelled the urge, knowing if I gave him that part of me, I’d be vulnerable to his eventual attack.

Eventually I stopped counting the weeks, stopped predicting what he would look like right now, stopped touching my stomach for what I believed was a flutter, a kick, a life, and boxed up all the clothes and toys and books I’d set aside for his arrival. Instead, I threw myself into motherhood, the very thing that had caused me the intolerable suffering in the first place. My legs were still in a brace, so Ari and I spent a lot of time watching Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. We built castles over the metal and a bridge to connect them in between. When he’d nap, I’d pass the time by flipping through the channels. The movies I’d once found appealing no longer held my attention, their plots bland and boring. The radio was off-limits, part of my disconnect to pleasure, and I puttered through the house in search of someone to blame. The hours vacillated between self-absorption and Romper Room with Ari. When morning came, I would wake up, and the rotation would begin all over again.

“I can’t do this anymore, Jess.”

It was a late Tuesday night in January. The new year had come and gone without any celebration, and our marriage was no different. There were no fireworks. There were no explosive revelations when the clock struck twelve.

Marty had returned from a business dinner, where he had obviously imbibed too many drinks. Finding me in our bed reading a magazine, he took a seat next to me and touched my leg affectionately. I looked up, taken aback at how good-looking he was, even messy with his tie undone and bloodshot eyes. I knew how those dinners evolved from business to pleasure before appetizers were served, and my appraisal of him turned to suspicion. Could he have returned to his old skirt-chasing ways? I wasn’t sure, but my leg reflexively moved away from him. His fingertips on my flesh left a mark of defeat. His eyes poked at me. I knew what he wanted, but I wasn’t ready.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he repeated.

“Do what?” I asked.

“This,” he replied. “We haven’t talked in weeks, months, for that matter. My wife,” he hesitated, “where’s my wife?” It was clear that he was upset. Upset and very drunk.

“I almost lost everything important to me in that car, Jess,
everything
. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I lost you too, but shit, it feels like I did.” He took a breath. “I need you to come back. I need my wife back.”

The tears spilled down his face, Marty crying openly for our lost baby, for me, for his wife who had disappeared in the crash, leaving him with an imposter. He didn’t even try to wipe them away, and neither did I. There was a wall between us that I couldn’t climb over.

His head hung down in his hands. I could have reached out to him and stroked the hair that I loved, kissed the cheeks, tasted his tears in my hungry mouth, but I was paralyzed. I believe I had finally become the horrible person I always imagined myself to be.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

He looked up, the sadness turned into anger. “I don’t want to hear that, Jess. You need to talk to me. You need to tell me what’s going on in your head.

“Look at me!” he demanded. I had turned to face the wall. “We have a life together. We have a child. He needs us. He needs us to love each other. He needs to see that his parents are still there for him.”

“I’m there for him,” I stammered, but I knew Marty meant that our team had dissolved.

“What happened to my girl? Where’d she go?” He reached for my hand and I let him hold it. “Talk to me, please.”

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to say.”

How could I explain that I didn’t feel part of an
us
anymore? There was just me, the pariah, alone on a hilltop, banished from the rest of society. There was an ocean separating us. If I tried to swim to him, even if I had a miniscule urge to do so, I would never have made it across.

“Then let me help you,” he said.

Shaking my head, I said, “My child died inside of me. You have no idea what that does to a woman.”

“He was my child too. Damn you for being so selfish.”

He could have just slapped me across the face; his words left a similar sting along my cheek.

Marty left the next morning for work, and I did not see or hear from him for four days. He called my mother in Arizona to come to the house to assist the nurse that was taking care of my wounds, and I was furious. On the fifth day, he resurfaced.

Genuine surprise appeared on his face when he saw that I was walking, but I was too angry to see anything but betrayal. I didn’t ask where he’d spent the last few nights, convinced he’d regressed to his previous immoral behavior.

He appraised me with his eyes, observing how self-sufficient I’d become. If I could have reached across the room, I would have shoved him away, slapped him, ordered him to stop looking, and just as quickly, I’d retreat. My response to Marty was conflicted. The anger alienated me from the sadness, the sadness from the regret, and what remained was a drained, unemotional well. If I loved Ari, there was nothing left to give Marty. If I loved Joshua, I could not love myself.

“You’re walking?” It was more a question than an observation.

“Yes.”

“Sorry I wasn’t here to see it.”

“Yeah, me too,” I replied, searching the space around us so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.

“What’s your problem?” he asked, noting my sarcasm.

“I don’t know, maybe you should be apologizing for other things, like what you’ve been doing the last four nights.”

Marty searched the same wall as I did, as though the way to make us whole again would appear in the crevices of Venetian stucco. “Does it matter?”

“You look like shit.”

“I’m surprised you noticed.”

“It’s hard to miss.”

“You still look the same. You still look beautiful.”

We stood like that, facing each other in the hallway. I knew I was a frailer, paler version of my old self, and Marty was thoughtful enough to overlook the obvious. Even when he pretended not to see the changes in me, I could vouch for the ugliness that sprang from deep within. It had to have transformed me, inside and out.

“You don’t have to say that.”

Then he surprised me, heading toward me, his arms extending around my shoulders.

We stood there like that as the vacancy between us became as noticeable as the silence. Before the accident, he would hold me in his arms, and life in my belly would brush against him, and we would smile as the convergence of our bodies fed love to the child inside. If I had gained any wisdom at all, which at this point in time was debatable, I would have concentrated on the solid arms around me, representations of viable, caring things I still had to be thankful for, but I could not. Instead, I honed in on the barren place within that I shamefully could not protect and retreated from his touch.

“Do I repulse you that much?” he asked

I didn’t answer.

“I love you, Jess. I’m not going to give up on us. You’re not going to walk away from me that easily.”

Even in moments of weakness, Marty could be strong. Even in the darkest hour of his grief, he could still love me without anger or blame. A man like that was rare to find, and although his strengths would be the very things most appealing about him, they were also the things that left me in a tangle of inadequacy. In the giant presence of his virtuous character, I had become diminished, overshadowed by his goodness.

I wanted to cry, the gnawing ache rising up through my neck, but I just held it in; at first it hurt, those few seconds, but after awhile, it felt better than the pain that accompanies the unleashing of tears. I realized how good I was at this game of pretend, how easy it was to hold it all inside and make believe that none of this was happening. Just like I did in Dr. Norton’s office.

2001 – 2002

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

-Anatole France

“Ari,” I said, “you have to hurry up because Mommy has an appointment today she can’t be late for.”

We were in his favorite toy store. It was wall-to-wall activity, and he’d gotten hung up on a particular aisle.

“Don’t know, Mommy,” he said, his nearly four-year-old body hunched over and defeated by the inability to make this important decision.

“Star Wars or Pokemon,” I said. “Pick one.”

He studied both boxes, holding one in each hand. They were the last on the shelf.

“Can’t I have both?” he asked, his eyes beckoning mine with their hopefulness while I quieted the desire to answer
yes, you can have anything you want
.

“One,” I told him again, firmly, realizing that I was definitely going to be late.

He was eyeing Pokemon closely. I could see how he was struggling with choice, as if not picking Hans Solo would result in a quick, painful death for the intergalactic hero. He put the boxes back on the shelf and studied them. He dragged out his decision as long as possible.

I checked my watch again. I didn’t want to be late. Not today of all days.

We were interrupted by a little boy of six or seven. He stepped right in between us and reached for the Star Wars action figure. He didn’t waver, didn’t deliberate, just snatched Hans Solo from off the shelf.