14. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Thirty-eight minutes after I hit send, he’s in my doorway.
He looks terrible in a way I have never seen him look, and I’ve known this man since I was sixteen.
Unshaven for the first time since I’ve known him, stubble shadowing his jaw around the fading bruise Glenn put there.
His shirt is wrinkled. He’s breathing like he ran from the parking structure. Maybe he did.
“Willow.” His eyes go to the IV, the monitor, the hospital bracelet, and every drop of color leaves his face. “Oh my God. The baby, is the baby…”
“The baby is fine. I’m dehydrated. It’s called hyperemesis gravidarum.
Severe morning sickness, except it’s all day and it doesn’t stop and apparently it might not stop for months.
” I keep my voice level, clinical, a stranger reading a chart.
“Sit down. I have a proposal for you, and I need you to listen to all of it before you speak.”
He sits. He folds his hands like a man in church.
“I need care. Around-the-clock care, for weeks, maybe months. I can’t do it alone and I won’t do it to Glenn.
” His jaw tightens at the name; he says nothing.
“So here’s the deal. You rent me an apartment.
You hire a nurse. I will sign a repayment contract for every cent, dated and notarized.
We do a paternity test, and when it comes back the way I already know it will come back, you will sign the divorce papers without a fight and you will never call me a liar again. ”
Silence. The monitor beeps. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattles by.
“God, no.” His voice comes out cracked. “Willow, no. I believe you. I trust you.”
I laugh.
I don’t decide to. It just comes out of me, this high horrible sound, and once it starts I can’t stop it.
I laugh in his face. I laugh until the IV line shakes, until my ribs hurt, until the laughing turns into crying without my permission, and he sits there and takes all of it with his hands folded and his eyes wet.
“You believe me,” I manage. “You trust me. Nice joke.”
“Willow…”
“You should be a comedian.” I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, the IV tube dragging.
“You believe me NOW. Now that Glenn told you. Now that you have proof. You didn’t believe ME, Corey.
You believed HIM. Twelve years of me wasn’t enough, but one sentence from the man you punched, THAT you believe. ”
“You’re right.” He doesn’t flinch from it. “You’re right, and I will spend the rest of my life being sorry, but right now none of that matters. What matters is you’re in a hospital bed. Come home.”
“No.”
“Come home.” He leans forward, elbows on knees, and the begging in his voice is naked and unashamed.
“Not for me. I know what I broke. But you need care, and I have the money and the house and every reason on earth to make this the only thing I do. Let me take care of you. Both of you. Whatever rules you want, I’ll follow them. Write them on the wall if you want.”
“I know what you did at the foundation. Glenn called me after they mopped up the blood.”
“I know.”
“You humiliated him in front of his entire staff. You outed his grief in a lobby.”
“I know.” His voice drops. “There’s no version of this where I’m the good guy, Willow. I’m not asking to be. I’m asking to be useful.”
I look at him for a long time. The stubble, the bruise, the wrinkled shirt. The exhaustion carved under his eyes, deep enough that I know he hasn’t been sleeping either, and I hate that some animal part of me is glad.
“Conditions,” I say. “One. I get my own room. You don’t come into it without being asked, and you will not be asked.
Two. The divorce is delayed, not canceled.
The day the doctors clear me, the papers get filed.
Three. Don’t speak to me unless it’s necessary.
We are not friends. We are not reconciling.
You are a man with a guest room and a debt. ”
“Done. All of it.”
“I mean it, Corey. The first time you push, I’m gone, doctors or no doctors.”
“I know you mean it.”
My ring doesn’t fit anymore. My fingers are too swollen, the knuckles thick with fluid, and the metal has been cutting into me for days.
While he’s signing forms at the desk, I work it off and thread it onto the thin gold chain I wear under my shirt, and I tuck it away where nobody can see it, and I don’t examine why I don’t just put it in my purse.
The discharge takes two hours. He handles all of it, the paperwork, the pharmacy, the wheelchair I insist I don’t need, and when they finally let me stand up my legs wobble and his hand is just there, under my elbow, steady and warm and infuriatingly familiar.
I say yes to all of it. And I hate the relief that floods through me at that hand, hate how much of my body remembers it, hate that some cell-deep part of me relaxes for the first time in two weeks.
This is how it starts again, I think.
Not this time.