Chapter Nineteen #2
When someone is closed off from you, all you can think about is closing yourself off from them.
You see their brick wall and imagine how much it would hurt to run into it.
But the second you see that door crack open, even an inch…
well, you have to open your own door to even check and see, right?
And Vin’s done more than open it a crack.
Vin’s just used a garage door opener. I could park a pickup truck in that wide-open vulnerability.
I’ve just witnessed a true act of bravery.
And now all I want is to protect him and reward him at all costs.
“Vin, when we dropped the orange juice and I was crying on the floor, was that fucking stupid?”
“No. Of course not.”
“And when I pushed you off me in bed and cried and panicked, was that fucking stupid?”
“I didn’t…I didn’t realize that happened. I was…”
“Freaking out yourself. Yes. But now that you know, was my reaction stupid?”
“No.”
“So don’t say that shit about yourself. None of this is stupid. It’s awful. It’s…” I search. “Wretched. Unfair. Bad luck. Onerous. Poisonous. Excruciating. Almost too heavy to bear. But it’s not stupid and neither are you. And I understand what you mean about being scared.”
“Are you scared?”
“Of having bad sex with you? No. So what if we have bad sex for a few years while we get this all straightened out again.”
“A few years?” He tips his head back and groans.
“Well, you promised me eternity, so what’s a thousand days or so?”
He reaches his hand across the console and tucks my hair behind my ear. I pull his hand into my lap. If it were his other hand, I’d spin his wedding band.
“Can I ask…” I glance at him.
“Anything.”
“Okay, so…That night in bed. You laid me down, you were on top of me. We were about to kiss…And then you saw my scar?”
He purses his lips, thinks, and then nods. “I…hadn’t seen it for…well, since you didn’t need the bandages changed anymore. So that was my first time seeing it…you know, as a scar.”
“Oh. Jesus.” Funny thing about brick walls. Sometimes you don’t even realize you’ve been bricking yours into place. “It’s really not bad, you know. As far as scars go.”
I think of Raff’s scar down his arm. Vin’s enormous purple line down his back.
He’s looking like he has an awful lot to say, but he just purses his lips, lets out a deep sigh through his nose. “Okay.”
I decide to veer away from the topic of conversation that clearly pains him the most. “Okay, another question, then. About sex.”
The smile is back in his eyes. “Shoot.”
“So, you don’t want to see my scar when you’re feeling frisky, got it. But…is it…are you also talking about, like, a boner issue?”
He grins at my discomfort. “No. Well, maybe, but I don’t think so.
I just mean…Okay…sex for me has always been this clear, calm lake that I can go swim in.
I can float around, I can swim, I can…you get it.
I just get in the water and play around and…
even when I’m all…turned on, my mind is…
peaceful. I’m just in a different place.
There are no…obstacles.” He points to his head.
“But…PTSD has made everything more…prickly? So…now if I want to go to the lake…I have to get through, like, some thornbushes on the way. Worries, stress, annoyances…all these things that just didn’t used to be there. ”
I’m gaping at him. “You…you just described how everything feels to me. Like life is just a million miles of thornbushes. Even things I normally love…everything makes me so fucking scratched up. I can’t…”
I break off because he’s pulling into his mother’s long, winding driveway.
Instead of driving all the way up to her house, though, he idles the car around a curve and I find myself pulled into the two biggest, strongest arms I’ve ever had the honor of knowing.
“I know,” he says low, his nose in my hair.
“But sometimes I can’t tell if life is prickly or I’m prickly. I’m like…I’m like a porcupine who keeps bumping into cactuses. I’m a PTSD porcupine!”
He laughs now. “Yes. Me too.”
“Well, how are two porcupines supposed to make marriage work?”
“I’m pretty sure they manage it in the wild.”
“I love that you think porcupines get married in the wild. New life goal, witness a porcupine wedding.”
And then Vin’s mother comes walking around the curve of the driveway, shading her eyes against the sun. She likely heard us crunch the gravel and then came to investigate why we didn’t pull up to the house. Vin rolls down the windows.
“Hi, Ma.”
She kisses his cheek. “Well, pull on up.”
We do just that and as soon as I step out of the car I’m swarmed by miniature dachshunds by the names of Allen and Rhoda.
Vin’s mom adopted them as a pair after visiting them at the shelter for weeks.
They were bonded, so the shelter wouldn’t let just one of them go, but Rhoda has diabetes and requires insulin injections, so no one else wanted the burden.
Vin grabs our bags and tiptoes into the house, trying not to step on any tails. “Allen! Dammit!” He stands there, helplessly frozen, while Allen vigorously humps his sneaker. Allen’s had an unrequited crush on Vin for years.
I remove the lovesick pup and pick up Rhoda as well, so she doesn’t feel left out. All of us tromp into the house.
Ramona moved into this tiny little farmhouse nine years ago when she finally got sick of her building in Brooklyn never having hot water in the morning.
She wanted to stay in the city, but anything within her price range was so far out in Brooklyn or Queens that it was literally going to be the same hour-and-forty-five-minute commute to her boys that this beautiful little house is.
Besides, she’d always wanted a vegetable garden.
How’d she afford it? We have no idea and she’s never told us.
She feeds us minestrone for lunch and then sics Vin on her broken washing machine.
Ramona’s got me in the vegetable garden wearing a gigantic visor. She sits on a little folding chair and points out all the weeds I’ve missed.
“So,” she says, face tipped toward the sun. “You look less like shit these days.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Okay? Didn’t realize that was a battle I was fighting, but okay.”
“What?” She’s eyeing me. “You looked like shit for a while after the accident. Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“Glad I can trust you to be candid.”
“I’m allowed to say things like this, sweetheart. I’m your mother.” I’m ya motha.
Well, mother-in-law, but she’s never made a distinction there, so why should I? “I’ve…been feeling better recently.” As in since yesterday.
“Vin says you’re in art classes.”
“Oh. Yup.”
“Says you’re a genius.”
“Wait, really? That’s sweet, but I’m definitely not.”
“He says he sees your heart in everything you draw.”
“I…” The heart that Vin can apparently see starts beating double time. “When did he say that?”
She shrugs. “Couple of weeks ago.”
A couple of weeks ago? When would he have looked at my drawings? Back when he found my stuff in my backpack? When everything was cold between us? He could look at some crappy little sketches and see my heart?
“He must have been looking really hard, then,” I say, my voice slightly scratchy.
“With you, he always does.” There’s a distinct pause. And then, “How are my boys?”
I glance up at her. She never asks me about Vin and Raff. She wouldn’t need to. They talk all the time. Vin is up and down from her house a few times a month for this or that. She and Raff watch episodes of Dancing with the Stars over the phone together.
I know she’s talking about this year. About the accident. It strikes me that my answer today, Sunday, is very different than what my answer might have been on Friday. “Better every day.”
“Yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“You taking care of my Vin?” Some might view this as an annoying question from a mother-in-law. After all, doesn’t she care that Vin is taking care of me? But of course…she knows Vin. Of course Vin is taking care of me.
“I’m trying,” I say, and if it’s not completely true, I immediately resolve to rectify that.
“You know…” She spots some weeds she can’t resist and gets off her folding chair to kneel in the dirt next to me. “You’re the only one he ever lets.”
“Take care of him?”
She gives one brisk nod. “It was like, his father died one morning and then by that night Vin had decided that he was just going to take care of everything. I was too…I was so…I couldn’t see it…at the time. And by the time I started recognizing the pattern, it was too late.”
“He was already Mr. Take Care of It.”
“But not with you.”
This is so surprising it rings as dead wrong. “Oh, he’s absolutely Mr. Take Care of It with me.”
She’s pursing her lips at me and tossing weeds into my pile.
“He calls you when he has a fever. He wears the clothes you buy for him. He eats your food and asks for more. You make him comfortable. You make him feel at home. And—” She clears her throat.
“I relied on him too much. To work. To take care of his brother. Growing up, he didn’t have a place to just… be. To feel at home.”
“Well.” I’m clearing my throat too. “Well, you don’t have to worry, Ma.
” Mostly I call her Ramona. But every once in a while, because she’s old-school Italian and it delights her and it’s the way she thinks things oughta go, I call her Ma.
“If he didn’t feel it when he was young, he’s gonna feel it when he’s old.
I’ll make sure he gets taken care of. That he has a place to come home to and someone there who lets him rest. Even when we’re old and gray. Especially when we’re old and gray.”
“Ma. Iced tea?”
Both Ramona and I jump at Vin’s voice behind us. We were facing away from the house and didn’t hear him pad up to us through the grass.
“It’s in the fridge, dum-dum,” she says, fighting to her feet. “Where do you think I keep it? The toilet?”