Chapter 12 – Cora
CORA
Pearl wakes me by shaking my shoulder and announcing in her outdoor voice, a hair from my face, “Daddy is asleep on the floor!”
I gasp and sit straight up, my heart in my throat. My head pounds, and my teeth are so furry, my lips are sticking to them. “What?” I mumble.
Pearl grabs my hand to drag me out of bed. “He’s sleeping on the floor, Mommy. In his day clothes.”
I kick my legs free from a cat mermaid flat sheet and stagger behind her, memories from last night shoving themselves into my brain like people into a crowded elevator. I was naked. He kissed me. Delaney called. I dropped his phone in the toilet.
I hope Pearl forgot to flush.
Winnie is wide awake and babbling when we pass her crib, so I scoop her up. Pearl beckons me to slip through the cracked open door to the hallway.
Adrian is indeed sleeping on the floor, seated and slumped over like a scarecrow. Thankfully, I see his chest moving before my nerves have the chance to totally freak out. I had no idea he was that drunk last night.
He doesn’t look good. The shadows under his eyes look like bruises. His face is so drawn, his cheeks are hollowed. Now that I think about it, he’s been looking a little rough around the edges for a while.
When did he lose that healthy rower’s glow? He was perfectly fine when I walked in on him banging Delaney. It was sometime after that, but I can’t pinpoint exactly when. I try not to look him in the face now.
Pearl squats in front of him, poking his shoulder.
Old, old memories of Mom listing over the couch arm, drooling onto the collar of her shirt, try to worm their way out of the back of my mind, but I squash them down.
Still, my stomach sours. What are we doing?
Adrian might be the one on the floor now, but I spent the night nearly falling off a princess bed. This is not okay.
“Daddy,” Pearl stage whispers, inching so close their noses almost touch.
He wakes up more calmly than I did. He actually smiles at Pearl as his eyelids flutter open, and my heart trips. He used to smile at me like that in the morning. Like he was happy to see me.
“Hey, Pearl. What am I doing down here?”
Pearl glances around, very seriously, as if there might be an explanation. “I don’t know.”
He maneuvers himself upright. “I just sat down for a minute.” He squints at the window down the hall with the morning sun streaming through. “I must’ve fallen asleep.”
“Why did you sit here?”
His gaze darts to me, sheepish. The expression is unlike him. “I didn’t want to go to bed, I guess.”
“I don’t like to go to bed neither,” Pearl says.
He stretches his arms over his head and cracks his neck. “Well, can’t sit here all day. Should we get breakfast?”
“Mommy?” Pearl looks to me.
I’m about to say we can’t, that Vera is bringing us breakfast, but I stop short.
Things are too out of whack. Safe parents sleep in their own beds.
They eat breakfast together in the dining room or at least the kitchen.
Pearl’s a bright kid. She must sense the strain.
The least I can do is pull myself together, eat with Adrian at the table like normal people, and act like everything is okay.
For her, it will be. I’ll make it so. Somehow.
Enough feeling sorry for myself. “Let’s get ready for the day and meet Daddy downstairs.”
Adrian flashes me a look. Not gratitude—I don’t think he’s capable of that—but something close. Relief, maybe? Or hope?
I don’t trust it. I gazed into that man’s face for years and believed with all my heart that he loved me. Whatever language he’s written in, I can’t read it. I slide my gaze to the right and pretend I didn’t see the look.
“I’ll grab a quick shower,” Adrian says, rising to his feet.
He clearly wants to go, but Pearl’s standing right in front of him, barring his way.
She’s not doing it on purpose, not quite.
Her mind has just drifted, like a five-year-old’s does sometimes.
She’s got her fingers in her mouth, and she’s staring neither here nor there.
“Let me just squeeze by,” he says to her gently, but maybe she’s groggier than she let on, because his request just doesn’t register.
If it were me, I’d scoop her up and set her down to the side or say beep, beep and bump her playfully with my hip, but Adrian hesitates. It’s such a small thing—nothing, really—but it reminds me of yesterday at the playset when he waited for her to leap into his arms.
He always does that, doesn’t he? He waits for her to jump. Hugs her only after her arms are open. Lifts her only once she’s grabbing with her hands for uppies.
I give her shirt a little tug, and she automatically backs toward me, letting him pass.
“Twenty minutes.” He nods at me and strides away down the hall. He’s still wearing his dress shoes.
I take the girls back into the nursery and get them cleaned and changed.
All the while, I conjure up memories of Adrian and the girls, starting in the hospital.
He’d sit when he held them, every time, even with Winnie.
He’s always been careful that way. Tentative.
I attributed it to the fact that he’s a tall, muscular man. I thought his wariness was sweet.
I scroll through memories like pictures on my phone.
So many outings—parks, the fair, zoos, children’s museums, the bubble show, the beach.
Adrian lifting Pearl onto a carousel horse, holding her up to see the bears, carrying her on his shoulders when she was too tired to walk and too contrary to ride in her stroller.
Pearl chirping, clamoring, demanding, whining, “Up, Daddy. Up!”
He doesn’t mind carrying her. He’ll do it for hours without complaint. So why does he always wait to be asked? Pearl adores him. He knows that.
Right?
You can tell when someone loves you. Well, most people can.
Did he believe that I loved him?
No, no, no. I’m not letting myself go down that path. That line of thinking is a crock of shit—the poor man cheated because he’s emotionally stunted and can’t accept love. It’s not his fault. He had terrible parents.
Everyone has terrible parents. Everyone is stunted.
But are they, though?
Adrian and I aren’t the only messed up people in the world . . . but we are messed up, both of us.
What else would you call a man who’s nervous around his own children? Who buys a family? Who doesn’t give a shit about love and can’t say sorry and tries to control his home life with contracts and bribes? That’s not my particular brand of crazy, but it sure isn’t well-adjusted, either.
When I met Adrian, I thought he was the most evolved, sophisticated, fully actualized person on the face of the earth.
Granted, I had pretty much no basis for comparison.
He presents himself very well. He’d fool anyone—if they didn’t look carefully.
If they were too satisfied with their own situation to notice.
Or too relieved.
I shove my legs into a pair of jeans and slide my feet into a pair of Crocs that Adrian hates. My head hurts too badly to be thinking this hard this early in the morning. I need a huge glass of orange juice, an even bigger cup of coffee, and a plate of bacon.
Pearl is ready before me for once, and she happily chats as we walk down to the dining room.
She seems to have lost interest in where Daddy slept and is back on the subject of shrimp boats, which she’s been obsessed with since I discovered a new-to-us TV series for her to binge a few days ago.
She sounds like Forrest Gump. Shrimp trawler. Shrimp captain. Shrimp beds.
When we arrive downstairs, Adrian is in his seat at the head of the table, freshly showered and dressed for work. My chest twinges with a strange excitement when I see him, which makes no sense. It’s not like I want him around the house.
Delicious smells waft from the kitchen. I sit, offering Winnie a bottle since I pump and dump the day after I drink, just to be safe.
Pearl climbs into her own big girl chair.
Our places are already set, and there is a basket of muffins and breads in the middle of the table.
I don’t know how Adrian made all this happen.
We took more than twenty minutes to get ready, but not that much longer.
The world does always smooth a path for him. I used to marvel over it. Now, it kind of pisses me off.
I snag the bread basket and pick through the muffins. Zucchini and walnut. Chia seed lemon poppy. Quinoa and cranberry.
“Can’t we ever have, like, blueberry muffins?” I grumble, taking a mini croissant.
“I’ll tell Minh,” Adrian says.
“No. Don’t.” I don’t want to hassle Minh. He works hard enough. I’m just being grumpy because I’m doing something I don’t want to do. I take a bite of flaky goodness. “I don’t know why we can’t have full-sized croissants.”
Adrian catches my eye. His lips curve at the corners. My stomach dips.
He drags the bread basket toward him. What is he doing? He never eats sweets for breakfast. Lean protein and fruit only. Pearl and I both watch him pick out all five mini croissants, put them on his plate, and slide them toward me.
Pearl is watching so I tug the plate the rest of the way until it sits in front of me. “Now you have all the croissants, Mommy,” she says, delighted.
I want to throw them at his head, but I also want to cram them in my mouth and watch while his brain blares carbs, inflammation, macros, gluten, gut lining, glycemic load inside his skull like Pearl smacking the buttons on her Talk and Learn Turtle when she was a toddler.
Since throwing food at a person is wrong, I hold Adrian’s gaze while I slowly lick a croissant from tip to tip and then shove it whole into my mouth.
I expect his lips to flatten like they do when he’s holding in his disapproval, but instead, he smirks, and a light sparks in his glassy eyes. The asshole is turned on.
“Yum,” I moan. “These are so good. I love refined carbohydrates.” I eat another one.