Chapter 21
TRIPP
It’s always quiet here.
We don’t have a noisy house. We don’t play much music unless we have friends over. We keep the TV at a comfortable volume when it’s on.
It’s always quiet here.
Today, though, stepping into the house with my wife’s hand held tightly in mine, the silence is heavy enough that it feels like my chest might cave in.
I don’t think either of us can take a full breath.
It’s just too fucking quiet.
“I’ll get you some fresh clothes and we can—”
“No,” Julia says with a shake of her head. Her hand rests at the empty swell of her belly, and her face pinches. Her fingers dig into the fabric of her t-shirt as her eyes move toward the stairwell. “I think I just want to get cleaned up and lie down on the couch.”
She offers a subtle shake of her head when I move to follow behind her, and I nod in understanding. As she reaches the stairs, I blow out a long breath, tossing the car keys onto the coffee table before I drop our overnight bag off of my shoulder and onto the living room floor.
I fix things for her.
That’s what I do.
Something hurts her, scares her, shakes her, and I fix it.
I’ve never felt more useless in my life than I do now, unable to fix this.
“Tripp,” she calls out no more than two minutes after she leaves my side. As I round the corner to the stairwell, she shakes her head at me with a hand resting beneath the curve her stomach. “I can’t— I can’t do it.”
I take the stairs two at a time until I reach her, and we walk into the bathroom together, where I carefully pull her underwear down her legs and hold her hands to help lower her onto the seat of the toilet.
A sharp breath pushes out of her nose and her elbows rest on her knees as I crouch in front of her, pulling packages of maxi pads and wipes toward myself.
“Don’t look at what I’m doing,” I tell her as she throws a glance in my direction. “Look at all the shit on the counter and tell me what I need to get us more of.”
She studies the space behind me while I work to take the maxi pad out of her underwear, wiping the back of her hand against her eyes with a loud sniff.
“Mouthwash,” she finally says.
“What else?”
“You need more aftershave,” she tells me. “I need toner. Maybe some dry shampoo.”
“The skinny yellow can with all the swirls on it, right?”
She nods as I pull a ‘feminine wipe’ from the container in my hand. I have a feeling that they’re really not all that different from the baby wipes tucked away in the closet in Paxton’s nursery, but the packaging and the wording make a whole world of difference.
Her body tenses as I gently pull the wipe between her legs with a kiss to her knee, and I toss it into the garbage can, topping it and the used pad with some bunched-up toilet paper, so she won’t have to look at them before I can get the bag changed out.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve taken care of her like this. On her twenty-first birthday, I got a hands-on crash course in changing a tampon in the cramped stall of a dive bar’s ladies’ room.
But this time is different.
She’s not stumbling over herself and laughing at me trying to figure out the logistics of a Tampax.
She wasn’t supposed to be using any of this stuff yet. She was never supposed to use it like this.
Everything about this was supposed to be different.
I just put his crib together last week.
“Anything else?” I ask her with a sharp tightening in my chest.
I try to keep the crinkly plastic wrapper in my hand as quiet as I can as I pull it open, keeping my eyes on hers while they scan our too-messy counter top.
“Your toothbrush looks like crap,” she sniffles. “You need a new one.”
“Yeah, I do,” I nod, offering her the best half smile I can muster. “That thing’s old as shit.”
Her eyes meet mine and we sit together, holding each other’s gaze for long moments before her lip finally gives in to the quiver that she’s been holding back and tears force themselves to fall from her eyes.
Leaning forward, she rests her head on my shoulder as she dissolves into loud wails, and I wrap my arms as tightly around her as I can.
“I don’t know what to do, now.” Her hand moves to cover her mouth as a sob rips through her throat. “I prayed so hard for him to make a sound. I begged Him for a miracle.”
Her body tightens, curling in on itself as if she can’t shrink down small enough, and I guide her off of the toilet, pulling her underwear back into place as I bring her down and onto my lap.
My molars clench together and my chest tightens as her arms wrap tightly around my middle.
I can’t fault her for trying – if I did, it would make me a hypocrite.
I tried to make my own bargains with God; I promised that I’d believe again, that I’d apologize to my parents for letting them down, that I’d admit I’d been wrong.
I would take back everything I’ve said and thought about God and the church, and I would repent for every bit of it.
Whatever the cost was, I’d have happily paid it for him.
Walking out of that room empty-handed did nothing but reaffirm for me what I’ve known for years: that God doesn’t exist, and that if I am wrong about that, He isn’t someone I want anything to fucking do with.
“Baby, look at me,” I tell Julia. Taking hold of her jaw, I bring her face to mine, pressing my forehead and nose against hers. “I love you. I got you. Okay?”
As my wife clings to me and her fingernails dig into my skin as if she’s desperate for something to hold onto, something she can use to ground her, I hear the voice of my six-year-old self in my ear.
She’ll cry herself to death, he tells me.
Pop.
Present Day
My fingers flex against Julia’s scalp, massaging into her hair. She lets out a soft hum against my chest in response as her arms snake around my body.
With my free arm resting behind my head, I focus on the ceiling and the spinning of the fan blades above us.
I didn’t sleep last night. As soon as Julia fell asleep, my mind drifted down the hall and got itself stuck, tucked behind a door left unopened for two years.
We should have fought all night. We should have slept apart from one another.
When I walked through the door, I had my armor on.
I thought I was ready for whatever was going to happen; and then she gave me the same look that she wore on the worst day of our lives, and that armor may as well have never existed in the first place.
We’ve lost enough. I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep us from losing each other again.
My older brother’s assigned tone pings from the phone connected to the charger next to me, and I carefully reach for it, trying not to disturb Jules.
“Checking in,” I quietly say to myself with a roll of my eyes before opening the message.
I chuckle at the same two words he’s said to me more times over the years than I can count.
Every day that Jules and I spent on the road, every time he dropped money into my account, every time that anything has ever happened in my life, B has always needed to ‘check in.’
He doesn’t respond at first, and I can only imagine that it’s because he’s sitting at his desk in his big, fancy office, rubbing his fingers against his temples before finally texting me back.
I laugh as I set my phone back in its place on the charger. Ever-so-carefully, I pull Julia’s arm away from my body and slide out from underneath her, replacing my chest with a pillow for her head to rest on.
I slip into the pair of boxers discarded on the floor next to our bed before trotting down the stairs and into the kitchen for a shitty cup of coffee out of our only-sometimes-functional machine.
I’m halfway finished with the watered-down brew by the time that I’m standing in the doorway which leads to the garage, leaned against the door frame.
My fingers tap against the sides of my mug as I scan the garage, making an exhaustive to-do list in my mind of all of the things that I’ve been putting off over the past few months – or in some places, years – and I offer a decisive nod before sucking down the rest of my coffee and heading back up to our bedroom.
Jules is awake now, propped up against her pillows as she scrolls through something on her phone – likely her calendar for the day or one of her salon’s social media pages. Her eyes meet mine as I reach our dresser, and she offers a soft, uncomfortable smile.
“Hi,” she says shyly, resting the screen of her phone against her chest. “Are you going in today?”
“Tomorrow,” I answer with a shake of my head.
“Are you going to talk to him?”
A heavy breath forces its way from my lungs as I step into a pair of worn jeans, and I shake my head. “No.”
As I pull a ratty work shirt from another drawer and slide it over my head, all that I can feel is the thick tension hanging between us.
I think there was a small part of each of us that had hoped that, if we could start talking and if we could finally make each other come for the first time in god knows how long, we could be back to normal this morning.
It would turn back the clock and we’d be exactly who we were before everything went south.
“Can you tell me what it is that you have to think about?” She probes.
“No,” I tell her, and her features fall in defeat. With a guilty nag in my chest, I cross the room to press my lips to the top of her head, and she brightens at that. “I mean, not yet. I just want to sort through it in my head before we talk about it.”
“Okay,” she smiles.
Her hands reach for my face, her thumbs trailing the length of my jaw as I meet her in a kiss.
“Do you know what I remembered?” She asks with a giggle. “You, jumping out of my bedroom window and knocking on the front door to pick me up for school. I heard you hit my mom’s flower bed, and I thought you’d definitely, one-hundred percent, broken your leg.”