Chapter 21 #2
I laugh fondly at the memory, not only of that morning, but also that she’d convinced her mom a week later that there was better sunlight just a few feet to the left, so I wouldn’t fall onto the flower bed again in one of the twenty-odd escapes that followed from that same window.
“Oh, I totally fucked up my knee, but I wasn’t about to let your dad know that,” I chuckle.
She holds the thick comforter over her bare chest as I press my lips to hers again. The tip of her tongue toys with the jewelry in my lip, and as I’m about to tear the blanket off of her and fall into bed with her one more time, the alarm blares from her phone to interrupt us.
With a groan, she silences the alarm, looking up through her lashes to offer me a soft smile.
As she hurries to hop into the shower and get ready for her day, I trek back down toward the garage. I start with my bike, making quick work of changing the oil and swapping out the chains before I roll it onto the driveway to give it a good scrub down.
I offer a friendly wave to the elderly woman who lives across the way from us as she steps out of her house and into her garden, and her lip pulls up with a shake of her head.
She’s never liked me, since the day we moved in.
Not because I’d done anything wrong; I’ve never said a word to the woman outside of shouting a quick ‘hey’ while we were bringing in our stuff.
She thinks I’m a bad guy because of the tattoos and the bikes.
That sentiment is shared by just about everyone in her age group who lives in this neighborhood.
It’s honestly kind of funny to me.
I’m afraid of bees, Peggy.
With the bike cleaned, the garage picked up, and the first floor of the house given a good cleaning, I head upstairs and down the hall from our bedroom.
The door there is the same white, four-paneled door which marks every other room in the house.
Same knob. Same frame. Same size.
Everything about this door is identical to every other door in this building.
And somehow, at the same time, everything about it is completely different.
A layer of dust coats nearly every surface in the room, from the boxes leaned against the wall and haphazardly taped back together, to the knobs and slats on the closet doors.
A storage room for dreams not only unfulfilled, but decimated.
A nudge against the back of my calf alerts me to Drumstick’s presence, and as he stands on his hind legs to paw at me, I reach down to scratch him between the ears.
“Don’t tear shit up in here,” I tell him.
It doesn’t take me too long to get the boxes moved into the garage and tucked behind a shelving unit. I did a good amount of clean-up in here a couple of months after our son died; taking apart the crib and changing table, donating the diapers and other perishables that we wouldn’t be able to use.
And then I closed the door, and neither of us ever opened it again.
It takes a lot longer to get the room itself cleaned and the carpet vacuumed than it does moving everything into a proper storage space, but I can’t say that it doesn’t feel good to finally get it all done.
There’s a certain kind of catharsis that comes with this; one that a part of me wishes Jules was here to experience, but that another, larger part of me is worried she still isn’t ready for; even if I think she needs it as much as I do.
When I’m finished, I don’t close the door tightly like it had been before. I rest it against the frame, knowing that Drumstick will likely push his way into the room at some point and hide a toy in a corner or in the closet.
But at least it’s not closed anymore.
“Dude,” I say with a laugh, shoving aside the shower curtain to look at the cat yowling at me from the safe distance of the under-sink rug. “You are being so fucking loud. I’ll be done in a second.”
God forbid I’m two minutes late with his dinner.
Another loud yowl flies out of him, and I laugh with a shake of my head as I try to rinse the suds from my hair.
“The more you talk, the longer it takes me,” I tell him.
He lets out an aggravated meow, and I poke my head out of the curtain again to see him spin in a circle and drop onto the rug in a huff.
I hurry to finish my shower at the demand of the small, naked cat, and after throwing on some clean clothes, the two of us head down to the kitchen so his majesty can be fed before he withers away to nothing but bone.
I find myself staring into the fridge while he eats, and the sound of the garage opening fills the house while I pull out some chicken breasts and vegetables to throw together.
“The garage is so clean,” Jules comments as she pushes open the door. “You must have been out there for forever.” She crosses the room to reach me, dropping a hand at my back to peck me on the cheek. “I’m gonna go change and then I can help chop the veggies.”
“Jules—” I stammer as she makes her way toward the stairs, quickly grabbing a towel to brush off my hands as she climbs up. “Wait. Let me—”
I toss the towel onto the counter before following after her. When I round the corner to our stairwell, she’s standing frozen at the top of it, using a thumb to point down the hallway.
“You cleaned out the nursery,” she says quietly.
“Yeah,” I nod, doubt suddenly swirling in the pit of my stomach. “Maybe I should have talked to you about it first. I just thought…”
I sigh, scrubbing a hand along my forehead.
The tremor in her jaw and the tightness of her chest are visible from here, and I want to fucking kick myself. I should have asked her. I shouldn’t have assumed.
Carefully trekking down the stairs to close the distance between us, her arms snake around my middle and she tucks her face into my chest with a heavy exhale.
“Thank you.” She sniffs, and I wrap my arms around her shoulders, resting my chin on the top of her head. “I’ve been telling myself for a year that I’d go in there and do it, but I couldn’t.”
My hand moves to rub along her back, the other tightening its hold on her.
“You could have asked me,” I tell her. “I would have done that for you.”
Her head shakes against my chest as she pulls in another sniff, and when she looks up at me, her brows dip.
“You had to build all of his furniture, and then you had to take it all apart,” she argues. “It wouldn’t have been fair to ask that of you.”
“Jules, you—”
I bite my tongue, wrapping my arms more tightly around her instead of reminding her of the cruelty and unfairness that was handed to her. My lips press against the top of her head, resting there.
“We both needed it,” I tell her.
The tears that soak through my shirt while I hold her in my arms are a purge.
After the first few weeks, unless there’s was a doctor’s appointment or Brody was calling to check in on us after he’d reluctantly flown back home, we didn’t acknowledge it.
I gave each of us a tattoo, my brother took some of the ashes and sent us keepsakes; a pendant and a necklace, and we pretended that the pain wasn’t there.
We pretended that a fault line hadn’t opened up between us and that it hadn’t turned into a chasm.
We held onto whatever we could to keep ourselves from drowning in it, and we closed the door and locked everything else behind it.
That room served a lot of purpose in its first year. It served as a reminder that, even though we didn’t tell anyone about him, he still existed. Like the pendant that I keep on my bike and the gem around Jules’s neck, it served as a vessel for our grief; something tangible.
And then I think it became a poison.
It was arsenic, tearing us apart from the inside and ripping us away from each other.
Maybe it was more like Brody’s cancer, eating away at everything that mattered until the body of our marriage was too weak and couldn’t sustain itself anymore.
I got distant. I got angry.
Jules found comfort in someone else.
I don’t know how long it will take us to clean this up, and I don’t know if things will ever be the way that they were before, but I had to do something.
It’s a start.