Twenty-Nine
Rilee
The buzzing of my phone woke me. It’s rattle on the hardwood floor shook my teeth.
An expanding balloon pressed behind my eyes and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I’d found a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt to pull on.
I’d also found Craig’s cabernet. Now my coffee table had a matching pair of empty wine bottles.
What it didn’t have was coffee, and the kitchen was far away.
A cool overcast sun lit the room and the chugging of the heater completed the morning’s soundtrack. Without getting up I maneuvered one arm out from underneath me to find my phone.
MIA: Are you in bed still?
I hadn’t been in my bed for over a bottle, so no.
ME: No.
Mia’s reply was quick and the phone almost jiggled out of my limp fingers.
MIA: Are you alone? [Wink emoji]
ME: Yes.
I was definitely alone. Alone is where I should have been all these weeks. Alone is not only simpler, it’s exceedingly safer. Mia didn’t catch the vibe of my morning because instead of texting, or leaving me alone, she called. Flicking on the speakerphone I collapsed face first back into the couch.
“So how did it go last night?” Mia asked with a lurid smoothness.
“I’m alone and on the couch with two empty bottles of wine.” That wasn’t entirely fair, Craig helped with the first bottle.
Mia went from Marilyn Monroe to Rosie O’Donnell in two seconds, “What did he do? No wait, let me conference Fiona and then you start at the beginning.”
I should have hung up. Instead, I waited for them both and then started with cooking dinner, and worrying about the black flats or heels, and how Craig arrived with wine and a present.
“Yes, he was wearing the coat,” I assured Mia, “He loved it.” Dinner conversation was nice.
I wanted to say great but that actually tasted like a cheap word for the experience, though that may have been because my mouth tasted like dirt.
I got up and put some coffee on and drank a glass of water before settling on the kitchen floor with the throw blanket.
“We moved to the couch and had another glass of wine and when he said he was going to leave I asked him to stay, the weather was bad and all … . I couldn’t help replaying everything as I told it, his chest beneath my hand, my lips beneath his.
“We moved it back to my bedroom and things went … bad.” I could only give the experience the space of one word, any more and I’d run the whole thing over again.
“Did he force you?” Fiona asked.
I cracked open the bedroom door of my memory. “No.” I couldn’t really see everything from outside the room but what had happened wasn’t that.
Fiona pressed further, “Was he rough?”
Yes. The word was in my mouth but died before it made it to my lips. I took a step inside to think about it. All I could see was the familiar crinkle of his eyes, and the feel of the blow that never came. “I’m not sure.”
We sat for a long time before anyone spoke again. “Talk us through it step by step,” Mia coaxed.
“At first it was so good. We carried the heat from the couch into the bedroom. His shoes were going to be a problem so I worked on them and his ankle brace.”
“He has an ankle brace?” Mia’s question cut through the flood of my feelings.
“Uh, yeah. He had back surgery a while back and I guess he still has some problems from it.” Admitting it felt ordinary and ugly at the same time, like the words should have been harder to say than they were, a door that didn’t have a lock but I didn’t have permission to open.
“Everybody has something,” I added quickly.
My dad was no back injury but was certainly a skeleton that kept chasing me.
“So, you took his shoes and socks off,” Fiona’s simple statement didn’t capture how it felt to my fingers, or what I saw in Craig’s eyes. “What happened next?”
“Well, he went to the bathroom and when he came back he brought up protection which I’d already planned for.”
“That’s good. On him I mean,” Fiona approved.
“Yeah, I liked that,” I said. The next part brought a flush to my face.
In the present I smelled that the coffee was ready but I ignored it, needing all my senses to let the rest of the past out.
How my fingers felt for him, and he found me, and we were leaning into the moment, falling into the bed, and then it all came apart.
“It was so good, and then he threw me away, and swore, and stormed out,” I coughed on the words. “And in the middle I flinched. I thought he was going to hit me and I curled up.”
Mia’s question was direct and supportive, wherever it led, “Did he?”
The answer was worse because to even think the question exposed the closet door where I hung my skeletons.
Having an answer presupposed I’d lived the question.
And by living that question, I knew I’d let the whether it would happen question direct which doors and windows I was willing to open to my heart.
“No. No, he didn’t.” The unspoken retort was but he might.
Mia kept digging. “Have you ever felt that way before?”
I wasn’t going there. Even with Mia and Fiona.
I wasn’t telling them about my mother’s black eyes, or the nights I’d spent huddled under my covers, pillow over my head to unsuccessfully block out the cries and shouts.
Mia must have sensed my reluctance and rephrased, “Has he ever made you feel that way?”
It came to me in an instant. “Craig shouted at a ref during a basketball game.”
“The foul shot.” Fiona already knew exactly the moment.
The vindication welling up in me soured when she said, “I remember that. The ref was being horribly unfair and he said what everyone was thinking but no one dared to say. I was there. I thought it. Maybe he was out of line, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary.
But that made you feel like he would hit you? ”
The moment made me feel like someone would hit me. Had it felt like Craig would hit, me? “No. Not him.”
I stood up and poured the coffee and sat at the table.
“I guess not. I flinched at something. No, Craig is careful and gentle, and even though he is as solid as a tree, he’s steady.
Well, he has his moments, but who doesn’t.
” I thought about him carrying me up the hillside.
Standing in the rain and asking to kiss me.
“Usually, I feel safe with him. Until that moment.”
“But he didn’t hurt you?” Fiona asked.
I was hurt, but did Craig cause the hurt?
“I don’t think so.” I held the coffee cup up to my face, like Craig the first time we talked, like a shield.
Taking a sip, I set it down. “No. No, he didn’t.
I think it was already there and so I expected it, but he didn’t do it.
” I’m not sure Fiona really followed all of that but it didn’t matter, I followed it.
“So, what happened to him? He’s the one who ran,” Mia asked. I’d spent all night trying to keep the closet door in my soul closed, I hadn’t asked that question. The whole thing played out in my head, once, twice, four times.
Fiona’s voice was soft, “You still there, Rilee?”
“I’m still thinking.” That was my problem, always thinking, trying to solve the problem, figure out the game play.
At that moment Craig wasn’t thinking, he was just feeling.
And what was he feeling? What had I been feeling?
My cheeks burned at the feel of denim, the touch of Craig, welcoming and obvious. And then not.
Free from the shadows cast by the closet door in my past, the moment played out slowly.
Just as we were leaning into the future, the inviting parts of his body withdrew and grew cold as an unexpected tremor shook him.
In a blink what had been strong and firm vanished. Then I was falling, and he was running.
“I think something happened.” The words were fraught because they weren’t really mine to say.
“Things were going really well, he was laying me down on the bed, fairy tale-like,” I admitted.
“Then there was a hitch, like his body was caught on something, and he went soft. Then he pushed me away, or it was more like he was getting space, and then he ran.”
Mia’s breath crackled across the speaker.
“I don’t think he was running from you. Since I started carrying this basketball belly around, I’ve been getting these electric zingers.
My OB says it’s a pinched nerve due to the way the baby is pulling on my body.
The weight is twisting my back and pressing into my pelvis.
The pains run right around my hip and into the inside of my thigh.
The worst part is even the simplest movements can set them off. Once I almost fell down.
The doctor said they should go away after the birth, and I am so looking forward to that. But what you are describing sounds very familiar to me.”
The back injury. It messed up his foot. It’s kept him from finding a new job. I asked the next logical question, “Has it ever affected you and Silas. Together I mean?”
“Oh yeah. Well, that and the belly. Our, uh, geometry is totally different now. And even then, sometimes I can’t avoid the zingers. They can be a real mood killer to put it mildly.”
My eyes lifted up from the coffee cup and rested on the drawing still angled on the counter.
Across the room the pencil lines merged into the twisted rugged tree, blasted by the wind, struggling to keep a hold on the rock face.
Struggling not to fall into the churning ocean below.
It hadn’t been about me any more than my flinch had been about him.
“His back bothers him. I think that’s what happened. Something about how he was holding me tweaked something, gave him one of those zingers you talked about. A bad one.”
Mia agreed, “That would be my guess.”
“What do I do?” I’d called out to him as he was bolting, but he hadn’t stopped. We could have talked about this.