Chapter 16 #3
“So glad I could drag you down into the gutter with me.”
“I don’t think of it as a gutter,” she said, walking ahead of him down the hallway toward her room.
He let out a slow breath. “I want to know everything,” he said.
“What in general?”
“About you. Listening to you talk to my brother tonight made me realize I didn’t know as much as I wanted.”
“You know that I’m from Vermont. You know that I started dating Aiden in high school. That Cara is my sister-in-law and that their parents are dead, that my family is dysfunctional.”
“Yeah. That’s a nice biography. When you met Aiden, what made you think that you should stay with him?”
“I want to. I wanted to believe that I’d found the person who was stable and easy.” She stuck her key in the lock and turned it. Then she pushed the door open. “Probably kind of silly to keep it locked today. But it’s a habit.”
The apartment was much more lived in than the last time he’d seen it. It just felt like her. Smelled like her. And it made his heart start beating faster.
“Anyway. I can’t overstate the fact that I have always been afraid that I was going to be like my parents.
And to me, that just meant messy. Messy and raw and all of these things that made my life so difficult.
When I think of my childhood, I just think of lying in my bedroom, on a mattress on the floor, listening to them scream at each other.
But then, after she left, it was just quiet.
My dad would sit in his recliner in front of the TV, just spacing out.
And sometimes he had a job, but a lot of the time he drank too much to keep it.
He drank because his body hurt. He drank because his heart hurt.
He drank because it was the only thing that helped him manage himself, I guess.
And it killed him. But I was the one who had to be responsible.
Because if I didn’t, then everything would fall apart.
If I didn’t, then who was going to make sure that he was okay?
Who was going to make sure that I was okay?
Maybe that’s part of why finding a husband felt important.
A partner. So that I had somebody else who was taking care of things.
But the bar was so low for that in my life that… ”
“He wasn’t taking care of as much as he should have.”
“No. And I didn’t notice it. I didn’t… he wasn’t just staring catatonically at a television screen, so it felt like an improvement.”
He wanted to take care of her. That was the most intense, driving need in him right now.
Of course he did. That was who he was.
He had always taken care of people. If she had been part of his little cohort, she would’ve been provided for.
There would’ve been a lot of things wrong, because of course their lives hadn’t been perfect, but he had made sure that everyone was okay. She was just there by herself, hanging on as best she could, trying to keep going.
“Did you have friends? It must’ve been hard to have people over.”
“No. I didn’t have friends. Did you?”
“Nolan. Because his life was just as dysfunctional as ours.”
She gestured toward the dining table. “You might as well sit.”
He really hadn’t expected to come up and talk. But here they were.
He sat down, and she pressed the lever on an electric kettle on the countertop.
“Tea?”
“I’m not a big tea drinker. But I’ll have one.”
“So, it was you all and Nolan a lot of the time?”
“Yes.”
“When did you meet Zane?”
“The rodeo. And he needed a place. Needed something, because once he retired from the rodeo, he didn’t have anyone or anything.”
She frowned. “Is he okay?”
“No. But are any of us?”
“I think some of us seem a little more okay than others.”
“It’s just all about the degree to which you can put a mask on over your trauma, I suppose. Zane isn’t very good at hiding it. Walker is great at hiding it. I think I’m better at it than I am.”
She laughed. “Fair. But you’re pretty good at it. I have a feeling, though, that you’ve been exactly like this since you were a child.”
There was something about that he didn’t like. It made him feel like she had opened up his chest and taken a quick look inside. It made him feel like she was getting a look at things he preferred to keep private. Hidden. Why that felt like such an intrusive observation, he wasn’t entirely sure.
“You just strike me as somebody who’s had to be grown up your whole life. Maybe because I recognize it.”
But right then, he wondered what that sort of thing did to you. Because he could see it. They’d both had to be adults when they were children, but he wondered if they were still adults with parts of themselves completely undeveloped because they had missed crucial things along the way.
Because children weren’t adults. And they weren’t doing it perfectly.
They were missing things like fun and friendships and how relationships ought to go. It put her in the situation she’d been in, with a husband she didn’t see clearly because any sort of affection had seemed like a gift.
And as for him, he had never learned how to attach much to anyone, beyond the people that he had been trying to help survive. It was still what drew him in.
It was how he had gotten to know Zane, because he could see that Zane desperately needed a place, and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was so altruistic. No. He was sure it wasn’t.
But he didn’t know how else to matter.
Didn’t know how else to measure his own performance except the degree to which he was taking care of other people, because it was the thing his dad hadn’t done.
It was the thing his mom hadn’t done.
That made the back of his mouth ache.
“It was tough,” he said. “But we had each other. I’m sorry you were by yourself.”
“It’s okay,” she said. Then she grimaced.
“You know, it’s not okay. It really isn’t.
But I never had another option. Neither did you.
And it’s frustrating to realize I made so many decisions because of trauma that was forced on me.
It’s so frustrating. Because I don’t know who I would’ve been, or what I would’ve done, what I would’ve explored.
I feel like I’m having some kind of secondary adolescence right now.
Where I just want to rebel against everything.
Kick out all the lights that I kept burning all this time.
” She wrinkled her nose. “That sounds crazy.”
The tab on the electric kettle popped, and she took two cups out of the cupboard, along with a couple of teabags. Then she poured the steaming hot water into the mugs.
“Cream and sugar?”
“Didn’t you watch me drink coffee the other morning?”
“Fair enough.”
She set the mug down in front of him and bustled around getting cream and sugar for herself.
Then she sat down across from him.
It was so quiet. Just the two of them.
“I guess I can’t know who I would’ve been if I had been raised in a regular neighborhood with a mom and a dad. And maybe even a dog for good measure.”
“No,” he agreed. “You can’t. I don’t think I would’ve been half as ambitious.
Because everything that’s ever motivated me has been related to it.
That’s not very healthy, but it’s also the only way I know how to get anything done.
Maybe I would’ve been one of those spoiled, entitled pricks that I hate so much.
Wandering around spending my mom and dad’s money, doing nothing because I don’t have to.
Because they forged a path for me, and now, I don’t have to do any sort of trailblazing. Maybe.”
“Somehow I doubt it,” she said, taking a sip of her tea.
“You can doubt it all you want, but you can’t know it. It’s impossible.”
“Sure. I suppose so.”
“Not saying you can’t be angry. I think you deserve it. Because you know who was from a functional family, your husband. And he’s still treated you the way that he did.”
“I don’t want you to think he was terrible. He wasn’t. He wasn’t terrible all the time. He was genuinely somebody who was worth falling in love with.”
She stared down into her teacup. “I guess that’s the thing I have to figure out how to deal with.
I don’t think all the years were lost. I think there were good things in there.
But I knew that something was wrong. I could hear it, like static in the background, but I wanted to ignore it.
I didn’t want it to be real. Because I wanted my life to be perfect, I felt like I deserved perfect.
After all that. I think that he started out wonderful, because I think he was in love with me. But then… something went wrong.”
She looked down in her tea and took a shuddering breath as she continued.
“I wasn’t what he wanted anymore. Our life wasn’t what he wanted anymore, and even though I could feel the distance, even though when we were running the bar, we were keeping completely different hours, and we were spending so much less time together, I just wanted it to be a phase.
I wanted it to be something that wasn’t going to define us.
Or end us. I suggested the move to Oregon because I thought it would let us spend more time together. ”
She blinked rapidly. “I don’t think he ever wanted to go.
But I think at that point, he was so used to just saying yes to everything that I wanted to keep the peace that he said yes again.
Maybe he knew from the moment he said yes that he wasn’t going to go, maybe he wanted to tell me, but I didn’t give him a chance. ”
Palms flat on the table, she let out a harsh breath.
“I don’t care. Because it doesn’t change anything.
He should’ve had a conversation with me.
More than one conversation. He owed me more than that.
I gave him my whole life up until now, so he owed me more than that.
But there were things that I didn’t want to see, and I can acknowledge that right now. Even though it’s hard.”