15. Carrie
— ? —
Carrie
Tom staggers back but doesn’t fall.
I see the impact ripple through him, the way his head snaps to the side, the spray of blood from his split lip, the grunt of pain he can’t quite swallow. But he plants his feet and absorbs it, and when he looks at his brother, his eyes go cold.
“Feel better?”
“Not yet.”
Ulises charges.
They crash together in the middle of the living room, fists and elbows and years of hatred finally finding an outlet.
The coffee table goes over first, champagne glasses shattering, liquid spreading across the floor.
Then the lamp, the one Tom made himself, smashing against the wall in a shower of ceramic and wire.
“Tom!” I press myself against the wall, trying to stay out of the way, trying to find anything I can use to help. But they’re moving too fast, a blur of violence I can’t track.
Ulises gets Tom against the wall, forearm across his throat. “You think you can just take what’s mine? You think you can humiliate me in front of my family and walk away?”
“She was never yours.” Tom’s voice is strained, but steady. “You didn’t deserve her. You never did.”
“She’s my wife!”
“Not for long.”
Ulises’s fist connects with Tom’s ribs. Once. Twice. I hear the air leave Tom’s lungs, see him double over, and the last of my restraint snaps.
I grab the fireplace poker.
“Get off him!”
Ulises spins. His eyes find me, standing there in Tom’s robe, my hair still wet from the shower, a poker raised over my head, an avenging angel in a borrowed robe, and his face twists.
“Look at you.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Standing there in my brother’s clothes. Like a common whore.”
“Carrie, don’t.” Tom tries to push himself up, but Ulises shoves him back down.
“My brother.” Ulises turns back to Tom, his voice dripping with contempt. “Of all the men you could have fucked, you chose my brother. What’s the matter, Carrie? Couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t already in my shadow?”
“Shut up.”
“Does he know what a frigid bitch you are? Does he know you cry after sex? That you make everything about babies and cycles and ovulation charts?” Ulises laughs again. “How long before he gets tired of you, do you think? How long before he realizes you’re not worth the effort?”
Tom moves.
I don’t even see it happen, one second Ulises is standing over him, gloating, and the next Tom has swept his legs out from under him and they’re on the floor again, rolling through the broken glass and spilled champagne.
Tom comes out on top.
His fist connects with Ulises’s face. Once. Twice. Three times, until blood is streaming from his brother’s nose and his lip is split and his perfect face is finally showing what he really is.
“Don’t.” Punch. “Ever.” Punch. “Call her that.” Punch. “Again.”
“Tom, stop!” I drop the poker and grab his arm. “You’ll kill him!”
“Maybe that’s what he deserves.”
“Tom. Please.”
The tone of my voice gets through. He stops, breathing hard, his knuckles bloody. Ulises lies beneath him, groaning, his face a mess.
“Get up.” Tom drags his brother to his feet and shoves him toward the door. “Get out of my house.”
“Your house?” Ulises laughs wetly, blood on his teeth. “This shitty little cabin? This is what you’ve got to offer her? A two-room shack and a woodworking hobby?”
“It’s more than you ever gave her.”
“I gave her everything. Money. Status. A name that meant something.” Ulises’s eyes find me, and there’s a brokenness in them that scares me more than his rage. “And she threw it all away for you.”
“She threw away nothing. She escaped.”
“Escaped?” Ulises’s laugh turns into a cough. “She’ll be back. They always come back. When she realizes what she’s lost, when she realizes you can’t give her what she wants.”
“I can give her everything she wants.”
“Can you?” Ulises’s smile is vicious. “Can you give her a baby, Tom? Because I couldn’t. Six years I tried, and her body refused. Broken. Empty. Dried up before her time.” He looks at me. “How long before he figures that out? How long before he throws you away just like I did?”
Every word finds its mark, the exact places six years of him taught me were weakest.
“Get out.” Tom’s voice is ice. “Touch her again and I’ll kill you.”
“This isn’t over.”
“Yes, it is. You’ve lost, Ulises. The evidence is with the lawyers.
The divorce is filed. By tomorrow, everyone who matters will know what you are.
” Tom shoves his brother toward the door.
“So go. Run home. Try to salvage whatever scraps of your reputation you have left. But don’t ever come near her again. ”
Ulises stumbles onto the porch. He turns back, blood dripping from his chin, his eyes locked on mine.
“She’ll never give you a child, Tom. She’s broken. She’s empty.” His voice is almost sad now, which somehow makes it worse. “And when you finally realize that, when you’ve wasted years hoping for something she can’t provide, you’ll throw her away just like I did.”
He walks into the darkness. A moment later, I hear an engine start, headlights sweeping across the trees, gravel crunching under tires.
Then silence.
Tom turns to me. His face is bruised, his knuckles bloody, his shirt torn. But his eyes are soft.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” I’m shaking. I can feel it starting in my hands and spreading outward, until my whole body is trembling. “I don’t, I can’t.”
He crosses to me and gathers me in. I bury my face against his throat and breathe him in, sawdust and sweat and the clean-skin smell that’s only him, and let myself fall apart.
“He’s wrong,” Tom says into my hair. “Everything he said. He’s wrong.”
“What if he’s not?”
“He is. You’re not broken, Carrie. You’re not empty. You’re everything.”
I pull back and look at him. This man who just beat his brother bloody for me. This man who gave up his family, his reputation, his peace, all because he believed I was worth saving.
“Tom.” My voice cracks. “I think I might be pregnant.”
He goes completely still.
“What?”
“I don’t know for sure. I haven’t taken a test. But I’m late. And I feel different, nauseous in the mornings, tired all the time, my breasts hurt in ways they haven’t since.” I stop. Force myself to breathe. “Since we started trying. Years ago. Before everything fell apart.”
“How late?”
“Two weeks.”
Tom’s hand finds my jaw, tilting my face to his. His eyes are searching mine, and what’s in them is hard to read, hope, maybe, or fear, or a complicated tangle of both.
“When we were making the deal,” he says slowly. “When I said I’d give you a baby. I meant it. But I never thought.”
“I know.”
“Carrie.” His voice breaks. “If this is real. If you’re really.”
“I don’t know yet. I could be wrong. My body has tricked me before.”
“But you might not be wrong.”
“I might not be wrong.”
He kisses me then, gentle, careful, unbearably tender. And I let myself hope, just a little. Let myself imagine a future where Ulises’s cruelty doesn’t win. Where my body isn’t broken. Where I get to be a mother after all.
“We’ll take a test tomorrow,” Tom says against my lips. “First thing.”
“Okay.”
“And whatever it says.” He pulls back, meets my eyes. “I love you. You know that, right? Not because you might be pregnant. Not because of the deal. Because you’re you.”
I do know. I’ve known for weeks now, even though I’ve been too scared to say it.
“I love you too.”
He smiles, bloody lip and bruised face and all, and pulls me close.
“Let’s go to bed.”
He doesn’t take me to bed to sleep.
He undresses me slowly in the dark, and when I reach to turn off the lamp he catches my hand and leaves it on. “I want to see you,” he says. “All of you. The parts he made you hate.”
I go still. Six years of sucking in my stomach, of turning off lights, of apologizing for a body that wouldn’t do the one thing it was supposed to.
Tom puts his mouth to the soft swell below my navel, the part I’ve hidden my whole adult life, slow and reverent, and the shame I brace for doesn’t come.
“Broken,” he says against my skin, and I flinch at the word until I hear his tone.
He isn’t agreeing with it. He’s insulted by it.
“He stood in our house tonight and called you broken.” His hand spreads warm over my belly.
“There might be a whole life in here. A life he could never make. You are the least broken person I have ever touched.”
And then I’m crying, the way I cried the first time, not from grief but from being seen, and Tom kisses the tears off my face and keeps going, in no hurry, intent on proving his point.
He takes his time. He learns me again, slow and certain, and when he finally moves over me he keeps his eyes on mine the whole way, and there’s no performance in it, nothing to survive, only him filling me up while the bruise on his jaw goes purple and his split lip catches mine.
“Tell me what you are,” he says, low, moving in me.
“Tom.”
“Tell me.”
“Yours.” It comes out wrecked. “Whole. I don’t know. Both.”
“Both.” He almost laughs, and the sound breaks in the middle. “God, I love you.”
When I come it’s quiet and enormous, a thing that rolls up from a place I’d given up for dead, and he follows me with my name in his mouth and his forehead against mine.
After, he keeps his hand on my belly, already feeling for what might be there, and I lie in the dark with the most dangerous thing in the world unfurling in my chest.
Hope.
I fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat, certain for the first time in years that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
For a few hours, there’s only this. The dark, the warmth, the two of us breathing in the same rhythm.