Lukas
FEbrUARY
Ipace along the creaky floorboards in my dark bedroom, walking the path in one direction before spinning and walking the other, murmuring a soft hushing sound to the sleeping beauty in my arms.
It’s going to be one of those nights where she’ll wake every hour or two. I can feel it already. The clock reads nearly midnight, and she hasn’t slept so much as a minute outside of my arms.
When I quiet my hushing, I tweak my neck to look down and see her eyes have fallen shut. I don’t dare risk it, don’t dare set her back in her bassinet until she’s good and passed out, so I grab my phone and head to the corner to sit in the gliding rocking chair that my mom insisted I get.
Another thing that woman was right about.
Settling in, I maneuver Ivy over my chest, so her forehead rests just under my chin. Grabbing the throw blanket my grandma knitted, I drape it over her, careful to leave her face uncovered.
I scroll through my phone, perusing sports highlights for games I no longer have the time to watch. I pull up the website for my old baseball team, and a little bit of sadness still hits me when I see how good they’ve been doing.
I don’t recognize any of the players on the roster.
I haven’t for a while now. Most of the guys I knew have probably moved on to the majors or traded to another team.
Those that were barely hanging on have probably left by now.
I wonder how many of the guys I played with are still in, or if any of them have settled down, married.
Maybe some are awake tonight, just like me, holding their sleeping baby on their chest.
And I wonder what Mags is doing right now.
It’s almost seven in the morning for her. I can imagine her waking up, stretching her long legs, pointing her toes toward the foot of the bed. She always liked to stretch once while lying flat. She said it made her feel taller, more limber, and helped with waking her up.
Then she will go make a cup of coffee. She’ll take the first few sips while it’s still piping hot, and then likely set it next to her as she starts her real morning stretches.
The mug will likely go cold once she gets lost in the movements, just like it always used to.
Or maybe that’s changed. Maybe now she drinks tea, matcha. Maybe she gave up caffeine altogether.
Or maybe she sits and enjoys a full cup of coffee before starting her day. For some reason, that little thought, the one that says I no longer know those parts of her, has me restless. I swipe through my phone, pulling up her number and hitting dial.
I press the phone to my ear, knowing that I will have to keep my voice quiet, so I don’t wake the sleeping princess on my chest.
I don’t really expect Mags to answer, anyway. We haven’t talked in a while, not since the one phone call. I wanted to give her time to think after that, then Ivy was born a few weeks early, and the last month has been pure chaos learning to adjust to life with a newborn.
Candi needed a real night’s sleep. I’ve been crashing at her and Rick’s house for nearly a month, opting to split the night wakings.
Between the three of us, it’s manageable, and even though Rick and I take turns changing diapers and rocking Ivy back to sleep, Candi still has to wake with the baby each time to nurse or pump.
The exhaustion has been wearing on her, and she finally agreed to let me take Ivy to my house for my first solo mission.
“Hello?”
My body jerks, and then I hiss, making sure Ivy didn’t wake up with my unexpected movement.
“Mags?”
“Yeah?”
“Uh. Hi.”
“Hey, Lukas.”
“I’m surprised you answered.”
“Well, that’s usually what you do when someone calls you.” The teasing glint in her voice has my lips twitching.
“Smart ass.”
“What’s going on? It’s been a while.”
“It has.” I had meant to give her a few weeks to digest everything after our call, but when Candi’s water broke one night after dinner, we all rushed to the hospital, and it’s been nonstop ever since. “Ivy’s here.”
It takes her a minute for my words to absorb. “Wait, what? Ivy was born? How is she? How did it go?”
“She’s perfect.” I press my lips to the top of her sleepy head, feeling the soft fuzz against my skin.
“People aren’t exaggerating when they talk about the exhaustion that comes with a newborn, but they also aren’t lying when they say it’s totally worth it.
” The exhaustion is more than I could have imagined.
More than I ever felt in the Marines, even when I wasn’t sleeping, and my mental health was at its lowest. It’s a different type of exhaustion, though.
One mixed with uncertainty in this new world, a little bit of fear that you’re going to do something wrong, but lots of love is mixed in, too.
The sudden, consuming, overwhelming love for this tiny little floppy thing that mostly sleeps and cries.
“I’m happy for you,” she whispers, and the words sound true, but I’m sure it’s hard for her to say them. I wish she was here. I wish she could see Candi and Rick together, to see my relationship with them to understand what it is.
“Would you believe I cried once we got home? I think it was day three when everything settled, and I started to cry. Broke down and blubbered like a baby.”
“You did? I can’t imagine that. What did you cry over?”
I chuckle a little, adjusting the blanket that’s starting to droop down Ivy’s shoulder.
“I was looking at her sleeping one night. Staring at her tiny hands and little face, thinking about how innocent babies are. Children in general, really.” I saw a lot of shit when I was deployed.
Things happening to women and children that I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to witness.
It hurt me at the time, but then I had a child of my own, and that protective instinct became stronger.
“I started thinking about what she will be like when she grows up, and I had this sudden realization that there will likely come a day where she dates someone, falls in love, and that person might break her heart, and I won’t be able to do anything to stop it. ”
Magnolia is silent on the other end of the line for a minute, and I laugh awkwardly. “Anyways, yeah, crying over her future fictional broken heart had me breaking down.”
“I think that’s sweet, Lukas.”
“I think it’s kind of messed up.”
“Why’s that?”
“There I was, crying that someone might hurt my daughter, this precious, perfect girl, and yet I had you…” I trail off, not knowing if I can finish my thought without cracking. “I had someone who was perfect in my eyes, my dream girl, someone I loved, and look what I did to you.”
“Lukas…”
I use the hand that’s gripping my phone to swipe the tears away with the back of my hand. “If someone ever hurts her the way I hurt you, I feel like I’d hunt them down. That’s kind of a hard pill to swallow.”
“I get that. But I think the important part is to raise her in a way that she knows what love is. To know what to tolerate and what to stand up to. I loved you, Lukas. I would have done anything for you. But at the same time, I was raised to know what love is, and to know when it wasn’t good for me to be around someone anymore. But you know what’s weird?”
“What’s that?”
“Even though you were the one hurting me, the way you loved me when we were younger also taught me what real love was like.” She pauses, sniffling once.
“I knew how a relationship should be, how one could be, and that’s how I knew what we had at the end wasn’t healthy anymore.
I learned a lot about love from being with you, both good and bad. ”
I bite the inside of my cheek, nodding along in the dark room.
“I’m sorry, Mags, for all of it. I know I’ve said it before, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve said it enough.”
“I know you are, Lukas … it’s just…” She sighs heavily. “I don’t know. It’s still a lot.”
“But you answered, and now I feel like I won the lottery.”
There’s a huff of a laugh on her end. “I’ve had time to digest it all, I guess. Still not sure if … not sure what I can give, but … I do want to talk.”
I mentally pump a fist in the air, but I keep my mouth shut, listening to her movements on the other end. She’s clanking around with something, and I can hear the ping of her pressing buttons.
“Warming up your coffee?”
“Yeah, had a few sips then got lost in my stretches, forgot about it.”
I smile at that, knowing that some of my favorite things haven’t changed.
“Are you still living with Raymond and Ronaldo?”
An alarm dings, and she must be pulling her coffee out. I hear a soft puff of air as she blows the steam. “No, I have my own place now.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a tiny apartment, tucked above a bakery in the 9th arrondissement. An easy walk to the opera house for me. Our breakup helped me realize a lot of things, actually. The most important being that I was too dependent on other people.”
My brows twist at that. “I never saw you that way, Mags. Hell, you moved from the States to Paris without knowing a soul. You forged your career yourself; no one handed it to you on a silver platter. That takes guts. Determination.”
“Maybe. But the ballet set me up in a furnished apartment with another dancer. I didn’t have to search for my own place or find a roommate.
Being in the ballet, the other dancers became my friends.
I had never lived alone, ever. I mean,” she chuckles, “Lukas, I didn’t even get my driver’s license at sixteen because I had you to drive me around.
What sixteen-year-old isn’t dreaming of that day to have their freedom? ”
I smile at that. “I loved driving you around.”
“It worked for us, but I needed to grow up.”
“Did our relationship hold you back? Did I?” I didn’t ever feel like I was holding her back.
We argued a bit when she first said she wanted to move to France, but any bitterness I felt was short-lived.
I always thought we communicated well, for the most part.
To think now that I was keeping her down or holding her back in any way is new.