A Love So Deadly (14 page)

For the first time since the surgery, I experience a pain worse than the pain in my head. For the first time in weeks, the fog that has clouded my every thought lifts and I experience a moment of clarity—sharp and brutal, like a knife slipped between my ribs.

I
want
that. I want to treasure someone that much. I want someone to look at me the way that mother and daughter are looking at each other. They are both so beautiful, feeling so much, holding nothing back. It’s painful to watch them embrace, the little girl hugging her mom’s neck so tight, the mom kissing her daughter’s curls with a tenderness that makes it clear they are everything to each other. They’re too far away for me to hear what they’re saying, but I imagine that it’s something sweet.

“Are you ready to go, Gabe?” Olia, my private nurse, returns from the bathroom, taking her position at the back of my wheelchair.

I shake my head. “One…minute.”

I don’t want to go yet. I want the little girl to look at me again. I want her mother to turn my way and see me, even if I am a wasted, faded version of myself. Even if I am in this chair with a nurse escorting me home, a woman who, until a week ago, had to help me wipe my ass. Olia still has to help me onto the toilet, and pull up my pants when I’m finished like I’m no bigger than the toddler in the young woman’s arms.

I know I’m no prize, and that the woman is probably married, anyway, but I still want the blonde to look at me. I want to see her eyes. Somehow, I know they will be green. They will be the pale green of that milky green stone…

What’s the name? The one they used to carve figurines and chess pieces a long time ago…

I curse beneath my breath and give up searching for the missing word. I can’t remember the damned stone’s name.

There are so many things I can’t remember, words and phrases and months of my life lost along with the tumor they whittled free. The surgeon said I might never see those memories again, but Bea, the nurse who watched over me before Olia, promised there was hope.

In the early days, when no one was sure if I would pull through, Bea would talk to me while she changed my various tubes and checked my beeping machines. She said that brain surgery is like an earthquake. It shakes things loose, transforming the landscape of the mind, but not destroying as much as it might seem at first. The missing pieces are still there, buried beneath the rubble, or exiled on the other side of the chasm surgery leaves behind. She said there could come a day when I’d find a way to those memories, and reclaim the things that I’ve lost.

But it will take time. At least a year. Maybe more. Endless days I will spend lost in a fog of pain, struggling to reconcile who my parents insist I was before the surgery with who I am now.

Sometimes, listening to them talk, I think the doctor may have cut away more of me than Aaron and Deborah can imagine. I don’t feel like the happy, well-adjusted, driven pre-law major they insist I was before. There is darkness inside of me, a rage and sadness that is bigger than post-surgical depression. Sometimes I get so angry it frightens me.

The things I want to do, the things I imagine…

They aren’t pretty. They aren’t sane or healthy, and, until this morning, I was beginning to think that my soul was a broken, twisted thing. Whether the surgery was to blame, or I was always a monster hiding behind a handsome face, I didn’t know. I only knew that I was full of hate and misery and there was no room for anything else. I felt no gratitude to the doctor who saved my life against all odds; I felt no affection for my parents. I haven’t even been happy to be alive, because what good is life without something to live for, something other than this emptiness that has threatened to swallow me whole?

But now, looking at this woman, this girl—she can’t be much older than I am, even if she is a mother—I feel something. There is a softening inside me, a bruised place on my heart that makes my ribs ache and my throat tight. A wave of longing sweeps through me, making me shake with the force of how much I want.

I want to love someone. I
need
to love someone. I need to love someone the way I loved…

I close my eyes, chest lurching as a ghost of a memory dances through my head. It’s a wispy, transparent memory, with graceful arms, a wicked smile, and perfect, moon-shaped toes. I see chipped nail polish and bare feet against concrete steps. I hear a throaty laugh in the darkness and feel hot breath on my lips as arms pull me down onto a lumpy bed. My head spins with the sense memories of nails digging into my shoulders, the tang of sweet, salty sweat in my mouth.

For a moment the pieces of the mystery struggle to come together, but then they’re gone. The memory slips through my fingers, turning to smoke in my hands.

By the time I open my eyes, the beautiful woman and her daughter are walking away, moving toward the security line, a redheaded woman now by their side. I watch them go with a ridiculous sense of loss, hating myself for not calling out, even if the blonde is a stranger. I should have said something. I should have told her thank you for giving me hope that I am more than a monster, that there may still be good left inside of me.

But I didn’t, and the moment is gone.

Now, it’s time for Olia to push me outside to the curb, where my mother is waiting in the new van, the one specially equipped to fit my chair. The doctors don’t know how long it will be before I recover the ability to walk. It could be weeks, months, years.

Or never. Some people never rebuild the bridges their tumors ate away. Some people stay lost in the wilderness without ever finding their way home.

Home. Staring at the blonde’s retreating form, I realize it isn’t a place. It is a touch, a gentle word, a tender look. It is knowing that there is someone out there who knows all your secrets, has looked into all your dark corners, and loves you anyway. It is realizing that you are not alone.

I am not alone. Someone—that ghost with the moon-shaped toes—loved me, once. And I loved her, with all the ferocity I’ve done my best to keep hidden from my parents since the moment I opened my eyes after the surgery. I loved a girl who cherished my rough edges and dark corners, who took me as I am, who kissed me in the shadows and taught me that even the most jagged puzzle pieces have a place where they will fit. Just right. Flush and snug and suddenly whole.

I can’t remember her name, or her face. I can’t remember when we met, or how long we loved, or why she isn’t here with me now, but the fact that she existed is enough to steady my hands and calm my racing heart. I found her once. I can find her again. I can search for her in the jungles of my mind until I find a clue, a trail of breadcrumbs, something that will lead me back to what I’ve lost.

Back to her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One Year Later
Caitlin
“The face of all the word is changed, I think,
Since I first heard the footsteps of they soul.
Move still, oh, still, beside me.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I’m falling again.

I’m always falling.

In my dreams, I’ve taken that one wrong step a hundred thousand times, my subconscious mind struggling to go back to the moment I lost my last link to Gabe and rewrite history.

But even my dreams turn against me. Sometimes I make it down the stairs to the loft, only to trip on the stone path outside the front door to the cottage, and go tumbling down the hill. Sometimes I make it down the hill and into the car, only for the tires to skid on the rain-slick streets and send the car hurtling through the guardrail, into the sea.

Sometimes, I’m back in Pitt’s attic, strangling the life out of him, and the moment he dies, the cramps hit, ripping through my core, taking a life for a life, every wave of pain assuring me that monsters don’t live happily ever after. Murderers don’t get to have a baby with ten perfect fingers and toes. Murderers get pain and misery and blood for blood.

No matter how the dream plays out, the end is always the same. I am always on my back staring up at the ceiling or the sky, with pain rocketing up and down my spine, agony fisting around my abdomen, and horrible, wet heat flowing between my legs. I always lose the baby. Every single time.

I wake up from the dreams with tears on my cheeks and my heart aching like it’s going to explode and a scream pushing at my lips, struggling to fight free of my mouth. But I never let the scream out. If I do, I know I might have trouble stopping.

Tonight, I sit up in bed, trembling in the darkness, listening to the island wind whip the palm trees outside my window. I swipe the tears from my cheeks, and take deep, silent breaths, fighting to get myself under control before I wake up Isaac. But I should know better. Most of the time, Isaac sleeps like a rock, but it’s like he can sense it when I’m really upset, even when he’s unconscious. He calls it his Caitlin-dar, and it is almost always dead on.

“Bad dream?” he asks, his voice a sleepy rumble as he reaches out, running one big hand up and down my spine through my thin sleep shirt. The trade winds keep the lower floor, where the kids sleep, cool, but it’s warmer up here in the loft. Warm enough that Isaac sleeps in nothing but his boxers, and I in a tee shirt and panties.

“Yeah.” I take another shuddery breath. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

I don’t tell him that I’m starting to think I
won’t
be fine, that I’ll never stop reliving losing Gabe, then losing our baby four months into the pregnancy. I don’t tell Isaac that I’m afraid I’ll never feel whole again, or that no amount of happiness or love or understanding will ever make up for the things I’ve lost.

I don’t want Isaac to know. After all he’s done for me and the kids, I don’t want him to realize that one half of the life we’re making together is built on a lie, and that I’ve only been pretending to get back to normal. In truth, I’m not sure I know what normal is anymore. Most of the past year has felt like a dream, a mix of nightmares and wishes come true that have left me feeling permanently off-kilter.

The day after I lost the baby—a little boy so tiny he never had a chance of living outside my body once my water broke—Isaac flew to the island. He sat by my hospital bed and coaxed food and water between my lips. He carried me to the car and then up to my bedroom at the cottage. He called his parents, said he wasn’t coming home, and got a job at the local flatbread company making pizzas until he could find something better. He shifted his entire life around to help Sherry take care of the kids during the month it took for me to emerge from my haze of despair and grief, and never once complained.

And when I was finally up and doing better—going through the motions, if not living the way I had before—he rented a room in a house of Australian surfers down the street and stayed on the island. He did it to be close to me and the kids, to be the kind of friend he’s always been, the kind who loves with his entire heart. It took a few months, but by the time the winter rains battered the roof of our cozy new home, Sherry had moved in with her new boyfriend in the next village over, and Isaac was sleeping over at our house once or twice a week.

At first, all we did was hold each other. He would pull my back against his front and curl his big, warm body around me, and I would feel safe for the first time in longer than I could remember. Eventually, cuddling turned to kissing, and then to painfully gentle lovemaking so different than what I had with Gabe, but sweet, and good. I can feel how much Isaac loves me in every kiss, every caress, and I can hardly fault him for treating me like I might break if he kisses me too hard.

Since I lost the baby, I haven’t been as strong as I used to be. I enrolled in college and am working on getting my degree in social work. I’ve been taking care of the kids, making new friends, and spending time with Sherry, but I have done it all while walking on eggshells, as if I’m balancing on a razor’s edge and this new life could come crumbling down around me at any moment. I have been distant, colder, too careful, and so much less than Isaac or the kids deserve.

I want to change. I want to lock the past away and only visit it when I choose to page through those beautiful, painful memories, but so far I haven’t been able to. I am a shadow, and I don’t know how to firm myself back up again.

“Same dream?” Isaac asks, still rubbing my back, though now he makes slow circles between my hunched shoulders. I nod, but don’t say a word. I don’t want to talk about it. Talking never helps, but sometimes touching does.

I push the covers down to the foot of the bed before I turn and straddle Isaac’s hips, not surprised to find him hard, his cock straining the front of his boxers. I tease him that he has a perpetual hard-on; he insists there are much worse problems, and I agree. There are much worse problems, and I like the fact that he’s always ready, always hot and hard and eager to give me the oblivion I crave.

“Off.” I curl my fingers around the waistband of his boxers and tug.

“Yes ma’am.” He lifts his hips and I drag his underwear down his thick, furry legs and toss the boxers to the floor before straddling him again. I lean down, capturing his lips for a kiss as I roll my hips, sighing as his bare cock rubs against me through my panties.

“God, you feel good,” he mumbles against my lips as his big hands move beneath my tee shirt, smoothing up my ribs to capture my breasts, one in each wide palm.

He teases my nipples into tight points, sending waves of desire crashing between my legs, dampening the crotch of my panties. I moan into his mouth and increase my rhythm, grinding faster, harder against him, until he grunts and his hands drop to my hips stilling me with a gentle squeeze.