A Missing Heart (13 page)

I grab the small photo I have of Cammy and I kissing from my bag and shake my head at it.
Man, this isn’t good.
I shake my head, knowing this is the beginning of the end. Powering off my phone, I slip it into my back pocket and tell myself things are definitely changing now.

CHAPTER NINE

It’s days like today where I realize, I had no right being a father at seventeen. I can hardly manage my life at twenty-nine. Though, if I had my daughter today, maybe my life would be different. Maybe Cammy would be here. Maybe, I would be happy.

ONCE TORI GOT
home, I realized my anger was not going to subside, and the only thing I can ever think to do when I feel this way is take a long, burning-hot shower. The steam doesn’t exactly clear my mind but it releases the tension running through me. There isn’t a goddamn day where I don’t wake up and wonder where I went wrong—where we went wrong. She looks at Gavin as if he were no more than a mistake. Regardless of my strong desire never to have another child again, there hasn’t been one second when I thought of Gavin as a mistake. He was supposed to be in my life, and that’s the only way to look at it. How can she look at him differently? I can’t understand and it’s killing me. It took her almost three full minutes to tell me she
did
love Gavin, but I swear it sounded more like a question than a definitive, immediate answer.

It seems as though things are progressing for the worse every day, and I’m scared to think what our situation might be like in a year from now. I’m scared for Tori in general. Today, I saw a side of her I didn’t know existed, and I’m not sure I know how to handle another situation like that if it were to arise.

It’s awful that I’ve considered taking Gavin to Mom and Dad’s to crash for a few days so I can clear my head a bit, but I don’t think that’s the best thing for Gavin.

As I’m rinsing the suds from my hair, I hear Gavin begin to cry. Poor guy must be hurting again. I lost track of the time but I’m guessing the six-hour dose of ibuprofen is close to being up. I lean my forehead against the cold, gray-slate-tiled wall, watching the drops of water trickle down my nose and fall to the basin of the tub, wishing for just another few minutes in the shower. As I wait a minute or two to see if the crying stops, I only hear the sound grow louder.
Just rock him, Tori. That always soothes him.

A ten-minute shower is pretty much the longest one I’ve had since Gavin was born, so I shouldn’t have expected anything more now, even so late at night.

I step out onto the shaggy bathmat and dry off quickly before stepping into my shorts. I grip the edges of the sink basin as I look in the mirror at my sleep-deprived appearance—the puffy bags under my eyes, the lines curving downward from both corners of my mouth, and even some small indentations forming on my forehead. In the last four months, I look as if I’ve aged ten years, and again, I remind myself how desperate I am for a real
break.

As I’m pulling the bathroom door open, the shrieks grow louder, and it’s immediately apparent that the screams aren’t just from Gavin, but from Tori too.
What the fuck is going on?

I race through the house and up to Gavin’s dark bedroom. I flip the lights on, finding Tori in nothing but a t-shirt and panties. She’s sitting awkwardly—one leg outstretched in front and the other bent behind her. Tori is in the middle of the floor with Gavin, who is squirming and screaming in front of her. “What the hell are you doing?” I shout at her, leaning over to lift Gavin from the cold hardwood floor.

“He won’t stop screaming,” she shrieks. “I can’t take it anymore. Why won’t he just stop?” Why today, of all days, does she need to pull this shit? I’m fighting the pain of not being with my daughter on her birthday today and she’s fighting the pain of being with our son.

Every part of me wants to ask her how old she is and why the hell she’s crying over a crying baby, especially a baby that is ours, but that she rarely has to take care of. Except, every minute longer I spend in this marriage with her, I continue to see she has no clue how old she is or why she’s acting the way she is. Yeah, this is hard. Yeah, a baby can push a sane person through the fine line between sanity and insanity, but as adults, we hold it together. We have to. “He’s in pain, T. He needs more meds.”

“I can’t stand listening to him cry,” she says, as her voice calms from the cries she was emitting earlier.

“Are you safe?” I ask her. It’s so cold, blunt, and to the goddamn truth, but Jesus, she hasn’t acted like this before and I’m scared for both of us—mostly her. It’s like something cracked within her, and she’s shattering from the inside out.

“Am I safe?” she asks, pulling herself up by the windowsill. “Am I fucking safe?” Her question forms into laughter, and the lack of response is sadly answering my question. She’s shaking, her knees are bowed in toward one another and her skin is becoming paler by the second. Her eyes are bulging with tiny red veins and her chest is heaving harder and faster than it should. I can only assume she’s having a panic attack since I’m not sure what else could be happening.

“What’s your doctor’s number, T?”

“You’re not calling my goddamn doctor,” she says pleadingly, through weak breaths.

“I’ll call 9-1-1 if I have to. You’re clearly in trouble right now, and God, I would do just about anything to help you, but you won’t even help yourself by telling me what the hell is going on.”

“Don’t threaten me, AJ,” she warns.

“Babe, this isn’t a threat.” I manage to calm Gavin down for a minute, so I place him in his crib and flip the mobile on to quiet him down. With my own shallow breaths not doing much to keep me composed, I force myself to relax for Gavin’s sake.

I turn toward Tori, looking in her eyes, realizing she doesn’t look like the woman I know, and she hasn’t for quite some time.
Through thick and thin. Through thick and thin.
Closing the space between us, I wrap my arms around her and squeeze tightly. I don’t say a word; I just hold her.

“I’m not okay,” she whispers.

“I know, babe.”

“I’m not okay in the way that I shouldn’t be here tonight,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I can’t panic right now. I must stay calm, for her. For Gavin.

“I want to hurt myself,” she continues in a whisper.

Her words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Hurt herself? She’s never spoken like this. “Tell me why. What happened in the past week to make you snap?” I should be reacting to her words quicker than I am but dammit to fucking hell, I want to know what happened.

“I broke. I’ve been barely holding it together for months. When I saw you holding Gavin in the hospital, you looked like your world was ending, like you’d give up one of your limbs to make him feel better. You looked the way I should have felt, and I felt nothing, AJ. Nothing. What mother doesn’t feel anything? I feel fucking nothing! Nothing!” She starts to cry, and the tears barrel down her cheeks again. Is that what this is? She doesn’t feel like she’s good enough to be his mother?

“Why, Tori? Why do you feel this way? What’s making you think this?”

“I don’t know how to love him. No one has ever loved me the way I’m supposed to love him.”

“I love you, T. Your parents love you, so that’s not true,” I tell her. I still have a firm grip on her shoulders, hoping my words are doing something to calm her irrational thoughts.

“Those people are not my parents, AJ.”

“What?” I’m not sure my response came out in anything more than my breath, but suddenly the wind has been sucked from my lungs, and I’m not sure how I even form a sound.
Of course they are her parents
. Her dad walked her down the damn aisle at our wedding. Her mother cried happy tears that day. Tori speaks to her parents several times a week. Is she telling me a story or is she trying to come clean? I don’t know what to believe.

“Just because they look like parents, doesn’t mean they’re mine,” she snarls.

“So then, who are your parents?”

Tori tears her arms out of my grip and uses the wall as leverage to move away from me. “I will hurt myself before I tell you or any of those pieces of crap who call themselves therapists.” She’s gripping at the roots of her hair as she paces back and forth between the crib and the window on the opposite side of the room. Instinctually, I feel the need to place myself between Gavin and Tori—a feeling I should never have to have about the woman who gave birth to our son, but I’ve never seen this side of her. I’m not sure she’s even aware of what she’s doing. I’ve never had a panic attack, but I think that’s what happens.

“Please stop making threats,” I tell her calmly. “I thought your therapist knew everything about your past. Hours ago you told me you’ve had the same therapist since you were a kid.”

“He doesn’t know the truth, AJ.”

“Does
he
know he isn’t completely aware of the truth?” I ask calmly. Tori
told me her therapist was a “she” earlier,
so now I’m wondering if she even has a therapist. If she doesn’t, she needs one immediately. I clearly can’t give her the help she needs.

“No.”

“How can he not?” I press.

“The same way you thought you were marrying a woman without incredible baggage. You were so quick to agree to asking no questions about our pasts. We were on the same page for two very different reasons, but we were on the same fucking page, AJ. The page that didn’t include children in our empty future plans.”

Empty future plans?
“How many times can you say this, T?”

“As many times as it takes for you to understand how serious I was about it.”

“I think I get it,” I tell her, feeling the sarcasm seep through my words.

“No you don’t,” she says, stopping the action of pacing the room. Thankfully, during our back and forth discussion, Gavin fell back asleep.

Tori leaves the room and heads downstairs to the kitchen. I’m surprised she doesn’t trip down the steps with the way she’s carrying herself. I can’t let her out of my sight now after the shit she’s said throughout the past hour. I won’t be able to sleep tonight because of
her
, not Gavin. She turns on all of the lights in the kitchen and tears open the cabinet high above the stove, pulling down a bottle of vodka. I’m trying to be easy going with stopping her actions. She’s never drunk before with a purpose so if she needs a drink, she can have it, if that means she’ll calm down.

She reaches for a glass from the cabinet near the sink and pours the vodka into it, but I remain still, sitting and watching as a bystander. She’s drinking the cheapest vodka we have in the house and with nothing in it. She’s going to make herself sick.

I lean back against the wall and watch her take a couple of sips. Her nose crinkles and her eyes squeeze shut. “Feel better?” I ask.

“No,” she says coldly, as she opens another cabinet and pulls out a bottle of pills from the back of the bottom shelf. I’ve never seen these pills before. I’ve never really had a reason to go into that particular cabinet she’s in, since I thought it was full of crystal glasses we never use.

“What is that?” I ask her, taking a couple of steps closer.

“They were prescribed, don’t worry,” she says, quickly flashing the bottle in front of my face. I grab her wrist while she’s waving the pills in the air and steady my focus on the small print.

“Why do you have—” Never mind. I can assume why she has a bottle of Valium. I keep my words to myself as she drops a pill into her hand. I remain silent as she chases it with the vodka, mostly because I’m in shock and don’t know what to say.

I’ve never taken anything that strong before, but I can assume it works fairly quickly. “Do you need to see a doctor right now, Tori?”

She finishes the glass of vodka instead of answering me, then slides down the side of the cabinet until she hits the ground. Folding her head into her arms, I watch her back rise and fall at a slow, steady pace, telling me she’s coming down from the panic attack, if that’s what this is.

I sit down in front of her and wait for the next move. I close my eyes as I search my mind for any memory that might hint of her having issues like this. There was one time when her mother called her, asking her to do something, and Tori started to cry really hard, which was not what I would have expected in response to someone asking a favor. She locked herself in the bedroom for the afternoon and night before she came out and asked me to let it go.
I let it go
. Then, although I sometimes forget about it, there is the sequence of events that took place the day we found out she was pregnant. I think I blocked it out on purpose.