But I Love Him (6 page)

I’m relieved when he nods and picks up the melody again.

I hate it that every little thing has become so important. I have to try so hard every moment of every day to do and say the right thing, or his mood will turn.

And my day will turn with it.

I’m tired of this high-wire act, this balance where I have to be on all the time, where I have to perform whenever the light hits me or risk falling.

As the notes fill the room again I lie back on his bed and stare at the popcorn ceiling. Connor sits just a few feet away from me, but it feels like miles. There is a cavernous hole between us, and I can never seem to fill it.

I know that he spent three hours doing this for me, but it’s empty because it’s not what I want. I want him to stop making everything so hard. I want him to smile at me and I don’t want to see the things in his eyes that tell me it’s not real.

I want him to be whole so I don’t have to try so hard to make him that way.

I want to not care if I make a mistake. I want this to be easy and happy, and I want to not walk on eggshells every moment of every day. I want to say the wrong thing and see him smile anyway.

I want him to hang out with me and my friends. I want him to come over for dinner with my mom and I want to be able to leave the room and not worry about what they are saying to each other.

The longing is so fierce I feel it in my chest, an ache that makes my whole body weak.

I want to be forgiven for my mistakes. I want them to wash away every day and I want a clean slate. I don’t want them to stack up higher and higher, like a house of cards ready to topple with the breeze.

I want him to leave behind everything from his childhood and look only at the future we have together. I want him to focus on his job and his apartment and pretend he doesn’t have parents at all, that I’m his family and we can find happiness and success together and nothing can touch him.

I want it to be like I thought it was going to be when we met. Like I thought it was going to be the first time I said those three words and realized I meant them.

But he will never let go of his pain. And that is all I want for him.

August 30

One year

I’m rocking back and forth, still sitting on the ground wrapped in a blanket, when I hear it: a car door. The telltale squeak tells me it is Connor’s truck. I’d know that sound anywhere.

My heart seems to spasm in my chest, first half-stopping, and then galloping off in a thunderous roar. My chest seems to heave and pulsate with my heartbeats. Nausea wells up.

Connor is back.

I’m not even sure how long he was gone. I lost all sense of time since I landed here, amidst the mess and carnage. Has it been minutes or hours? Is he back because he’s still angry—or has he realized what he’s done?

This is so much worse than anything before. He must know that. Does he think he can walk in and apologize and hold me?

Would I let him?

I look up at the door. The chain is still locked. So is the deadbolt, which Connor doesn’t have a key to because he lost it. He can’t get in, not until I let him in. Not until I am ready.

Unless he does something crazy like break the window. Would he do that? Is he that angry? Or maybe he’s worried. Maybe he knows he went too far this time.

I listen to his footsteps approach, and with each step my breathing gets more erratic.

I am afraid of him.

I am truly afraid.

May 18

Eight months, eighteen days

I can’t figure out what set him off.

He broke two dishes while trying to wash them. That was the start. And now he rakes his hands across the wall and knocks all the pictures off, and when I go to pick them up, he turns on me.

“Get out,” he says. He spits the words at me. “I’m so sick of looking at you.”

I don’t know where he expects me to go. If I walk through the front door of my mom’s house tonight, she’ll take one look at my red eyes and know he caused it again, and that will make things even harder. She’ll want to know everything. And I can’t explain any of this. Not even if I had all day. No one will understand this.

I crouch on the ground and pick up shards of glass, ignoring the malice in his voice. “Just let me pick this up. You’re not even wearing shoes.”

But he ignores me and steps into the glass and pushes me over with his leg, and I can’t catch my balance before I fall and knock my head into the wall and a flash of pain blinds me.

“I don’t want you to see me like this today. Just get out,” he says again.

I breathe in and out slowly, stalling for time. “Connor, just go sit down, okay? Just go play your guitar or—”

“Fuck that stupid guitar!”

I swallow and fight the urge to look up at him. His face is so ugly when he’s this angry. I don’t like to see it. It haunts me, like a ghost that hangs around even when his anger is gone. I can see it behind his eyes, even when he smiles. It reminds me that there will always be more of this, that it will happen again and again and again until I can figure out how to be everything he needs me to be.

I swallow hard and get my feet back under me and stand up, doing it slowly, like I don’t know what I’ll find once I’m on my feet again.

And he watches me, calculating, and I know he will have something to say when I get to him.

But he surprises me. He doesn’t say anything. He just pushes me backward until I’m against the wall and he towers over me. The glass still litters the floor around us.

His face is so close that his nose brushes mine. “Why the fuck do you just sit around like this? Why the fuck do you put yourself in my way?”

I swallow, slowly, waiting. I never speak when he’s like this. The words belong to him.

“Are you that fucking stupid? Do you want me to hit you?”

My breath comes in shallow, quick bursts through my mouth, because my nose is already stuffed from the tears. I hate this so much. If he’s going to do it, I wish he would just do it.

He is so ugly right now. His eyes are empty when he’s like this. His anger consumes him, and Connor is gone. He is a product of his childhood.

It is what it is, and I know I have to wait for him to come back to me.

And I know that when the anger is gone, and he’s back, he will cry for what he’s done to me. He’ll mean every word he says, every apology. But it won’t stop it from happening again.

I don’t know what to do anymore. I think I might actually have to get away from him for anything to get better. I think about it, for tiny little moments, until that pain sears through my chest and I realize I can’t do it. I realize I love him too much, and the mere thought of leaving makes my heart throb a dull ache.

The house is so still. So frozen, as he stares at me. Long moments pass and I just keep waiting. Waiting for the moment chaos breaks loose. It will happen. It always happens.

And yet he just stares at me, that ugly look in his eyes, and something inside me snaps and I shove him. Hard. He has no time to react. He just topples over and lands in the glass, and a piece slices his palm.

I’m so stunned by my own actions I don’t move. I don’t know how I could have done that. I don’t know how I just let loose and did that after all these months of just taking it. I stand there, eyes wide, and fear snakes its way up me and coils in my stomach and throat.

I should not have done that.

He’s up like lightning and he’s in my face again. I retreat, but only succeed in smacking my head against the wall yet again. It’s pounding now, a steady beat that keeps up with my racing heart.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says, as if he can read my thoughts. His voice is so calm. So even. So murderous. It’s worse than the moments he is uncontrollable.

Because he’s scheming, calculating his next move.

And then he turns away from me, and it unleashes.

The half-eaten dinner goes first, flying across the room and splattering like red paint on the wall. A dining room chair shoots past me, inches from my head.

His palm is still bleeding from the glass. It drips on the carpet, seeps in. “Why can’t you just fucking hate me ?”

He doesn’t expect an answer. He’s tearing apart his place. He grabs a remote and hurls it across the room, into a mirror, and it splinters into a web of cracks.

And all I can think is seven years bad luck. As if that matters, as if we have any luck at all.

“You’re too good for this! You’re too good for all of this!”

He picks up a lamp and it flies across the room, the cord trailing after.

And then he’s done with it as quickly as he snapped into it. He slides to the ground, silent. There are no tears, no shouts, nothing. He’s simply empty.

I walk through the carnage and drop to the ground, then lie down and rest my head in his lap. He doesn’t seem to see me. His eyes are vacant. He just strokes my hair with one hand, and I close my eyes and try to disappear.

We are traveling down a path with no happy ending, and it’s too late to turn around.

May 14

Eight months, fourteen days

I’m standing in line at the coffee shop in town, waiting on my order, when Abby walks in. Just seeing her makes my stomach hurt. Why can’t this be any other day? I wish I’d showered and dressed in something bright and happy, that she’d see me laughing with Connor.

But it’s just me. And I’m exhausted after a night of talking Connor down off the edge yet again. I don’t even like coffee, but I’m buying it because I need the caffeine to get through finals.

And I have nothing to do but wait here as she walks up, a tentative smile on her face. She stands in front of me, looking at me, for too long.

“How are you?” she finally says.

She knows how I am. She can see it. Does she want me to say it out loud? Does she want me to admit I’m tired and haunted and just weary of all this?

“Good,” I say.

It’s a lie and she knows it, but she just lets it hang there.

“That’s good.”

I want to hug her. I want to leave Starbucks with her and get in her car and go wherever she’s going and pretend her life is mine. I could live like her. I know I could. A world where your parents sit at the dinner table and ask you how your day was. A world where they tuck you in at night and you roll your eyes and act annoyed, but you secretly love it.

“My mom wants to know why you’re never over anymore.”

My coffee is sitting in front of me now. I should just walk away. I don’t have to answer her.

“What did you tell her?”

“That you hate me,” she says. Her voice is even. Like saying those words is no effort at all.

“I don’t hate you.” My voice is barely above a whisper as I say it, as I look at her to see if that really is what she thinks. I’m the one who abandoned her, not the other way around. I’m the one who ignored her calls and barely nodded at her in the hallways at school. It was me. She did nothing to deserve hate.

She doesn’t answer. She just picks at her nails and we stand in silence, two old friends with nothing to say to one another.

“And Connor? How’s he?”

She knows how he is. She knows who he is, and that is enough.

“Fine.”

Fine. Everything is fine. She knows this, too, is a lie. I don’t know why I insist on saying it.

She starts to leave.

“I mean—”

I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know why I stopped her.

She turns back to me and looks me in the eye for the first time.

I know she sees who I am now. I know she pities me. The silence hangs between us like a weight, and neither of us has to say anything to know what has gone unspoken.

And then she hugs me. It lasts at least five seconds longer than necessary and I close my eyes and lose myself in it, a hug more secure than anything I’ve felt in months.

And then without looking at me again, she walks away.

And I know that she’s a real friend. And I wish I could have her back again.

May 7

Eight months, Seven days

I think I might be pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know what to do or say. All day long, every time my stomach twinges, I think it might be cramps and I rush to the bathroom, but it’s not.

We were so careful.

I know he cannot handle this. I know I need to find out first, before I say anything. He has too much on his plate. He has too much to deal with. I can’t add this to it.

All day at school, I’ve been distracted. I keep counting the days on my fingers, in my notebooks, but every time, it’s the same. I am two days late.

This can’t happen. This will ruin it all. It will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Some people can handle things like this. We can’t. Not now.

PE is the worst. I was supposed to be playing basketball, but after the third time I got hit with the ball, I feigned sick and left.

It’s not a lie. I do feel sick. I don’t know if I’m sick because I’m really pregnant or I’m sick because I’m so scared, but either way, I feel weak and vaguely nauseous. I need to lie down. In a dark hole where no one will find me ever again.