F*ck Love (23 page)

There are days—many of them. I can’t tell you what happened on those days: who I met, who I spoke to, what I ate. I definitely can’t recall the details of my thoughts, only that my dread jangled around the quiet corners of my mind until I couldn’t keep it sectioned off from anything. It soaked into work, and into home. Into my dealings with customers, and my phone calls with my parents. I was dreading life without him, and that was a sad, sad thing.

Numbness. That came next. After weeks of feeling pain so potently, it was a welcome relief.
It is what it is,
I tell myself. And I feel so proud that I made it to the point of nothingness.

But, then it comes back.
Fucker.
I don’t expect that. I wake up one morning with the sun streaming through my window. The sun, for God’s sake. Isn’t this the land of no sun? I roll over onto my stomach and pull a pillow over my head. And that’s when it happens. Everything comes rushing back—the intensity of what I feel for him, the dream right down to the ridiculous Pottery Barn couch, and the way he left with a big fat
sorry
. I can see the sinews in his neck pulled taut when I close my eyes. The full lower lip that falls into a pout when he’s thinking about something. I know his smell—not of his cologne—but his actual skin. I think of the day in his closet when he caught me smelling his shirt. God, that seems like forever ago. I am so devastated. So utterly devastated.

I tell Phyllis. It’s an accident, really. I’m browsing through knitted hats that look like doilies when she suddenly smiles at me from behind the register. I start to cry right away. It’s not even normal crying—it’s an ugly cry.

“Hurt of this magnitude is like menopause,” Phyllis tells me. I’ve just wiped my nose with one of the hats. She takes it from me and hands me a tissue. “Comes in hot flashes. Just when you feel like you can’t take it anymore, it passes for a bit. But it comes back, boy does it.”

I nod, but Phyllis is wrong. It never passes, and it never pauses. It’s like a fist clutched around my heart, squeezing all day long. The only thing that eases the pressure is when I’m working. You can distract a mind for a little bit, but when the heart and mind work together, they’re cruel. Phyllis sends me off with the hat I used to wipe my nose—as a gift. It takes me a few days to notice the glances. People in town seem to know. I’m in the Conservatory picking up something to send to my mom for her birthday when the owner touches my hand. I look up, startled. I’m hardly ever touched nowadays. I almost cry because everything makes me cry.

“Just so you know,” she says, “we were all rooting for you.”

I blink away the tears. I can’t speak. I don’t know whether or not to thank her, so I grab my purchase and nod at her before walking quickly from the store. When I mention it to Greer later that evening, she frowns at me.

“Did you really think that no one knew? This is a small town, Helena. When a golden boy like Kit follows a girl around town with a bottle of wine in his hand, people get excited.”

“He wasn’t … he didn’t…”

Greer rolls her eyes. “He’s clearly in love with you. Too bad he knocked that girl up.”

Her words take my breath away. Kit … in love with me? No. That is laughable. I do laugh a little bit. I haven’t heard from Kit or Della in weeks. As far as I know, they are painting their nursery some puke shade of gender neutral. I’ll just be over here in magic town licking my wounds. Drinking my wine. Slowly dying inside. Being melodramatic. Clinging to a dream I had once that changed everything I thought I wanted. I miss him so bad. I am too afraid to look at pictures. Too afraid to remember the way he sucked on my lips like they were candy. It is all a slippery slope. Me sitting in the dark with wine dribbling down my chin. Hating Della for touching him. Hating him for letting her. Where does it end? It doesn’t. That’s why you have to put it away.

News of the Della/Kit wedding comes
five months later via Instagram (surprise, surprise!), where Della posts a picture of her freshly manicured hand with the caption:
He put a ring on it!

Also, their baby’s lungs are developed, and she can open and close her eyes. We know it’s a
her
because Della hasn’t stopped announcing it … also on her Instagram.

I feel sick. Also, stupid caption. #realoriginaldells

I also feel sick because I’m so mean-hearted. #imsorry

Della will not get married until she’s had her baby and is back to a size two. I feel comforted by this. It’s not imminent, and I have time to adjust. As for Kit: fuck you, you fuck! I make to delete his number from my phone again, then I start to type a text. I want to send him something angry and mean.
Coward! Fool!
But I can’t find the words to express how I’m feeling. How am I feeling? I touch the patch of skin that rests over my heart, massaging it. It aches right there. I almost had something, and now I’ll never know it. I’ll never know what I want most. I do text him.

Fuck you, Kit.

It doesn’t take him long to respond
: Helena…

The text bubble appears and disappears. I wait, but it doesn’t come. I feel disregarded. Used. And then my phone rings. A chill runs through me when I see his name. I have never spoken to Kit on the phone. I answer.

I don’t say a word, though he knows I’m there because he says my name.

“Helena…” I can hear him breathing into the receiver. Harsh breath. I cover my mouth with my free hand so he can’t hear me crying.

“Helena,” he says my name again. “I’m so sorry. Please believe me.”

We sit in the middle of that for a few seconds. My heart shakes off the day’s numbness and begins to ache.

“It’s not what I wanted. I wanted you. I can’t run away from this. This child is part of me.”

His voice breaks, and I wonder where he is. In the storage room at work? In his car? At the home they’ll share with their child? I can’t hear anything aside from the roughness of his voice as he speaks those words.

“I know,” I say.

“I’m a coward,” he says. “I’ve wanted to talk to you every day since I left, and I haven’t known what to say.”

“There really isn’t anything to say, is there, Kit?”

“There is. That I’m sorry. That I had no right to pursue you and then hurt you. That it wasn’t easy for me to walk away. I ignited something in your heart, and then left you to burn on your own. Forgive me, Helena. I wanted to protect you from the world’s cruelty, not become it.”

I can’t. I bend over, wrapping my arms around my belly. There isn’t a way to stop the grief. I’m going to have to let it take its course. I need his words to seal the wound.

“Thank you,” I say softly.

And then I hang up.

I wake up. My phone is ringing. I fumble for the light, knocking things off the nightstand—my water bottle and my watch hit the floor. I reach for my phone.

Kit

I sit up, swiping hair from my face. I can’t find my ear! Where is my ear? My topknot has fallen to the side of my head and is covering my ear like a giant fur earmuff.

“Hello?” My voice is thick, filled with sleep. I look for my bottle of water, but it rolled under the bed.

“Helena…”

I get chills at the sound of his voice. When someone calls you in the middle of the night it’s never a good thing.

“Yes, what’s wrong?” I’m suddenly wide awake, standing up and walking over to the window.

“It’s Della,” he says. I hear a lot of words after that. I can barely make sense of them before he’s said something else that has me reeling. But the thing that stands out most is, “We don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

I go to them—all three of them. After stuffing clothes into a bag, grabbing deodorant and contact solution, I wake Greer to drive me to Seattle. I take the first flight, and don’t sleep a second of it. I clutch my hands between my knees and bounce my feet on the floor until my seatmate asks me to stop. I can’t throw the feeling that this is all my fault. It’s illogical, but if I’d been there, maybe…

Kit meets me at the airport, standing at the bottom of the escalator with red-rimmed eyes and hair longer than I’ve ever seen it. I run, throwing myself into his open arms, and we stand like that, holding each other. I try not to cry, but the way his shoulders sag around me.
God
. I lose it. People must look as they walk by, but we don’t notice.

“Is that all you brought?” he asks of my duffel. He won’t look at me when he pulls way. I wipe away my tears and nod. We head for the car in silence. I want to ask him a million things:
How did this happen? What can they do for her? What are you feeling? What are you thinking? How is the baby?

We climb into his truck. I notice the carseat in the back, and my stomach clenches. I quickly turn back around. I don’t want to think about that.

It’s not until we are on the freeway, rain pounding down from a charcoal sky that he tells me what happened.

“She had an amniotic fluid embolism.” He says this, carefully; I imagine just like the doctors said it to him. “The amniotic fluid got into her bloodstream during the birth. It made her blood unable to clot, so during labor she started bleeding out. Disseminated intravascular coagulation. After Annie was born, they rushed Della out and wouldn’t tell me anything.”

Annie,
I think. So sweet.

“They made us wait forever. God, that was the longest day of my life. They wouldn’t let me see her or the baby. The doctor finally came out and told us her kidneys shut down, and her lungs filled with fluid. They put her in a medically-induced coma to allow her body to heal.”

My reaction is mostly internal; I don’t want to freak out in front of Kit and make things worse. I clutch the edge of my seat with both hands as he speaks.
God, Della. She almost died. We could have lost her. And I wasn’t here.

“Is she…?” My voice cuts—breaks—whatever you want to call it.

“We don’t know.” He pauses, and out of the corner of my eye I see his hand swipe at his cheek. “They asked us if she was religious. Told us to have a priest come.”

I wrap my arms around my stomach and lean forward until my head touches the dash. This was not the sort of thing that happened in real life; this was a special on television, a soap opera. The fact that it was happening to my best friend seemed inconceivable. Couldn’t be. I’d get to the hospital and she’d be fine, sitting up in bed holding Annie, her hair perfect and shiny, styled to perfection so everyone could walk in and say, ‘
Oh my God! I can’t believe you just had a baby!
’

“The baby?” I ask Kit. “Annie?”

“She’s fine,” he says. “Perfect.”

“There’s something else,” he says.

God, what else could there be?

“They had to give her an emergency hysterectomy.”

I get a cold shiver. It runs all the way through my body and out my fingertips. Della was from a big, Italian family. Her mother was only able to have three children before the doctor told her another would kill her. Since as far back as I can remember, Della’s mother had been prepping Della to have the large family she herself had always wanted. Her older brother, Tony, was a bachelor. He had no intention of settling down, and her sister, Gia, was a lesbian. No one in the family would speak to Gia, who lived in New York with her partner and their three rescue dogs.
She doesn’t even get pedigrees,
Della had said once about Gia’s dogs.
She just takes all the mutts.
It was an unspoken thing that Della would be the one to carry the large family torch. This was going to crush her. If she woke up.

Since it’s a Saturday, the hospital is crowded. Visiting families, children holding tightly to parents’ hands. I have to remind myself that not everyone is here for something sad. Babies have been born, kidney stones have been removed, lives have been saved. Kit grabs my hand and leads me through hallways and up elevators until we are on the fifth floor. Everything on this floor is hushed, somber. I try to ignore the thoughts of panic that enter my mind, but they are loud.
They put her here to die, and they told her Catholic family to bring a priest.

We walk past the nurses’ station to a room at the end of the corridor. I am breathing through my mouth, afraid of what the smells will make me feel.
Beggiro
is written on the white board outside the door. I brace myself, hold my breath, clench both fists. The door pushes open, and my eyes focus on the hospital bed. It’s strung across with lines: red ones, white ones, all connecting to machinery that stands like sentries beside her. They are loud, protesting her medical condition with beeps, and clicks, and humming. Her mother sits in a chair to her right; her brother is asleep on a cot. I am embraced, spoken to through tears and random Italian words I’ve come to know well over the years. It is only when they are through with me that I approach the bed and get a look at my best friend. My hand goes to my mouth, and I stifle a cry. This is not Della. It’s not.

She is swollen, bruised; her face is a dull beige, like cooked pasta. I want to brush her hair away from her face-why has no one done that? It hangs limp and dirty. When I turn around, Kit is standing by the door, head bowed as if looking at her hurts him. I touch her hands, which are folded across her stomach, the remnants of pink nail polish still there. They are cold, so I pull a blanket up to cover them. How would anyone know if she were cold when she can’t say it? I want to say something to her. Tell her to wake up and meet her baby girl, but I am crippled by shock.