The Bridge to a Better Life (39 page)

The drive home was done on autopilot, and as soon as Natalie stepped inside, she dropped her purse on the counter. Blake hadn’t arrived yet. Touchdown pawed at her legs, wanting to play, so she opened the back door to let him out. She didn’t have anything for him right now—the cold phantom was calling her name again. The pain was spreading, so bitter and harsh she wanted to scream.

She didn’t want to feel it right now. She didn’t want to feel anything ever again.

It was all happening once more. She could feel it. Her mom was going to die, just like Kim, and nothing was going to stop it. She couldn’t stop it. She’d have to stand there and watch it unfold.

Blake had been wrong. Learning to express her feelings hadn’t changed a damn thing. The pain wasn’t less this time. The mad call on the edge of her mind was still there, louder and colder than ever. She wasn’t going to let it claim her.

She grabbed the tile powder and a sponge from under the kitchen sink and headed to her bathroom to do the one thing under her control. The tile powder fell down on her like rain as she shook it over the tiles. It burned her skin, and she welcomed the sting. Anything to fight the cold fingers and even colder breath touching her skin. She dug her fingernails into the sponge. Her breathing grew labored as she worked. Her heart raced.

She scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, ignoring cracked nails and bleeding knuckles.
It’s not going to happen. Mom’s not going to die.

If she didn’t listen to the dark whispers that told her that the worst
could
happen, that she of all people knew it, maybe everything would be all right. Her mind swirled in circles like her hand did as it cleaned the tiles.

“Natalie,”
Blake called.

Her head came up. She shook herself. He was standing outside the door to the shower. She had to crane her neck to see him. His mouth was parted in shock, his eyes wide and unblinking. She’d seen that look before.

“Babe, what’s going on?” he asked, worry woven into his voice.

She couldn’t tell him. She’d promised her mother.

Besides, if she spoke the words, they might come true. She shook her head and pressed her lips together tightly.

He crouched down until he was kneeling beside her, outside the shower stall. “Honey.”

He only called her honey when she was crazy. She focused back on the tiles, caked over with cleaning powder.

“Leave me alone,” she told him with an edge in her voice.

“No. Not until you tell me what happened. Nat, you’re scaring me here.”

The words were like echoes from their past—the past she’d thought they had moved beyond. It was like her life had turned into a broken record that kept playing the same sorry track again and again. She made herself look at him. “I don’t want to talk about it! Go home. I don’t want you here.”

He flinched. “You don’t mean that. What happened? What’s wrong?”

“
I said I don’t want to talk about it!
” she yelled, making him rock back on his knees. “Leave. Me. Alone.”

“No.”

“I can’t take this anymore! I don’t want to talk about my feelings. I’m tired of bleeding out every time we speak. It doesn’t make anything better. Stop hovering over me, dammit! I’m not a child. You’re
suffocating
me.”
You’re making me feel too much.

His whole face tightened up, and she watched as his hands gripped his thighs. Her head filled again like a mushroom, the cold phantom breathing on her neck.

Your mom is going to die. I’m going to get her. Just like I got Kim.

The darkness started to envelope her. She turned her back on him and dug her hand into the sponge. She started to scrape away the natural brown lines in the grout, but it wouldn’t come out.

A deep gust of brutal, punishing cold blew over her, but she kept on cleaning to stay grounded, to stay warm, to stay sane. When she could take it no more, she hurled the sponge against the wall of the shower and screamed until she was hoarse. She grabbed her hair as her sobs poured forth, mad cries, agonized calls for help.

But no one came to help her.

When she finally stopped crying, she curled into a ball on the shower floor, shivering from the cold. No one had come because she’d finally done the worst thing imaginable.

She’d pushed Blake away for the last time.

Blake stumbled across the yard to the bridge. When he reached it, he gripped the wood and bent over at the waist, his breaths heaving out.

It the worst kind of déjà vu he’d ever experienced.

Something had happened, and he couldn’t reach her. She wasn’t going to let him. The normal, happy person she’d been lately was like the tile powder she’d strewn all around her. Easy to scrub away. As he stared into the dark woods, he realized she was always going to run away when something terrible happened. Rough times would come again, and when they did, she would choose to stay numb. She would shut him out again.

He kicked the bridge, wanting to tear it down with both hands. The infinity symbols mocked him. She didn’t love herself enough to let him love her in the worst moments of life, which meant they didn’t have the foundation for a happy marriage and never would. Even crafting a dream job in Dare Valley wouldn’t change that.

Touchdown barked, and he turned his head, his vision refocusing. Their dog had followed him. His heart broke because he knew he had a decision to make.

He dashed at his tears and picked him up, pressing him to his chest. She needed their beautiful beagle more than he did. She always had. The dog licked away his tears and nuzzled his face.

“You’ve been…the best dog ever. I’m…” Oh shit, this hurt. This fucking hurt. “I’m going to miss you, but Mommy needs you more right now.”

The pain was spreading, but he kissed the dog and hugged him hard and set him down. “Go.”

Touchdown’s brown eyes stared at him, then he gave a short bark like he understood. After giving him one last rubdown, Blake forced his hands to his sides. The little dog trotted back to Natalie’s.

His next move became clearer. He couldn’t stay here.

Not next door to her. Not after what she’d done.

Still, his worry for her couldn’t be erased. Whatever had happened to make her backslide like this had to be horrible, and a part of him wanted to call Andy to find out. Surely her brother would know.

But he’d done that before, and going to her family with his concerns wasn’t the answer. If she wasn’t willing to lean on him in hard times, it was time to face the brutal reality and move on. He was going to return to Denver. Tonight.

It was time to stop holding onto something that would never be.

He turned off the lights on the bridge as he made his way back to the house for the last time.

When Natalie finally pulled herself off the bathroom floor, her head was groggy from crying and her hands burned from the tile powder. Touchdown stirred on the floor outside the shower. He’d come to sit beside her like the loyal dog he was as she surrendered to another batch of horrible, gut wrenching sobs, deep in her belly. She hadn’t been able to stop the guttural sounds that had tore from her throat. Touchdown hadn’t left her side once, but she’d made him stay outside the shower because she didn’t want him to get tile powder on his paws.

She straightened like an old woman who’d sat too long, her bones popping in protest, and looked in the mirror.

There she was again. That crazy woman, maddened by grief, reduced to insanity by the threat of that damn thing called cancer.

Her hair was streaked with powder and in wild disarray like she was the bride of Frankenstein. She brushed the white powder off her shirt, and that’s when the full pain of her hands hit her. The blood had coagulated, but they were a fiery red, and they hurt like a million bees had stung them.

Turning on the faucet, she let the water run over them, wincing in the beginning as her hands burned. Everything throbbed. Her knees ached. Her back was tight. Her head was pounding.

She’d succumbed to the cold, to the dark, once more. Looking at herself, she saw the puffy, mascara streaked eyes. The tightness around her mouth from sobbing.

Her eyes gleamed under the lights in the bathroom.
Love me,
she heard a soft voice say, one that had warmth, one that was totally different from the whispers of the cold phantom.
I need you to love me. Even when I’m like this.
It took her a moment to realize the voice was her own.

The faucet continued to run as she braced her hands on the countertop. Tears started to fall as she watched herself start crying again. How was she supposed to love herself like this? How was she supposed to find anything beautiful about this mad woman? How was she supposed to be willing to feel this pain, this agony? Ever since childhood, she’d tried to be strong, to keep a stiff upper lip, to never show weakness. She’d been proud of that.

Then she thought of how she’d found her mother earlier. The woman she admired had been suffering alone with this horrible secret. Would their mother ever have told them if the biopsy turned out to be negative? She doubted it, and while she understood her mother’s reasons, she didn’t want to be like that.

Her hand lifted to the wild locks of her hair, sticking out like the snakes of Medusa. She gently stroked her hair back from her face. Looked at herself in the mirror again.

Love me,
she heard that whisper say again in her mind.
Comfort me. I’m hurting.

She didn’t want to hurt, but it didn’t seem like she could escape it as she looked at herself in the mirror. After Kim’s death, she’d stacked brick upon brick around herself to wall off the pain, to keep the cold wasteland away. Many of those bricks had been toppled these last few weeks, toppled from the sheer force of Blake’s love for her.

What had he said?
When you looked at Kim at the end, when she weighed less than a hundred pounds, did you love her any less?

The Kim she’d loved, the woman who’d been her best friend since college, hadn’t been recognizable in those final weeks of her life. But Natalie
had
loved her. If Kim had even once called herself ugly and unlovable, she would have told her that it was bullshit. That
she
loved her. That she found her beautiful.

Why couldn’t she give herself that same fierce love?

She brushed a tear as it trailed down her face. This woman, this crazy, hurting woman was her too—just like the ravaged body on the hospice bed had still been Kim.

This hurting woman deserved to be loved, not shunned. Not abandoned. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do it, but she had to start somehow.

“I…love you,” she whispered to the crazy woman in the mirror.

The pain that radiated from her heart was like a supersonic wave, and she started crying harder. But she didn’t look away from the woman in the mirror with the wild eyes and hair.

“I love you,” she whispered again as the tears streamed. “I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t even sure what she was apologizing for as she rocked herself and cried, but she kept saying it until her voice grew even hoarser, looking at that woman in the mirror the whole time, Touchdown nuzzling her legs in comfort.

A new emotion finally flowed in, like a warm breeze after a brutally cold day. The pain started to ebb away, replaced by a feeling so soft and luminous she pressed her hand to her heart. It took her a moment to give it a name.

It was love.

The kind of love she felt when she was with Blake and her family. That simple, beautiful feeling that made her feel whole and complete.

But this time she felt it for herself.

Her hand lifted to her mouth of its own accord, and she blew that woman in the mirror a kiss.

She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t mad. She was hurting. And somehow, she now had enough compassion to see that and love that part of herself anyway, the part she’d always judged too ugly for compassion.

Did she like to cry? No. But she sometimes felt better after she did. Maybe it was time to start allowing her emotions to be whatever they were. She loved her mother, but she didn’t want to end up like her, concealing a secret and a pain all alone. Or like her father, turning inward whenever he faced a problem. Not when she had so many people who loved her to comfort her through it.

Blake.

Thoughts of him made the cold come back, but this time their whispers rained new ice over her skin.

You said he was suffocating you. You pushed him away. You’ve lost him for good.

She had pushed him away, trying to scurry back behind the broken wall of numbness he’d been helping her disassemble. She’d wanted to escape the pain of reality. And she’d shoved him away just as she’d shoved that part of herself away.

But she didn’t want that anymore, not with this new awareness of herself, not with this soft, sweet feeling of her self-love keeping her warm despite the cold wasteland that surrounded her once again.