The Space Between Us (24 page)

   “But what was wrong with this pregnancy?”  I asked
again, desperate for answers, desperate for a reason.  “Why my babies?”

   “There’s no real way to know, Charlie. 
Miscarriages, especially in the first trimester, are common, unfortunately.  But listen to me when I say this.  There is
nothing
you could have done to prevent this from happening.  This was not because you did something wrong.  This just happens and I can’t give you a reason, medically.”

   No reason.
  No explanation.  Nothing.  Emptiness. 

   “What happens now?”  I whisper
ed. One question, so many meanings. 

   “Your body will continue to bleed,” the doctor paused for a moment.  “Eventually, the embryos will pass, along with the blood and clots.  You will experience cramps, just like you would during your period, although they may be intense and more painful.  You might bleed for up to two weeks.  Most women feel fine within a week or so.”

   I hated my body in that moment.  My body couldn’t hold onto my babies.  My body would soon eject them.  Toss them away.

   “I can prescribe you some stronger pain relief than you would get over-the-counter if you would like.”  I nodded.  I would welcome any medicine that would take me away for a little while.  “You should go home and take it easy.  Rest.  Perhaps not be alone,” she said, looking at Reeve.

   “I’ll stay with her,” Reeve answered.  The doctor continued to talk and Reeve continued to listen, but I tuned everything out.  I couldn’t be bothered with any more thoughts, or facts, or apologies.  The doctor brought in a pair of mesh underwear that looked like fishing net and a large pad.  The whole thing looked ridiculous but I put it on and decided to leave my pants behind.  Reeve and I walked out to her car, her helping me keep my hospital gown closed.  We drove through a pharmacy, got my pain meds, and then went home.

   After a week of crying, staying in bed except to shower and eat, not hearing from Asher, and not answering any of Reeve’s questions about him, I made the decision to leave.  To leave it all behind.  There was nothing
left for me there.  Nothing outweighed the pain of being there.  Reeve went out to the store and I took the opportunity to pack a small bag.  I left most of my things behind because they simply didn’t matter.  I left Reeve a small note, apologizing for leaving without saying goodbye, but explaining that I would call her when I could.

And then I left.

Part II
I

Chapter One

Asher

   The knocking on the door dragged me away from my computer screen and forced me to blink, something I wasn’t sure I’d done in the last hour.  At least, I hadn’t done it enough.  My eyes felt like they might be filled with saw dust for all the scratchy-stickiness that came with the blinks I gave at the sight of Phil at the door to my office.

   “Hey man,” Phil said.  His voice sounded worried.  “We j
ust got a call from Willow Falls Memorial.”  My heart plummeted at those words because I already knew what they meant.  I’d been waiting for this call every day for the last month.  Waiting for the news that I knew would change my world forever.  I’d been dreading this phone call, but knew there was nothing I could do to avoid it.

   “Yeah?”  I said, even though I could feel the words before he said them.

   “The nurse on Charles McBride’s floor says it’s time.”

   “Damn it.”  I rubbed my hands up and down my face.
  “Ok, thanks. I’ll leave right now and head down there.”

   “You gonna be ok?”  Phil asked sincerely.

   “Yeah, thanks man.”  Was I going to be ok?  Probably not.  But that didn’t matter.  I hadn’t been ok in a long time.  I hadn’t been ok in over thirteen years.  That’s how long ago it was I made the biggest mistake of my life, and I was still paying for it.  But that was ok; I would gladly pay my debt forever.  Pay for my mistakes.  Nothing that happened to me would make up for what I had done thirteen years ago, so this was just a drop in the bucket of pain I would endure because I knew I deserved it.

   I closed
my laptop and grabbed my suit jacket off the coat rack by the door.  I rode the elevator all the way down to the bottom floor and walked through the lobby and out the doors of Libman & Carmichael Law Offices.

   The drive to the hospital was one I was familiar with.  I
drove to the hospital to visit Charles once or twice a week since he was admitted.  The fact that I pulled into the parking structure with no real recollection of how I had actually arrived there wasn’t surprising.  I had a million things running through my mind, and driving to that particular hospital became second nature to me recently.  I walked through the main doors to the hospital and wound my way through the corridors, took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and found the room that was home to Charles for the last three months.

   I
’m not sure what I expected once I arrived at his room, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so quiet.  In the past when I had walked into this room, Charles greeted me with a smile, a wave, and a quiet hello.  As the weeks passed, his strength waned, and in the last week I was lucky if he’d been able to speak.  But the silence in the room now was filling the empty space like water, pouring in, making me nervous.  Drowning in this silence was inevitable.  The only noise to be heard was the heart monitor beeping at regular intervals, keeping time to the emptiness.

   After a few minutes of sitting in the uncomfortable chair next
to his hospital bed, Rachel, a nurse I was familiar with, entered the room.

   “Hello Asher,” she said sweetly with a sad look on her face.

   “Hi, Rachel,” I responded, rubbing my hands over my face.  She walked to the other side of his bed, checking his IV and looking at the paper printing out of the machine monitoring his heart.

   “You seem comfortable, Charlie,” she said to him.  My heart lurched at t
he name.  His name was Charles.  Charlie was someone else entirely.  Charles always understood how it affected me whenever someone called him Charlie and tried to correct them for my sake.  But he was unconscious now and probably would never be awake again.  These were his final hours and I’d let Rachel call him whatever she wanted.  I’d deal with the pain of hearing her name; it was the least I could do.  Today wasn’t about me or the guilt and pain I carried around.  Today was about Charles.  “Do you need anything?”  She asked me.  I smiled at her thoughtful question. She was more than likely accustomed to helping families dealing with the loss of their loved one.  But I wasn’t family.

   “I’m fine, thank you.”

   “Let me know.”

   “Rachel?”

   “Yes?”

  
I looked over at Charles and then back to her.  “How much longer?”

   “Not long.  Hours, maybe.”

   “Has anyone called his daughter?”

   She shook her head.  “He said he didn’t want anyone to be called but you.”  I nodded, understanding.
  She left, quietly shutting the door behind her.  I turned back to look at Charles McBride.  The man who I had grown so close to over the last thirteen years.  The man who became a friend, but more like a second father to me.  The man who I selfishly and admittedly used as a lifeline to the one person I knew I had to live without.

   “Charles,” I said, moving closer to the be
d, seeking out his hand.  I never held a man’s hand before, but I figured that if I was trying to cross over, if I was on my death bed, I would want someone to hold my hand.  “I’m here, Charles.  I’m here.  I came.”  I paused, looking down at our hands, mine clasped around his.  His hand was limp in mine, not responding to me.  “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I want you to know that I’ll take care of everything, Charles.  You’ve done a great job planning for this, making sure everything is laid out right, and I will make sure it gets done.”

   Over the last
thirteen years Charles and I developed a friendship.  At first, I needed him in order to feel close to her.  I went around to try and breathe in a piece of her, to soak up any part of her I could.  But, eventually, after it become obvious that any relationship between him and I wouldn’t involve any piece of her, our own friendship developed.  As the years passed, we only spoke about her in theory and only recently.  He never told me any detail about her life now.  He never discussed where she was, what she was doing, how she was.  If I was going to be his friend, it wouldn’t include her in any way. 

   Then Charles became ill.  The illness, the
cancer, didn’t go away as we originally hoped.  And once we accepted that the cancer would, in the end, take him from this life, we started planning.  I’d never planned for anyone’s death before, but Charles was adamant that she wouldn’t be burdened with another parent’s death due to cancer.  He made decisions, and even though I didn’t agree with all of them, I honored them.  Who was I to argue with a dying man?  His choice, to not tell her he was dying, was something I struggled with.  I tried, over and over, to convince him that she would want to know.  That she would want to spend as much time with him as she could.

   “To do what?  To watch me die?  She did that with her mother and I watched it ruin her.  I watched her sit next to her mother as she withered away. 
I saw what it did to my Charlie and I won’t have her go through that again.  She doesn’t need to know.”

   Charles was a hard man to persuade.  I’d done it a few times in my life, when I was younger, trying to convince him to let me date his daughter, to take her away for a weekend, to sleep in her bed when we were home for breaks from college.  But I couldn’t convince him to tell his daughter he was dying.  He knew what I knew.  That she would be at his bedside, crying and remembering her mother,
crying and mourning her father, and breaking on the inside.  He didn’t want that for her.  I understood.

   “I love her, Mr. McBride.”  I hadn’t called him that in years, but it felt right at that moment.  I felt like I was fifteen again, asking him in his living room if I could please be his daughter’s boyfri
end.  That was the first time I admitted, out loud, that I loved her.  And it remained true since then.  “I love her and I always will.  I will do everything to make sure she is taken care of.  You don’t have to worry and you don’t have to hang on.”

   I felt the slightest pressure on my hand as his fingers grip
ped mine in the faintest way, the way you would imagine a man on death’s door would squeeze your hand.

   “I promise.  I will take care of her.”

   I saw his chest rise, then fall, and then rest.  The beeping of the machine slowed, his heart rate dropped, crawled, stilled.  Rachel came in to make the machine stop its slowing, dragging beeping, and I watched as the monitors went blank.

   I found myself, an hour later, sitting in my car outside of a house I
never thought I’d visit again, not until a couple months ago anyway.  This was one place I avoided, one person I avoided.  I knew, from the beginning, when I stood by Charles as his only ally in death, that this was the next step.  I knew it was coming, but it didn’t make it any easier.  I walked slowly to the red wooden door of the house.  I gathered my courage and finally knocked. I heard footsteps from inside the house quickening, like my heart rate, as they neared.  It pulled open and I was face to face with a piece of my past.

Chapter Two

Asher

   “Hello, Reeve.”  I watched as her face moved from the pleasant look you plaster on your face when you answer your door, to the anger and annoyance that came naturally to Reeve when she encountered me.  It had been quite a long time since we’d seen each other, since she told me frankly to
“Fuck off” back in college.  She was a loyal friend and that was what I was counting on when I showed up on her doorstep.

   “What are you doing here, Asher?  How did you find out where I live?”

   “It’s a matter of public record.  And it’s a small town, Reeve.”

   “What do you wan
t?”  She was just as icy as she was before and with good reason.

   “Can I come in?”  I asked, hopefully, not wanting to have this conversation on the porch.

   “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

   “Mom, who is that man?”  A little girl had pok
ed her head between the door and Reeve’s hip.  She had short blonde hair and bright blue eyes.  Reeve bent down and put herself at eye level with her daughter.

   “He’s just som
eone trying to sell something, Baby.  Go back in the living room and keep an eye on your brother, ok?”  The little girl skipped away and I felt the clenching in my chest that I was accustomed to feeling when put face-to-face with children.  Reeve stood and turned back to me.  “I think you should leave.  I have nothing to say to you.”  She moved to close the door and I put my foot in the way.

  
“It’s about Charlie,” I said, knowing that will catch her attention.  I saw her face, clearly contemplating what to do next, and as I expected, her loyalty won out.  She creaked the door open and stood back, silently and regretfully inviting me in.

   “You have five minutes.”  I nodded, knowing I’d need more than that, but I’d take the five to begin with.
  She led me into her kitchen and motioned for me to take a seat at the table.  She didn’t offer me something to eat.  She didn’t ask me if I wanted some water.  She just sat and stared at me expectantly. 

   “Mr. McBride passed away about an hour ago.”  Immediately her frosty demeanor melted away as her hand came to cover her mouth.

   “What?”  She whispered.

   “
Yes.  He died at Willow Falls Memorial Hospital about an hour ago due to complications of bone cancer.”  I watched as a tear fell from her left eye as I coldly told her about the death of a man we all regarded as one of the best on the planet.  Inside, I was just as upset about his passing as she was, but I couldn’t show it.  Right now, I wasn’t Asher, childhood friend of Reeve.  I was Mr. Carmichael, lawyer and representative of Charles McBride.

   “Does Charlie know?”  She asked through a broken sob. 

   I nodded.  “Someone from my office should be calling her shortly.

   “Calling her?  She wasn’t there?”

   “She didn’t know.  Mr. McBride had very specific wishes and Ms. McBride wasn’t informed of his condition.”

   “Ms. McBride?  What the hell is wrong with you Asher?  Her name is Charlie.” 

   I ignored her comment. I knew it seemed like I was being an ass, but I didn’t know how else to act in the moment.  I didn’t know how to be all the people I was at the same time.  I couldn’t be friend, enemy, ex-boyfriend, lawyer and man completely torn apart all at once.  I had to pick one and stick with it, so I chose lawyer.

   “Mr. McBride wanted to make sure that Ms. McBride wasn’t alone, so I am here to make sure that you will make yourself available to her at his service, but most importantly at the reading of his will.  Mr. McBride was afraid that she wouldn’t contact you, so I am here to make sure that if you don’t receive a call from her that you are aware of the times of the service and the reading.”  I paused and looked down at my hands.  “He thought she might not reach out to anyone.
  That she might close up again and he wanted me to make sure you were there for her, that someone was there for her.”

   “Close up
again
?  Damn it, Asher, she hasn’t opened up from the last time.”

   That tiny piece of information was like salt in a wound, but also like a sip of water in a desert.  I was thirs
ty for information about her, desperate to know any tiny bit of information I could gather and I had been since the last time I saw her that day.  But hearing that she was closed up, like a flower refusing to bloom, burned going down – stung like guilt.

   “Someone from my office will contact you with the exact date and times of the service and the reading.  Can you agree to be at both?”

   “Yes.  Of course I will be there.  Will you be there too?”  I looked her in the eyes for a moment, willing myself to be honest with her, to tell her that I would be there in an instant if I thought it was what Charlie wanted, but I knew better.

   “It was nice seeing you again, Reeve.  You have a beautiful daughter.”  I
stood and walked through her door and out to my car without looking back.  I started my car and drove to my place, purposefully avoiding the neighborhood that held all the memories burned into my mind.  I prepared myself for an agonizing evening, and thought I might as well get some bourbon to ease the ache growing in my heart.  My throat already burned from hearing her name on someone else’s lips, from hearing about how still, after all these years, she was still not the same person she had been before I had ruined everything.  If I was going to burn from the inside out, I might as well get drunk while it happened.