Читать книгу Come Away with Me - Karma Brown, Karma Brown - Страница 13

4

“I’ve never seen you look more beautiful.” Gabe is beside me on our couch. I’m looking at the collection of photos on my lap that have yet to make it to a scrapbook or album. I shuffle through the photos, stopping at one of Gabe and me in Millennium Park, in front of Cloud Gate, or what Chicagoans call “the Bean.” In it Gabe kisses my cheek, my one foot kicked up and my hands holding the dress’s frothy layers of material in a sashay move. Our image is reflected back in the Bean’s smooth, shiny steel surface, along with the Chicago skyline and a slew of strangers, now part of our memories. A day I’ll never forget.

“Aside from the tinge of green on my face,” I say. Remembering. It’s only been six months, but feels like a lifetime.

We were married at dusk, during an early September heat wave. The ceremony was on the rooftop of the Wit hotel under the glass roof, which, along with the potted magnolia bushes that were somehow in bloom despite the season, made it feel as though we were inside a terrarium. Glowing lanterns lined the aisle and guests sat on low, white couches that would later become seating for the reception. It was all much more than we could afford, me a kindergarten teacher and Gabe just out of law school. But his well-off parents insisted—and paid—so the Wit it was.

I was horribly sick at the wedding, throwing up most of the day—including right after the picture at the Bean, in a bag Gabe wisely tucked in his suit pocket, “just in case”—and only five minutes before I walked down the lantern-lit aisle. Luckily my best friend and maid of honor, Anna, grabbed a wine bucket just in time. My mother-in-law blamed the catering from the rehearsal dinner the night before, which my parents had organized. My mom, bristling at Gabe’s mother’s implication, suggested it was nerves, telling all who would listen I’d always had a weak stomach when I was nervous. As a child that was quite true. I did my fair share of vomiting before important school exams, anytime I had to public speak and, most unfortunately, onstage when I was one of the three little pigs in the school play. But I had outgrown my “nervous stomach,” and figured I’d just caught a bug from school. When you teach five-and six-year-olds all day you spend a good part of the year ill.

Gabe was so sweet that morning. Sending me a prewedding gift of a dozen yellow roses, a bottle of pink bismuth for my stomach and a card that read:

You’ve always looked good in green—ha-ha. You are my forever.

G xo

Even sick, it was the best day of my life.

We found out a week later it had nothing to do with food poisoning, or nerves, or a virus. I was pregnant. I’d never seen Gabe happier than when he opened the envelope I gave him, telling him it was a leftover wedding card previously misplaced. When he pulled out the card, which had a baby rattle and “Congratulations” printed on its front, at first he looked confused. Then I handed him the pregnancy test stick, with a bright pink plus sign, and he burst into tears. He grabbed me and spun me around, laughing and hollering with joy, until I couldn’t see straight. There is nothing like being able to give your husband, the man you’ve loved since the day you laid eyes on him, a dream come true.

We met at Northwestern in our first year, during frosh week. My dorm was having an unsanctioned floor crawl. Gabe, who had been invited by a friend who lived in my dorm, had backed into me coming out of the Purple Jesus room, his giant Slurpee-sized cup of grape Kool-Aid mixed with high-proof vodka spilling all over both of us. Shocked at the cold, rubbing-alcohol-scented drink sopping into my white T-shirt and shorts, I simply stared at him, my mouth open. But then we burst out laughing, and he offered to help clean me up in the women’s washroom, which also happened to be the orgasm shooter room for the night.

“How apropos,” Gabe said, wiggling his eyebrows at me and handing me a shot glass. I laughed again, tossing back the sickly sweet shooter.

“Thanks,” I said. “That was the best one I’ve ever had.”

While we’d been together for so many years after that, our lives intertwined, the day we were married was the day it all really began. If only we’d had more time to bask in that happiness. There was a carton of orange juice in our fridge that had lasted nearly as long.

I stack the photos back together, not bothering to wipe away my tears.

“Teg, please don’t cry.” Gabe shifts closer to me, but I can barely feel his touch. I’m so numb.

“Do you think I’ll ever be happy again?” I close the lid on the box of photos. Saving them for the same time tomorrow night. “I mean, really happy?”

“I know it,” he says. “You’re just not ready yet, love.”

I touch my necklace, still trying to get used to it. It’s a white-gold, round pendant, about the size of a quarter and a half-inch thick. It hangs from a delicate chain. And while the pendant was hollow when the necklace arrived, via a white-and-orange FedEx box nowhere near special enough for its cargo, it’s now filled with the ashes of a broken dream.

I chose the necklace off the internet shortly after I was released from the hospital, one late night when sleep was impossible. I considered an urn, but somehow it felt wrong. That’s how my grandma had kept Gramps’s ashes, in an ornate brass urn on her kitchen windowsill. “Where we can still kiss him every day, the sun and me,” she liked to say.

In truth, twenty-six felt too young to keep—or need, for that matter—an urn of any kind. I casually mentioned the idea of something a little more intimate to Anna, hoping she’d tell me wearing a necklace filled with ashes wasn’t at all weird, but her frown and pinched look suggested otherwise. Gabe hadn’t been much help, either. None of us wanted to deal with the horror, but I didn’t have that luxury because it was my body that was now hollow. Empty, like my gold necklace used to be.

Gabe glances at the pendant. “You don’t have to wear it all the time, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Does it...make you feel better?” he asks, shifting sideways so he can face me straight on.

I pause for a moment. “No.” Then I turn my head and look at him before quickly turning away. I don’t like his look. It’s a complex mix of concern, sorrow and frustration.

“I’m worried it’s making things worse, Tegan.”

Anger burns in my belly. The last thing I should have to do is explain myself. Especially after what he’s done to us, to me. “How could anything make this worse?” My voice is low, unsteady.

“You know what I mean,” he says.

“Obviously I don’t.” I slam the box of photos on the coffee table and stand up so quickly I feel woozy.

“Hey, hey, Tegan,” he soothes, and I know if I were still on the couch he’d reach for me. But I’m just out of his grasp, and neither of us tries to close the distance. “I want to understand. I’m just trying to help.”

How do you explain that if you could, you’d cut your chest open and pour the ashes right inside so they could forever lie next to your heart? Like a blanket to smother the chill of sorrow. You can’t, so you don’t.

Gabe and I are the only ones who know exactly what’s in the necklace. Well, us and the funeral director, who filled it at my request. Close to my heart. It’s the only way I can keep breathing.

“I’m going to bed,” I say. My muscles ache as I walk slowly to the bedroom, making the space between us even greater. I’m so fragile these days, paper-thin. Even though I’m only halfway through my twenties, I feel more like a ninety-year-old. Probably because for the past couple of months I’ve done little aside from move in a daze from couch, to bed and back.

I barely remember what it feels like to get up and get ready for work. To enjoy takeout during one of the nature shows Gabe loves to watch, to shop for shoes or bags or the very short dresses Anna likes to fill her closet with, hopeful for date nights. I forget what it’s like to have a purpose that gets me up each morning.

These days I care little about what’s happening beyond my four apartment walls. I don’t remember what fresh air smells like, except for when Mom opens one of the apartment windows, touting fresh air as effective an elixir as anything else. The late winter chill that tickles my senses always feels good, but I don’t want to feel good. Not yet. It has only been seventy-nine days. So I ask her to shut the window and she sighs, but she always does it. That’s the thing about going through something like this. People will do anything to try and make you happy again; they’ll give you whatever you want. Except that the thing you really want you can never have again, and no one can bring it back.

“I’ll come with you,” Gabe says, from behind me.

“You don’t have to,” I reply, although I don’t mean it. As much as I am still so angry with Gabe, still full of rage and blame, I don’t like to sleep alone.

“I want to.”

“Fine,” I say, pushing the door to our bedroom open. As I do, I glance into the guest room to my right. The door is supposed to be closed—I’ve been quite clear about that—but it’s wide-open. Beckoning me.

The pile of baby blankets rests on the dresser, which would have doubled as a change table to save precious space in our not-so-spacious apartment. My mom must have forgotten to close the door when she left. Casting my eyes around the dim room, the bile rises in the back of my throat. Pushed up against one wall, the crib is still covered by a white sheet, with the mobile—plush baseballs and baseball bats, which Gabe had picked out as soon as we found out it was a boy—creating a peak in the sheet’s middle like a circus tent. In another corner I see the cradle, which Gabe had restored beautifully, waiting for a final coat of stain. Even though we still had months to go, we had been ready for our boy’s arrival.

Feeling sick, I turn away and shut the door firmly. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll agree to the crib being taken apart. It will have been eighty days, nearly three months, and I know I’ll soon have to accept no baby will ever sleep here, gazing with wide, curious eyes as the mobile circles soothingly overhead.

As I settle into our bed, pulling the sheets—which smell clean and fresh, thanks to Gabe, or my mom, or someone else who takes care of the things I no longer seem able to—up to my chin, I try to pretend none of it happened.

But the nightmares won’t let me forget, not even while I sleep.