A Missing Heart (9 page)

She runs the side of her hands across her cheeks, smudging away some of the black makeup, but at the same time, making it worse. Sniffling, she opens her eyes wider, as if she’s realizing what she’s doing and she looks around. “Tori,” I say calmly.

“What am I doing out here?”

Oh boy. Has she had these episodes before? Is that what this is? An episode?

“You told me you wanted to get out of the car, and I pulled over,” I explain with hesitance. I’m looking at her the way she’s looking at me, and there’s nothing but utter confusion between the two of us.

“I’m sorry,” she says. With her hands folding up against her chest like a battered woman, she walks past me and slides back into the passenger seat, quickly closing herself in. I watch through the window as she pulls her shoulder belt over her chest and secures it. Then she lowers the mirror and attempts to clean up her face. I don’t know who this woman is right now.

I place Gavin back in his seat and settle in behind the wheel, debating if I should say anything or if it’s safer to keep my mouth closed for the remainder of the ride. Quiet wins.

Only an hour has passed between the time I convinced Tori to get back into the car, got us all home, put Gavin down for a nap, and sat down on the couch in front of the black screen of the TV. I feel scared for what happened, and I feel more scared about asking her what happened. We can’t ignore this, though. This affects more than the two of us, so I muster my courage and broach the subject, “Tori, babe, you have to talk to me.”

In this precise moment, as if Mom has bionic telepathic senses for when things aren’t going perfectly, her face lights up my phone, which is sitting directly between Tori and me.

“She always knows when to call, huh?” Tori says, standing from the couch and leaving the room. For a moment, I’m angry at Mom, my phone, and everything that interrupted the possibility of me finding out what the hell is going on, but now I realize there will always be an interruption or an excuse. Tori doesn’t plan to tell me the truth, or she would have told me by now.

With the room empty of any hope in finding out answers, I pick up the phone and hold it up to my ear. “Everything okay, Mom?”

“AJ,” she laments. “You can’t answer the phone with a ‘Hello’?”

“Sorry,” I spit out. When do parents stop smothering? I ask myself this question all of the time, and now I realize I will smother Gavin until the day he dies, which will be long after I do. Then I’ll haunt him to make sure he’s always doing the right thing.

“Hunter told me Gavin had a high fever and you two were in the hospital all afternoon. How’s he doing now? Do you need anything?”
What else did Hunter tell you?
I want to ask.

“He’s sleeping now, but when I took his temperature last, about an hour ago, it was back down to one hundred at least.”

“Did you already get the prescription?” she asks.

“No, they said it would be an hour before it’s ready.”

“I’m going to go pick it up for you. I—I know Tori has been sensitive about company lately, so I’ll just leave it at your door so I don’t bother the two of you.” I’ve been allowing Tori to act like this to my family—my family who will do just about anything to help each other in a time of need. I have the most selfless family a person could ask for, and Tori would rather I push them away.

I’m the first to admit that Mom can most definitely be overbearing and put her nose where it doesn’t belong. More often than not, though, I’ve grown to see how much of her behavior is from love, and for the fact that Hunter and I have put that woman through pure hell for the past thirty-one years. She deserves a little more respect than to be pushed away when offering to help. Of course, I would never admit that to her, but I’m trying to be more understanding of her incessantly helpful ways.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Give Gavin a kiss for me.”

As the call ends, Tori passes by the living room with her purse in hand. “Are you going somewhere?”
Because I don’t think you should be going anywhere after what happened today.

“I need to go see my therapist,” she says.

“I think that’s great, but does your therapist take walk-ins?” I ask.

“I called her, and she told me I could come in,” she corrects me.

“I’m glad you have someone to talk to; it’s important, but I can’t understand why you can’t talk to me? I want to be here for you and support you in any way I can. I’ve tried to make that clear, and I’m sorry if I haven’t done a good enough job at showing you.” I stand up from the couch and walk over to where she’s standing, trying my hardest to make the necessary effort here. Grabbing her hand, I hold it up to my heart. “This is killing me, T. Whatever has been going on with you or us these past couple of months, it’s hurting me a lot. I love you. I want to see you happy again, and I want us to be the way we were.”

Her voice breaks as she begins to talk. “The only ‘us’ you know is from the time we were dating until the time I got knocked up.” I hate that she still refers to the pregnancy as getting knocked up. She’s not eighteen. “I
was
happy.”

“Well, we can get back to that.” I sound like I’m trying to fix something she might not want fixed. It’s a fear I’ve desperately tried to avoid considering.

“We can’t,” she says.

“Okay, so if we can’t go back to what we were last year, at least treat me like your husband. Talk to me. Use
me
as a second therapist. Let me in, Tori. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

She pulls her hand out of my grip and takes a step back. “If I tell you what’s wrong, it would mean I’d have to start at the beginning, and that’s not something I can do.”

“You told your therapist everything from the beginning,” I argue.

She clutches her purse against her chest and narrows her eyes at me as if I just said the most degrading thing I’ve ever said to her. “My therapist has known me since I was thirteen years old. I don’t have to tell her everything from the beginning because she was there at the beginning.”

“What does that even mean?” I plead, needing some kind of answer or hint as to what she’s talking about.

“It means; I don’t want to talk to you.”

“But, I want to talk to you.” Isn’t this what I’m supposed to be doing for the woman I love? Fighting for her. Is this what love is? Because if it is, it fucking sucks.

“I know,” she cries. “When I can figure out how to start from the beginning, I promise, you will be the first person I do it with.” And that has been the biggest and most important thing she has said to me since the day I met her.

From the beginning
…my mind isn’t going anywhere good, and it’s circling around a thousand thoughts of what she could be referring to. She comes from a good family—wealthy, happy, and put together. It’s not adding up.

“Fine,” I tell her. “I’m here when you want to talk. Even if that’s never.” She presses her lips together, and takes the step back toward me. Her hands press into my shoulders and she rises up on her toes to kiss me, a soft and very quick kiss, yet the most affection she’s shown me in what must be more than a month now.

“I love you for understanding,” she mutters. “Thank you for sticking with me through all of this.”

Through all of what?
It’s like I missed some kind of world-changing event that evidently happened right in front of my eyes.
That doesn’t just happen
.

CHAPTER SIX

IT’S BEEN EIGHT
weeks and three days since Cammy told me that she and her family were leaving Connecticut. She didn’t know when, how quick or slow the process would be, but her parents made her miss the last two months of school, as well as graduation.

I’ve been sitting on the back bleachers, away from the crowd—away from the parents with cameras, and my classmates who are signing each other’s caps and other memorable tokens from our high school days. I’m here and I did my thing, for Mom and Dad. That’s all I’m giving though. It didn’t feel right receiving my diploma the way I know Cammy dreamt about receiving hers. She shouldn’t have been forced to miss this. I took pictures for Cammy and kept her on the phone during the speeches so she could at least listen. She’s a glutton for punishment and wanted to hear the ceremony, so I helped her do that.

When Principal Valler yelled, “Congratulations!” to our class, Cammy disconnected the call. I don’t know how she listened as long as she did. When I’m finally alone, with a moment to breathe air that isn’t being shared with my three hundred classmates, I call her back. The phone rings a number of times but she picks up, hoarse voice and all. “Hi,” she says quietly into the phone. “Sorry—”

“You have nothing to apologize for. This isn’t fair.”

“It’s not just that, AJ,” she says, though my name is hardly audible with the increasing weakness within her voice.

“What is it?” I ask her what’s wrong as if I can’t list a hundred things that could be upsetting her right now. Although there are probably more than a hundred things upsetting her.

“They sold the house,” she says. “We have three weeks to pack everything up and leave.” We knew it was coming, but I convinced myself it would take all summer due to the decline in real estate right now, or so I’ve heard Mom and Dad talking about.

“We have three weeks,” I tell her, trying to sound positive regardless of how I feel.

For the last eight weeks, we’ve talked a whole lot. We patched over our broken hearts with a common understanding of loss. I forgave her for hiding the decision on what to do with our daughter, since I understand it was out of her control too. The anger I felt for her at that moment was the same anger she had been feeling toward her parents for months. We’re together in this, no matter what. We both have broken hearts—hearts that will never find where they truly belong, even though we try to say we did everything we did for a good reason. I think that’s bull, and if it makes me less of a man or less of an adult to think that way, it’s because I’m seventeen.

Our relationship has changed. It changed when we found out she was pregnant. It was less about the number of kisses I could steal before her father would turn on the porch light and almost catch us on the side of her house—less about the quietness of my shoes hitting the porch roof below her bedroom window—less worry about my raging need to be with this girl in every way humanly possible. I took part in ruining our lives, and I’ve punished myself every day for it. I did what I could to convince her that she looked beautiful every morning at school. Even though I noticed the swelling in her face as well as the rest of her body, she was still beautiful to me. I spent my time reassuring her our lives would be okay, even though I was pretty sure they never would be again. I spent the days and months falling in love for the very first time, and it was all about the girl I wanted to be with, not the girl I wanted to get with. It was different, and maybe that’s why guys my age don’t usually know what love is—they’re too busy trying to explore new interests, feel new sensations, experience the thrill of danger and stupidity. Yeah, it’s all stupidity. Putting all of that bullshit aside, like most people who are beyond the age of high school years, then there’s room for love.

“Right, only three weeks,” she says, sniffling into the phone.

“Then we have texting…and courier pigeon.” I hear a quiet giggle with that one, and feel like I’m doing something for the better, rather than just making her cry more.

“I’m scared—” she says, her voice suddenly sharp and strong.

“Of—”

“I’m scared you’re going to realize how much you hate me when I leave. You’re going to have time to think about what I did and how selfish I was, how I handed away a life that belonged to us. It’s going to happen, and I know I can’t prevent it from happening but I’m scared for when it does. I’m scared that will be the end of us, and it sucks because I know there can’t be an ‘us’ as it is anyway. So whatever is left of your feelings for me, will likely be erased and masked by your rightfully horrible feelings toward my decisions.”

We’ve had this discussion so many times over the past couple of months. I get it. I might have gotten over it, but I will never move past it to the point where I’ll be okay with giving up our daughter. I understand. I will always understand, but that doesn’t fix the pain. “If that were going to happen, it would have already happened.”