soft. The egg and cheese melted on my tongue, and the tomatoes, onions, and spinach delivered flavors like bursts of life. It was satisfying.
“What do you think?” my wife asked.
I shrugged and took another bite. She forced a smile and continued eating. I was surprised she did not react to my indifference, but something in her countenance seemed to fight negativity today. She closed her eyes as she chewed, and the corners of her mouth curled upward. She looked happy.
For some reason, I was not angry with her. I still resented my wife’s attempt at normalcy, but my resolve had waned with time. Time was a brutal enemy, merciless and unyielding. It had riddled me with agony, and then spent months wearing me down, stripping away each memory that had made me feel love towards my son or anguish at his passing, stripping away my humanity.
“So. Where’d you go? The park?” my wife asked.
I chewed and gave my head a nod. She smirked and looked at me. Then, she took another bite of eggs.
“I wish you would’ve woken me up,” she said, eggs in her mouth. “I would’ve liked to go with you.”
I took another large bite. My omelet was almost gone. When it was finished, maybe I could go back to the bedroom and sleep.
“I don’t know what you do there for so long,” she said.
Silence followed. I chewed with haste. Her fork and knife clinked and scraped her plate. Whistles screeched and pads crunched on the television behind me. Pop exhaled an ahhhhh after his Alma Mater gave up another first down.
“Are you excited about going back to work?” my wife asked.
I shrugged.
Her nostrils flared and lips pursed. “Can you not talk?”
“No,” I said before taking my last bite of omelet.
She shook her head and cut herself another bite, but before she ate it, she dropped her fork on the plate and her head onto her hand. I chewed as fast as I could so I could leave the table. She pivoted her forehead on the heel of her palm. I stood and took my plate to the kitchen sink.
As I dropped off my plate, I heard my wife’s chair scrape against the carpet. Pretending to be oblivious, I continued to the bedroom. Just as I was about to turn in, just as I was about to enjoy the sweet invisibility of sleep, I felt my shoulder jerk backwards with surprising force. My wife leered at me the same way a dog that had chased an imaginary stick one too many times would leer at her tormenter.
“I’ve been trying to talk to you all morning,” she said.
“I know.”
Her eyes widened in anger. “Then why didn’t you talk back?!”
I paused a moment. There was silence in the hallway. I felt it infiltrating my eardrums to play its symphony of nothingness, but it was stolen away by another groan from my pop watching his game. My wife shook her head.
“Do you even care why?” My wife asked. “Do you care about anything?”
I grew angry. She had no right to say that to me. I had a son who I loved more than my own life, and he died.
“I miss him, too,” she said. “Do you ever think about that?”
I jerked my shoulder away and sneered at her.
“But we have to move on,” she pleaded. “It’s been—”
“—Five months, one week, and four days,” I interrupted.
My wife was silent. Her nostrils flared again but not in anger. Instead, she fought her emotions, breathing them in through her nose and attempting to eradicate them through her mouth. She did not realize that I did not want that. I wanted to keep the emotions. I wanted to feel them. I wanted them to sit heavy in my gut like an anchor. I wanted to be anchored to the void inside of me. It was all I had left of him.
I turned into the bedroom. I was tired and needed sleep. The anchor in my gut was dragging me down, down to my bed, down to the deepest depths of my broken dreams. But, my wife would not let me go. She darted past me into the bedroom and cut me off.
“He’s … gone,” my wife said, clenching my arm, her eyes wet and wild. “He’s gone, Thomas. There’s only us now.”
She would say that. Just cast him into the abyss like a pebble skipping across a lake and plunging down. I tried to jerk away again, but she seized me with both hands.
“He’s gone and all that’s left is us and our baby,” my wife said.
I froze. A truth I had known my whole life seemed to flicker to light in my mind. I had not realized it yet, but it had always been there. Toying with me.
“What baby?” I asked, playing my part in the charade towards this truth.
My wife sighed and sat on the bed. I stood by the door and waited. It was a moment.
“That’s what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” my wife said. “I know it’s been hard for you…” Know. She knew nothing. “… but I’ve known for a few weeks now and ...”
She looked up at me, and then down at the ground when I had no reaction. Her words had gone into my ears and my brain had interpreted them, but I did not feel their implications. My body was present and acted as it always did, but what made me human was missing. It was back in the cave, hiding, like Daffney in the shadow of the tree behind her bush.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Something about those words swelled my heart with rage like a balloon being filled by a geyser. I shrieked like I did when I told my wife Sam had cancer. I glared at her.
“Is it mine?” I asked, hoping it was not.
The words hit my wife like spit in her face. Her mouth twisted into a scowl, and her shoulders tensed until she ripped the pillows off the bed and heaved them at me. When she ran out of pillows, she threw the lamp. It shattered in the hallway.
“I hate you,” she whispered in admitted defeat.
I nodded. I knew it was true.
She panted on the bed, her ribcage expanding to the point of breaking with each breath, her tiny nostrils working overtime like the exhaust pipes of a Mac truck.
“You don’t care!” she cried. “You just don’t care! I don’t know what else to do, you just don’t care!”
“I can tell you what not to do,” I hissed. “Get pregnant!”
“Like I’d want another child with you!” she screamed. “I almost wanna pray for a miscarriage!”
“So you could avoid another problem like you did with Sam.”
“Avoid? What do you mean avoid?! … I was working! Working so we could pay for all the crazy medicines and surgeries and radiations that you wanted because you couldn’t face the truth.”
“Truth? He was our boy! He was supposed to live and you did nothing!”
“I did everything! You were the one refusing to take extra shifts. You were the one sleeping on the job and almost getting fired!”
“Is this ‘cause of the fire? ‘Cause I didn’t ask for you to take time off. I wish you hadn’t, it’s just made my life Hell.”
“Your life?...” She stared at me, wide-eyed and searching. “What life?! Is that what you call this? Going to the park to watch ducks. Sleeping all day. Refusing to say more than one damn word at a time. Moping around like a damn child. Is that life to you?”
“At least I didn’t trick you into making a baby.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah. Don’t think I forgot what you did. And don’t complain to me about almost getting fired when you put on a damned strip show in my office like a horny damn teenager.”
My wife’s eyes gaped, and she held her breath, too stunned to speak.
“And it turned into a baby, which probably suits you just fine. Now you can go on with your normal life and your normal family. And everything will be just so damned normal. You even got a replacement kid. We can pretend Sam never existed.”
She blinked the disbelief away and dropped her head to face the floor.
“You’re a heartless bastard,” she said.
“Not a bastard, my pop’s in the other room. Which I’m sure you didn’
t consider when you sprung this on me.”
“We’re having a baby!” she protested. “You’re going to be a father again.”
“I am a father.”
I leered at her. I was outside myself, in a control room pulling levers and pushing buttons to make responses. My body was an avatar. My brain was in control. My spirit was disconnected.
“I’m a father that lost his son. I’m a father that failed.”
“Failed?” Tenderness flashed across her eyes. “You didn’t fail.”
I shook my head and turned away. She approached me and tried to put a hand on my shoulder, but I slapped it away.
“Don’t touch me,” I growled.
She paused. Then, she swallowed her hurt like she was forcing down a lump of vomit.
“I haven’t for over a month,” she whispered.
I snorted and shook my head. She was being a woman. She was trying to be the victim and trying to win sympathy. That was what she always did. When she was wrong, she would always twist it around so it was my fault. I would not let her.
“Poor you,” I mocked.
Her lip quivered, and she bit down to subdue it, but that only caused the hurt to curdle into anger, and the rage erupted out of her mouth in a volcanic diatribe.
“Damn right, poor me!” she yelled, her body quaking and trembling. “Poor me for losing my child. Poor me for losing my boy. He was my boy! For nine months he was in my stomach!...” Such a cop out. She knew Sam loved me more, so she made excuses. “…Poor me for being stuck with you, for lying down next to you every night. Poor me for screwing you to get this baby, or for ever sleeping with you. Poor me for having ever loved you! Poor me for having ever had