My hands were starting to shake a little, and I knew if I had been anywhere else, I’d be heading straight for the nearest needle right now.
“Aimee was almost six months along,” I told Tria. “I was sleeping in my car near the school’s parking lot and spent my time going back and forth from Aimee’s trailer to school. I kept trying to get her to open up and tell her mom about the baby, but she wouldn’t. She was afraid she’d get kicked out, too, and wouldn’t have anywhere to live before the baby was born. I bought her a bunch of baggy clothes, and she even made me wear baggy shit, too, so she could claim it was just the latest style. Her mom wasn’t really all that observant anyway. I think she just liked that I was buying shit for her daughter.”
“Where is she now?”
“I’m…uh…I’m getting there,” I replied quietly.
With my heart starting to pound inside my chest, I labored to keep my breathing as normal as possible as I continued on.
“It was a Saturday about a week before Christmas,” I told her. “I still had about seven hundred dollars in cash, and I had been out shopping. I bought a bunch of shit for the baby and was going to stash it in Aimee’s room. Just walking up to the door, I had this weird feeling—like something was wrong. I don't know why, and maybe it's just in my head, but that's what I remember. Her mom was in the main room, and she didn't even look at me when I came in. She just gave me a little wave as I walked by.”
“The door to the bathroom was closed, and I figured Aimee was in there, so I went in her room and just hung out for a while. It wasn't long before that creepy feeling that something wasn't right came up again, so I went to the bathroom to check on her. “
My breath caught in my throat and drowned my words. I realized I was rocking back and forth on the floor in front of Tria and that she was no longer glaring but looking at me kind of quizzically instead.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look kind of pale.”
“Just need to…keep going,” I said. My breaths were coming too fast, and I was starting to get a little dizzy.
Tria gave me a slight nod and sat back again.
“I called out to her, but she didn’t answer me. I was knocking then banging my fist on the door, but she still didn’t answer. Her mother was yelling at me to keep it down, but I just knew at that point something…something was wrong. Really wrong. So I busted the door open.”
I gasped as I tried to bring in more air to speak. My words came out staccato and breathy.
“The door pretty much flew off the hinges when I…when I kicked it. Aimee’s mom started yelling at me, but I don’t know what she said, because when I looked in the bathroom…”
My voice halted, and I couldn’t breathe right at all. My heart was pounding so fast in my chest that I was starting to get light-headed. My chest began to ache, and my throat felt like it was closing up on me. Baynor said I had post-traumatic stress or whatever—could that cause a heart attack?
I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to keep going.
“She…sh…she…she was on-on-on the floor,” I stammered, barely able to form the words. “Everything was covered in…in…in…in red…in blood. There was so much, so much blood…you couldn’t even see the floor. I...I…I took a step toward her, but I slipped…I fell…”
My throat closed up on me, and I couldn’t breathe at all. As I gasped for breath, I felt heated tears flowing out of my eyes and hands in my hair. Tria was kneeling on the floor in front of me with her arms around me.
“Calm down,” Tria’s soft voice commanded. “Liam, please—you are scaring me.”
I leaned against her, but the nausea in my stomach was overwhelming, and I had to shove her away long enough to get to the trash can so I could puke. When I was done, I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth and rocked back on my knees. Tria was yelling to Yolanda, saying I needed help. I didn’t know what I needed, but I couldn’t stop shaking, not even when Tria’s arms went back around me, and she held my head to her shoulder.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s okay, Liam. It’ll be okay. Just relax for now, okay?”
“N…n…no!”
I wanted to scream at myself. I had to do this—Dr. Baynor said I had to do this if I was going to have any chance at getting her back. Tria said as much as well. Yolanda wasn’t even going to let me in until I said I’d tell Tria everything. If I understood what was going on now, Yolanda was calling an ambulance.
I couldn’t stop now.
“I fell…I fell on…on…on this thing,” I sobbed. Tria tried to tell me to stop again, but I knew if I did I would never be able to finish, so I kept going. “I didn’t know what it was…it just looked like…looked like a chunk of meat lying on the floor. Like some piece of something the butcher would have thrown away after chopping up a cow or something. But when I looked closer…it was…it was him…it was our baby. I fell on him.”
“Oh my God,” I heard Tria utter, but I tried not to pay attention to her. I had to get through this, and the only way to do that was to just keep punching through the words. She pulled me against her, and I wrapped my arms around her back and tucked my head against her neck.
“Her mom was screaming behind me, and all I could do was sit in the middle of it. I couldn’t move, and…I…I couldn’t think. Her blood was all over me, and when I touched her, her arm was stiff. I didn’t want to look, but I kept looking back to…to him. Aimee’s mom was screaming…and she was crying and asking what I had done to her. I guess she must have called 911, because I couldn’t move. The ambulance came, and they eventually took me out of there when they came for...came for the…the bodies.”
I reached for the trash can again, but nothing came up. Tria was still holding me tightly, and I took a long breath and tried to blurt everything else out in one long sentence.
“They took me in an ambulance as well, and they said I was suffering from shock, and when I was in the ER, they told me Aimee had a miscarriage and hemorrhaged, and they said if she had called out to someone, her mom probably could have…could have gotten her to the hospital in time…but by the time I knocked down the door, she had been dead over an hour…She was dead before I ever got there, and there wasn’t anything they could do, and the…the…the baby…he was buried with her, and her mom wouldn’t let me inside the funeral home…so I just left. If they hadn’t said….if he hadn’t said those things to her, she would have called out for someone.”
“You blame your parents,” Tria said. “She wouldn’t tell her mother because of how your parents reacted.”
“She bled to death because of them!” I screamed. My eyes burned, and my jaw clenched at the thought. “If they had just supported us—realized we were trying to do the right thing, she’d still be alive! She might have still lost the baby, but Aimee would have been okay. She would have been okay!”
With Tria’s hand slowly moving over my cheek, I fell to the side with my head in her lap. I screamed into the fabric of the robe and let my tears soak through to her skin. I reached around to her back and held on as tightly as I could.
“I can’t let that happen to you, Tria!” I cried. “Please, Tria—please! Don’t do it! I can’t protect you from…from that! Please, please, Tria!”
“Liam, that’s not going to happen—”
“You don’t know!” I screamed as I gripped her again. “You can’t be sure. Tria—I can’t lose you! I can’t! I need you, Tria. I love you—I can’t lose you!”
She traced her fingers against my cheek, and I pushed myself up enough to wrap my arms around her shoulders and bring her to my chest.
“Please, Tria…I love you…don’t do this…please…”
“Liam, you need to calm down…”
“Please don’t…please…”
“Shh, baby…”
There was a lot of noise coming from the other room, but I ignored it and just held on for life and sanity.
“I love you…I can’t let that happen to you…”
??
?He’s in there,” I heard Yolanda say.
Three guys came into the room, and I clung to Tria as they tried to lift me up and get me onto one of those gurneys. As tempted as I was to just beat the everloving shit out of whoever was grabbing my arm, I was more interested in keeping my hold on Tria.
“Please don’t fight!” Tria said. “Let them help.”
“No!” I grabbed on and held her tighter.
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I’ll even ride in the ambulance.”
She looked up at the EMT, and he nodded his head. Yolanda still had to threaten me a bit, but I finally let them load me up and strap me down. Tria stayed right next to me, holding my hand as I just let myself crash and burn inside my head.
I was never one to accept help, but I knew when I was in over my head.
Chapter 4—Make the Promise
“I wish he would have called before running off to find you.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“I might have been able to prepare him a little. He needs to consider some medication treatment along with therapy. I don’t think he realizes when he has a panic attack, and this one was definitely severe.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“That’s up to him.”
Dr. Baynor’s and Tria’s voices mingled together inside my heavy head. I opened my eyes slowly to find myself in a very similar room—if not the exact same one—as the room I woke up in after surgery. Like the last time, my right arm itched where the IV entered my skin, but my left arm itched, too. It was a lot worse than the other one, and when I moved to scratch it, I remembered it was because I had been using again.
Slowly, the events of the past few days sloshed into the forefront of my mind.
“Welcome back,” Dr. Baynor said. He was smiling when I looked over to him. “Don’t talk yet. Give yourself a few minutes.”
He came to the side of the bed and injected something into the IV.
“It should help with the itching,” he said quietly. He nodded his head toward my arm and then picked up the cup of water beside the bed. He gave me a quick drink through the straw. “How’s that?”
“I…” I cleared my throat a couple of times. “I feel like I got run over.”
“Not surprising.”
I looked at Tria and tried to find some way for those “gateways to the soul” to give me some inclination as to where I stood right now, but they told me nothing.
“When can I go home?” I asked, and a little voice in my head wondered if I still had a home. “’Cause this place sucks ass.”
“You could consider vacationing in the Alps,” Baynor suggested. “How do you feel about skiing?”
“Would you be there?” I asked.
“Sure, I’ll tag along.”
“Forget it then.”
Baynor laughed, but Tria just fiddled with the strap on Hercules’ Humvee as Baynor explained a lot of shit about how I was suffering from anxiety attacks and that the one I had at Yolanda’s apartment was quite a major one.
“You can go home in the morning,” he told me. “I’m keeping you here for observation, and I want to start talking about treatment for both your anxiety and other issues. You can either cooperate, which means you walk out of here tomorrow, or you can bitch and moan and threaten me, and I’ll hold you for three days on a psych evaluation. Your pick.”
“Fucker,” I muttered.
He picked up my chart and poked around at it while Tria stood off to his side, down at the end of the bed. Our eyes met, but she dropped her gaze to the floor. After a minute, she looked back up at me.
“Can I…can I talk to you?” I asked. I tried for the puppy-dog eyes that usually worked when I had a cold and wanted her to cook for me.
Baynor looked from me to Tria, then gave me half a grin, tapped his pen on the clipboard, and walked out the door. Tria didn’t move but stayed down at the end of the bed not looking at me.
“Tria?” I whispered, and she finally looked up.
“Here we are again,” she said. She made a little gesture that took in the room.
“Yeah,” I said. “Um…maybe if we worked out a deal, we could just move in…save on the rent or something.”
Her tight lipped smile didn’t express any humor.
“Yeah…probably not. The décor here sucks.”
Nothing.
“Tria?”
She looked up at me again.
“Are you…I mean…will you…you know…come back home?”
For the longest time, she wouldn’t meet my eyes. When her head finally tilted up, she didn’t have to answer.
“Please,” I heard myself whisper. “Please, just…don’t. Don’t do this.”
“Do you have any idea what the last couple of weeks have been like for me?” she asked quietly. “Any at all?”
I couldn’t look at her anymore because her point was far, far too valid. Other than wondering where she was and being paranoid about her going back to Maine, I hadn’t really thought about what was happening with her.
“I spent that whole afternoon trying to figure out how I was going to tell you,” she said. Her voice cracked a little, and as I looked back at her, tears began to stream down her cheeks. “I know babies are pricey, and I figured I could spend some time at the library, researching ways to figure out ways to make it less expensive. I’d breast feed, use cloth diapers. Whatever I could do to make it not cost as much because I figured that’s what you would be worried about.”
She ran the back of her hand over her face before looking back to me.
“But when you…you said you didn’t want…that you wanted me to…to get rid of it…”
Her breath caught in her throat, and she sniffed before continuing.
“And then you started screaming at me, and when I looked in your eyes, I wasn’t even sure who you were. Everything Keith had said about you being violent came to my mind, and then you picked up the table and—”
She gasped and covered her mouth.
“I thought you were going to throw it at me.”
“Oh fuck, no,” I whispered. “I’d never, never do that, Tria. Fuck.”
“Normally, I would agree,” she said, “but you weren’t you then, and I didn’t know who you were. And then you just walked out.”
She stopped, and she bit down on her lip hard enough to make it look painful. She covered her mouth with her hand again and looked toward the window even though the curtains were drawn.
“You said you wouldn’t do that again,” she reminded me. “Even so, I thought maybe you’d come back in an hour or two. I thought you just needed some time to cool off.”
She straightened her shoulders a little and then looked back to me.
“Then you didn’t,” she said simply. “And I started to wonder if you were going to come back at all. Then…well, I just started thinking about everything. There’s something more important in my life now—more important than me or you. I had to do what was right for my baby. Yolanda was the most likely person to help me. She was close by, so I could still go to school, and she knows…well, she knows you. Better than I do, really.”
“I did just need…what you said,” I told her. “Cool off time. But I got arrested on the subway.”
Tria’s mouth dropped open as she stared at me, dumbfounded.
“Do I even want to ask?”
“Some drunk just…pissed me off. He pulled a knife on me—no charges were pressed.” I tried to shrug it off.
“That really doesn’t make me feel any better,” Tria informed me.
“I know.” I swallowed hard, knowing the last thing I should do now was to keep anything from her. “When I got back to the apartment, and you weren’t there…um…I lost it.”
Tria looked quickly at me, but I looked away.
“What did you do?”
“I…I went out and, um…” I had no fucking clue how to say it without making it sound just as bad as it was. There just wasn’t enough
perfume to cover the stink on this shit. “I bought heroin, and I used it.”
Before now, I hadn’t been sure if Baynor or Yolanda had told her or not. The way her body stiffened when she realized what I had said made it clear she had no idea.
“You started using again.” I could barely hear her strained voice.
I looked away, not wanting to admit this but knowing there really wasn’t any point in denying it. I had to come clean, so to speak.
“When I figured out you were gone,” I admitted, “I…I couldn’t deal with it, so I went back to H.”
“While I spent the week wondering how I was going to raise a child on my own,” Tria said, and her words made me want to crawl under the bed.
I couldn’t deny them. I couldn’t defend myself. I could only try to explain as best I could and then hope she’d let me spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
“There’s more,” I said to her. “I mean—I didn’t tell you everything from before. There isn’t much left, but there’s a bit. I want you to know everything.”
“Now you tell me,” she muttered. She blew out a long breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
“Go on,” she said with a wave of her hand.
“I told you they took me to the ER, right?” Tria nodded. “Well, I left the hospital before my parents could get there. I knew if my father hadn’t said all those things to her, then Aimee wouldn’t have been afraid to tell her mom. If she had, none of it would have happened. I kind of think if I had seen them at that point, I might have tried to kill them. When Aimee’s mom wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, I just drove around the city for a while, then parked the car near the river and just sat there—I’m not even sure how long. There was a group of people near the river all huddled together, and I watched them for a while. Eventually I got out of the car and walked over to them.”
“As it turns out, they were junkies getting fixed. They were all banging, and when they tried to tell me what it was like, I offered them cash to let me try it.”