me, telling me the baby had stopped moving? Do I stop later when she stopped crying and telling me that she is so desperately sad? When she started to say that everything was fine when it wasn’t? When she started to lie to me?
I wrote about our baby boy. How Quinn looked to me when she carried him, how she was intensely beautiful to me even though she didn’t believe it when I told her. I wrote about how we made love then, full of passion and love. I wrote how full of hope we were, how full of joy we were.
And then I stopped. Our baby died and so did we.
Wednesday
I listen to Wade’s latest tirade. I wonder if he actually believes this crap. I know I don’t anymore. His words are toxic, poison, and he delivers them in his own brand of chalice, easy on the eye and sweet to the taste. The truth is we all like his brand. We all like to hear the pain of others, and we all like to hear him pile onto it. The proof is in the figures and the coffers filling. I can’t help thinking that there has to be a better way.
I wasn’t always like this. I liked what we were doing. We were making easy money and while it didn’t affect me personally then I was happy to motivate him. I could even excuse his dubious moral standards. The problem was he did attack me personally. He went into my home and took the one thing I had of value. True I treated her badly and I was a moron for doing so, but that didn’t mean that he could take her from me.
And the funny thing is I keep coming back to bitterness and words of life. Wade is bitter. Something or someone has hurt him sometime in the past. Now he just spews forth vitriol like its gospel when really it’s just his bitter heart talking through his mouth. I suppose thinking of him as a victim like the rest of us kind of makes him human and not some mindless force of destruction. I want to hate him, keep on hating him, but I just can’t. Actually, I kind of pity him.
All of this bitterness is going to kill him eventually. He’ll die alone, probably when his liver packs it in, and no one will mourn him. He won’t have throngs at his funeral, because at the end of the day he’ll be easily forgotten. He won’t have saved people from a burning building, he won’t have cured cancer. Hell, he won’t even add one iota to world peace. When he goes he’ll just be replaced by another saying the same crap, and that guy will be replaced and so on until the end of time. The same poison, the same words, generation after generation. It’s kind of sad, really. And I’m a part of the process.
Words have power. Either they’re full of life or full of death. Right now I know what Wade’s words are full of. There has to be a better way.
Friday
She calls me after work, invites me to coffee. It’s starting to become a routine for us now, a time to get together and talk about our week, regroup before we’re stripped bare and analysed, then put back together. It’s the time that I look forward to all week.
I’m there first. I order our coffees and I wait. She’s a little late because she’s had to walk three blocks to get there and she’s nearly four months pregnant. She’s already wearing the right clothes for her condition and I think she looks lovely. I remember how she looked when she carried our little boy, how wonderful and full of life she was. I’m missing seeing that every day, but that’s just the cards we’ve been dealt, I suppose. I stand when she’s gets to me and she kisses me lightly on the lips. She sits heavily, like she’s pregnant and walked three blocks, which of course she has.
“How are you going with your story?” I ask her.
“Good.” She smiles. “You?”
“It’s done.”
“That was quick.”
“It’s easy to write about the good things”, I point out.
“True,” she says. She’s still smiling. She’s remembering what it was like at the beginning. I see what these people are doing. They’re making us remember what it is we want to hold on to, not the stuff that we need to let go.
“How is work?” she asks me.
“Fine,” I tell her. “Wade’s ticked off just about everyone who’s paying for his show but we’ve got most of them back. I’ve had to kiss some serious ass.”
She laughs. “Anyway,” she tells me, “I have some things to say.”
“I suspected as much.”
“You did?”
“I haven’t heard from you all week. I guessed you’ve been working through some heavy stuff.”
She looks down. “I have.”
“Well, you’d best get on with it then. The new ‘us’ shots straight, right?”
“Right.” She takes a deep breath. “I have some unresolved issues from the past.”
“I know what you mean.”
She shakes her head. “But I mean before-before. Before us.”
“When you were a kid?”
She nods. “My father wasn’t exactly the father of the year, and I’ve been hurt by him, and I guess it’s flowed onto us.”
“Your father is a minister.”
“That doesn’t necessarily make him the best parent.”
“I see.”
She sighs. “And he’s not talking to me at the moment – because of what happened between us. He’s ‘displeased’ with me, mom says. I couldn’t make him proud of me before, now he’s practically disowned me.”
“Damn. That’s harsh.”
She laughs a little. “We’ve both lost our fathers. But, I guess, my problems are self-inflicted.”
“I won’t let you take all the blame for what happened. All of that was started by me, and he should know that.”
“You try and tell him. He won’t even come to the phone. Anyway, I guess I’ve got some serious abandonment issues and then, when things started to get difficult with us, I sort of felt that you might leave me and I started to pull away. I guess that’s part of why I didn’t hang on and fight for us. I thought you’d go at any moment.”
“But I didn’t go.”
“I know. But in my mind I was waiting for it and it pulled me further away from you. Wade wanted me and there wasn’t that sort of fear with him – we were never going to be serious, not until you found out about us anyway.”
“And then I did leave.”
“Yes,” she says sadly. “And I suppose that just proved my fears were founded. So I’ve got some fences to mend. And the first one is with you.”
“You don’t have to, not with me. I’ve forgiven you.”
“I know. And I’ve said that I’m sorry, but the problem is that I didn’t know what I was sorry about. I do now.”
She reaches over and takes my hand, looks me in the eyes. “I’m sorry that I put my unresolved feelings of abandonment onto you. It was unfair and it was one of the things that pulled our marriage apart. Can you forgive me?”
I nod, smile, squeeze her hand.
She breathes heavily. “That was the easy part.”
“That was easy?”
She nods. “I know that you’ll forgive me. You said you would and I trust you. The hard part is talking to my father.”
I get that. Quinn’s father is a staunch protestant minister. He believes in the bible and truth and the sanctity of marriage. He scares me, he always had - right from the day she brought this cocky Jewish kid to meet him for the first time.
“When are you going to do that?” I don’t want her to do it alone.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It might take me some time to build up the courage.”
I nod, my face serious. “Well, you won’t have to do it by yourself. I’ll come with you.”
“You would? You’ve never exactly got along. I’m sure he’s as ticked off with you as he is with me.”
I smile. “But the beauty is that I’m not related to him, so I can say whatever I like.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Relax. I’m not going to burn my bridges. But really, I’m on your side. You don’t have to do any of this alone. We’re a team, like before, only better.”
She smiles in that way she smiles when she’s I’m doing something right. For
a change.
“I’m a little tired,” she says. “I should get home.”
I nod, perhaps a little sadly, but I know she is and she should.
“Can I drive you?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. She’s been stubbornly independent for a year now. I guess it is part of the abandonment thing. She didn’t want to start to rely on me when she felt that I would leave her. She’s still got her issues to work through – we both do – but she’ll have to change that soon. Soon she’ll need me and she’ll have to swallow some pride.
“Tomorrow then?” She nods.
“Pick you up at nine?”
She leaves me again. It’s becoming part of our ritual too, a sad part. Maybe soon I’ll be able to come home, but the time isn’t right yet. We still need our space to think. If nothing else, Quinn’s realisations have proved that.
Saturday
We sit - them on one side and us on the other. They smile easily. We’re looking nervous and don’t know what to say. We don’t hold hands. Mine are defensively folded and Quinn’s are on her lap. The Uptons take us in, take the measure of us. They’ve seen people like us before, and they’re working to a script.
“Now Quinn,” Mary says finally, “why don’t we start by hearing what you hope to get out of our time here.”
Now I’m madly thinking of something intelligent to say but I’m realising that Quinn is floundering and that I should be listening to her. Too often I wasn’t hearing what she was saying because I was too busy trying to think of what to say, something sharp or clever.
“I don’t know,” she says, “Ah, I guess I haven’t really thought about that...”
“I’m sure