The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Three

BOBBY

IF ONLY YOU’D GIVEN ME A SIGN.
Any little thing I could have taken as a sign.
Bobby kept waiting for it, kept changing the deal in his head: “If she asks me to help hitch the damn trailer, I won’t leave today.” But, no, he watched her from the window stubbornly doing it herself like he didn’t exist. She didn’t think of him.
So he changed the deal again: “If she asks me to help catch this psychotic horse she’s brought home, I won’t leave.” But she never even considered him.
He’d become invisible here.
He thought about making waffles when she left, but he’d learned these rescues sometimes ate an entire day. To be honest—although he realized he couldn’t actually say the word honest with any f*cking seriousness ever again—he didn’t have it in him to perform this last gesture if the waffles were going to sit there cold on a plate. No way in hell could he picture himself staying to do the dishes after he told her, any more than he could picture leaving the dishes for her to clean up.
He sat in the spare bedroom he used as an office and waited. Sometimes when she came home he’d have this moment of panic—he didn’t know what else to call it—wondering if she even remembered he was there. He knew it sounded nuts, like he was crazy, but it was this brief fear that he might’ve become invisible for real. More and more lately he had thoughts like that.
Cami called, “I’m home!” but he couldn’t answer. He opened his mouth but it was like he honest to Christ couldn’t remember how to speak. He couldn’t do this! And just as fast a new level of fear layered on the first at the thought of continuing the way he had been.
When she plopped down on the guest bed beside him, he watched her face, this face he knew so well, as she went on about the horse, about Helen, about people screaming at them. He loved her face. He knew the next logical thought was, “Okay, whatever, if you love her, how could you do this?” but he did love her. Even now. He searched her face for signs of the woman he used to cherish. For hints of the woman who’d once cherished him.
She was drenched. Mud-splattered. She had goddamn gravel in her hair. It didn’t seem fair to tell her his news while she looked so beat up, but he felt relieved, a little, at her appearance. He might actually find the courage to leave if she didn’t look so strong, so fearless.
As she talked about the rescue, he kept thinking, Do you not f*cking see that I’m dying here? Can’t you tell that something important is about to go down? Can’t you sense it? She used to know his thoughts before he even did, but she kept talking about these horses, and when she told a story about euthanizing a mare, the weirdest image flashed into his head. He felt nuts, but she always struck him as sexy with a syringe. He remembered the first rescue he went on, back when she used to invite him. He loved the way she pulled off an injection cap with her teeth. He’d seen her do it at least a hundred times. She’d have one hand holding the scruff of a neck—cat, dog, whatever—and she’d reach up to her mouth with her other hand and bite off the cap, exposing the needle, clenching the cap in her teeth while she injected the animal. The confidence in the move, the careless certainty—for some reason that picture of Cami defined her for him.
Why the hell did he want to think of her as strong and sexy at that moment? Was he truly going crazy? No, the point was she was strong enough that she’d be okay no matter what he did.
“I just don’t understand people,” she said, as she always did after a removal. It honest to Christ amazed him that she said it so sincerely every single damn time. He wasn’t sure which was stronger: the way her perpetual horror annoyed him or the way it made her remarkable.
“These animals are living, feeling fellow beings,” Cami said. “When you take one into your life you’re making a commitment. How can you just throw them away like garbage?”
Bobby knew this should be his cue to take her face in his hands, to say, “My little crusader, Cami,” but the word commitment made him mute.
Cami showed him her arm where that son-of-a-bitch horse had bitten her. He knew the blue and red welts should evoke something in him besides exasperation for her carelessness with her own body. He hated when she was hurt—it made him feel sick—and she hurt herself all the damn time. He knew he should get an ice pack or suggest they go get an X-ray—it really did look like her goddamn arm was broken. He almost took that as an out—a trip to the ER—but he knew she’d think the delay of this moment, once she knew what the moment held, was unforgivable.
“I need to tell you something important,” Bobby managed to say. There. He could do it. He could speak. The words were out there in the room. There was no turning back now.
Her face was curious. She leaned forward and grinned. “Is it what I think it is?”
Not likely. Christ. He didn’t want to humiliate her. He would cut off his damn arm not to have come to this point if he believed it would save them.
He opened his mouth and said the words he’d been dying to say for months: “I don’t want to be married anymore.”
This smile curled up her mouth like she wanted to laugh. Oh, shit. She didn’t believe him. But he watched it dawn in her face as she studied his. She was blindsided. But why wouldn’t she be blindsided after that pile of bullshit he’d told her yesterday? “Are we okay?” she’d asked him. He should’ve told her then. But he hadn’t been ready. He’d still been trying to convince himself, still believing, even yesterday, that maybe he could change his mind and stay.
He clung to his scripted words. “You know I’ve been unhappy for a long time, Cam. I know I’ve been hard to live with lately.”
She looked so . . . wounded. He’d never seen her look hurt. She got physically hurt all the time, but that didn’t stop her. He’d never seen her look like she actually felt a wound, like she did now. She wore no makeup, which is how he loved her face the most. Her hair and clothes were stuck to her with rain, and she probably didn’t know or care that blood was seeping through the left leg of her jeans. She’d smudged mud on the quilt Ma had made for them on their third anniversary.
“I think I should go away for a while,” he said, “and then we should talk.”
She shivered, fidgeting with a loose thread in the quilt.
He remembered them making love on this quilt when they first got it, this ugly quilt they’d relegated to the guest room. Ma had accidentally left a pin in the fabric that snagged a streak of red—like a cat scratch—on Cami’s left hip. He’d run his tongue over that scratch. Her warm skin, her vanilla smell, rose up in him. What am I doing? Why would I leave you?
She kept pulling on the damn thread. “We should see a counselor.”
For a second, he considered what she said—a reasonable request. But it took only a second to see what would happen: they’d cry, then they’d have sweet, careful sex and they’d tiptoe around each other and nothing would change. Bobby would still dream about drowning. “I don’t want to see a counselor. I don’t think there’s anything to do. It’s too late for us to—”
“Too late? But you just told me.”
He stood and picked up his gym bag. “I’ll call you in a few days.”
She sat up straight on the bed. “Whoa. Wait. You’re leaving right now?”
What the hell? Did she think he was going to sit here in this house after he’d told her this?
“Don’t go, Bobby. We can figure this out. We can make things better.”
This strangling sob came out of his throat. Then another. He hit the door frame with his fist; the pain felt good. “Shit. I’m sorry. Aw, f*ck.” He was lost, crying big, back-shaking sobs. He knelt beside where she sat, hugging her shivering legs, burying his face in her knees.
She put her hands in his hair and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as if she were talking to a crying Gabriella. Her comfort felt so familiar that he thought I’m crazy. Just stay. You can get by on this. But he knew it wasn’t true.
How could he tell her that for more than a year he’d dreamed about drowning? Terrifying scenes that had him dreading bed and intentionally drinking himself too dull to dream. In sleep, a heavy anchor pulled him down in deep green water that he swallowed and choked on. He’d thrash his arms and kick, fighting for the surface, once even knocking the goddamn clock off the nightstand, another time socking her in the face with his elbow, giving her a shiner that cut him to the bone every time he looked at it.
That black eye made him feel like his father.
When he looked down through that green water, it was Cami holding him down. Cami holding his ankles, her jaw set, her nails digging into his skin.
One night, panting from the dream, he whispered in the dark when he was certain she was asleep, “You’re drowning me.” The damn dog whined at him, and Bobby’d had this irrational fear that Max would be able to tell Cami. She was closer to the animals than to him. She saw what they needed and gave it to them. He knew he was a small, coldhearted jackass for being jealous of a gimpy dog and a maimed cat, but there it was. That’s what pulled him down.
He blundered on, desperate for her to know he did love her and didn’t want to hurt her—all that lame-ass shit everyone says—even though he knew it was asinine to think that leaving wouldn’t hurt her. “I couldn’t tell you, Cam,” he said into her knees. “I knew when I told you, I had to be prepared for us to be over. I had to be ready. It took me a long time to be emotionally ready for this.”
The words she said next peeled back his skin. “So, you needed a long time, but you thought I’d be okay with, what? Ten minutes?”
Christ, how could he have said that to her? He should leave before he f*cked it up worse.
But Cami wasn’t done. She never knew when to quit. He should’ve known.
“Don’t do this, Bobby. We’re intelligent, creative people. Let’s fix this.”
In the flash of lightning that lit the room, he watched that funky raspberry-colored pattern crawl over her face like a rash. She flowered like this when she was pissed or embarrassed. And when she came. He knew under that damp, dirty T-shirt her breasts and belly would also be blotched. He knew she hated this trait in herself. He knew so much about her. He knew her.
Then she asked it. “Is there someone else?”
Tell the truth. Just tell the f*cking truth. But he couldn’t. “No. No. Don’t think that.”
It threw him when she yelled at him. “Don’t f*cking tell me what not to think. What am I supposed to think?” He thought she might hit him, and for a second, he wished she would.
“This isn’t about anyone else.” That isn’t a lie. Not really. We would be over regardless. He remembered a line he’d rehearsed and grabbed for it. “I have to make peace with the fact that I may never be with anyone ever again. Not until I work out my own issues.”
Something like hatred flashed across her face. “Where are you going?” she asked.
He couldn’t tell her. Not yet. “Call my cell if you need me.”
Then she asked, “Does Gabriella know?” Shit. He’d screwed this up so bad. Thinking about Gabriella, already missing Gabriella, almost drove him back to Cami’s knees. This furious woman had given him Gabriella. They’d created her together. If Cami wanted counseling, he should go to counseling. If she wanted a trial separation, he should do that, too. He shouldn’t leave until they both knew it was the right thing. He wanted, so badly it made him ache, to be able to stay and do this like a man.
But he took his bag and walked down the stairs and out the back door, where that goddamn goat jumped out of Cami’s truck bed and came running toward him. Without even thinking, he turned to call up the stairs, “Um . . . goat’s out.” It hit him then, like a ball bat to the gut, the history he was leaving.
But when he stepped off the porch, he took a breath. He felt that breath go deep, all the way through his body, and expand in his lungs.
He’d done it.
He’d broken through the surface.