True.
“I’ve never completely disregarded your humanity by turning myself over to someone else, while still in the ring with you. For God’s sake, Eric, you’d come home and lay in bed with me after kissing someone else? How did you do it without going completely insane?” I sit on the chair across from him, he follows my every move. “And, to think, I beat myself up over feeling detached from you for so long. I reminded myself daily how much you cared for me and the boys. How much you loved me. How I was fucking everything up by being so selfish in being angry that I had to put everything on hold . . .”
“Like I said, I didn’t think you’d care. Then, the look on your face when you walked into my office . . .” Eric rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“You can’t erase a visual memory that way.”
“You looked like you still loved me . . .”
“That was betrayal I was feeling, Eric. Not love. You don’t have to love someone to feel betrayed by them. I still trusted you, even when I stopped loving you.”
Ryker’s Valentine’s letter sits inches from Eric’s foot. I reach for it and tuck it in the box behind me while Eric still sits with his eyes tightly closed. I resist the urge to show Eric all of the letters, to show him what true love looks like. To explain that when someone you love is hurting, you would walk barefoot through hell and back to bring them back to you, even when you know you’re fighting a losing battle. You don’t turn to someone else. War, though, is a crueler mistress than a scientist with morals with the tensile strength of a Twizzler.
“I think we can fix us.” He kneels in front of me again, taking my hands.
“Don’t touch me.” Recoiling, I pull my hands away and tuck them between my legs. “I want you to leave, Eric. I’ve heard all I need to know, and I don’t think I can take anymore today. Don’t say anything to your parents yet, and I won’t say anything to mine.” I stand and walk to the door, opening it.
“Come on, Nat—”
“No, Eric. This . . . this is too much. We might be broken, but I’ve been broken for longer, and I need to figure some shit out. Just leave, please.”
Eric walks, slumped-shouldered, toward the door. “I love you,” he says as he meets me in the doorway.
“Just because you say it doesn’t make it true, you know.” I look toward the stairs, where I want him to go.
“I do love you, Natalie.” His brown eyes are faded, pleading. He’s actually able to pull off looking remorseful, which makes me feel even sicker. He’s an actor of the most threatening kind.
“Yeah?” I huff. “Well, you’ve just proven that it’s not enough.”
Feeling used, disgusting, and disregarded, I let my tears fall freely out of his view when he leaves. I can’t get over the gratefulness I feel over our boys being gone for the week.
Our boys.
I can’t make a clean break and never see him again. There’s no restraining order or semester at home with my parents that will make this all go away. Not this time. I’m going to actually have to deal with this. So, grabbing my purse, I decide the first place to start is a quiet townie bar on a Sunday afternoon. One I’ve never been to with anyone before. One that will be free of any memories the last twelve years have etched into my brain.
Chapter 28
This entire time I’ve been thinking how awful I would look leaving my marriage—breaking up my family—while one of my boys begins dealing with what will be a lifelong disability. How distasteful and unspeakable it would look to others for me to leave my doctor husband while unemployed. For the last three years I’ve talked myself up, saying women have done this for centuries—this motherhood thing. It’s not that I don’t want to be a mother. I simply don’t want to be the mother in Tim Burton’s version of a family.
The last several weeks have had me hiding in the bathroom, cutting my skin open to relieve the guilt and shame I’ve felt about wanting to leave. Yes, I’ve wanted to leave the boys at times, too, but I can’t do that. Especially not now. I feel my heart clinging to them all of a sudden, like they’re the only true and pure things left in my life. The rest is complete shit.
“Fucking guilt,” I mumble as I turn into the parking lot of “The Harp” in North Amherst. It’s an Irish bar I’ve been to about two times in a decade and a half, but that’s just enough to know where it is and that I’ll be away from people I know.