She searched him all through the house, tension growing in her as if she was looking for the monster in a horror film. Poor Kurt. He deserved so much better than the role into which time had thrust him, in her life.
She passed his jacket on the coat rack by the front door twice before she finally pulled open that door, to find him sitting on the steps, his forearms braced on his knees, his fingers locked together between them. He wore only his light cotton shirt over a T-shirt, in weather well below freezing, but he wasn’t shivering.
He just sat there, staring down at his locked hands.
She grabbed his jacket to put it around him, and he gave her a startled look, not moving to take it. She pressed it back around his shoulders as it started to slide off him, sitting down beside him. “Kurt, you’re freezing.” As the cold started to bite through her wet hair and sweater, she realized she didn’t have a jacket either.
“Am I?” he asked numbly.
“Kurt.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, low but still with that even, controlled diction of his, the man who could never quite mutter. “I couldn’t manage to leave.” He looked from his hands to her and back again. “I miss you so goddamned bad,” he said helplessly and lifted his interlocked fists to press his forehead into them.
Emotion swept over her and she had to speak before it could take her, before she could drown in it. “Have you been out here all this time?” All the time she had wept, all her time in the shower, out here, in that thin shirt? “You’re hypothermic,” she decided, although what did she know? When she had taken that first aid class the first pregnancy—the way she had signed up for birthing classes right off the bat, and started painting the room, and called every single friend and member of their family as soon as the blue line showed up on her pregnancy test, in thrilled delight at the happy future stretching out before them—she had been focused on things like what to do if a baby choked. But—an hour or more outside, in this cold? And he wasn’t shivering? “Kurt, come inside. You can’t drive until you’ve at least had a hot shower.”
“If I get near a hot shower in your company, I don’t know what I might do,” he told his fists, a driven, desperate voice.
Ah. Everything inside her just yanked at the thought of what he might do, in terror and longing.
“Just come inside.” She pulled at him. Whatever he did, she would have to handle it. Whatever he did—God, hadn’t she handled worse?
Hadn’t she done worse? In the end, that had been the very hardest thing to handle of all, as she pulled herself slowly into peace again, the fact that she had destroyed them in her grief and rage and a shutting-off-of-hope so intense and so crazy that only a long time later, when her hormones started to rebalance, had she realized she must have been in the equivalent of a severe postpartum depression.
He’d told her, of course. He’d tried and tried to make her go get help. She had hated him so damn much every time he said, It’s not that bad, Kai, it’s okay, we’ve still got you and me, you’re just not seeing that in the end this is just a minor thing.
A minor thing.
A minor thing.
He’d tried to recoup, tried to explain that he wasn’t trying to diminish her grief—her grief—that minor wasn’t what he really meant, that he was just trying to say that sticking together was more important than anything else, but she just couldn’t get past it—her grief and her rage. She couldn’t get past anything he did or said or tried. She hated him for all of it.
Honey, I think there’s something wrong with you.
And she had screamed, I know there’s something wrong with me! Why is it me? Why is it me? Maybe it’s you! Maybe it’s your damn sperm that don’t work!
No, Kai, I meant—honey, I know you’re sad. But this isn’t like you. I think you need help.
I’m sad? You don’t even fucking care, do you? You’re not sad!
Kai. Kai, please. Listen to yourself.
And she would slap her hands over her ears and run off crying, slamming doors, locking them.
He was so right. It hadn’t been like her. Hadn’t been like the woman he had married who always made him laugh, who used to make his face light up just by walking in the room, as if all his serious care dissolved into joy just to see her.
She had become another person and destroyed everything close to her in the transformation. As the closest and the most important, he had taken the greatest harm of all.