And here I am, doing the same thing my mother did, the thing I hated most about her. I’m trying to make the pain go away by running, trying to compartmentalize the inevitable when I should be dealing with it. That strategy never worked for her, it certainly didn’t help my father, and it’s not working for me. I need to go out and apologize. Kayla is many things that I don’t like, but my behavior makes me no better, and in some ways, far worse.
As I walk down the hallway and toward the dining room, a glimmer of vibrant light steals my interest. A glass knickknack glistens from high atop a shelf, a globe, no larger than a golf ball. I pull the object down to inspect it, admiring the filamentary spatters of iridescent color in each continent. Beautiful in many ways, this tiny glass world, yet in others, so very fragile and vulnerable.
So completely loaded with aching truth.
I smile with sadness, lift the globe higher, and a ray of light shoots through, igniting it with even more color, more life. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
So I slip it into my pocket, then head back to join the others.
34
Adam and Kayla make an earnest attempt to accept my offer of reparation, then Kayla launches into her next topic; but I don’t hear much of it. I’m too distracted by an expression on Jenna’s face that seems to work its way deeper into her as the evening wears on. Uncertainty. Fear. The look of someone pulling away.
Silence widens the fissure between us when we arrive home. Jenna goes upstairs and leaves me standing in a vacuum of uncertainty. I can’t endure another minute. It crushes me to see my wife hurt this way.
When I reach our room, she’s still fully clothed and sitting up in bed, expression stoic, knees to her chest, arms wrapped around them. I close our door, and the sound brings her attention to me momentarily before she takes it away again.
I walk forward, then lower myself slowly to the edge of the bed, keeping my back to her.
Again, there is silence. And again, it’s stifling.
“I don’t know what to say.” I turn to look at her. “All I know is that I’m so very sorry.”
Jenna searches my eyes. “Chris, tell me what’s happening. Give me the truth.”
I vacillate for a few beats. “I’m not even sure.”
“You scared the hell out of Devon last night, and tonight it was as if I didn’t even know you.”
Like an axe, her comment cleaves a plumb line through the center of me, breaks me in two, because she’s the last person in the world I want to hear that from. It reactivates so much old pain that runs so deep. Pain that lies heavy at my core like some rotten and stinking piece of meat. I turn away because seeing my wife like this is excruciating—and I don’t know how to fix myself. I feel so powerless.
Jenna must sense my agony because I immediately feel her hand on my shoulder. Still, I can’t bring myself to meet her gaze.
“Chris,” she says. “Look at me.”
I shake my head. My hands are trembling.
“Don’t do this,” she persists, firming her hold on my shoulder. “Don’t shut me out. Not now. Not when you need me the most. I know it’s your old pattern, what you had to do in order to survive your father, but . . .” I hear her soft, labored breaths. I hear her pain—no, I feel it—which gives me the courage to finally turn around. She’s biting her bottom lip, shaking her head. I look at the tears filling her bottom lids.
Sliding over, I place an arm around her body, pull it against mine, but still I don’t know what to say, don’t know if there’s anything in me that can make this better. Instead, I hold my wife tight. I cling to her, hoping our physical closeness can in some way mend what now seems so terribly torn apart.
“I’ve been fighting this battle alongside you for years,” Jenna says after we’ve been quiet for a while, “and I understand it . . . and I know your pain as well as any that I could ever feel . . . and I goddamned hate the pain, Chris. I hate it every bit as much as you do, and God knows I’d do anything to take it all away. But what I don’t understand—what I can’t, hard as I try—is why, after all this time, you still think you’ve got to go through that misery alone.”
“I don’t want to,” I answer, voice no more than a crippled whisper. “I’m trying not to.”
“Baby, I know you are, but you have to try harder.”
“I’m not sure how.”
“You do it by starting with the truth. Whatever that is.”
“Then what?”
“Then you put one foot in front of the other. You walk on faith, and the answers will find you. They always do.”
I study Jenna’s confident expression, as if it might in some way give me strength to trust her wisdom. I shake my head, feel desperation in my tragic smile when I say, “I think it may be serious. I think I’m losing my mind.”
Jenna doesn’t appear surprised. It’s as if she already knew, like she’s been waiting for me to tell her.
“We need to find out why,” she says.
“I’m scared.” My response comes out fast and instinctual, like it’s been fighting for air.
“Then we’ll do that together, too.”
“Adam is arranging an MRI.”
“Good.”
“If he’s still talking to me.”
“Adam will talk to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. You’ll tell him the truth, and he’ll understand.”
I say nothing.
“He will,” she assures me, “and then whatever happens after that, you will not be alone. I won’t let you be. Do you understand?”
My nod is barely substantive, not because I don’t believe her, not even because I can’t trust or feel her commitment. The problem isn’t what I know, but rather, it’s what she doesn’t, what she never could.
That my cracking mind may be the one thing stronger than us both.
35
“I wanna see the ducks when we get there, Daddy! Can we see the ducks like last time?”
“Absolutely.” I glance at my son and smile.
It’s Sunday. Devon, Jake, and I are on our way to Anderson Lake. After my outburst at Adam and Kayla’s, I’m hoping this road trip may restore balance and, if I’m lucky, some calm to my life. But more than that, because I frightened Devon at dinner the other night, I owe him this and want to be sure our relationship is back on solid footing.