When you need to laugh, let me be your joker.
When you need to cry, let me be your shoulder.
When you need to yell, let me be your endless sky.
When you need to fall, let me be the arms to catch you.
“Candace? Are you okay?”
I ignored the muffled question and subsequent rap of Harper’s knuckles on the bathroom door. She didn’t deserve to know why I cried. She would have judged me for it anyway. A grown woman crying from a bad dream. Only for me it wasn’t just a dream; I had relived one of the worst parts of my life. Harper wouldn’t understand; hell, even I didn’t understand it sometimes, how I let myself steep in the abuse, then again subconsciously chose to relive it.
In this moment I was glad for the inches of wood that separated us. I turned on the shower to make her go away. Staring my reflection down, I watched streaks of tears cut a snail’s trail through my makeup. I rested my hand on the mirror and leaned against it, the steam from the running water slowly spreading across the glass. Soon I began disappearing, the mist taking my shoulders, then neck, then finally my face. Then I was gone in the haze, merely a faceless shape.
Ever since I discovered I was pregnant, I couldn’t stop crying. Over every sappy commercial. Over the growing pile of laundry. Over a text message from Lane saying he was held up at the hospital. Over an argument with my sister-in-law who hated me. The saddest part was that I wanted her to like me, and I wanted to like her back. It was an unexpected want because, up until now, I had hated her from afar, eager to wedge distance between us. She was the competition, after all. But I empathized with her struggle against grief. We shared those same tears, that same loss, the same heartbreak. Kindred, anguished souls. Initially, I thought we could heal each other. They say to keep your friends close but your enemies closer. What happens when you want your enemy to become your friend?
After all the other pregnancies, and all the subsequent miscarriages, I had never experienced this part of pregnancy. It was like my sensations were heightened to superhuman capacity—my feelings, my sense of smell, my voracious hunger. Everything except for my physical strength, which felt sapped, like my body had been drained of all its lifeblood, leaving me limp and helpless and hungry and nauseated. How could I be both sick to my stomach and yet starving? Pregnancy hormones made no sense whatsoever.
Along with the unexplained weeping came anger. My rage became flesh. Sometimes I could visualize wrapping my fingers around a neck and squeezing the life out of the person. Harper had been my target for that whimsy. Countless nights I had crushed her throat to shut up the nagging and the criticism, imagining watching her eyes bulge until I choked out her words. The images slipped into my dreams. Then I’d awaken loathing myself for the hatred I couldn’t contain.
The dreams were another thing altogether. Some nights they featured strange sexual fantasies with my best friend from high school, a short, pimply, plump girl who looked just like you’d expect a girl named Enid to look. Other nights were plagued with nightmares about losing the baby, me reaching down between my legs, my groin soaked in blood. All of it was so horrifyingly graphic. The wild cards were the flashbacks in time. I never knew what I was going to get, whether nostalgic or traumatic. The recurring theme of my pregnancy dreams tended toward reliving my worst experiences, scratchy sandpaper memories. Like the one I couldn’t shake out of my head.
After undressing, I felt the shower water running hot and stepped inside. The water sluiced down my back, and I sobbed until I didn’t know what was water and what was tears. Little streams of sorrow circled the drain, then were gone.
I closed my eyes as the water ran over my face and let the memory wash over me . . . praying it would circle the drain and disappear with my tears.
* * *
I flinched as the front door slammed shut behind my love, now my hate, while my tears dripped on the yellowed linoleum floor. Noah had left, and knowing him, he wouldn’t be back for hours. Grime had collected in the crease near my bare toes where the wall met the baseboard. This was my corner, where the dust and hair and grease settled into the edges of the kitchen. And me—the dirtiest of them all. This corner was my hiding place when Noah’s fists got riled up. Not that I could hide from him, but at least it protected me from the fullness of his wrath. Noah usually gave up when I cowered in the corner with a kitchen chair blocking me in and him out.
Noah Gosling believed in what he called the “Rule of Thumb.” This was the width of a stick with which husbands were allowed to beat their wives. He’d read it on Wikipedia and felt the ancient practice was worth adopting as his own. If you thought the eighteenth century was long gone, you’d be wrong. Noah thought he was burying my will. He didn’t know I was a seed growing roots.
With Noah gone, I breathed. My hand rested on the barely noticeable bulge of my stomach, as if clinging to the life inside. But the blood seeping into the crease of my jeans told a different story. A story where the man I loved, the man whom I created a child with, hated me more than I hated myself.
He hated me so much that when I told him about the baby he called it entrapment. As if our nuptials years ago weren’t already a contractual bond, dumbass. He slapped me for that comment. Maybe I did want to trap him into a future with me because I loved him to a fault. Maybe I wanted to trap the best pieces of him with the best pieces of me in a tiny, beautiful, pink-skinned, better whole.
Despite the fists and the cursing, I loved the son of a bitch. Because with the darkest lows came the brightest highs. Euphoria when he held me, cradled me like a sad child, then kissed me with all the passion of a thousand lovers. I was never an open book, but with Noah I let him consume my every page. When it was good, it was mind-blowing good. But when it was bad, I bled, I died inside. And now my baby was dying with me.
No one understood my addiction to Noah. Not even me. If you asked me to explain it, I couldn’t. It was as if he had entranced me. He had charm, and a lot could be forgiven of a charming man. I was cursed to be in love with a monster. But that monster knew how to bring me to orgasm, he knew how to play with words that lured me in, he knew all of my secrets and I knew his. We were secret-keepers, dark soul mates, a tornado meets a hurricane, wrapped in a typhoon. I loved being devastated by his love.
But now I had another life to think about. The baby’s. I would give up orgasms and wordplay for the tiny human growing inside me. I had to this time. There was no other choice. If there was any chance this baby would make it, I needed to get out. Now or never. Over the years I could never do it for myself, but for my baby, I would.
I had contemplated killing Noah. Many times, in fact. It would be easy to claim self-defense, with my bruises as my witness. But every time I felt the urge, made a plan . . . I simply couldn’t. I loved him too damn much. He had saved me when I lost my parents. I owed him enough to let him live.
I stripped off the bloody jeans and panties, leaving them in the corner behind me. I found a pair of stretchy yoga pants in the laundry room, ones that comfortably fit my rounding belly. I grabbed a handful more, along with underwear and several oversized T-shirts, then grabbed the biggest duffel bag I could find in the bedroom closet. Noah’s old, faded green military duffel, one not earned but purchased at a thrift store—he’d never served a day in his life. “Independent thinkers like me don’t make it in the military. We’re leaders, not followers.” Except that Noah was neither of those things. Noah just was.
I shoved the clothes I could grow into, along with the barest of necessities, into the bag with the hopes that I would indeed keep growing. If I lost the baby, there was no point in me leaving, was there? Because I had nowhere to go and nothing to go to. I was never strong enough, or brave enough, to forge my own path, but for my child I would be strong and brave. As I buckled up the only possessions I could heft over my shoulder, I vowed never to let Noah find me. Or to let him lay hands on me, or my baby, again.
Next, I needed cash. The little that we had saved up could get me an Uber and a bus ticket out of town. It could get me a few nights in a seedy motel until I found something more permanent. To my benefit, Noah didn’t believe in banks. “That’s how the government keeps track of you,” he warned ominously. “Money is how they control you.” Noah was passionate that way. When he believed in something, or was against something, he followed through. So, instead of depositing his paychecks into the safekeeping of a federally insured bank, he cashed his checks and hid the money in a red Folgers Coffee can on his dresser, the first place a thief in the night would look. Popping the lid off, I grabbed the entire wad of cash.
A dollar for my tears? How about interest?
Almost $500, I counted. Enough to catch a bus to the coast. Find a small town where I could start over. Raise my baby somewhere safe, and beachy, and sun-kissed. Somewhere far away from Noah.
I pocketed the bills, pausing to look at a picture sitting on my memory box, as I called it. The image contained me, Noah, and his parents back when we first started dating as teenagers. He’d been my friend through childhood, helped me survive losing my parents. Somewhere along the way the friendship turned to young, dumb love. I couldn’t leave behind my small wooden memory box, the only nice thing my father ever made me, full of both happy and crappy memories, so I placed the picture inside it and slid it into my duffel. Tossing the bag over my shoulder, I walked out the door, following the cracked concrete sidewalk toward an unknown future. I didn’t know where exactly I was going, but I knew where I was coming from. And I would never go back. My old story had been told, a tale about a victim. As my stride grew more confident, and the sidewalk more level, I wrote a new story. A story for my baby and for myself about a woman who became the victor. No matter what—or who—it cost.