Before Brenna, she’d won first place in a playwriting contest for her play about a group of high school students with secret superpowers and had been cast as the local playhouse’s first female Hamlet. In the two years preceding getting pregnant, she’d finished highly successful runs as Amy in Little Women, Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life, Emily Webb in Our Town, and the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After going with Hunter and Savannah to see her in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rye had given Christine two bouquets of daisies and told her she was the crème de la crème.
After they’d begun dating, to help her make some money of her own, Rye had persuaded her to try waitressing at his family’s restaurant. She was a terrible waitress. So bad that he had to beg her to quit so his mom wouldn’t have to fire her. But she was an outstanding actress. Brilliant and affecting and funny, coming alive onstage in a way she didn’t anywhere else.
After Brenna, Rye had encouraged her to start auditioning again. When she scored the role of Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the local theater, he helped her run lines, getting fully into it with her—in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom—reading Brick’s parts and Mae’s, too, in a whiny, high-pitched southern drawl. They’d collapse together on the floor, wine-buzzed, laughing from too much silliness. Those were the best days after Brenna. When previously safe things like having a glass of wine didn’t feel so dangerous anymore. She shouldn’t have been drinking on her antidepressants, but they welcomed the small rebellion because it made things feel normalish. And it was settled—Brenna was perfect and would be their only child. When she was two years old, Rye got a vasectomy and was laid up on the couch for a weekend, a nubby bag of frozen peas between his legs.
*
One evening a year later, after a bad morning and a worse afternoon, after a blowout over Christine not eating and not taking her meds, Rye suggested maybe she needed to go for a short stay at the psychiatric hospital. He was willing to try anything to calm her anxiety, anything to lift her from the concrete fog of depression. The seesaw of Christine’s moods and emotions dizzied him completely.
“This will never end. It’ll never stop. And I’m so tired,” he’d told her.
“You’re so tired? You? What about me? You want to leave me!” she’d said, her ever-present fear of abandonment snaking around them both like a boa constrictor, squeezing and squeezing.
“Christine, I promise I’m not leaving you. I’ll be back. I’m just going for a walk,” he’d said, holding her still so she couldn’t throw anything else. “Please don’t yell. Brenna’s sleeping.”
She squirmed wildly in his arms like she always did. Kicked, demanded to be let go.
“You want me dead. I’m calling the fucking cops!” she screamed before Rye closed the kitchen window.
*
“No. I’m not missing. It’s a mistake,” Rye said to Joel in the hospital hallway. “Tallie, I’ll explain. If I could talk to you alone for a little bit longer.” He was pleading with her, his eyes welling. He didn’t want to cry there in front of Joel, in front of everyone. He felt the earth dragging him down and leaned against the wall for balance.
Rye had done this to himself. He was the reason Joel was there, and Joel was the one to out him? It was too stupid to be true. Tallie had her hands up close to her chest. And for all the faces she’d made in the past few days, this was one Rye hadn’t seen before. So sad she could burst into tears, so angry she could kill him with her bare hands.
“Yeah…if you could excuse us again that would be…awesome,” Rye said to Joel, sniffing.
“Tallie, are you all right? Is everything okay?” Joel asked carefully.
“Joel, please just give us a sec,” she said.
Joel looked back and forth between them before saying he’d go find a cup of coffee.
Rye watched Joel disappear and asked Tallie if she’d step outside with him. Out the door at the end of the hallway and down flight after flight of stairs, under the darkening Sunday sky, they would be able to breathe. They wouldn’t suffocate under the antiseptic and fluorescence. Outside, they could have a chance.
But in the hallway, Tallie didn’t say a word as she began moving toward the door, practically running. Rye had to make a deliberate effort to keep up.
“I can’t do this.” Her tenuous echo bounced around the stairwell.
“Please let me explain,” he said behind her.