It frightened me, the loneliness left in the wake of his fury. When he came in, very late, smelling of tequila, I reached for him, sliding my hand over his chest. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He opened the space beside his ribs and I crawled into it, pressing my flesh into his. “I’m sorry, too.” He kissed my head, and held me. “I love you. I want you to stop suffering.”
I closed my eyes. “It’s over. I gave it my best.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I pressed my cheek close to his heart, and spoke a soft truth. “I just hate that it might be all the damage that’s preventing a baby. I mean, how would that be fair?”
“Oh, Pumpkin, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that’s what you were thinking.” He enveloped me in his embrace, and I melted into him, disappearing into his gentleness.
But I never stopped wishing for a part of him to live inside me, our mingled DNA traveling on into the future.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Maya
Ayaz brought me home and saw me settled, then reluctantly left me. Comfortable on the couch with a pot of tea at my elbow, I look out the french doors and think of my dad. This is not my first broken arm.
When I was four, I fell down the stairs from the front door of our building to the sidewalk below. It was a head-over-heels tumble, and the miracle was that I broke only my arm in two places, not my head or my back or my legs or my neck. Four-year-olds have soft bones, which saved me, and I wore a hooded jacket that protected my head from the concrete, but my full body weight landed on my arm. I remember standing on the top stair, and then my father cradling me many days or hours later. I dreamed a tiny devil creature was chopping at my arm with an axe, and I howled, trying to get him to stop.
My father held me, rocked me, sang songs in his deep baritone voice. Silly songs in French and English. He read to me. He bathed my face with cold water and filled plastic bags with ice to pile on my arm, fixed by surgery and not yet in a cast because it would keep swelling for a full week. I remember waking up with him slumped in sleep against the couch, his head on the cushion below my legs. His black curls fell over his face. One hand rested on my shin, securing me to the world so I wouldn’t fly away.
This is the memory that floats back to me as I lie on the couch with my broken wrist throbbing, afraid that even an ibuprofen will send me back into the spiral of addiction. Usually, I push away those memories of his good side, but lying in the living room where he reigned so often, listening to the endless sound of the sea coming to shore over and over and over and over, I hold ice on my wrist and let my father rise. In my mind, I can hear him singing in his faint accent, his voice rumbling into my ear from his chest. I can almost feel him holding my small self, and the self I am now, and I suddenly miss him starkly.
Daddy!
I’m alone in the house, and although I’ve been longing for it, now I want my father or Meadow or Rory, someone to love me and take care of me when I feel so crappy. My arm hurts like that devil with his axe is back again. Now, when I need someone, I’ve sent Meadow back to her farm, and Rory has enough to deal with, and my dad is dead.
Dead. How is that possible? How could my big, charismatic, infuriating, charming father be dead, just like that? He’s always taken up so much space in my mind and life that I feel like an earthquake has knocked everything down. Along with, you know, everything else in my entire life.
My brain offers me an image of a tall cold glass of sauvignon blanc. That will help.
And honestly, it would. It would ease my tension. I’d feel less anxious. It would make my wrist hurt less.
I text my sponsor. Bad day at work. Broke my wrist. No drugs, but damn it hurts.
Poor baby! That sounds painful. Why don’t you give me a call?
Maybe later.
The gnawing animal in my wrist and the restlessness in my soul combine to create a symphony of distress. Like a coyote, I want to howl, howl out my fury and sense of loss and pain. I want to make noise about it.
It occurs to me that there’s nothing stopping me. If I want to howl, I can. For a moment, I consider getting up and going to the french doors in a dramatic gesture—roaring out my pain at the moon like an abandoned wolf—but instead I stay right where I am. Resting a comforting hand on my belly, bracing my swelling wrist against my chest, I take in a massive breath and just . . . howl. Howl at the top of my voice, with all my fury and loss, and my fiery arm. I howl and howl, finding release and some strange solace. My voice sails out the open french doors and into the night.