“I . . . I . . .”
Moving swiftly toward me, he swept me up and against the wall. “God, I have to have you.” He was out of breath. “Please.”
“Nate, I . . .”
He pulled away again and braced my shoulders. “Forget about him.”
My eyes shot open. I was shocked by the harshness of his statement. “What are you saying? How could I forget about him? He was my husband and I loved him. I still love him.”
Anyway, what happened to taking it slow?
He dropped his head in dejection. When he glanced back up, he looked absolutely shattered. Yet he remained undeterred in his pleas. “He killed himself, Ava. He left you behind.”
The passionate heat I felt before boiled over into anger. When he arched his eyebrows as if he wanted a response, I lost it. “I remember! I remember every moment before and every heart-shattering moment after. You don’t because you weren’t there. You don’t know what it feels like to watch your soul leave your body and drive away in the back of a coroner’s van. Don’t ever tell me to forget. I will never forget. I don’t know how I’ll ever be normal again when I still see his dead body on my floor every time I walk through that door. What’s worse is that I’m the reason he did it. Did you know that, Nate?” He took a step back but I didn’t let up. “Did you know that Jake would be alive right now, walking around like the rest of us, if it weren’t for me? Did you know that? Huh?” He didn’t respond, just cringed like the sound of my voice pained him. I let out a heavy breath. “I can never forget,” I said and then collapsed to the floor, dropped my head in my hands, and began sobbing.
He bent down toward me, placing his hand on my back and rubbing up and down. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say or how to make it better.” I shook my head, letting him know there was nothing he could do. A moment later, all I heard was his footsteps retreating. In a low voice he said, “I’m sorry,” again and then I heard the sound of the door shutting behind him.
It was hard for me to explain to Nate that every time I thought about moving on with my life, I would think about the last words Jake had spoken to me. You want to come with me, don’t you? he’d said over and over. It played in my mind like a broken record. I constantly wondered what Jake was thinking in those final days or even the final moments right before he mouthed, I love you, then put a gun in his mouth.
I remembered one time, before his accident, when he told me that he felt like we were born as two halves of the same heart, like one of those friendship trinkets with two pieces that interlock along a fractured edge. When we came together, we fused so tightly that the heart became solid again, no visible signs or even the memory of a fracture. When Jake pulled the trigger, the sound of that gunshot shattered our shared heart into a million pieces. After his death, I searched for those pieces for years. I was desperate to find them, just as a reminder that our love had existed.
One time Bea told me to say a Catholic prayer but to substitute the word God with love. The first line I said was, “I believe in love.”
She said, “See, same thing.”
How do we keep going knowing that the same love that brought us here could push us apart? How could I call that love?
When you lose faith in love, you lose a sense of who you are. I was smart enough to know that what Jake did was selfish but was also sad for him. His pathetic legacy had left me feeling sorry for him for what felt like an eternity. It made me resent him. I tried to hear Trish’s words, to remember Jake during the good times, but when he took his life he destroyed my sense of self-worth, and for that I was angry. I was mad, heartbroken, and guilt-ridden, which left me too paralyzed to move forward. How ironic.
CHAPTER 10
From Where I Stand
Nathanial
“You enjoying your steak and eggs?”
“Mmm, Bea’s still got it,” my father said from the round breakfast table in the kitchen the next morning. Bea and Redman had already gone out to work, leaving my father alone in his joyful gluttony. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down with him.
“You’re a heart doctor, you must know how much cholesterol is in that meal.”
“Moderation is the key, Nate. You don’t have to cut out everything.”
When he began gnawing on the steak bone, I looked away. “We’re leaving today?”
“Actually, I told Dale we’d go out with him to do his rounds and spend one more night here and head out tomorrow.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his belly. “I’m enjoying this.”
“I bet. You don’t have Mom measuring your portions.”
“Speaking of beautiful women, what exactly did I walk in on last night?”
It was the beginning of the father/son conversation I had always craved, but I found myself at a loss for how to explain the situation. “I was just hugging her.”
“On your lap?”
“I like her.”
“Ahh. So that’s what happened. I wondered why you weren’t hassling me to come back to the hospital.”
“Do you know anything about her?” I asked him.
“Your uncle filled me in.”
“She’s very . . . I don’t know . . . guarded. But when she’s not around other people she’s funny and smart and sweet.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, I suppose,” he said earnestly.
“I don’t think she can let herself really get to know anyone, though.”