by Megan Walker
“Maybe you are,” he says. “But it’s understandable weird. I take it Anna-Marie doesn’t agree?”
“She says she gets it,” I say. “And we decided to try IVF. But she’s so upset that her body won’t do what she wants it to, and it’s affecting us, and her work, and I know I’m making it worse by not letting her just move the problem into somebody else’s womb.”
“When you put it that way,” Felix says, “it’s definitely weird.”
I laugh. “Yeah, okay.” We both eat for a minute, and I try to breathe. I can’t really get out of this conversation politely without at least asking what’s going on that he needs to talk about. “What’s going on with you guys? How’s the new baby?”
Felix smiles at me. “You don’t want to hear about that. But it’s good. Mostly.”
“Yeah? Is Ty doing okay with it?” I don’t know the kid very well, just enough to know that he basically worships Felix for coming into his life and being the father he’d never had.
“Yeah, Ty’s great,” Felix says. “He’s so happy to finally have a sibling. I think he’s even adjusting to it being a little sister.” He takes a deep breath. “But Jenna’s having a hard time. She’s got all these ideas about this being her chance to make up for how she wasn’t there for Ty. I mean, she was fifteen, so it’s not like she’s to blame for that, but she always felt like she was missing out on being a mom for that part of his life, you know? So she wants everything to be perfect, and she wants to do everything herself, when clearly she’s exhausted. And she has me and her parents, and I keep telling her that not every mom is an island of nurturing unto herself . . .” He sighs. “I know. It’s a stupid thing to complain about to someone who desperately wants a kid, but—”
“No, actually,” I say. “God, that’ll probably be us if we ever manage to get pregnant. We’re going to be so obsessed with being perfect parents and feel guilty for complaining about anything, because we wanted it so badly.” I shrug. “Maybe it’s nice to hear about someone appreciating the opportunity too much instead of not appreciating it enough.”
“Yeah,” Felix says. “Exactly. Like, dude, childcare is hard. Not getting sleep is not great. It doesn’t matter how much you love the kid or how long you waited for the opportunity, everyone needs some help and everyone needs to complain a little.”
“I think I need to have that stitched on a pillow. I’m definitely not going to remember it when we eventually get there.”
“I’ll make myself a memo,” Felix says, “and remind you.”
I laugh. This is still weird as hell, but I have to admit it does feel good to talk with someone who isn’t involved, and also isn’t going to tell me I’m an idiot.
I love Ben, but this is his reaction to many, many things.
Felix raises an eyebrow. “So when are you going to talk to Anna-Marie?”
“I don’t know. When are you going to talk to Jenna?”
He grins. “You got me. I know I’m not supposed to let this stuff fester. We’ve been through that a hundred times. But having a newborn does not feel like a great time to piss off my wife by telling her she’s making herself crazy trying to be perfect, you know?”
“Yeah, I do,” I say. “But one month slides into another month and another—”
“Right.” He chews on his sandwich and then nods, like he’s decided something. “Okay. I’ll talk to Jenna tonight if you talk to Anna-Marie.”
“Ha,” I say. “I have to, because Ben’s moving into my guest room. But yeah, if it’ll make you get off your ass and have the hard conversation, I’ll pretend this is what motivates me. Done.”
Felix groans. “I walked into that one. But yeah, okay.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
He shrugs. “Talking.”
I’m not sure what he could possibly have gotten out of listening to me whine, but I shrug back. “Sure, no problem.”
I finish my sandwich, go back to work, and try not to feel too weird about the strange anomaly of having told all those things to Anna-Marie’s best friend’s brother.
I hope Gabby is the only one in the family with a tendency to talk too much.
Six
Felix
When I get home from set, having finally succeeded in getting Axel Dane to hold his damn cello, even if he didn’t do it particularly well, I find Ty absorbed in watching Pokémon on the couch.
“Where’s Mom and Rachel?” I ask.
“Upstairs,” he says. “Rachel was crying again.”
Fantastic. I head upstairs and ease open the door to the nursery as quietly as I can.
Jenna is curled up on the big comfy chair that Ty picked out for the nursery. The back of the chair is the head of a giant plush bear, and the arms have plush bear claws at the end. It’s adorable, if impractical, and it was one of the things that convinced Ty to feel good about giving up his room, so in all, it was a net gain. She looks like she’s about to fall asleep, but she’s humming the song she wrote for us, “You are the Story,” which was one of our first hit singles. Normally I love when she sings that song—how can I not, when it’s all about how deeply in love we are?—but now she sounds desperate, as if this mantra alone will keep Rachel asleep in her arms.
“Hey,” I whisper softly, and Jenna looks up at me.
“Hey,” she responds.
“Let me take a turn? Or I can see if I can put her down, and you can grab a shower.” Jenna’s still wearing the clothes she woke up in this morning, so I gather that hasn’t happened today.
Jenna shakes her head. “No, I’ve got it.”
She’s cradling Rachel, and while I don’t want to deprive her of baby snuggle time, the way her brow creases makes me think that she’s actually had plenty of baby snuggles, and she needs a break.
“Come on,” I whisper. “I need a little Rachel time anyway. If she wakes up, I’ll walk her until she falls asleep again.”
Jenna shakes her head. “I don’t want to put her down.”
I press my lips together. It looks like it won’t be all that hard to bring this up.
“I need to talk to you,” I say. “Let me put her down, or you do it, and let’s go sit in our room.”
Jenna shakes her head again. “I need to get dinner finished, and Ty needs help with his homework, and—”
“And it can wait.”
Jenna looks up at me, and there’s a hard edge to her expression. I don’t want to upset her, and I definitely don’t want to make her life any harder than it is.
But if we don’t talk about this, it’s only going to get worse.
“Fine,” she says, and she stands. Rachel lets out a long whine that angles up toward a piercing cry, and Jenna’s face crumples.
“I’ve got it,” I tell her, taking Rachel. “You go shower, and by the time you’re done, I’ll have her down. Okay?”
Jenna looks at me like I’m patronizing her, and maybe I am. But people who’ve had no sleep and have been pacifying an infant all day apparently need someone to occasionally remind them to take care of basic things like having ten minutes alone in a shower.
Jenna leaves and shuts the door, and a minute later I hear the water running. I put Rachel on my shoulder and walk back and forth, singing her a slow, lullaby-style version of Johnny Cash’s “Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog.”
By the time the water stops, I’ve got Rachel down in her crib, her arms stretched up over her head and her little fingers clenched into tiny fists. I stand there and stare at her for a minute, and I can see why Jenna was reluctant to leave her. There’s something soothing about being in the presence of a sleeping baby.
Still, nothing compares to Rachel smiles.
I turn around and open the door as silently as I can, and then ease it closed again. When I get to our room, Jenna has put on another pair of comfy pants
and a t-shirt, her damp dark hair pulled back into a bun.
“You got her down?” Jenna asks.
“Yeah. Though who knows how long it’ll last.”
“The baby monitor is downstairs.”
I sit down on the bed and pat the bed beside me. We still have the same bedroom furniture she had before she met me—the black and white dresser, still covered with her sheet music and new recipes, the lamp with Ty’s old macaroni necklaces draped on the shade, her glasses on the nightstand. Even the same puffy white down comforter. There’s my stuff here, too—my record player and Johnny Cash LPs on the dresser, my clothes tangled with hers in the laundry basket.
It’s this perfect mix of our lives together, something I could only have dreamed of that first night.
“Rachel’s just in the next room. If she needs us, we’ll hear her.”
Jenna sighs and sits next to me. I wonder if she already knows what I’m going to say, because she’s curling into herself and is a little too interested in examining her fingernails.
Might as well not beat around the bush. “I’m worried about you,” I tell her. “I feel like you’re trying to do too much. And I know I’ve been gone the last couple days, but even when I’m here, it’s like you feel like you have to do everything.”
Jenna shrugs. “There’s a lot to do.”
“I know,” I say. “But we could get your mom to come by more, or we could hire someone. You wouldn’t even have to leave Rachel—”
“I’m fine.” She sounds like she’s begging me to believe her.
“Jenna,” I say gently. “You’re not. And I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
Jenna is quiet for a long moment. “Yeah, okay. I need to talk about it. I know I do.”
I reach for her hand and she lets me take it, but her shoulders are still hunched over. She’s silent, and I stay silent too, not wanting to pry more and annoy her.
Then she takes a deep breath. “I’ve been having flashbacks.”
Oh. That’s not what I expected at all. “Flashbacks,” I say. “To what?”
“Grant.”
Oh, shit. Grant was her ex-boyfriend, the one who tried to kidnap her at our concert two years ago and ended up stabbing me instead. He was a complete asshole even when she was dating him, and pretty hardcore abusive.
“And some other guys, too,” she continues, “but mostly Grant, the things he used to do to me. And of him stabbing you, only sometimes now it’s Ty, and sometimes I picture him taking Rachel. I don’t know if it’s because I have a daughter, and I’m so scared about those things happening to her, like someone is going to come out of my past and hurt her.” Her voice trembles.
I wrap my arm around her. “That isn’t going to happen.”
“But it did happen,” Jenna says. “And yeah, I know it’s not likely, but I don’t know if I can protect her.”
“Okay. Do you want to increase security? We could hire someone, or—”
“No. I’m handling it. It’s just . . .” She shrugs. “I’m not sleeping very well.”
“Yeah, neither of us are.”
“But even when Rachel lets me, I keep waking up, expecting Grant to be there, or Rachel to be gone.”
I look down at her, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. “You could have told me,” I say.
Jenna shrugs again, and it stings. This is supposed to be a thing with us, a thing we’ve learned over and over again. “We have to keep talking to each other about this stuff.”
“Maybe,” Jenna says. “But I’m tired of talking about it.”
I feel like I’m failing her, but I know better than to spiral down into those thoughts. They don’t do either of us any favors. “Maybe we should get you an appointment with someone. A therapist. You’ve talked about doing that forever, but you always say now isn’t a good time.”
“I know,” she says, “but now is legitimately a really bad time. I have a six-week-old. I can barely stay on top of things as it is.”
“The point of therapy is to help you feel more on top of things.”
“But you haven’t been going,” she points out.
That’s true. I’d dropped down to seeing Cecily every other week about a year ago, and then bumped it back up to every week when I started tapering down the Suboxone. That’s gone so well, though, that I decided to take a month or two off when we had Rachel, and told Cecily I’d call her when I was ready to come back, or if I felt like my sobriety was sliding.
It hasn’t, which has been a huge relief.
“That’s true,” I say. “And it’s probably time for me to go back. I could find you someone and make you an appointment, too.”
Jenna shakes her head. “I’m not ready for that right now. What if talking about it makes it worse?”
“That’s not what’s happened in the past.”
“I’m just not ready,” Jenna says.
I sigh. “Okay. I’m not going to insist that you go, but you do have to talk to me. That’s part of the deal, right?”
She stares down at her hands, and her fingers fidget against her knees. “It’s just frustrating to talk about it when there’s no solution. It’s not like it’s anything new. Just the same old stuff.” She looks back up at me. “Is there something you do in therapy that might help?”
“I don’t know.” I think about it for a minute. I want to have some tools I can hand her, or better yet, an easy solution. But I’m sure that second part doesn’t exist. “Honestly, most of what’s been useful to me is twelve step. You’re not an addict, so I don’t know if it would help, but it’s what I know.”
She nods, sucking in her lips. “I know you’ve talked about this a thousand times, but I still don’t remember which step is which.”
“Step one,” I say, “is admitting you have a problem, and that your life has become unmanageable.”
“My life isn’t unmanageable.” There’s a defensive edge to her voice, and I’ve heard it before.
“Yeah, well, step one is where you start admitting that you’re not in control, and that your best efforts to stay in control haven’t been enough.”
Jenna frowns. “I don’t see how it’s going to fix my flashbacks to decide I’m not in control. Maybe things are hard, but I am managing.”
“I’m not trying to say you aren’t,” I say quickly. “And yeah, maybe it won’t help you, because you’re not an addict. But all I know is that as long as I kept telling myself I was handling things, the tighter I held to the things that were killing me. But trauma and heroin are totally different things.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she says. “Do you think that means the steps can’t fix me?”
“The steps can’t fix anybody. It’s not about being fixed. It’s about admitting you’re broken, and starting to heal.”
Jenna stares at me. “But you’ve come so far.”
I both have, and I haven’t. “I achieved a level of healing where I can avoid indulging in my addiction, and where I’m treating the underlying psychology that would lead me back to the needle. But the truth is, I’m not fixed. I’ll never be fixed.”
Jenna folds in on herself further, and I close my eyes. “Which doesn’t mean you can’t be,” I say. “It’s not the same.”
Really, though, I’m not sure that trauma can be fixed either. Not in the sense that the problem goes away entirely. In that way, it seems likely to be similar to sobriety. A condition to be managed, not something that can be cured.
I have a feeling, though, that saying that at this moment isn’t going to help.
“Okay,” Jenna says. “What’s the next step?”
Step two doesn’t matter until you’ve mastered step one, and even if it could help Jenna, she’s not there yet. But she’s still talking to me, so I decide to answer her. “Step two is where you recognize that God has power to heal you, a powe
r you don’t have by yourself. And step three is where you decide you’re going to let him.”
“That sounds helpful. It’s a lot like what the church teaches about Jesus Christ.”
“Right. It’s just like that.”
I was an atheist before my last stint in rehab, when I was finally ready to admit that maybe I didn’t know everything about the universe, and when I became desperate for the solace that comes from believing in redemption and an afterlife. I wasn’t sure if I was just being hopeful until I met Jenna, and the way that the three of us became a family felt like proof positive that a force bigger than myself had nudged us all together and let us know, instinctively, that we belonged together.
“And then what?”
“Then step four,” I say. “Which after step one is probably the worst of them all. It’s where you make an inventory of all the things you’ve done, good and bad, so you have an honest accounting of who you are.”
Jenna leans into me. “I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been.”
“Yeah, it sucked. It’s hard to look at yourself honestly like that. And in step five, you share your inventory with someone, and it’s their job to help you figure out where you’re letting yourself off the hook too easily, and also where you’re being too hard on yourself. So you’re not taking more or less responsibility for your actions than is due. Just the right amount.”
She swallows. “I don’t want to do that.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to. I was just telling you about the steps because you asked.”
Jenna wraps her arms tight around herself. “But it’s important to you. It’s what helped you stay clean.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean you have to—”
“But you think I can’t handle being a mom. You think my life is out of control.” She closes her eyes, but not before I see them get shiny with tears.
I hug her closer, stunned. “That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s true,” Jenna says. “I have a problem, and I can’t handle it.”
That’s technically what step one is about, but there’s so much judgment in her voice. She’s not admitting a problem, only hating herself for it. “Jenna,” I say, “I’m not trying to change you. I think you’re a great mom. But you’re struggling, and I want you to get help. Sometimes, you see someone pulling on a door, and you just want to tell them, ‘Hey, the sign says push.’ It’s not like you want them to change. You just want them to not continue to be frustrated by the door.”
