by Megan Walker
Somewhere in the middle of this, I retrieve my phone and discover I’ve missed several calls from Felix and a text saying Axel is at his house.
I don’t know what could be going on there, but it’s hours old at this point, and there’s nothing I can do for him.
Anna-Marie gets Gabby to give her a ride home while I’m still cleaning up the mess. I text Anna-Marie that I love her and I’ll see her at home when I can get there. I have to download Uber for a ride, having never used it myself, and will probably have to take another in the morning to go get us a rental car, since I think mine will be in the shop for a while.
All this time, I wait to begin to be excited about the pregnancy. I should be feeling happy about it. I should be feeling . . . anything. But it’s like my emotions are on lockdown, my entire being numb.
I’m waiting for both my Uber and my emotional response when Ben calls. “Hey,” he says. “Wyatt and I are back together.”
I reach for some ability to care about this, but I come up dry. “I’m happy for you,” I say, because I know that I must be, even if I can’t feel it right now. Ben needed this. “So the letter worked?”
“Yeah,” Ben says, his voice happier than I’ve heard it in a long, long time. “And we had a long talk about everything. After we had sex. And before we had sex again.”
“That’s great.” I sit on a bench outside of the hospital, the seat cold and hard. “Do you think you’re going to be able to work it out?”
“Yeah,” Ben says. “I don’t know how yet, but I think we’re going to try the therapy thing.”
“That’s great,” I say, and then realize I just said that.
“You okay?” Ben says. “Are you outside somewhere?”
“I’m fine.” It’s a lie, and the words taste bitter in my mouth.
I should tell him about the snake, about the accident. About the pregnancy. I know I should.
But I don’t want to dump that on him right now, and I don’t want to have to pretend that I’m happy. I don’t know what I am right now, but it isn’t that.
“I’ll tell you all about it later,” I say. “I’m guessing you and Wyatt aren’t done attacking each other?”
“Hell, no,” Ben says. “Just wanted to let you know why I won’t be there tonight. I’ll come pick up my stuff tomorrow.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I say. “I’m really happy for you.”
And before he can notice that the stress has apparently reduced me to a very few repetitive utterances, he hangs up.
I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell my best friend in the world that my wife is pregnant after two years of trying. He would have been happy for us. Overjoyed, even.
So how come I’m not?
I look down at my phone, at my log of missed calls. And while I know that Ben would hate me for this, I call Felix.
He picks up immediately. “Hey,” he says. “Jenna’s home.”
For the dozenth time tonight, I’m rendered speechless. “Really?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Someone ID’d her at a bar, and the bartender called Phil, and I went to pick her up. She’s in bed asleep now, and she was pretty drunk, so we haven’t been able to talk yet.”
“Shit. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Mostly, anyway. I’m just glad she’s back.”
I feel relief over this, anyway, if not as happy for them as I would be if I wasn’t running on empty. I watch the cars drive by on the street in front of me, blinking against the harsh headlights.
“And don’t worry about the Axel thing,” he says after a moment. “I forgot I texted you about it. I drove Axel home on the way to pick up Jenna, and yelled at his mom for sucking so bad.”
“No problem.” I rub at my eyes. “That’s actually not why I’m calling.”
“Oh,” Felix says. “What’s up?”
And while I have even less right to dump this on Felix right now than I did with Ben, somehow I know that Felix isn’t going to tell me I ought to be happy. “Tonight has been kind of a mess. Anna-Marie decided to drive my car—I’ve been bugging her about it for a long time. And we were pulling up behind one of those buses that give tours of the stars’ homes—”
“Oh, no.” Felix says. “Anna-Marie’s terrified of those things.”
“Yeah, probably more so now. Because when she was stopping behind the bus, that snake jumped out and bit her on her leg.”
“No way,” Felix says. “It was still in the car?”
“Yeah, apparently.”
“Is Anna-Marie okay?”
“Yes.” I let out a long sigh. “It was a gopher snake.”
Felix is quiet. “Seriously? After all that, it was a—”
“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.”
“Jeez. I’m sorry.”
“There’s more,” I say, even though I don’t want to. But I’m pretty sure I need to. “They ran blood work, and Anna-Marie’s pregnant.”
“Really? That’s good, right?”
I’m silent for a minute.
“Damn.” Felix’s voice is quiet. “You weren’t ready for this.”
I close my eyes. “It’s not that I’m not ready for kids in general. I was. I am.”
“So what is it, then?”
“I don’t know. I’m just, I’m not happy. And Anna-Marie is, and I don’t know what I’m going to—”
“You’re going to talk to her about it,” Felix says.
The idea makes me want to start crying again. “I want to be happy. She needs to me to be happy. But I’m just so tired. And it’s not like having a baby is going to be the end of our stress.”
“Yeah,” Felix says. “Tell me about it.”
“Right?” I grip the hard edge of the bench. “And I’m such a mess. I handled tonight so badly. Anna-Marie needed me to keep calm and tell her everything was going to be okay, and I flipped out and yelled about how she was going to die and it was all my fault, and I threw snakes at people.”
“Like, literally? You threw snakes at people?”
“It was dead.” As if it will make it better this time.
“Okay,” Felix says slowly. “But you’ve been under so much stress for so long. It was probably inevitable that you were going to snap.”
“I’m a mess,” I say. “And I may be ready to be a father in a general sense, but I sure as hell am not ready right now.”
“Yeah, okay,” Felix says. “But you’ve got a while before you have a baby that actually needs anything from you.”
This brings me closer to tears. Closer to emotion, but the kind of emotion I’m afraid to feel. “But I have a wife right now who needs me to be happy with her, and I’m going to ruin this for her. She’s waited for this for years and I’m going to wreck it. She’s never going to forgive me for this.” My voice shakes at the end.
“For what?” Felix says. “For being a human being without an infinite capacity to be strong? Do you really think that’s what she needs you to be? Because I think it would be obnoxious as hell to be married to that person.”
I pause. “Yeah, maybe.”
“It’s okay if you’re not happy. You will be. But if you don’t let yourself be what you are right now, it’s going to be a lot harder to get there.”
I sniffle. “How do you know this stuff?”
“Ha,” Felix says. “Heroin recovery. Zero stars. Do not recommend. But at least I got something out of the deal.”
I take a deep breath. My car shows up and I confirm and get in the back seat without hanging up the phone. “I’m really glad about Jenna,” I tell him. “Do you think she’s going to be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Felix says, and I can hear the stress and worry he’s still obviously feeling. “I mean, I feel a lot better about it than I did when I didn’t know where she was. But I still don�
��t know exactly what happened, or where she’s been, or what she did that she’s going to be beating herself up about for the next who-knows-how-many years.”
“But you’re going to get her treatment, right? And isn’t that what the treatment is for? So she can learn to forgive herself and handle things differently.”
“Yeah,” he says, as if this is news to him. “It’s really hard to imagine that, but I guess that’s exactly what it’s for.”
I’m glad even in my completely drained state, I can still be a little bit helpful. Even if all I have the capacity to do is state the obvious.
“We both have less fun conversations ahead of us,” I say.
“Yeah,” Felix says. “But isn’t it great to have somebody to have those conversations with?”
For the first time in hours, I smile. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
And when I get off the phone, I try to remember how lucky I am to be going home to Anna-Marie, even though I know she’s not going to like what I have to say when I get there.
Thirty-eight
Josh
When I get home, Anna-Marie is still in her slayer outfit, with bandages on her leg and her arm, sitting in the den with a small quilted blanket I don’t remember ever seeing before. It’s bright aqua with gold edging and little white shapes across it. She looks up at me as I walk in, and her smile is practically glowing. “So remember how forever ago Gabby dragged me to those community college classes?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, and plunges ahead excitedly. “I know it’s stupid, but when you and I first started trying to get pregnant, I may have gone back there and taken another class and made this baby blanket.”
I can feel my eyebrows raise, even as my stomach plunges deeper. I didn’t know about this.
She bites her lower lip, still smiling, looking down at the blanket. “I put it away, because I wanted to show it to you when we were actually pregnant, but then—” she pauses. “Anyway, look at the fabric! It’s tiny dragons!”
She holds it closer, like she wants me to take it, but I can’t seem to move my arms. But I can see that the little white shapes are dragons, and it’s adorable, and I know I should love it. It’s exactly the kind of thing I would love. I should feel anything now.
“I just couldn’t help but dig it out the minute I got home,” she says, and she looks a little guilty, probably because it’s really early to be getting her heart set on anything.
But she’s had her heart set on this for two years. We both have. There’s no use pretending otherwise.
“I get it,” I say. “You basically had to.”
Anna-Marie grins at me, and all I want is to take her in my arms and tell her how happy I am. More than anything, I want that feeling to come.
Anna-Marie’s smile fades as she looks at me.
“Can we talk?” I ask.
She nods, and moves the baby blanket out of the spot next to her on the couch.
I sit down next to her and lean my head back. “I want to be happy,” I say softly. “But I can’t.”
I can see the devastation on her face, and I want to snap the words back and pretend.
But I can’t. It won’t help. I have to feel what I’m feeling, or it’s going to last a lot longer.
“Do you,” Anna-Marie says hesitantly, “do you not want to have a baby?”
“I do,” I say. “Just not right now.”
Tears slip into her eyes, and there’s a look of panic on her face.
“I’m going to want our baby,” I say quickly, sitting forward again and taking her hand. “It’s just emotion, and I want to be honest about it.”
“Oh.” She chews on her lower lip, recalibrating. “Okay.”
“At this moment,” I say, “all I can see is how hard it’s going to be. It’s so early, and we don’t know if everything is going to be okay. And we’re going to have to wait nine months to find out for sure, and even then, how worried do you think we’re going to be about SIDS and choking and all the things that can go wrong with an infant?” I take a deep, shaky breath. “I just don’t feel like I can do it. It feels like the stress is never going to end.”
Tears start leaking out of my eyes, and Anna-Marie puts her arms around me. “Yeah,” she says. “You’re right. We need to figure out how to handle the stress a lot better than we have been, because this isn’t the end of it.”
Something inside me breaks. She’s right. We can’t change the stress; the only thing we can change is how we handle it. It seems so obvious, now that she says it.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry that I can’t hold it together. I want to be happy right now. I want to celebrate this with you. I don’t want you to have to see me like this.”
Anna-Marie takes my face in her hands. “Why not?”
“Because,” I say through the tears. “Because it hurts you.”
Anna-Marie presses her forehead to mine. “You’re hurting, Josh. I hurt with you. And yeah, sometimes I get hurt or scared myself, but so are you. We’re in this together.”
The steady leak of stress and fear gives way to a flood, and I cry harder. Anna-Marie pulls me even closer, so my head is resting on her shoulder, and it feels so good to just be with her, to just let it all go.
“It’s okay, Josh,” she says, stroking my hair. “It’s going to be okay.”
My words come out between choked sobs. “You have no idea how badly I needed to hear that.”
“Of course it’s going to be okay.”
“I think,” I say, pulling back enough to look her in the eyes. “I think I’ve been so focused on trying to keep you from being scared or hurt that I haven’t been able to tell you when I am.”
“Yeah,” Anna-Marie says, and I see tears shining in her eyes, too. “But we can both be scared and hurt at the same time.”
“Can we?” I ask. “Because I don’t want to hurt you worse. You need me to be strong for you when you’re falling apart.”
“Okay. But when do you get a turn to fall apart?”
That question makes me cry harder. “I don’t know. I guess sometimes I need a space where I can feel a thing, and that can just be okay. I feel like when I’m upset it’s always scary and painful for you, so I don’t ever get to just feel something without hurting you.”
“Oh, Josh.” Anna-Marie’s mouth drops open. “Is that what you need? Because you get so upset when you feel like I’m not being honest about my emotions right on the spot. I try to always tell you how I’m feeling, because that’s what you say you want, but I could set that aside sometimes and just be there for you.”
I sniffle. “Could you?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’d like to, even. You just get so worried that I’m not telling you everything, so I try to be honest.”
Oh, god. I did that to myself. “Yeah, okay,” I say. “I probably need to trust you that you’re not going to bury stuff just because you’re not saying it at the moment. I think I want you to be honest with me in general, and I want to be honest with you in general, but maybe neither of us should be saying everything we feel in the moment we feel it.”
Anna-Marie laughs, and swipes at a tear that has started to run down her cheek. “Seems obvious now that you say it.”
I nod. “Sometimes I think I just need to be able to feel something and have it not mean anything. For you or for me.”
“I love you so much,” Anna-Marie says, “and you’re absolutely allowed to fall apart. I think I need you to. It’s not fun to always have to be the one with all the problems.”
I grimace. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” Anna-Marie says. “I wanted to be what you needed, but I didn’t know how.”
“You are. God, you are what I need. But like you said, we need to handle stress better. And I need to be more open with you.” I wipe my face and sit back, and An
na-Marie settles in at my side.
“Okay,” she says. She squeezes my knee. “Let’s start by naming the emotions.”
I laugh. “Wonder where you got that idea.”
Anna-Marie grins up at me. “I learned from a guy who took Psych 101.”
“Yeah, okay.” I swallow. “I’m scared. I’m scared we won’t ever have children and our hearts will be broken. That makes me feel like I’m failing you, because obviously as your husband I should be able to meet every need you could possibly have, even those that are out of my control.”
“Obviously,” Anna-Marie says.
Damn, it feels good to say that out loud, hearing how little sense that last part makes. “And I’m scared of having kids,” I say. “Because it means we’ll always be afraid of losing them. We haven’t been handling fear well, and it’s never going to end, and I don’t know how to do this for the rest of our lives.”
“Do you feel like you’re ready to go back to therapy? Because I think if we go and ask for help handling stress and fear, that could be really helpful.”
I nod. “Yeah, definitely. I wasn’t ready to face it before, I think, but I can now.”
“What else?”
I think about it. My well of emotion feels full, now, and it’s the well of secrets that’s empty. “I think that’s mostly it.”
“Okay,” Anna-Marie says. She pauses for a moment before speaking again. “Objectively, other people have children without becoming balls of stress and fear for the rest of their lives, right?”
“Objectively,” I say, “most of the parents I have known are functioning adults.”
“Right. So there has to be a way to do it. We can get help and figure it out. Both of us. And probably we need to leave some of the problems to future us. Let them carry the burden of the problems that we don’t even know about yet.”
“Yeah,” I say, “future us are probably superheroes, having been through all this.”
She laughs. “Totally. Although current us is pretty badass.”
