Broken in Soft Places

by Fiona Zedde

  “Rille usually picks up the mail,” she said, as if explaining something he didn’t know.

  With her hair twisted into a tight bun, long-sleeved white shirt tucked into navy slacks, high heels braced against the tile floor, it could have been Sara after any day at work. But tears ran unchecked down her face. Breath hitched at the back of her throat like a too-quick metronome. She was wrecked.

  Stephen put the mail in the basket and urged Sara to sit at the kitchen table. He made her a cup of hot chocolate and sat with her until the tears dried and she was in control of herself again.

  On Friday evening, seven days after the accident, Stephen came near the end of his own breaking point. He leaned over Rille’s bed, terrified by the absolute stillness in her face.

  What if this was all there was? He looked around the cool hospital room. What if she never recovered? Could he spend the rest of his life in this room, watching and waiting?

  “Wake up, dammit!” He shook her. “Stop being so goddamned selfish.”

  She was nothing but meat in his hands, flopping and loose-limbed. Her face stayed slack. The monitor beeped its relentlessly even rhythm.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sara’s voice jerked him upright over the bed.

  “I’m trying to do something.” He swung to face her. “If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t be here.”

  Sara’s face slammed shut. All emotion, the worry in her voice, dropped away as if they had never been. She became stone. “Do you think you’re telling me something I haven’t thought of myself?”

  He felt the scorn of her eyes on him, a single searing glance that pushed him back into the chair at Rille’s bedside. Sara walked deeper into the room, looking Rille over as if checking for some damage that Stephen might have done. Then she sat in the chair farthest away from the bed. Not bothering to look at him, she threw the brown paper bag she carried into the trash can and dug into her purse, emerging with the day’s paper. It rustled angrily as she opened it in front of her face.

  Stephen sat, regret sitting hard on his chest. I’m sorry. The words hovered just beyond his lips, but he couldn’t make himself say them. He felt them. He knew Sara wasn’t to blame. There was nothing to blame except maybe fate and unfortunate circumstances, but he needed this anger. He needed something to burn away the yawning ache in him. He needed it.

  “Sara…”

  The newspaper before her face slowly lowered. Tears. Tears dripped away from the wide misery of her eyes.

  “Oh fuck.” He moved toward her.

  The newspaper crumpled in her hands then fell to the floor as she stood. Sara backed away from him and out the door. He followed.

  “Sara!”

  But she didn’t stop, only hurried down the brightly lit corridor, ignoring the curious stares of nurses and patients she shot past.

  “Sara,” someone else called out.

  Farther down the hall, a tall gray-haired man Stephen didn’t immediately recognize walked toward Sara. A slender figure followed behind like a ghost.

  “Daddy?” Sara stopped, hands flying to her mouth. “Daddy.” She sagged where she stood, like a puppet with its strings abruptly cut. Then started running and didn’t stop until the sturdy figure caught her against his chest. Sara’s father wrapped his arms around her, pressed his cheek into her hair, hugged her as she released deep, heaving sobs into his shirtfront.

  Stephen shoved his hands in his pockets and slowly approached them until he stood mere inches away from the woman he used to think was the most controlled person he’d ever known. Her cries drowned the sound of his pounding heart.

  Sara lifted herself from her father’s chest, palming away tears.

  “What are you doing here, Daddy?”

  His forehead rippled as he rubbed a soothing hand down her back. “I never got a response from Merille to my last letter so I got a little worried.” From him, Rille’s full name had cadence of comfort and familiarity to it, unlike when her mother, Beverly, said it. Neville Chambers continued. “A few days ago, I called the house and Stephen told me what happened. We got on the first flight we could.”

  “We?” Sara looked past her father.

  Stephen felt the shock in her from where he stood. She took a step forward, as if pulled against her will toward the slim woman behind Neville Chambers. But she reeled herself in and held fast to her father’s arm instead.

  “Mama?” She looked confused. Wary.

  “We were both worried. We still are.” Neville shook her arm, gently, bringing her eyes back to him. “How is Merille?”

  “The same. She’s the same.” She looked at her mother, then away.

  “Take us,” her father said.

  Stephen stepped up. “Neville, I’m glad you could come.” Sara’s father shook his hand and smiled gratefully at him.

  “Stephen. Thanks for everything.”

  A few days before when Stephen had answered the phone call from Sara’s father, he had been shaken from the routine of grief. It never occurred to him to call Neville Chambers and let him know that his daughter’s girlfriend was in the hospital. He didn’t even know that Sara’s father and Rille were close. But apart from that, he knew that Sara was hurting and needed her father’s support.

  Without hesitation, he made the arrangements to fly Sara’s parents to Atlanta to be there for her.

  “It’s the least I could do, sir, for both of you.” Stephen made sure his smile included Mrs. Chambers. She wavered at her husband’s side, not with uncertainty but with a reserve born from years of practice. Stephen had never met Millicent Chambers before now but had heard her husband and daughter talk enough about her to form his own opinion. He’d never shared those opinions with Sara. “Rille is just down the hall.”

  In the room, Neville stood at Rille’s bedside. “Oh my Jesus.” He touched her face. “She didn’t deserve this.” He closed his eyes.

  Uncomfortable with any show of religiosity, Stephen wanted to leave the room. But for Sara, he stayed. Still hidden in his pockets, his fists clenched. He backed up until the wall supported him.

  Sara’s mother, once she came all the way into the room, kept glancing between Rille’s body in the bed and Sara who stood pressed tight to her father’s side with clasped hands pressed to her chest, as if Neville’s mere presence in the room would make Rille better.

  Neville put his hand to Rille’s forehead. He offered his prayers. But Rille didn’t rise and walk. She did nothing but lay there and play dead. Stephen stood apart from them, his emotions clenched in his fists, and hoped anyway.

  At the end of visiting hours, they piled into Sara’s car and went home. While she showed her parents to the guest room and gave them a tour of the house, Stephen made a simple dinner. Black beans and rice with steamed broccoli on the side. Mechanically, he set four places at the table and sat down with a cold beer, waiting for them to finish upstairs.

  Neville and Millicent Chambers’ presence in the house banished the sense of emptiness that had lived in it since Rille went into the hospital. Their soft voiced conversations. Sara’s uncertain almost girlish tone. The way she leaned on her parents the way she had never done with him. Even on the mother who had abandoned her. But why should he expect her to rely on him? He’d been the one to encroach on her relationship with Rille. He knew what he was doing four years ago. He knew she hated what he had become to Rille.

  Over the years, he’d simply hoped that she would get used to the idea and the reality of him. Of him being in their shared bed and in Rille’s heart. Rille was too big of a personality, too magnanimous of a lover to have just one lover of her own. Sara was too selfish to see that. This had been his rationale. And now? He sipped his beer, the bottle a cool, wet slide between his lips. The sound of footsteps against the hardwoods approached the dining room. Three voices moving seamlessly together in a delicate wave, moving closer.

  After dinner, Stephen slipped away to the workout room to give Sara and her par
ents privacy. Breaths. Muscles burning. Mind numb. He dead-lifted the seventy-five pound weighted barbell, grunting as it tugged at his forearms, the muscles in his ass, legs and back. One. Two. Three. Pungent sweat, his own, snaked into his nose, conjuring the last time he was in this room.

  Rille slipping in to watch him, watch him sweat. Her mouth curved up, but there was no humor in her face, only a coveting, a naked craving that made him feel worthwhile and bursting, the clear control of her gaze on his straining body, that gaze that became like a touch on his heated skin until all of his body, flush with arousal, cock hard as his back pressed into the weight bench, the fifty-pound stacked barbell trembling above his head, his body working as much against the weight as Rille’s eyes on him, pressing into him like a fist.

  And only when he was done, when the hour was up and his body was a twitching, adrenaline-infused mass, did she come to him. Eyes and cunt greedy, body dry against his wet, mouth drinking his salt. And after, always after, she kissed him gently, sipping his breath, rolling his lower lip between her teeth, feeding him her love.

  A moan jerked the weight from his hands. The barbell slammed into the floor with a thud and rolled once. Stephen dropped to his knees, his breath coming rapidly, as if he’d run a useless distance only to end up at the same place. He doubled over, squeezed his hot face into the mat that smelled thickly of sweat and effort and Rille. Oh God. Oh God. He couldn’t bear it again. He couldn’t. Sound tore out of him in a grating howl that he pressed into the mat. The plastic was bitter and salty under his tongue.

  He gathered himself. He gathered himself slowly. Stood, wiped his face, and shrugged off the sadness. With steady hands, he retrieved the errant barbell and replaced it on the stand before leaving the room, not looking back into its emptiness as he headed for the shower. Wet comfort. Tile against his palms. His tears hidden in the hot stream over his head and face. As he dressed, he listened for Sara and her parents, that whispering closeness that excluded him. That whispering closeness that he’d had with his own parents so long ago.

  The house sat quiet and still as he crept through its dim corridors, bare-chested. Barefooted. Loose pants an indifferent caress against his thighs and legs. He settled into the sitting room, stretching his body into one of the chairs before the naked bay window, resting his feet on the sill framing their lamp-lit front yard and the dark street beyond. His loneliness was utter. This is how it begins, he thought, his mind drifting to his life before Rille had appeared to take its reins into her hands. A desert.

  He felt Sara’s presence in the room before he heard it. The shifting indecision in her once she saw that he already claimed space there. But after that hesitation, she came and sat near him, keeping the empty chair—Rille’s chair—between them.

  “I’m sorry about earlier.” Stephen offered the apology before the tension could lengthen. “This thing has been hard on me, but I know it’s been hard on you too. I was out of line.”

  Sara nodded. She curled into the plush armchair, her tall body in tights and T-shirt morphing into a child’s. “I don’t know what my mother is doing here,” she said.

  It took him a moment to shift the focus of his thoughts.

  “Did you ask her?” Stephen asked.

  “No.”

  “You should.” When she focused her intent gaze his way, Stephen nearly flinched. “I’m just guessing, but I think she’s here to support you through this. Not do anything sinister.”

  “But why? She doesn’t know who I am, and I sure as hell don’t know her.” Sara steadily watched Stephen. “Rille is my lesbian lover. Mama threw me out because I’m a dyke. Rille is in the hospital, but I’m still a dyke. Nothing’s changed.”

  “But maybe she has.”

  “Hm.” The chair creaked as she moved again. Silence descended between them. Another creak of the chair. “Do you think she’ll die?”

  Stephen blinked against a sudden sting at the back of his eyes. He drew a silent breath before answering. “I don’t want to think.”

  Instead of thinking, he wanted to wait and sit in his hope. Make dinner and go to work and take care of their family until Rille came home again. But he wasn’t taking care of things. In the wake of Rille’s accident, Sara was diminished. Her façade of icy control that he’d recognized from the very beginning as just that, lay around her in pieces. Hurt lingered just at the corners of her eyes. Her mouth seemed always on the verge of a tremor. It shouldn’t be like this. He never wanted to break her. He never wanted Rille to break her. Even with her death.

  Beside him, Sara lay unmoving in her chair, head leaned back, her knees tucked into her chest. Despite her vulnerable pose, he knew she wouldn’t welcome any pitying words from him.

  “I met Rille’s new girl,” he said, deciding to follow her random pattern of conversation. “Nazrin.”

  A soft sound left Sara’s throat. She lifted her head in surprise, and he felt the steady weight of her eyes.

  “And?”

  And he’d been struck by how young she was. None of her qualities that Rille had gushed about afterward had been apparent to him. The girl, like a guppy, was unformed and uninteresting. Did she even have any sort of personality to fall in love with? Her body was spectacular, and probably that was the thing that had lured Rille so effectively.

  “I called Rille a dirty old bitch.”

  A smile ghosted across Sara’s face. “She’s that young, huh?”

  “Very. I doubt she’s even twenty.” And a young twenty, at that, Stephen thought, recalling the pretty girl who’d seemed tough, but overwhelmed by Rille’s attentions.

  “That’s too young, though.” Sara frowned. “A girl that age has her whole life in front of her. It wouldn’t be fair of Rille to pull her into this with us.”

  “Do you think it’s that serious?”

  “You know it is. She’s working her up to moving that girl in. I can feel it.” Sara paused. “Rille wants to invite Nazrin to dinner here at the house. The other day she asked me about it.”

  Stephen couldn’t help but notice Sara’s words. She’s working. Rille wants. As if she didn’t believe for a moment that Rille wouldn’t wake up from her coma. Would not continue her life as it had been before the accident.

  “Do you think she told Nazrin about her HIV?” Sara asked softly.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Stephen replied after a surprised breath. “With me—” He cleared his throat, overcome by memories of that night Rille revealed herself to him in the deliberately bright bedroom of his old condo. She, already naked, with her voice low and serious as she shared her condition. Stephen, too far gone to care less. “With me,” he continued, “she was honest, but not until four months after we started seeing each other. At Sara’s shocked look, he shook his head. “She told me before we slept together.”

  “Jesus! After four months of cock-teasing I’m sure you would have fucked a dead chicken by that point.”

  Stephen flushed, unable to deny it. He hadn’t had such a bad case of blue balls since high school. Although with Rille it had been more than the promise of sex. Her unshakable confidence, the idea that he could both lose and find himself in her. Those things had kept him at her feet after she told him about the HIV.

  He pushed the subject away from him. “Nazrin is young enough for her youth to be an advantage in more ways than the obvious. Most people under twenty-five don’t think of HIV and AIDS as any big deal these days. If and when Rille tells her, she’ll probably dismiss it as just another thing to live with, like herpes or hereditary baldness.”

  “Neither of which we have any experience with,” Sara said dryly.

  “Thank God,” Stephen said, running a hand over his thick hair.

  A weak laugh trickled from Sara’s lips.

  Then her smile disappeared. “You know, I think Rille is trying to capture college again. Back when she was the big girl on campus and all the little freshers tossed their panties after her.” She made a noise of disgust. The old Sara coming
back.

  “Was it really like that for her?”

  “Yes. I was one of those freshers. So eager to have a taste of her.” She spat a laugh, the opposite of amusement. “I got a taste all right. It almost killed me.”

  “But you survived.”

  “Did I?” Her eyes lifted. “Rille’s going around searching for a repeat of her college experience. Unfortunately, she resurrected mine in the process. I’d rather have left all that uncertainty in the past. But here it is again, and that feeling of death looming. And my mother.” She glanced quickly at him in embarrassment. She’d shared too much, her gaze said.

  Stephen shrugged. “But it’s not like before,” he said, fumbling his way toward reassurance. “This is nothing like college, despite all the surface shit. You don’t see a beer bong or naked frat pledges around here, do you?”

  That faint smile came again. The beginnings of an arch look. “I have no idea what you have hidden up there in your so-called workout room.”

  Stephen chuckled, glad for the bit of unexpected humor between them. There hadn’t been much throughout the years, he shamefully realized. At least not without Rille initiating it. The reminder of Sara sent a lance of sadness tearing through him. He peered briefly toward Sara’s face, but she had turned away.

  Her chair creaked. “I’m heading up to bed.” Sara rose to her feet, squeezing his shoulder as she brushed past.

  “Good night,” Stephen murmured.

  Alone in the darkness, he listened to the unique silence of a house asleep. Noises he barely paid attention to during his waking hours. From the kitchen, the faint hum of the refrigerator. Rille’s antique clock ticking above the fireplace. Somewhere close, a dog barking.

  Was he the one responsible for all this?

  He had come fully into Rille’s life knowing that Sara already existed in it. Knowing that she would be hurt by his presence. If he said no to Rille four years ago and told her he wanted no part of what she already had with Sara, maybe they wouldn’t be at this point. No Rille in that hospital bed. No tears.