I am doing my part. I go see Dr. Moore once a week every Wednesday afternoon. At the beginning I thought it was a waste of time and that I had no other choice but I also knew things needed to get better. I threw all the alcohol away in my house, my office and even when we visit Alex I don't have a beer. The temper seems to be under control, I try my best but there are times where it overpowers me. It’s an everyday struggle. I still find it hard to breathe, I still have that pain inside my chest, that dark cloud that lingers over me and the only light I ever see is when I’m with Katherine and our daughter. They are that little bit of sunshine that shines through the storm.
When we get home, Katherine sits down on the couch, exhausted and rubbing her swollen belly. I still find it hard to believe that our baby is there, inside her and I can’t think of a time I’ve seen her this excited. She sees the baby as a little miracle, a little angel. She loves it. I do, too, but the fear is there. It has always been there from the moment I found out she was pregnant. Am I going to be a good father to it? Am I going to protect it the way I should? Is it going to be happy? I still doubt myself when I'm with Elizabeth, wondering if she thinks I'm a good father. Katherine makes sure to tell me every day that everything will be okay, but she hasn’t heard the thoughts that run through my head. She doesn’t know exactly how deep my fears run.
I feel her slightly push me against the couch and climb on top of me, each of her legs on the side of mine and her hands curl up in my hair which makes me look up at her. She pulls my hair away from my face and smiles that sweet smile I've missed so much.
"Don't be scared," she whispers.
"I'm not scared," I lie, placing my hands on her hips.
She chuckles, leaning closer to my face until our noses touch. "I know you are and it's okay to be. I've been married to you for six years, I've known you for ten. Trust me when I say don't be scared it's because I know you are." She pecks my nose and pulls away. "No one is ever going to know you better than I do. Also, Matt will be coming in half an hour for his lessons," she reminds me as she walks back to our bedroom.
A month ago Matthew came to me, asking for piano lessons for his son Matt who has now shown interest in music. He's a good student and learns fast with everything I teach him. I thought it would be hard to teach him at first since I haven't touched my piano in a long time, but it didn’t seem like a big problem when I saw how good he is at. I didn’t need to touch the piano as often as I feared.
Exactly half an hour later Jessie came over to drop off Matt, but she did not leave without having a little chat with Katherine about our baby. She's eager to know the gender but we decided to keep it a secret until it's born. Call it cowardice, but it terrifies me to find out what we are having. While they had their little talk, I took Matt to my office and began with the lessons. I wanted to teach him happy songs and easy ones, but the kid has a great touch. He has the simple melodies I assign him in one afternoon and he even teases me by asking for the harder songs. Boy, he won’t know what hit him when we start with our advanced classes.
"Uncle?" He stops at what he knows so far in the song I’m teaching him and looks at me with a small smile. It became a habit for him to call me and Alex his uncles and Elizabeth is cousin. Given how close our families are, it seemed most appropriate.
"Yes?"
"Do you miss my cousin?"
The muscles in my body tense. A cold chill runs down my back. He never touched the subject before, no one, not even Katherine has mentioned it in a long time. Even when we did try, it was more than obvious I couldn’t go through it. I mess with his hair and shake my head.
"Play it one more time and I'll teach you the next part," I tell him instead. He nods, placing his hands over the keys and begins to play again.
He never asked again after that and I was grateful for that. Children are curious and I can’t imagine what exactly went through his head when he asked that question. After the lesson is over he runs to Elizabeth's room, leaving me seated on the stool by myself.
"He's good." I turn to Katherine who stands next to the door, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed over her belly. "I thought you were going to stick with the basics."
"I thought that given he has a good hand, he’d be more offended if we stuck to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I know I would be." I shrug and stand up. "How long have you been standing there?"
She shrugs back. "Long enough." Her body then tensed and her hands flew to her stomach. She smiles, reaching out of my hand. "He's moving." She grabs my hand when I’m close enough and places it over her stomach. "Can you feel it?"
There is a small nudge. Our baby stirs inside her, kicking his mother with impatience. It’s an odd feeling. A feeling that before would have floored me with joy, a feeling that before would have made me the happiest man on earth. Now? I’m the biggest coward there is. But when I look at Katherine, she has that smile I love so much on her face. She's looking at our joined hands with love and excitement. This moment right here is no different from the times before, she feels the same joy, the same excitement, the same love that I would kill for. I leaned forward placing a gentle kiss on her stomach, earning a kick in return.
"I think he woke up pretty energetic," she said when I looked at her.
"He?"
She shrugs. "Just a little guess."
"I would not mind if it was a girl instead." I look back down at her stomach and silently plead for the baby inside her to be a girl.
Katherine grabs my chin between her two fingers and makes me look at her deep chocolate eyes. "This baby will be whatever it wants to be, okay?" She gives me a peck on my lips and pulls away. "I'll go check on the kids."
Matt stayed over for dinner that night. He is more talkative when Katherine is around, especially when it comes to cars and monster trucks. I enjoyed watching her act so interested in the different types of trucks he can remember. He has Jessie’s energy. He has that childlike curiosity, an excitement that lights up the room and for a moment, for a millisecond, I wondered if that’s what he would have been like. I watched in silence as Katherine laughed with the kids and then leaned in to clean some food off his cheek and pinch his nose. The thought was like a knife digging deeper into my already wounded chest and I cast away, burying deep in the back of my head.
Matthew came to pick up his son after dinner and Katherine and Elizabeth went to the backyard to watch the sunset. I watched them from the kitchen as they laid on the grass and Lizzie had her little hand on her mother's belly. Katherine talks to her about the baby all the time, perhaps to get her ready for the new addition. She’s a smart girl and an eager sister. It was a beautiful image seeing the both of them together like that, so I stayed back and watched them as the sun set.
Every Wednesday afternoon I sat in Dr. Moore’s office at 5 pm for my appointment. It was the land where time stood still. It was my personal hell where every mistake and every consequence that has happened in the last year were louder than they were before. I used to hate it. It made me angry that this was the only thing that kept me from losing my family, that kept me from falling over the edge and losing the bit of myself I had left. I used to think that if I buried that last bit of myself that maybe this thing we call life would be bearable, perhaps it would numb me enough that I would be able to keep the woman I love. Now? I hold onto that for dear life, hoping that one day it’ll be enough to bring me back.
Another reason why I hated my appointments with Dr. Moore was that his favorite subject was that night. He brings it up every chance he gets and I shut it down as soon as the words leave his mouth. It’s a hard limit. I cannot think about it without feeling as if I’m drowning. But even sometimes when I shut it down, he still talks and tells me that it wasn’t my fault. He tells me it wasn’t my fault a drunk driver hit the side of my car, it wasn’t my fault leaving my brother’s house when I did, it wasn’t my fault bringing… him with me. He tells me that I couldn’t have stopped what happened.
"Do you have an
y idea how much has that been said to me overall this past year," I told him, running my hands through my hair. "It's been a year, Moore. One fucking year. And those same words have been repeated to me over and over again, telling me that what happened was not my fault, it was another man. I was driving, too. I took him from his home, I decided to take him with me. I had the chance to prevent it from happening, but I did not do anything about it. I took that path and look at the consequences now."
After he managed to get a reaction from me and to speak about that night, I call it the end of the appointment even when we still had another thirty minutes left. But the moment that subject is brought up, it feels like the room is suddenly on fire and I need to escape. Moore lets me go, but not without saying, "remember, you're the one who keeps walking away from the help granted."
It took me months to realize this was my hell only because I wanted it to be. I made it my hell when it wasn’t. One day I came home after an appointment with Moore’s words echoing in the back of my head…
"Life isn't always going to be perfect, Aidan. At some point everything you thought was never going to break shatters and it weakens you. It makes you feel hopeless and it makes you feel useless because you weren't prepared for it, but it is up to you to overcome that weakness and that's the time you start calling out for help.
"You've experienced the ugliest side of life and it weakened you for a very long time. It changed you. It changed you to the point where your own wife no longer recognized you. This to you no longer feels like you don't have a choice. Being here is your choice. You're here now because you realize where you've gone wrong and how much those mistakes could cost. You're here because you're afraid of losing the only thing that makes you feel whole and that's your wife. The support you need is Katherine. You're here because you know Katherine deserves more, she deserves her husband back and even now you know it’s time to bring him back."
That day when I arrived home, Katherine had music playing through the speaker. Before that it had been a long time since the house was filled with music, and that day I was taken aback. Katherine was sitting on the couch with her computer on her lap, her legs stretched out, crossed one over the other as she sang along to Us by James Bay. She turned off the music when she realized I was standing by the door and asked me how the appointment went, but I couldn’t answer. Before that moment, it had been a long time since I’d seen her sing and it wasn’t until then that I realized how much I missed it. I took her computer from her lap and set it aside on the couch, then took her phone and started the song all over again. Katherine watched cautiously as I debated internally if I wanted to do what I was about to do. It felt alien. But the simple thought was enough to make my heart pound hard against my chest, to make shivers run up and down my spine… It made me feel… alive for the first time in months.
So instead of answering her question, I took her hand in mine and guided her to the center of our living room. She was a little tense, unsure about what I was doing. I pulled her closer to me, laying her hands to rest on my shoulders and held her by the waist. We started swaying from one side to another, one step at a time, trying to overcome the alien feeling as the music filled the room. Katherine pulled me closer, laying her chin on my shoulder and her arms wrapped around me tightly. I buried my face in her hair, inhaling her sweet scent as we let the lyrics sink in, wrapping around us like vines.
And as we let the music take over, we began to let go. I twirled her around, I picked her off the floor and spun her in circles, I dipped her and twirled her back into my arms. At first she let out a nervous chuckle, a nervous smile, but then the smile became genuine, her blush got deeper and she threw her head back as her laughter filled the room. It brought a smile to my face. It teased a laugh out of me. And as the song neared its end, she pulled me closer to her, nose to nose, forehead to forehead. The tears came but her smile never left. She pulled away just enough to look at me in the eyes and in that instant, I knew that those tears were not sad ones, they were happy. For the first time in months my heart beat for a purpose and Katherine no longer cried out of sadness, but out of joy. Standing there in the middle of our living room, looking at each other, we felt like us.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Aidan
Life has its ugly side. Sometimes, it's not only just ugly, it's simply hideous. But then there are moments where it can be beautiful and sweet and unexpected. Those moments are the ones to be cherished, loved. Sometimes those moments make you feel overwhelmed or even scared. I thought perhaps I'd go insane, maybe even more than what I already was.
I looked at my wife who sat by my side eating from the freshly made Barbeque that Alex had cooked. Everyone was here. Mom, Dad, Jess, Matthew, Matt, Leila, Alex and their new addition to their family, Willow. They adopted her a few months back. She's a newborn, her parents were teenagers that didn't know what to do with a baby but asked to keep in touch with her just to see how her life turns out. She's beautiful and Leila absolutely adores her.
I watched from afar how Elizabeth ran around my parents’ backyard with Matt playing catch. Her hair was flying over her shoulders as she ran behind him, jumping up and down without a care in the world. I looked at my wife and her swollen belly. It's small, judging by the fact that she's due in a few weeks. I watched my family eat, talk and laugh. I would participate but most of the time I was watching. I became an outsider to my family, watching from the sidelines as their lives moved forward. They moved on while I was still stuck in the same spot for the last year. I was watching until Katherine’s hand gripped my arm, hard. She let out a groan, hovering over her belly.
"Baby, are you okay?" I asked her. The table went silent.
She looked up, her face red and twisted in pain. "Something is wrong," she whimpered. "Aidan, something is wrong!"
It took me a moment to realize what she meant. The red liquid rolled down her legs as she let out a cry. Alex jumped to his feet with the car keys in hand and ran to get the car, no questions asked, no moment of hesitation. Everyone took a step back as I took Katherine in my arms and ran behind Alex.
Alex took off down the street and I sat in the back with her. "It's okay, Kathy. You're going to be okay,” I said against her ear as she crushed my hand in hers. She didn’t cry or whimper, if she was in pain she didn’t show it. Her eyes were closed, her teeth clenched and her chest rose and fell with every breath she took. We rushed her inside the emergency where a nurse seeing her condition called our doctor and they brought her rollaway bed. They rolled her away far too quickly, not giving me the chance to follow. The doors shut behind them, leaving me powerless and terrified.
I might have pulled my hair from its roots, maybe kicked a wheelchair or cursed out loud, but my fear and emotions were getting the better of me. They were wrapping around me like a rope, tightly and squeezing the air from me. If anything happens to her… ever… I wouldn’t survive it. The worst thoughts, the worst-case scenarios played on repeat in my head over and over again, bringing me to the very edge of my control. Alex pulls me down to a seat after several nurses throw concerned looks in my direction. He told me to stay seated and try to calm down while he went to call Mom and tell her we made it to the hospital. After he briefly explained to her that I wasn't allowed in with her, he passed the phone to me. I wanted to check in with Elizabeth because she must have been scared after she saw her father and uncle rush her pregnant mother to the car with no explanation whatsoever.
"Mom, seriously, you can bring her here if you can't handle her," I told my mother after she said Elizabeth wouldn’t stop crying and honestly, I’d feel better if she was here with me.
"Aidan, don't be ridiculous. I'll take care of Elizabeth. Jessie and Leila are staying here with us. The only thing you have to worry about is your wife and your baby," Mom said. "I love you."
"I know. Me, too." I sighed, hanging up the phone. Alex stood in the corner of the waiting room with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked deep in thought which is not
a common look on him. "Alex, you seriously don't have to stay. I'm fine here by myself."
"Aidan, swallow your pride for once and shut the hell up," Alex replied, rolling his eyes. "I'm here for the baby. That little thing is my blood, too."
Suit yourself, I thought. If I once thought sitting through one of my appointments with Moore was hell, then I was wrong. I have no idea how much time goes by before we get any news on Katherine. Alex got us coffee and we both sat in silence, waiting for something to happen. I hated it, I hated how quiet it was, I hated the anxiety I felt run through me the longer I sat waiting for answers. I hate hospitals, I hate sitting here without an idea of what's happening with my wife and child. This place is repulsive to me and even before I prayed to never set foot here with the little faith I had left.
"Mr. Callahan?" A nurse walked down the hall, looking around the room. I run to her and tell her I'm Mr. Callahan. "Your wife is being taken to the OR. Dr. Henry is doing an emergency C-section."
"What's wrong with them?" I asked.
"There seems to be fetal distress. Dr. Henry doesn't want to lose any more time which is why they are on their way to the OR right now," she explained. "Unfortunately, he told me it was best if you wait out here while he does the operation." Just as I began to protest, she interrupted me. "You have to understand, sir, we cannot waste any time. You will be allowed to see them after the operation.”
With that said, she left and the scenarios in my head were not better than the ones before. Anything could happen on that OR table, anything… I run my hands through my hair and drop back in my seat next to Alex, exhausted and broken. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs just to relieve some of the pressure on my chest. Alex and I wait sitting down, walking around, roaming in silence. Patients come and go. Alex made conversation with some while I just sat in silence, staring off into space with chaos reigning over my head. It was so loud inside.
Same Old Song Page 18
