“Then don’t. Suffering is a choice. If you don’t want it, lose it.”
He made it sound so easy, which I told him.
He laughed. “It’s not supposed to be easy. Do you think it was easy watching your mother lose herself? She was our baby. Our only child. And she lost herself when she had you. But,” he said, and patted my hand, “we had you. We’ve loved you, for years—you were worth losing her.”
My heart heaving, I looked down at where his wrinkled hand covered mine.
“And that fella out there, he thinks you’re worth it too.”
By the time I joined Jude in the hallway, I felt the weight of my visit with Grandpa bearing on my shoulders.
And then Jude placed his arm right around me, where I felt the burden the most, and it suddenly wasn’t that unbearable after all.
My mom’s trailer remained unchanged, which was how I knew she still lived there. Some rust bucket sat in the driveway, and her porch light was on, which told me she was probably home.
“I’d offer to stay in the car to give you and your mom some space, but to be honest I don’t feel that comfortable with the idea.” Jude looked around the neighborhood as he turned the engine off. “So, I’m telling you now that I’m coming whether you want me to or not.”
I smiled at him, knowing he was fully supportive of me. “I’m not going to try to stop you, but I do want to warn you—my mom isn’t all together in the head. There’s a good chance she’ll be at least partially nude, high, or drunk. Or maybe a combination of those things.”
“I think I can handle it,” he replied with a grim smile.
“Let’s get this over with.” I climbed out of the car and waited until Jude had locked the doors before I ascended the steps to her front door.
My knock caused the conversation inside to halt and the radio to turn down. Her face appeared in the tiny window to the left of the door and then she scowled.
“What do you want?” she asked the second she opened the door. Her eyes slid over me to Jude, who she greeted much more kindly, with a smile and a cock of her head. “Who’s the tall drink of water?”
“Jude,” he said, reaching a hand for her to shake.
“I’m just coming to check in,” I explained, wringing my hands together in a nervous tick. “For Grandpa. Make sure you’re not doing anything stupid.”
“By all means, come in and be a spy.” She pushed the door open and stepped aside as Jude and I walked into the trailer.
I didn’t think it was possible for the trailer to be even more dingy than it had been before, but I was proven wrong. There were several patches in the carpet completely burned, and the couches and chairs she had looked like they’d been rolled down a rocky hill before being placed in the living room.
And right in the center of one of the couches sat the man I’d hoped not to see again for a long time.
I felt my breath catch and my hands begin to shake. I glanced over the carpet, where he’d hit me, and I turned my head reflexively. That spot was stained with the memory, and my body began to cower just thinking of it. My breath became tighter and my eyes filmed over. And then I saw Jude, standing at the door of my mom’s trailer, watching me. Steady. He was no doubt watching my reaction to this exchange and, because of him, I pulled my fingers into fists and turned to face the man whose touch had had a lasting, rippling effect.
“Well, hello,” Doug said, one arm over the back of the couch and his other hand wrapped around a bong. “Didn’t get enough the last time?”
The connotation of his question had me putting my back up. It would’ve been so easy to walk out now, to run away. But I was really great at running away and not standing my ground. I straightened my spine and held my head up high, exuding a strength I hadn’t known I’d possessed all this time. “You can fuck off, Doug.”
He stood, his eyes narrowing as he looked at me from my ankles to my face. “You called the cops that night, didn’t you?”
“That was you?” my mom asked, coming around and sitting where Doug had been sitting.
Doug took a step toward me and I backed up, right against Jude. His hands closed over my upper arms, holding me steady, keeping me safe. “Don’t even come one step closer,” I warned him.
“Of course it was her. Bitch scratched up my face and called the cops on us as she left.”
I swallowed my fear. “You could’ve killed me,” I said, looking right at my mom after, waiting to see her reaction.
Nothing. Not a single muscle moved on her face. It shouldn’t have hurt me, her indifference to how I’d suffered at her boyfriend’s hands. But knowing I’d been trying to protect her when it happened made me want to fall apart. I didn’t have her support. I didn’t have unconditional love from the person who’d created me.
“I wasn’t going to kill you,” Doug said, ignoring my warning and taking another step toward us. The closer he came, the more I remembered about the way he’d beat me so severely that even a raised hand in my vicinity caused me to wince.
“You came too close,” I said, rubbing my elbows in my hands. “I had a black eye for a week, my knuckles were so swollen that I couldn’t grip anything in my hands and I had glass lodged all over my chest for a month.”
“Wait.” Jude placed his hands on my shoulder. “He hit you?”
He wasn’t looking at me, but I knew he was talking to me. “Yes,” I said. “But I’m okay now.” I wondered how many times I could say that before I believed it. Jude stared back at me, and I watched as anger and sadness intermingled, turning his brown eyes almost black.
“You owe me,” Doug said, stepping closer still. “You got me in some serious shit with my supplier, and I can’t forget that.”
I watched as Jude turned to face Doug like it was all in slow motion. “She owes you nothing,” Jude said, his voice calm but his body tightening in anger. I wished I’d told him all that had happened, but in the lone day we’d spent together last year, there just hadn’t been enough time. “And we’re leaving.”
“Who are you, her master? She can talk,” Doug spat, and I turned my face like he’d hit me again. Fear was an incredible thing, especially when ignited by memory.
But Jude squeezed my hand, reminding me that I could do this. “I can talk,” I said, before leaning in so I was closer to his face. I felt safer just knowing that Jude was there to protect me, from Doug or from hurting myself in the process. “And I’ll repeat what I said, go fuck yourself.” I felt power in my words, a power that made me stronger than I knew I was.
Doug made the mistake of stepping forward again as anger burned in his eyes. Before he could get too close, Jude pulled his arm back and punched it forward, knocking Doug right off his feet so that he landed on the coffee table on his back. We all froze for a second, Doug included. But Jude stood solid, his presence alone intimidating for my mom, who curled up in a ball on the couch and didn’t try to defend Doug once.
“Come on,” Jude said, gently pushing me out the door while he kept his front to Doug. It said something about Jude, that he could go from using his hands in anger against my attacker to touching me so gently immediately after. “Touch her again,” he said with a finger pointed at Doug, “and you will fucking regret it.”
Jude rarely swore, so hearing the F-bomb drop out of his mouth and feeling the anger emanating from him as he held my hand made me realize just how serious he was. “Get in the car, Trista,” he said, tossing me the keys and keeping his body between Doug and me as we walked back out to the car.
I didn’t need to be told twice.
I was breathless as I drove down the road out of the trailer park. Jude buckled his seat belt before rubbing his fingers over his knuckles. I’d had an adrenaline rush inside of my mom’s trailer, and as it was slowly leaving my body, I felt my hands begin to shake on the steering wheel. I turned on the radio, anything to drown out the roar in my head, and then when I took a wrong turn out of the trailer park, I erupted in nervous giggles. The expelling of all
that energy had made me a shaky, uncontrollable mess.
“I want to vomit,” I admitted aloud. I could always regain control after vomiting.
“No,” Jude said. “Pull over up here and let me drive.”
I did, waiting in the driver’s seat as Jude left his seat and walked around the side of the car. All the anger that he’d carried out of the trailer seemed to be leaving him, so I unbuckled and quickly slid out of the car and wrapped my arms around him. I felt a call to comfort him, after seeing how he’d defended me.
Jude’s arms came around me easily, solidly. That’s who he was. Solid, steady, so sure of his place in the world. It was both enviable and admirable, the way he carried himself without wearing his insecurities on his face.
“Thank you,” I whispered into his neck. His arms tightened briefly before he pulled me back only far enough so that he could look in my face. “Tell me what happened.”
I knew it was coming, but it still made my stomach hurt to think about letting it out. It’d be the first time I’d told anyone all the details of what had happened. Charlotte had known a little bit, that my mom’s boyfriend was abusive had seemed like enough to tell her. “Okay,” I said on a nod.
So I told him everything—including what Doug had said about me. Jude listened as we sat on the hood of his car, holding my hand in both of his. More than once, I had an overwhelming desire to crawl up into the smallest space I could, but as if he sensed that, he just held my hand and assured me it would be okay.
“Why didn’t you come back to Colorado?” he asked, but he wasn’t judging my decision to leave entirely.
I ran my thumb along the inside of his palm. “Because I felt broken.” It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it, but it was the first time I’d told someone else. “Everything seemed to be out of my control.”
“Is that why you started purging?”
“It’s part of it.” I told him about going to Brendan’s house at Christmas a year and a half earlier. “In some ways, I feel like vomiting can help me disappear. I’d rather not be noticed than have people staring at my flaws.” Jude let go of my hand to put his arm around me and pull me against his side. “And after I’d been in Maine for five months, I was still no closer to figuring out who I was and suddenly the burden of being alone was too much.”
I could feel the tremble that moved through Jude’s arm as he wrapped it around me. “I wish I’d known. I would have come for you sooner.”
“I was glad you’d came,” I said. “But when you were disappointed in me, I just shut down. I had no one but myself to blame for what I’d been doing. But hearing from you—the one person I cared about most in the world—that you were unhappy with what I was doing made me feel empty all over again.”
“I wish I could go back to that moment, to sit and listen to you longer.”
The feelings churning up inside me were almost too much to bear and I looked at the ground before me, thinking about how wonderful it would be to be able to vomit. “I wish I could vomit, Jude. I really, really want to.”
“I know.” He pressed his lips against my hair and held me tighter still. For a brief moment, I believed that he could keep me safe, cocooned in his arms. “But I really, really don’t want you to. So please, for me, don’t.”
“I wish I knew how to shake all of this, Jude,” I confessed. “It’s so hard to walk around in this sheet of self-loathing.”
“If you can’t love yourself,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, “let me love you enough for the both of us.”
I didn’t know why it felt like my heart was breaking, but it was. “I can’t.”
His eyes searched mine, but I didn’t say why I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair, to him, to burden him with how very broken I was. When he opened his mouth to ask, I slid off the hood of the car. “I guess we need to go back to Colorado.”
“We do. I didn’t want to tell you before. But it’s not looking good for Colin.”
I felt my chest restrict. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“We’re hours away. I took a chance that seeing your grandpa wouldn’t halt us from seeing Colin.” He swallowed and his eyes turned sad. “One last time.”
But I wasn’t ready to accept that I’d only see Colin one last time.
Chapter Seventeen
By the time we made it back to Colorado, Jude got a call from Colin’s mom that Colin wasn’t keeping food down. Jude’s demeanor was stoic as we drove to the hospital, and he was rigid as we walked to the waiting room.
“Trista,” he said as we sat in the waiting room outside of his room. “This is it. He’s not going to get better. We need to say goodbye.”
But I shook my head, even as the tears welled up in my eyes. “I can’t, Jude. I can’t say goodbye to him.” I was shaking my head so hard that I thought it would twist right off of my body. “No, I cannot.”
“You have to. I know he wasn’t always kind to you—”
“It’s not that,” I interrupted as I felt the cool pool of tears in my eyes. “It’s that I can’t. I physically can’t.” I thought of Ellie, of how I’d been holding her hand when she’d gone unconscious. To lose the last person who knew Ellie the way I did was like reliving her death all over again. I stood up and walked to the water fountain, cupping my hand under the flow and splashing it on my face. Every bit of skin from my forehead to my chin was white hot, the pressure of tears so heavy that it felt like it was exuding from every pore. Jude stood next to me and ran a hand down my back.
“I can’t,” I said again, but the words felt like twin masses of grief, stuck in my throat. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
Carefully, he closed his fingers around my wrists, holding me firmly to him. “You can and you will. Say goodbye—for you and for him.” His voice was rough, his eyes swimming. I couldn’t look into them; I was too weak. I could hardly carry my own grief for what was happening, I couldn’t carry Jude’s too. And that’s how I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say goodbye.
Colin’s mom stepped outside of the room and watched us for a moment.
“Go, Trista.” He squeezed me tight and I felt the tremble in his touch, like my pain was a tangible thing, something he felt to his bones and echoed back at me. Pain for our loss, pain for the man we both loved in different ways, complicated ways.
“I can’t, I can’t.” My lip trembled and I sucked it into my mouth, chewing over it, tasting blood. I said the words I knew would affect Jude, would get him to listen to me, to understand, “I’m not ready.”
Jude exhaled then, hard and fast, and I felt that shift between us from a friend pleading to another friend. It became something else, lover to lover, so that our grief was intertwined with our love and loss with one another. He moved his hands to my face, so that I was forced to look him in the eyes. He cradled me so gently, but I felt the power behind his words. “I need you to be ready. God, I need you to be ready, Trista.” His eyes blurred as tears coated mine. “Please.” His voice cracked and so did my heart.
I swallowed the lump of emotion in my throat. I didn’t know what he was asking me to be ready for, but I desperately wanted to be ready. For him. For Colin, so I could say goodbye. So he could be at peace.
“Okay,” I managed, but it sounded warbled. I clenched my teeth together, sucked in a breath through my nose. As I blinked, the first tear fell from my eyes and Jude’s hands on my face squeezed gently before they slid back into my hair.
“I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”
I didn’t wonder what he was apologizing for. I turned my face in his hand and pressed a kiss to the warm center of his palm, just as his other hand wrapped around me and pulled me even closer. I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. “I love you,” I mumbled against his skin, too afraid to give the words the clarity they deserved. I lifted my eyes to his and felt the pulse in his thumb leap.
“I love you, too,” he said, and the crack on my heart went deeper, because I was about to walk away fr
om the man I loved to say a final goodbye to the man I used to love. It wasn’t fair, that Colin should have me in the room with him when he had such a tenuous grip on his mortality. It should have been Mila. It should have been someone who had loved him through everything, someone he had shared this part of his life with.
But it was just me.
I squeezed Jude’s hand on my face before I stepped back. I couldn’t keep touching Jude because I knew it would make my resolve that much less solid.
The hallway felt impossibly long, like I was in an alternate reality and my destination kept getting moved farther from my touch, despite my advance toward it. The blues and grays of the hallway blended together, blurring in my vision once I reached the door to Colin’s room. The handle was cold and the curtain was drawn over the window so that passersby couldn’t look in.
When the door opened, a rush of warmth enveloped me. The walk to the bed somehow felt longer than the walk down the hall, but I did it, pulling back the privacy curtain to give him a smile.
He looked awful, lying in bed with machines hooked up to his whole body. He tried to open his eyes, but they fluttered immediately closed. He was so weak, so tired, and I could sense he was ready. Ready to leave the earth and its punishments upon his body.
I couldn’t let him see me break. I knew that. The last thing he needed to be burdened with as he left this world was my grief.
Taking a seat in the closest chair to the bed, I wrapped my hand around the rungs on the plastic bed. There were wires in one of his hands, and other wires that disappeared under his gown. The scene was unchanged from a few days earlier, when I’d sat at his bedside, but Colin’s face was now bloated and his skin was a color I’d never seen. When his eyelashes fluttered again, I leaned in and said, “I’m here, Colin.”
I watched him lift a finger against the white waffle-knit blanket and impulsively, I grabbed his hand and squeezed, hoping he could feel me since he couldn’t open his eyes.
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