Fourth and Inches

by Kata Čuić

  Please let her be in the psych ward.

  It’s a prayer I never imagined whispering.

  “She’s…okay.” Byers hesitates. It’s just enough for me not to believe him completely. “Sinclair hasn’t been anywhere near here. My net would have picked him up by now. He is off the radar, though. No credit card transactions, no ATM withdrawals, no street cam hits, nothing. But, he isn’t in California. That much I know.”

  “Then why,” I grit out for what feels like the millionth time, “are we here?”

  Byers gestures with a jerky head movement to several unoccupied chairs flanking the wall. “Sit down.”

  “I don’t want to fucking sit down!”

  The head of our security team goes from sympathetic to cold-blooded ex-Navy SEAL in an instant. “Sit the fuck down. You might be the one who signs my paychecks, but my job is to protect her. And, right now, I’m protecting her from you.”

  That arrow hits its mark.

  I sit down, not even trying to stop my knees from buckling. “Just fucking tell me what’s wrong.”

  Byers takes a deep breath, but doesn’t meet my eyes. “I’d rather you hear this from her, but you need to know what you’re walking into.”

  “I swear to God– “

  “She had a miscarriage.”

  The world stops on a heartbeat.

  One I’ll never hear.

  “She’s here because she had a miscarriage.”

  No more talking. No more questions and answers. “Where’s my wife?”

  Byers leads me into the previously mentioned private room, past the promised guards who throw sympathetic glances my way.

  Nothing could prepare me for what waits on the other side of the door.

  Evie’s unfocused eyes gaze out the lone window in the room.

  The bright sunshine of another perfect Sacramento day seems duller, less promising.

  No one else is here. No doctor waiting to tell me her prognosis. No nurse fussing over the IV line that leads from Evie’s tiny hand to a bag full of clear fluid suspended on a pole.

  The walls are bare, not even a clock or single painting break the monotony of a plain shade of blue likely meant to be calming.

  Evie never tears her eyes away from whatever holds her interest. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’m sorry.”

  Grief incinerates all my rage. The first sob slips out unchecked, the second is muffled by her neck as I wrap her in my arms.

  “I should have stayed calm.” Evie runs her fingers through my hair, but her voice is completely void of emotion. “I’m calm now.”

  When Evie and I were separated, I looked up a local gynecology specialist after my move to Sacramento, still clinging to the slight hope we might reconcile, that she might ever be able to forgive me for my infidelity. Like an institutionalized football player, I needed to know what we’d be up against if our marriage survived. I learned everything I could about endometriosis. But, I threw away all the doctor’s reminders of fertility never been guaranteed. I ignored her well-meaning warnings that even if, by some miracle, Evie could get pregnant, carrying a pregnancy to full term was a long shot.

  I’d give anything for those words to not be true.

  “Ssh,” Evie soothes, still with her robot voice. “Don’t cry.”

  I will fucking bawl my eyes out for the both of us and feel no shame over it.

  We just lost a baby we were never supposed to have because of a sociopath who never should’ve been a part of our lives.

  If that’s not reason to cry, I don’t know what is.

  “Rob? Will you take me home?”

  I pull back to look at her face, in her eyes. She seems eerily lost yet controlled.

  “Baby– “ The pet name curdles on my tongue. I may never give voice to it again. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Let’s wait and see what the doctors say.”

  “They’ve said enough.” Evie’s voice is still hollow, her eyes lifeless. “There’s nothing more they can do. It’s over.”

  Please, no. Don’t let it be over.

  I take a deep breath to steel myself before turning the doorknob.

  A month of living on the edge will make even the most devoted men reluctant to walk into a heaven that’s become hell.

  I know what I’m going to find on the other side of this door.

  A zombie wife who refuses to cry, get angry, or even concern herself with Jackson’s MIA status.

  Emails of useless updates from the officials assigned to our case, basically apologizing for having no information.

  An increasingly frustrated former Navy SEAL who can’t understand how a man without any intelligence training has managed to seemingly disappear.

  Mallory has admitted on more than one anytime-of-the-day phone call she thinks he may have killed himself.

  And, that pisses me off, to be completely honest.

  How dare he take the easy way out and leave us to live in limbo for the rest of our lives? Constantly fearful, looking over our shoulders. The stress has already cost us so much.

  Too much.

  If that bastard wanted to die so badly, I would have gladly helped him out.

  At least then I’d know for sure.

  I can’t take these murderous thoughts inside with me, so I stuff them in the same mental locker where I constantly fight to keep memories of him hidden away.

  I push open the front door with some weird resistance and promptly greet the floor.

  “Dammit, Felix,” I grumble.

  This is exactly how guys end up missing a few weeks during the season. Not because of an injury sustained during play, but because of stupid shit everyday life throws at us.

  The little asshole just licks his paw and eyes me with what I swear is a smirk.

  Only when I manage to right myself do I notice I didn’t trip over a conniving feline.

  Boxes.

  Boxes everywhere.

  Cardboard cubes have invaded the living room, mostly stacked by the door.

  The space is empty. Void of life.

  My heart pounds wildly in my chest.

  She’s not in the bedroom; not in the bathroom; not in the closet.

  I tear down the hallway, finally, finally hearing noise coming from the spare bedroom.

  Evie’s in the middle of the room, a disaster spread out before her on the bare mattress as she packs various items into more boxes. She’s wearing earbuds, but not bobbing to the rhythm like she used to.

  For a few minutes that will never feel like long enough, I simply watch her as she continues to ignore my presence.

  How did everything go so wrong when we were so close to having it all?

  Her wild curls are held in place with one of her usual pencils on top of her head. One of my old Ironville football t-shirts practically swallows her frame. Her bare legs are crossed on the bed. The blue of her eyes is still dull, and maybe that won’t ever go away.

  That thought scares me most of all.

  As she carefully separates our things to pack away, I rack my brain for the moment I missed.

  The moment she decided to leave.

  I brought her home the day she miscarried, just like she asked.

  I held her in bed.

  I cried.

  She didn’t.

  And every night after for the next two weeks, we repeated the same pattern.

  I kissed her goodbye every morning.

  She told me she loved me before I walked out the door.

  I made sure to be home for dinner instead of eating at the team facility. She would tell me about more improvements to the Sing Out foundation oversight board she’d made during the day. I would tell her about the latest prank in the locker room.

  Our conversations never went deeper than the surface, but at least we were still talking.

  She stayed on emotional lockdown while I was sad, but everything seemed okay.

  As okay as it could be.

  Evie pries open the tabs on another bo
x. She roots around inside, a soft smile forming on her lips. And then she cocks her head back, raises her eyebrows in obvious confusion, and produces a pair of black lacy little panties from the depths.

  “I remember those.” I step forward into the room, my gaze transfixed on the tangible memory of one of the best nights of my life.

  A bloodcurdling scream tears from Evie’s throat.

  She flings the panties at me. Boxes, along with their contents, sprinkle the floor as she leaps from the bed.

  Just as quickly as panic overtook her, it subsides. She rips the earbuds from her ears and glares at me from a corner of the room, her chest still heaving. “Are you trying to give me a fucking heart attack?”

  “I’ve been standing in the doorway watching you for at least ten minutes. I thought you realized I was here.”

  “Well, I didn’t!” She presses a hand to her chest, visibly trying to regain control of her body, even as a guilty expression steals across her face. “Why are you home so early?”

  Was she going to sneak out with not so much as a goodbye?

  “It’s Friday, b- …Evie.” I’m always home at this time on Fridays before an away game.

  “Oh. Right.” She takes a few more deep breaths, then begins collecting the items all over the carpet, stuffing them haphazardly into boxes when she was carefully sorting them before.

  I clutch the panties tighter in my fist, choking off a sob. I’m so sick of crying. “Why?”

  “Why, what?” She doesn’t even look up as she continues her task.

  “Why are you packing?” Why are you leaving?

  She aims another glare at me. “This is all your fault.”

  I know.

  She goes back to her work, her movements getting more agitated by the minute. “I said I wanted to keep this private, but nooooo. You had to call our mothers. Behind my back! Again!”

  “I’m sorry.” I meet the floor for the second time in the past twenty minutes. “I just…you won’t talk to me. I didn’t know how to get through to you. I thought maybe…you might want another woman around.”

  “Oh, they’ll be around all right. Your mother called and said they’ll be on a flight first thing in the morning. Not one of them. Both! They’re taking a month off work! An entire month! I was doing okay. Really, I was. How do you think I’m going to be doing after a month of both our mothers breathing down my neck, trying to get me to talk about my feelings and let it all out with a good cry? I’m going to lose what little’s left of my mind, Robert!”

  She said my full name.

  She’s seriously pissed.

  She’s…

  “You’re not leaving?”

  “What?” She blinks at me, but the anger hasn’t evaporated from her face.

  “I thought…” I cough as air slowly returns to my lungs. “I thought you were packing your things and leaving…me.”

  She falls back onto her butt with a thud, zero grace in her clumsy movement. “Why?”

  “I didn’t know why for sure.” I crawl toward her on the carpet.

  She doesn’t back away.

  “I thought maybe…after the miscarriage…you decided the bet was over.”

  “You didn’t trust me to stay?” The first tear in a month slides down her cheek.

  Fuck. There is nothing I can say to deny it.

  “What was I supposed to think when I came home to find you packing all your stuff?”

  She shakes her head, rolls her lips in between her teeth, and glances away. “We can’t keep doing this.”

  “Yes, we can,” I beg.

  Evie levels me with a deadly stare. “No. We can’t. The bet was supposed to be over. We’re either all in or all out at this point. There’s already so much in our lives we can’t control, can’t predict.” She waves a slender index finger between us. “This shouldn’t be that. This should be our safe place. You shouldn’t have to wonder when I’m packing our extra things to put in storage so our mothers can have an actual room to sleep in for a whole freaking month if I’m leaving you. I refuse to live that way, Rob.”

  “That’s not fair.” I refuse to go down like this. “You were the one who thought I was having an affair, even after everything I promised you. Even after I told you cheating nearly killed me. You didn’t trust me, either.”

  She rears back like I slapped her.

  And, in many ways, I have. Not always physically.

  If we can’t get it all out in the open and finally forgive each other for the sins of our past, we will keep living in this limbo.

  “Fear: you’re shutting me out. I don’t know why you have this idea I can read your mind because I can’t. I can only read what you show me. And ever since the miscarriage, you’ve shown me nothing. I just want you to talk to me.”

  Evie narrows her eyes at me, but shudders out a sob that weirdly brings me so much relief.

  This. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

  Some reaction, any emotion at all.

  “I don’t feel the same way about it as you do,” she finally admits. “I never let myself completely hope we’d ever have kids naturally. I didn’t even know I was pregnant, so it seemed stupid to mourn something I not only wasn’t expecting, but couldn’t miss having out of ignorance. The doctors said I wasn’t very far along, maybe a couple of weeks. It might have happened, anyway, and we would never have been the wiser.”

  “Okay, that’s…fair. I wish you would have told me, though. All this time I thought you were just shutting down and ignoring it the way you did after the assault.”

  She nods, but focuses her gaze on the opposite wall instead of looking at me. “That’s my biggest fear, Rob. That’s why I’ve been practicing containing myself. Cathy’s been helping me. It’s just like you said, I don’t want the fear controlling me anymore. I don’t want him causing panic and chaos in our lives. What if we did have a family? I wanted that. We could’ve adopted. But, over the past month with Jackson’s specter hanging over our heads, I’m not sure it’s fair to bring any children into this nightmare. It’s bad enough for us to deal with. How will it affect our kids?”

  Our kids.

  Even after the hell of the past month, it’s still so fucking easy to let my mind run wild with images of a future family.

  Evie pulls her knees up to her chest, literally curling in on herself and finally letting loose heartbreaking sobs.

  “I feel like I’m having to give up that last dream I’ve been clinging to. I can control my reaction to him constantly invading our lives, but I can’t control him. We don’t know where he is, what he’s thinking. Not even Mallory can get inside his head; she never really could. She was just an illusion of an added layer of protection, like a human security blanket. I can’t justify terrorizing our children this way without knowing for sure. I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I knew I wanted to be a mother. Somehow. Just, please, give me some time and space to come to terms with the fact that can never happen.”

  She lets out a soft, “oomph” when I tackle her to the floor, covering her body with my own.

  I brush the tears off her cheeks. “That’s exactly why it should happen. You’ll make an amazing mother someday, Evie. This is proof you’ll always put our kids first. And I will, too. It’s not like you’ll be handling things alone.”

  Her fingertips graze over my forehead, nose, cheeks, lips before she threads her fingers into my hair even as she continues to cry. “I know you would. You’d make an amazing father, too. Way better than either of ours.”

  “Then, the only thing we need to do is decide where to go from here. My contract is up with the Rushers in a few weeks. They’re pushing for a renewal, but I’ve had offers from other teams all across the country. Pick a city and Shawn can make it happen. We’ll buy a house big enough for our whole family. No more rushing to pack things away and put them in storage.”

  She shakes her head furiously. “We can’t.”

  “Yes. Yes, we can. You said in hig
h school you didn’t want him to beat you, to beat us, so why let him have that power now?”

  “Because it’s more than just us!”

  “It is. Way more. We have a pretty big team behind us. Our moms, YiaYia, Tini, Mike and Alex and their families. We’ve got Shawn and Byers. I know football can drain us both sometimes, but it affords us the ability to protect ourselves in ways we otherwise couldn’t. We’ll be okay. I promise, I will never let anyone or anything hurt my family.”

  I’m trying to convince myself as much as Evie. I couldn’t protect her from a miscarriage. On the field, anything can happen in the blink of an eye.

  I know that.

  I also know we deserve this chance. To try.

  “Fourth and inches, baby. Don’t punt now.”

  Evie laughs a little through her tears. “You haven’t called me that in a whole month. You haven’t hidden how much this miscarriage hurt you. I don’t want to put you through this ever again.”

  Dammit. We still haven’t found that balance between being open with each other while being in tune to the other’s needs. “It’s my choice. And I want it all. Even the bad stuff.”

  Her expression changes. Less misery and more awe. “I get that. I want it all with you, too. It’s why I couldn’t move on or walk away.”

  Touchdown in sight.

  I dry her face with the soft object still in my grasp.

  Evie blinks a few times before pulling it from my hand and staring at it. “Care to explain to me why you had a pair of my panties shoved in a box full of old college stuff?”

  At least she isn’t assuming they’re someone else’s. Progress.

  “They’re the first ones I ever took off you, remember?” That was a great night. “I told you I was keeping them.”

  She scrunches up her nose in that way I love. “I really thought you’d find a way to hide these on your person somehow during games.”

  “You’re actually going to let me? You said I wasn’t allowed.”

  “What if they fall out during play? You could get fined. That’s against league regulations. It was a risk to even give you my mati in college.”

  I glide my finger over the charms cradled at the base of Evie’s throat. Her cross, Pops’ medal, and the creepy eye that’s supposed to ward off evil. Only one more keepsake to add to her collection. Very soon. “That’s what you were worried about? I figured you just didn’t want anyone else seeing your lacy underthings.”