I wanted to go back in and ask the girl what had actually happened, but I didn’t. She didn’t know me well enough. She’d see I was deeply disturbed by it and freaked out, so she’d lie to me to make me feel better. Or worse, she might actually tell me the truth, in gut wrenching detail until I puked.
I had to go. Dane. I had to find him…
I fished my phone out of my pocket and ordered a ride to pick me up from the convenience store a half block down the road. When the ride came, instead of going home, I directed it to the office. If there was anything that would calm me down and help me feel a sense of normalcy, it would be work. And there was the off chance that Dane would be there. Or at least he would show up at some time, I hoped.
I could have just gone to his place, but work was closer. Besides, depending on what we’d done last night, he might have been someone I wanted to distance myself from. While riding in the car, I left him a voicemail (why would he never answer his phone even if he could see it was me?) and sent him several texts messages asking him to please call me and tell me what happened last night.
That was it, I was done drinking. I’d said it before, but this time I meant it. The bottle was spinning my life completely out of control. I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. I couldn’t remember a huge section of time and what I’d done, but I was pretty sure I did something really stupid. And I would be punished for it.
I was about halfway to my office when my phone rang. I eagerly looked at the caller ID. It was Tina!
“No…” I moaned. Could she have heard what happened? Of course not. How would she? I didn’t have an answer for that, but at the moment I was scared and paranoid enough to believe anything. My mind was working on overdrive, spinning around a thousand miles per second. I felt a panic attack coming on, drowning me. I wanted to lie down and pass out for a bit, to hide from the world.
I ignored the call and let it go to voicemail. I should have talked to her. I knew she was worried. I’d stormed out the door last night and I hadn’t’ come home. I was being a total jerk, but I just couldn’t talk to her right then. In my current mental state (I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown), she would have known something was desperately wrong.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket and closed my eyes. I had to calm down. There had to be a way to fix this. Now was not the time to panic.
But in that moment, panic was the only world I knew.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tina
“Blake, can you please call me. Honey, I’m really worried. We can talk about this. I love you.”
I ended the call and sat in my car for a moment. I had no idea where Blake was. I thought he’d just go somewhere to blow off some steam and then he’d come home, possibly late after I’d gone to bed, but there was no sign of him.
When I woke up to his side of the bed unmade, I was immediately alarmed. I checked downstairs. There were no signs that he’d been there. Lastly, I looked outside. The Ferrari was gone. He’d most likely gone to see Dane, so I called his phone a few times, finally leaving a message. Dane hardly ever answered the phone, but I never called him, so if he saw my number popping up, I thought he might realize it was urgent and call me back.
That was an hour ago and I still hadn’t heard from anything. I tried Blake’s office, but he hadn’t shown up there yet, and finally I left a message on his phone. Was he intentionally trying to avoid me? Or did something happen to him?
I struck the last thought from my mind. No… he was fine. He was ok. He had to be. There was no way that our last conversation could have been that fight…
“Get a grip,” I said. “He’s fine.”
My voice did little to soothe my concerns, but now it was time to go to work. I thought about calling in sick, having a sub take over for the day, but I didn’t. The school day would take the pressure off my mind a bit.
I went into the school and made my way to my classroom. The moment I stepped foot in the place, I realized that I should have gone home. I was too stressed for this. Everything was crashing down around me. I felt half sick to my stomach, and each time I started to lecture about something or write up on the whiteboard, I totally lost my train of thought and felt like fainting away on the floor.
The students must have sensed this because they were all way rowdier than normal. It was like they were subconsciously feeding on my negative energy and doing their best to deliver more negativity back to me.
Still, I did my best to handle it. And for the most part it was working, with the occasional “Hey, kids, pay attention,” or “you need to listen to this if you want to be ready for that pop quiz I might spring on you at any time”. I had no intention of a pop quiz, but they didn’t know that. Besides, with the way they were acting I might just have become so inclined as to give them a random pop quiz right then and draw questions from the previous day’s lecture notes.
There were days of teaching that really tried me, hard. Sometimes I didn’t know if I was cut out for it or not. Whatever made me think that I could make a difference in some kids’ lives, the way some of my great teachers had with me? This was something that you were born with, a calling. I thought I had it, but what if I was wrong? What if teaching would always be a paycheck to me and nothing more? I’d just grow more and more embittered every single year until I hated kids the way that Wicker seemed to. I didn’t want to adopt that kind of attitude about kids and teaching. But with all of the stress invading every synapse of my brain, and attacking me with anxiety and worry, it was all I could do to not scream at them every five seconds.
I was worried sick about Blake. What if he’d gone out and done something really stupid? He might be lying somewhere in a ditch in need of medical help, or he might have been so mad that he decided to call the whole thing off, and was done with me for good. It would be all my fault. I’d driven to this with my incessant badgering.
The last straw was my mother poking her nose where it didn’t belong. I was a grown woman, and I didn’t need any help with my love life. I was doing just fine on my own.
Except, I wasn’t. Was I really standing there, making excuses for Blake’s behavior? Why? Because I loved him? I knew that I was in the right here. If Blake had something to hide from me regarding his family, then I needed to know about it. I had to know for our child’s sake. It was important.
Blake was acting like a child. He had walked out on me and now he wasn’t even replying to my attempts to reach out to him. It was his fault. Maybe I had approached it the wrong way, but what choice had he left me? I was at the end of my rope. I was desperate. I had to know some things about the family I was marrying into.
But, I wanted Blake back. I had to know where he was and what he was thinking. I had to know if there was still an “us” to think about. What was I saying? Was our relationship that fragile that it couldn’t withstand this?
I was standing at the whiteboard preparing to write something down when I felt the pencil hit the back of my head. It didn’t really hurt, but I could feel it was a hard object and it had been thrown at me. Automatically, my whole body suddenly felt threatened. I was in a state of heightened alertness anyway. The stress was coursing through me, invading every single channel of my cells, flooding them all with the responses typical of fight or flight.
My hands gripped and released repeatedly, letting go of the dry erase marker I had been using to scribble on the board. My back tensed up and I felt the rage welling up within me like I’d never known before. It started with a tingling sensation at the base of my spine, and it rolled up and down me branching out to all of the outermost reaches of my being, where everything suddenly collided in my brain. I felt insane for a moment. I’d never felt that much rage and anger with anybody.
These kids had clearly picked the wrong day to be total jerks. There I was trying to teach them basic life skills that they would need to succeed in the world in anything that they attempted to do with their lives, and those little bastards decided that pelting m
e with pencils was acceptable.
“Who did that?”
I demanded spinning around. My voice was loud and exaggerated. I was gritting my teeth, clenching them almost. My heart was flying in my chest, practically beating right through my ribcage. I saw red. The looks of defiance and glee on the faces of those awful kids I was expected to teach, did nothing more than infuriate me to an even higher level.
“WHO THREW THAT?”
I was screaming now. I knew I was. My throat hurt from my outburst, but I was powerless to stop it. I was almost not even there. It was as if I was standing on the outside, looking in. I was in the worst possible state of mind I could have been in to deal with this particular situation.
Yes, I was losing it. I was aware of this as well. I could sense it, and I could almost hear a voice on the side from someone I couldn’t see telling me to calm down, that this wasn’t the way. But I was gone, enraged, livid.
This was the closest I’d ever come to a break with reality. And it was frightening.
The kids were all looking at each other, no one coming forward to take the blame. Their expressions of joy at messing with their teacher had all been replaced with fear and uncertainty. They had never seen a teacher this angry with them.
I walked towards the front row of the class, my fists were now clenching into fists repeatedly, with every single clenched finger I felt a little bit of the anger subside, but then rejuvenate within me. My teeth were gritting so hard that they reverberated pain back up through into my gums and cheeks. It hurt, but the more it hurt, the angrier I became. How dare these little shits throw something at me and treat me with that level of disrespect.
“I DEMAND AN ANSWER NOW!”
I was shouting at the top of my lungs, pacing back and forth in front of them, eyeing every single student down. A few looked as if they were ready to cry. Good. I wanted them to cry. They were probably the guilty ones. They were scared. They were afraid of what they’d done and the beasts they’d unleashed in front of them.
I’d never felt such a total loss of control before. It wasn’t me; I knew that. I felt almost inhuman, but I couldn’t stop. I knew that I was going to be utterly appalled at my behavior when I looked back later, but still, even with all of these little tidbits of self-awareness, I could not for the life of me put the brakes on and take a few minutes to calm myself. I was beyond reproach. I’d lost it.
“FINE! THEN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU WILL HAVE DETENTION WITH ME STARTING TODAY! HOW DARE YOU TREAT ME THIS WAY! I DON’T DESERVE THIS! YOU THINK YOU’RE TOUGH? YOU THINK YOU ARE HOT SHIT? I’LL SHOW YOU ALL WHO YOU ARE MESSING WITH!”
I was now panting, my breath completely gone. I was getting far too upset. It wasn’t good for the baby. I knew this. But I couldn’t stop. I’d gone over the edge and I didn’t know how to come back now. My body was fighting me.
“Miss Daniels!”
A man’s voice came from the doorway.
My head shot angrily towards the intrusion. Suddenly, there I was out of breath from yelling at the top of my lungs, and the entire first floor hallway had probably heard me. Suddenly, I could take a step back and see what I was actually doing. I was a mess. I was so out of control.
I was looking into the face of Wicker. He had heard a good portion of what I’d said. He looked both furious and shocked.
“In my office,” he said. “Now.”
I looked at the class, who were all still reeling in shock from what had just happened. My head felt like it was going to fall off my body. I was lightheaded, so dizzy that I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, but I managed to pull it together and took a deep breath as I walked out of the classroom.
I knew I should have apologized for my actions, but I wasn’t that sorry. These kids had it coming, and they deserved every bit of what I’d said, but I shouldn’t have said it the way I did. I got carried away. I’d lost myself. Everything had boiled over inside of me at the wrong place and time.
“I don’t know what is going on with you,” Wicker said when we were seated in his office. “But, this is unacceptable. I’ve never had a teacher blow her lid that way, especially when she was first starting out.”
“I know. It was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it,” I said.
“Well, whatever is going on with you, I suggest you get it fixed and straighten your head up. Another outburst even a tenth of what I saw in there, and you are out of here, with no recommendations. I won’t put up with this sort of behavior.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and closed my eyes. I felt like crying.
“Take the rest of the day off, and come back tomorrow, if you are feeling better,” Wicker said.
I got up to leave.
“Miss Daniels? You’d better do some serious soul searching to decide if this is the right place for you, after all.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
When I slumped down behind the wheel of my car, that was when I let the waterworks fly. The pain, the frustration, all of the anguish that dwelled within me—all of it just fell out of me. It really was like falling apart at the seams. I felt sickened by my actions, by the worry about Blake, about our relationship, and the stress of becoming a new mother. It was all too much to take and I had a meltdown.
I sat there and I cried for several minutes alone in that parking lot, parked tightly away in my little car which I’d owned for the past few years. I had to talk to Blake. This madness would end, once I knew he was ok and I found out what he had to say for himself regarding his lies, and we could work past it.
Would we be able to work past it? Was that going to be an option? Or were we doomed to fall apart? That was the thing that was most troubling to me, the not knowing. The uncertain future, or rather the idea of a possible uncertain future kept creeping into my head, and I knew it was all stupid, but I couldn’t quiet my mind on this. I felt utterly sick about everything in my life at that moment. I’d reached what I thought rock bottom must have felt like. I couldn’t have imagined hitting a lower point in my life.
I suddenly remembered the baby. And then I knew that there was a much lower point after all. If something ever happened to my child, I wouldn’t know what to do. That would be the one thing that I knew I would never recover from. Never.
And in that time of total desperation, the knowledge that my baby was there, and it would depend on me, and I would have to be there for my child no matter what, was what kept me going. That was what pulled me through.
I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time either.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Blake
I was going nuts.
It had been a morning of total confusion and panic. Even my secretary asked me if I was alright. She had several messages from Tina. I took the messages and told her I would call her when I could. Then I locked myself in my office and stared at my computer screen, as I tried to locate Dane. He hadn’t come into the office of course, but he could have shown up at any minute. Finally, I was able to talk to his secretary Lucy, when she showed up for work. Apparently, she had a doctor’s appointment that morning, which she had cleared the time off with Dane, and was three hours late. I didn’t know what kind of a doctor’s appointment took that long, but she wasn’t my secretary.
She finally was able to pull up his schedule and see that according to the time of ten forty-five, Dane was meeting out in the field to go over breaking ground at a new construction site for some clothing store. It sounded like his type of thing, mostly because those stores attracted predominantly women.
I told my secretary I was going out for a bit, and I might be back later. She gave me a strange look since I hardly ever took off this early. Plus, I had a few meetings scheduled for later in the afternoon. I had to be back for those, they were too important. But right now, I had to get out of there and talk to Dane to find out what really happened last night. What did we do?
I had a pretty good idea what that pervert did, but what did he let me do in
my drunken state? That was a more important question. I got in my car and drove out of the city, hopping on the ten and heading towards the East Valley. It was about a forty-five minute drive with light traffic, and I actually found myself jamming along to the radio, clearing my head with some old grunge tunes from the nineties. The panic and the anxiety ridden thoughts that were dominating my mind, had started to subside just a little bit, at least enough for me to think about something else besides the fact that my life might have been falling apart.
Tina… I needed to call her. I had to hear her voice; it had been too long. But what if I had to tell her that I did something stupid, something awful… something so unspeakable that it made the constant lies about my family’s history seem like some little nightmare that I’d had as a child. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse… here it was crashing down all around me.
I just hoped there was some light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I didn’t do anything. That was possible. I was so drunk that I had no idea what I might have done, or not done. I just hoped that Dane didn’t lie to me. I liked to think I could read people pretty well, and I knew Dane about as well as one person could ever really know anyone else. He’d never really lied to me before, not about anything really important.
When I got to the site, Dane was there talking to the foreman. He seemed to be in good spirits. How was he always in such a good mood, no matter how much he’d partied the night before, how bad he had to have been feeling, or how much debauchery he could have gotten into?
“Hey, buddy,” Dane said when he saw me coming. He had the easiest going smile, his shades on, his hair perfectly combed, and his attitude was all relaxed business. The guy was unbelievable. “What brings you out here? I got all this covered.”
“I have to talk to you,” I said. I pulled him aside out of earshot.
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