Broken Love Story

by Madison, Natasha

  Chapter Eighteen

  Blake

  She never answered my text, her words still lingering in my mind. The softness of it, day by day, a piece of us left behind. There are so many different things going on, and I am not going to sit and think about it. I’m not ready to.

  The whole day, I cleaned the house and picked up shit. Packed away stuff. I was fixing the bed when she texted. I pressed FaceTime right away.

  Her face fills the screen. “That was fast.”

  “I was making the bed,” I tell her, laughing. “Just finished.”

  “Just in time,” she says, smiling. “Did you eat dinner?” she asks, sitting at the kitchen counter.

  “No,” I tell her. “Did you? Where are the girls?”

  “I did not,” she says. “The girls were invited to my in-laws’ house for dinner.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” I ask her, watching her face. Her brown eyes light today.

  “I wasn’t really invited,” she tells me, and I roll my eyes.

  “I’ve never seen you annoyed before,” she says, laughing. “It’s okay, really.”

  “It so isn’t okay. What the fuck is it showing the girls?” I ask her, and I see her eyebrows pinch together. “It’s disrespectful not to invite you.”

  “Honestly, it’s good to just be by myself,” she tells me. “We spent the day at the park taking pictures.” Her eyes light up. “I think I got some good ones.”

  “Really?” I ask her, and she gets the camera to show me the ones she took. “Is that you doing a cartwheel?” I ask, laughing.

  “Yeah. I tried anyway,” she tells me. “I gave Elliot Eric’s clothes.” She puts the camera down while she picks up her coffee cup and takes a drink. “It was a little tense there but …” She puts it down and comes closer to the phone, her face filling up the screen. “I showed him the letter. He wanted to take the picture of Hailey and Eric,” she says, and the hair on my neck goes on alert. “I didn’t let him take it or the letter.”

  “You did good,” I tell her, not sure why it was the right move, or why it was a good idea not to have him hold it.

  We chat for two hours when I hear the door open and the girls yell. “I’ll call you back in a bit,” she tells me, disconnecting, and I toss the phone to the side. I scroll through my phone, looking for Elliot’s number. I’m so close to calling him and fucking telling him what an asshole he is, but I don’t. Something stops me.

  For the next two weeks, we continue our chats. More FaceTime conversations when the girls aren’t around. On Friday, her face isn’t the same. She looks worried.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask her right away.

  She looks at me. “The girls are going camping with Elliot tomorrow for the night.”

  “Okay?” I ask her. “Do you not want them to go?”

  “It’s not that; I know he would never hurt them,” she says. “It’s just I haven’t been without them overnight since before Eric.”

  “Do the girls want to go?” I ask her, wondering, and she nods.

  “Even Lizzie is looking forward to it,” she says, and I try to tell her that everything will be okay. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” she tells me, and we quickly get off the phone.

  I look at the phone and then up again, taking a pull from the beer I had on the table. I won’t be talking to her tomorrow, and I haven’t told her yet. I’m not sure I can.

  The next morning, I wake up, dread filling me right away. I get out of bed, and for the first time, I don’t look at Frankie’s picture. I put on my jeans and get into the truck. The phone rings right away. Looking down, I see it’s Samantha, but I don’t answer. I send it straight to voicemail. Not today, I can’t today.

  I pull up at the cemetery with the bouquet of red roses on the seat next to me. I grab them and carry them with me as I walk to Frankie’s grave.

  “Morning,” I say to the black granite stone that holds her name.

  “I brought you flowers,” I tell her as I place them down on the middle of the stone.

  I sit down, bending my knees, and rest my arms on my knees as my hands hang. “Do you remember when I asked you to marry me?” I ask her and close my eyes, taking me back to the moment.

  “I don’t understand.” I looked at her as she stood there in the middle of the hospital room, one frail hand holding the IV pole that she wheeled around with her when she walked. A blue satin scarf wound around her head where her beautiful, thick curly hair had been. In its place, she had patches of hair growing back.

  “I will not marry you,” she said with her head held high, the blue cotton robe hanging off her. She hadn’t been well this whole week. No matter what we did, she couldn’t fight the cold she was coming down with. Her immune system was too depleted from her treatment.

  “Do you not love me?” I asked her, with tears running down my face. I was on one knee in front of her with a ring, asking her to be my wife, to be mine.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, not moving from her spot in the middle of the room while holding the red roses that I brought her in her spare hand. “Don’t make this harder on me than it has to be,” she said with tears running down her beautiful face. She had lost so much weight, her cheekbones stuck out now. She held her head high on her slender neck, so slender I was afraid to put my arm around her when we sat down.

  “I’m on my knee asking you to be my wife, asking you to be mine.” I begged her to give me this one thing.

  “No,” she said adamantly and then had to walk to the bed to sit down, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths.

  “Why?” I looked at her, taking in her face, knowing I would never forget this moment. There were balloons and a cake ready in the hallway along with all our family members and a priest. I wanted to marry her right away.

  “Because you will only get married once in your life. It’s just the way you are; you are loyal to a fault. If you marry me, you will never move on,” she said with tears running down her face. “If you marry me, you will never marry anyone else; you will never have babies. You will die with me, and I won’t do that to you.”

  “You think just because I put a ring on you and marry you that I won’t move on? You think a ring is going to stop me from moving on?” I got up, mad that she wasn’t giving me this. “You think regardless of if you marry me or not, that I’ll move on?” I shook my head, the hurt coming from my stomach. “I don’t want anyone but you,” I told her.

  “I love you with everything I have,” she told me. “I love you enough not to hold you to the promise that you make me. I love you so much that I won’t let you die with me. You have to promise me,” she said, her breathing getting weaker. “You have to promise me that you’ll live and fall in love.”

  The roses fall from her hand. Her hand goes to her chest, and I yell out for help. She closed her eyes and fell into a coma right after that.

  The tears run down my face as I come back to now. Looking at the roses move in the breeze, I shake my head. “I can’t believe you never married me.” I try to joke with her, but the hurt is still here seven years later.

  I close my eyes, and I’m back to that same day. The balloons were gone, the cake out of my face. We sat by her bed as I held her frail hand in mine, kissing the inside of her wrist where her heart was beating. Faintly. The doctor had just left, and he didn’t have to say what we all knew. There was nothing he could do. Her body was failing. Her parents sat on one side of the bed while I sat on the other, and the tears never stopped. “I love you,” I whispered to her, and her eyes fluttered open.

  “I’m tired.” She looked at me. “I can’t do it anymore.” She didn’t have to tell us because we knew. We saw it in her eyes. “Best thing I ever did was join that debate team.” She tried to be funny, but no smile came to her face. “Don’t close yourself off,” she told me. “Live.”

  “I love you,” were the only words I could say.

  “Then live,” she said. “Do everything we said we would do. Pro
mise me you’ll fall in love.”

  “Frankie,” I said as she closed her eyes, and then slowly opened them again.

  “Promise,” she whispered, and then closed her eyes. Two hours later, she took her last breath and took my heart with her.

  My eyes slowly open as I look at what’s left of her—the cold black stone. “I’m sorry I didn’t do what you told me to.” I lie on my side, resting my head on my arm. I sit here for what seems like forever, then get up and go to my truck. My phone is beeping from calls and messages. My family knows what today is. They give me my space but always call just to check on me and tell me they are here for me.

  I see that Samantha has called a couple of times and has also left a couple of messages. Not today, I tell myself, though I’m not sure what that feeling is that creeps in.

  I get home, close the door and all the drapes, and take the bottle of whiskey out of the cupboard on my way to the couch. I pour myself a couple of shots, taking them all in a row. The initial burning starts to slowly go away. For two hours, I finish the bottle. The sun’s setting, and I close my eyes, hoping that the darkness takes me until tomorrow. I rest my head, and I’m about to sink into the darkness when a soft knock makes me open my eyes. At first, I think I’ve imagined it, that it’s just in my head, but I hear it again.

  I get up to go to the door when the knock sounds again. “I’m coming,” I bark out and swing the door open. “What?” I say, and I’m not sure if it’s the whiskey or my imagination, but she’s standing there in front of me.

  “I figured you needed a friend,” she says softly, and right then, my heart fills for the first time in forever. Her smile fills me; it makes almost everything okay.

  “How did you know?” I ask her, moving aside to let her in.

  “I didn’t,” she says softly as she looks around. “The kids left for the night, and I went into my room and I read the letter again. But this time, this fell out.” She takes the white envelope out with Hailey’s name on it. “Seems Eric wanted to say goodbye to her also.”

  She turns around and notices the empty whiskey bottle. “Am I crashing a party?” she asks, and I don’t know why, but I tell her.

  “Seven years today, Frankie died,” I say and then go to the couch and she follows me.

  “Do you have another bottle somewhere?” she asks me, and I actually smile. “In the kitchen.”

  She gets up, and I follow her the whole way. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater, nothing sexy, but she oozes class. She comes back with it and pours a shot in the glass and hands it to me “To a great, great woman.” When she holds the bottle up, we click the bottle to the glass, and she takes a pull while I swallow the shot. She hisses. “That’s fucking awful,” she says, coughing, and I laugh while she pours another shot. I raise it to my mouth, but she doesn’t join me.

  “How did you know where I lived?” I ask her.

  “I didn’t. I went to the firehouse I found online. They gave me your address,” she tells me and smiles. “FYI, they think I’m a stripper gram.”

  I burst out laughing, smacking my leg. “No way.”

  “I had to make it believable.” She laughs as I swallow another shot. My vision starts to get foggy.

  “I promised her I would fall in love,” I say, looking at her sitting on my couch. “I lied.”

  “You’ll fall in love again. I know it,” she tells me, smiling with tears in her eyes. “Anyone would be lucky to be loved by you,” she says, crouching down next to me and looking straight into my eyes.

  “I can’t love anyone. I’m broken,” I tell her the truth. “Half of me is broken.”

  “What if you find someone who is just as broken as you are and”—she swallows, and her hand comes to my face as she cups my cheek in her hand—“together, you’re whole.”

  My hand moves on its own, brushing the hair from her face. “I would be so lucky,” I whisper, and then my eyes close, and the darkness finally finds me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Samantha

  I don’t know what I was thinking. Fuck, I wasn’t thinking. When the girls left, I went to my room and remembered the white envelope stuck in with the letter from Eric. When I pulled it out, I was in shock that he left Hailey a letter. I immediately called Blake, but he didn’t answer. I knew he wasn’t at work, and when he spent most of the day radio silent and then didn’t answer my texts, I got worried, so I decided to take a drive. Was it my smartest moment? Obviously not. When I walked into the fire station, the eyebrows all raised when I asked if he was around. I joked around, saying I was his stripper, and one of the guys finally gave me his address.

  When I knocked on the door, all the drapes were closed, but his truck was in the driveway. When he opened the door, the glaze in his eyes was apparent, and so was the shock of seeing me. I had no idea today was the anniversary of Frankie’s death.

  He’s suffered all by himself; the big man with the biggest heart I’ve ever seen suffered by himself all day long. So I sat with him shot after shot until he passed out. But not before he told me he could never love again. Not before my heart broke for him and with him.

  I close the door softly behind me as I walk down the steps to my car. I hold the tears in until I sit in my car and head toward my house. Our conversation plays over and over in my head for two and a half hours. When I finally roll home, I don’t bother to turn on the lights. I just walk to my bedroom and kick off my clothes, the first tear finally falling. Of course, I went and fell in love with a broken man who could never love me back.

  I fell in love with a man who thinks he’s so broken he can’t love another person. “Wow, do I know how to pick ’em,” I say and fall into bed. The darkness comes for me easily, and the next day, when I roll out of bed, my whole body aches.

  I walk to the coffeepot, and my phone rings, showing me it’s Blake. I press connect to start the FaceTime.

  “Did I dream that you came here last night?” he says. I look at him, and his face is rough this morning. I laugh at his one eye open and the other eye closed.

  “Would it freak you out if I said it was a dream and you thought you were going crazy?” I laugh at him as he groans.

  “I can’t believe you came and just left,” he says as he lays his head on his arm. “I woke up looking for you.”

  I shake my head, placing the phone down while I start the coffee. “It was a rough day yesterday,” he says softly, and I go back to the phone. “It’s been so long, yet it feels like it just happened.”

  “I guess when it’s that day, the memories of what you did that day just suddenly surface, right? I mean, I can never smell lemon again without thinking of Eric.”

  “Yeah. I asked her to marry me the day she died,” he says, and my heart breaks for him again. “She said no.” He shakes his head. “Every single year, it’s the only memory I have.”

  I look at him, not sure what I should say. Not sure there are any words out there to say. “Anyway, thank you for bringing Hailey’s letter. I’m going to visit her tomorrow when I get off my shift.”

  “That should be relaxing. You can detox all that whiskey from your body,” I tell him, winking at him as the doorbell rings. “Okay, mom duty time.” I hang up and go to the door, opening it for the girls.

  Lizzie comes in and doesn’t say anything but just goes upstairs. I watch her and then turn and look at Elliot. “What is wrong with Lizzie?”

  “I guess she just didn’t sleep well,” he says, dumping their bags at the front door without making eye contact. “Um, I guess I’ll see them around,” he says and walks out. The whole encounter is so fucking weird.

  I look at Daisy. “What in the world?” I ask, and she looks at me. “I don’t want to live with Grandma and Grandpa either,” she says, and then I call Lizzie right away.

  “Come here please,” I say, and she comes down the stairs with tears running down her face. “What in the world?” I take her in my arms, and she sobs. Her hands squeeze me so hard when my arms go ar
ound her. “What in …?” I whisper, and she finally lets me go.

  “I don’t want to go live with Grandma and Grandpa,” she finally says out loud.

  “Why would you think that?” I look at Daisy and then Lizzie.

  “Uncle Elliot wanted to know if we would like to go live there instead of here,” Lizzie says, and my heart stops and then beats faster. “When I got mad, he said it was just a question.”

  “I don’t know why he asked you this,” I tell them both, “but there is no way I would let you live with them when your home is right here. Now, let’s unpack the bags, and we can have movie day on the couch.” I smile, and they walk with the bags to the laundry room. I pick up my phone and call Elliot and it goes to voicemail. I call him back again and leave him a message. “Elliot, you need to call me back.”

  I hang up the phone, but my stomach never settles, even after we watch two movies and the girls return to normal. That night, I text Elliot when he doesn’t call me back, and he doesn’t answer that one either.

  I toss and turn all night long, my hands shaking with nerves, and the next morning when I get back home from dropping off the kids, my phone rings, and I jump at it, expecting it to be Elliot, but it’s Blake.

  “Hey,” he says, and I sigh. “What’s up?”

  “I’m waiting for Elliot to call me back,” I say. Sitting down, I feel my legs shaking with nerves. “He asked the kids if they wanted to go live with my in-laws.”

  “What?” he asks, and I suddenly hear he is in his truck.

  “Yeah, Lizzie came into the house pissed and stormed upstairs. He gave me this horse shit excuse about her not sleeping. Daisy is the one who said she wasn’t going to live with them.”

  “Why would he ask that?” he asks the question that no one has the answer to.

  “I have no clue, but you can bet your ass if he doesn’t call me, I’m going to show up at his work tomorrow. I don’t give a shit anymore.” He doesn’t say anything as I rant and rave about them. “Where are you going?”