by Cara Colter
“Perfect,” she said.
And it was perfect. After dinner they watched the news together, and it felt so utterly easy, as if they were an old married couple.
Which they were, sort of.
Of course, when they’d been a newly married couple, they hadn’t sat around watching television. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Later, when that stage had passed—or when she’d killed it, by bringing out the dreaded chart—they had played cards sometimes in the evening.
She suddenly longed for that.
“You have a deck of cards, Kade?”
“Why? You want to play strip poker?” he asked with such earnest hopefulness she burst out laughing.
“No!”
“How about a strip Scrabble game, then?”
“How about just an ordinary Scrabble game?” she said, trying not to encourage him by laughing.
“Can we use bad words?”
“I suppose that would be okay. Just this once.”
“How about if we use only bad words?”
She gave him a slug on his arm. “That falls into the ‘give him an inch and he’ll take a mile’ category.”
Suddenly, she wanted to play a bad-words Scrabble game with him. She wanted to not be the uptight one, the stick-in-the-mud. “A bad-words Scrabble game it is,” she said.
“I don’t actually have a Scrabble board.”
“That figures.”
“But I bet we can find it on the computer.”
And so that was what they did, sat side by side on his sofa, playing a bad-words Scrabble game on the computer until she was laughing so hard it felt as if she could die from it.
“So,” he said casually, after he had just played phaut, “tell me why you want a divorce all of a sudden.”
“I told you, it’s not all of a sudden.”
“But there’s something going on.”
And, maybe he’d done this on purpose, reminded her of what it was like to have a best friend, because she wanted to tell him. Crazily, she wanted to know what he thought.
“I’m thinking of adopting a baby,” she said quietly.
He was staring at her. “Aw, Jess,” he said, not as if he was happy for her, but as if he pitied her.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It’s the Old English spelling of fart,” he said. “P-h-a-u-t. You can challenge it if you want. But you miss a turn if you’re wrong.”
She had just told him something very important! How could he act as if the stupid word he’d made up was more engrossing?
“Not that. What does ‘aw, Jess’ mean?”
“Never mind. I’m sorry I said it.”
She saw, suddenly, that he was using his stupid made-up word as a way not to get into it with her. “No, I want you to tell me.”
“But then when I do, you’ll be mad,” he said, confirming his avoidance strategy.
“Will I?” When had she become that person? The one who invited opinions, but then was angry if they were not what she wanted to hear? She wanted it not to be a truth about her, but in her gut, she knew it was.
“You don’t want to hear what I have to say, but maybe I’m going to say it anyway, for the sake of the baby.”
She felt as if she was bracing herself.
“A baby isn’t supposed to fill a need in you, Jessica,” he said quietly. “You’re supposed to fulfill its needs.”
Jessica felt the shock of it. She felt as if she should be very, very angry with him. But she was not. Instead, she remembered the revelation she’d had in the change room of Chrysalis, the one she had tried to shake off.
That she was using a child to try to fight off her own pervasive feeling of inadequacy. Instead of being angry with Kade, Jessica was, instead, sharply aware she had carried a certain neediness in her since the death of her mother. The miscarriages had made it worse.
So Kade had called a spade a spade. She saw, from the look on his face, it was not a put-down at all. She had a deep sense of his courage, that he had handed her a simple truth, knowing it might make her angry, but also believing she needed to hear it. And maybe also believing she would know what to do with it.
Jessica remembered how before she had hated everything about Kade, she had loved everything about him. And this was one of the things she had loved, that he had a way of seeing right to the heart of things. He would have shrugged it off, uncomfortable, if she called it intuition, but that was exactly what it was.
It was part of what made him so good at business. He was brilliantly insightful. Before things had gone sideways between them, Jessica had loved his input, so different from her own.
“I’ve been too blunt,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, Kade,” she said, “it’s what I needed to hear, even if it’s not what I wanted to hear.”
She suspected this was why she had not wanted to tell him about the adoption, because he could shed a light on her plans that could change everything.
“You and I,” she said, “we’ve always been so different. It’s as if we each have the pieces of half of a puzzle. It’s when we’re together that we can piece together the whole thing.”
She thought of those adoption papers at home, and it occurred to her this was what he had shown her: she was still wanting a baby to fill gaps in her life.
She had probably never been less ready for a baby than she was right now.
“I’m very tired now,” she whispered, feeling as if she was holding the remnants of another shattered dream within herself. “I’m going to bed.”
“Jess, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She smiled wanly. “Oh, Kade, I don’t think we ever wanted to hurt each other. And yet, somehow we always do.”
And yet, over the next few days it was as if something had broken free between them; a wall of ice had crumbled, and what was held behind it flowed out. As they shared his beautiful space, there were moments of spontaneous laughter. And quiet companionship. As they shared meals and memories and old connections, they rediscovered their comfort with one another. And caught glimpses of the joy they had once shared. And relaxed into that rare sensation of having found someone in the world with whom it was possible to be genuine.
And so when Jake called Kade on Thursday afternoon and told him that the house was done, Kade felt not happy that the work had been finished so quickly, but a sense of loss. He wanted to give Jake a list of ten more things to do. No, a hundred. No, a thousand.
He brought her the news after work. Jessica had arrived at the apartment before him. She was wearing one of the outfits they had bought together—a lively floral-print dress with a belt and a wide skirt that reminded him of something someone might wear to dance the jive.
She had her arm out of the sling and was wiping down his counters. Once it had bugged him so much that she felt driven to wipe up every crumb.
But now, watching her, he could see it gave her a kind of contentment to be bringing order to her space, and he found he liked watching her.
She looked up and saw him standing there, and she smiled a greeting.
“Hey! You are not supposed to be out of that sling yet.”
“You know me.”
It was the most casual of statements, but it filled him with some sense of satisfaction that, yes, he did know her.
“I could not handle the mess on the counter. I needed both hands free to wring out the dishcloth.”
“You’ve always been such a stickler for tidy.”
“I know. You used to protest daily, too many rules.”
“Did I? I don’t remember that.”
* * *
Jessica cast Kade a look. Could he really not remember the mean things he had said to her?
“You called me the sock Nazi,” she remembered ruefully. Was she hoping he would apologize? He didn’t. He cocked his head at her, and looked at her in that way that made her stomach do the roller-coaster thing.
“I couldn’t unders
tand the changes in you,” he said. “We said ‘I do’ and overnight you went from being this kind of Bohemian free-spirited artist to Martha Stewart’s understudy.”
“And you,” she reminded him, “resisted me at every turn. It drove me crazy. If I put out a laundry hamper, you would throw your dirty clothes on the floor beside it.”
It had driven her crazy that she had been creating this perfect little nest for them—a perfect world, really—and he’d resisted her at every turn. He’d left his socks in the living room. He’d hung his towels crooked in the bathroom. He’d left dishes in the sink, and if he’d been working outside and forgot something in the house, he’d just traipsed in, leaving a pathway of leaves and grass and mud in his wake.
“I know I could be inconsiderate,” he said, but he didn’t sound very remorseful. “I felt as if you were trying to control me all the time, I felt as if you thought the way you wanted to live was the only correct way, and what I wanted, to be a little relaxed in my own space, didn’t count at all.”
Jessica felt shocked by that. It was certainly true. She had always wanted things her way.
“And then I’d come home from working all day, and you’d have some elaborate meal all prepared and candles on the table and the best dishes out. I would have been just as happy with a hamburger and my feet up on the coffee table in front of the TV. Not that I was allowed to put my feet up on the coffee table, even though it was really a bench that was sturdy enough to have survived one war, a fire and two floods.”
She was aghast at the picture he was painting. He looked as if he was going to stop, but now that the floodgates were open, he was completely unable to.
“I wanted to talk to you the way we had always talked—about ideas and dreams and your art. I wanted to laugh with you and be lighthearted.
“But suddenly all you wanted to talk about was paint colors for the nursery and could we please get a new sofa, and did I think there was too much tarragon in the recipe. Tarragon, Jess.”
And so this was how their relationship had started to show cracks, she thought. She had known it was all going dreadfully wrong.
“I wanted to shake you, and say, ‘Who are you and what the hell have you done with Jessica?’”
It wasn’t until after he’d gone from her life that she realized how stupid it had been to make an issue out of the very things she then had missed.
“But you—” Jessica’s defensive response died on her lips. She considered the possibility he was right. Instead of feeling defensive, she let what he had just said sink in. Suddenly, for the first time, it occurred to her maybe she should be the one who was sorry. If she was going to move on, if she was going to be a good parent—no, a great parent—to a child someday, she had to start working on herself now. And part of that meant facing her role in the relationship going wrong.
Up until this point, had she really told herself she had no part in it? That it was all his fault?
“What happened to you?” he asked. “And worse, what did I have to do with it?”
“Nothing,” she said softly, and with dawning realization. “You had nothing to do with it. I think, Kade, ever since my mom died, I longed to have that world again.
“I was only twelve when she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. She went from diagnosis to dead in three weeks.”
“I know that,” he said, reminding her he knew so much about her.
“But what you didn’t know—maybe what I didn’t even know until this minute—was that I wanted my world back. After she died, it was just my dad and my brother and me. Everything went south. The house was a catastrophe. We ate takeout and macaroni and cheese. I couldn’t even invite a friend over, our house was such a disaster. I wanted my lovely, stable family back.”
“Oh, Jessie,” he said. “I probably should have figured that out.”
“And then we got married,” she said slowly, “and I already had this idea in my head what a perfect life looked like, and I set out to make our life together look like that. And when I could sense you were dissatisfied, I thought it was because we needed to take the next step—to solidify ourselves as a family.”
“You decided you wanted to have a baby.”
“Didn’t you want to have a baby?” she asked.
“Of course I did,” he reassured her. “But maybe not for me. I wanted you to be happy. It didn’t seem as though paint chips and the creative use of tarragon were making you happy. It certainly didn’t seem as though I was making you happy.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SO HERE WAS a painful truth looking Jessica in the face. She’d had a wonderful husband who loved her, and somehow she had managed to manufacture misery.
Not that their challenges had not been real, but why hadn’t she been able to focus on everything that was right and good, instead of working away at the tiny cracks until they had become fractures between Kade and her?
As painful as this conversation was, Jessica was relieved by it. This was the conversation they had needed to have a year ago, when everything had fallen apart so completely between them. Maybe if they had had it even before that, they could have stopped things from progressing to a complete fallout.
“When the first miscarriage happened,” Jessica admitted softly, “I think it was a cruel reminder of what I’d already learned from my mother’s illness—I was not in control of anything. And yet instead of surrendering to that, I fought it hard. The more out of control I felt, the more I started trying to control everything. Maybe especially you.”
“Jessica,” Kade said, and his voice was choked, “I always saw the failure as mine, not yours.”
Her eyes filled with tears. It was not what she needed to hear, not right now, just as she was acknowledging her part in their marriage catastrophe.
“When I married you,” Kade said, his voice low and pain-filled, “it felt as if that was a sacred vow and that I had found my lifelong duty. It was to protect you. To keep you safe. To stop bad things from happening. I felt as if my love should be enough to protect us—and you—from every storm.
“When it wasn’t? When the growing chasm between us was made impassable by the two miscarriages, I could not enter your world anymore. I felt as if I was losing my mind. Those miscarriages, those lost babies, made me admit to myself how powerless I was. I couldn’t do the most important thing I’d ever wanted to do. I could not save my own babies.
“And that compounded the fact I was already dealing with a terrible sense of failure at lesser levels.”
“What levels?” she asked.
“I had failed to even make you happy. I wanted you to stop trying to get pregnant. But you wouldn’t. It made me feel as if I was not enough to meet your needs. It felt as if the bottom fell out of our whole world. When you wanted to keep trying—keep subjecting yourself and us to that roller-coaster ride of hope and joy and grief and despair—I just couldn’t do it. And so I retreated to a world where I could be in control.”
“And abandoned me,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes. Yes, I did abandon you. But I think not nearly so thoroughly as you abandoned yourself. It was as if a baby was going to become your whole reason and your whole life.”
She realized that she had not been ready then, and she was not really ready now, either. She began to cry. She had vowed no more losses, and now she faced the biggest one of all. Somehow in marriage, she had lost herself. She had become the role she played instead of the person she was.
Kade had always hated tears.
Always. If they argued and she started crying, he left.
Except when they had lost the first baby. They had crawled into bed together and clung to each other and wept until there were no tears left.
But after that, it was as if he steeled himself against that kind of pain, against feeling so intensely ever again. Even after the devastation of the loss of the second baby, he had been capable of only a few clumsy claps on the shoulder, a few of the kinds of
platitudes she had come to hate the most.
It had seemed as if her grief had alienated him even more, had driven him away even more completely.
The tears trickled down her cheeks. She could not stop them now that they had been let loose.
She expected him to do what he had always done: escape at the first sign of a loss of control on her part. But he didn’t.
“Jessie,” Kade said softly. “In retrospect, we weren’t ready for those babies. Neither of us was. We thought our relationship was on firm ground, but at the first stress, it fractured, so it wasn’t. Babies need to come into a stronger place than that.”
He came and he put his arms around her. He drew her deep against him, doing what she had needed so desperately from him all along. He let her tears soak into his shirt.
“I’m okay now,” she finally sighed against him. “Thank you.”
“For what?” he growled.
“For holding me. It’s all I ever needed. Not for you to fix things, but for you to be there, as solid as a rock, when things went sideways.”
He looked at her. He nodded. She could see the regret in his face. She could see that he got it. Completely.
And then something changed in his eyes, and he reached down and lifted a tear off her cheek with his finger, and scraped his thumb across her lip.
Jessica could feel the move into the danger zone. And she should have stepped back from it. But she could not.
A part of her that would not be controlled missed him—and missed this part of their life together—with a desperation that made her think she knew how heroin addicts felt. The need overshadowed everything. It overpowered common sense and reason. It certainly overpowered the need to be in control and the need to be right.
They were all gone—common sense and reason, control and the need to be right. They were gone, and in their place his thumb scraping across her lip became her whole world. Her lips parted, and she drew his thumb into her mouth. His skin tasted of heaven.
He went very still. She gazed up at him. And then she stood on her tiptoes, and she pulled his head down to her. She kissed that beautiful, familiar little groove behind his ear. He groaned his surrender and placed his hands on each side of her face and looked down at her, and then lowered his mouth to hers.
