by L. D. Davis
“It will just be us, but that’s okay,” I said to my children after I’d given them the news. I smiled and tried to appear cheerful and excited and hoped they couldn’t see how sad I was. “We’ll make dinner together, and we’ll make the pies together. Cora, I’ll even let you make a pie all by yourself. Okay? We’ll have mashed potatoes and yams and stuffing and string beans and homemade cranberry sauce. Right?”
“Yeah!” Amanda squealed and clapped her hands.
She was the only one who seemed eager for my plans. Even Cora, who loved anything to do with cooking, was less than thrilled. Her small voice and the sad droop to the corners of her mouth just about killed me.
“No one else is coming?”
“No, but that’s okay. We will still have a wonderful dinner. It will be fun for us all to cook together.”
“I don’t want to cook,” Gavi said, stone-faced. “I’ll just play with my Legos.”
“You can play with your Legos another day. Thursday will be family time.”
He crossed his arms and his blond brows came down. “I don’t want family time.”
My smile was hurting my damn face. “Too bad. You should appreciate the time you have with your family. You should be thankful for the time you have with your family.”
“I’ll be thankful to play with my Legos.”
I gave up on trying to be calm and nice. “Gavin, that’s enough. We will make Thanksgiving dinner together and eat together, and then watch a movie together. You don’t have to like it, but that’s what we’re doing.”
He stomped a foot. That was new, too. Cora stomped her feet on occasion, but Gav had always been calmer than that. “You’re not fair!”
“That’s right. I’m not fair. I don’t have to be fair. I just have to be your mother.”
“It’s stupid! We should just cancel Thanksgiving because nobody else wants to be here.”
“Marco might come,” Cora said, her eyes wide with hope.
I would’ve let her have that hope and hang on to it, even if she were disappointed in the end, but her brother crushed it.
“He won’t come! He doesn’t want to be here anymore. He doesn’t want to be here with Mom or us anymore or he wouldn’t still be in Italy with those other kids and their mom.”
Did my own feelings and insecurities somehow transfer to my son? Logically, I knew why Marco was still there, but I felt Gavi’s words in a visceral way. They were words that echoed very quietly in the back of my mind late at night when all was still.
“Gavin,” I said his name quietly but firmly. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Why not? It’s true. He doesn’t want us anymore. Nobody wants us anymore. Thanksgiving should have been canceled as soon as Daddy left!”
I’d lost my patience as a mother many times. I’d been exasperated and irritated and aggravated and plain old pissed off, but I had never snapped. He was just a little boy, angry at the world, and he had every right to be, but it was just too much for me this time.
“Gavin, that’s enough!” I shouted, making all three of the children jump. “I’m doing the best I can here!”
“Daddy would have done better!”
The words were like a slap, because they were true, and because I felt totally incapable as a parent. My husband might’ve had his faults, but he’d been a fantastic father, and he’d made every holiday festive and exciting, despite any marital drama between us. He always made our kids happy, and I was obviously failing at that.
I stared at my son for a long moment. His face was red, and his little chest moved up and down as he breathed hard from his rushing emotions. My own emotions were rushing to the surface, and one thing I could not do was break in front of my kids. Without another word, I got up and went upstairs. I needed a minute, or ten. I closed myself off in my bedroom, and the instant my butt touched the bed, I started to cry.
There was no one reason why I was bawling. The discussion—or argument—over Thanksgiving was just the thing to set me off. I’d been crying a lot since that talk with Marco, as if the past year and a half of suppressed tears were finally making their way out a little at a time. I hated to cry. While I’d never thought of others as being weak when they did it, I’d held myself to a higher standard in that regard after Gavin died. Tears had been a waste of time in my mind, but I thought differently now. Crying can be cleansing, but I didn’t want to become a chronic crier. I had a vagina, but I didn’t want to be a vagina.
There was a light knock on my door. I glanced at the digital clock and realized I’d been upstairs for almost fifteen minutes. Instantly, I felt guilty for having run away from my kids for so long. None of this could have been any easier for them. They all missed Marco and the steady presence my mom had had in their lives for almost two years, and they were even losing time with their paternal grandparents, but Gavi especially missed his father, even if he hadn’t expressed that aloud.
I wiped away the last of the dampness on my cheeks and called out for the person on the other side to come in. My son entered hesitantly, his gaze downcast as if he were in trouble.
“Mommy, are you okay?” he asked quietly.
My heart glowed a little. He had stopped calling me Mommy at some point over the past couple years. I was just Mom, which was still nice, but not as nice as Mommy.
“Yes, Gav. I’m okay.”
He fidgeted with a button on his shirt as he continued to stare down at the floor. His voice came out in a barely audible whisper. “I’m sorry I was mean.”
“Come here.” I held my hands out to him. Reluctantly, he shuffled the short distance and placed his smaller hands in mine. “Look at me, Gav. You’re sad and a little angry. Nan and Grampy are away, Gran isn’t here much anymore, Marco has been gone for a while, and you miss your dad. Missing all those people, especially one that…isn’t coming back, can make anyone emotional. You know me. When I get emotional, I get mean sometimes, too. I don’t mean it. Sometimes I don’t know how to handle it.”
He wiped away a single tear and averted his face so I wouldn’t see it. I ran a hand through his strawberry-blond hair. He looked so much like his father.
“It’s okay to cry. I know we don’t talk about our feelings that much here, but maybe we should start. I don’t want you to think you can’t be sad, or angry, or that you have to be alone when you are thinking of Daddy.”
“You don’t talk about him.” His voice quavered as he finally met my eyes with accusation. “You act like he was never here.”
There was no doubt in my mind now, I had definitely damaged my child. I felt so horrible.
I held his gaze. He deserved for me to look in him the eyes. “I know. I know now how wrong I was for that. It hasn’t been easy for me, but it hasn’t been easy for you either, and I’m sorry.”
He cried silently for a moment before he asked a question I’d asked myself dozens of times over the past few weeks. “Do you still love him? Daddy, I mean. I know you are Marco’s girlfriend now, but do you still love Daddy?”
Without hesitation, I spoke the truth. It was true, even despite all that had happened between us. “Yes. Always.”
Gavi was satisfied with that response. His shoulders dropped with relief, as if he’d tensed for a negative answer. I reached for a tissue and wiped his nose as if he were just a toddler again.
“I do want to have Thanksgiving,” he said with a sniffle. “I don’t want to cancel it. It’s just not going to be the same.”
I stroked his hair once more. “No, it won’t be the same, but we’ll have to start new traditions without forgetting about the people we love who aren’t here. Okay?”
He nodded, sniffled again, and managed a weak smile. Something in me loosened some of the tightness and darkness that had been in my chest for a long time.
I stood, feeling better than I had in days or maybe weeks. “We better get downstairs.”
“Yeah,” he agreed with a sigh. “The girls are probably wrecking everything.”
/> I laughed softly as we headed out the door. “Probably.”
The next day, Adam called me. We had texted a few times since he had been in town, but this would be our first phone conversation in a while.
“What are you doing with your life?” he asked.
“When I know, I’ll let you know. Maybe I will have an answer by the time I’m thirty.”
Adam’s sigh came down the line. “Why haven’t you done any of your preop tests yet? Are you chickening out?”
“I never said I would have the surgery,” I said evasively.
“You said you wanted to Chuck Norris people in the face. You can’t Chuck Norris people in the face in your current condition. If you are not going to have the surgery, you should have already started physical therapy at least.”
“It’s not a good time for surgery. My sister is about to have her baby, and she’ll be getting married soon. I don’t want to miss any of it.”
Adam and the other doctor wanted to remove at least one of the screws in my leg. It was a simple surgery, but I would have to be off my feet for a while. I couldn’t afford to be off my feet, and I was still on the fence about using someone else’s money to fix my problems. Little did Adam or anyone know, that despite my gloomy mood, I’d been working on one of those problems.
“Oh? When is the big day?”
“Umm, I don’t know. They are waiting until the baby comes before they pick a day, but Lily said they won’t wait long.”
“Hmm,” he hummed, suspicion laced in the sound.
“I won’t be able to travel,” I quickly argued. “Or go to the wedding.”
“And how pregnant is your sister again?”
“She’s due at the end of December, but she’s had complications, so it can really be any time.”
“Okay, I understand why you can’t do surgery, but what about PT? Whether you have the surgery or not, you can only benefit from therapy. Since I don’t trust you to be able to not only make the appointment, but to show up for it, I am going to come out there and hold your little hand and take you to your first session.”
I sighed and decided it was time to tell him the truth. “Adam, I don’t want to have surgery, like at all. After I saw you and Doctor Snyder that day, I knew that I didn’t want it. Even though both you and Marco have offered to cover the costs, I don’t want you to, and besides that, I just don’t want the surgery if I can avoid it.”
“If you are expecting me to carve you a new leg out of whale bone, I’m not doing that, Ahab.”
“I don’t need a new leg. Listen, I haven’t just been sitting around brooding, okay? I’ve…I’ve been doing things.”
There was a brief pause before he asked with suspicion, “What kind of things?”
“You know I did some PT before, when I first got out of the hospital. Well, all this time I still had my brace and a few other things I got from the therapist, including instructions for different exercises. I’ve also scoured the internet and have watched a million YouTube videos. I’ve been doing some therapy—maybe it’s not good enough by your high fancy surgeon standards, but I have been doing something with my life.”
Now there was doubt mixed with his suspicious tone. “And how is being a fake doctor working for you?”
“It’s actually not bad. I’ve been rebuilding muscle in my leg and it’s been getting easier to go up and down the stairs or to stand for long periods.”
“Hmph. I am skeptical.”
“If you don’t believe me, I have a follow-up appointment with Doc Snyder on Wednesday. You can conference in and check my progress.”
“I’ll do you one better. I’ll fly out there and go to the appointment with you. You’ve sparked my curiosity.”
“In other words, you don’t believe me.”
“Not even a little bit,” he said cheerfully. “But even if you have made progress at home, I am still going to strongly recommend you see a PT specialist so that you continue to improve and don’t plateau. I’ll make a deal with you. If you start therapy—like in a facility and not from YouTube—as soon as I can arrange it and make every session up until the wedding, I will give you a compound cream I prescribe to my patients. It is both an anti-inflammatory as well as a pain reliever. It should help you along. You’ll be able to dance with Marco at your sister’s wedding.”
“If he bothers to come back,” I muttered.
“I heard he was still in Italy,” Adam said sympathetically. “I’m sure he will be back, but this isn’t about Marco. This is about you and what you need to do for yourself and for your kids. Right?”
I sighed but nodded firmly, more for myself than for Adam. “Right, but you don’t have to come out here.”
“Yeah, I do. I am your doctor, and I am also your friend.”
“But won’t that interfere with your holiday? It’s not going to be easy navigating the airports the day before Thanksgiving.”
“I don’t have any plans anyway. I mean, Aiko and Brodie invited me to another vapid egotist party, but I really have no desire to be there.”
I thought about it for only a couple seconds before I extended an invitation. “You can always come here,” I said in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a big deal.
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“It’s not an intrusion if I am inviting you, but you might not want to come anyway. You don’t want to be around vapid egotists, but I’m sure your idea of a good time isn’t hanging around me and my three kids all day, either.”
“It’s just going to be you and the kids? What about your mom?”
“She accepted an invitation from her boyfriend’s sister in Akron, about two hours northeast of here. My in-laws left for Florida a couple days ago and will be gone for a couple weeks. Obviously, my sister isn’t coming, and I don’t think Marco will bother to make the trip, so…” I shrugged as if he could see me. “But like I said, you probably don’t—”
“Will there be turkey?”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
“Gravy? Homemade mashed potatoes? Dessert?”
He sounded so hopeful, I had to laugh. “Yes. All of that and more.”
“Then I’ll be there.”
“Okay, cool. Doctor appointment Wednesday and turkey on Thursday.”
The thought of Adam joining us for dinner actually made me happy, the first bit of real happiness I’d felt in weeks. I had a friend for the first time in years. His visit gave me something else to focus on, something to look forward to. It was a little easier to make it through the next few days. There were fewer tears, a little less of the gut twisting.
In a blink, it was Wednesday morning, and Adam and I were walking into a busy medical center for my follow-up appointment. Both he and Doctor Snyder confirmed I had improved, but they also agreed I needed to be under the direction of an actual therapist. The PT specialist they referred me to had a cancelation and was able to see me immediately. I’d had a few sessions in the past right after the accident, so I’d gone in with dire expectations, but this place was nothing like the one I’d gone to before.
The DPT, Dr. Bielle, spent the first half of our session talking to me. She wanted to know my routines, when I was typically in pain, where, and how much. I was asked about my sleeping and eating habits, and she even asked about my kids. Even more, she wanted to know what my expectations were for therapy, what I’d hope to accomplish, and she asked me to be honest about my fears, limitations, and strengths. Afterward, she carefully assessed my movements and tested my physical capabilities. She then told me what her expectations were before she put me in a new brace, taught me a few exercises, and gave me instructions on what to do at home.
“That went much better than I imagined it would,” I said to Adam over lunch later.
“Yeah, I mean, once you were able to get past your 90210 I’m-so-Brenda-Walsh attitude, anything was possible.”
I rolled my eyes skyward. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re a drama
queen, and that you make mountains out of mole hills, but I don’t mind. It’s pretty entertaining. Do I have to come next week, too? Or do you think you can be a big girl and go all by yourself?”
“I’ll go on my own, thanks,” I said flatly.
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I won’t back out. Especially not after all the trouble you’ve gone through to get me this far. Besides, my insurance is paying for it and not you or my wealthy boyfriend, so at least I can retain some of my dignity.”
“Don’t confuse dignity with assholery pride. It isn’t going to be easy. Somedays will be very difficult.”
“I know, but I have to do it this time. I have to go as far as I can go.”
Adam nodded his understanding. “We’ll see how this goes. Perhaps we can avoid surgery. Maybe PT will be enough. I have to be honest with you, kid. I didn’t think you were going to do anything after that first appointment.”
I gave him a small smile and shrug. “I didn’t think I would, either. I was so angry and hurt. Then Marco and I talked, and I…I told him just about everything I could tell him that I’ve been keeping to myself these past couple years. That was really hard, and it reopened a ton of emotional wounds I didn’t even know I had. I was struggling with my thoughts and feelings, especially after Marco left—I’m still struggling with it all, but I knew I had to do something. I felt like I needed to be a better mom, and I can’t be a better mom if I’m not trying. Like we discussed, I did it for my kids. That’s how it started, for them, but now I feel like I’m doing it for myself, too.”
“What does Marco think?”
I sipped my hot chocolate and bit my lip. “I haven’t told him.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“At first, it was because I didn’t want him to pressure me into going to some upscale facility that he would want to pay for, and then once I really got started, I didn’t want to tell him, or you for that matter, in case I failed.”
