the first time she’d spoken. “Not so that you could die.”
“I wished it more times than I can tell you. That if I couldn’t have saved them I could have just gone with them. But you don’t get to make those choices. You don’t get to rearrange the world like that. I mean sure, I could kill myself.”
That sounded awful, but there was no way around the truth of it. No pretending it hadn’t crossed his mind.
He kept on talking. “I could have.” She didn’t argue this time. Not even an indrawn breath. “But that... I really couldn’t do it. Because... I’m alive. Aren’t I? They aren’t. What a... What a shitty response it would’ve been to take my own life. No. I couldn’t do that. Even when it was the worst. I had to keep breathing.”
She still didn’t say anything. And he thought back to their earlier exchange. Before they’d made love.
Before, when they’d been standing out in the rain. When they had talked about her parents. About how there were no words. And how people tried anyway. And usually failed.
But what they did was pull away. And so her, pressed against him, just being with him in the grief, he realized was the kind of gift no one else had ever offered.
Everyone in his family wanted to fix him. His friends wanted him to be fixed so that they could be more comfortable.
But she was just sitting with him. And all this broken discomfort.
His story was an awful one. In part because it was senseless. You couldn’t find the meaning in the death of a young woman. In the death of a child. You couldn’t lay blame, not when the house had every safety system in place. You could do nothing but sit with the senselessness of it. And that, he had a feeling, bothered people most of all.
That this wasn’t something he could make sense of, box up and stick on the shelf of past wounds.
It was a cloak laid over the top of him that he had to figure out how to wear. Like a new skin that he couldn’t shed. And in many ways didn’t want to. Because how did you let go of something you needed to remember?
“Would you like to talk about them?” The question was spoken softly.
“What?”
“Would you like to talk about them? That was the hardest thing. For me. Is that sometimes I wanted to just talk about the good things about my parents, and not the tragedy of losing them. I wanted to be able to have good memories, and I didn’t know how. And people... They wouldn’t let me. They were sad and my sadness made them sadder. I imagine that’s been even worse for you. So do you want to tell me about them?”
He didn’t talk about them. Ever. Because it... It hurt too much. Except... Suddenly he did. He wanted someone else to know. The good things.
And it didn’t make any sense at all. That he should talk to this woman he just slept with about his wife. It was strange, though, because after five years he wasn’t confused about whether or not he’d been released from his marriage vows.
He was all too aware of it, every day.
That he wasn’t a husband. Not in a practical way.
That was where the grief came in. That he couldn’t give love to Mel or Emma in the way that he once had. Couldn’t be those things to them he’d once been. He was just a man who remembered those things.
“I met Mel ten years ago. At a work function. Her dad was CFO of a company I did business with. And... It was not love at first sight. Not for her. But we ended up talking and decided to see each other again. And then again. We dated for longer than she’d have liked before we moved in together. Then I waited too long to ask her to marry me.”
The thought made him smile. Now. They’d fought about it a lot back then. “We got married seven years ago. And Emma... We had Emma about a year later.” He stopped for a long moment, grief a boulder that he couldn’t shift. This was too heavy. But he could see her. Chubby and blonde and dimpled, and he wanted Iris to know. “She was the cutest baby that you’ve ever seen. And I’ve never liked babies. But... I knew the minute that I saw her that I would die for her.”