“It feels so empty,” she whispered.
The house or her?
I had told everyone to give us some privacy. Rocco didn’t feel it was safe to leave us all alone, so the men who stayed were outside. The rest took shelter in the chapel.
Nemours, Ettore, all of the rest—they all seemed like distant, dangerous lands that I’d eventually conquer. I couldn’t look to the next moment, not until we got through this one first.
She peered inside the refrigerator, looking for something.
“Are you hungry, baby?”
“No,” she said, her voice flat, lifeless. “I want to give Jet some cream.”
She moved a few things aside, pulled out a glass jar that she put to her nose, sniffing. Her nose wrinkled in disgust a second later. She flung it into the sink, the bottle shattering upon impact, bits of sour cream ricocheting in all directions, splattering against the counters, on the window behind the sink, and on to the floor.
Jet let out a shriek of protest at the noise, hightailing it into the other room to escape the violence.
“I can’t even keep fucking cream good!”
The note of anger in her voice gave me some hope. It was the first true sign of life in her since I had told her. She never brought it up again, and I never pressed her to. The hospital was cold, impersonal, a constant, brutal reminder of why we were there in the first place.
As soon as the strike of anger came, it seemed to fade, her eyes losing all brilliance, going completely dull. She didn’t move for a while, so sunk into her own skin that she could have been floating in water.
“Let’s eat something,” I said, picking up the bags from the floor, putting them on a seat by the table.
She held a hand up. “I want a shower.”
I nodded, wrapping an arm around her waist and helping her up the steps. Tito had been keeping her well medicated, and not for the first time, I wondered if she was using it as a gateway to escape. Her face stayed poised, but her feet were unsteady.
I helped her undress and then ran the water. As I did, I noticed that she was staring at herself in the mirror, at her stomach. Studying the battle scars she thought no one else could see. I could—I couldn’t stop seeing. A sudden flash of anger flared in her eyes again. Then it was gone, like a stroke of lightning. The mirror fogged, but she still wouldn’t turn away. I had to call her name three times before she turned to me.
“The water’s ready,” I said, giving her my hand. She put it in mine but didn’t hold it. It sat there, cold and limp.
When I first fell in love with Scarlett, I would’ve argued to the point of fists if anyone had said that a heart was not elastic; my love for her continued to grow, beyond a degree that I ever thought possible. But during our hardest times, I realized that a heart has many sides, and elasticity is only one—like a priceless jewel with many facets. Hard times showed me that another side of the heart was made of glass. When I told Scarlett this one night under the stars, she had become more thoughtful than usual, her eyebrows drawn, and then she told me that glass was the most beautiful side because it was the most vulnerable.
True, but my point was that glass was the most likely to crack when rocks were thrown.
My wife was the only one who held the stones capable of causing me damage.
The sound she made as she stepped into the warm shower was a sharp-edged pebble. The crack of it against the most vulnerable side of my heart created a fracture that not even a glassblower could fix. Somewhere between a sob and a sigh, it came from a place deep inside of her that was filled with a hurt I couldn’t kill. She rested her forehead against the wall, the flow of water collecting in her hair, forcing it down and into a V. The stream ran down every knob of her spine—the short time in the hospital made her seem so fragile—and over the slope of her cheeks, down to her legs, where it mingled with blood. Some of it ran in pink rivers. Other lines were still as red as the day she started to bleed.
To steady myself, I braced my arms above the shower, closing my eyes. The metallic smell, the slick feel of it on my hands before it became sticky, the warm rush of it seeping into my clothes before it turned cold—it all refused to leave my mind. I had bathed her in the hospital, but the constant wash of it swirling down the drain triggered the memory. The fucking helplessness.
“Brando?”
I opened my eyes. She watched me carefully.
“You don’t have to stay with me. I know—” She looked down at herself, a quick glance at the blood, and then her eyes met mine. She swayed on her feet, the medicine strong and doing its job.
“Turn around, baby. I’m going to wash your hair.”
She didn’t protest. I scrubbed her scalp, going through the motions. She sighed occasionally but said nothing. A few times I had to put a hand to her slim waist to keep her from sliding along the slippery wall.
“You fell asleep,” I said. “Time to—”
“No.” She shook her head. She put an arm up, resting her head against it, hiding her face from me. “What kind of woman doesn’t know she’s pregnant?”
All I could do was stare at her back. That was part of her struggle, always had been.
