Every day since I’ve been on leave, I’ve had something homemade waiting. Apple cake. Banana bread. Cookies if it’s Friday. I have overcompensated for my negligent emotions. For pretending to feel when I’ve been numb to my precious girls, and the husband who’s been so patient with me as I leave our bed every night to be alone on the sofa.
“I’ve been super busy,” I tell them.
They sit at the small oval table in the kitchen, and I heat up something I made yesterday, smother it with butter, and serve it with cold milk. I sit with them and watch them eat and then feel their eyes lift and fall upon me. And I know that they know.
“Mommy?” Fran has stopped eating. She looks at me and then Amy.
Now Amy is looking at me as well. “Mom?”
I smile as wide as I can, and this causes the muscles of my face to move, and I realize tears are falling. I can’t believe there are any left.
Maybe they’ve been waiting for this moment. Maybe I haven’t pretended as well as I’ve thought. Kids are instinctive creatures. They have to be becausegrown-upsare always hiding and lying.
Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. Grandma is in heaven, looking down on us. Grandpa is too. They are together. We lie and lie and lie.
We tell them we’re just getting dressed when we lock our bedroom door. We tell them we’re fine after they hear us yelling in the kitchen. Sometimes about other people. One of Mitch’s clients. One of my cases. Sometimes about the past. Her name still rings in my ear.Briana.
On and on. We lie to protect them. We lie to protect ourselves.
“What’s wrong?” Amy asks.
I construct a new lie. “I was just thinking that this is our last afternoon together. I’m going back to work tomorrow, remember?”
Fran climbs on my lap, nuzzles her face into my neck, and strokes my hair. And then they both rattle things off to comfort me, about how they do remember because I told them last night and Daddy told them again this morning, and I shouldn’t be sad because they like Kelly, our sitter, and maybe I can make the snack in the morning and save it for the afternoon and I can still see them all weekend.
They tell me they love me.
They tell me they’re proud to have a mom who has such a cool job.
They tell me if I didn’t have my job, I wouldn’t have been able to save all the people in that store. They are too young to know the truth about that day or what just happened to me on that back road. How the one thing led to the other thing, and now I have gone from being numb to feeling enough to cry.
I squeeze Fran and gaze across the table at Amy, and the pain rises and rises beyond the clouds, and then something breaks loose. It comes barreling down from the heavens to this kitchen table, to my children, my loves, and crashes and explodes and the wall breaks into a million pieces.
“I love you,” I say. But I don’t just say it. I feel it. For the first time since the numbness crept in, I feel my love for them.
And with the love comes something else. A different pain. In my arms, where large hands held me against my car. And around my neck, where they cut off the supply of blood to my brain. And on my hip bones, where they slammed into the side of my car.
It won’t be long before the swelling comes, the bruising.
Whatever emotional path I was on before today, in the aftermath of the shooting—the stages of trauma recovery or maybe not, maybe just profoundself-loathing—Wade has now set me on a new course. I am no longer numb. I feel everything. The pain in my body. The love in my heart. But also the fear in my bones.
I breathe my way back to center.
We talk more about new things and scary things, and they offer me their wealth of experience, like maybe I can just take one day at a time and see how it goes and, if it’s too hard, I can let Rowan be in charge. Then we talk about Rowan and make jokes about how messy he is and what our shared desk probably looks like after two weeks on his own and how he needs to find a wife to teach him how to be organized because girls do everything better than boys, but then who would marry Rowan,yuck, then giggles.
I let myself be in this moment, knowing that I have broken free of something but entered a new reality where I have been assaulted. And in which I will now respond and react in ways I cannot yet imagine. I haven’t even begun to deal with the emotions from the shooting, as Dr. Landyn made so painfully clear when I evaded his inquiries. The stages of trauma from that event are now surpassed by this one. I consider the irony. I have gone from the assailant to the victim, the fallout from both now competing inside me.
Mitch arrives just after four. I’m in the shower and don’t hear him until I’ve turned off the water. The girls are on our bed, doing their homework. Fran has to draw a picture of the story that was read to them on their trip to the local library. Amy is writing a short essay. She is meticulous and easily frustrated, especially by English because there’s no right or wrong—everything is subjective and therefore uncertain. I can see my anxiety flowing through her, and I have already begun the mitigation. There are coping techniques now, skills she can learn that will serve her throughout her life. Things my parents and teachers didn’t understand when I was her age.
My thoughts ricochet between homework and dinner and what happened to me not hours before. For the briefest moment on that back road, I had felt free of the shooting. Wade told me that he saw me fire my weapon and he knew he would be dead if I hadn’t killed Clay Lucas. It had washed me clean of the guilt. Now I don’t know what I can believe or not believe. The relief can’t be trusted, and what has come in its place is fierce. Unruly. The stages of trauma recovery will have to wait.
I’m naked, dripping wet, my skin red from the heat when I hear thehigh-pitchedshrieks and giggles and then my husband’s deep voice.
“Why are there monkeys in my bed?”
I can tell from the sounds that he’s jumped between them, tickling them on their bellies with his strong hands and on their faces with the beard he’s grown since the shooting, and they are filled head to toe with excitement. His love for them is enormous, and he expresses it in enormous ways. Maybe that’s what made his affair so shocking. It was such a deviation from everything he stands for. What’s at his core. Maybe that’s why we pulled through after it ended.
Andthank God, because right now I’m desperate for him.
