“Thank you for being understanding.”
“Of course.”
The call ended, and I felt like a complete jerk, but we were both part of the stupid decision. I couldn’t focus on Tucker though because Adam needed me.
I walked back into the new room Adam would be living in indefinitely. His parents found him a bed at a local nursing facility. The place was run down and smelled like urine. He was the youngest resident by at least sixty years, but he most likely didn’t notice. The staff wasn’t very attentive and barely gave him the minimal attention needed to keep him clean and comfortable. His parents, Tracey, and I took turns visiting to check on him, making sure his vitals were being maintained properly, but we came to notice the care he was receiving was degrading by the day. His room began to smell as horrible as the rest of the facility, the sheets were no longer being changed regularly, and he wasn’t being moved enough to prevent bed sores. Adam was starting to sleep more than he was awake, and we feared he might fall back into a coma without knowing what was causing him so much exhaustion.
Adam’s parents were frustrated, and guilt was eating at them, knowing they couldn’t provide better means for their son, who was already suffering. Those feelings trickled down to me, becoming a constant reminder of what I caused.
My stomach ached all the time. The nerves from anxiety, the nausea, and constant sadness was making me feel sick whenever I ate. It was as if I was putting a bunch of acidic foods in a blender and filling my body with it, so it felt better to avoid food, which was easy to do as I sat hunched over in a chair beside Adam’s bed for hours each day, waiting for his sister or parents to relieve me.
Tracey was due in and was never late, which I was thankful for at the moment because I wanted to make the call to an attorney and start the process of an annulment so I could put just one thing behind me. Tracey came in at three on the dot and put on a smile for Adam’s sake, as we all did. He was asleep, though. She waved her hand in front of her nose and clenched her eyes.
“I know. It’s bad today,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, did you get ahold of Tucker?”
Tracey and I had become close, spending so much time together, and I confided in her a lot, sometimes more than Melody. Tracey was good at listening. Melody was good at pushing her opinions on me, but I did the same to her. Sisters could get away with it. Tracey was a practicing psychologist, though, and was trained to handle matters of the heart a little differently, which Adam’s family desperately needed.
“I reached him, and he’s cool with the annulment and seemed to understand my reason for running.” I shrugged because there was nothing else to say, and I didn’t think I deserved that kind of easy release from Tucker.
“Well, good,” Tracey said. “Now, you can just contact an attorney and get things moving in the right direction.”
“Exactly,” I told her.
“Everyone does things out of haste, and you can’t beat yourself up over this. You’re doing the right thing—correcting your mistakes. It’s how we learn in life; you know this.” Some mistakes couldn’t be fixed. I learned that too. “Will you help me move Adam before you go since I doubt the nurses will be in any time soon? He looks uncomfortable.”
I stand from my seat, and she places her bags down on the chair behind her. We’re so used to moving Adam that we tend to our normal positions on either side of him and count to three before shifting him around. He had lost so much weight throughout the previous two years that he wasn’t difficult to move.
“I better get going,” I told Tracey while kissing Adam on the cheek. Then, I whispered in Adam’s ear, “I still love you even though I hope you hate me with every fiber of your being. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Good luck with the attorney. Let me know how it goes,” Tracey said as I gathered my belongings.
“I will,” said, giving her a hug before heading out.
The moment I arrived home, I closed myself into my bedroom and made a phone call to the attorney I had gotten a number for. I figured she wouldn’t answer, and I would have to leave a message, but surprisingly, she picked up the phone.
The call ended five minutes later, leaving me with the worst-case answer of, “You can’t qualify for an annulment because neither you nor your husband were residents in the state of Nevada for at least six weeks prior to the nuptials. Your only option is a dissolution of the marriage—a divorce.” All I could think about was the news of celebrities annulling their sporadic Vegas marriages after just two days. How could they do it and I couldn’t?
The sick feeling in my stomach grew to the point of pain. I felt trapped and suffocated within my body. Without knowing what else to do, I ran to the bathroom and forced myself to vomit, leaving me with a euphoria of free space, emptiness, and a different kind of pain—one I quickly learned to prefer over everything else.
It was the day a sickness took over my being.
Brody is parked in the lot outside of my apartment. His hands are tightly wrapped around the steering wheel and he stares out toward the landscape of mountains. “You used the money from your divorce to support Adam, didn’t you?” he asks.
He makes it sound like I didn’t try to send the money back first. “Tucker refused to take my half of the assets. He said, ‘This amount of money won’t offer me the happiness I’m seeking, and it won’t do me much good.’ He was right. The money wasn’t worth anything to me either, for the same reason. Anyway, a thought came to me in my sleep one night after the final conversation I had with Tucker. Maybe my ridiculous road-trip across the country was meant to bring me an upside-down kind of fate. If Tucker wouldn’t take the money back, then I could use the money to get Adam the care he needed. It wouldn’t offer me forgiveness because nothing would, but it was something.”
“Journey, you’re an incredible person. Do you know this?”
“Yeah, what can I say,” I reply, trying not to get emotionally tangled up in the conversation. “The money won’t last forever, but I gave it to Adam’s parents, and they invested some to prolong the worth, and it’s given them time to put money aside for if or when the funds run out.”
“Everything happens for a reason, and we learn from those reasons. I’m just glad that whatever reason led us to reconnect has become something more than I could have imagined.”
“Don’t be all mushy on me now,” I tell Brody, smirking.
“I can’t help it. You make me mushy,” he says, pinching my arm.
“I wouldn’t go around bragging about that,” I jest.
