Till the wheels fall off.
“You don’t mean that.” I swallow against the hot lump in my throat. The tears may finally come.
“I only know that I’m so sad all the time. It hurts all the time.” Her shoulders shake with sobs, her face twisted with the violence of her emotions. “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would hurt less than the way I’m sad with you.”
“I make you hurt?”
“Yes,” she whispers, closing her eyes over the tears trickling down her cheeks.
“You don’t love me anymore?”
“I can’t find it. I can’t findus. It’s buried under all this pain.”
“It’s not buried. I don’t have to look for it. I don’t want a divorce. I love you, Yas, and you love me. We are going through a hard time, but we said till the wheels fall off.”
“Look at us,” she says, glancing down to where I press her body into the wet wall. “Did you hear us tonight? Is this what we want our kids to see? I said I hated you, but I don’t. Not yet, but if we keep on like this, I will, Si. And you’ll hate me.”
“I could never hate you.” I brush my knuckle over her damp cheek. “I will love you until I die. We said till death do us part.”
“Deathistearing us apart.” Her laugh is bitter and short. “We assumed it would have to be our deaths that ended this. Turns out it was theirs.”
“We said vows.”
“Those are words, not walls. They don’t defend. They don’t enforce. They don’t protect us from life. From pain. From how things change. And I don’t want to stay in this just because we said we would. I need to stop hurting, and being with you? It hurts now.”
The words stab through me with the sharpness of truth. I hear in her voice that she believes it. Of all the things that hurt her, being with me is what hurts most. She strains against my arms, trying to leave, and I instinctively tighten them around her, holding her to me, pinning her to the wall.
“Let me go,” she whispers, the tears thick in her voice and shiny on her cheeks. She doesn’t just mean in this moment. She means for good, and as strong as I’ve been through everything—losing Byrd, losing Henry, the struggle to keep our business—I don’t know that I’m strong enough to let Yasmen go.
Our gazes lock, and the sadness in her eyes swallows the gold. I used to think the lighter flecks in her dark eyes meant she could shine even in the darkest night. Now there’s no light in the eyes raised to mine. Her bottom lip quivers, and she bites down, fighting back more tears. My arms ache from the tension of holding her, trapping her.
I slowly ease up, step back, giving her room to move. She leaves the circle of my arms immediately, heading for the door. She looks at the wall, and so do I—at the hot pink streaks of obnoxious optimism through the dark gray paint, obscuring the verse. Shame curdles in my belly. Of course, we need to move on, and part of that will be repurposing this room, but the way I did this in a fit of anger, a surge of rage, it feels like I erased him. Paint slides down the wall in clumpy rivulets, weeping along the surface unchecked and staining the carpet. It’s a wailing wall. Even this flat, inanimate thing can weep, but I can’t.
“I meant it, Si,” she says softly, but with enough resolve that the words sink to the very bottom of my heart, chained to an anchor. “I want a divorce.”
The room is as still and airless as a tomb, and I can’t breathe. The impossible truth of what she’s asking me to do, to give up, lands on me with boulder force. I stagger to the rocker, sink into its cushions, aching for the son I never got to meet. I held him once, his little body holding on to the last of its warmth, to the residue of life. My teeth clench against the feral scream caged in my throat, and despite all my efforts—in spite of all the ways I’ve held things together—I feel myself coming apart at the seams. The very fabric of my life, every part that matters, ripping. I set the rocker in motion, hoping for some magic in the back and forth, but there is no soothing this. Not even a false comfort to be found, so I stop, but can’t make myself move from this spot. I sit here, where I’ve come home so many nights and found Yasmen exactly like this. Immobile and staring at a wall of dead wishes.
Chapter Fourteen
Yasmen
It sounds like things are going well,” Dr. Abrams says, her intelligent eyes peering at me from the screen of my laptop.
We usually meet in her office, but she’s out of town this week. Thank God for teletherapy. We only have a few minutes left in our session, and that same sense of peace I usually experience after our time together permeates the brightness of my home office.
“I think so, yeah.” I smile and toy idly with a stack of paper clips on my desk. “I forgot to tell you I’m working with the Skyland Association again. We’ve had two events, and they went well.”
“That’s so good, Yasmen.” She sits back, folds her arms and smiles. “You should be proud of yourself. You’ve come a long way.”
When I first started with Dr. Abrams, I couldn’t envision waking up excited or making it through the day without crying at least once. That kind of depression is blunter than sadness. Sharper than misery. It is the impenetrable dark of midnight deepened with the blackest strokes of blue—a bruise on your spirit that seems like it will never fade. Until one day…it finally does. With the help of the woman on-screen, it did.
It is not an exaggeration to say Dr. Abrams—with her always-on-point silk-pressed hair, fashionable blouses and pencil skirts, and watching, wise eyes—changed my life. I trust her implicitly, and she has taught me more about trusting myself.
“How are things with the kids?” she asks. “How’s Deja?”
I sigh, rolling my eyes, but allowing a tiny smile. “She’s testing my limits and working my nerves.”
“That’s what they do,” Dr. Abrams chuckles.