Текст книги "Rock Bottom"

Автор книги: R. K. Lilley

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

DANIKA

After that, it was a slow motion free fall for us.

A quiet, helpless unraveling.

Some days I raged against it with every fiber of my being, but others…others I was as far gone as Tristan, and I didn’t even need to be drunk to get there.

So much had been torn apart with the miscarriage, so many little pieces of us that needed to be sewn back together.  Only, there was hardly any thread left.  Barely enough for one of us, and certainly not enough for both.

He was gone nearly all the time after that, it seemed.  I had no one to comfort me, no one to share in the pain.

I never told Bev or Jerry what had happened.  As far as they knew, I’d simply spent a few days at Tristan’s apartment.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

I couldn’t make myself talk about it, and though Bev’s keen eyes told me that she knew that something was wrong, I never admitted it out loud.

I visited his apartment for one of his rare visits to town.  He was supposed to be expecting me, but it was obvious that he wasn’t prepared when I walked into his bedroom.

I found him alone, lying back against his headboard.  I could tell that he was wasted at a glance.  With what, I couldn’t say, and didn’t ask.

The what of it didn’t matter.

What mattered was the cause.  And the fact that he didn’t hide it from me, when he’d always put some filter on it before, for my sake.

I could tell that he’d just given up.

I didn’t blink.  I didn’t look away from his bloodshot eyes, or his shaky hands as he lit a smoke, trying and failing to meet my eyes.

I took it all in, the brutal reality of it, my face wet with tears, my jaw trembling nearly as hard as my voice when I spoke.  “What can I do?  Tell me, and I’ll do it.  Tell me how to help you.”

To save you, I thought.

He didn’t flinch.  His sensitivity, his feelings for me, had just deteriorated that much, or he was just that high.  It could have been either, or both.  There was nothing in his voice when he spoke.  Nothing at all, not even an echo of the things he should have been feeling in response to my pain.  “You can’t.  I can’t.”

“Well, someone has to.  Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?  Can’t you see what it’s doing to me?  Don’t you care that it’s tearing me apart?”

“What do you want from me?”  His voice, at least, was animated now.

“Everything!” I shouted, enraged, heartbroken.  “Everything you promised, and everything I need.   What I’m willing to give to you is what I want from you.  Can’t you do that for me, Tristan?  Isn’t there enough of you left?”

He just shook his head, his eyes drifting closed.  I’d been as good as arguing with the bed.

He’d remember none of this in the morning.

But I remembered.

I remembered everything.  I had no drugs to numb me, to make me forget.  I couldn’t take that path.

I wouldn’t make it back.

And neither, perhaps, would Tristan.

I began to notice a gradual change in myself, as well.  I was becoming less of myself, or rather, a different version of myself.  I became less Danika, the strong young woman who worked hard to build a good future, and became more Dani, the waif of a girl I’d been when I was a kid, who could never get enough love, because she had never gotten any love at all.

I fell back into old patterns from my childhood, the patterns of an enabler.

Tristan was not my mother.  Our relationship was, of course, dissimilar in nature, and he was a much more loving charge to me than my mother had ever been.  But I was becoming who I’d been when I’d been in my mother’s care, or arguably, she mine.  The first time this occurred to me, it made me so sick that I had to run to the bathroom and lose my dinner.

No, I thought.  Please, no.  I love him.  He loves me.  We can be good for each other.  He just needs more time.  

This sad little phrase became a mantra in my mind.  I lived for what if and if only, and I became who I thought Tristan needed me to be, rather than so much as considering what I might need for myself.  That was the debilitating power that he held over me, that I’d given him along with my heart.

I’d heard about depression, had suffered from different forms of it in my abused youth, but a crippling one overtook me after that.

The most despondent low that followed the most soaring high.

For the first time in my life, I began to fantasize about dying.  Not ending my own life, necessarily, but about the peace of it, the tranquility.

It was a dark time for me.  The blackest phase I’d ever experienced.  My thoughts constantly took morbid, twisted turns.

I would look at ceiling fans, and see myself hanging from them.  Every intersection while I drove to school was a potential end to all of my pain.  A leftover handful of painkillers served a new purpose in my mind, suddenly.

I would fantasize about how life would go on without me, obsessively so.  Perhaps my death would be the wake-up call he needed to get his act together.  Perhaps he would miss me so much, he’d follow me to some better place, where the weight of life’s sorrows held less of a hold on our every waking thought.  Jared would be there, and our barely formed child would have shape and life, and we could hold him and touch him, and call him by name, and things would be better.

Unfortunately, it took another tragedy to bring me out of that dark depression.

As though my own morbid thoughts had substance, the next blow seemed to come from my very own nightmares.  What I had fixated on, Leticia had embraced.

To say Leticia hadn’t taken news of the miscarriage well was a gross understatement.  In fact, she’d asked me not to come see her any more.  I wasn’t even hurt by that.  I was worried, a bit, because I knew she needed comfort, and was refusing it, but I had so little comfort to give anymore.

I left her in peace without a fight.

In hindsight, I should have fought, but I’ll never know if that would have changed anything.

We all make our own choices, and Leticia’s was impulsive and permanent.

Tristan was making a rare visit to my house, and at first my heart soared, thinking that he was finally ready to start getting better, and he was coming to me to help him.

One glance at his face when I opened the front door told me I was dead wrong.

I led him to my room without a word, sitting on the edge of my bed beside him.  He clutched my hand, looking down at his lap, and I threw my other arm over his shoulders, rubbing soothingly.

I let the silence keep us company, never knowing what to say to him anymore.  The miscarriage had taken so much of the fight out of him, and he’d already been through too many rounds before that, so there hadn’t been much fight left.

Finally, after an eternity, as I stroked his back, and rubbed his shoulders, and he shuddered under my hands, he began to speak.

I could barely make the words out at first.  They were given to me in quiet mumbles, in gasping sobs.

“Oh no,” I whispered, as I began to piece it together.

I turned to him then, pulling him into my body, laying back and forcing him to lie on top of me.  He didn’t put up a fight, all the while whispering about his mother, his poor mother, all alone when she’d ended her life at the bottom of a bottle of sleeping pills.

I comforted him.  That was my job.  But my initial reaction, my first gut-deep response was pure rage.  How dare she?  How could she be so selfish?  How could she do this to my poor, dear Tristan?

It was such a permanent solution to her problems.

It was hard to fathom, hard to process.

Leticia had been a conflicted woman.  And that about summed up my feelings for her.

I loved her, and inside of real love, there was always room for forgiveness.

The way she’d treated Tristan had infuriated me, but I’d still felt for her.  Always, even now.

In the end, that initial response was the most fleeting of things.  More than anything else, I pitied her.  We all had a breaking point, and life had landed too many solid blows for her to survive, too many tragedies for her poor mind to handle.

When I spoke at her funeral, it felt like the past repeating itself, though Tristan and I were the only attendees for this one.

Suicides were a touchy thing.

“I know she wasn’t perfect.  I know well how flawed she was, but she was a loving woman.  She loved with her whole heart, and when that whole heart was broken, she left us.”

I spoke directly to Tristan.  “She loved you.  I know she did.  She was blinded by her grief, but I know that, in her lucid moments, she adored you, and felt pride that you were her son.

“I’m no authority on the universe.  I know little about God, or the stars, or the afterlife, but I do know this: somewhere her soul still survives, watching over you.  Somewhere they all survive.  Jared, our son, your mother.

“My relationship with Leticia was brief but powerful.  I felt like she loved me, no, I know she did, and it meant a lot to me.  No matter how selfish it was, her death shouldn’t have more meaning than her life, so let’s remember her for the way that she loved, not the way that she died.”

Tristan met my stare and nodded, his eyes shiny, his jaw trembling.  He was suffering, but I’d said the right thing.  I was gratified, that even in the black cloud his mind had become, I could bring him some little bit of relief.

As terrible as the tragedy of Leticia had been, it served a desperate purpose for me, at least.

It was as though the fog had been lifted from my brain, and I could think again.  I was still hurting, my heart still aching with all of the loss, but I began to attempt to live again.

To wake, to move, to try taking small steps in the right direction.  I was alone in that path.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DANIKA

Tristan’s decline was steady and sure after that.

Every tragedy, every hardship, seemed to suck him just a little bit deeper into the grip of his own personal hell.

It felt like every slip up, every relapse, was pulling us down, until the weight of all of our failures was dragging us under.

At first, we were drowning together, but my will to survive was too strong to let that continue forever.

My hold on him became weaker and weaker, and eventually, every finger broken, my hands opened, and I let him go.

No one could say I didn’t fight for him.  No one could say I didn’t lose.

I strode into his apartment, annoyed and frustrated, and disappointed.  They were all feelings I’d become accustomed to where Tristan was concerned.

He’d stood me up again.  We were supposed to meet for dinner two hours ago.

He was by himself, sprawled out on his sofa.

I saw that he was playing with a little black wristband, the kind Jared used to wear, and that we’d given out at his funeral.  I wasn’t surprised.

I was, however, angry.  My fear, my desperation, my need to help him, all seemed to be channeling itself into a bitter anger these days. That anger kept me up at night.

I was trying to be there for him, but who was there for me?

His eyes were glazed, and pointing up at the ceiling.

“I get why you’re doing this.  Don’t think I don’t.  The pain is so harsh that you’ll take anything to numb it.  It’s so bad that you’d be willing to lose everything else in your life, if that pain would just go with it.”

He was silent, turning that little band in his hands, over and over.

That silence told me everything.

“Do you not understand how far gone you are?  Or do you just not care anymore?”

Silence.

“It should tell you something that I’ve already had to think about what your black wrist band will be, when you follow him.”

He stopped twirling it for a brief moment, then resumed the movement, still silent.

“I’ve decided it will be a deck of cards.  Does that seem appropriate to you?  You have veto powers, of course, since it’s your funeral I’m talking about.”  My voice broke on the word funeral.

He sighed, finally moving his eyes from the ceiling to my face, looking awfully annoyed for someone who was high as a kite.

“You think he would want this?  For you to follow him?  Jared doesn’t need you to do that, Tristan.  Leticia doesn’t need you where she went.  Our baby,” I gasped.  I had to stop and compose myself before continuing.  I still couldn’t talk about our lost little angel without breaking down.  “Our baby doesn’t need you to follow him.  Certainly there’s nothing you can do for him now.  But I need things from you.  I’m right here, and I’m asking you to stop chasing these ghosts, and start living again, with me.”

“You don’t need me.  You don’t need anybody, Danika.  You’re stronger than all of us, and you’re better off without me.”

“Don’t start on that.  I’m just going to tell you one thing, and then I’ll leave you to it.  This is it, Tristan.  This is the last warning.  I find you like this again, I’m done.  You wanted an ultimatum.  You got one.”

I went home, my shoulders slumped from the weight on them.

I lay down on my bed and did not get back up.

Not for hours.

Not for days.

What was left of a woman when she gave a man everything?

The answer was easy.

Impossible to deny, even for me.

Nothing.

Nothing was left of her.

Had I given too much?  Was there enough of me left to even try to move on from this?

Is this what had happened to my mother? I wondered, feeling some bit of sympathy for her for the first time in years.  Had some man broken her spirit, so much so, she had become a shell of a woman without him?  Would I let myself turn into some apathetic ghost of a woman?

No, I thought furiously.  I was stronger than her.  I would struggle untill the end.  Even if I could see now what it would take for me to become like her, it didn’t mean I had to.  There was one undeniable quality that I had known about myself since I was a very tiny, unloved child.

I was a survivor.

And so, I had to try to move on from this.

TRISTAN

She was at my apartment, slamming around in my kitchen.  She was pissed at me again.

She’d brought me a cup of coffee, and I sipped on it while I listened to her venting her frustration at my kitchen.  I winced as I heard something break.

The thought suddenly occurred to me that our separations weren’t doing this to her.

She seemed harried, yes, stressed out and busy, of course, but the pain in her eyes, the rage, came not from my absence, but from my presence.

That killed me.

A light suddenly went on.

It wasn’t a spotlight, but a floodlight, illuminating everything I didn’t want to see, every dark, sinister corner of my pitiful existence.  The facts were the light, and I’d been ignoring the facts for way too long.

My life was cursed.  People I loved, people close to me, who depended on me, had died, and I was responsible.  As far as I was concerned, every single one of those deaths had been preventable, and I had failed to prevent them.

I had no future.  This had been clear to me for a while now.

But what suddenly became clear, what made my skin crawl with its pristine simplicity, was that Danika did not have to share this future with me.  She didn’t have to be dragged down into the abyss with me.  I’d been selfishly keeping her on this sinking ship, and she deserved so much better.

What had I ever been thinking, dragging her into my mess of a life?  How had I ever thought that I could be good enough for her?

She came back into my room carrying a plate of food.  She set it on the nightstand, then came to stand in front of me, hands on her hips.

I set my cup on the floor, my hands going to her hips.  She was wearing tight, low-slung jeans, and I buried my face against the bared skin between the top of her pants and the bottom of her shirt.

Could I really do this? I wondered.

One thing was for certain, I couldn’t do it without touching her at least one last time.

Her hands went to my hair, gripping.  I could tell that, with just the small touch I’d given her, she was softening in her anger.  She never stayed mad at me for long, no matter how much I deserved it.

I kissed her belly, that perfect belly.  “Danika,” I breathed against her skin.  My arms snaked around her body, clutching her.  “We can’t do this anymore.”

She stiffened, then relaxed, stroking my hair.  “Drink some more coffee, Tristan.  Get sobered up before you start spouting nonsense at me again.”

I kissed her belly again, closing my eyes, digging deep for strength that I didn’t think I possessed.

“This isn’t working, Danika.  You know it as well as I do.”

“Stop it!” she said sharply, tugging my head back, making me look at her.

I flinched away.

She was ruthless, following me, kissing me, lying down beside me.

I groaned and covered her body with mine, needing to feel her against me more than I needed to breathe, even if this was the last time.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed against her face.  “I’m done.”

I couldn’t take her eyes for even a second, couldn’t take the wounded, condemning stare, the pursed, angry mouth.  “Stop it,” she said, but this time her voice was weaker, less certain.

Still, she wasn’t done torturing us both, and lifted her head to press her lips to mine.  I took her mouth with a rough moan.

She was going to be taking another important piece of me with her when I made her leave.  There was no helping it.  No changing it.

“We’re over, sweetheart,” I told her, when we pulled away to catch our breaths.

“No,” she protested, her voice a faint thread.

She kissed me again, and I kissed her back.  She peeled her shirt off, and I helped her, my hands roaming freely over her bared skin.  She reached down to free my thick length into her hand, and I pushed hard against her palm.

I was only human, and a flawed one at that.

She stripped us both bare, and pulled me on top of her.  I didn’t enter her, just lay on top of her, our bodies molded perfectly together, our heartbeats pumping restlessly against each other, my erection throbbing along her entrance.

It was the most exquisite torture.

When all else failed, I thought, become the kind of asshole that I knew she would hate.  I squeezed my eyes shut as though bracing for a blow, face buried in her neck.  “I think I’d be better off on my own.  Being tied down just isn’t doing it for me.”

She was sobbing, and I held her.  She kissed me, still sobbing, and I kissed her back, eyes still closed tight.  “Why, Tristan, why?  Why are you doing this?”

“We need to do what’s best for us, and at this point in our lives, we aren’t best for each other.”  I used the we, because if I made it only about her, she’d never accept it.  The we was a lie, but it was also my only hope.  “This marriage was a mistake.”

She writhed against me, shifting her hips to push me inside of her.  Her sobs came in sweet, soft pants against my cheek.  With a rough gasp, I shoved in to the hilt.

I was dying, and in my death throes, I let myself have her one last time.

Every stroke was sweet agony.  Every cry I drew from her held as much pain as it did pleasure.

I rutted out my pleasure inside of her sweet, perfect body, and a torrent of self-loathing tainted every rough stroke.

My skin should have been crawling in shame when I was done.  I should have never been able to rest again, for the guilt.

But should haves meant nothing.  I came, buried deep inside of her, and still buried deep, I fell asleep.

When I woke again, fourteen hours later, she was gone.

DANIKA

He lay on top of me, buried deep, and fell asleep.

He slept all night like that, and I did not move him, did not want to.  I gasped breath in and out and closed my eyes and thought that I would never forget this feeling, of him on me and in me, of him consuming my soul and letting me go.

He was too callous, too far gone to realize that I’d never be free of him, and all he’d really done was set me adrift.

I never left that bed.

That feeling of helpless abandonment and unendurable longing stayed inside of me, for hours, for months, for minutes, for weeks.

For years.

I went through my life, through tragedy and pain, through hardship and life, and my heart, my very soul, stayed in that bed.

I felt broken after that last encounter.

Was broken.

Pieces of me had been shattered on that bed, important, essential pieces, and they would not, could not, ever find their way back together.

But I kept going.  Life is cruel like that.

The facts revealed themselves all too clearly, when I could look at it through the numb filter of fresh, untested grief.  That brief moment between the denial and the agony.

I had two distinct paths to choose from in front of me.

One was painfully bright, and paved with brutal certainties.  I could move on.  It would hurt, it would kill some parts of me, but I could still have a future.  It was not the path I desired, but life was not about getting what you wanted, it was about living with what you needed.

Tristan started me calling me exactly one week later, apologizing, trying to take it back, but I didn’t take his calls.  Couldn’t.

He had too many weapons that he used against me with no effort at all.  I was defenseless against those weapons.  The only way to survive was to avoid them completely.

I sent Jerry to Tristan with the divorce papers and a very long letter explaining everything that was in my heart, explaining every action.  And I’d given him a choice.

Rehab or divorce.  He had to decide.

I could not take seeing him again.  I could not physically hold myself together and see again the evidence of how he was tearing himself apart.  I had some little bit of myself left to save, and in a last ditch effort, I needed to at least attempt to save that little, damaged bit.

I could not spare even one more tiny, wounded, piece of myself, or I would lose any shot of making it out alive.

The papers came back promptly.  They were signed.

He didn’t call me again.