Duncan, Courtney

Issue No. 8, May, 2012

Winter

Courtney L. Duncan

Winter stole inside my body that year, turning my bones to ice so that I never was better than partially numb. I took to walking the streets at two, three, four o’clock in the morning, when the sleeplessness, the frantic ache inside me got to be more than the walls of the house could contain anymore. I would flee in tears, walking quickly up one street, down another, trying to escape the panic that lived in my heart.

Sometimes, when I returned, he would be there, bent over the baby’s crib, stroking her hair.

“Where the hell were you? You can’t just leave her here alone! You should be here!” He would admonish me.

“Where the hell were YOU?” I would ask, “YOU should be here, too.” And his eyes would close me out, the conversation was done.

He would sleep in our bed if I bothered him enough about it, but most of the time he said he’d be in soon and slept on the couch. He was always on his phone, sending text messages like a teenage girl, but he thought he was sly. I could not believe he was cheating on me and yet, conversely, I could not believe he wasn’t- no matter what he said. There were so many lies in our house, the air was thick.

At work, at my desk, I would stare at the computer screen in front of me but see nothing. In my head, I would play and replay the months and years before this, trying to figure out what happened. What the hell happened? We were so happy, for so long. The months of my pregnancy were the best of all—despite my enormous body, I had never felt so loved. We had never been more together than we had then.

In November, our daughter was born. Within a week, the distance between us went from a heartbeat to unfathomable miles. He was working later and later and later until finally it was other things-stopping at a friends, working out of town, twice his battery had died. Nothing I could disprove, but my heart told me the truth. He never answered his phone when I called, and when he called me back, his voice told me he would rather be talking to anyone but me.

I loved the baby with all of my heart, still I could not help wondering if I had made a terrible mistake—was this the life I would have to live now? I could not imagine doing all of this on my own- that was never the plan—but could I keep living this way? If only he would tell me the truth, I would know what to do . . . but he wouldn’t, no matter how I begged, no matter that I knew already- I needed to hear it from his lips, in his voice.

“Yes, I am in love with someone else. Every time I am not where I am supposed to be, I am with her.”

But he wouldn’t tell. He preferred to let me believe I was losing my mind.

In January, I did.

Things had escalated. Sometimes he didn’t bother coming home until three or four in the morning. The sound of his truck pulling up outside filled me with intense relief and horrible rage at the same time. I would fly out of bed and out the door screaming at him before he could even step outside. He would tell me another lie and I would find something to throw at him.

“I’m not STUPID!” I would scream, and though tears blinded me most of the time, I could see that I was. I was stupid, stupider than I ever would have believed I could be, because I kept wanting so badly to believe. I would rather have believed I was crazy, I would rather have had to apologize for my erratic behavior all this time, to think that it was my mental illness keeping him away, than to see the truth. He may still have used my address, but he had left me for another woman. It was as plain as that.

The truth came to me in the worst way possible—through hours of my life I should have spent being happy, loving my new baby, spent instead sifting through his pockets, combing through our phone records online. Over and over this number, and I knew who she was. I called her, but of course she didn’t answer. She was 24, so much younger than me, and thinner and she hadn’t just had a baby-or any babies at all. . . . How could I compete? And why should I have to? Finally, she left me a message to tell me they were “just friends”, that I was wrong. I blocked her number. He bought a different phone. He was letting me know there was nothing I could do to stop this.

I found his new phone on an unseasonably warm day just after the new year. I hadn’t been looking for it, but he had, and he kept accusing me of taking it. Which is how I knew there must be something he did not want me to see in it. I found it before he did and hid it in a hole in the carpet by my desk, where I sat, with my foot on top of it, waiting for him to leave for work. He finally did, and my hands shook as I tried to figure out his password. Finally, I gave up and just removed the memory card and placed it in my phone. When I realized it had worked, I was sick with dread. The moment had arrived when I would know for a fact what I thought was not wrong, and I was so scared—I knew my life was about to change. I wasn’t wrong.

Picture after picture of her showed up in my phone. The sexy ones I understood . . . it was the others that cut the deepest, the one of her driving, the one of her putting her hair up with a rubber band clamped between her teeth. That he kept these meant she mattered to him, she was more than just a fling. It was over.

He didn’t bother coming home that night, and I tried not to care, but if I thought the truth would ease my pain, I was wrong- now I knew where he was, who he was with, and I tortured myself thinking about what they were doing, what they were talking about. It was the longest night, the most agonizing so far. He showed up the next day, and the minute he walked in the door, I picked up the phone and called our landlord.

“We’re moving out,” I told her. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but we are splitting up and need to get out of here as soon as possible.” I looked right through him as I spoke. I pretended not to notice the tears in his eyes. I refused to cry anymore of my own. I was done. Within days, I had found myself and my kids a new place to live. I didn’t ask him to come with me and I didn’t ask where he was going. I didn’t call him and I didn’t ask him where he was, what he was doing. As if he lived to contradict me, suddenly he was always under my feet, trying to touch me, to reach what had become unreachable.

“I don’t like this!” He cried, one night when he said he was leaving and I hardly glanced up from what I was doing to nod.

“You begged for this. I’m just giving you what you wanted.” I told him, and I knew by his expression that my eyes were cold and I looked just like a stranger that he only wanted to know . . . inside, though, I was floundering. This was the man I loved, in spite of everything awful he had done, and I felt he’d left me no choice but to leave him. A part of me hated him for that, and a desperate part of me wanted to go to him, to find a way out of this, unscathed. It was too late for that, though, I knew.

I was gone before January ended. The last night in our house together, it snowed—in all of my years on the coast, it had never snowed that I could recall, but that night it did and it flew from the sky in a fury that seemed just as it should be. The room was dark and it was so quiet and we were alone together. I don’t know how it happened but it suddenly was, that we were touching and then naked and then making love with an intensity I could not recall. All of the heartache and emotion was there in every movement, as if our bodies spoke every word our mouths could not. When it was over he looked me in the eye.

“I’m so sorry.” He said.

“It’s ok.” I replied . . . not because it was, but because that is what we say when someone apologizes.

“No, I mean . . . for everything.” He said.

And the dam burst. We laid in each other’s arms and cried and that was how the dream of that home and that life ended.

The healing began in the silence of February, within the walls of a place that was my own. The pain did not leave me, but it lessened. Mercifully, he was working far enough away that he had to stay out of town during the week, but he came on the weekends- we pretended it was just to see the baby, but he missed me. I missed him, too.

Human beings are the funniest creatures, with this strange idea of what we are “supposed” to do in certain situations—he cheated on me, he broke my heart, he lied to me. I am supposedto leave him, hate him, maybe forgive him eventually but never take him back. We feel shamed when we stray from this path. We cannot confide in others lest we are judged.

I broke the rules. Slowly and painfully, we regained our footing. Trust does not spend long stretches of time in our home, it darts nervously in and out the doors, the windows. It certainly isn’t perfect. But in the mornings, I can sit on the edge of the bed where we sleep and I can look at the face of this man that I love, and I can tell him this without being afraid anymore. I can see how careful he is with me and how tiresome it gets to always be tending this wound of mine, but I am returning. These things take all the time they need.

I was driving to work the other day, and I thought of all the pain and the heartache between us, the joy, too, and the memories and the love. The things between two people, no story could ever really tell perfectly. Ninety percent of our tale is invisible, indescribable. I know this in a way I never would have had this road been easy. The sun comes around again, for some of us, if you are willing to wait. And with all of the hurt and the anguish like weeds surrounding us, sometimes it is hard to see the heart of the matter—the strong green stalk that holds out our love, like a flower's face to the sun.

But I see it, now.

Courtney L. Duncan lives on the central coast of California, just up the hill from the beach. She has two daughters, two cats, a puppy, a fish, and a boyfriend. She uses every spare moment of her time to write. She has a blog called "The 'ME' Project" on Wordpress, and a novel she is (supposedly) hard at work editing.