Chevy Stevens - Still Missing

Now, months later, he interrupted me on the phone and said, “Please stop, Annie. You don’t owe anyone an apology, least of all me. I screwed up. I shouldn’t have just showed up like that. I rushed you. I’ve kicked myself over and over for that. That’s why I kept calling. I knew you’d be blaming yourself.”

“I was so mean to you.”

“You had every right to be—I was an insensitive prick. That’s why I’ve tried to keep my distance, but maybe you’re still not ready to talk to me? I won’t be mad if you say so. Promise.” That was always our thing—he’d say I love you, and I, not quite willing to say it back even after a year, would say, Promise?

“I do want to talk to you, but I can’t talk about what happened.”

“You don’t have to. What if I just call you once in a while, and if you feel like talking, pick up the phone and we’ll yak about whatever you want. Does that work? I don’t want to push, like before.”

“That works. I mean, I’ll try, I want to try. I’m getting a little tired of only talking to my shrink and Emma.” His soft laugh broke the tension.

After that we chatted about Emma and Diesel, his black Lab, for a while. Finally he said, “Talk to you in a few, ’kay?”

“Don’t feel like you have to call.”

“I don’t, and don’t feel like you have to answer.”

“I won’t.”

He called the next day and again earlier this week, Doc, and we just had brief casual conversations, mostly about the restaurant and our dogs, but I still don’t know how I feel about it. I like it, but then sometimes I feel rage toward him. How can he still be so kind to me? I don’t deserve it—the guy needs to give his head a shake. His very goodness makes me love him and hate him. I want to hate him. I’m like a wound barely sewn shut, and every time we talk the stitches break, the wound reopens, and I have to sew it back together.

On top of all that, his kindness makes me feel even stupider because my biggest fear in seeing him again is that he might try to touch me. Just thinking about it makes my armpits flood with sweat. And to react that way to Luke, of all men? Luke, who would remove spiders from the sink and carry them outside? It’s beyond ridiculous. If I can’t get myself to the point where I can be comfortable around a person like Luke, then I’m royally screwed. Might as well pack up my crap and move right into the pent house suite at Chez Crazy.

Thanks again for accepting that I didn’t want to talk about the mountain last session, and it’s been a hell of a week, so I’m still not sure if I’m ready to tackle it today—I’ll see how I feel. My grief is a windstorm. Sometimes I can stand straight up in it, and when I’m angry, I can lean into it and dare it to blow me over. But other times I need to hunker down, tuck around myself, and let it pummel my back. Lately, I’ve been in hunker-down mode.

Hell, you probably need a break yourself—pretty damn depressing stuff, isn’t it? I wish I could tell you happy stories, or make you smile at something witty I’ve said. When I leave here, I feel bad that you had to listen to all my crap—it makes me feel selfish. But not enough that I want to change. This shit made me selfish. I have a righteous sadness.

When I first came to you, I mentioned I had a couple of reasons for giving therapy another go, but I never told you what finally popped the I’m-doing-just-fine-on-my-own-thank-you-very-much bubble I’d been bouncing around in.

It happened in a grocery store—I only shop late at night and with a baseball hat on. I’ve considered Internet shopping, but God knows who they’d send to deliver the groceries, and I’ve had enough of reporters using any ruse to get inside my house. Anyway, a woman was bent down reaching for something on the bottom shelf. Nothing weird about that, except a few feet behind her sat her cart, unguarded, with a toddler in it.

I tried to just walk by, tried not to stare at the baby girl’s little white teeth and rosy cheeks, but as I passed, one of her tiny arms waved out at me, and I stopped. Like metal to magnet, I was helpless to keep my feet from bringing me close or my hand from reaching out. I just wanted to touch that tiny hand for a second. That’s all I needed, I told myself, just one second. But the baby’s hand curved over my outstretched finger and she giggled as she squeezed it. Hearing her giggle, her mom said, “That’s my girl, Samantha, Mommy will be there in a sec.”

Samantha, her name was Samantha. It echoed in my head, and I wanted to tell this woman, who was kneeling down to choose jars of what I now saw was baby food, that I had a baby too, the most goddamn beautiful baby you ever saw. But then she’d ask how old my baby was, and I didn’t want to say she was dead and see this woman’s eyes turn to her daughter in relief and gratitude that it wasn’t her child, then see in those eyes that she was sure—sure with a mother’s necessary confidence—that nothing terrible was ever going to happen to her daughter.

When I tried to pull my finger away, Samantha squeezed tighter, and a tiny bubble of spit formed at her lips. My nostrils inhaled her scent—baby powder, diapers, and the faint sweet odor of milk. I wanted her. My hands ached to lift her out of the seat and into my arms, into my life.

With furtive glances down either end of the aisle—empty—my mind worked to calculate how many steps it would take me to escape. I knew only one cashier worked this late. Easy breezy . I stepped closer to the cart. With my heart whooshing in my ears, I noticed every one of the baby’s fine blond hairs glimmering in the store’s fluorescent lights and reached out with my free hand to finger one silken strand. My baby had dark hair. This wasn’t my baby. My baby was gone.

I stepped back just as the mother rose to her feet in the aisle, noticed me, and began to walk back toward the cart.

“Hello?” she said with a tentative smile.

I wanted to say, What were you thinking? Turning your back on your child like that. Don’t you know what could happen? How many crazies are out there? How crazy I am?

“What a happy baby,” I said. “And so beautiful.”

“She looks happy now, but you should have seen her an hour ago! It took me forever to get her to calm down.” While she went on about her mom-stress, stress I would have traded my soul for, I wanted to call her an ungrateful bitch, tell her she should be glad for every cry out of her baby’s mouth. Instead I stood paralyzed and gave an occasional smile or nod to the woman until she finally ran out of steam and wrapped it up by saying, “Do you have kids?”

I felt my head shake back and forth, felt my lips straighten out from the smile, even felt my throat vibrate with the words, “No. No kids.”

My eyes must have revealed something, though, because she smiled kindly and said, “It’ll happen.”

I wanted to slap her, wanted to scream and rage. I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. I just smiled, nodded my head, and wished her a pleasant evening as I left them there in the aisle.

That was when I realized I might not be doing such a good job of handling things on my own. I’d managed to shove that moment behind all my other moments of near-madness until I saw a notice in the paper yesterday that one of the girls I used to work with just gave birth to a boy. I sent a card, but I knew I didn’t trust myself to be around that baby. Even picking out the card was agony. Not sure why I did it, other than as another pathetic attempt to prove to myself I can handle shit I very clearly can’t.

“Wayne and I would like you to come for dinner tonight,” Mom said when she called late Tuesday afternoon. “I’m making a roast.”