Jane Lark - I’m Keeping You

I’d failed.

I didn’t see how I could be a mom anymore—or a wife.

Jason had found me in a park, on a swing, hours later, I’d been lost in despair, it had been agony, a heavy, dense pain—too intense for words. I’d been too ill to even talk.

He’d called for an ambulance. It had taken me to the hospital. The doctors there had started me on a heavy dose of mood-controlling meds.

I didn’t remember much about my days in the hospital.

“What were you dreaming of?”

“The river,” I breathed against his skin.

His other hand stroked over my hair.

It was my stupid, distorted bipolar view of the world that had given my ex, Declan, Saint’s biological father, a chance to take Saint. He was saying I was unfit to care for Saint because I’d walked into the river. But I didn’t understand why Declan wanted Saint. He had kids already and he hardly had anything to do with them. He didn’t like kids. He was a shitty dad.

“It’s going to be okay,” Jason said over my head.

Jason was a good dad, but that didn’t seem to matter, and it wasn’t okay, nothing was okay, and that’s why we were flying out to New York tomorrow and I was leaving Saint. Because I was a bad mom. I’d failed him.

My arm slipped about Jason’s waist and I held on to him. His fingers gripped my shoulder and he pressed a kiss on to the crown of my head.

He’d never judged me for my error, just loved me. He understood me. He’d taken time to learn about my illness since we’d gotten married last year and he’d said a hundred times he knew it hadn’t been a choice, I’d just been sick.

The anxiety that had clasped at my lungs and sent my pulse soaring into a manic dance rhythm in the dream swept back in. Terror. I was terrified of losing Jason. As terrified as I was of losing Saint. Maybe because Jason was so special, and I’d done nothing to deserve a good guy, so how could he keep loving me? But he still did. He’d spent hours in the last few days reassuring me he did and that him leaving me would never happen.

I fell asleep again, holding him, and being held by him… I belonged with him… and Saint belonged with him.

When I woke sunlight shone into our room in Jason’s parents’ house.

Jason wasn’t in bed, or in the room, but I could hear Saint in his crib. I got up, picked him up, and held him tight, breathing in the smell of his hair as his breath stirred the tiny, fine hairs on my neck. Love was a great, deep well and it filled me up. The room became a shimmering blur. I’d die if I lost him as much as I’d die if I lost Jason. I wouldn’t want to be alive without either of them. Before I’d met Jason and had Saint, I didn’t even know if I could love a child, especially a child of Declan’s. But I didn’t think of Saint as Declan’s, he wasn’t. Saint was Jason’s son, in every way that mattered. Jason had been around for Saint and me right from the get go, from the moment I’d discovered I was pregnant, not just when Saint was born.

He was still here. I hoped he always would be. That’s what I wanted.

I brushed Saint’s hair back and kissed his head, wiped away my tears, then walked over to the door, turned the handle and went to find Jason.

Saint babbled away in his baby language. He’d laughed the other day. On Halloween. At the silly Halloween trick Jason had bought him. That had been the best sound I’d ever heard.

I heard Jason talking to his mom in the kitchen. I walked in there, wearing one of his old tees and just my panties, my legs bare. I hugged Saint against my chest. Jason turned around, a smile broke his lips apart immediately. I loved it when he smiled like that—he hardly ever smiled like that now.

“Hey, honey.” He walked across the room to us, and his fingers stroked over Saint’s head as he leaned over to kiss my lips. “You okay?”

I nodded.

But we both knew I wasn’t.

I’d been terrified for ages that he didn’t love me anymore, I’d gotten so lost. I didn’t know how to be me anymore since I’d gone on to this last batch of meds. But the other day, over Halloween, we’d talked stuff out, and he’d gotten cross that I even doubted it. He did still love me—us. I’d been telling myself that as much as he had in the last few days, trying to convince my head what my heart knew.

When we’d talked stuff out, we’d kind of found each other again—that’s what he’d said. But I hadn’t found my old self and he’d admitted that he missed the me I’d been before I’d started on the strong meds. I missed that person too—desperately. She used to laugh a lot, and she’d felt free. This me… felt trapped, lost, and afraid.

“I love you,” he whispered in my ear, before he pulled away. I smiled.

He winked at me.

We’d had a lot of sex this week. It had been another of his ways of reassuring me, we hadn’t done it much for a while before that.

“Morning, Rachel,” his mom called. She was cooking pancakes. The scent of them filled the kitchen.

I didn’t want to leave here, or Saint. This was home. But Jason and I had to go. If we didn’t, Saint would leave us.

Maybe I’d explode, suddenly, the weight pressing down on me was so heavy. Jason took Saint from my arms and hugged him. I didn’t know if I was well enough to go to New York. I didn’t know if I’d cope.

But I knew some things; I didn’t want to have to deal with Declan when the doctors had me all drugged up and knocked out like a zombie, I couldn’t carry on as I was, and I couldn’t let Declan take Saint.

Those things had to change.

I had to stop them happening.

Rachel

My fingers held on to the arm of the seat as I stared out the window of the small United Airlines plane. It was taxiing out to the runway. My body was so heavy with fear it felt like I’d been tied down to the seat with iron chains. They held me in place. I wanted to run. I could see Saint, in my head, reaching out his hands for me when I’d walked away with Jason. My heart hadn’t beaten in a normal pattern since.

But I was doing this for Saint. To protect him. To keep him.

Jason could have gone alone. But I didn’t want him to go alone. I didn’t want Jason to leave me. I wanted to be with him—but I wanted to be with Saint too. I was breaking in half. The two guys in my life were ripping me in half.

I sighed out. My breath became moisture on the small oval window. My teeth sank into my lower lip, holding in the emotion threatening to well over in a flood of tears as I lifted a hand and wiped the moisture away.

“Are you okay?” Jason’s hand rested over mine on the seat arm.

I didn’t look at him, just turned my hand up the other way and clasped his, clinging to any connection that held me closer to normal.

“Rach…” He pushed, worry catching in his voice

“Yeah.” No. I was a fucked-up mess. But he knew that already.

The plane taxied around, turning on to the runway, then stopped.

I breathed in deep and held the air in my lungs. The image in my head became the packet of meds I’d left in the drawer in our room. The meds I’d stopped taking a week ago. I couldn’t be the zombie I was when I took them. I needed my brain to be working. Declan was clever. I needed to be able to think when I faced him. The meds made me feel like I was drowning all the time, trapped under an ocean and looking at the world through a fog; I couldn’t breathe through it, or reach through it. I needed to be alive and awake to cope with Declan and New York.

My head was full of memories, memories that said the meds would make everything too hard to deal with—and there was the memory of Jason telling me at the Halloween party the other day that he missed the me who’d had crazy moments. He’d liked my crazy moments. The meds stomped on all my crazy—I wanted to be able to be crazy sometimes. I wanted to make him laugh and smile wide. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t stop loving me.