“Trustme? You don’t trust me?” I see a water droplet splat on her forehead. My instinct is to wipe it off, but with the indignation evident in my outburst, I stop myself.
“No, I-I trust you. You know I do.”
“Then what do you mean? Why are you talking about trusting me?”
She hesitates. I can tell she doesn’t want to be angry. She just wants me to understand. And to do that, the gap between us needs to be closed. That disconnect needs to no longer exist. We need to talk to each other in a way we both understand because if we continue this—attempting to communicate through misunderstandings and resentment—there really won’t be anything left of us. “There are things I keep from you because I don’t know how to tell you?—”
“Then tell me,” I interrupt, my panic growing frenzied inside me. I want to know how to talk to her, relearn our lost language so we understand each other. I’ve lost it all, the muscle memory on my tongue atrophied into silence, but I want to master it all over again. “Why do you say you can’t trust me?”
“I—”
“What, Kendall?” I urge.
“I can’t trust you with all the things in my head,” she cries. “I have these thoughts that haunt me, and I can’t even say them to myself. And every time I try to say them to you, you prove to me you can’t handle it. I can barely trust myself with them, and I try to trust you with them, and I can’t. I justcan’t.”
“I…” I try to say something, dispute her words, tell her none of it’s true. This trust in me that’s apparently waned over time is just an excuse for her to keep things from me. To avoid talking to me and keep our marriage in its rocky state. But she’s right. I’ve done nothing but prove to her I can’t handle the truth. And I think it might be too late.
The rain starts to flow now at a steady pace, becoming an intrusion we can’t ignore. She turns to walk back to the house when I don’t say anything. I follow, watching more drops land on the concrete in sharp splats. It starts to pour. We both run, our hands hovering over our heads. We make it to the front door, the rain pelting all over us. I pull my collar over my neck, trying to stay as dry as possible, but it doesn’t help. The small awning above the doorway does little to shelter us from the rain, much like my makeshift stole, so I work quickly to get the key out. Only, it’s not where I thought it was.
“What’s wrong?” Kendall asks.
“I can’t find the keys,” I tell her, patting my back pockets.
“I thought you used it to lock the door when you left.”
“It locks on its own,” I explain. “I thought I had the keys in my pocket.”
I turn the doorknob only to confirm my assumption: I locked it before we left. Kendall huffs, clearly frustrated with me. Her hair is soaked now, her clothes a lost cause. We both know we can’t stay out here much longer. The water starts to seep into my skin when Kendall turns away.
“Where are you going?” I call after her.
She doesn’t answer and continues stomping off toward the backyard instead. She gets to the back door only to find that it’s locked as well.
“It’s locked.”
She keeps jimmying with the door, rattling it in hopes it’ll open with one last jiggle.
“Kendall—”
“I regretted being a mom,” she says, giving up on the door and finally facing me. “And not some passing thought I could wait out until it just went away, but Ireallyregretted it. I wanted to take it all back. Go back in time so we never even had her.” The rain is drowning out her voice. Gone is the anger and dismay, and I can barely hear her. But she’s finally talking to me. I lean closer, finally attempting to bridge that gap with something stronger than a few weak wooden slats and some measly strings of rope. “Things were so perfect in the hospital because we were surrounded by nurses, and we had all the help we could’ve asked for. But then we came home, and everything was all on us. She was crying so much, and I was holding her. She wouldn’t go to sleep, and it was just me and her in the middle of night. I kept thinking how I’m such a bad mom if I can’t even comfort my own child. I regretted having her.
“And then I started to wonder if…if I would’ve loved our first one more. Maybe she would’ve been an easier baby if I had only kept her alive, and I started to wish I was holding her instead of Sophia. I pretended it was her instead of Sophia, and it made me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t let her go and move the fuck on. And I realized I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to hold on to that grief, and it made me resent Sophia because I wasn’t ready to move on, but…it was like she was forcing me to. I hated that. I couldn’t stand what she was making me do, and it made meangry. I started to think how much better it would be if I wasn’t Sophia’s mom. If I could just stop existing and just…disappear. She would be so much better off without me.”
I can’t tell the difference between her tears and the rain, but I know they’re there. Streaming down her face as her eyes turn red and her voice grows hoarse. Her chest hiccups as she catches herbreath. And then, with all the scary parts of her splayed open for me to finally see, she reaches in for the darkest of them all.
“And then I wanted nothing more than to just…”
“Disappear.”
She nods. “I just wanted to stop…existing. Not just run away from it all, but because it felt easier to just take myself out of the equation completely. I thought it would solve all of my problems. But then I realized I couldn’t do that to Sophia and my mom.” I take a step closer to her. She doesn’t back away, but her breathing picks up. Her chest heaves in desperate gulps. I see her body tremble when she adds, “Or you.”
“You tried to tell me this.” I say it like a statement of fact. All the times she managed to hold the words on the tip of her tongue only for her to have to swallow it because I couldn’t hear them. Because I was too chicken shit to hear my wife tell me she wanted nothing more than to disappear off the face of the earth because she didn’t have any other choice. Where I would have to live a life without her.
The thought slices into me, and I can’t believe how fucking stupid I’ve been.
She nods. “Maybe I should’ve tried harder.”
“No, no,” I tell her, shaking my head. “I…I should’ve listened instead of shooting you down because it was all too much for me to hear. I should’ve just shut my fucking mouth and listened and been there for you.”
