Page 25 of Liquids

This is going from bad to worse. I’m surprised he wasn’t crushed by all the secrets falling out of my closets.

“A guitar.”

“Ah.”

“You play?”

I shake my head. What do I say here? “Boyfriend.”

“Ah.” He nods. “And he left it behind?” His mouth quirks. “Babe, he’s coming back.”

I almost choke. “I hope to God he isn’t.”

He chuckles. “That bad, huh? You mind if I play it?”

I give him a small smile. “Now that I would like to hear.”

“Then eat up, because that’s your entertainment for this evening.”

And what a night’s entertainment it is. He’s not a great player, but good enough, and he downloads music from the internet and practices a bit, and strums away and I start singing and he sings with me. It’s years since I did anything like this, and it brings tears to my eyes.

After, we have a shower together, and he takes me apart on my bed again, and tucks me into his huge body, and we fall asleep in my clean room which now smells like Pine-Sol. I have dreams about drawing: long swirly pictures of the sky and faces appearing out of a page of charcoal. My grandma, my dad, my mom. Charlie. And I start to cry, and I wake up with a jolt, hiccupping into the silence with Rig snoring softly behind me. Those pictures of Charlie don’t exist anymore because I burned them, and my heart pounds and aches as I lie there remembering his small, perfect body, perfect toes, and tiny hands that I drew over and over and then destroyed. I want him back more than I want to breathe.

8

UNDERTOW

“Who was he?” Rig asks.

He’s sitting on my couch when I get home the following night, holding a photograph of me with a small baby on my chest, hand on his tiny bottom. It’s the only picture I’ve got left. Cold blows through my soul.

“Where did you find that?”

If I could be bothered, I’d object to his rifling through my things. But I’m not the kind of person who gets riled up about stuff like that. Especially since he’s done so much for me in the two days he’s been here. And I hide this photo from myself … He could have come across it anywhere. Most of the time I forget I’ve got it, and I definitely don’t want to see it.

“Picked up a book to read, it fell out.”

Figures. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy all the photographs. I had to keep one. I roll my lips together. “My son.” Fuck, I don’t want to talk about Charlie.

He shuts his eyes. “Your son?” His eyes pop open again. “A son you no longer have.”

I nod. My throat closes up. He reaches out and squeezes my hand.

“The guy I was with”—I swallow—“the guy I was with beat me up six weeks from my due date. I went into labor early. Charlie … he struggled when he was born, bleeding on the brain. The damage was extensive. They tried so hard, but …”

“How long did he live?”

“Three weeks.”

Rig’s eyes shutter closed, and I grimace. “That’s when I kind of …” I gulp as I stare at the window that looks out over the street. “I gave up. I just … too much grief, you know? I started drinking. Nothing startling or unusual about it. Moved back here then, too. Had to leave that place.”

“What place?”

“St. Louis. Left one day and started driving, ended up back where I grew up.”

“You lived there with the asshole who …”

“Yeah.”