AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s the truth I fear most of all because the guilt could kill me. It could rip me apart.
But keeping it inside is killing me every day.
“He drowned,” I choke out. “In our bathtub.”
Remi lets out her breath, and her shoulders sink. Her whole body deflates, and instead of fear and anger, all that’s left is sadness.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Tears flow down my cheeks, hot and burning.
“Don’t give me sympathy…it was my fault.”
The words are so painful I can barely get them out, but they’re true and I mean it—I deserve this misery and so much more.
The bitter blackness inside of me is an ice storm that cuts everywhere it swirls, freezing and slicing my guts—numbness, then pain, then more numbness in a never-ending cycle.
I’m ready to sink into it, ready to lose myself in the storm like I have so many times before…until Remi wraps her arms around me. She hugs me and holds me, all her heat pouring into me from her arms around my body and her head against my chest.
At first, I just stand there, still numb and unbelieving. But the longer she holds me, the more her calm and her strength overpower the raging blackness inside of me.
At last, my arms wrap around her, too, and then the circuit is twice as strong, her heat flowing into me and mine into her until our bodies relax and we’re not clinging to each other like survivors anymore; we’re just hugging, breathing deeply in rhythm.
“Tell me what really happened,” Remi begs.
And for the very first time, I tell it all.
* * *
??Love Story - Sarah Cothran
“I loved Lila,and she loved me. But we were young and immature and made constant mistakes. It all felt so intense and romantic when we were thumbing our noses at our parents, eloping when she was only nineteen and I was twenty…but we were kids, stupid fucking kids, making stupid kid decisions.
“We’d always had fights, but the fights got so much worse once we were living in the same house, constantly in each other’s orbit. I was jealous when she’d go out in the day without me; she hated that I kept working nights when neither of us really needed the money.
“She’d scream and smash things, and I’d get cold and critical and shut myself away in my study or pick up extra shifts so I’d be gone all night long and then sleep in the day…”
I swallow hard, remembering the cycle, how it would repeat again and again…we’d apologize and make up, and then there’d be a week or sometimes only a couple of days of reconnected bliss until something would trigger one of us, and in an instant we’d be tossed back into the hurricane, a hurricane that never calmed but was right there waiting for us, already raging worse than the time before…
“Lila had always been…volatile. Her wildness and passion are what drew me to her. But once we were living together, I saw the uglier side of her and began to realize how little control she had over that part of herself. Once she smashed a clock that had belonged to my grandfather, the most sentimental thing I owned…
“It really hurt me. I couldn’t believe she’d do that, knowing what it meant to me. Afterward, she bawled and begged my forgiveness, and I gave it to her like I always forgave her, but the amount of time that other Lila was in control began to increase, and the things she would do got worse and worse…
“When she was herself, she’d cry and beg me to help her, but that other part of her, that part that’s inside all of us, that irrational mind, was onfire.And like a fire, it raged and spread because she couldn’t control it—she’d never controlled it.
“Then she stopped taking her medication. And I realized things weren’t even close to as bad as they could get.”
I remember the day I found her pill bottles in the trash. She’d always kept them hidden from me. That was the first time I read the labels and understood what a cocktail she’d been taking all that time—uppers, downers, painkillers, anti-anxiety meds…
“Without the medication, she went into a deep depression—stopped talking to her mom, her sister, her friends. Then it was her who wouldn’t leave the house. She started talking about how life is a cruise ship, and whether you’re up on the lido deck by the pool or down in the boilers shoveling coal, eventually you get sick of the cruise and you want to get off…
“I didn’t know what to do. Some days she’d seem happy again, manic even—she’d clean the whole house and cook enough food for an army. But then an hour later, she’d be sobbing and crying on the floor because the steak burned or the soufflé fell…
“I tried to get her to go to therapy. I said we could go together. Lila hated therapists because her parents used to make her see a shrink who would tell them everything she said. Things got so bad between us, I said she had to do something or I was leaving—and that’s when she told me she was pregnant.”
I hear Remi’s soft intake of breath. She still has her arms wrapped around me, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to look into her face. It makes it easier to get this all out while I can.
“I wanted to be happy…but I was fucking terrified. She was getting more unstable by the day—doing things she never used to do before. She wanted all the windows open in the house, all the time, even when it was raining, because she said she couldn’t breathe without the fresh air…She painted the nursery pink before we knew if it was a boy or a girl because she said she knew she was having a daughter, she could feel it…”
