The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

The doctor came in his street clothes on a Saturday morning, someone whose house you had designed who had offered you the favor. He said I must have had a stomach bug, that it wasn’t just grief, that sometimes the immune system can be compromised when dealing with something like this. You agreed and thanked him with a bottle of wine on his way out the door, and I didn’t care enough to tell you both to fuck off.

Your mother came to stay with us. She brought me tea and tissues and sleeping pills and cold cloths to press on my face. I said what I needed to so that she’d leave the room. I’ll be fine, I promise. I just need some time to myself. She tried her best, but her presence took up space in my brain, distracted me from the only thing I wanted to be thinking about. Him. Anger made it hard to breathe. Sadness made it hard to open my eyes, to let the light into me. I belonged in the dark, I was owed the dark.

Your mother took Violet to a hotel for a few days, thinking the change of scenery would help. I hadn’t seen Violet since the hospital. The morning you went to pick her up, I sat under the window in our bedroom with a blade from the modeling kit you left on your desk. I lifted my shirt and I cut a faint line in my skin from my ribs down to my waist. I yelled for Sam until my voice was raw. The blood formed a perforated line, and tasted rancid, like I’d been rotting inside since the minute he died. I couldn’t stop putting it on my tongue. I smeared the blood all over my stomach and my breasts and wanted more. I wanted to feel like I was murdered, like someone had taken my life and left me to die.

When I heard Violet’s voice downstairs, I had to hold my hands tightly together to stop them from shaking. I locked the bedroom door and then I showered and put on a shirt that I had bought the week before Sam died, one I’d taken him out in the slushy frozen rain to buy, because I had felt like I had nothing to wear anymore. When that kind of thing had felt like a problem. I forgot his snacks. I had hushed his hunger impatiently in the long line and had made him late for his nap.

‘Mommy’s upstairs,’ I heard you tell her. You so rarely called me Mommy and neither did she.

You were wearing black sweatpants and a red flannel shirt. You didn’t change your clothes for weeks after he died. That was the only thing about you that looked any different than before, although I know you were hurting immensely. I listened to you walk between the den and our bedroom and Violet’s room and the kitchen. You never went into his room. A loop around our house, making the same creaks in the floors and the same noises: the toilet flushing, the hallway window opening, the fridge door shutting. Maybe you were waiting, respectfully, for someone to tell you that life could go on again, that you could set your alarm for the job you loved, and go to pickup basketball on Tuesdays, and laugh with Violet as loudly as you had before. Or maybe you never expected to find these joys in life again.

Do you know you spoke to me just four times? Four times in almost two weeks. There was too much pain to bear in the sight of each other.

You said you didn’t want a funeral. So we didn’t have one.

You wanted to know where Violet’s thermos was kept.

You told me you missed him, and then you lay down next to me on the bed, naked and wet from the shower, and you cried for nearly an hour. I lifted the blanket up, the only invitation I’d given you since he died, and you rolled in close. I held your head to my chest and realized that there would not be space for you in me, not that day, and maybe not ever. (This was the last time you would ever say those words to me – I miss him – of your own volition. ‘Of course I miss him,’ you would recite back at me for months after that, whenever I worked up the courage to ask.)

You asked if I would make dinner for Violet the night she came back, because you would be going out, you would be leaving the house at five o’clock. I told you no, I couldn’t, and you left the room.

I hated you for trying to be normal. For leaving me there with her, alone, within the walls of Sam’s home.

Violet never came up. I never went down.

When I woke up the next day and saw that you had taken the painting from his nursery and leaned it against the wall near the end of our bed, I became weightless for a moment. The pain stopped thumping in my bones. I had stared at that mother holding her child for nearly a year, while I rocked and fed and burped and whispered lullabies in his tiny ear. I realized when I saw the painting that I would live, and I don’t know why. I knew I would crawl out of this place that crushed every ounce of me. And I hated you for it. I didn’t ever want to feel normal again.

I walked to Violet’s room in my underwear, my legs as heavy as they’d ever been. I opened her door and there she was, stirring under her sheets. Her eyes fluttered and then squinted at the light from the hallway.

‘Get up.’

I poured her cereal and looked around the kitchen. Someone had taken away his high chair, his bottles, his blue silicone spoon, the crackers he liked