“No,” I growl. “I won’t stop. You won’t get to experience the joys of motherhood, Lacey. You won’t hold her in the middle of the night when she wakes. You won’t get to watch her grow or teach her how to walk. You won’t even give a fuck because you and your maker will be one. She wins and your child, the precious baby you fought so hard to bring into this world, she fucking loses.”
Suddenly, Lacey spins around and takes the glass from the sink. Before I realize what she’s doing, she turns back to me and throws it across the room. It misses me by an inch and crashes against the floor.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she cries.
When I don’t move, she advances towards me and stands across the other end of the island.
“I want you to leave!”
“I’ll go,” I tell her. “But I won’t fucking apologize for a word of what I just said. Children are born with birth defects every day, Lace. Sometimes the doctors catch them early on and sometimes they don’t find out until the baby is already in the mother’s arms. That don’t make them broken or any less loveable.”
I loosen my grip on the granite and take a step backward. Glancing at the broken glass, I move to the sink and bend to retrieve the dustpan. Silently, I clean the mess and discard the shards of glass in the trash before looking back at her.
“I know it’s your body. I also know it’s our baby and I’ll love that baby no matter what. If there’s something wrong, I swear I will find the best doctors. I will do everything in my power to make sure she gets whatever she needs. I just don’t want to lose her mother.”
Lacey doesn’t say a word and I don’t really expect her to. As I make my way through the house and towards the front door, I start to wonder if maybe I’ve already lost her. When the cards fall, sometimes we can’t pick them up. We can only walk over them and do our damnedest to escape the wreckage.
If you’re me, you get lost.
You lose your pain to the bottle.
You drown in the poison until you forget who you are and what you’ve seen.
You get so fucking high you don’t feel your heart split wide open.
You fuck up and lose everything.
Every single fucking thing.
Chapter Seventeen
Lacey
For the first time in our relationship, the roles were reversed, and I was the one overdosing. There was no bottle. No needle either. The poison killing me came disguised as everything I ever wished for and it was labeled love. Narcan could sometimes reverse the effects of a drug overdose but it couldn’t reverse the damage of a broken heart. So, there I laid the victim, drowning in heartache, wishing I hadn’t taken that last hit.
I shouldn’t have let him go, but I wasn’t thinking clearly, and his words, as true as they might be, they inflicted so much pain.
Too much pain.
I never thought it would hurt to be in the same room as the man I love. That I’d look him in the eye and wish he’d disappear. Everything he said, every fear he shared, they were all valid and all very possible. It’s nothing I didn’t know. Nothing I didn’t fear too. But once he spoke of them, once he said those things aloud, he put them in the universe, and I couldn’t bear that.
There’s this book, The Secret and the message between the pages says we create our destinies by what we put out in the world. If you believe you won’t amount to anything, you won’t. If you believe you can conquer any challenge, you will. It’s hard for someone with a failing mind to rely on positive energy, but when your faith is tested, it’s all you got.
I didn’t need Blackie tossing shade on the little light that remained shining and so, I acted out of grief. Instead of realizing we were both suffering, I ignored his feelings and let my own pain take away my common sense. It was just another selfish act to add to the long list.
A beep sounds, cueing me to leave a message.
“Blackie, I’m sorry,” I rasp. “I shouldn’t have asked you to leave. Please come home or at least answer the phone. I need to know you’re okay.” I pause, pushing away my glum thoughts. “I love you,” I add, barely audible.
Disconnecting the call, I lean forward and place the phone on the coffee table. My eyes slice to the bay window and I swallow the lump in my throat as the sun begins to rise. It’s the dawn of a new day and instead of waking up next to my husband, I’m left wondering if I sent him to wrestle his demons.
For a moment, I contemplate calling my father, but he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. No one knows, well, except for Reina. I suppose I could call her, but she’s not going to send the cavalry out to search for my husband. The only thing I can do is pray for him.
For me.
For us.
For this baby.
Placing my hand over my flat stomach, I tear my eyes away from the window.
“We’re going to be okay,” I whisper. “You and me, whatever happens, however this plays out, we’re going to be okay.”
I’m not sure if I believe it, but I say it anyway.
I call Blackie again, and again, I get his voicemail. However, this time his inbox is full and doesn’t accept another message from me. Ending the call, I scroll through my list of contacts and pause when I spot my therapists name. I can’t bring my husband back to me, but I can honor his concerns by speaking with Dr. Spiegel. I can tell her I’m pregnant and that my doctor is concerned about me being on Lithium. That my husband doesn’t want to lose me to my mental illness, that he fears I’ll have a psychotic break and he’ll be left alone, raising our child.
My thumb presses against the little icon of a phone and I lift it to my ear, not caring about the early hour. Dr. Spiegel picks up on the third ring and sounds just as chipper as she does when I’m sitting across from her in her office.
“Lacey,” she greets. “How are you?”
How am I?
I’m a fucking mess.
My throat goes dry and my response doesn’t come.
“Lacey, are you there?”
“I’m here,” I reply hoarsely.
“Is everything okay?”
The tears fall from my eyes and I hate that they’re not tears of happiness or joy. At the risk of sounding like a spoiled child, it’s not fair. It’s just so incredibly unfair.
“I’m pregnant,” I sob.
The line goes silent for a moment before Dr. Spiegel responds to my news.
“I’m taking the pregnancy wasn’t planned.”
“Oh, it was planned. I don’t think either of us expected it to happen so quickly but nonetheless, it was planned.” Before she can ask me why I’m so upset, I draw in a deep breath and begin to ramble all the details, explaining what happened at the doctor. More tears fall as I reveal Blackie’s concerns and when I’ve finally laid all the truth bare, I release a heavy breath.
“I don’t want to take the Lithium, Dr. Spiegel,” I tell her, gritting my teeth as I furiously wipe the tears from my cheeks. “A baby is supposed to be safe inside their mother. Once he or she is born, I won’t be able to protect him or her from the world but while I’m carrying it, I can.”
It’s hard to admit that, and it feels as if I’m already failing as a parent.