“It’s not your fault.” I’m so quick to defend her, even to her. An old habit dying hard, I guess. “You had a mental illness.” Had or have? I don’t know. It’s been so long since she’s discussed the details of her mental state with me.
“Yes,” she confirms. “And it hurt everybody around me.”
She doesn’t say the words, but they hang there anyway, bright red and silent between us. It almost killed me.
Anna’s confession that she was having suicidal thoughts had been my wake-up call. I’d been sticking my head in the sand and pretending everything was going to work itself out, but her admittance forced me to finally admit how sick she was. That night I found Harmony and got her booked for treatment. She left the very next day. I didn’t know it was the start of a long, slow, excruciating breakup.
“We’re divorced.” I say it matter-of-factly, trying it on the same way I tried on Jordan’s name. It doesn’t taste any better.
“Yes.” Anna’s voice is small, something I could fit into one of the silver thimbles my grandmother kept beside her sewing machine. “I can hardly believe it either, if it makes you feel any better.”
“What happened to us?” A lone tear snakes down my face, but nobody is here to see it, so I don’t bother wiping it.
“I happened to us, Warner.”
I make a face. It feels like a cop-out. I want more. I want specifics. Times, dates, concrete evidence. I want to know where we went wrong, what turn we took that we were incapable of coming back from. “I need more than that, Anna.”
She doesn’t say anything, and I picture her looking down at the ground and biting the inside of her lip. It’s what she does when she’s uncomfortable.
I pull into the school parking lot and gaze out to the soccer field. Charlie is easy to identify. I’d know his gait anywhere. He has a jaunty, jubilant run. Completely unlike the other Hayden males. Wes, Wyatt, and I all run in a compact way, head lowered and shoulders tucked.
“Waiting on you,” I say to Anna.
“I don’t know how to say it.”
“Just spit it out. Whatever you have to say will only hurt until it stops hurting.”
She laughs, a quiet chuckle, devoid of whatever it is that makes a laugh sound happy. “This would’ve happened no matter what. This destination was always where we were headed.”
“What are you talking about?” I’m baffled. Our divorce happened because Anna was diagnosed with clinical depression, because life threw a fast-pitch curveball into the heart of our family. Not because this destination was always where we were headed. How can she even say such a thing? All those nights with Charlie, colicky and screaming, when we took turns holding him and trudged through the house, willing our exhausted bodies to stay awake. And when Peyton took too many of her gummy vitamins, declaring them candy, and we rushed her to the ER. Soccer matches, dance recitals, toddler tantrums, and bandages on injuries that were barely a scratch. We were a team. Me and Anna. High school sweethearts. Living on love. Our couch was hand-me-down but our devotion was pristine. Until it, apparently, wasn’t.
“How could you not agree, Warner? How could you not see what we became when we were married? We were parents first, people second, and somewhere too far down the list we were lovers. We lost what we had when we were young. It… happens.” She sighs for what has to be the seventh time since I called her. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t see what I’m saying? None of this is resonating with you?”
My jaw clenches against her questions. I don’t want her to be right, but it doesn’t change the fact that she is. Mostly, anyway. We did become parents instead of lovers, and it happened quickly. Nearly as soon as Peyton was born.
“Warner, I’m going to ask you a question, and you don’t need to answer me. I’m not the one who needs the answer, because I know it already.” I’m silent, and she continues. “When was the last time you remember being in love with me? In love.”
In the distance, Charlie crosses the ball to the center of the field and the striker attacks, scoring. The boys cheer. A pang twists in the center of my chest, a sense of nostalgia that hurts more than it should. I was like Charlie once. Looking out at life and wondering what awaited me. Not knowing it would hold all this.
“Charlie’s practice is almost over. I better go.” The boys stride toward bags thrown haphazardly on the sidelines.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Warner. Six o’clock?”
It’s her weekend with the kids. “Six o’clock,” I echo, hanging up and placing the phone in my cup holder.
Charlie is just about to my truck, so I reach over and grab the handle, opening the door. He climbs in, tosses his bag in the back seat, and fastens his seat belt.
“I’m starving,” he announces.
Despite how sour I feel on the inside, I smile. The kid is always hungry these days. On the way home, I swing by a drive-thru and grab a burger for Charlie.
“Don’t tell Grandma,” I instruct, thinking of my mom. “She said she’s making your favorite tonight and she’ll be irritated if she knows I fed you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Charlie says around a mouthful of food. “I’ll eat Grandma’s tater tot casserole.”
I feign a look of confusion. “Tater tot casserole? Sorry, Son. She’s making sushi.”
Charlie sticks out his tongue. “Very funny, Dad.”
He finishes his food, balling up the wrapper and tossing it into the paper bag. He drinks from his water bottle and drags the back of his hand over his mouth.
“Mom’s tomorrow?” he asks.
I glance at him. I don’t know what it’s like to have parents who are no longer married. My parents have been together so long I think of them as the same person sometimes, like an object someone stuck in a tree and the tree grew around it. Dislodging would be impossible.
“Yeah, bud. Mom’s tomorrow. Or, Grandpa Brock and Grandma Susan’s, anyway.”
“It would be nice if we could go back to that house mom had with the pool and the water slide,” Charlie says, looking out the window. “What happened to that house?”
I shake my head slowly, as if I don’t know. The truth is, it was a sort of halfway house. A place where Anna stayed after the treatment center, with a person who’d gone through treatment years ago and volunteered her home to people exiting. I saw the wisdom in Anna staying there, almost like stairs. Leaving Harmony and coming home would’ve been like jumping from the third stair onto ground level. She’d said she needed it to be gradual, and I agreed. I just didn’t realize she’d never be coming home again. Now she lives in an apartment, processing mortgage loans from her dining room table, and drives up to Sierra Grande every two weeks to have her kids at her parents’ house. She still doesn’t trust herself enough to be on her own with them. From what I’ve seen of her, maybe it’s time.
“She was just renting it, and the lease was up.” I detest the lies, but the kids aren’t ready to know about Anna. She’ll have to be the one to tell them.
“Too bad. It was a cool house.”
Charlie hasn’t said a lot about his mom or me. I wish I could crawl into his head and watch the thoughts pass. Maybe he feels more than he’s letting on. He was eight when Anna left. Old enough to remember. Old enough to absorb what it meant? I don’t know. I did everything in my power to cushion the blow.