“Come here,” Jase murmurs. Moving slowly. Everything is slow and foggy in the midst of our grief. Deep inside me, I can feel a new seed beginning to sprout, deep in my belly, in the place where our child used to be.
Rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. I didn’t know I could hate Dornan Ross any more than I already did. But I do. Now. I try to grab hold of that rage, to use it to keep me afloat, but the grief has me drunk, vacant, and I lose my grip on the rage, sinking back down again as I drown in our collective despair. It’s not even the lack of heroin anymore that makes me sick. After the first couple of days back from the hospital, my body adapted, finally adjusted to life without a constant dose of something to sedate the demons inside me. Now, my only companion is the heart-rending grief that threatens to destroy me.
I let him pull me off the couch, because I am a zombie. I resist nothing. I force a mouthful of food down when he tells me, I watch the steam billow from the tea he fixes me, and I lay like a little girl when he tucks me into bed at night.
I am a ghost. I am nothing, and inside me, that tiny seed of rage grows patiently, a little each day, and I know when I’m strong enough I’ll be able to harness it for my own survival.
I need the rage to come back to me, because without it, I am a shell. Our future is gone. Our baby is gone. The promise of rage is all I have.
He pulls me into the bedroom. Sometimes I notice he’s making an effort to look me in the eye, like a real effort, staring at me until I meet his gaze. Only, I never do. I avert my eyes to the floor, stuck in my own world, almost preferring that I’m alone in here. I don’t know what to say, what to do, how to act. I don’t know how to be this person anymore. This person who was selfish enough, stupid enough to lose our baby.
I lost our baby, and it’s all my fault.
Mine, and his. Dornan’s.
I repeat those words inside my mind. My vengeful mantra. Come and find me, you motherfucker. Come here and find me, so I can kill you.
Jase has pulled one of the dining chairs into the bedroom, set it up in front of the floor-length mirror. He gestures for me to sit down, and finally, I do return his gaze.
“I don’t want to look at myself,” I say quietly.
His face falls. He squeezes my hand. “Trust me. You can close your eyes if you want.”
I sit. Look at the floor instead of the mirror. I can’t bear to see myself. To see what I’ve become.
He reaches over and grabs something. “Stay still,” he says, one hand stroking my hair, and then he’s brushing it for me. It hurts at first, more than three months worth of knots in the wild rat’s nest atop my head, but he’s gentle, and he takes his task seriously. I watch his face, the subtle changes in his expression as he untangles strand from strand, and finally the brush glides through. It makes me think of my father. How, when I was a girl, he would brush my hair every day. It makes me think that Jase will never get to do that for his own daughter, because I lost our baby, and now we have nothing.
He puts the brush down and picks up something else. A hair straightener. My chest constricts as I remember the deal we had, the deal that if I ventured into the storm with him, he would straighten my hair for me. The straightener looks old, dusty. He must’ve found it when he was checking out the bathroom.
“I told you I’d do this for you,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. “Do you remember?” His hands are steady but soft as he scoops up a chunk of my hair and runs the iron over it. As he releases it, warm strands settle against my cheek, and it takes everything inside me not to cry. He’s so gentle, so loving, I wonder again to myself what I could have possibly done to deserve someone as beautiful, as capable, as unwavering as Jason Ross to carry me through this darkness that threatens to split me apart. That is splitting me apart.
I nod in response. To speak would be impossible right now. But I meet his eyes when I nod, offer a pathetically sad smile, and that is enough for him.
He continues the rest of the job in silence, and the feeling of him tending to me, taking care of me with this one small gesture is so fucking good, it floods me with warmth. A fragile warmth, a temporary one, but while it lasts, it is a blissful relief.
When he’s done, he rests his chin on the top of my head, so his face is directly above mine in the mirror. He angles his face into my hair, leaves a lingering kiss there.
“I love you,” he says. “More than anything. Do you know that?”
A lump rises in my throat. I nod. I know.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he adds.
My eyes slide back to the floor.
“Yes, it was,” I reply.
My life becomes measured in days since we lost our baby. Two days. Five days. Eight. On the ninth day, Jase travels to the hospital, returning with a box full of ashes. A small white box full of fleeting memories like footprints, a Polaroid, and ashes.