Arrest (A Disarm Novel) (8 page)

“Elsie, can you come up here?” Henry’s voice boomed throughout the house as I cleaned the downstairs bathroom. We’d decided to spring-clean the entire house that Sunday afternoon, Henry taking the upstairs while I tackled the downstairs.

I stuck my head out of the bathroom and called out, “Hang on, I’m not done yet.”

“Now.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” I muttered to myself, performing a sarcastic little salute in his direction. I took my time wiping down the bowl, not in the mood to be summoned in such a manner. I figured if he needed me so badly, then he could come to me himself.

And come he did. “What the hell is this?” Henry said, appearing in the doorway with a round plastic case in his hand.

Shit.
“Where did you get that?”

“I was looking for some aspirin in your drawer and found it,” he said, his lips a thin line of aggravation. He opened the case, seeing that each pill had been taken up to today. “Why are you taking them again?”

I put down the cleaning spray and wiped my hands on a paper towel to buy some time while I thought of a suitable explanation. But in the end, I had nothing but the truth. “You know why,” I said softly.

He snapped the case shut. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his face red.

“Because . . . I don’t know. Because I knew you’d disagree.”

“I thought we were trying again.”

“You just assumed we would.”

“Don’t you want to?”

I put the toilet lid down and sat on it. “I do, but . . .” I looked up at him, feeling like I was once again disappointing him. “I didn’t think I was ready yet.”

He kneeled between my legs and set his hands on my thighs, his long fingers splayed. “If you need more time, then just say so,” he said, giving my legs a gentle squeeze. “Just . . . don’t leave me out of the decisions.”

I nodded, kissing the tip of his nose. I hated that he was mad at me, particularly when we’d just arrived at a good place in our relationship again. “I promise you won’t be,” I said.

He sighed. “It’s been awhile, Els. Doc said we were ready to try again after a normal cycle. You’re sure you’re not ready yet?”

Easy for him to say; he wasn’t the one who went through the harrowing ordeal. “I don’t know . . .” I reached up to run my hands through my hair when he captured my wrist.

“We can just call it nonprevention,” he said. “To take the pressure off.”

I bit my lip. “I guess so.”

“Doesn’t mean you’ll get pregnant right away.”

I looked at him, at the unabashed determination on his face, and decided to push myself beyond my comfort zone. For him. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Harmon first for a checkup.”

“Really?” he asked, the smile spreading slowly, cautiously. His hand slid up my thigh. I nodded and he let out a relieved laugh, giving me a quick peck on the lips. “God, I love you.”

I wanted to return the sentiment but was too filled with anxiety to speak, so I simply pasted my lips to his and hoped for the best.

—

My appointment with Dr. Harmon took place a few days later. She was a well-respected OB-GYN, often booked for weeks, but she made sure to squeeze me in during her lunch break.

“I’ve been wondering about you,” she said inside the exam room. She looked at her laptop, where her patients’ files were held. “So you had an emergency D and C and were released the next day.”

“Yes.”

“No complications, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And you’re here because you want to try again?”

“Right.”

She stood up and slipped on latex gloves. “Okay, lie back and I will examine you.”

I got into position, sliding down to the very edge of the table and slipping my feet into the stirrups. I hated being in this position and what came right after it, but it’s one of those things every woman must endure repeatedly. It was best to just go to my happy place until it was all over.

So I thought of a time in Oklahoma when Jason, Henry, and I had gone camping at Red Rock Canyon. We shared a four-man tent, which really meant four people had to lie side by side in order to fit. I somehow ended up in the middle (for man-spacing purposes), which meant sleeping beside Henry. I hadn’t thought of him as anything more than my brother’s best friend in years, so when I woke in the middle of the night and found him watching me, a frisson of excitement ran up my spine. But the irritating guy didn’t say anything. He just got up and went outside, pretending he simply needed to pee. But I saw the way he looked at me, felt the warmth of his gaze on my face . . .

Dr. Harmon pressed on my stomach and I flinched.

“Pain?”

I nodded. “I’ve had some cramping the past few weeks.”

“Bleeding?”

“Beyond my normal period? A little.” At her concerned expression, I asked, “What is it?”

She ignored my question. She simply took off the gloves and picked up the phone from the wall, speaking to one of her staff for a few minutes. “Yes, bring the ultrasound machine to room three, please. Also, saline and a catheter.”

After she hung up, I leaned up on my elbows, my heart beginning to hammer. “What’s wrong?”

Dr. Harmon turned back to me. “If you have about thirty to forty minutes to spare, I’d like to perform a sonohysterogram.”

“A what?”

“Sonohysterogram. It involves inserting a catheter into your uterus, which will pump saline into your uterus while I perform an ultrasound.”

“An ultrasound? Why, am I already pregnant?”

She shook her head, regret in her eyes. “If my suspicions are correct, you may have suffered uterine scarring from the curettage.”

—

I couldn’t sleep that night, the worries eating away at me until the dawn began to peek through the blinds. I couldn’t imagine how Henry would react; I didn’t even know how I would begin to tell him.

I decided it was best if I told him right away, ripping the bandage off and all of that.

So I headed him off at the door as soon as he came home. He hadn’t even taken his shoes off before I sat him down at the dining table and prepared to tell him.

But before anything else, I’d make him some eggs and toast. And pancakes. Maybe some fresh-squeezed orange juice if I had the time.

“What’s going on, Els?” he asked, coming around the counter and hugging me from behind. He reached out and grabbed the salt and pepper and seasoned the eggs in the frying pan.

I whisked the pancake mix in the bowl until my arm was frozen with fatigue. Henry flipped the eggs over and waited for me to speak.

“Does it have something to do with the visit to the OB-GYN?” he asked softly. When I nodded, he shut off the stove and unplugged the griddle, then gently turned me to face him. “What happened?”

My eyes were already watery when I forced myself to look up at him. “I have Asherman syndrome,” I said, hiding the truth beneath confusing terminology.

His eyebrows drew together and he bent down to look into my face. “What’s that? Is it serious?”

“It’s . . .”

“Just tell me.”

“It means I can’t have children.”

He took a startled step back, his eyebrows drawn together.

“I have scarring in my uterus from the D and C, which means that the embryo can’t implant.”

“Is it treatable? Is there something they can do for it?”

“There’s an operation—”

“Then do it.”

“You’re already wheeling me down to the operating room and you don’t even know what it is yet.”

“Does it matter? We need to try everything.”

I pushed him away. “Of course it matters. This is my body we’re talking about.”

“I don’t understand. Don’t you want to get pregnant?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Don’t you?”

I stared at him for a long time, faced with the question that had been haunting me for the entire night. “I don’t think so. No,” I whispered.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me in disbelief, but for the first time in a long time, I was actually being completely honest.

“I don’t want a baby right now, Henry,” I said, gathering courage with each word. “Not so soon.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

He issued a snort of incredulity.

“You said you could wait as long as I needed,” I reminded him.

“Not when you keep changing your mind.”

“It’s my body, Henry, I’m allowed to do that.”

“It might be your body, but it’s our family we’re talking about.” He walked farther away, running a palm down his face. “I’ve been on patrol for twelve hours. I’m too fucking tired for this.”

“What about your eggs?”

“I don’t want them,” he said with distaste. “They’ve gone cold.”

—

We didn’t talk to each other for another five days. Henry picked up extra shifts during his days off and when he was home, he said only the bare minimum to get by.

It hurt to be apart from him, more than I’d care to admit, but pride dictated that I remain steadfast in my belief. Asherman syndrome or not, I refused to be guilted into having a baby. Period.

The chill remained until early one morning, when he came home after a twelve-hour shift looking bedraggled and weary as he took off his clothes. The bed sagged under his weight as he sat down and rested his elbows on his knees. Something about the way he slumped over, about the weary way he held his head in his hands, caught my attention.

I sat up and turned off my alarm, which was set to wake me in a half hour. “What’s wrong?” I asked, touching his bare back. When he turned around, his eyes were ringed in red and the look on his face was so heartbreaking that I instinctively crawled over to him. “What is it?”

He grasped my hand on his shoulder and shook his head. “You won’t want to know,” he said in a broken voice. “Trust me.”

“I want to know what it is that’s making you this way.”

He swallowed hard as he studied my face. “You remember the case with the missing five-year-old boy? The one kidnapped in his front yard in Aurora?”

A cold chill went down my spine. “Yes.”

The droop in his eyelids told me that the end of the story was not a happy one. “We found him today.”

I covered my mouth as my eyes filled with tears.

“We got a tip from an anonymous caller about a house in Five Points. Sondra and I were the closest, so we took the call.”

I sank to my heels as fat tears fell down my cheeks. “Stop. Please.”

“We found him. He’s alive.”

I let out a shuddering breath.

“He’s in bad shape though. The EMTs took him to the hospital, but he’s dehydrated and there were signs of—”

I covered his mouth, unable to hear anymore. “He’s alive,” I said. “You saved him.”

“He was so tiny in my arms when I carried him out of there, I felt like he might break if I squeezed too hard.” He bent his neck down and buried his face in his hands. “He was so helpless.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed his head. “It’s okay. He’ll be all right now.”

When next he looked up, his eyes were burning orbs of coal. “It took everything in me not to kill the motherfucker in that house. To tear him limb from limb.” As he talked, one side of his mouth curled up in a sneer and his hands formed fists in his lap. “If Jones hadn’t taken him, I would have broken every bone in his motherfucking body.”

I wanted to recoil from this ugly, violent side of Henry that I’d seen only once before. Instead I continued to hold him in hopes that it would anchor him to his humanity. I couldn’t afford to lose him again to the undertow of post-traumatic stress. “It’s okay,” I told him once again because I had nothing else to say.

“It’s not okay!” he cried, shaking me off and pacing by the foot of the bed, his muscles straining against his olive skin. “There are a lot of sick assholes out there. And I’m going to take them all down one by one.”

I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t possibly do all of that himself—he was only human after all—but I figured that, at least for tonight, he could keep on believing that he was capable of the impossible.

Suddenly, Henry crossed the room and, without warning, punched a hole in the wall.

I slipped off the bed in shock, my ass hitting the floor with a thud.

He punched the wall again, creating another dark crater, pieces of drywall crumbling to the carpet.

“What the hell!” I cried, jumping to my feet. I grabbed his arm before he could destroy the wall altogether. “Stop, Henry. Stop!”

His arms dropped to his sides as his anger drained. “It was just a kid,” he said, his voice breaking. He sat on the bed and buried his face in his hands. “Nobody deserves to die that young.”

I stared down at him, my eyes blurry as it all dawned on me. I’d been so blinded by my own sorrow that I neglected to consider Henry’s feelings. I thought he’d coped with the miscarriage, but what I failed to consider was that maybe he’d simply buried his sadness in order to appear strong for me.

I touched his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about . . . the baby?”

He looked up at me with lifeless eyes. “No,” was all he said before disappearing into the bathroom.

After a long day of work, I went upstairs and lay on the bed with my laptop. I no longer worked in the nursery-slash-office, didn’t even know what state it was in these days. Henry had probably painted over the mural by now and put everything back in place, but I couldn’t bear to be in there knowing that just underneath a layer of paint was evidence of the hope we’d lost.

I sat there long after the computer booted up, staring at the desktop wallpaper without seeing. I was supposed to be doing work but I couldn’t help but think back to Henry’s outburst, at his promise of ridding the streets of every criminal.

I knew it wasn’t possible, but God bless him for wanting to try.

Instead of logging onto Shake Design’s FTP server, I opened a new browser window and searched for the news reports on the kidnapped Aurora boy. I didn’t know what possessed me to do it—goodness knows, I couldn’t bear to hear it last night—but I suddenly wanted to know, to make sure that the child was okay.

The report didn’t reveal much, only that he was in stable condition, but the photograph of his mother standing by his hospital bed was enough to make my heart clench tight. I didn’t know how I would stand it, knowing that my child was found but that he was not yet out of the woods. It would break my heart ten times over to see him suffer.

I’d lost a brother once; I didn’t think I could survive the loss of a being I’d birthed and raised.

I pushed away from the bed, suddenly angry, and stalked into the closet. I hurriedly dressed in running gear and was out the door, running down the street before I even realized that it was starting to get dark and cold.

To punish myself, I kept going down the block, taking the four-mile running path that I’d run before. I lengthened my strides, not caring that my nose was starting to run, or that my legs were stiff and chilled to the bone. I pushed past the discomfort and ran faster. Finally, two miles away from our house, I came to a stop. My lungs burned and my cheeks throbbed from the cold air, but the endorphins were kicking in and I was suddenly elated beyond reason.

I was alive, I was married, and I had a thriving career. I was living the dream.

I stood in the middle of the quiet neighborhood, raised my eyes up to the navy blue sky and let go. I laughed and laughed until tears leaked out of my eyes and ran down the sides of my face, and then the laughter turned into sobs and I found myself inexplicably crying. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was out of control and powerless.

After a few minutes, I wiped at my face and started to run back home, but my muscles had cooled down and refused to move. So I trudged on instead, miserable and cold, unable to control even my own limbs.

“Elsie?”

I turned to find Henry driving alongside me in the Volvo. “Hey,” I said with a tired wave.

“Are you running in the dark?” he asked with worry in his voice. “It’s freaking cold out here.”

I shrugged, suppressing a shiver. “It wasn’t so bad before.”

“Please get in.”

I slid onto the passenger seat and huddled into myself. Thankfully, Henry had already turned on the seat warmer.

“Are you okay?” he asked quietly as he drove us home. He laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed at the tight muscles there.

“I’m fine,” I said, relaxing under his firm fingers.

“You’ve been crying.”

I pulled down the visor and looked at myself in the mirror but there were no telltale signs of my tears. No smeared mascara, no dried snot on my upper lip.

“I can tell, Els,” he said. “I’ve known you forever. I can tell when something’s not right with you.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“Then why does my gut say you’re not?”

I forced a smile as we pulled into our garage. “That’s just hunger talking,” I said, getting out.

I lay on the couch, intending to rest for just a few minutes before starting dinner, but the next thing I knew Henry was nudging me awake.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Nearly ten.”

I sat up slowly, realizing that Henry must have pulled the blanket over me at some point. “Crap. I need to make dinner.”

“I made it,” he said, reaching to the coffee table and handing me a plate of chicken Alfredo. “It might be a little hot. I just nuked it in the microwave.”

I stared down at the warm plate in my lap then up at my husband, whose face was full of worry. I reached over and kissed him briefly. “Thank you.”

“Els,” Henry said, his eyes blazing over my face. “Do you want to tell me why you were running out in the dark and howling at the sky?” he asked. “You’re not turning into a werewolf, are you?”

I snorted. “No. On both accounts,” I replied and stuffed my mouth with creamy pasta before he could ask any more questions, burning my tongue in the process.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been pressuring you lately,” he said. “That was not my intention.”

I set down the plate, my appetite lost. “Dr. Harmon said the scarring was pretty bad, that even if I have the surgery, it could still come back.”

Henry sat beside me. “Then we’ll just let it be and leave it up to fate,” he said. “I just want you to be happy.”

“I want the same for you.”

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and nestled me close. “Then we’ll just take that off the table for now. You can tell me when you’re ready.”

I pressed my face into his chest, feeling the burn in my throat. “I feel so out of my depth. Everything keeps changing and I can’t seem to keep up.”

He grasped my face in his hands and looked at me solemnly. “I’ll try harder, Els, I promise.”

“You don’t have to try so hard, Henry,” I said, placing my hands over his. “You don’t have to be strong all the time. You can be human too.”

He blinked a few times and gave a small nod.

“I know you said I can lean on you, but you know, I can be there for you too.”

He leaned forward until our foreheads touched. “Okay,” he breathed. “I just didn’t want you to worry about me. On top of everything else.”

“I’ll always worry about you. It’s my job,” I said with a small smile. “So if you wanted to talk about it, you can.”

“Okay,” he said again but didn’t say anything else.

—

Letting go is often a slow process, but sometimes, when you’re ready, it happens nearly all at once. In less than a week, Henry had the office back like before. The desk and computer were in their original places. I’d asked him not to paint over the mural to hold on to some semblance of hope, so he’d just covered most of it up with the bookshelf and books so that the child’s silhouette could no longer be seen.

I forced myself to start working in there again, to let go of the notion that the room was a nursery. It was just an office again, nothing more.

One beautiful Saturday afternoon, I went out into our backyard, green now that spring had come. I walked barefoot onto the grass with a white balloon in one hand and a Sharpie in the other. I wrote a girl’s name across the balloon’s surface and raised my hand up to the clear blue sky.

Then I let go.

The thin red ribbon slid through my fingers as the balloon rose and rose farther away from me.

As I lifted my face up to the sun, a strong hand enveloped mine. I looked over to find Henry standing beside me, his face also turned up, squeezing my hand to let me know he was there like always.

“Remember in Monterey,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “We were standing just like this the day after Jason’s funeral.”

“Yeah.” I remembered that day like it was yesterday, when the warmth of the sunshine wasn’t enough to hold off the hollow cold inside as we stood in front of that freshly covered grave.

Henry had reached between us and tried to hold my hand, but I’d wrapped my arms around me instead and continued staring at my brother’s gravestone.

“Just hold my damn hand, will you?” Henry had said, his open palm extended.

I didn’t have the energy to argue so I did as he asked, and immediately felt better, like I’d found shelter from the hurricane.

“I can’t believe Jason’s really gone,” I’d said with a shaky voice.

“Yeah.”

I’d looked up at him through tear-filled eyes. “I guess you’re the only brother I have left.”

“We’ll get through this, Elsie. I’m right here if you need me.”

I’d sniffed, wiping at my nose with a tissue. “You have me too.”

He’d tried a grin, though it was only a shadow of his beautiful smile. “Guess that makes you my new best friend.”

The death of my brother had changed everything for Henry and me, but through the shared sorrow, we’d solidified our bond and learned that we could conquer anything together.

Now here we were again, standing in our backyard, facing down another death. There was no grave, no physical proof that our baby had even existed, but we knew. We felt the loss together.

I don’t know how long we stood out there that day, watching that balloon float upward until it was nothing but a white spot against the sky. And I felt it then, while blades of grass tickled my toes and the breeze played with my hair: the weight lifting off my heart and my conscience. I knew in that moment that Henry and I would get through this too.