Written in the Scars (15 page)

The glass in the door gives me a warning that Ty is coming up behind me. I stand, facing the door, my breath fogging up the glass as he nears. Far too quickly than I’m prepared for, his chest is inches from mine, his arm around the front of me as he sticks his key in the lock.

His chest is not quite touching my back, but I can feel the energy pouring off of him. Knees weak, I fight myself not to fall back into him because he’s not my safe place anymore.

Just as I start to disintegrate and lose all composure, the door groans, opening wide. I don’t hesitate to step inside . . . and neither does he. The groan sounds again before I hear the lock latch shut.

“Guess who I ran into today?” he asks, his voice far too calm. The disparity of the tone against the look I saw in his eyes a few minutes ago sends a chill down my spine.

I have no idea why he’s doing this, why he just doesn’t come out and say whatever it is he has to say about my visit with Parker. But I’m in no hurry to get to that part of the conversation, so I play along. Hoping, praying, that I’m wrong about the purpose of this visit.

“Jiggs?” I offer, my back to him.

“Did ya happen to run into Pettis today?”

My hands tremble as they cover my face. The coolness of the metal of my wedding band caressing my cheek. It suddenly feels so heavy on my finger. “Yeah.”

His hand smacks the table and I jump, the jolt dissolving the wall holding back the tears.

The wetness courses down my cheeks, my lashes heavy with the weight of the fluid. It’s a silent cry—no sobs, no gasps for breath.

“What the fuck, E?”

The huskiness of his voice quickens my tears, the sadness so thick that I can’t bear to endure it for the both of us.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, my own voice muddied.

“Pettis told me you filed for divorce.”

Like a mortar hitting its target, even though it’s a shell I shot, my heart bursts into flames. I swallow a sob, nearly choking as I do.

“Tell me he’s lying, E,” he says, a hitch in his voice that breaks me. “Tell me I need to go find him and bust his ass. Tell me I’m going to spend a couple of days in the county jail.
Please
,” he adds, the pain so palpable that I can’t take it anymore.

Thoughts, fears, questions, consequences, failures hurl through my mind, consuming me. I can’t think, I can’t make sense of anything other than the overwhelming desire to shut my eyes and succumb to the pain.

Reaching for the doorframe, I start to steady myself, but not before a set of strong hands finds my waist and does it for me.

A sob slips by my lips instantly, the sound filling the quiet of the kitchen. Another one rips from somewhere in my soul, and another, and another, and before I know it, I’m twirled around and my face is buried in Ty’s chest. His arms pull me against him, his chin rests naturally on the top of my head like it’s done a thousand times before.

My hands wind around his waist and I cry for everything we’ve had together, every moment of our life we’ve spent as one unit.

For every late night we sat in bed eating a pint of ice cream.

For every drive through the country with no destination in mind.

For every decision we made, inside joke only we understand, every minute we’ve spent loving each other.

For the two babies we lost, one he doesn’t even know about, I cry.

This is this most peace I’ve had since he walked out the door. A bottomless pit of sadness, sure, but there’s a stillness in this moment that allows me the opportunity to just mourn everything I’ve been up until this moment. Because when I pull back, I will never be this person again.

Even though I haven’t done it, even though I’m not sure I could’ve done it if I had the money, it’s inevitable. My heart knows it. My fears feed it. My soul loathes it.

Never again will I know the feel of his arms around me, the warmth of his breath on my cheek. Never again will I hear his heartbeat in his chest or feel the roughness of the palms of his hands on the small of my back.

I love him. Damn it, I love this man so fucking much.

His shirt stains with my tears, my body shaking like a leaf in his arms. I don’t bother trying to control it because this isn’t something that can be reined in for any reason.

Ty holds me, occasionally shushing me like he would when I heard a story about a disadvantaged child at school and would come home in tears or like he does when I cry at the end of
Steel Magnolias
. He strokes my back with such tenderness that even though he’s the enemy, he still feels like my best friend. And that little fact is going to be the hardest to get over, if I ever can.

My phone rings in my pocket, breaking the tranquility of possibly the last good moment of my life. I press one final kiss into the center of Ty’s chest and don’t look him in the eye as I pull back and answer the call.

“Hey, Linds,” I try to say. It comes out as a fuzzled blurb. “Ty’s here.”

“Oh, shit,” she murmurs. “Do you want me to come over? Do you want me to send Jiggs by?”

Taking a deep breath, I look up. He’s watching me, a need in his eye that I can’t deny. I know we are going to have to have this conversation. We owe it to the life we’ve shared.

“No, I’m good,” I lie.

She sighs into the line. “If you’re sure . . .”

“I’m not sure about anything,” I laugh, sniffling back tears. “But I’m okay. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you later.”

“Make sure you do that,” she says as I end the call.

Wincing as my temples begin to ache, I rub the sides of my head. Without looking or acknowledging Ty, I head down the hall and enter the bedroom. I pop a couple of pain relievers without even a drink, sucking them down dry.

I’ve never felt this way in my life. It’s a mixture of terror and anxiety, yet in the midst of the chaos, there’s a smidgen of calm.

Inhaling a deep breath, the air is filled with his cologne. The scent takes me back to another time, and as I sense his proximity to me, knowing he’s standing at the door watching me, I would give virtually anything to open my eyes and have this entire part of my life erased. I would go back to the day he signed up at Blackwater Coal and forbid him from working there.

That’s what caused this. His injury. Things were never the same after that.

“Elin?”

His voice brings me back to the bedroom and the current situation. I don’t answer because I don’t trust my voice. I also don’t respond because I don’t know how to deal with the emotion in his. It’s not anger and it’s not fury, it’s something else. Something so much more real that I don’t have a default answer for.

“Did you file for divorce today?” he asks.

“I found out what I have to do and how much it’s going to cost,” I whisper.

“What the hell, Elin?”

There’s a drip of franticness in his tone now too that stirs up the same feeling inside me.

“Aren’t ya going to say anything?” he asks. He moves closer behind me, within touching distance, but he doesn’t reach out, and I’m glad for that.

“What is there to say?” I reply simply, looking at the picture of a landscape over the bed.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe . . . why? Why you thought you should end our marriage and not even say something to me first? I was here last night and you didn’t say anything. Hell, Elin. We were
together
last night.”

Shrugging, I turn slowly to face him. His eyes are wild, his hands laced together at the back of his neck—maybe to keep from reaching out for me, I don’t know. But it’s a good idea, so I stick mine in the pockets of my jeans for the same reason.

“I just got it over with,” I say. “It was inevitable.”

He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“I’m fucking crazy? I’ve been right here, Tyler. Where have you been?”

“Damn it, Elin,” he groans, pacing a circle in the middle of the bedroom floor.

“
Damn it, Elin
?” I repeat. His words stoke some life back into me, diffuse some of the numbness I’d begun to feel.

“I never said I wanted a divorce from you!” he booms.

“Sometimes actions speak louder than words.”

“Yeah, you’re right—they fucking do! What was last night? Was that my way of asking you to see about a divorce? You think I came over here and held you in my arms so you’d get the picture I didn’t want to be with you anymore? Don’t lie to yourself, Elin, and don’t lie to me either.”

“Ugh,” I huff, walking around him and into the hall. Ignoring his shouts for me to come back, I enter the living room. I need to put some distance between us. Scurrying to the far end of the sofa, I clench the armrest as he walks in.

“I couldn’t divorce you,” he says, positioning himself against the other side of the sofa.

“As soon as I can save the money, I’ll file. You don’t have to do it,” I whisper. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I want to fall to the floor and sob. I know, in the bottom of my gut, that I don’t want it to be over. I want to love this man for the rest of my life. But I don’t want the relationship he and I have now. It’s not . . . us.

We’ve agreed to stop the fights dozens of times, promised each other we’d do better. Yet, we’re still here.

His jaw ticks, his knuckles turning white as he re-grips the couch. “The hell you will.” Running his hands through his hair, his eyes never leave mine. “I’ll tear up every set of papers they send me. I’ll put up a fight at every turn, Elin. I’m not letting you do this to us.”

“I don’t have another answer!”

“The answer is right fucking here!” he shouts back, holding his arms out to his sides.

Tears burn my skin as they flow down my face. He notices them, watches them cascade to the floor, before he looks me in the eye again. When he does, I see the pain he’s in, and as much as I hate to admit it, it breaks my heart.

I just want this over.

“Please,” I gasp, “just let me go.”

“Let you go?” he asks, his voice starting to break. “Like it’s something I can just laugh about and keep going?” He leans towards me, his eyes burning into mine. “You’re everything to me, Elin. You’re my lover, my best friend, my partner in everything, the mother of my children someday.”

My chest heaves with my sobs. I can’t even see him in front of me anymore. It’s all a blur, a watery vision of colors and fuzzy shapes.

“If you take
you
away from me, you take
everything
. Don’t you understand?” he says, just loud enough for me to hear over myself. “You’re everything to me, Elin Whitt. You’re my entire world.”

“You don’t get to say that after you just vanish! That’s not how this works!”

“Is that what this is?” he asks, starting to come around the couch. I back away in the opposite direction and he stops. “Are you punishing me for leaving? Fine, make me feel the pain you felt when I left—”

My hand trembles as I put it in the air to silence him. My body shakes with fury as I think back on the night I lost our baby. “You could
never
feel the pain I felt. I could never,
ever
do that to you, even if I wanted to. You have no idea,” I seethe.

“I didn’t know what else to do. I—”

“You didn’t know what to do? About what, Ty? What in your fucking life was so bad?” My hand shakes as I point a finger at him. “You don’t get to just come and go as you please. You don’t get to get sick of being married and—”

“That’s not what happened!”

“I don’t even care!” I scream, my temples throbbing as blood rushes through my body. “I don’t even care,” I say again, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.

“Yes, you do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I laugh sadly. “How can I ever trust you not to just walk away when things get hard or boring?”

“Is that what you think I did?” he asks, astonished. “You think I just got sick of this life and walked out?”

“Yup.”

“How could you think that?”

“What am I supposed to think? You leaving was a new low, Ty, a new bottom. You’ve never even thought about leaving me before and all it took was one little—”

“You asked me to.”

My hands throw in the air. “Yeah, I did. You’re right. So you just decide a few weeks of not talking to me at all was the right answer?”

“My phone broke. I—”

“What if I needed you?”

The heft of my question cuts him off, his mouth still open. Slowly, his head cocks to the side. “Did you?”

I only look at him. No smile, no smirk, no staring daggers his way. Just a somber look that has him thrown off balance.

“Elin . . .”

“Do I even want to know what you were doing?”

He still hasn’t recovered from my insinuation. Gathering all the courage I can gather, I go for it. I ask the one question that, depending on the answer, will answer every other one.

“Was it another woman, Tyler?”

“No!”

“Do you have any idea the reasons I’ve came up with to try to make myself feel better about this? Did you have any idea the hysteria I’d feel not knowing if you were alive? Then I hear from Pettis that you are alive and well and everything becomes clear that it’s probably another woman—”

He lurches forward. “It was not another woman!”

“How do I know?” I ask breathlessly.

He runs his hands through his hair, tugging at the roots. “Do you want to know why I left?”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I reply, not sure that’s true.

He starts to speak and then stops a few times, like he’s gathering the courage to share whatever secret he’s kept to himself. The longer it takes him to come forward with the truth, the more confident I feel that I don’t want to hear it.

“Save it,” I say, starting back to the kitchen. If he won’t leave, I will.

“I felt emasculated.”

The room stills, an eerie silence dropping over the space. He doesn’t speak and neither do I as he waits for some sort of reaction.

“I did,” he shrugs, looking at the floor. “Here I am, the man of the house. I can’t work and I’m sitting here all fucking day, watching you kill yourself at work and taking care of the house and me and paying the bills while I do nothing.”

“You were hurt,” I say in disbelief.

“And then,” he continues, like he got a second wind, “all I hear about is the baby stuff. When we can have sex, when we can’t. What’s wrong with you, what could be wrong with me.”