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In the car, the kids tell Noah every detail about the fresh flowers and the way the sun was glittering off her name on the headstone. He says nothing, his hand tight on the steering wheel.
The fifteen-minute drive to his parents’ house, we don’t talk. Hazel sings “Baby Shark” for the hundredth time, and by the time we pull down the long dirt road, Noah looks as if he’s going puke. He’s pale and breathing heavily.
Again, I get the kids out of the car by myself. He looks at me over the roof of the car and I see the lines of worry in his face, the furrow in his brow. He’s wanting to say something, but doesn’t. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he can but won’t. And then he turns and walks away, down the path to the lake without saying a word to anyone.
His mom’s on the porch, all the kids surrounding her. Even Fin who wants nothing to do with me now that she’s spotted Noah’s dad in the house.
Noah’s mom glances up the trail to where Noah disappeared and then shifts her expression to mine. “You okay, darlin’?”
The use of darlin’ tugs at my heart. Noah always called Mara his darlin’. I nod. “It was a long drive. I’m gonna go check on Noah.”
Grace takes the kids in the house with her. “Nana made cookies.” She gleams, herding them inside. I watch them for a moment. Sevi drops to his knees and crawls inside the kitchen. Being the ever-supportive mother she’s always been, Grace pets his head when he barks at her. “Who’s a good puppy?” Grace coos, placing a cookie in his mouth.
With a deep breath, I follow Noah, journal in my hand and near tears. I find him at the water’s edge, his back to me.
“What the hell is your problem?”
He doesn’t turn around. “I don’t want to be here.”
My jaw tightens, anger for our situation, our daughter, all of it surfacing. “You didn’t have to come. I could have come by myself.”
“Jesus Christ, Kelly,” he shouts, spinning to face me. And then he stares at me and his expression makes me want to take the words back and lock them away. “I don’t mean it like that. I just hate how much it hurts being here.” Pausing, he rests his hands on his hips and stares up at the sky. “As soon as we crossed the Texas state line, I got this feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it’s only worse now that we’re here, where we raised her.”
“Then talk to me,” I beg, wanting to reach out and hold him. I can see that he’s hurting, but he won’t let me help him. He won’t help me. “We can get through it together.”
His gaze falters for the briefest moment. “I’ve been trying.” Though I don’t think he means for it to happen, his words break.
“No, you haven’t. You’ve been avoiding.”
“I don’t know how to make this better,” he mumbles. “I know you’re not happy, but everything I do and say is wrong.”
In part, he’s right. “If you wanted to be there for me, or make this better, why couldn’t you just get out of the car? Why?”
His expression shifts, hell, his entire demeanor shifts. Those eyes, his words from earlier, I’m waiting for him to tell me he’s joking, that he doesn’t want to forget her, but it isn’t in my imagination. Truthfully, this conversation, it’s one I’ve known was coming for a long time. I just didn’t think it’d be the same day we arrived at the lake house we got married at eleven years ago. I’d gone over it in my head—what I would say to him, the words, the expression, the tone—all of it. This, right now, isn’t how I saw it happening. Neither is having Journal with me. A piece of me that I said I would never share with anyone, not even my therapist.
The scars on my heart speak for me. “So she meant so little to you you’re not even coming with us to her grave?”
It’s a low blow, and as soon as the words leave my lips, I regret them. Standing there staring at him, I wait for his response, my legs wobbly while the rest of me is numb. I told myself over the last day I’d let this go because it’s just Noah and his avoidance, but the closer we got to Austin, the need to visit her grave again became stronger. Then when it happened, and he didn’t bother to get out of the car, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to be a part of it. Then everything else came crumbling down on me emotionally, and I lost it.
I expect him to say something,anything, but I’m met with silence, the awkward kind before his eyes deceive him, and he briefly glances at me. That expression, that one right there, wordlessly tells me what I need to hear. He wants to but won’t admit it.
“Say something,” I demand, my voice trembling.
He crumbles me with that look. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say,” he snaps, his eyes on the lake, avoiding eye contact. Agitated and aware, he takes that old, worn baseball cap from his head and runs his fingers through his mop of dark brown hair before replacing it.
“Well….” I shift my weight from one foot to the other, my journal, my life, my tears, and fears clenched in my sweaty palm. My eyes drift to him, the one holding every memory of my childhood, and the child we couldn’t save. He stares at my feet, wishing they’d move, wishing all of me would move away from him, but I can’t.
Crossing his arms over his chest, his body tenses even more.
Feeling the sudden panic rise, my hands and heart tremble, and I can’t hold my temper or my emotions back any longer.
I’m done.
I’ve had enough of him avoiding this and certainly enough regretting. When I opened that leather notebook and started to write the day after Mara was diagnosed with cancer, I never intended for anyone to read it. It’s ugly. It’s truth and most of all, it’s me and Noah and everything that ever went wrong.
Inside that book is love, pages and pages of nights I can’t forget, memories of a beautiful wild-hearted little girl gone too soon and the man who left me to deal with it on my own emotionally. Every hospital stay, every fight, every doubt, it’s in here.
Unfortunately, my anger gets the best of me. Searching for the moment, the lie I knew he’d been keeping from me, I wipe the tears from my heated cheeks and square my shoulders. “Maybe this will matter to you,” I say, tossing the book at him. “Read that and tell me you want to forget her because if you do, you’re forgettingus.”