“It’s okay,” he says, holding me down so I don’t hurt him. “It’s, okay, Lexi. It’s Kyle. I’m not him. You’re safe. You and Ellie are safe here.”
He wraps his arms around me, holding me tightly until I calm down. “Shhhhh,” he whispers into my ear, his hot breath rolling across my neck.
“Kyle?” I ask, trying to shake the dream away.
“Yes. I’m here. It’s okay.”
I stop fighting back and he relaxes his hold on me. But he doesn’t entirely let me go. He’s behind me in my bed, kind of spooning me, but without any of his lower body touching any of mine. His reassuring hand rests on my upper arm.
I crane my head back to see him in the dim light coming from the hallway. “Sorry,” I say with a big sigh.
“Bad dream, huh?”
I nod and put my head back down on the pillow. “You could say that. More like a nightmare,” I tell him. “One I actually lived through.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
I shrug noncommittally.
“I did a rotation in Psych, you know,” he says, squeezing my arm. “And if I learned anything, I learned it’s always best to talk about things that bother you. If you don’t, they will grow like cancer, slowly eating away at you.”
I turn away, so he can’t see the shame on my face. “Grant destroyed my flower garden.”
“Why would he want to do that?” he asks.
“Because I loved it.”
Those four words tell Kyle more about my relationship with Grant than I could ever tell him in an entire conversation. I can feel him shaking his head behind me. He doesn’t know what to say.
“When I took the pregnancy test and found out I was going to have a baby, my first thought was of my flower garden. I planted it right after we moved into the house. It was shortly after we married. He told me it was a great idea. That he would love to have fresh flowers around the house. He even helped me till the earth and haul in fresh planting dirt. He was always nice and helpful back then—early on.
“Then about a month into our marriage, when things had begun to change, he started complaining that I spent more time with my flower garden than with him. And he was right, I did spend a lot of time there. But only because he wouldn’t let me get a job. It was the only thing I had that was truly mine.
“Months later, I’d find freshly cut flowers, that I had put in vases around the house, thrown into the trash. He told me they were a reminder of how he wasn’t enough for me. He actually thought my entire world should be centered around him. So when the pregnancy test turned positive, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I needed to leave.
“If he destroyed a flower garden because he thought I loved it more than him, I wasn’t about to stick around to see what he would do to a child. Because I knew, despite who its father was, that I would love it more than anything in the entire world. And he wouldn’t be able to handle that.”
“Jesus, Lex.” His hand comes around my body to pull me against him, but he quickly realizes what he’s done and he removes it, sitting up on the bed to look down at me. “It makes me sick to think there are men like that walking around.”
“Do you remember when I showed you my scars that one time we played ‘Never have I ever’?” I roll onto my back and look up at him.
“Yeah.”
“The night he destroyed my flower garden. That’s the night I got this.” I run my finger across the scar on my collarbone.
He stares down at the scar. His hand twitches as if he wants to touch it, but he doesn’t. He just stares at it, his jaw hardening, his eyes burning with hatred.
“I broke one of his boxing trophies,” I tell him. “I did it out of anger when I saw what he’d done to my garden. I tried to glue it back together before he saw it, but I didn’t fool him. He stabbed me with a broken metal shard from one of the pieces.”
He scrubs his hands across his face. “If I ever see that bastard,” he says, shaking his head.
“The plan is to never see him again, Kyle. Now you know why I can’t ever contact him. He would destroy everything that I love just to hurt me. I love Ellie. I can’t risk it.”
He nods his head, looking from Ellie’s crib back to me. He nods it as if he finally understands what I’ve been telling him for weeks. “I know,” he says. “I know.”
“He was having an affair,” I admit. “As far as I could tell, for the whole time we were married he was also with someone else.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “You deserve so much more.”
I think I can see regret in his eyes. Regret over what? Grant hurting me? Or him not wanting to be with me?
“She deserves more,” I say, glancing over at Ellie.
“You both do,” he says. “Are you okay now?”
I nod. “Yeah, thanks.”
He stands up and checks on a sleeping Ellie. “I’ll bet they don’t list that as one of the benefits of having a deaf child,” he says.
I look at him strangely. “Benefits?”
“Yeah, you know, that you can have nightmares and you won’t wake her up. Or you can fight with your . . . whoever, and she won’t even know.”
My gaze goes past him, beyond the door where I can almost see the place we made love. “Or have loud animal sex,” I say.
His eyes meet mine and I swear he’s remembering every second of that night.
Just like I am.
“Yeah, that, too.” He pulls a blanket up over Ellie.
“Thanks, Kyle.”
“Anytime.” He turns to leave, but stops in the doorway. “I’m off at seven. Think you can wait for me to celebrate?”
“Celebrate what?”
He nods to Ellie. “It’s her seven-month birthday tomorrow.”
I smile. I know it is. Of course I know it is. But I didn’t know he did. “I think she wants Sal’s,” I say.
He laughs. “Does she now?”
“Definitely.”
“See you at seven-thirty, Lexi.”
Then he pulls the door closed, leaving me a fidgety mess. Because for a second, it almost sounded like we just made a date.
~ ~ ~
“I had a deaf patient today,” Kyle says, handing me my chopsticks. “He was in his mid-twenties. Broken leg. Interesting guy.”
“How so?” I ask.
“I was trying to pick up pieces of the conversation he was having with his friends. I saw them doing a sign I wasn’t familiar with. His friends would sign the letter ‘R’ while simulating the motion of strumming a guitar. I asked them what sign it was and they told me it was his name sign. His name was Ridge and he plays guitar for their band, and they explained to me that deaf people can have name signs which are like shorthand for their names.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty common.”
“Does nothing about what I told you seem unusual?” he asks.
I cock my head to the side, shrugging an ignorant shoulder.
“Lexi, the guy is in a band. He plays guitar. And he’s profoundly deaf.”
My eyes snap up to his when I realize what he’s telling me. “Oh, wow. Really?”
He nods proudly. “He’s good. Really good. After I told him about Ellie, he played his guitar for me.” He looks over at Ellie who is playing on a blanket on the floor across the room. “There truly are no limitations to what she can do.”
“You told him about Ellie?” My mind races wondering just how that conversation went. Did he tell him he has a friend with a deaf daughter? A roommate? I’m dying to know how he refers to Ellie, to me, with a stranger.
“Yes. Well, technically, his friends told him. I’m not very good at signing much more than asking Mommy for more milk.”
I laugh when he does the signs for those three words. “How can he play guitar?” I ask.
“It was pretty amazing. He holds it tightly against his chest and he feels the vibrations of the different chords. I’m telling you, there is no way you’d know he’s deaf when listening to him play.”
“Oh, my gosh. That’s incredible, Kyle.”
“It is. I wish Ellie were older. I’d take her to see his band.” He shrugs. “Maybe someday.”
I smile thinking that he would do that for her. I smile knowing that he’s thinking about a ‘someday.’
“It got me to thinking,” he says. “Do you have a name sign for Ellie?”
I shake my head. “I can’t give her one.”
“What? Why not?”
“In deaf culture, only another deaf person can give someone a name sign. It’s like a rite of passage into the deaf community. It might happen when they start going to school. Or when they pick their profession. Maybe it’s a physical trait, such as long hair, or a dimple, that gets used to make their sign. With that guy, Ridge, he’s probably played guitar his whole life and people came to associate him with it.”
“So, they take the first letter of their name and then do a sign that describes them?”
“Yup. Sometimes, they don’t even use a letter.”
“So, what do you think my name sign would be?” he asks.
I study him for a minute. Then I sign the letter ‘K’ before putting two fingers on my wrist as if to feel my pulse.
“Ahhh, good one,” he says. Then he signs the letter ‘L’ and puts his pinky in his mouth.
“What does that mean?”
“That would be your name sign,” he says. “Because you always chew on your pinky when you’re nervous.”
I look at my little finger and then back up at him. “I do not.”
“Oh, but you do,” he says.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing you’re not the giver of name signs. Because you are terrible at it.”
He laughs, holding out the fortune cookies so I can pick one. Just as we always do, each of us only selects one and he pushes the others aside. We’ll add them to our collection. The collection we started a few weeks ago. A jar we earmarked for extra fortune cookies. Because you never know when you might need one.
We open them up simultaneously and hide the slips of paper as we eat our cookies.
“Go ahead.” I nod to his hand.
He opens up his fortune and reads it. “He who dies with the most toys is still dead.” He looks up at me. “Damn, that’s deep.”
I read mine to myself, crumpling it up and throwing in the trash.
“Hey, that’s not allowed,” he says.
“Why not? You’ve done it.”
“Come on, Lex. What did it say?”
I sigh. “It said ‘The world is your oyster’.”
He looks at me sadly. “It wasn’t your parents who made you eat them, was it?”
I shake my head. “He thought they were an aphrodisiac. He made me eat them a lot.”
Kyle looks disgusted. “They aren’t, you know. Medically speaking, oysters do nothing to stimulate sex hormones. But the theory is, they resemble female genitalia, thus they can increase sexual desire.”
“Only if you desire to have sex,” I say sadly.
He runs his hands through his hair and I know he’s thinking about Grant forcing himself on me. He picks up one of the discarded fortune cookies and hands it to me. “I think we can make an exception,” he says.
I take it from him and crack it open, giving him half of it to eat. I stare at the slip of paper, then I glance down at my tattoo before I read my fortune aloud to Kyle. “Take nothing for granted,” I say.
Suddenly, I know what I need to do and I vow to call Skylar after dinner to get the ball rolling.
“Holy shit, Lex. Look!”
I look where he’s pointing to find Ellie up on all fours, scooting one knee forward and then the other as she attempts her very first crawl. “Oh, my God!”
I sit stunned, my eyes locked on Ellie as she reaches this milestone. I’m mesmerized by watching the careful and meticulous way she tries to move herself forward. After a few failed tries, she manages to crawl a few steps. “She’s doing it!” I squeal, excitedly.
I glance over at Kyle to see that he’s gotten out his phone and is videoing the entire thing. And I’m not sure which touches me more—my daughter crawling for the first time, or Kyle looking like the proud father while she does it.