Nicola
You know that part of the movie when the hero gets dragged through the mud, or kicked off the team, or captured by the crime syndicate, and all hope is lost and yet you know, no matter what, somehow it’s all going to come together and the hero is going to get his big fat happy ending. And while he’s being tortured or the town turns against him or his wife walks out on him, you feel for him but you’re kind of spurred forward by the knowledge that everything will work out in the end. It just has to.
Well, I wish I could say the same could be applied to my own life. Because I feel like I’ve fallen off a cliff, been kicked through the mud and been tortured and there’s no sense of hope or a happy ending in sight.
Of course, all these blows I’m taking, well, they’re right in my heart. But that’s where they count, that’s where they hurt the most. And it’s kind of ridiculous, here I am, nearly two months later and I’m still this raw, gaping open wound when it comes to Bram. The rest of my life has some ups and downs. I live with Kayla still while I’m constantly searching for an affordable apartment. It’s actually not so bad, and while I know Kayla really appreciates the rent I pay, I know I’m also cramping her style. I mean, Kayla likes to have her fun and more and more she stays out at whatever dude she’s seeing’s place.
So I know that having me and a five-year-old girl in her place isn’t exactly ideal but she knows I’m working on it. My job at the Lion has been going well enough. I mean, it’s a lot of work that I’m usually not interested in, and James can be a real bitch of a boss sometimes. But it gives me money and my savings account has grown and grown. Even if everything inside me still feels like it’s constantly collapsing and rebuilding itself, I’ve got some form of security for the both of us.
I’ve also been concentrating on my designing more and more. I’ll spend hours at the sewing machine in the mornings and at night. Being creative is great fuel and I have to admit, it feels good to be pleasantly distracted. Sometimes it’s the only way to keep my mind from thinking about Bram.
Which it does. All the time. And I’m ashamed to admit it, even to myself. I don’t talk about him with Steph or Kayla and when I do see Linden, I notice he’s careful not to bring him up either. There have been a few close calls though. Once I heard he was coming to the Lion with Linden, so I went and hid in James’s office for an hour, pretending to work on something. All very mature, I know, but at the moment I care so much about keeping my heart alive that I’m shielding it from everything in sight.
I just want to stop feeling this deep, cold hole inside me when I wake up and realize I’m alone. I want to stop remembering what it’s like to have Bram hold me in his arms when I’m sad or run his hands over my body when I’m not. I want to pretend I never had that connection with a man who made me feel wild and free and full of life. I want so much that I can’t have.
And so, I trudge onward, that hero in the story, even though I haven’t done anything brave. I’m just another broken-souled person on this planet, waiting for time to pass. I don’t feel that undercurrent of “everything will be all right.” I don’t see how I can possibly have a Happily Ever After, that would mean things have to go back to the way they were and how can I ever forget the pain that follows me everywhere?
“Cheer up, buttercup,” Steph says to me. I can’t help but wince at the word. It reminds me too much of that damn yellow couch.
We’re sitting in a booth at the Lion. Ava is across from us and coloring away in a coloring book. Lisa called in sick and I had to work, so I had no choice but to bring Ava in. Luckily James is pretty good about that and she usually just hangs out in the back office with me. Steph is on her lunch break and wanted to have a drink. Lately I’d been leaning on my friend a lot, so I figured I owed her one.
“Sorry,” I apologize to her.
“Don’t be sorry,” she says, peeling the label off her beer. “I just hate seeing you look so sad. You know, now. And all the time.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her, and watch as she takes the label all the way off then starts picking at the sticky bits that remain. “You and Linden having problems?”
She stops and looks up at me. “Huh?”
“Sexual frustration,” I say, nodding at the bottle. “It’s why you’re peeling off the label.”
“Oh,” she says. She pushes her beer away, looking at it in surprise. “No. No, Linden is Linden, you know? If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s – ”
I raise my hand. “Please. Just stop.”
She shrugs and then picks up her coaster, starts twirling it around. And around. And around.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, noticing her foot is tapping on the floor as well.
“Hmmm?” She looks at me. She says it rather absently but it’s a little too absently.
“You’re acting like a nervous wreck.”
“Mommy,” Ava says in a lilting voice. “I drew you a bugosaur.”
She proudly displays her coloring book. She hasn’t even colored in the pictures that she’s supposed to, she’s just drawn green and brown blobs in all the white space. Blobs with legs. Bugosaurs, I guess.
“Thank you, sweetie,” I tell her and she goes back at it, tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth.
“Nicola,” Steph says uneasily.
I give her a look. “What is it?”
“Are you still in love with Bram?”
Where the hell did that come from? I can feel my face go white as I wonder if I was speaking all my thoughts out loud earlier. “What?” I can’t help but gasp. I look over at Ava and she’s watching me, frowning and pouting a little at the mere mention of his name.
“Do you love him?”
I blink at her. My heart thuds against my ribs, as if to remind me that it’s still beating.
“Oh, Steph,” I start to say, searching for words, for a way to deflect. “It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple,” she says, her eyes boring holes into mine. “It’s the simplest of questions. You either love him. Or you don’t. There are no maybes in love.”
Whoa. Steph is being deep. I don’t even know what that means. I don’t want to get deep. I don’t want to dive down there and pull out what remains of him from far inside me.
“I…”
She’s staring at me. Ava is staring at me.
And I can’t lie.
I sigh, slowly, softly. “Yes. I love him.”
Just saying those words makes my heart seem to exhale.
“Good,” Steph says, smiling smugly to herself.
“Good?” My eyes nearly bug out. “Why is that good? It’s bad. It’s terrible. I don’t want to love him. I want to be free of all that and move on.”
She wags her brows at me, that stupid smirk still on her face. “Love is good, my friend, love is good.”
“What is wrong with you?” I punch her lightly on the arm. “Why did you ask me that?”
She takes a long swig of her beer and says, “Do you know what the worst way to start a sentence is?”
“I farted!” Ava yells with a big smile. “That’s the worst way.”
Steph nods her approval at Ava and then looks back to me. “Do you know what the second worst way is?”
“What?”
“Please don’t hate me,” she answers and for a moment her smile fades and she flinches, as if I’m about to punch her in the face next. “And seriously, Nicola, please don’t hate me.”
She looks over at the door to the Lion and my eyes follow. There, outside in the sunshine, is the familiar silhouette of a man. He opens the door and steps inside.
I feel like I’m sinking and rising at the same time.
I feel like I definitely hate Stephanie right now.
It’s Bram and he’s walking toward us and I’m gripping the edge of the table so hard, I may actually break it in two.
She leans into me, whispers in my ear, “I’m sorry. He had to see you and I knew if I told you, you wouldn’t meet with him.” Then she quickly gets out of the booth, exchanges a quick look with Bram as she walks past him and out the door.
“Nicola,” Bram says, his throaty accent jarring me to the core. He stands in a sharp navy suit just a few feet away from the table, hands at his side. His face, that beautiful, handsome face, is the most serious I’ve ever seen on him.
“Bram?” Ava says softly and I look to her, her eyes wide with wonderment. “Bram?” she repeats louder.
“Hey, little one,” he says, grinning at her and she immediately stands up in her seat, flapping her arms up and down. It would be the cutest thing I have ever seen, if it weren’t for the circumstances. I may have just said that I was still in love with Bram, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see him. It didn’t mean that it would change the past. You can love someone and not do anything about it.
But Ava doesn’t care. She runs to the end of the booth and practically throws herself at him. He envelopes her into a big hug, picking her up off the ground and I’m torn between being angry and wanting to break down and cry. There are too many big things inside me, vying for me to make a choice, to pay them all attention and in the end I’m just a giant mess.
Bram carefully places her back on the ground but Ava keeps jumping around, going crazy. She’s smiling so big, her eyes are so wide, her breath so sharp and shallow.
Her breath shouldn’t be like that.
While Bram is now staring at me, I’m staring at Ava in concern, watching her carefully, trying to listen.
“Bram-a-lama…” she starts to sing but she stops and tries to take a deep breath. Her face is going white before my eyes and she rocks on her feet back and forth.
“Oh, shit,” I cry out, getting out of the booth just as she tips toward the ground. Bram is there, catching her in time and I fall down to my knees beside her as he holds her up.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
I grab her hand and squeeze it. It’s clammy. Her eyes are unfocused, glazed, and that familiar fruit odor permeates from her breath.
“Oh, fuck, no not now,” I say as she starts to lose consciousness right there in front of me. “Ava!” I yell at her and her eyes briefly flutter open before closing.
Bram gingerly lowers her to the ground while I crawl over her, tapping on her face. He brings out his phone. “I’m calling the ambulance.” I hear him place the call and I’m not about to argue over this one.
“I think it’s DKA. Diabetic shock.”
“That same thing she had before?” he asks, voice high.
I nod and then he relays the information to the agent. Ava’s been great lately, so good. The diet, the readings, everything has been working out well. But the last time she got like this was when Bram left and now that he’s here, the emotions are just too much.
“I think it can be brought on by stress and emotional upheaval,” I tell him without looking at him. I’m trying my hardest to keep her awake and keep myself calm. I’ve learned a lot. I can do this. I can get her through this.
But I can’t do it alone right now. I finally meet Bram’s eyes and see that he looks on the verge of breaking himself. “I need you to get my bag, the large purple one in the booth, and bring it here,” I tell him.
He nods and swiftly does as I ask. Now people are gathered around us and James is asking if I need anything and I don’t know what to say, I just know what to do. I inject her with the insulin, right into her stomach and she doesn’t even flinch.
“That will work, right?” he asks me.
“I hope so,” I tell him, not wanting to think about what would happen if it didn’t. The last time, she didn’t lose consciousness she didn’t have that fruit breath. Last time the shot brought her around but this time…this time I’m so afraid it won’t.
Thankfully it’s not long before the ambulance roars up to the doors, even though to me it felt like hours, and they get Ava on a stretcher and into the ambulance. The EMTs are asking me questions and I’m rattling off everything about her disease and our routine, like it’s textbook formula.
But when I try to make my way into the back of the ambulance, they tell me I can’t be there with her. It’s then that I break down, that I lose it. That I scream and I cry, while they tell me it’s their policy not to when the sirens are going.
Bram holds me back, his hands on both my arms, keeping me from lashing out at them in anger. I feel crazed and feral, the worry and panic and unfairness of it all ripping me at the seams. Finally, the ambulance pulls away and I feel like all my hope goes with it.
I lean into Bram and try to catch my breath, to gain back my control. I wish he wasn’t the one holding me and at the same time I’m glad he’s here.
The only person who really seemed to care about the both of us so much.
You were a charity case, a wicked voice says to me inside my head and I ignore it because what had happened between us has no bearing now, not while my baby girl is on the verge of dying. Nothing else matters anymore.
Bram puts me in his car and then we speed off after the ambulance and to the hospital, the same one as last time. With any luck, I’ll have the same doctor and that thought, this little bit of familiarity, brings me a tiny shred of calm.
This time there is no waiting in the emergency room. Bram and I are ushered down the hall toward the room Ava is in, and when a nurse asks if we are her parents, I feel myself nodding. Bram seemed ready to leave but the truth is too sticky to explain and at this moment I need someone like him here to hold my own hand when I need to be holding Ava’s.
It’s the same doctor as before but the news isn’t the same. He says her insulin levels are so off the charts that it’s becoming difficult to keep them where they need to be. His words dig deep and now I’m really afraid there won’t be a happy ending. There will be no out. It will be one of those ironic ones, the type in a film noir where the mother loses the daughter but gains a husband. But the loss she feels is one that can never, ever, ever be replaced.
The doctor wants privacy and has brought in someone else, so Bram and I wait out in the hall, stuck in uncomfortable chairs and I’m rocking in it back and forth, my brain wanting to latch onto the horrid impossible. I keep imagining what it would feel like if they came out with bad news and it’s akin to free-falling into Hell. It’s so brutal and unbearable that I get dizzy even thinking about it.
Bram rubs my back as I curl up into a ball and try to breathe and stay in the moment and stop panicking. It’s so damn hard. But his presence, his comfort, is relentless.
And all this time, he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t try to win me over – he doesn’t even tell me that everything’s going to be all right. Because he knows, as much as I do, that it’s not all right. She’s in there and it’s not all right and no amount of saying it is ever going to make it true.
All Bram does is be there. It’s simple.
He’s just there.
And it’s all I will need to get through.
I just hope that Ava, wherever she is in her head, her mind locked down by her betraying body, can feel him too.
***
“Nicola.” Bram’s voice breaks through the haze. “I got you a coffee.”
I open my eyes and see him holding out a chipped Styrofoam cup filled with inky brown liquid.
“It tastes like bloody petrol,” he says apologetically. “But it will help.”
I straighten up in my seat and gingerly take it from him, shooting him a quick smile of thanks. I look over at Ava who is lying in the hospital bed, IVs everywhere and eyes closed. She looks more angelic than ever.
“How is she?”
He sits down next to me with a tired sigh. “She hasn’t woken up. I think she had a funny dream because she was smiling at one point. The nurses say it’s best to let her sleep. Her little system has undergone so much.”
That it has. It was about 1am when the doctors were finally able to pull Ava out of her quasi-coma. She wasn’t entirely with it at the time, but she recognized me and Bram and thank God she was too doped up she couldn’t get emotional over him again.
After that, I pretty much stood vigil at her side, making up stories and telling them to her as she slept. Finally, I must have fallen asleep in the chair, utterly exhausted.
All the while, Bram was here, just like that first time, when I didn’t know him at all.
He was there for us then.
He’s there for us now.
But still, there’s just so much time, space and distance between us, all that messy past to hold us down, that I’m not really sure how to make things right again.
I just think that I want to.
“Bram,” I say softly.
He rubs his hand over his face and looks at me. His white dress shirt has the sleeves rolled up, a spot of coffee near the buttons. His hair is disheveled. His eyes are wide but red, his skin tired and grey. He looks like he hasn’t gotten any sleep at all and I know he hasn’t because of her.
And maybe me.
“Yeah,” he says.
I take in a breath for courage. “I know this probably isn’t the right time to be bringing this up but…I’m still mad at you.”
A small, sad smile flashes on his face. “I know. And you have every right to be mad with me for as long as you want to.”
“But I don’t want to,” I say and look at my hands because it’s easier. “Being mad takes so much out of me. It’s crippling…I don’t want to regret you. That’s not how I want to live, with regrets, even if it pains me.”
“I don’t want you to regret me either,” he says and he puts his hand on my arm. I can feel his eyes on me, searching my face, searching for answers that I may not know myself. “Sweetheart. I’m sorry. Unbelievably sorry. I know there is nothing I can say or do to make you believe it, but just hear me out. Just know that it’s true. I never meant to keep Taylor and Matthew from you, I wanted to tell you…I was just a coward and so bloody afraid that you’d leave me. No one wants to admit to someone that they were once a terrible person who did terrible things. I was afraid that if I showed that truth to you, it would scare you away for good. That you would forget about the person I became, the person I am.”
I nod, wondering what I would have done if he had told me on his own time. It’s impossible to know. I might have been okay with it. I might not have been. We might have been strong enough to handle it. Or maybe not.
I think back to what he had said when I told him I loved him. How everything happens in due time. But I think it’s more about the right time.
“Just please listen to me when I say that you were never ever a charity case, okay?”
Ugh. That part still burns.
“Please,” he repeats and I can feel his conviction. “Everything I did for you and Ava is because I wanted to. Because I liked you…a lot. Both of you. I just wanted to be with you. Maybe subconsciously I was trying to make amends for the things I’ve done or maybe it was the matter of properly helping someone when I finally had the means to do it. I just wanted to make you smile. That’s it. That’s really all there ever was. I wanted to make you smile because it seemed like such a hard thing to do. And if I could take care of you both, two girls who deserved it more than anyone I knew, then I would do that too.”
“You took very good care of us,” I tell him, sounding small.
“And I hope I made you smile.”
Of course I have to smile at that. “You did that too. Always.”
A fuzzy, warm kind of silence settles between us and I can’t stop comparing the then and the now and how so much has changed, and so little at the same time.
“Nicola,” he whispers and his voice melts my bones. I can’t help but meet his eyes and in them I see everything I’ve always wanted to see and not because I want to, because it’s there.
“I love you,” he says and at that moment I know it’s true.
Because I can feel it. Because my heart is trying to fly. And I want to let go. Because I know it’s going to boomerang right back to him.
“I am just simply in love with you,” he says, his fingers stroking my jawline, down to my chin. “And there’s not much more that I can say than that. I hope the words are enough because I know them here.” He puts his hand at his chest. “And I had to know that first.”
My eyes water just when I think I can’t possibly have any tears left. My heart swells and swells and swells, threatening to spill over, to drown me, to wash me away.
I welcome it. Because having a heart full of his love, and my love for him, is the best feeling in the world.
“I still love you,” I manage to tell him, my voice breaking. “I couldn’t stop even if I tried. And I tried. I kept wanting to forget you but you were always still in me, no matter what I did.” I swallow hard and he leans forward, kissing me as the tears slide down my cheeks.
I’d dreamed about these lips again and again. Even when I didn’t want to, even when it hurt more than it did me good. I’d dreamed about them.
Now, they were here, kissing me, shedding my skin, making me wild and free.
Making love to my soul.
Suddenly the bed creaks, stirring me out of Bram’s warm embrace and we break apart to see Ava staring at us in confusion. For a moment, I think she’s going to lose her mind again, though who knows which way this time.
But she just smiles, brighter than the sun that’s streaming in through her window.
“Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend now?” she asks, her voice a bit groggy but upbeat.
Bram squeezes my arm. “Would you like that?” he asks her.
She nods slowly. “Yes. Because you’ll take me to Disneyland again.”
I laugh and look at Bram. “Well, it looks like you owe this kid another trip.”
“I owe this kid another trip,” he jerks his thumb at himself. His smile turns wistful as he stares at me. “We’re going to be okay,” he says to me. “I promise. Me, you, her. We’ll be great.”
“Great,” Ava says softly.
I kiss Bram on the forehead and get up, walking over to Ava.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her, putting my hand over her impossibly small one.
“Tired,” she says. “Sleepy.”
“No pain? You know where you are?”
She nods once. “Hospital. Something went wrong with my special disease, didn’t it?”
I squeeze her hand. “It did. You got a bit excited when you saw Bram again. Sometimes if you get too excited, it becomes too much. But the doctors were able to help you, and from now on, I have to watch you a little closer, maybe try some new ouchies. But you’ll be okay.”
“I’ll be great,” she says sleepily. “Just like you and Bram.”
She closes her eyes and drifts off again.
Bram comes up behind me, putting his strong, supportive arm around my waist and the two of us watch Ava as she dreams.