Chapter Twelve

Gwendolyn

"I am so glad that you are bringing new life into this world and I'm so sorry that I'm not going to be there to celebrate your shower with you... but I don't want to." I looked over at The Reverend. "What do you think? Would that work?"

He looked at me and I swore he narrowed his little eyes. I sighed.

"I know. I have to go. Tell them congratulations and show them how happy I am for them and all that crap. She could at least have the common decency to be pregnant when my personal life isn't a big old failure."

Feeling like, if nothing else, I was nailing the self-pity angle, I dragged myself into the kitchen to start making yet another trifle. I was feeling pretty determined that once the last mouthful of cake, fruit, and cream was eaten, I was going to accidentally shatter the dish so that I didn't have to make another one of these.

The dish.

Damn it.

I suddenly remembered that when I brought the trifle to Garrett at the firehouse, I was too distracted to remember to bring it home with me. That meant that the only dish that I had in my kitchen that was capable of containing the dessert, that I had been assigned to bring to what promised to be the most annoying baby shower ever thrown, was still at the station. Maybe that can be my excuse to not go to the party. I really shouldn't be around those happy, excited women anyway. I wasn't exactly the best guest right now. If I wasn't me, I probably wouldn't like me much and wouldn't want me at my party anyway.

Hell, I was me and I didn't much want me anywhere near myself.

The truth was I had been pretty miserable company for the last several weeks. Work had gotten into a steady groove and things were going much more smoothly, even with Jason Baxter. But even though that was exactly what I had said that I wanted, I wasn't happy. I couldn't stop thinking about Garrett and as much as I hated myself for admitting it, I missed him. That didn't change what I had seen in him, though, and the type of person I now knew that he was. A beautiful body, mind-melting kisses, and fingertips that seemed capable of creating magic just weren't enough to make me overlook the sick feeling in my stomach that I had gotten when he faced me in the classroom and I saw the fury in his eyes.

Now, I would get to see those eyes again when I went to get my stupid trifle dish. I looked around the kitchen, opening, and closing cabinets, hoping upon hope that the magical kitchen fairy had left me another dish or gadget that I could use that would stop me from having to see him.

No such luck.

I was reaching for my jacket, ready to drive over to the station to get my dish, when I stopped. I looked at The Reverend.

"Why should I have to go to him?" I asked. "I've gone to him every other time. He should have to come to me for once."

I picked up my phone and sent him a text message telling him that I needed my dish and giving him my address. I tried my best to maintain the perfect balance between terse and civil, not wanting to come across like I was concocting a layered fruit dessert booty call, but also not wanting to incite him to leave a bag full of glass shards on my porch either. My phone buzzed a few seconds later to tell me that he had responded.

"K."

That was it. Not even an entire word. Just a single freaking letter.

I went to work baking the sponge cake and making the fruit compote that would go into the layers, and twenty minutes later I heard my doorbell ring. I brushed flour from my hands on to the dish towel that I always kept tucked in my apron pocket. He might have been able to warp my brain enough that I had forgotten my dish, but I sure as hell wasn't going to answer the door all streaked with flour and looking like a complete mess. I opened the door and felt my breath catch in my throat when I saw him. I hoped that he wasn't able to see my reaction on my face. I expected him to hold the dish out to me and continue on his way, but instead, he looked at me expectantly.

"Aren't you going to ask me to come inside?" he asked.

"Seriously?" I asked. He continued to stare at me and I made an exasperated sound before stepping out of the way and gesturing for him to come inside. "Of course, come on in."

He stepped in and I noticed that he was holding the trifle dish by his side. It was still full of the remnants of the last trifle that had now mummified against the glass. I took it from him and glared.

"Oh," he said. "Yeah. Sorry about that. The guys at the station are not really the best about washing the dishes."

"So, what do you do? Just eat everything take-out off of paper plates?"

"Sometimes," he admitted. "Other times one of the wives will bring food in, and then that firefighter just brings the dishes back home and lets her take care of them. Since there wasn't a wife to bring this home too, apparently it just got shoved into the back of the refrigerator. That's where I found it."

I resisted the urge to shudder. I could count at least five things wrong with what he just said, but now wasn't the time for me to start arguing about that too. There was enough tension between us already without bringing social justice and laziness into the conversation.

"Well, thanks for this," I said.

I started for the kitchen and he started to follow me. He had only taken a few steps when I heard a high pitch snarling, a fierce hiss, and the shouted profanity that I'm sure my aging neighbors absolutely loved. I whipped around and saw The Reverend clinging to Garrett's thigh, his claws firmly implanted. Garrett was spinning around and rocking back and forth, his hands up above his head as if he was doing everything he could not to grab the cat and throw it. As for me, I was doing everything I could not to just stand there and laugh.

"Holy Frijole!"

Garrett’s eyes snapped up to me.

"That's it?" He shouted. "That's your entire reaction? Your cat is trying to gore me alive and you throw an antiquated and vaguely culturally insensitive exclamation at me?"

I stomped over to him and grabbed The Reverend. It took a few tugs, but finally, he retracted his claws and let me pull him into my arms.

"It wasn't an exclamation," I said. "It's his name."

Garrett was examining his leg and he looked up at me quizzically.

"What?"

"His name," I said. I held the cat out to him. "The Reverend Holy Frijole."

"The Reverend Holy Frijole," Garrett repeated.

"Yes."

"Well, he isn't very welcoming for a cat of the cloth."

"Maybe he's just a good judge of character."

Garrett looked at his thigh again.

"I'm fucking bleeding."

I looked and saw that there were several pinpricks of blood spreading through his jeans. I suddenly felt a little guilty.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You want me to get you a Band-Aid?"

"I don't need a Band-Aid,” he said. “I just came in here to say…"

"To say what?" I asked.

The Reverend hissed again, and Garrett rolled his eyes.

"You know what? Never mind!"

He stomped back out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

Feeling even lower than I already had, I went to the kitchen and put the trifle dish in the sink. I filled it with dish liquid and hot water to try to soften the petrified trifle stuck to the sides and fought the tears that were forming in my eyes.

These men can take out burning buildings, but they can't manage to get raspberry off of glass.

Spending time with other women celebrating the joyful events of life can be a wonderful way to ease negative feelings and soothe an aching heart.

Guessing how much tissue paper you would need to shove up your shirt and create a fake baby belly that would rival that of the mother-to-be while eating tiny pastel foods, and trying to force yet another giggle at the thousandth time that someone made a baby joke, or guessed the gender was not one of those ways.

I got through the series of ridiculous games. I ate my weight in Petit fours and coordinating buttermints. I watched as Sandra opened a seemingly endless stream of gifts. I even made a half-hearted guess that she would be having a girl sometime in the next two months. Finally, I felt like I had made it through a respectable amount of the celebration and I bowed out. I felt exhausted as I drove home, and I was relieved to see my mother's car sitting in front of the house. I didn't know how she managed it, but she always seemed to know when I was at my lowest point and needed her, yet she also knew when I needed my space and to be left alone. Now was one of those moments when I was indescribably grateful that she not only knew me that well, but that she had a key to my house on her keychain.

I walked into the house and found her sitting on the couch with The Reverend curled up in her lap, purring shamelessly.

"Now you're nice," I said.

"Father Beans is always nice," Mom said, leaning down to kiss him on the top of the head.

"There's a certain firefighter who might argue that," I said.

I dropped down onto the couch beside her and saw her eyes light up.

"A firefighter?" she asked. "What firefighter has been in your house?"

I realized what I had said and groaned, putting my face in my hands. I hadn't intended on going into all of the details with her about it. Now, though, she was looking at me with the hopeful expression I had seen before and always managed to ruin.

"He was here to bring my trifle dish back to me," I said. "That's it."

"Oh," she said. "I hoped that…"

Her voice trailed off, but I knew what she hoped. It was the same thing that she always hoped. It was what she had been hoping since the day that I had called her from the hospital and tried through my sobs to explain what was happening with Michael. The words 'psychotic break' were reverberating in my mind and I was struggling just to make sense of everything that I was experiencing. The doctors were trying to tell us what had happened and what to expect, and I was trying with everything in me to support Andrew, to hold him up and be strong for him. But I was too young. I was too young for this to be on me and to be taking the pressure onto me. Every time that I saw Michael during those days that we spent in the hospital, I wasn't sure who I was seeing. He seemed like a completely different person, but I could see glimmers of the man I knew he was. I could still see beyond the devastating impact of whatever had shattered him and of the medications that the doctors kept pumping through him. There were moments when he seemed lucid when he would look at me as if he completely recognized me and knew what was going on. In those moments he would communicate with me at an almost feverish pace as if he was trying to tell me everything that he possibly could before he faded away again. He knew, in some way, what was happening to him. It was as though he was locked inside himself. There was one moment, three days into that hellish stay, when he looked at me, grasped the front of the sweatsuit that he perpetually wore, and told me that he knew that blue was his color.

The doctor who was standing in the room with us looked at Andrew with an almost pitying expression on his face.

"See? He isn't making sense. He doesn't know what he's saying."

But he did know what he was saying. I knew exactly what he meant. It was something that I had said to him countless times during our relationship. Any time he was picking out clothes. Any time he couldn't decide what to wear when we were going out, or to a dance at school. Anytime that he got dressed up for me, I would tell him that. He was trying to tell me in a way that I would understand that he was still there, he was still in there. I clung to that moment with near desperation. I held it close to me, letting it convince me that it would all be OK, that he would get better, that he would come back. We were only able to stay with him for a few days before we needed to come back home and return to our lives. A few weeks later he was finally discharged and came home. I hoped that in the familiar environment surrounded by his family and with me by his side, Michael would come out of it. That day never came. Instead, six months after his discharge the police found him under an overpass, a weapon in his hand.

He was gone. He would never recover from that. Never again would I see a lucid moment or a glimmer of who he had been. While his body kept going, who he was, the person who I loved so much, was no longer there. He had dissolved away under the illness and it seemed that no one around me could really, truly understand what that put me through. It was in many ways worse than a death. He was still there, breathing, his heart beating, and his body walking through each day. But he would never again be the person I fell in love with or who I had built my future around. What had happened within his mind had not just taken Michael away from us, it had taken everything that I saw for my life. I had been standing on the very brink of all that I had wanted unfolding in front of me, and giving me a future I was so excited to explore. Then suddenly all of that disappeared and I was standing on the edge of emptiness.

That had paved the way for a series of disastrous relationships after him. Each one with a man who seemed stronger and more powerful, but only proved to be controlling, cold, unfeeling, and even cruel. My mother had watched me go through each of those relationships, trying to support me and help me to see what I was going through, what I was putting myself through. I couldn't imagine how painful it was for her to watch her only child so lost. I admired her strength and courage. Each of those relationships had only built on the one before, eventually leading me into a rushed marriage to the first man who I thought showed me tenderness and compassion. Within a matter of weeks of our wedding day, I learned that he was the worst of them all. I hadn't stayed. I hadn't lost myself completely and what strength and courage I didn't have, my parents had for me. They saved me. They ensured that I got through that and that I still had a life ahead of me. But though neither of them would ever say it, I knew that deep inside of them they were disappointed. They had hoped as much as I had that my marriage would be the fairy tale that I had been hoping for and that it would whisk me away into a life of happiness and fulfillment. Now I was two years beyond my divorce, and there were times when I loved the life that I had made for myself, even if it was just me and The Reverend, but there were other times when it seemed that I was no closer to happiness and fulfillment than I had been that day when I signed those papers that gave me back my life.

I was so young and yet in my years, I had managed to live more life than many women twice my age.

My mother gently lifted The Reverend out of her lap and put him aside so that I could lay down and put my head where he had been. She gently ran her hand through my hair and we remained in silence for several long minutes.

"Do you remember when your father went zip-lining?" she finally asked.

I nodded.

"Of course, I do. I was terrified that something was going to happen to him."

"But it didn't,” she said. “But he never would have known that if he had let everyone around him control his thoughts and had listened to the voice inside him that said there was always a chance he could be hurt. He would have just stopped and stood there and looked at the zip-line and wondered what was on the other side. Instead, he found out."