“Hemorrhage (In My Hands)”—Fuel
THIS WAS NOT SUPPOSED to be my life. No one sits in their seat, cap and gown shining, at their high school graduation day and says, “I’m going to be a widow by the time I’m twenty-three.” Caressing my imperceptibly mounded abdomen with the hand holding my wad of tissues, I looked around once more, desperately seeking the gray eyes I prayed would be there for me. It shouldn’t be a surprise; after all, every call went to voice mail, every e-mail I sent went unanswered. The one person I thought would be my best friend until the day we died was conspicuously absent.
Not that there were many close family members there. Most of the attendees were the massive group of police officers, all in their dress uniforms to pay homage to one of their fallen brothers. Tyler didn’t have a big family; the force was his family. His mom sat next to me and reached over to grab my hand when the pastor’s voice cracked, speaking of Tyler as a little boy in the congregation of his church. Tears streamed down both of our cheeks, and her watery blue eyes sought mine. Trying to be strong for everyone was killing me, tearing apart my soul bit by bit.
My dad sat to my other side, my brother, Christian, next to him, stoic and proud. Too proud to shed a tear for the man who had been one of his best friends for the past fourteen years. However, the slight tremor of his hands gave him away, and I knew he was shattered by the loss of his childhood friend and brother in blue.
Christian, Tyler, and Kayde had all been about the same age. The boys were the three musketeers and had been the best of friends, but Kayde had been my best friend, ever since I “claimed him” as mine when I was three, almost four. They were a year ahead of me in school, but they tolerated me hanging out with them because Kayde felt sorry for me and always persuaded them to let me tag along.
Desperate to be part of their group and stay close to Kayde, I did my best to keep up with them, whether climbing trees, riding bikes, or just playing video games. Being younger and smaller, it was a struggle, and I ended up with more than my fair share of bumps and bruises. If I fell and scraped my knee, he was the one slapping disinfectant, antibiotic ointment, and a Band-Aid on it. At five years old, when he first moved in next door, he could do that. No one ever stopped to ask him how he knew what to do; we just took it for granted that he would fix us up. Often, I wondered why he didn’t join a branch where he could be a medic, but instead he joined the Marines.
He’d also been a phenomenal artist, even though he kept that kind of under wraps because he said “real men” didn’t color, paint, or draw. No matter how many times I told him that was stupid, he wouldn’t share his talent with anyone but me. God, the things in his sketch books should have been framed. I often wondered what ever happened to them.
For so long, they’d been like brothers to me, and I hadn’t seen them as anything else. Then something changed over the summer before my freshman year, and all my friends were always wanting to spend the night at my house. At first, I was irritated because they would come over and want to just sit in the living room and watch the guys play video games or throw the football in the backyard. Not understanding why they were acting that way, I got pissed and quit having anyone over. If they didn’t want to be with me, why did they want to come over so bad?
Shortly after that, I started to notice Kayde and Tyler were actually handsome, and I began to understand. Like they were hot, which kind of made things weird when we were all together. Kayde especially, because we were best friends and it was strange to have your heart speed up and your belly flutter when your best friend walked in the room. God, he was beautiful—still is—but he was always with a new girlfriend. It made me angry because he hardly ever had time for me.
Looking back on it, even when we were just four and six and he still went by his first name, Indigo, I always thought he was a pretty little boy. His dark hair was shaggy and hung over his smoky gray eyes. His smile so rare but stunning in its brilliance when he let it slip.
After Tyler moved in across the road from us, people said they could have been brothers. Except Tyler’s eyes were just a little more blue than gray and his hair was straight, where Kayde’s was slightly wavy and tended to curl at the ends if it got too long. They both had a single dimple, but on mirrored sides of their faces.
Anyway, during my senior year, the boys were all taking classes at the community college, and one night Tyler had lagged behind as they were leaving the house to head to their evening classes. I’ll never forget how uncomfortable he looked. He had tugged on his straight, dark hair and his eyes were everywhere but me. A flush had crept over his cheeks.
“Hey, Sera. Shit, this is… well, I mean….” Evident fascination with his feet as his shoe scuffed back and forth on the floor had his eyes averted from me. “Hell, I… I just wanted to know if maybe you wanted to… uhhh… go to the movies this weekend.” His gaze slowly lifted to look at me, and he appeared to hold his breath. Shock that he was actually asking me out had me momentarily speechless. A niggling sadness that Kayde hadn’t asked me first was shoved down quickly.
After I got over the surprise, a warmth flooded my chest. “Um, wow! Uh, okay, sure.” His smile was beautiful. Never in a million years would I have imagined I would date one of the three musketeers. Well, the two who weren’t my brother, that is. Most times, I just felt like they thought of me as one of the boys since we’d all been friends so long. I had no idea either of them would look at me as an actual girl.
Tyler and I had kept things on the down low for about two months because we weren’t sure how Christian was going to handle us dating. Also, I had a hard time building up the courage to tell Kayde. It made me feel more than a little guilty because we were sneaking around behind not just my brother’s but also Kayde’s back.
In fact, it especially upset me that I hadn’t told Kayde right away. Maybe because we had been best friends. Nearly everything I did, he had been a part of. Kayde had taught me to color in the lines. Taught me to ride a bike. For crying out loud, he had been the one to take me into Walgreens to get pads after my first period, because by then my mom had run off with a rodeo clown. No, I’m not making that up. She did. But that’s another story I’ll get into later. Anyway, Kayde was always there for me, so to make the decision to date Tyler without talking to him first felt like I was betraying him as well as their friendship.
The day I finally told him was confusing and incredibly awkward. The look on his face… God. First, he was astonished, and possibly a little angry, but that quickly morphed into pain. He said it was because I had hid it from him for so long, but it seemed like more than that.
After the day we talked, he seemed okay with it, but things changed. Not in a way that would have been noticeable to an outsider, but I think we all felt it. Just no one said anything. Christian was surprisingly cool about it, but he honestly surprised me when he said he always thought it would be Kayde. That added to my guilt and discomfort, wondering if Kayde had felt that way too. Had I messed up? Ruined my friendship with him because I was so excited to have beautiful Tyler interested in me?
He’d never said anything to me though. Instead, it seemed he was always dating a new girl and had begun spending more time with them than me. It hurt, and I didn’t want to examine why. Seeing those girls hanging on his arm any time we all went somewhere together used to piss me off something fierce. I hated each and every one of them and their long hair, full lips, big boobs, and too much makeup.
Then time went on, and Tyler and I were just a “thing.” It was comfortable and sweet. Back then, we really thought we were in love.
On the day of my high school graduation, as everyone was standing around taking pictures, chatting and congratulating, Tyler got down on bended knee and asked me to be his wife. Kayde had looked shocked, and no one but me noticed when he turned heel and walked off. Tyler’s gray-blue eyes had lit up when I said, “Yes.” Yeah, maybe we were young and foolish, but we had been “dating” for nearly a year and it felt so real. I say “dating” because the four of us had been hanging out since the boys were about ten or eleven and Tyler had moved in across the street with his mom. But for that past nine to ten months, we had been a couple.
It took me a while to find Kayde that night. He wasn’t answering his phone. When I finally found him in the backyard fort that he, Tyler, and Christian had built when they were about twelve, he was just sitting there staring out into the night sky. Trying not to hit my head on the low ceiling, I had crawled over to sit next to him. His arm had wrapped around me, and he kissed the top of my head. Warmth had spread through my body, and I had felt like I was home.
We had talked about my graduation, and then about Tyler’s proposal. He had been happy for me on the surface, but I could tell he wasn’t really thrilled with it. He tried to talk me into waiting, telling me Tyler and I should wait, that we were young, that I was going away to college and long-distance relationships were hard, but he was right about one thing. I was young, and I knew everything—meaning I thought I knew everything.
Then, the week after my graduation, he became scarce. We found out he had been talking to a recruiter. Hell, I had begged him not to go. People were dying every single day, and the odds of him being deployed and becoming one of those statistics was too great. Pleading with him did absolutely no good. He had held me, and I felt his breath hitch as he told me he’d be fine and this was something he had to do. Despite my tears, a week later, he left for the Marine Corps.
Just like that, I had lost my best friend.
Christian was pissed at him for joining the Marine Corps, because they were supposed to join the police academy together. They had all been taking college courses in preparation for the academy. It had been their plan since we were all little, playing cops and robbers in the backyard.
Tyler and Christian were devastated. Me? My heart was crushed. He was the one person I could tell everything to, and he had left me.
On our wedding day, it was just a small group of us. But Kayde was absent then too. He had told Tyler he couldn’t get leave approved. He sent a card simply signed with his name and a gift card. It wounded me because I had really wanted him to share that day with me.
I’d only had random e-mails and phone calls from him since then. Christian wouldn’t talk to him when he called. Conversations with Tyler had been stilted, and I knew it hurt him something fierce. We’d often sat talking about it after he would hang up from the call. Tyler said he felt like he did something wrong and could never figure out what to do to fix it.
My heart ached whenever I’d spoken to Kayde. I missed him so much it hurt, but if my relationship with Tyler hadn’t caused a noticeable change, the Marines had changed him for sure. It was impossible to miss on the few occasions he came home over the last few years. He was harder, he laughed less, and his eyes seemed duller, dimmer… subdued. Something told me the military had been hard on him.
My mind had wandered longer than I thought. The pastor was just finishing his speech, and he asked me if I was ready to speak. Though I’d written down what I wanted to say and I had tried to memorize it, my mind was blanking as I prepared to stand. The gaping wound in my chest nearly brought me to my knees as I stepped up and moved toward the small podium set up by the casket holding my husband. A casket that I had avoided looking inside because that wasn’t my husband. The man whose smile had once lit up a room. My friend. My confidant. The father to my unborn child.
That last thought was my undoing, and the coffin I had avoided became my crutch. Leaning heavily on the edge, I looked upon the face of the man I thought would be there for our child even if he wasn’t going to be with me. Guilt ripped and tore at me like talons. No one knew we were on the verge of filing for divorce. Not because we couldn’t get along, but because we had finally realized our relationship was mostly a friendship, that the exciting spark of youthful infatuation was gone—was maybe never more than that—and we both agreed life was too short to stay together just because we were “comfortable.”
Staying together as long as we had had been dumb. But we’d done so because each of us felt like the other was the one in love and worried about how bad we would hurt them. When I finally gathered up the courage to talk to him, he’d been so relieved. We both wanted to find that ever-lasting romance. The one that set us on fire. The one that made our hearts race. The only reason we were still together when he died was because we found out I was pregnant, and in Texas you can’t divorce during a pregnancy. The plan was to continue to live together, just to share finances until after the baby was born.
Then, on a routine traffic stop, Tyler was shot by a tweaking meth-head, leaving me with this wax figure look-alike in the coffin in front of me. There was no way this was my Tyler. Tears rolled from my eyes and dropped on his neck, where the wound was nearly invisible, as I leaned over him. My whispered words were broken and coarse through my tears.
“Why? Why did you leave us, Tyler? This isn’t fair. You were supposed to go on to find the one. We agreed. We had a plan, dammit.” A deep hiccupped breath helped me compose myself enough to continue walking to give my speech.
Looking out at the sea of faces, I had a hard time focusing on any single one; they all just blended together. The words on my paper were blurry, and my hand shook. Tears spilled over and down my cheeks, momentarily clearing my vision. Blinking rapidly only cleared it briefly. Giving up, my hand holding the shaking paper dropped to my side. In despair, I swallowed the lump in my throat, trying to find the words—any words.
Jesus, how am I going to get through this?
“I had a speech written, but eloquent words won’t change the fact that a great man is gone. I don’t need to extol his amazing qualities because you already know. I still needed him, but evidently he was needed somewhere else. I love you, Tyler, and I’m going to miss you.” My eyes raised and zeroed in on a pair of stormy-gray, pain-ravaged eyes in the very back of the large church. As my knees buckled, sobs were wrenched from my spine through my chest.
No one caught me. This wasn’t the movies. God, I wished the whole thing was just a bad dream or a bad movie. My knees hit the ground with a painful jolt, just as my brother and father reached me. Desperation had me searching over their shoulders for the person I thought was Kayde, but he was gone. Now my mind was playing tricks on me, and that made it worse.
Kayde, wherever you are, I need you! My mind screamed for him, but all I was met with was silence.