Page 161 of Only After We Met

“I can’t do that!”

“Rhys, I’ve got shampoo all in my hair. Just do it. You bend over, take him out of the carriage, and sit on the couch. It’s easy. He’ll stop crying, I promise.”

I ground my teeth as I walked off. He was still crying downstairs, his eyes humid. He was a sly little boy. I could tell he was trying to arouse my sympathy. I picked him up and held him to my chest. I was scared of everything: him falling, me holding him too tight, just everything. I walked him close to the window, and he was hypnotized as he looked at the pool as the sun glimmered on the surface of the water. When he got tired of it, I sat on the sofa with him in my lap, and he stretched out, relaxed.

He grabbed the pacifier hanging around his neck and put it in his mouth himself. I smiled. We stared at each other a while. And in that instant, there alone, observing each other in silence, him sucking on his pacifier, me cradling him, I remembered the message I’d written Ginger a year ago. She’d probably just read it that verysame day. I told her in it that I sometimes wished the baby she was expecting was mine. That I wished everything had been different, as if it was a parallel reality. Later I thought I’d lost my mind in that moment, but if I had…then I was losing it again.

I reached out with my free hand and rubbed his cheek. He didn’t react—he went on staring at me as before. I wondered what it would be like to live like that, blindly trusting in any stranger who just came along and picked you up, so relaxed I could fall asleep without fear or terror, without a head full of doubt, without all those threads getting twisted up and complicating things as I grew.

“You all right?” Ginger asked.

I stopped rubbing his cheek and looked away. She approached uncertainly but smiled when she saw Leon had fallen asleep. She sat beside me on the sofa. The two of us here, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, almost like a routine. I expelled a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding in.

“Yeah, he calmed right down.”

“I told you. All he wants is to be held. I’ve spoiled him.” She reached over. “You want to hand him off to me? He won’t even notice.”

“No, he’s fine.”

I relaxed, leaning back into the sofa. Ginger did too, pulling her legs up beneath her and resting her head on my shoulder. I don’t know how long the three of us stayed like that. Just breathing. In silence. Without saying a word. But it was perfect. It was what I needed to start to process everything, to comprehend what I’d done the other night, all that I could have lost, how Ginger and her life had changed… We were no longer the people we’dbeen. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t worse; it was just different. A newness within that familiar feeling that surrounded me when she was near.

104

Ginger

We made dinner not long after putting Leon down in the guest bedroom, pushing the bed against the wall. It was a simple meal: spaghetti with sauce from a jar. When I kept bugging him, Rhys finally admitted with a laugh that he’d barely even used his kitchen.

“All this is just…” I looked around.

“What?” he asked, sitting down.

“It’s just not you. I don’t like it.”

“Yeah.” He sighed and twirled his noodles around his fork.

We didn’t talk about anything that mattered during dinner. I just told him stuff about Leon: that he’d be starting day care soon; that he’d already taken his first steps (with a bit of help), but that he still preferred crawling and dragging himself around; that he was in love with Donna and a stuffed elephant he always slept with… Rhys smiled, eyes glistening, as he listened and asked questions.

I don’t know which of us said we should go out to the yard after dinner. We lay on the damp grass by the pool under a tree with twisted branches, a mimosa, maybe. Rhys had his arms folded behind his head and was staring into the dark sky while our barefeet touched.

Crickets could be heard in the background. I realized that, for the first time since we saw each other at the hospital, silence wasn’t enough.

“What happened to you, Rhys?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Continuing despite my fears, I asked, “Did you want to end it all?”

“No. Jesus, Ginger, no.”

He turned to me. His eyes were bright, nervous, staring straight into mine. He looked surprised by my question, but I hadn’t been able to suppress it after reading all those messages in one go and seeing him so lost, like a little boy.

Because that’s what he was. In some way, Rhys still had a child’s soul. Despite the darkness in him. Despite the way he glowed. Despite how together he seemed to the people who didn’t know him. A Peter Pan in Never Never Land. A Little Prince on his asteroid. I could see what was missing in him, his weaknesses, his fear of confronting his father.

“Things just got out of hand. I wasn’t thinking that night. I hadn’t been thinking for a long time. I was up against the limit.”

“Why’d it happen, Rhys?”

“I don’t know…”