The chair screeched behind him, and I could hear the thumping sounds of him jumping over the table as he chased me. I got to the hallway before his body hit my back, and my chest and head slammed into the wall with a cry. He spun me around by my arm and gripped both my biceps in his big hands while he shook me.
“Fuckin’ explain, Brenna! You fuckin’ explain that shit right now!”
I didn’t notice I was crying until I felt my nose start running into my mouth. I was gasping in pain and terror as he shook me, and it took me a minute to realize he wasn’t going to stop until I started talking. I could feel the skin around my cheekbone tightening as it swelled where it hit the wall, and every breath I took came out in a shuddering gasp.
“He died.”
“Who died?” He jerked me again, still screaming.
“MY SON! MY SON DIED!” I screamed back in his face, my fear becoming overshadowed by anger at this man.
How dare he bring this up to me? How dare he make me relive the absolute worst moment of my entire life? How dare he think that he has any right to my memories, to my anguish?
He dropped my arms as if burned and searched my face with bewildered eyes. I didn’t know what expression was showing on my face, but his face had gone pale at my scream.
“They were early.” It was almost as simple and as heartbreaking as that. “That happens with twins…a lot. They didn’t have a lot of room in there, and I didn’t have the easiest pregnancy anyway. I was constantly fucking sick! I threw up every single day until I gave birth, and some days afterward.” I shook my head, looking at the floor and trying to find the words I needed.
I didn’t know how to talk about this. How do you describe the loss of a child? You don’t. There was no explanation; there was no answer.
“His lungs hadn’t developed. He wasn’t ready,” I sobbed. “Trix wasn’t either, but she was bigger. Stronger. He was here for a week, and then he was gone. I was in so much fucking pain. I barely got the chance to hold him. I never even got the chance to breastfeed him.”
By that time, I was screeching, and my throat was getting raw. My hands were in my hair as I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet. I was so caught up in my own misery that I hadn’t seen Dragon’s. There wasn’t room for his. My own pain made me want to curl up on the floor in the hallway. I wanted to smash things and hit someone and tear my hair out. When I brought Trix home from the hospital, I’d pushed anything I couldn’t deal with to the back of my mind. I had no help, no one to lean on, no time or space to grieve. It was the first time I’d felt the full magnitude of my loss since I’d held him for the last time in the hospital, and I’d wondered vaguely if that was what it felt like to lose your mind.
Dragon braced himself with one arm against the wall, his body hunched the way it had been when he came home beaten to a pulp. “Are you telling me that our son lay dying in a hospital for an entire week, and you didn’t try to contact me?”
“Yes.” My answer was almost defiant.
I hadn’t called him; I’d done it on my own.
At my calm answer, he swung the arm hanging at his side in a wide arc and slammed the back of it against my swollen cheekbone, knocking me to the floor.
“You fucking cunt!” he screamed, looking down at me as I curled in on myself, wrapping my arms around my head as I sobbed. “You fucking, fucking, fucking cunt.”
At the change in his voice, I looked up through my arms and saw the tears rolling down his face, unchecked. I wanted to wrap my arms around him. I wanted to make this better. I wanted to console him and let him console me and do this together. But I couldn’t. He didn’t want me to touch him. It was all such a fucking mess, a boiling pot of emotion. I hated him, and I loved him at the same time, but mostly, I just wanted to be able to take away the agony I saw on his face.
I lay there on the floor as I watched him grab his cut off the back of the couch and slip it on. He hurriedly grabbed his keys, slipped on his boots, and walked around the living room.
Before he reached the door, he turned back toward me. “What was his name?”
“I didn’t know your real name,” I whispered back, my voice raw and thick with tears.
He just stood there by the front door, staring at me, waiting for my answer.
“His name was Draco,” I finally answered.
Then, I watched him turn and punch the wall twice, putting huge holes in the drywall, before he left and slammed the door behind him.
I crawled on my hands and knees into the bedroom, sobbing and shaking, until I made it to the edge of the bed. I didn’t have the energy to climb up, so I just pulled the comforter toward me, dragging it down to wrap around myself, as I lay, crying on the floor.
Eventually, I stopped crying and just lay there, staring at the baseboards in the hallway, my mind finally going blank when I couldn’t take any more.
That was where Casper found me hours later.
I didn’t sleep. I just laid there, the last five years playing and replaying in my mind. What I hadn’t told Dragon was the agony of falling down the slick carpeted stairs in Tony’s parents’ house. I hadn’t told him how I’d crawled to the phone and called an ambulance myself. That I’d laid on the floor until they got to me and how they had broken down the front door to get to me because, at that point, I was in too much pain to get to the door to let them in. I didn’t tell him about the guilt I had about walking on carpeted stairs in nothing but my socks. If I would have just put on shoes, I wouldn’t have slipped, and our child wouldn’t have been born too early to survive.