Jacey stares at me, her eyes still horror filled, but now there’s something else too. Curiosity. A need to know. A need to understand. And beneath all that, a hope that I’m wrong—that I’m not to blame.
But I am.
“I can’t imagine how it was your fault,” she answers slowly. “Suicide is a personal choice. You couldn’t have made her do such a thing. But if you think that’s true, then we need to talk about it, because it has definitely affected you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut hard, trying to blink away the red, then take another breath.
“Emma cheated on me with Cris. She told me about it and she cried. She was so sorry. Apparently, they got drunk one night when I was out with other friends. One thing led to another, and they had sex. She was sorry and I was devastated.”
Jacey freezes now, her eyes glued to mine. “That’s why you hate Cris now.”
I nod silently.
Jacey stares at me a second, then speaks hesitantly. “Okay. I can see where you would be pissed at him. But to this degree? You were kids, Dom. I mean, you were teenagers. Even adults make that mistake.”
“I know.” I sigh. “But Emma got pregnant, Jacey. And since we always used condoms, we had a pretty good idea that the baby was Cris’s.”
I look away. “I remember standing over a pile of pregnancy tests in Emma’s bathroom, all of them showing a fuzzy pink plus sign. If I could go back in time to any one moment, it would be to that one. I would handle everything differently.”
I wouldn’t have annihilated her.
Jacey sucks in her breath, her hands twisted in her lap. “Jesus. I don’t know what to say, Dom. What happened?”
I failed her.
“I was so pissed at her,” I admit. “I screamed and she cried, but at the end of the day, it boiled down to one thing. I loved her. More than anything. More than a pregnancy, more than her cheating on me.”
“So you stayed with her?” Jacey asks hesitantly. I can see that that notion doesn’t match the idea of me that lives in her head. That’s because that version of me died with Emma.
“She swore to me that it was a one-time thing, an accident. That she’d been lonely because I’d been away so much, visiting colleges. I’d pulled away from her a little and Cris moved in. He took up my slack and hung out with her all the time. I should’ve seen what he was doing, but I didn’t. He was my best friend and I was blind.”
“So you think it was your fault that Emma cheated on you?” Jacey asks doubtfully.
I ignore that and take a gulp of water. “Because I could see that it was true, that Cris had swooped in on her and I’d been neglecting her, I forgave her. He took advantage of her. And they were drunk. But I demanded one thing from her in exchange for my forgiveness.”
I pause, staring out the window again as I remember the way Emma’s head had dropped when I told her. How I’d stood over her and how I didn’t feel sorry about what I was asking. I didn’t care that it devastated her. I didn’t care about anything but myself and my own pain.
I hadn’t even begun to know pain yet. I just didn’t know it at the time.
I don’t want to say the ugly words to Jacey. I don’t want her to know. But she prompts me.
“What did you demand?” she asks quietly, but there’s a certain knowingness to her tone, an aching fragile timbre. She knows.
“An abortion. I demanded that she have an abortion. I wasn’t man enough to raise his baby. I forgave her, but I couldn’t do that.”
Jacey’s quiet now, still. She watches me, waiting for me to continue. I don’t want to, but I know I have to. The bullet is out of the gun now. There’s no putting it back.
“We were just eighteen,” I say quietly, staring at the wall. “We were getting ready to go away to college together. We were going to have a new start, away from Cris. I made my forgiveness contingent on that one thing. She had to get an abortion. If she wouldn’t, then I was done. I made that very clear.”
Emma’s face is in my head, innocent and young, as she pleads with me.
Dominic, I can’t, she’d cried. My parents would kill me. And it’s wrong, Dom. It’s wrong.
“I pressured her hard,” I finally continue, even though those words are a gross understatement. “Every day. Every hour. She cried and I raged and I refused to give in. I didn’t care that her family was strict Catholic. I didn’t care that she thought her soul was in jeopardy and that her parents would never forgive her. In my head, I thought of the baby as an it, as Cris’s mistake. I didn’t think of it as an actual human life. I was too blinded by my anger and my hurt and my hate to care about anything but myself.”
I pause and stare at Jacey. “Do you see how selfish I was?”
Jacey is deathly pale as she stares at me, as a million thoughts flash through her eyes. “Anyone would’ve been upset, Dominic,” she finally answers hesitantly. I can see that she doesn’t know what to say. I can’t fault her for that… because who would?
I turn away, staring into the dark, trying to focus on the night instead of the memories in my head.
“I took her to get the abortion. It was a quiet ride. They wouldn’t let me go back with her, so she had to do it alone. On the way home, she huddled into the car door and cried. She wouldn’t talk to me for days. But she talked to Cris. Because a few days later, on our graduation day, I went over to her house and got there just as he was leaving. I lost my shit. I told her that I never wanted to see her again, that if she wanted Cris she could have him. So after making her have an abortion for me, I left her anyway.”
Jacey utters a weird noise, a guttural sound that I’ve never heard pass her lips before. Her knuckles graze her teeth as she presses her fist to her mouth.
“Emma skipped the graduation parties. She didn’t come and I didn’t care. I went to a party with Sin and Duncan that night, determined to get drunk and forget all about her. So that’s what I did. I was getting a lap dance from Taylor McKay when Emma called me. It was late and she was babbling and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what she was saying… except that she’d cut her wrists. And that she needed me.”
“Did you go?” Jacey whispers, and I can see from her face she’s afraid of the answer.
“Of course I went. But it was too late to save her.”
Jacey shakes her head in disbelief now, like she’s expecting that I’m just spinning a tale, acting out a scene. “Dom… I…”
She doesn’t have the words. Because the answer is clear. I’m a horrible person. A monster.
I nod curtly, once, determined to keep my composure.
“Emma was a light. Everyone who met her knew that. She was too good for me. And I failed her. She trusted the wrong person, because I turned away when she needed me the most. I abandoned her. The worst part is that she loved me anyway.”
And she did. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw me come in. It was like everything was right in the world, even though she was dying in a sea of her own blood.
“What happened when you got there?” Jacey whispers.
I’m wooden now as I force the words from my lips. I stare back out the window, away from Jacey’s horror, as I see the memories in my head.
“The bed was covered in blood, and Emma was pale and shaking and cold. She’d sliced her arms from wrist to elbow, and I knew that it wasn’t a cry for help. She wanted to die. She didn’t want to be saved. She was surrounded by poems that she had written, all about death. I don’t know how I didn’t see that I’d broken her so completely.”
I pause, trying to untangle my tongue, trying to swallow the emotion that lingers there, trying to swallow the memories so that I can act calm. I’m a fucking actor, for Christ’s sake. I can act calm.
I somehow manage it, because my words come out in a wooden monotone. “There was so much blood. There were bloody footprints everywhere. I’ve never seen so much blood. She grabbed my shirt and clung to me and her hands were so cold. Her lips were so blue.”
She was so pale.
The blood.
The blood.
The blood.
I pause. “There was so much blood. We had towels wrapped around her arms, but they soaked through within minutes. The EMTs came in and she acted like they weren’t even there. She just kept apologizing to me. Telling me how sorry she was for killing our baby… a baby I’d never wanted in the first place. I begged her to hold on until they got her to the hospital, I begged her to try. But she didn’t even make it to the ambulance. I begged, but she died anyway.”
The room is quiet now, utterly silent but for the soft sounds of Jacey’s breathing. I close my eyes, and behind my eyelids a movie plays out. The movie of my life. The movie of the night that destroyed me.
“There was so much blood,” I murmur, seeing it like it was yesterday. Some emotion has slipped through my voice, but only a little. I’m still in check. For now. “I’ve never seen so much. Emma’s entire bed was covered in it. The towels were soaked, my clothes were soaked. It was all over my hands, my face. Her mom was screaming on the phone with emergency dispatch… her dad was crying. Emma and I were on her bed, and she got weaker and weaker so fast, and then she kept trying to tell me something, but she couldn’t get the words out. But I finally figured it out.”
I turn and look at Jacey. “She was saying Cris’s name.”
Jacey opens her mouth, but closes it again. There’s nothing she can say.
“I ignored it. I pretended I didn’t hear. Instead, I just told her that I was so sorry that I’d pressured her. I told her that I loved her and that I would always love her no matter what had happened with Cris. Nothing else mattered in that moment because I knew she was dying. I knew she only had a few minutes left, and I didn’t want to spend those minutes being ugly. In the end, all that matters is life. You forget the ugliness, you forget the pain. Just for one moment.”
My eyes burn and I look out the window, seeing Emma’s face. She was so beautiful, even then, even with her lips blue and her eyes wide and scared and sad. Her body was so slight, so cold as I held her.
“She died in my arms.”
Jacey is utterly silent, horror in her eyes. I don’t know what else to do but keep talking.
“I was drunk, but I’ll never forget how still she was. I didn’t even know she was gone at first… I was clutching her to me, pleading with her, and then all of a sudden I realized that she wasn’t answering. I pulled away from her, just a little, and she was like a rag doll. Her eyes were empty.” I pause, taking a deep breath, filling up lungs that don’t deserve the oxygen.
“She died while I was holding her, and I didn’t even know it. I don’t know when she took her last breath. Even at the end, she deserved so much more than me.”
“Jesus.” Jacey breathes, and horror is in her eyes as she looks at me. She finally sees me for the monster I am, but I don’t get any satisfaction from it. “Dominic, what she did wasn’t your fault. You were young and scared and you asked her to get an abortion. You didn’t ask her to kill herself. She did that on her own.”