An Ordinary Life

Chapter Nine

Something in the very air seems to have changed. Grown heavy like a thick syrup clogging the airways and moving sluggishly through the veins. Infecting both of us. Heavy as a weight. Not that he was too talkative to start with, but now he has become absolutely silent, withdrawn to the point where I think he might just turn and leave without explanation.

But no explanation is needed here. I've heard the rumors of his childhood traumas. Substantial enough to hold the psyche of a grown man tight in their grip, still, after all these years.

I don't know whether to probe or to let it be. There is a boundary here and I fear to cross it. I mean, what are we to each other exactly? Friends? No. Not yet. Hell, we're barely even acquaintances. Yet somehow, here we are and I'm not quite sure just where we stand. But between us... Between us, is everything in the world that matters.

"I'm sorry," he apologizes, seating himself on the edge of Edyn's neat little desk and looks up at me with those pretty eyes that make girls swoon and lose their minds. It seems so odd that he's here, right here in our son's room and I don't know what to say or exactly what he's sorry for.

"Just talk to me, Emerson. Tell me about him," he encourages. And you would think it would be easy. What mother wouldn't jump at the chance to speak of her child. Guess what little Johnny did today! Not that there isn't any of that here but it is smaller, bittersweet victories under this roof. Edyn allowed me to hug him today. Edyn didn't disrupt circle time at school. He looked me in the eyes as I spoke to him. But it is the bigger things that I suspect he is looking for and I fear what I do have to offer will be woefully disappointing to him.

At first I think, if he had been here, he would know, or some snarky thing like that. But then I hear the words tripping haltingly from my mouth. A difficult beginning, just like our son's. Just like us now. But the intensity of his gaze, of the way he seems suspended, awaiting my words, like the desert, that first drop of life giving rain, gives me all I need to move forward.

'He came a month early," I hear myself tell him. The words slipping off my tongue like a knife from a wound. "Impossibly small but perfect. Perfect in every way a new baby can be to a new mother. But almost right away he started turning blue and the doctors rushed him away. I was never so terrified. Later they came and told me he had a... a problem with his heart. There was a hole. A small one. But just enough that he would need surgery."

Prince covers his face with his hands, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips as if he were trying to scrub something away. Silent, his thoughts unreadable, he breathes roughly behind his fingers while I'm ripped wide open again just by speaking of it. I could tell him and tell him but he could never fully comprehend what I went through in those first few days. Days that are suppose to be filled with the joys of becoming a new parent, spent watching my tiny son cling to life beneath a snarl of tubes and wires. This is what I think of when things get particularly bad. It is a miracle that he is here at all.

"Jesus... Emerson..." He says, his voice low and painful as if there were glass in his throat.

"This isn't what you wanted to hear is It?" I snap, my nerves poking like quills at the underside of my skin, bristly and sharp. "I'm sure you want all bright, shiny tales of milestones reached and first words spoken. But it ain't like that with Edyn. Nothing is easy and nothing ever will be."

"I want to know it all," he says, calmly, quietly. Perhaps as he would speak to a reporter or a record company exec. who doesn't quite see the big picture. "The good and the bad." He peers at me through his fingers and then lowers his hands. "It doesn't have to be easy but I'm here now and we'll get through it together.

Together? Really? This almost makes me laugh. I turn away and take a seat on the bed, my back to him where I can't see the guilt in his eyes or he, the pain in mine.