Pieces of Paisley (31 page)
My relationship with Laura has taken off. As soon as I got home, I started spending some time with her. She was still too young to really understand the logistics of the situation, but now with her almost being seven, her curiosity is getting the best of her. She has a different bond with Mick and I; he has been there from birth until now. I don’t begrudge him that and I have my own relationship with her. Just last night I tried to explain the situation as best as I could.
“Sweetpea, your mommy and I were together when we were younger. I didn’t know you were in her tummy and then she met Mick and fell in love with him. We all thought you were Mick’s little girl, but when you got here it turned out you are both mine and Mick’s. So you are lucky, you have two daddies.” I tried to tell her as much as a child her age would understand.
“Daddy, when are you going to give me another mommy? I want two of those.”
“I don’t know. That may not happen.” I tell her as gently as I can
.
Ever since that conversation I haven’t been able to get Paisley and the mistakes out of my mind. I should have trusted in her the way she trusted in me. When things were too much for her, I pushed and demanded she turn her burdens over to me, but when push came to shove, I didn’t do the same with her. I haven’t been a monk since divorcing, but screwing and intimacy are completely different and I would rather be alone than try and force something that wasn’t there, and for now, I am content with how I live my life. I still have dreams of her every single night and find myself reaching for her in my sleep, to only wake up alone.
I made my mom delete her off of Facebook, I figured out of sight out of mind. After many hours of arguments I think she relented because looking at the picture of her with another man, where she was happy and relaxed in his arms was more than I could bear. I had gotten married, but I had never fallen in love, and I could see her doing that in picture after picture I scrolled through. I had to have my mom remove that from our lives because I wasn’t strong enough not to go back and look at them daily. I would have tortured myself and I think my mom was afraid of what I would become.
Chad and Toby are a couple of the guys I still keep in touch with and they want to plan a trip to Florida, to reminisce and catch up. I declined that trip unless they move it to another location. I left there one time with the wrong girl, and I don’t want to ever leave there again, without Paisley. Since she isn’t living there now, that isn’t an option.
I go into a meeting and talk with the architect. The first part of the project is the ICU and some other patient floors. We will eventually get to the administration offices and radiology departments but looking at the time frame and all the work, I tell him I don’t see that happening for another year or two. Right now, we have a contract with the federal prison to use their departments for anything we need that we don’t have. It is like Club Med at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, so might as well put our tax dollars to good use and get our veterans top of the line care. We discuss a few other things that need to be done and then he asks, “Jake, when we are done with this project or when it is well under way would you consider traveling for the next remodel we do? You have been such an asset and you are young, not tied down and now would be the chance to make a name for yourself. I have a few projects overseas that I would love to hire you on for.” “That sounds amazing, man. I don’t know how I would work it out with my little girl, but we can talk about details as the time nears.” I assure him.
Chapter 32
Paisley
(Wayne)
I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.
It is a shock to think that since that first dinner Wayne and I have been a couple. Almost six months and no major drama. He is pushing me to move in with him, but that is more because his parents think he should be settled down and want grandkids. Neither of us is in a rush, and we both know the reason we are in this relationship, the sex is off the charts. Both of us are jaded, and we guard our hearts close. I remember our conversation last week and feel myself accepting of it.
“Paisley, I am not getting any younger. I care about you, I adore you, and I worship your body. I am not capable of loving another. I know you aren’t either. We are a pair of sad souls and I would never hurt you. I want to spend my life with someone, and not be alone. I want a family, but I don’t all the trimmings with it. Even if I feel in love with you, you aren’t capable of giving me that back, so what we have is safe for us.”
He wasn’t being cruel or untruthful. We have been through the whole turbulent relationships of past history. I don’t want to try, and I don’t’ want to be alone for the rest of my life. I adore Wayne, but he isn’t the one. Just like I am not the one for him; his was his college sweetheart, Angela. I have seen pictures of her, she is beautiful, but when you hear the stories of her you know her beauty radiated from the inside. They met freshman orientation and were inseparable from day one. She followed him to medical school. They were going to work side by side. During residency she was hit and killed by a drunk driver, and he has never gotten over it, and has no desire to. I can’t imagine how he feels, even though my relationship died, Jake is still breathing. If something were to happen to him, I don’t know that I could face it. I can’t have him, but knowing he is able to live his life is enough for me.
I get along with Wayne’s parents; they are very loving and pushing us forward in our relationship. It used to be gentle nudges, now it is full out inquisition whenever we are together. I mean, after five months you think they would not be at that point yet, but after the fifth date his mom was picking out our china pattern. He isn’t in a rush for marriage he says, but I know once I move in that will be the next step, and love or not, when I get married it will be forever. I am about to celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday, and I know I need to make a decision, or let him go.
For my birthday he spoils me with exactly what I want: a Coach bag, filled with Starbucks gift cards and a beautiful charm bracelet with four charms on it. I don’t know what the charms symbolize, and I ask him. “The sun is for the extra days you have added to my life and yours. The moon is for all the nights we will have together, the stars are for what I see every time you wrap your lips around my cock, and the blank one is for our future.” See, he may not give me love and false hope, but he is a very passionate and giving man. He knows he is wearing me down.
Four months after my birthday I agree to move in with him, but something keeps coming up. My lease isn’t up, and I refuse to allow him to buy me out of it, he had a slab leak so the house in under total renovation, and we just keep putting it off, but with the promise of it happening his mom has now moved to marriage. She has wrapped Lily right in her scheme and so now I have my own mother breathing down my neck. She doesn’t see the light isn’t in my eyes like it was with Jake, she doesn’t question why she has never heard Wayne and I profess our love, but she does ask over and over when the wedding is.
I haven’t heard from Krista in a few months, and need to tell her the good news. She won’t be thrilled I am relenting and not holding out for love like she thinks I should, but she will support me from afar. My emails keep going unanswered, and I wonder if I have upset her and don’t know. It isn’t like her to ignore me, and above all she knows it is my life. Wayne tells me not to worry too much about it, that she is busy with wifely duties and working, or they have decided to go totally green and live off the land. I roll my eyes at him, but wouldn’t put it past her.
I awake, not to my alarm but to my ringing cell phone. It is four o’clock in the morning and besides an emergency nobody should be calling me. I was up until the wee hours engrossed in the news and the tragedy of the international flight that went down above the ocean last night. I felt bad for those families, and prayed for their healing. I couldn’t imagine waiting hours on end to find out if your loved ones where okay, but they knew pretty early that there were no survivors. It was a bit eerie because the flight was out of Missouri, which is where Jake and I flew into, and for the first time in a long time, I cried myself to sleep. Partly out of grief for what might have been and partly out of anger for not having the courage to call him. I just need him to tell me to move on, that he has, and that he is happy.
“Hello,” I mumble in my cell phone. I am not fully awake but the next words rock me to the core. I am instantly numb and full of pain at the same time. My mouth is watering and is about to expel the bile rising up. I can’t say anything; I just sit there and listen. Dead. Gone. It happened fast. No suffering. The words keep replaying in my mind and not making sense. I should be comforting the person at the other end of the line, but all I can do is wallow in my own misery and pain. I manage to write down service information and assure the person I will be there, no matter what. Once I hang up, I let lose. I cry, I dry-heave, I can’t breathe, and the world feels like it is closing in on me. I never got to say good-bye.
Chapter 33
Paisley
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
I don’t know how I made it through the last few days, and I have no idea how I am standing here at the funeral home. I have to go in, say good-bye, but I can’t move. Wayne prods me forward and whispers, “I got you. It will be okay.” But it won’t. It will never be the same again. Somehow I put one foot in front of the other, and make my way up the stairs, the whole time my legs feeling like lead. I stop again when I reach the doors. I refuse to go in, I can’t say good-bye and I reason with myself if I don’t then it won’t be true. I want to remember the good times, the happy times, not the last years of our lives.
The decision is taken away from me as the door opens and I am enveloped in arms followed by weeping, and I am about crumble. If it wasn’t for Wayne’s steadying grip I would be on the floor and I wouldn’t be able to get up. I force myself to pull out of the embrace and face this head on. “Paisley, it has been too long. I am so sorry it is like this.” I don’t give her words, but I meet her gaze. The pain, anger, and regret meeting me is not lost on me. She feels guilty for all the years she let slip by. I am feeling the same guilt. I quietly slip out of her embrace and step away from Wayne, “I need to do this alone.” I inform both of them. For every step I take towards the viewing room, I stop. I try and control my breathing, I try not to flee and as I step up to the casket, I can’t stop the emotions that overcome me.
Tears coursing down my cheeks, my vision is blurry but what I see isn’t right. This person staring back at me is not the same person I loved. I stop breathing to gain some control and blink to clear my vision. I want to run, I want this to all be a nightmare, but it isn’t. The devastation is all around me, surrounding me and seeping into my soul. “How did this happen?” I ask. I get no response and am thankful for the emptiness in the room, because that is how I feel. Completely empty. “I am so sorry.”
Her beautiful auburn hair is not shaved close to her head and her once beautiful face is swollen, both effects from the chemotherapy and radiation she underwent to try and save her life. Her mom explained it to me, a brain tumor. By the time they found it, it was really too late. She tried treatments, but everything failed and at the end of the first round, she was so out of her mind she had to have constant supervision. She didn’t want me to know, she wanted me to remember her as we were. Young, carefree, the world at our fingertips. Krista, why wouldn’t you let me say good-bye? I don’t want to be angry with her, but that is one emotion I have. I am angry with God, at myself, at her and all the wasted years. I know logically we had made amends, but things were never the same. Right now, I hate God. He took a vibrant, beautiful woman at the prime of her life. She was only twenty-five and now she is gone. I want to scream, I want to punch something and above all I have to get out of here. I can’t take it, seeing her lying there, not able to snort at me in laughter, not able to tell me to get over myself, to live a little.