“Are you the father?” she asks again with a somber pull to her lips as if she’s smiling to abate the words that she’s about to tell me.
I just stare at her, unable to speak as every emotion I thought I’d just emptied out of myself while my dad held me comes flooding back into me with a fucking vengeance. I sit stunned, speechless, scared. My dad’s hand squeezes my shoulder, urging me on.
“Rylee?” I ask her, because I have to be mistaken. She has to be mistaken.
“Are you the baby’s father?” she asks softly as she sits down next to me and places her hand on my knee and squeezes. And all I can focus on right now is my hands, my fucking fingers, the cuticles still caked with dried blood. My hands start to tremble as my eyes can’t move away from the sight of Rylee’s blood still staining me.
My baby’s blood staining me.
I raise my head, tear my eyes away from the symbol of life cracked and dead on my hands, and hope and fear for things I’m now not sure of all at the same fucking time.
“Yeah,” I say barely above a whisper. I swallow over the gravel scraping my throat. “Yes.” My dad squeezes my shoulder again as I look over at her brown eyes as mine beg for a yes and no at the same time.
She starts out slowly, like I’m a fucking two year old. “Rylee is still being tended to,” she says, and I want to shake her and ask what the fuck does tended to mean. My knee starts jogging up and down again as I wait for her to finish, jaw grinding, hands squeezing together. “She suffered from either a placental abruption or a complete previa and—”
“Stop!” I say, not understanding a fucking word she’s saying, and I just look at her like a goddamn deer in the headlights.
“The vessels attaching her to the baby severed somehow—they’re trying to determine everything right now—but she lost a lot of blood. She’s getting transfusions now to help with—”
“Is she awake?” My mind can’t process what she just said. I hear baby, blood, transfusion. “I didn’t hear you say she’s going to be okay, because I need to hear you say she’s going to be fucking okay!” I shout at her as everything in my life comes crashing down around me, like I’m back in the fucking race car, but this time I’m not sure what parts I’m going to be able to piece back together … and that more than anything scares the fuck out of me.
“Yes,” she says softly, that soothing voice of hers makes me want to shake her like an Etch A Sketch until I get a little more assurance. Until I erase what’s there and create the perfect fucking picture that I want. “We’ve given her some meds to help with the pain of the D & C, and once she gets some more blood transfused, she should be in a lot better state, physically.”
I have no fucking clue what she just said, but I cling onto the words I understand: she’s going to be okay. I hang my head back into my hands and push my heels into my eyes so I don’t cry, because any relief I feel isn’t real until I can see her, touch her, feel her.
She squeezes my knee again and speaks. “I’m so sorry. The baby didn’t make it.”
I don’t know what I expected her to say because my heart knew the truth even though my head hadn’t quite grasped it yet. But her words stop the world spinning beneath my feet and I can’t breathe, can’t draw in any air. I shove myself to my feet and stagger a few feet one way and then turn to go the other way, completely overwhelmed by the buzzing in my ears.
“Colton!” I hear my dad, but I just shake my head and bend over as I try to catch my breath. I bring my hands to my head as if holding it is going to stop the turmoil bashing around inside of it. “Colton.”
I push my hands out in front of me gesturing for him to back the fuck off. “I need a fucking pit stop!” I say to him as I see my hands again—the blood of something I created that was a part of Rylee and me—saint and sinner—on my hands.
Untouched innocence.
And I feel it happen, feel something shatter inside of me—the hold the demons have held over my soul for the last twenty-something-years—just like the mirror in that goddamn dive bar the night Rylee told me she loved me. Two moments in time where the one thing I never wanted to happen, happens and yet … I can’t help but feel, can’t help but wonder why hints of possibilities creep into my mind when I knew then and know now this just can’t be. This is something I never, ever wanted. And yet everything I’ve ever known has changed somehow.
And I don’t know what this means just yet.
Only how it feels: different, liberated, incomplete—fucking terrifying.
My stomach turns and my throat clogs with so many emotions, so many feelings that I can’t even begin to process this new reality. All I can do to keep from losing my fucking sanity is focus on the one thing I know that can be helped right now.
Rylee.
I can’t catch my breath and my heart’s pounding like a fucking freight train, but all I can think of is Rylee. All I want, all I need, is fucking Rylee.
“Colton.” It’s my dad’s hands on my shoulders again—the hands that have held me in my darkest hours—trying to help me break away from this fucking darkness trying to pull me back into its clutches. “Talk to me, son. What’s going through your head?”
Are you fucking kidding me? I want to scream at him because I really don’t know what else to do with the fear consuming me but lash out at the person closest to me. Fear that is so very different than ever before but still all the same. So I just shake my head as I look up at the brown-eyed lady trying to figure out what to do, what to feel, what to say.