Silent Child(73)

“I want you to leave. No… forget it. I hate living in this house anyway. I’ll go. I’ll take Aiden and we’ll go to Josie’s for a few days. Then we can sort out what we’re going to do going forwards. For fuck’s sake, my due date is in a week. I’m having your child and you’re fucking other women.” As heat spread through my veins, I found a coffee mug on the kitchen table, snatched it up, and hurled it across the room. Jake ducked, and the mug hit the extractor fan above the stove, smashing into pieces.

“Jesus… if that had hit me….”

“It didn’t.”

“Emma, I don’t want you to leave.” The smashing of the mug had sobered us. Jake’s crying had stopped and he spoke at a regular, low level. “I love you so much. You mean the world to me. I would never hurt Aiden. I’d never hurt a child, Emma. You believe that, right?”

I let out a long sigh and nodded. “I believe that much, yes. I think, anyway. But I can’t stay here, Jake. You’ve betrayed my trust. I can’t have Aiden around someone I don’t trust. Not right now.”

“But we’re having a baby. The crib is all set up. Our little girl is coming into the world soon. You can’t just up and leave a few days before your due date. What about the baby, Emma? Doesn’t she deserve to come into this world with all the comforts she needs?”

“I… I could have some stuff taken to Josie’s,” I said uncertainly.

“And what is Josie going to think of all that? The woman is infertile and you’re going to bring a newborn baby into her home just a few weeks after her husband left her? That’s pretty low, Emma.”

“Fine, then I’ll find my own place.”

“Don’t leave,” he pleaded. “Don’t break up this family. I know you love me. I can change. I will change for you.”

“I can’t trust you anymore,” I whimpered. I was tired. So tired. I sank down into one of the kitchen chairs.

“I can’t live without you.” Jake poured another glass of Scotch and drank half in one go. His eyes and nose were wet from crying. His skin was pale and there were red rims around his eyes. He seemed older. “I just can’t. You’re everything to me, Emma.”

I flinched. “Don’t say that.”

“Face it, without each other we both have nothing. Neither of us have any family, not that count any—”

“I have Aiden.”

“I’m sorry, love, but he doesn’t even speak to you.”

“Stop it, Jake.”

“You have to face the fact that he isn’t the boy you thought died all those years ago. Aiden isn’t that boy anymore and I’m not sure you’ll ever connect with him again.”

My chin began to tremble. “Don’t say that.”

“Emma, we need each other. We need to stay together for the baby.”

I was so tired. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I just wanted it all to stop.

“Don’t leave me, Emma. I’ll go to counselling. I’ll get help. This will all work out. You’ll see. I promise.”





37


No one wants to believe they are weak, but we all have weakness inside us. We have strength, too, but there are times when the circumstances in our lives are so overwhelming that we easily succumb to that weakness. Jake wore me down that day. I was so tired I couldn’t fight anymore, and yes, I felt trapped. What he said about Josie did hit me hard. She was my best friend and I hadn’t thought about what it would do to her to have a newborn baby in her home. My parents were dead. I didn’t have my own home. I was one week away from the due date for the birth of our child. I was emotionally drained, physically weak, and easily swayed by what seemed like the easier option at the time. I stayed in the house with the compromise that Jake slept on the sofa. The next morning, I waited in the bedroom pretending to be asleep until he left for work.

I wiped my eyes, took a shower, dried my hair, and dressed. I plugged in my phone, which had died while Jake and I had been arguing until late into the night. Then I checked on Aiden. He was up, making himself some toast.

“Morning,” I said, attempting to inject some brightness into my voice. “I hope we didn’t frighten you last night. Jake and I had some things to discuss and it got a little heated. I know you were working hard on your painting so I don’t know what you heard, but we should probably talk about it. Jake and I are having some problems. He’s made some mistakes and I said some horrible things, but we’re both adults and we’re going to work through them. We might even have therapy, like you do, Aiden. We want to move forward as a family.”

The more I spoke, the more I worried I was trying to convince myself rather than him. I shook cereal out of the packet and ignored my trembling hands. I swallowed two of my blood pressure pills with a glass of water and sat at the table with my silent son. If he was in the slightest way perturbed by what had been going on, he didn’t show it.

When breakfast was over, I went upstairs to make a start on putting the blankets inside the new crib. After Aiden’s paint incident we’d bought an entirely new crib. We could probably have washed most of it away, but there was something about seeing the red paint splattered across the baby’s blanket like that. It made me want to buy a new one just to rid my mind of that image. So we did. And I decided to keep Aiden out of the baby’s room.