Her Savior/Her Doms

Someone Quieter Pt2

I did not go back. I divorced him, and I disowned her, and there was a conversation with her first — a confrontation, really, ugly and necessary and long overdue — that I will not describe in detail, except to say that I said everything I had needed to say and some things I had not known I needed to say until they were already out of my mouth. After it was over, I drove home and sat in the shower for a long time, let the water go cold, and thought: I will never trust anyone like that again. And I meant it. For years, I meant it completely.

The version of me that had walked into that marriage — open, certain, unguarded — did not walk out of it. Someone quieter and more careful did. Someone who had learned, at nineteen, that the people you love most are capable of the worst betrayals, and that there is no way to protect yourself from that except to stop letting people close enough to try.

I live with my mom because suddenly she is having a lot of health issues, and I cannot leave her, as I am the only one out of her four kids who is willing to take care of her. I try to make her go to the doctor because her breathing is so bad and only getting worse. But I should have just submitted the appointment myself. And I took her to make sure she went. I failed her! She had breast cancer, and we did not know.

Or at least I did not. And when she got so bad that I had to rush her to the ER, they admitted her right away. And again, no one thought of breast cancer; the doctors kept telling me it was pneumonia. They gave her antibiotics through an IV for two weeks and then told me to take her home and keep her on oxygen, and that she would be fine.

We are home for two days, when I am rushing her back to the hospital again. And this time, doctors take more X-Rays and see a spot that concerns them, so they ask me if I consent to a biopsy, and I sign the consent forms as I am her P.O.A.

The doctors take her into surgery, and when they come out, even before the test is done, the surgeon tells me it's cancer, but they will not know which one or which stage until the test is complete. It was stage 4 breast cancer. The cancer doctor tells me he can cure her. And the lung doctor is telling me it will not work; Mom’s lungs are too far gone. He explained to me that her lungs were like saddlebags that had dried up and couldn’t move air in and out properly. So, we spent a month in the hospital in the critical care unit.

I spent every minute with her until one day I was told that if I didn't come to work, I would lose my job, so my mom wrote me a note to go. She will be okay. And I go try to do my job. I am there for a couple of hours when I get the call that I have to come back ASAP. She can no longer breathe on her own anymore. I rush there and meet with the lung doctor, and he is asking me to put her on life support or let her go.

I struggled with the decision to put her on life support or to allow her to die. I denied her life support, essentially; I killed her because they said she would never come off life support. As soon as she took her last breath, I wanted to die too. I have had to live with the fact that I failed her, and I did not do more to save her. By the time I am telling them my story, I am crying so hard that I start to hyperventilate. My guilt is real, and my hatred is real. Some days I cannot even look in the mirror.

And then, as if the universe had decided that one devastation was not enough, a few years later I lost my son.

His name was Elijah. He was twenty-two years old, and he was the best thing I had ever done, and he was an addict. It had started in high school the way it always starts — slowly, quietly, with things that seemed small enough to explain away. By the time I understood what I was looking at, it had already taken root in him in a way that I did not know how to reach. I sent him to rehab the first time when he was nineteen. He came back clean and bright-eyed and so full of intention that I let myself believe it. He stayed clean for seven months. Then his friends found him again — the same ones, the same corners, the same pull — and everything we had built in those seven months came apart in a matter of weeks. I sent him back.

And again after that. Four times in total, four rounds of hope and structure and carefully worded plans, four times watching him come back to himself, and four times watching the same thing happen. He would do well in treatment. He always did well in treatment. It was coming home that undid him, every single time. The neighborhood, the friends, the familiar geography of old habits — it was all still there waiting for him, patient and unchanged, and he did not have enough distance from it yet to resist it.

I knew what I needed to do. I knew it the way you know things you are not yet brave enough to act on — clearly, completely, with a certainty that lived in my body rather than my head. I needed to move. Not to another apartment, not to another part of the city, but somewhere entirely different, somewhere his old life could not follow him, somewhere we could both start over on ground that did not have his addiction buried in it. I had the money. I had the time. I had every practical means to do it. What I did not have was the courage to uproot everything, to believe that the move would actually work and not just delay the inevitable. So I stayed. I told myself I would look into it seriously after the holidays. After the spring. After things settled. I kept finding reasons to wait, and while I waited, Elijah did not.

He overdosed on a Tuesday in October. I found him. I will not describe what that is like — finding your child — except to say that it is the kind of thing that rewires you permanently, that there is a before and an after, and the two halves of your life never quite speak the same language again. The paramedics came, and they tried, and there was a long, terrible stretch of time in a hospital waiting room where I sat completely alone and bargained with every version of God I had ever believed in or stopped believing in. And then a doctor came through a set of double doors, and I knew from the way he was walking before he had said a single word.

I did not cry when he told me. I went still, the way I always went still. I nodded, and I thanked him — I actually thanked him, which I have never been able to explain — and I walked outside into the October air and sat on a concrete bench and looked at the parking lot for a very long time. The guilt came later, and when it came, it came in full. If I had moved us when I knew I should have.

If I had been braver, faster, and less willing to wait for the right moment that never arrived. If I had done the one thing I knew would have changed the outcome, he would still be here. He would be twenty-five now. He would be calling me on Sundays the way he always did when he was clean, just to check in, just to hear my voice. I carry that every single day. I carry it the way you carry something you cannot put down—not because it is too heavy, but because putting it down would feel like forgetting him. And I cannot forget him. I will not.

By the time I got to this part of the story, I was not crying the way people cry in movies — quietly, with dignity. I was crying the way you cry when something has been locked up for too long, and the lock finally gives, ugly and uncontrolled, and I could not breathe around it. I felt Jake’s arms come around me from behind and Leo’s hands take mine, and I did not try to pull myself together. For the first time in years, I let someone see its full size. I let them hold the weight of it with me. And it did not break them. They did not flinch, or look away, or say any of the things people say when they do not know what else to do. They just held on. And that, more than anything else that had happened in the last two days, was what made me believe that maybe — maybe — this was real.

They both jump up and just hold me until I can calm down, and I told them I release you from your promise, as I don’t think I could handle anything else tonight. But could we just sit and listen to the ocean? And then we all just sit out on the balcony and listen to the ocean. And no one says a word, me thinking about that day and reliving it again, and they just want to make a plan to help me.

They want to save me from myself and from my nightmares. Finally, they decide to shower me and put me to bed. Telling me that we will discuss the plan tomorrow. That I have had enough for one day.

And I could not have agreed more. I am totally wiped out. Leo and Jake go to their office while I go to sleep to make a plan and decide how they want to proceed with me.

Leo thinks the way to go is to be less of a Master/Sub and more of a Daddy Dom. Because I need to be thoroughly rebuilt. Jake thinks that maybe I will need both, so they continue to hash out the game plan, and they know that they still really want me. They are already falling hard for me. They climb into bed with me and hold me, and I did not have any nightmares that whole night.