Last Words

Trigger Warning: Miscarriage.

CHLOE

Before we fell in love, Evan and I spent two months talking to each other over text and phone calls. After we fell in love we spent three more months talking over text, and all night phone calls. We spent three years talking to each other through morning breath, evening whispers, late night confessions, ordinary daytime passing remarks. Our vows took almost fifteen minutes to say a piece. If someone attempted to calculate the sheer number of minutes we have spent talking, I’m sure that it would equal years longer than we have even known each other. Same with the number of ‘I love yous.’

Here are my favorite things I have ever said to my husband:

1. You are the love of my life.
2. Good morning, husband.
3. March, 16th, 2014. I hope he has your eyes.
4. Quick, Evan, feel him kick!
5. I can’t wait to see what we’ve made.

The list of my least favorite things I have said to my husband is too long to count, but it starts and ends with this:

1. Evan, I can’t feel him kicking anymore.

After that, it's all regrets. 

We have spent the last sixteen months without talking to one another, although it’s been far from silent. We have snapped and screamed and bickered and swore and slept against cold shoulders each night. It’s like the cold January morning when our blue baby slid out into the world, we lost our ability to love each other, and all that’s left is bitterness, coating our tongues and making each word poison. 

And now, for the next thirty days, I will not speak a single word to Evan, and he will not speak a single word to me, because if we do we will have to leave this little monastery in the cool, late spring Catskill mountains, where, in a last frantic effort to save what is left of our marriage, we have signed up for a month long silent retreat. 

I was the one who found out about it, through social media, but Evan was the one who signed us up. 

“We have to try,” he had said, and his voice had been so stripped and exhausted and broken that something inside my steel heart softened and I agreed. I didn’t agree because I thought that a month of meditating and gardening together silently would heal the rift that tore its way into our relationship like the doctors tore our son from my uninhabitable womb; I agreed because I had already found a terrific divorce lawyer, and I wanted to be able to truly tell myself that I had tried when I signed the papers.

And maybe it was also that a little part of me wanted to see if he was still in there, the man that I fell in love with, the man whose eyes my son might have had- the one thing I would never know for sure.

EVAN

On the first day at the silent retreat, I bite my tongue so hard to keep from speaking that blood pools in my mouth, and I have to swallow it, salt and iron and rage, during the two hour meditation. I’m sure that the gongs are meant to be soothing and trance like, but they remind me of the ringing that I get in my ears when Chloe is infuriating me, and speaking of Chloe, she is sitting two entire rows of closed eyed meditators away from me, and I can hear every one of her overly enunciated breaths from here. 

I’m convinced she is doing it just to keep me from peace, I am not fooled by the bow of her head, clasp of her hands, and serene expression. I know that woman, and I know that inside she is planning, calculating. Chloe’s mind has always been a hamster wheel, even Before, and I used to think it was an endearing quality. Now, with every one of her long, slow breaths, (slight intonation on the exhale, just like the tutorials say), I feel my teeth sink deeper and deeper into my tongue, physically repressing the urge to break this stifling silence and scream ‘shut up!’ 

I won’t, of course, scream anything, because that would mean that Chloe would win, and I would have to see that smug smile of hers that makes me feel like I am no man at all. 

I find it baffling to think that once I would find myself obsessively scrolling through pictures of Chloe if we were apart for more than a day, missing her as much as an astronaut after years on the lonely moon. 

I don’t think I’ve taken a single picture of Chloe in over a year. 

I taste the warm copper of my blood, and swallow hard, remembering the first week that Chloe and I spent together. We were already in love, our long distance relationship full of phone calls and texts being more than enough to make us fall for each other. I remember the first few days of that week were exhilarating and terrifying. We were strangers who knew one another more deeply than anyone else, and while being in her presence was electrifying and more than I could have dreamed of, it scared me. I think a part of me knew that once we held hands and kissed and made love there was no go back, for better or worse. 

We didn’t have sex for the first two nights, and I was in a panic, afraid that Chloe wasn’t attracted to me, and also fiercely relieved that she was giving me the time to adjust, to learn what real life Chloe liked. I was an expert on long distance Chloe, but hearing her laugh two inches away from me made my voice catch in my throat, despite how used to I was of her loud laugh over the phone and on a screen in front of me.

On the third day we went to the pier after dinner, and Chloe, perhaps emulating some romcom she had seen, jumped up on a railing and balanced there, arms outstretched. I still remember her little white dress and long tan legs, right next to my face, and it really was like a romcom for a minute, until she fell off the railing and split open her knees and the palms of her hands.

I had sat next to her on a bench, pressing my shirt to her bleeding knees and trying to keep her from giving into the tears I saw perched on her eyelids by telling her stories of my own clumsy falls over time. When I realized that no matter what I said, she was going to cry, I surprised myself by taking her wrist in my hand and raising her bruised and scratched palm to my mouth, and kissing the cuts there, tasting her copper blood on my tongue.

She had gasped softly, and said, “Didn’t anyone tell you not to touch someone else’s blood?” But the tears had disappeared, and I remember the warm flush on her cheeks, how her shoulder had melted against mine.

“Your blood is my blood, Chlo,” I had said, and pressed my mouth to hers, sealing the promise there.

That night, we had sex for the first time, and when her breathing grew so loud it filled my head and made me forget my own name, I gave what was left of my heart to her, knowing it would never be all mine again. 

CHLOE

On day three, I realize that I am spoiled. If you had asked me a month ago if I thought I was indulged, I would have decisively said no, but that was before I realized how much I hate eating the same exact thing every day, before a deafening gong wakes me up every morning at 6:00, before I am forced to wear the same shapeless, colorless gray robe day in and day out.

On day four I realize that I am not indulged, just completely and utterly ignorant. I took for granted waking up on the weekends at ten in the morning, making the ordinary decision of what to eat for each meal, picking out an outfit befitting my mood and the weather each day. I sorely miss my bed, with its soft pillows and hard mattress and invisible stone wall that runs exactly down the middle of it. 

By day five I miss talking so much that I develop a severe sore throat, and am very close to breaking my silence to ask someone for a cough drop. 

I make a list in my head of all the things that I miss from life outside this retreat during our afternoon meditation on the sixth day, and I realize that Evan is not on the list. It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, and reflexively I turn my head to look at him, where he is always sitting during our morning, afternoon, and evening meditations. Two rows back and to the right, sometimes I can feel his eyes burning into the back of my head, and I purposeful breathe as deeply and look as peaceful as I can, so he has no idea how much my back burns from sitting up so straight, and how much I am starving for a slice of pizza. 

This is the first time I have actually looked at him during the meditations, and I am not surprised to see that his eyes are wide open. He never was one to follow rules, or go along with the herd. Once I told him that the saying when in Rome was invented for a reason, and he replied that I was the kind of person who would jump off of a bridge into a dry river if everyone else was doing it.

Remembering this brings an angry flush to my neck, I feel it rising like the tide, and then suddenly I realize that this conversation took place only one year into our marriage, before the stillborn baby and the subsequent death of our relationship. I remember, suddenly, that the conversation took place in bed, and I turn my head away quickly from Evan, not before his eyes meet mine, burning and ready for war.

I try to head off the memory, to imagine my thoughts as clouds and focus on the endless gong like we are supposed to, but it is too late. We were in bed, in a hotel in San Diego for my twenty-fourth birthday. The windows were open, and the air was salty and hot, and we were naked, and Evan’s bare chest against my cheek was also salty and hot. 

We were discussing our plans for dinner, I remember, and Evan insisted he was going to wear the vintage corduroy pants he had bought earlier in the day. I also remember that was shortly after I had discovered that I was the only person in the world who knew how much Evan loved vintage clothes, and I wonder suddenly if I still am. 

“Just wear shorts like every single other person here,” I think I had said, giggling and twining my legs around his, like pea vines. “There’s a reason why the saying ‘when in Rome’ was invented.”

I remember how he had kissed my nose, and replied, “You’re the kind of person who would jump off a bridge into a dry, rocky creek bed, Chlo, just because everyone else was doing it.”

If he had said anything like that to me in the past year, I would have bitten his head off with the swiftness and efficiency of a lion, however, then, in the golden years before the pregnancy and loss, I had giggled and pressed my forehead to his, our possible third eyes gazing so close they would be blurred. 

I remember exactly what I had said: “No, silly, I would only jump off the bridge if you were going with me.”

The cessation of the gong in the hall, signaling the end of the meditation, brings me back to the presence, and my face feels salty and hot, like Evan’s skin and the San Diego air of years before. 

I jumped off the bridge, I think, and Evan was right there beside me, and now we are lying broken on the rocks trying to remember how in the world we ended up here.

EVAN

We are working in the garden on our tenth day here when a carrot reminds me of when I proposed to Chloe. Every day here at the monastery, after our morning meditation and before lunch, we work in the small vegetable gardens that are spread out across the modest grounds of the facility. So far, Chloe and I have made sure to be in separate groups, and today is the first day that I can see her, kneeling next to a garden bed pulling weeds around lettuce plants with a ferocity that makes me wince for the lettuce. 

I turn back to my own work, carefully pulling up the carrots by their fluffy heads, memories of helping out on my grandparents farm as a kid helping me to be careful to not lose the carrot in the soil when I pull the top. 

A carrot comes out in my hand, and it’s deformed, smaller and paler than the rest and knobby, with a band of brighter orange close to the end. I am reminded suddenly of when I proposed to Chloe, and how when I slid the small diamond onto her slender ring finger it got caught on her knuckle, and how for a split second panic had shot through me until Chloe had burst out laughing, screamed “yes!” at the top of her lungs, and slid the ring onto her middle finger, a gesture so filled with love and understanding and acceptance that tears had come to my eyes. 

Eventually, I had gotten the ring resized so it could fit on her ring finger, but Chloe told me that she didn’t mind, that seeing the sparkly promise of my love for her on her hand had blinded her to anything else, that it could have only fit on her pinky, and she wouldn’t have cared. 

Four months ago, during a raging fight that began over me forgetting to load the dishwasher, Chloe ripped her ring off of her finger and hurled it at my face, screaming that I had never known her, that I hadn’t even known what size ring she wore, and what kind of a blind promise was that? 

I remember how, after she stormed out of the room I had picked up her ring and held it in my hand for the longest time, remembering her exhilaration when I gave it to her. 

It had been a blind promise, I had thought, and I hurled the ring towards the slammed door, and turned away before I could see where it had landed. 

I look up from the carrot in my hand, and Chloe is looking at me, her hands filled with an explosion of lettuce, and I remember how she looked in her wedding dress, the bouquet of Queens Anne Lace clutched in a spray below her beaming face. I stare at her across the garden, carrot clutched in hand, and in her stone face I see the ghost of the bride she was, the memory of the woman who I promised to love forever.

CHLOE

On the sixteenth day, I fall asleep during the meditation, and dream about our son. In the dream, when he falls out into the nurses' hands, he is pink and screaming, and when they lay him on my breasts I feel the heat of his body, warm from the cocoon of my womb. He looks up at me, and his eyes are Evan’s, down to the yellow gold ring around his irises, and the unfair fringe of lashes. When he sees me, the sobs stop, and he smiles, and it’s Evan’s smile, and then it’s Evan who is suckling from my breast, and I am writhing beneath him on silk sheets, clutching his back with my hands, and he is drinking all the milk that my body made for my son, he is swallowing my grief and turning my loss to ecstasy. 

I awake with a jolt, and my heart is pounding and my breasts are heavy, tingling with the memory of the dream. I look over my shoulder and Evan’s eyes are closed, his face is utterly still. I have the sudden, breathless realization that for all this time, not knowing what my son’s eyes looked like has haunted me, when they have been right in front of me all along.

EVAN

On the twentieth day, after a restless sleep, I come to the meditation hall early, before anyone else. At first I think I’m alone, and then I see a woman I don’t know on a cushion. Her blonde hair falls around her face, her eyes are closed and she seems utterly at peace, and filled with sorrow, somehow at the same time. I am struck by the straight curve of her spine, the curl of her lip, her grace and grief that is written across her serene face.

She turns to me, and it’s Chloe. She opens her mouth to say something, and then she closes it. Slowly I walk over to her, and sit down on the cushion beside her, face forward and close my eyes. I feel a shift besides me, and I know she does the same. 

The morning sun breaks through the windows, and I know we can both feel it behind our closed eyes, the warmth washing over us like a blessing, like forgiveness. I feel her hand find mine, and I feel the cold band of her ring on her finger. 

Somewhere outside a bird sings, our son perhaps, letting us go at last.