Paying For Damages

Lauren can’t even look at Milo, who resembles her husband more every day.

Until last night, Lauren believed that life had dealt her a winning hand. She’d grown up wealthy enough that getting a bachelor's degree from a good school was a mere formality. She met a tall, similarly minded man when she was twenty, entered into a loveless but cash-flush marriage, and never had to use her degree for more than decoration. She jetted off to St. Bart’s every year and had three beautiful homes and two gorgeous, blonde children, a boy and a girl. She hadn’t seen her bare nails or body hair in years.

Lauren licks her lips, which are dry and cracked, like salt flats. She scrambles for her purse before realizing she never brought it.

It's strange how she kept it together the whole goddamned morning, and not having lip balm is the thing that makes her want to scream. She presses her lips together and exhales quietly, trying to calm her heart.

“Mom,” Milo says.

Lauren knows that Milo wants to talk about it. Milo always wants to talk about things. But Lauren can’t. The two halves of her brain are fused together by what feels like a loose single knot, and thinking about anything but her next breath, her next step, will send everything unraveling.

“Milo, please,” she says. “Stop.”

Lauren turns, the gold bangles on her wrists clinking against each other. The bangles Dan gifted her for her birthday. She avoids looking directly at Milo, her eyes settling on Mimi, her golden curls forming a halo around her ashen face. If it weren’t for the tubes and the bandages, she could be asleep. She is asleep.

What if she sleeps forever?

Lauren folds over and dry heaves, a heavy weight stretching the back of her throat, but nothing comes out. She gags once again, her diaphragm spasming inside her.

“Mom,” Milo begs.

“How many people do you think have died in this room?”

“Mom, what the fuck—”

“It’s a rhetorical question, goddammit,” Lauren screams. She lowers herself down to the cold hospital floor, her hands shaking in her lap. She presses them together, but they tremble with the aftershocks of her outburst. Lauren can’t recall ever screaming at Milo. Mimi, all the time, but Milo has never given her trouble. Her sister always used to beg her to trade sons.

“I’m sorry,” Lauren says to her palms. “I just—I feel like my life is over.”

“I feel like my life is over,” Milo snaps. “My dad—”

“No, no, no,” Lauren says. She presses her fingers into her temples and rubs furiously. “No.”

“It happened, okay? He—”

“Milo,” Lauren cries. “Please don’t.”

Lauren can’t think about Dan, about what he did to their family, their life together, without throwing up. She can’t look at Milo without thinking about Dan. She can look at Mimi for only a minute at a time before the memory comes flooding back.

“Okay,” Milo says. His voice is oddly still, like soda that’s been sitting out too long. “You’re right. Nothing happened. I can’t wait to go home and eat leftover lasagna and watch Wheel of Fortune. I can’t wait to go to school tomorrow and take my calculus test. I can’t wait for my nineteenth birthday—in fact, you should probably call the restaurant ahead of time and make a reservation for four. Oh, and don’t forget, we’ve got an appointment on Thursday to get my car serviced, so you should probably call me out of school for that. And—”

“Enough,” Lauren says. Her brain is stuck on reservation for four. Will she ever say those words again?

“You think your life is over? Seriously?” Milo walks over to where Lauren’s sitting and points at his comatose sister with the arm that isn't in the cast. “Her life could be fucking over. For real. They had to cut her out of her clothing. You weren’t even there. You didn’t have to see it.”

“Milo,” Lauren pleads. “Milo, my love. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fuck you, Mom, you think I want to?”

Milo crosses the room swiftly. There’s a loud crash and an immediate whimpering. Lauren’s head snaps up, and she can’t quite believe what she sees.

Milo has punched a hole through the wall and ruined his one good hand. Lauren’s sweet Milo, who carries stranded earthworms to safety, who writes a diary, who wears dorky, boxy glasses that sit just too big for his delicate, boyish face.

Lauren has spent enough time poring over parenting blogs to know that this day creeps up on every boy mom—the day her kind, loving child morphs into an angry, emotionally repressed man. She always thought Milo would be the exception, that he’d stay that sensitive child forever.

She's sure her husband's mother felt the same.

The thought nauseates her.

But now, there’s a hole in the hospital room’s wall, and her sweet Milo has made it with his fist, and Lauren, unemployed, has been thrust into single motherhood, and Mimi might as well be dead. These things stack neatly in her head like a Jenga tower as she stares into the hole.

“Oh, Milo,” she breathes. “Oh, no.”

She pushes herself up off the floor, straightening her shirt, and wobbles over to him, folding him into her arms. He’s taller than her now, and Lauren is struck with the fact that one day, she put her baby down and never picked him up again.

“I don't want Mimi to die,” Milo sobs, and Lauren hugs him tighter, still unable to pull back and look him directly in the eye.

My heart is not breaking, Lauren tells herself.

“She won’t,” Lauren breathes. “We’ll be strong for her, won’t we? You and I?”

“But how?” Milo says. “How can we be strong when you—you won’t even look at me?”

Lauren’s stomach twists in pain. She didn’t know Milo had noticed. She forces herself to stand back, steadying her hands, and raises her eyes to his face.

Nothing happens. Nothing changes. He’s the same Milo she’s known for eighteen years. But the similarities to Dan are there—the sharp chin, the left-side dimple, the soft brown eyes.

Lauren knows she is looking at Milo. But at the same time, she is looking at the man who tried to take her children away from her. The police had called him what—a family annihilator?

It wasn’t quite real. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to women like her. Women that had no cycles to break.

“I can,” Lauren says, but they both know it’s not convincing. She runs her hands through her hair, remembering a long-forgotten Drybar appointment she would have been at that morning. If nothing had happened. If Dan hadn’t been—what did they say? Set off.

“Look,” Milo says. “I know it’s hard for you. I feel like everything’s collapsing. But really, is nobody going to say it? You're the adult. I'm not. My dad tried to fucking kill me, and he nearly succeeded in killing my sister, and that’s realer for me than it is for you. I know that you’re trying to deal with the fact that—that you married a— a—,” he shakes his head, unable to finish the sentence. “But the fact is, he was my dad. And you’re alive, and you’re the adult, and I’m tired, I’m so tired.”

Lauren shuts her eyes, guilt racing through her body. Of course she’s the adult.

“All I want is for you and Mimi to be well and happy,” she whispers, reaching for Milo’s hand. “Nothing more. I love you. And if you’re tired, my love, rest.”

Once Milo is asleep, Lauren folds her legs up into the cold, plastic visitor’s chair and lays her head atop her knees, gazing at her sleeping children. She is not a particularly religious person. But she surprises herself and starts to pray.

Maybe Mimi will not wake up today. But Lauren is certain that the day will come soon. Her children are brave, strong creatures. Braver and stronger than she.

She knows that once Mimi wakes up, there will be a long road to physical recovery, and a lifetime of redressing emotional wounds. But as long as Lauren is alive, she will tend to them.

Lauren looks over at the hole in the wall, another thing to deal with. But it is the easiest thing to fix, and she will start from there.