Page 33 of Against the Current

“You must miss your cousins,” Trisha said of Rebecca, Bethany, and Valerie.

“They escaped the Suttons,” Ryan said without thinking about it.

“That’s right,” Trisha affirmed thoughtfully. “It’s like the pain is passed down generation after generation. We can’t pass it down to our baby. Okay?”

Ryan promised he wouldn’t let that happen.

However, when Ryan and Trisha returned to their apartment three weeks after their departure, they found their mailbox stuffed with letters from Jackie. In them, Jackie asked for forgiveness. She promised to make space in her life for Trisha and for Ryan and for their baby. She promised to babysit whenever they needed her. She wrote: “I just want to be in your lives. I want to know and love you all as well as I can.”

Ryan let Trisha read the letters, studying her face as her eyes traced the words. She was difficult to read.

Finally, she said, “Let me think about it.”

But time passed after that. Ryan threw himself into work and into looking for a new home for them, and Trisha found a secretary job down the road that allowed her to spend all day sitting down and typing emails and notes and answering phone calls. She liked it, sort of. She was respected there, sort of. Ryan packed her nutritional lunches and reminded her to drink enough water. She rolled her eyes and said, “What would I do without you?” But really, she meant it. Their love felt like a cloud upon which they floated into the skies.

And then suddenly everything changed.

Trisha was ten weeks along when she started spotting. Panic filled Ryan’s chest. He drove her to the hospital and waited,squeezing her hand, until the doctor told them what he’d already begun to suspect. The baby was dead. Just like that.

The doctor said, “These kinds of things are very common. Really. In just a few months, you’ll be able to try again. There will be no problems.”

Ryan had the sense that the doctor was promising too much.

Trisha was utterly destroyed. All night, Ryan held her as she cried and tried to get her to eat something, anything. But she refused. After Ryan finally fell asleep—on accident—he woke up to a murky gray morning to discover that Trisha was gone. One of her backpacks was missing. Her car wasn’t in the apartment parking lot.

Ryan called Trisha’s cell ten times that morning to no avail. Finally, she shut it off wherever she was so that the ringing ceased, and it went straight to voicemail. Ryan was heartbroken. He felt as though he was walking through lava.

Without fully knowing what he was doing, he called his mother. Jackie could hear the devastation in his voice.

“I’m at your grandmother’s,” she explained. “Come over for lunch.”

It felt like an order that Ryan couldn’t turn down. He needed his family.

He called into work sick.

During his drive to the Sutton Estate, he didn’t once consider what Trisha might think of his running back to his grandmother and mother. He was crying without realizing it. When he reached the front door, Jackie threw it open and hugged him.

“Is it the baby?” she asked.

Ryan nodded and slumped over. “No baby.” That was all he could say.

Jackie led him into the kitchen, where she and his grandmother had made him a smorgasbord of food—sandwichesand muffins and soup and salads. Grandma Dana rubbed his back as he explained what had happened at the hospital.

“And she took off this morning? Just like that?” Jackie asked, appalled.

Ryan was having trouble believing it, too. His mother's expression fueled his anger. How could Trisha do this to him? Didn’t she understand that he’d lost a baby, too?

Years later, Ryan would adjust his opinion on this. Yes, the baby had been his baby. But as a twenty-five-year-old male, he couldn’t possibly fathom what was going on in Trisha’s heart, mind, and body. Losing a baby at ten weeks was excruciating. It forced Trisha to question everything she’d ever understood. She felt like a failure.

But Ryan was too young to understand that.

Toward nightfall, Ryan drove back to the apartment and tried Trisha’s cell again. No answer. He called a few of her friends, but they hadn’t heard from her.

It was beginning to dawn on him where she’d gone. Probably she was back at home with her mother and brothers and father and grandfather. But Ryan knew that was a place she didn’t want him to follow her to. It was a line drawn in the sand.

After Ryan said goodbye to another of Trisha’s friends, his mother called him. “Come back to the Sutton Estate,” she ordered him. “We’re going to have a big dinner and watch a movie. Together.”

Ryan knew how giddy his family was to have him “back.” He didn’t want to wait around in the apartment, eating soup from a can and chips from a bag. He wanted to feel normal again.

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