Page 37 of Say Something
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“The river is pretty dried up,” Danny said, pulling me from my memory.
I looked ahead of us, over his shoulder and felt a deep sadness run through me. The dock we’d jumped off of as kids was there, but the water line was at least fifty feet beyond that.
I reluctantly released Danny’s waist and climbed off the four-wheeler. We walked down the dock, our booted footsteps sounding hollow without the water below. I paused at the end, seeing an image of us in the water under the moonlight. Him holding me, so close and so tight.
Oh, to be seventeen again.
“Uncle Pete said there were several dry summers. Water level dropped each year. Sad to think it may completely dry up one day.”
The thought almost brought tears to my eyes. Aside from the night we skinny dipped, we’d come to this river a lot that summer. Kicking our feet off the dock, swimming around, floating on our inner tubes that were connected to the dock by a rope so we wouldn’t float too far away.
The fact that it had dried up just like our relationship...it hurt. It hurt a lot.
As though he knew I needed the support...the feel of his touch...Danny put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his side.Always so intuitive.
“We had a lot of good times here,” he said, reading my mind.
“We did,” I agreed, staring out across the expansive space. The tree line across the way seemed so much closer without the water running in between.
“Are you looking forward to starting work on Monday?” He dropped his arm from my shoulder and sat at the edge of the dock, legs hanging off the end, feet swinging.
I copied his move, sitting beside him. “I am. It’s kind of weird,” I confessed. “I don’t have any appointments or anything, so I have no idea what the day will bring, but I am looking forward to getting up in the morning, getting dressed and walking all the way across the driveway to my office.”
“Do you miss the city?” he asked.
I frowned. How to put it into words? Simply... “No, I don’t miss it.”
“That’s surprising,” he said, glancing at me briefly. “You loved it so much.”
I sighed. As easy as our camaraderie was, there would always be the hard parts. The tough parts. The real parts. They would always be there until we talked about them, resolved them, and they weren’t there anymore.
“The city wasn’t kind to me,” I said after a while. I must have surprised him with my reply because suddenly he was looking at me with a curious expression on his face. “I had so many hopes and dreams, you know? Plans for city life. It all came crashing down around me. Maybe it was my own fault, but it happened all the same.”
“Jess, none of what happened was your fault,” Danny said. The honesty of his words shown through his light brown eyes.
“Wasn’t it, though?” Maybe it wasn’t my fault that I’m infertile. Maybe that was God or biology or Mother Nature or whatever, but wasn’t the way I handled it my fault? Isn’t that what ultimately caused our downfall?
Danny sighed. He knew me well enough to know that was a rhetorical question, and that the old argument still stood. I held the weight of the failure of our relationship, of our future, on my shoulders. Therapy and time wasn’t going to change that. His words weren’t going to change that. It was up to me. I had to change my mind, and I wasn’t quite ready to do that. I wasn’t there yet.
“We did everything we could, but the damage was irreparable. We had to remove both of your fallopian tubes.” The doctor’s words echoed in my head long after he’d spoken them.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this,” Danny said, and I nodded absently. I looked away from him and towards the window of the post-surgical unit, not really seeing anything. I noticed the sky was gray, which was the way my heart felt. Gray, drab, dreary.
My chances of conceiving a baby—Danny’s baby—naturally had just gone out that hospital window.
What kind of woman was I? Was I even a woman if I couldn’t perform this one task? We were biologically made to carry children. I had all the right parts; they just didn’t work. I felt like a failure. Iwasa failure.
I was incomplete…literally…having just had my tubes removed due to an old inflammation. Some kind of bacteria had caused damage to my tubes and ultimately resulted in a blockage that couldn’t be fixed. Was I naïve to have thought they could repair it? I didn’t think so before, but now? Not so much.
I felt useless.
I felt like less of a woman.
I felt like nothing.
Nothing.
