Show me where forever dies.Somehow preferring to letting the children do all the talking on our trip up to the lake with Caleb parlayed the day into an extended engagement and I wound up tucking them into his guest room just past eight, when they caved in and almost fell asleep over slices of pizza outside on the tiny balcony at my favorite table, watching the traffic and the lights across the river, still mired in their delicious sand and sunscreen smell.
Once they were asleep three servers appeared with our dinner, just after ten with a perfect view of the approaching thunderstorm. Wine. Salads. Tenderloin. Cake. Water, after I asked twice and then shot Caleb a look because unless he says it they don't hear it. On cue they vanished out the door and he cleared the table, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, humming songs I only learned yesterday, packing the dishes back into the box that would be collected tomorrow by yet another series of paid-for help. Oh, if life were only like that box, and we could pack up all the dirty memories and distasteful items and have them taken away.
Aside from asking for water, because I was dying of thirst and refusing to touch my wine, I didn't say much. I watched him because he spent the day watching me without seeming to and I let him ask questions I didn't answer and he called me a brat because I wasn't playing nice and I didn't care because sometimes he's not going to get everything he wants. And I don't plan to either.
I sat there in a chair that costs as much as my car, still in my stilettos while someone brought me dinner that I didn't have to cook. I don't have to lift a finger there. I could admire a French painting and be on a flight to Paris the next morning. I could wish for the beach and be given one. I could ask for escape from the hell inside my head and get it and never come back. Though I don't think he would take a mother away from her children, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I would hope he wouldn't. I'm sure he'll now tell me he won't.
Unless I fail to play the game, which rages painfully on. The only thing he gained from all this is the honor of fatherhood that all of them crave so privately. Oh, because according to Lochlan, fathering a child with Bridget is pretty much the brass ring in their lives and since there were only two rings, the game is over. But maybe it's not and they hold out for that ultimate connection. Caleb has been playing with them, teasing them with horror by hinting that perhaps he is Ruth's father as well. He isn't but why would they believe me at this point? There's no one left to back me up but I was never defended in my life until Jacob fell into it and then kept falling, right through my fingers because they fluttered so badly I couldn't hold on to him.
I pointed out we could have testing done and then what would change? I'm still forced to endure Caleb's dangerous presence and everyone else is forced to watch me founder around for purchase on life. I've got the moments down, I think. Overall I'm doing spectacularly poor. I can talk your talk. Optimism. Hope. Faith. Looking toward the future, living in the moment. Working hard. Making improvements. Making headway.
It's bullshit.
All of it.
I'm sorry.
Ben being perpetually absent leaves me falling hard into old habits and comfortable fears. I'm terrified of Caleb and attracted to him at the same time. It's an easy place for me to be within his reach, scared for my life and aware of the mind-breaking sexual tension there. His Coleisms that burn into me because I keep my hands in the fire.
It only got worse as I got older.
Just thinking about him makes me outwardly flinch. The goosebumps flare up and my brain goes into hiding and Cole's little survivor-girl kicks right in to high gear, because he taught me how to slay a man with a look or a touch and then he regretted it only in the moment where I found my voice and ripped his life away from him.
There is only so much one person can take and I'm at the uppermost limits of that. You sit there and throw money at it and it doesn't make it any damned different, okay? What has she got to worry about, anyway? They fight over her. Yeah, well, I worry that when I'm gone they'll still be fighting over my corpse and my children will get ignored. Because I'm a distraction, I can't remove myself from the picture. I won't try. I'm so fucked up. I worry that they'll kill each other without me around as living example of the hurt they can evoke in each other. When there is nothing left to fight over, these boys will still fight on principle.
Caleb wants that loyalty, he wants the lap dances and the fatherhood and he wants to make me his. Hell, they all do. I'm not dumb and all of it with different plans and different wants and different futures. It doesn't matter.
(I stepped outside the lines I drew. What good is a line you can't cross, anyway? And I stood on the wrong side of the lines and I put my hands up over my eyes without prompting and I began to count. I counted until the sounds fell away and the numbers became hypnosis and I knew for sure everyone would have a hiding place by now. Especially Ben. Ben needs a little extra time because he's so big, he can't fit in the places I can, like the pantry under the shelves or the cookie cupboard or the bench in the hall or the dumbwaiter or the little space under the attic stairs. In spite of his size, I found him first and we stopped playing the game altogether.)
They think it's a phase. They think I've lost my mind and I have. Cole took it and hid it somewhere and I looked for a while but then I stopped because it was more fun playing hide and seek with people than with the contents of my own skull.
I'm hurt by that.
It's not, he's not a phase. I know my actions maybe speak for me because I don't say enough but everyone's waiting for Ben and I to stop playing and be serious. To give up on being married because my God, she picked him out of everyone? The freak. The one who's never around. The one who lives in his own little world as much as she does? It won't last. Besides, look what happens when she's with Caleb?
Yeah, well, fuck you too, and thanks for your support (rhetorical, as always, Bridget, for you are self-soothing again).
The night I met Ben, we went skinny dipping and then Cole called me in from the water was the first night Ben ever went camping in his entire life and forgot to bring the tent part of the deal. He brought his guitar and a Gameboy and lots of food and beer and cigarettes and extra strings even, but he expected a cabin because he drifts along like that and doesn't actually ask. The girls he knows would expect a cabin so he figured there was a girl going, there must be a cabin. Cole offered him space in our tent and it became a tradition after that, he would forget his tent forever in order to spoon with me as soon as I fell asleep. His security blanket, he said.
We forged an easy friendship, to great surprise. The other guys were slow to warm to Ben. He marches to his own drummer, keeps time with the metronome in his head that never quits and serves as his heartbeat and he sticks out like a sore thumb. He looks scary. Handsomely frightening, instead of frighteningly handsome. Very good looking but hulking, scowling. His angel voice is hidden in layers of surging screams. Most stations skip playing all but his softest creations and he doesn't say much. Just like I don't so much, not anymore. We have stuck together like long-distance glue for a while now and eventually the guys saw that we did connect well. For all the nights we closed down bars and sang in taxis and collapsed on couches, meeting up the next morning to agree on greasy food, even when he would take some girl home, he would still appear at the table within 20 minutes of a phone call from me. He's looked after me when we've been out in sketchy situations and he had the really hard job of standing between two friends and being the deciding factor on a lot of issues between Cole and I. When I left Cole for Jacob, Ben took it personally and picked a side. Cole's side.
Then he lost his mom, his best friend and his father in the space of eighteen months and he checked out on me, becoming someone I didn't recognize anymore. Someone I was afraid of, suddenly. Someone just like Cole only scarier. He came to me once, when he got the call about his dad, and I held him while he cried, sitting on the floor of the apartment he had been kicked out of the day before for nonpayment of rent because he couldn't remember to leave post-dated cheques when he'd go on the road. I sat there surrounded by beer bottle caps and pizza boxes and I hung on so tight while he ranted and rolled at all the bad things I had ever done to him, in lieu of saying he would miss his father. That was the only time he's ever shown any emotion concerning his parents and then he asked me to look after Daniel because he said he couldn't.
Ben started spending more time away, and when he was here he was adversarial and spending too much time with Caleb. He started doing things that he shouldn't have been doing.
I had to let him go. I tried to help him and he took his rage out on me and I finally came to the conclusion that I was more of a problem to him than any help at all and so I cut him loose in spite of loving him, and kept his brother close because Daniel founders something awful. I know Ben was grateful after a fashion for that. He would call me maybe once a month to tell me that he loved me and I make the wrong decisions, always, and I told him I would be here but that I wasn't going to make any effort to be his friend anymore if this was how he had changed. We made a few stabs at repairing our friendship over the next two years but it was pointless. He had started drinking, started using, would be due back from tour one day and not show up for weeks, with no account of where he had been.
I waited for the call every minute telling me that he had died somewhere on the road from a drug overdose and apathy combined.
A call did eventually come but it wasn't for his death, now, was it?
Fuck. I don't know where I'm going with this.
Yes, I do.
we're so much alike, it's fucking stupid. He says I make him laugh. He gives me free reign to go fuck up and then come back to him and I do the same for him. Trusting in boomerangs. I don't trust that he'll ever come home from his trips and he doesn't trust that I won't change my mind and fall in love with someone else while he's away and yet outwardly we will tell you we trust each other because we don't have much choice. We won't allow for that choice.
He's always going to come home. He always has come back to me even when there was nothing of me here to come back to. When I hated him. When I was barred from even speaking to him. And I have no interesting in falling in love with anyone else because I've had the offers of money and trips and that easy life and someone who would always be here and I could be content in arms that would never vanish from my life.
Whatever.
Because even with Ben's disappearing act and his angry, beautiful face and his weird ability to live on pizza and guitar picks and wool scarves and my lip gloss, even with his history of not being able to ride on the wagon because he is too big and keeps falling into the road, even with his history of pain and misery and self-gratification and immaturity and uncontrollable emotions?
He is still MY Ben. My capital-B. My Tucker. And I am his.
For the record, I left my children at the loft with Caleb last night, kissing them good night and coming home to an empty house that featured John sitting on the front porch, since he lives at the end of the street, to make sure I did get home safely and he walked back down the sidewalk after I came inside and locked the front door.
The children were treated to a lovely car ride home this morning at eight. Same servers as last night, but with pancakes and fruit for breakfast with Uncle Cale. He let them eat in bed while watching cartoons. Which is lovely, I know he'll just box up the dirty linens and have them sent away. Just like everything else.
No accountability. None whatsoever.
Ever think that I'm the one using him for time with Cole? Atoning for the sins of the past so that I can clear a path to the future? Allowing Caleb access to the children, playing nice instead of playing hardball and putting up with him licking me with his eyes all damned day and night is a means to an end and nothing more.
Ben knows that. And I love him for it. Even when I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. He seems to know the method to my madness, even when I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Just like he instinctively knows that he won't fit in the corners of my head when we're playing hide and seek. That, and he makes me laugh.
I don't care if you get it. I'm just emptying my head.