The Five Stages of Falling in Love (3 page)

“Look, I’m sorry I was snappish about the pool. I just… I was just worried about Abby. I took it out on you,” I relented, but wouldn’t look him in the eye. I’d always been terrible at apologies. When Grady and I would fight, I could never bring myself to tell him I felt sorry. Eventually, he’d just look at me and say, “I forgive you, Lizzy. Now come here and make it up to me.” With anyone else my pride would have refused to let me give in, but with Grady, the way he smoothed over my stubbornness and let me get away with keeping my dignity worked every single time.

“It’s alright, I can understand that,” my new neighbor agreed.

We stood there awkwardly for a few more moments, before I swooped down to pick up my plaid pants and discarded robe. “Alright, well I need to go get the kids ready for school. Thanks for convincing her to get out. Who knows how long we would have been stuck there playing
Finding
Nemo
.”

He chuckled but his eyes were confused. “Is that like Marco Polo?”

I shot him a questioning glance, wondering if he was serious or not. “No kids?” I asked.

He laughed again. “Nope, life-long bachelor.” He waved the box of Pop-Tarts and realization dawned on me. He hadn’t really seemed like a father before now, but in my world- my four kids, soccer mom, neighborhood watch secretary, active member of the PTO world- it was almost unfathomable to me that someone his age could not have kids.

I cleared my throat, “It’s uh, a little kid movie. Disney,” I explained and understanding lit his expression. “Um, thanks again.” I turned to Abby who was finishing up her breakfast, “Let’s go, Abs, you’re making us late for school.”

“I’m Ben by the way,” he called out to my back. “Ben Tyler.”

I snorted to myself at the two first names; it somehow seemed appropriate for the handsome life-long bachelor, but ridiculous all the same.

“Liz Carlson,” I called over my shoulder. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“Uh, the towels?” he shouted after me when we’d reached the gate.

I turned around with a dropped mouth, thinking a hundred different vile things about my new neighbor. “Can’t we… I…” I glanced down helplessly at my bare legs poking out of the bottom of the towel he’d just lent me.

“Liz,” he laughed familiarly, and I tried not to resent him. “I’m just teasing. Bring them back whenever.”

I growled something unintelligible that I hope sounded like “thank you” and spun on my heel, shooing Abby onto the lawn between our houses.

“Nice to meet you, neighbor,” he called out over the fence.

“You too,” I mumbled, not even turning my head to look back at him.

Obviously he was single and unattached. He was way too smug for his own good. I just hoped he would keep his gate locked and loud parties few and far between. He seemed like the type to throw frat party-like
keggers
and hire strippers for the weekend. I had a family to
raise
, a family that was quickly falling apart while I floundered to hold us together with tired arms and a broken spirit. I didn’t need a nosy neighbor handing out Pop-Tarts and sarcasm interfering with my life.
 

Chapter Two

“Hey-O!” Emma called from the open front door. “Where are you, Lizbeth?”

“In here,” I called back over my second cup of coffee. This morning had been a dismal failure, and the kids were, as predicted, late for school. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

My sister rounded the corner, flustered as usual. This was quite possibly a genetic trait, since I suffered from the same wild blonde hair and general air of confusion. She smiled at me, her full lips stretched tightly with unease. I recognized her assessing eye immediately. She was gauging my mood, deciding whether she would get emotionally-volatile-near-breakdown me or the somewhat holding-it-together me.

Today, I was in no way holding it together.

“I’d love one,” she sighed a little out of breath. She dropped her oversized bright orange purse on my kitchen counter and slid onto a barstool next to Lucy. “Hey little girl,
whatchya
up to?”

“Coloring a picture,” Lucy replied in her sweet four-year-old voice.

“Can I help?” Emma asked, already picking up a crayon.

“Just don’t use green. We
hate
the color green,” Lucy emphasized.

I cleared my throat and turned my back on them. That was my terrible influence and obsession with her daddy’s eyes. It was unfair to take out my trauma on the kids, but I didn’t know how to stop.

“For now,” Emma agreed. “But I bet we learn to like it again.”

“No psychobabble this morning,
please
!” I begged. I poured my sister her cup of coffee and handed it to her along with the creamer. She liked her coffee insanely sweet, and I wasn’t even going to try to guess her creamer-to-coffee ratio.
 

“What happened?” she asked in her knowing, grownup voice that I still had a hard time taking seriously. She was my little sister, a good six years younger than me and a complete flake. But ever since Grady, she had actually stepped up to the plate and been a huge support system for me. I wouldn’t be functioning today if it weren’t for her.

“I didn’t hug Abby when I dropped her off,” I admitted and the tears were already falling. Hot mess did not begin to cover the train wreck I had become.

“Alright, start at the beginning.” She pulled off her gauzy infinity scarf and settled in for the duration of my tale.

She was still getting her masters in counseling, so her schedule allowed her to stop by during the day and help me out. She was my saving grace in so many ways, but adult conversation was high on the list.

“Abby left the house this morning without telling me. I found her swimming laps in the new neighbor’s pool.” My anger still simmered under the surface, but more than that, the fear of almost losing her was choking me and I could barely breathe through the panic.

“Your sister is such a little fish,” Emma looked down at Lucy and giggled.

“Don’t make jokes,
Em
. She’s only six. Anything could have happened to her and I didn’t even know she left the house!” I stared into the black depths of my coffee and sniffled back more frustrated tears.

“Liz, you cannot keep blaming yourself for not being both parents. You
are
enough. You’re everything these kids need.” She smiled at me sympathetically and reached across to pat my hand. These were coping/comforting techniques she picked up from school and I found them mildly obnoxious.

I pulled my hand away from my sister’s compassionate grip and looked at Lucy. She colored happily for the moment, but I knew this would be another picture added to the pile I was supposed to “keep for Daddy.” The daddy she was convinced was just vacationing to heaven. The daddy she was positive wouldn’t leave his family forever. The daddy that should be walking through the front door any moment.

I wasn’t the only one struggling with denial.

The cold hard truth was that I wasn’t enough. I
had never been
enough. My marriage was a partnership built on mutual love and shared responsibility. The house had run as smoothly as the chaos of four little ones would allow, but we ran it
together
.

Grady had always been a doting father. He would get up early with the kids, make holidays, important days at school and birthdays so unbelievably special for them, and most of all, he met me halfway with discipline. He wasn’t a perfect man, and our marriage had been anything but.

I knew that. I told myself that often because it was too easy to idealize our relationship into utopic perfection. And imagining our life as perfect was a straight spiral into the dismal abyss of despair. But life had been good- really,
really
good, and easier and happy.

And now we were just barely surviving.

“So what happened with Abby?” Emma prompted.

“I couldn’t get her out of the pool. She was being difficult like usual. Finally the guy next door found us and lured her out with a Pop-tart. By then, we were late for school. I had to walk all the children inside and stop in the office to sign them in. I was so mad at her. Mad because she left the house without telling me, mad because she went swimming by herself and I can’t even think about the worst case scenario there, and mad because she made yet another morning difficult for me. I was so angry when I dropped her off in her classroom that I didn’t even hug her or tell her I loved her.” I was helpless to stop the tears that flowed freely down my flushed cheeks and dripped off my stubborn chin. “Now I have to wait until after school to see her. She has to go all day thinking I’m so mad at her that I don’t love her anymore. And I’m making myself sick over it.”
 

Emma’s blue-gray gaze held mine, her own tears brimming at the corners. With equal parts conviction and concern, she promised, “Liz, you
will
see Abby again. You
will
get to hug her and tell her you love her. She’s going to be alright. She knows you love her. There’s not a doubt in her pretty red head.”

I nodded, with my chin trembling and more tears falling. These were things I’d been trying to convince myself of all morning, but it helped when they came from someone else. Just because I lost one of the people I loved most in life, didn’t mean I was going to lose them all.

At least I wanted to believe that. The hole in my chest argued differently.

“Liz.” My sister stood up from the barstool and walked behind the long, tiled island to give me a tight hug. “You’re going to get through this. I know this is hard, but you are the strongest person I know. Grady would not have left you if he didn’t think you could handle this.”

I
hiccupped
a big, ugly sob and bent my face into her neck. She smelled like lilac and vanilla and like my sister. We’d been sharing hugs like this since she was born.

“
Em
,” was all I could sniffle. The pain was too acute, too shattering right now. I looked around the kitchen with watery eyes taking in all the careful details Grady had done himself with his own, rough hands.

Before cancer, he had been a strong, smart, capable man that started his own construction company and built it into somewhat of a local empire. He went from working every job himself to having multiple crews and foremen. He built our house, brick by loving brick and designed the entire inside himself when we finally had enough money and enough good credit to leave the cracker box of an apartment we shared for the first years of our marriage.

We had lived here for a little more than six years. Other than Blake, all of our kids were born into this home. We had gotten to know our neighbors as they each built around us and we had gotten our dream home, our forever home, when we were only twenty-six. We felt unbelievably blessed here when Grady was still healthy.

Now I felt drowned in memories of him. His ghost haunted me from every room, and lingered over each piece of furniture and hand-touched detail. This place by the island was where he would kiss me each morning and take his travel cup of coffee from me on his way to work. The long, weathered sectional couch in the living room was where we would cuddle up each night and fight over my reality shows vs.
Sports Center
. Our backyard was devastated by memories of him grilling, teaching the kids to play catch and enjoying nice evening nights as a family around the fire pit.

A consuming ache gripped at the center of my being and fractured my soul right down the middle. I felt the cracking intensely as it fissured out to each and every part of me, shattering my already broken spirit to pieces. Again.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered, ignoring the concerned look from Lucy. “How am I going to survive this,
Em
?”

Emma was bawling too by now. My hair was damp and matted from where her messy tears had fallen. But at my questions she straightened and cleared her throat. Using her mature voice again, she said, “First, you’re going to go take your run. I have to be back at the coffee shop by twelve to meet my study group so I don’t have a lot of time. And then… we will figure this out together, Lizbeth. You are not doing this alone.”

“Okay,” I agreed with a pathetic nod. I could do that. I could run. It would help me feel better anyway. I could use the time alone and the time to focus on at least one coherent thought.

“Mommy are you sad about daddy again?” Lucy asked, naïve, as any four-year-old would be.

I nodded, unable and unwilling to show her exactly how deep the sorrow was rooted.

“It’s okay to be sad, Mommy,” Lucy promised on a know-it-all whisper. “But don’t be sad all day. He only went on vacation. He wouldn’t leave us forever. He loves us too much.”

The tears immediately started again and in that moment I instinctively knew this day was only going to get worse.

Emma took that moment to ask, “Where’s
Jace
?”

I listened for a second and heard only silence.

So, I immediately panicked.

Unlike Abby, there was no way
Jace
had left this house without sounding alarm bells or leaving clues to what he was trying to do.
Jace
, in all his two-year-old glory, still hadn’t mastered the fine art of turning a doorknob. But he was dangerously quiet and that never signaled good things.

Emma and I raced through the kitchen and up the stairs. “He was playing in his room,” I panted as we careened down the hallway in search of him.

His room was empty, and so was his brother’s. There was a chance he was in Lucy’s room, so we headed that way next.

Then we heard the toilet flush. We changed paths and backtracked towards the kids’ bathroom, dread sending icicles of anxiety into every part of me.

There he was standing over the toilet looking down at a bowl filled to the brim with entire rolls of toilet paper. A mischievous smile played on his lips and he looked up at us with a giggle. His finger played with the flusher, as if he was getting ready to flush it again. Panic hazed my vision.

“
Jace
, don’t even think about it,” I threatened in a low voice.

Emma and I paused in the doorway, hands raised like he was a wild animal we were careful not to spook. He let out another devilish giggle and enthusiastically flushed the toilet.

Emma and I leapt toward him, watching in horror as the bowl filled with water and all the sacrificed rolls sloshed around in their sogginess. I shuddered at the mess and started to cry again when the water reached the brim of the white, porcelain bowl and spilled over onto the tiled floor.

My sister grabbed
Jace
so he wouldn’t get soaked and we all hopped back out of the way.
Jace
just kept giggling and the water just kept gushing onto the floor.

My head fell into my hands and I moaned, “This is just not my day.”

I thought Emma would agree with me, instead she said, “Go, Lizzy. Go run. I’ll clean this up.”

“Emma, I cannot leave you with this mess. Are you kidding?”

“You need the run,” she shrugged, but her face was contorted in disgust at the mess the bathroom had become in just a few short seconds. “I’ll have this cleaned up by the time you get back.”

“I love you,” I whispered, still not able to get ahold of my emotions, but anxious for the opportunity to bale on this latest catastrophe. If I didn’t have to clean up just one of the many tragedies in my upside down life, it might be the difference between my sanity and a mental breakdown.

“Go!” she ordered. “Before I change my mind.”

And I obeyed. While she calmly chastised
Jace
on his destruction techniques, I slipped on my tennis shoes and bolted out the front door. I ran away from the mess in the bathroom, away from children I couldn’t control on my own and away from a house so saturated with memories of the man I loved, I couldn’t breathe with him so close.