The Fourteen Day Soul Detox (9 page)

“You know I do have walls and
furniture you could do that on.”

“You’re just the right
height. Don’t you dare move,” she said. “So, it
sounds like your day fucking sucked.”

“I heard that!” Beza yelled
from Sarah’s room.

“Crap,” Susan mumbled under
her breath.

“I’m not sure, in a way it
was horrible, but not really. Sometimes, I think that life is only a
series of moments. And today, moments were just shooting at me left
and right. It was like I didn’t have a single thing really
happen for a year, then just today, a million things happened. Except
for almost hitting that girl, they weren’t even that big
either, just there.”

“Maybe you were walking around
asleep for the past year, and some… power determined that you
were ready to wake up,” she said.

“If life is a series of moments,
and you have a year without any real moments, I guess you wouldn’t
have really lived that year. And then maybe you could live a whole
lifetime in a day filled with moments like the ones I had today.”

“Maybe you’re just paying
attention again, and seeing what you forgot how to see,” she
said.

“How am I going to fix my life,
Susan?”

“With a pen and paper,” she
said.

“You make it sound so easy,”
I mumbled.

She sighed, letting go of my shoulder.
“I’m going to go lie down on your couch. I always thought
you and Beza were just being big whiney babies, but oh my god, this
pregnancy thing is exhausting.”

“That is why you got to do it
this time around,” Beza said as she reentered the room with
Sarah’s small suitcase.

When I walked over to the kitchen, all
I heard was giggling. Aiden spoke along with the announcer of the
gymnastic event, though he obviously didn’t know the words. He
said in a low voice, “That lady just did a flip-de-loo, and now
she’s going to do a wa-de-ka. Don’t fall lady, the
snakes!”

Sarah’s shoulders shook with her
laughter.

“He has a pretty good announcer
voice,” I said to Beza. “Maybe he has a future career in
being a goofball.” I tickled Aiden as I said it.

He giggled, trying to grab my hands.
“Mom, Aunt Jamie just said balls!”

Susan started laughing from the other
room.

“I did not,” I said, still
tickling him.

“Aiden,” Beza said in a
warning tone, though I heard suppressed laughter in her voice.
“That’s what it’s been all this week.” Beza
shook her head. She turned to Sarah. “Hey cutie, you ready to
go? You’re going to have a sleep over with just me and Aiden
tonight.”

“I’m ready to go,”
Sarah said, jumping off her chair. She jumped up and down. “Bye
mom!”

“Wow, I’m glad you’re
so excited,” I said, breathing out a laugh. “Come give me
a hug.” When she did, I told her, “Now behave for your
aunt Beza, okay?”

“Yes,” she said. After
walking the group to the door, I stole another hug from each of them.

“Unlock your car so I can grab
your booster seat,” Beza said.

“Oh, shoot, you want me to switch
it?”

“No, I got it, Jamie,” she
said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

I unlocked the car remotely and watched
the group walk away.

When I reentered the living room, Susan
laboriously moved her feet down and sat up. “Come over here and
help me get my pregnant ass up,” she said, holding a handout to
me.

“Who knew you were going to be
the biggest baby of all of us,” I said as I helped her stand.

“Shut the fuck up,” she
said.

“What, are you trying to get your
swearing out while Beza is not around?”

“Yes, she’s on my case,”
she said.

“I’m surprised she’s
put up with you for as long as she has,” I said.

“Me too, me too,” she said,
plopping her butt down on my kitchen chair.

“Will you make me something to
eat? I’m starving,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, but I’m
microwaving it.” I opened my freezer, “Enchiladas or
lasagna?”

“Ooh, lasagna,” she said.
“And grab me a pen and a piece of paper, too. Oh, and a glass
of milk.”

“Holy shit, Susan, I thought you
were here to help me,” I said.

“I am, hence the paper. Move,
woman, I’m not getting any less pregnant here,” she said.

With a sigh, I warmed up the lasagna
and brought her everything she wanted.

She clicked the back of the pen. “Okay
so, you want to change your life,” she said.

I sighed. “I guess.”

Her bright blue eyes drilled into mine.
“You do or you don’t?” she snapped.

“I’m pretty sure I need to
change things,” I said, looking away.

“Oh, you need to change things.
That’s a definite. I’m just asking if you’re
willing to change things, if you’ve given yourself permission
to change things yet. I don’t want to spend all this time
figuring out how to make you better, just to have you go back to
punishing yourself.”

“Why would I punish myself?”
I asked, rocking back in my chair. “I didn’t do anything
wrong.”

“I’m not saying you have a
good reason, I’m just saying that you’re doing it.”
She rubbed her hand over her belly and looked away from me. “When
my mom died, it felt like the worst thing that could ever happen in
my life, but it wasn’t. It was Logan’s death that truly
destroyed me. I wake up thinking about him. I still cry myself to
sleep. Sometimes I even still call him and leave a message on his
answering machine, hoping like hell that you don’t still check
those messages.”

“I don’t,” I
whispered.

She wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Losing Logan felt like more than I could bear.” She
turned her gaze on me. “But you know what? I can still have a
healthy relationship with my wife. And you don’t see me slowly
destroying my body. And I definitely don’t make monthly
payments into some huge inflated lien on Logan’s coffee shop.
Because you know what, even when you pay that off, he’ll still
be gone. You’re not immortalizing him; you’re
immortalizing the shit situation he left you in.”

“There’s nothing left,”
I said to her, tears again coursing down my face. “We don’t
have the house. I don’t have a single thing of ours.”

“You have Sarah,” she said,
eyebrows raised.

“You don’t get it,” I
said.

“Oh, I get it,” she said.
“Do you need his permission to move on? Because, you know what?
Logan and I shared a womb. Most people said we shared a personality
too, and I can tell you, it’s okay to move on. If I got myself
killed in some screwed up way that left Beza and Aiden in a ton of
debt, I would want her to sell my fucking bones if she had to, to get
out of that debt.”

I shook my head.

“I know he screwed up, I know he
went off the deep end and you guys probably would have split no
matter what, but even so, I know he loved you and Sarah more than
anything. All he would want now is for you two to be happy. He’d
want you to move on.”

Pressing my palms into my eyes, I
whispered, “I have to sell the shop, don’t I?”

I felt Susan’s hand on my back,
rubbing up and down. “Yes,” she said. “And a lot
more, I think you need a whole life detox.”

“How do I do that?” I said,
half laughing, half sobbing.

“We’ll start small,”
she said. “First, we’ll just write down the things to fix
your health. Then we’ll figure out the rest.”

“I have to quit Cameron, don’t
I?” I whispered.

“Or be with him for real,”
Susan said.

“I can’t do that,” I
said.

“You’re in love with him.
He’s in love with you and your daughter; I can’t fathom
why you two can’t be together.” When I didn’t
respond, she made a huffing sound. “No… really, Jamie?
You have to get over that.”

I looked up from my hands. “I
can’t. Don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t you
think that I’ve thought these exact same thoughts a hundred
times? I’m never going to get over it.”

“Then yeah, you have to let him
go,” Jamie said, shaking her head and looking away.

“That’s going to be hard,”
I said, swallowing.

“So, if say, you were with a guy
and you were in love with him and loved his kid, and you spent all of
your free time trying to be with both of them. Then you went and
played mommy three times a week, watching his kid. But all this time,
the guy knows there’s no future for your relationship, but he
refuses to pull the plug because it would be too hard to let you go.”

“Sounds like an asshole,” I
said, blowing out a breath.

“Honey, you’re an asshole.”

I let my face fall into my hands.
“You’re right.”

Susan put her pen to the paper. “My
fourteen day soul detox,” she said, while writing.

“You’re giving me a
deadline?”

She met my gaze and pursed her lips.
“Yes. Alright, let’s start with your body. You need to
gain fifteen pounds.”

“Fifteen pounds in fourteen days?
That’s impossible,” I said.

“Women going back to the creation
of the holiday season would beg to differ. You just need to…
cut back on coffee. That will be up here at number one,” she
said while writing.

“Nope, vetoed,” I said.

“You only get one veto, you
really want to use it on coffee?” she asked.

“Do you know me at all?”

“Better than even you do, soul
sister,” she said. “Okay fine, I’ll put a ‘to
be decided’ by it. When’s the last time you exercised?”

I smirked at her. “This morning.”

“That,” she pointed at me,
“does not count. I’m talking like a run, or a Zumba class
or something.”

“I hate those dance classes, I
can never learn the routines and I’m just stumbling into
everyone.”

“Yoga,” she said as she
wrote it. “You can come with me to my class.”

“You don’t go to yoga. How
come I’ve never heard of this yoga class?” I said.

“Okay, so I’ve never
actually gone there, but I was given the brochure a couple months
ago, and I kept it because I thought sometime soon, I might actually
go. We can try it together.”

Susan and I spent the rest of the
evening working on my detox list.

The
Fourteen Day Soul Detox

In the next fourteen days, I plan to:

Body

1)
Cut back on my coffee intake.

2)
Gain some of my weight back.

3)
Start getting some exercise again. Yoga? Maybe.

4)
Sleep.

Mind

5)
Take on my daughter’s school board.

6)
Sell my coffee shop.

7)
Go on a date.

Soul

8)
Stop wearing my wedding ring.

9)
Spread my husband’s ashes.

10)
Forgive the woman who killed him.

11)
Stop sleeping with her ex-husband.

12)
Remember what love feels like.

13)
Be happy.

14)
(Vetoed and erased from the list.)

Day
One

Dying
a Slow Coffee-Deprived Death

I woke up staring at the USA 2012
Artistic Gymnastic Olympic team. The young women grinned from ear to
ear, all holding medals—three of them held two. I blinked my
heavy eyelids as I scanned the room. It was difficult untangling
myself from the purple bed sheet, but when I finally managed, I sat
up and pushed my feet into the shag carpet.

Trudging out of Sarah’s room, I
walked to the cupboard and grabbed a mug. The coffee maker beckoned
me forward with its delicious promise of wakefulness, and I smiled.
Grabbing up the carafe I poured it over my mug.

Nothing came out.

I glanced at the glowing buttons
beneath on the coffee maker control panel, where the timer button was
not lit up.

“Don’t tell me you don’t
remember,” Susan’s voice said from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder to find her
big pregnant belly sticking out of her tank top. She folded her arms
over her chest.

“Oh, no,” I said, my hand
going to my forehead. “I changed my mind.”

“Nope, I don’t think so,”
she said. “Go get dressed; we’re going to the health food
store.”

“I’m better, my soul is
detoxed. Give me my coffee,” I said.

“Nope,” she said.

“You’re just doing this to
me because you’re pregnant and can’t have coffee; so you
want me to suffer with you,” I said. I collapsed forward onto
the counter, laying my head on my arms.

“Yep, that’s exactly why
I’m doing this,” she said. “I love watching you
suffer. Now go get ready.”

“Can’t we start with a
different thing? Like, I could go eat an entire cake or go on a run
or take a nap.”

“Nope, you have to at least start
on one task per day, going down the list in order. You can do things
early, but you can’t skip anything. Otherwise, you’ll
give up when the hard part comes. You only get one day off, and
you’ll need it later,” she said.

“This whole thing is ridiculous,”
I said. I filled my cup with water, and then crossed to my cupboard
to retrieve my aspirin bottle.

“If you are good, you can have
one cup of coffee before work tonight,” she said.

After swallowing the pills, I asked,
“Why the hell did I ask for your help?”

“Because you finally actually
wanted help, and not a pat on the back,” she said.

Laughing, I said, “You are so
mean.”

“Get dressed, I’ll drive,”
she said.

“I can drive,” I said.

“Um, no, I’m probably going
to insist on pushing the grocery cart around, too,” she said.

“Ugh,” I said at her as I
passed on my way to my bedroom. “You made my bed?” I
asked as I entered my room.

“You’re welcome,” she
said.

“I’d be thankful if I liked
you,” I grumbled.

Opening up my dresser, an empty drawer
stared back at me. When I opened another drawer, I realized I was out
of sweatpants too. “Crap, I’m out of clothes!” I
made a ‘ugh’ sound and laid back down on my bed.