Free If Forever Comes by A. L. Jackson Page A

just intensified the
aching numbness. Not in the counseling sessions that did nothing
but stir up the pain, those anguished hours that only amplified the
loss.
    All I wanted was to sleep.
    I didn’t dream. I didn’t see. I didn’t
hurt.
    I didn’t exist.
    Get up, I screamed at myself from
within my mind .
    Sucking in a breath, my feet hit the floor and
I pushed myself to stand. Pain rocketed through my body. Something
physical. Something real.
    Clenching my hands into fists at my sides, I
swallowed down the tears that worked their way to my eyes, hoping
Natalie wasn’t there reading my posture from behind.
    “Go on,” she prodded at my back.
    I forced myself to nod and plodded into my
bathroom. I turned the shower as hot as it would go and let it warm
up as I shed the clothes I’d worn for days. Grimacing, I stepped
into the steaming shower.
    Blistering heat scorched me as the water
pelted my skin. I made myself stay under it, wishing it could
somehow burn this sorrow away, begged for it to cleanse my spirit
the same way it did my body.
    But it was no use. Unrelenting anguish built
up in my chest and burst from my mouth and eyes. Beneath the
shower, I placed my hands on the wall and dropped my head, bending
at the middle as I gasped for breath. For countless minutes, I gave
into it and let myself cry, let my grief go unseen in the water
that pounded on my head and back. It streaked in rivulets down my
body then dripped onto the tiles of the shower floor before it
disappeared down the drain.
    Gone .
    I clutched my stomach as I wept.
    Gone .
    And I knew this hurt would never
fade.
    Swallowing around the emotion lumped in my
throat, I forced it all back inside, searching for the numbness.
The last thing I needed was for Natalie to think she needed to come
up here to check on me. Quickly I washed, then turned off the
shower.
    I dried and dressed. Mindlessly I ran a brush
through the long length of my hair.
    I didn’t dare look in the mirror.
    Inhaling, I searched inside myself for some
semblance of normalcy, and I trained my expression as I left my
room and started down the stairs. I gripped at the railing as I
took them one by one.
    Natalie looked up from where she stood in
front of the couch, facing the stairs as she folded
laundry.
    “You don’t need to do that,” I fumbled through
the embarrassment that surged through me.
    “Pssh.” She smiled a smile that was much too
fake. “I don’t mind laundry at all.” She inclined her head to the
towering pile. “Besides, it looks like you could use some
help.”
    I knew she meant it to be nice, but it punched
me in the chest. I’d become helpless. Worthless. I couldn’t even
fold my daughter’s laundry. It was pathetic.
    What was hardest for me was the fact that
Christian was still financially taking care of me. Every two weeks,
he deposited money into the account we shared, one we’d opened
together as we’d started out on what was supposed to be our life
together. A life I now had to accept was never meant to be. He
never touched any of it, either, and I knew he left that money for
me.
    It was humiliating. Demeaning.
    Yet I took it because I didn’t know what else
to do. The thought of having to get up every day and go to work
churned my gut into a frenzy of anxiety. So I took from the man I
had broken, or maybe he had broken me.
    My chest squeezed.
    The truth was, it was life that had broken us
both, ripping from us what we didn’t know how to live
without.
    Natalie folded one of Lizzie’s shirts and
stacked it on top of the growing pile. “So how are you feeling
today?” she said in the most casual way, but with the heaviest of
undertones.
    God.
    Every time I saw my family, it was the
same—them looking at me, waiting for me to snap out of it, all of
them constantly telling me one day it would be okay. Resentment had
steadily built, because none of them understood. I’d gotten to the
point where I didn’t even want to see them, didn’t want to be