AJ (VI)
AJ would never know what woke him up that night. All he knew was that it was still dark when he awoke, abruptly, in the middle of the night and that, at first, he was disoriented.
He sat up halfway, squinting blearily at the bedside clock. It was one-thirty in the morning, which meant he had only been in bed for a couple of hours. He lay back down and rolled away from the clock, intending to go back to sleep. That was when he saw that Jori’s side of the bed was empty.
AJ sat up again and reached over to his bedside table to turn on the lamp. He looked around the room, but Jori was nowhere to be seen. The sheets on her side of the bed were rumpled where she had slept – or rolled around, at least, since Jori rarely slept well these days. She had gone to bed with him before midnight, but she must have gotten up again after he’d fallen asleep.
For a full minute or two, he sat stewing over whether or not to get up and check on her. On one hand, he was still tired and wanted to go back to sleep. On the other hand, he was concerned about Jori and wanted to make sure she was alright. In the end, he realized he would not be able to rest until he knew where Jori was, so he dragged himself out of bed and went to find her.
It didn’t take long. When he padded into the darkened hall, he noticed a soft glow radiating from an open door to the right. Lucy’s bedroom. Invisible fingers squeezed his heart. He and Jori always kept the door to the nursery shut. The only time he had opened that door and gone inside since the day they’d come home from the hospital without their baby was when Jori had asked him to pick out the clothes Lucy would be cremated in. She couldn’t do it, she’d said. As far as he knew, she hadn’t been in the room since.
But she was in there now. Standing in the doorway, he could see her sitting in the rocking chair. She was hunched over, holding something in her hands – one of Lucy’s stuffed animals, by the look of it. He could see her shoulders shaking and knew she was crying. He hesitated, unsure of whether he should go in and comfort her or just let her be. With Jori, he never knew what to expect, and he couldn’t predict how she might react.
Her grief had manifested itself much differently from his own. While AJ had welcomed the support of friends and family, Jori had isolated herself, spending long hours locked up in her room, refusing to see anyone. Whenever he tried to talk to her about Lucy, she shut down, insisting she wasn’t ready. And although he had stayed sober for her sake, Jori had drowned her sorrows in alcohol. AJ had tried to get her help for her depression, even suggesting they attend grief counseling together, but Jori had declined every offer. She’d stopped seeing the therapist she had started talking to after Lucy was born, leaving AJ to live with the fear that he would wake up one morning or walk upstairs one evening after work and find her dead, too.
So in a way, it was a relief to find her in Lucy’s room, visibly upset but very much alive. He made up his mind and took a tentative step into the room. It was musty from being shut up for so long, but underneath the stale smell of dust, he could still smell the cloying scent of baby powder coming from Lucy’s changing table. The carousel lamp by the crib was on, splashing colorful shapes across the walls and ceiling. The light illuminated the mural Jori had so painstakingly painted. Neither of them had the heart to paint over it, nor had they packed up any of Lucy’s things. Her clothes were still hanging in the closet, and her toys and books were still stacked on their shelves. Sometimes Jori acted as if Lucy had never existed, but to AJ, it looked like she’d never left.
“Jor?” he whispered, and she jumped out of the rocker, startled.
“God, you scared the shit out of me!” she said shrilly, glaring at him through eyes that were red and puffy.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized quickly. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I just wanted to see why you weren’t in bed. What are you doing in here?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she snapped, flinging her hands into the air. As the stuffed animal she’d been holding flew across the room, he recognized it as Lucy’s octopus, the one Jori’s mother had given her on their trip to Indiana.
He stooped to pick up the toy. “Do you always come in here at night?” he wondered aloud, winding one of its tentacles around his finger. “Or is this the first time?”
“Why does it matter? Why are you always so concerned about what I do, what I think, how I feel?”
He could tell that she’d been drinking. With a pointed look, he replied, “Because I love you, Jori.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she muttered. It was half under her breath, but he heard it anyway.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. If you love me so much, do me a favor and leave me alone, okay?”
AJ just stared at her, looking for some sign of the woman he loved behind the walls she had built up around herself. Some days, she was hardly recognizable. He wanted to be there for her, but she wouldn’t let him in. In the six months that had passed since Lucy died, their relationship had deteriorated to the point that he wasn’t sure when or if they would ever get married. Out of habit, Jori still wore the opal engagement ring on her finger, but she hadn’t made any more plans for the fall wedding she’d wanted. It was already November. The leaves had fallen from the trees and withered on the ground. Winter was on its way. AJ knew there would be no wedding that year.
But he still wanted to marry Jori someday. He still loved her, and so, although her response stung, he stood his ground. “No,” he said firmly. “I will not leave you alone. You’ve been dealing with this alone for months and not doing a very damn good job of it. You need to open up and start talking to me about this stuff, Jori. We’ve been through hell together. We’re never gonna heal if we don’t help each other out. Let me help you.”
He reached out to her, but she turned away.
“Jori, please,” he begged, but she took a step toward the crib, ignoring him. He knew how stubborn Jori could be, but he was determined to break through her defenses that night.
Had he not been, she might have lived to see the light of morning. But AJ was just as stubborn as Jori, and he persisted until she finally cracked under pressure.
“Come on, babe,” he said, coming up behind her and placing his hand on her back. “Talk to me.”
“Talk to you about what?” she asked, without turning around. “About Lucy? About the day she died?”
“Whatever you wanna talk about.” He rubbed her back in slow circles, gently encouraging her to keep going. “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
She sniffed. “I can’t stop thinking about that day,” she said softly, and AJ was encouraged.
To him, it was a relief to hear her start talking, after months of keeping her thoughts to herself. But by the time she finished, he would wish she had never said a word.
“It was raining,” she went on, still facing the wall. “Lucy was fussy, and I was dragging. I just wanted to go back to bed. I put her down for her morning nap, but she wouldn’t go to sleep. She just lay here in the crib and cried.” Her fingers closed around the crib rail. “I tried to leave her – you know, so she could learn to self-soothe. I walked away and closed the door to her room. I went back to our room to lie down. I could hear her crying on the baby monitor. I tried to block out the sound so I could sleep, but I couldn’t. So I shut off the monitor.”
AJ’s heart sunk. He had a feeling that Jori had been harboring some feelings of guilt, as the one who had been with Lucy that day, and her admission that she had turned off the baby monitor confirmed these suspicions. “Baby, you can’t blame yourself,” he said, still stroking her back. “You couldn’t have heard her stop breathing on the baby monitor. She died in her sleep.”
Jori shook her head. “I could still hear her crying through the walls,” she continued, as if he hadn’t interrupted her. “I closed my eyes and lay there, waiting for her to stop, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. So I got up and went to get her. I walked into her room, and she was still screaming her head off here in the crib.” She bowed her head, looking down into the bed in which their baby had slept. “I just wanted to calm her down. I grabbed her octopus, and I sort of shook it in front of her – you remember how she liked to watch the tentacles wiggle around.”
Though she couldn’t see him behind her, AJ nodded, a lump clogging his throat as he remembered Lucy’s slobbery smiles.
“I thought that would work, but she just wouldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stand it anymore; it was driving me crazy. Literally crazy.” Her voice had started to shake. “I don’t know what came over me. I just know I couldn’t take it anymore. I just wanted her to stop crying. So I took the octopus…”
AJ’s grip tightened around the toy in his hand.
“…and I put it over her face, to cover her mouth… and I held it down.”
His heart jumped out of his stomach and into his throat, hammering so hard he could scarcely breathe, let alone speak.
“I closed my eyes, and I held it until I heard her stop crying.
“No,” whispered AJ, as he realized what Jori was telling him.
A sob escaped her throat. “When I lifted it off her face, it looked like she was sleeping.” Her voice had gotten so shaky, it was hard to understand. Still, AJ hung on to every word. “So I went back to bed and lay down again, and I fell asleep. And when I woke up… I realized she was gone.”
“BULLSHIT!” The word spewed from his lips like venom, startling her. She spun around, tears streaming down her face. He glared at her, his heart beating pure rage through his veins. “You didn’t just ‘realize’ she was gone when you woke up. You let me go six months thinking she had died in her sleep, when all this time, you knew full well that you fucking killed her! You KILLED OUR BABY!”
Jori shook her head, but she did not deny it. All she said was, “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”
AJ just stared at her. Through a fog of fury, he saw the woman in front of him, but he did not recognize her as the love of his life, the mother of his child. The person who stood before him was a stranger.
She quailed under his furious stare, stumbling backwards as if her knees were on the verge of buckling. Clutching her face in her hands, she let out another sob, then turned and ran from the room. AJ could hear her crying as she rammed clumsily through the apartment. Then the door swung open and slammed shut, and she was gone.
He was left standing alone in the center of Lucy’s room, reeling with the shock of Jori’s confession. In a matter of minutes, he rapid-cycled through a full range of emotions, from disbelief to anger, to sadness, and back to anger again when he realized he was still holding the stuffed octopus. His hand shook as he held it up, looking into its friendly, smiling face with revulsion. What had once been an innocent baby toy had become a murder weapon, the very same one his fiancée had used to smother their daughter.
Why? he thought desperately. Why? Jori had tried to explain, but he couldn’t understand how the woman he’d trusted to take care of his child could have done something so unspeakable. He couldn’t let her run away from this. He needed more than an apology. He needed answers.
“JORI!” he roared at the top of his lungs, storming out of the room. “JORI, GET BACK HERE!”
She was probably already outside the building, but she couldn’t have gone far. He spotted her keys still hanging on their hook beside the door and swiped them on his way out of the apartment. He took the stairs two at a time and barreled out the back door of the building, barely feeling the cold sting of the wind and rain as he made a beeline for her tie-dyed truck. He jumped in and jammed the key into the ignition, revving the engine to life. The tires squealed on the wet pavement as he peeled out of the parking lot.
There was no telling which way Jori had gone, but AJ turned right, heading toward the liquor store three blocks down the street. His instincts proved correct. He had only driven a few yards when his headlights splashed over a familiar silhouette, running on the side of the road. She kept weaving, her hair whipping wildly in the wind as she turned her head to look at him. A red hot rage descended upon him as he squinted through the rain-soaked windshield, the wiper blades keeping time with his racing heart.
Acting on impulse rather than conscious thought, he pushed the pedal to the floor, forcing the old pick-up to accelerate. She twisted around to glance over her shoulder again as he came up behind her. Then she tripped, stumbling out into the street. In the split second before he hit her, AJ saw the look of horror in her eyes as his headlights shone directly into them and felt a short-lived sense of satisfaction.
Then he felt the impact against his front fender, heard the crunch of metal and glass and broken bones, and saw Jori’s body bounce onto the hood of the truck and roll off again. And when he looked into the rearview mirror and saw the lifeless lump lying in the middle of the street, AJ just felt sick.
What have I done? he wondered, meeting his own wide, crazed eyes in the mirror. Oh God, what have I done?
***
