Random Acts of Hope (24 page)

It was worse than I thought, then. This explanation made sense. It was rational. Logical. All the parts fit, but they hinged on
his
bedrock certainty that the only way I could be preg
n
ant was with someone else’s baby.

And that meant Liam never really loved me the wa
y
I’d convinced myself he had.

“
Did it ever occur to you that maybe telling me you were sterile was a good idea back then?” I was talking to the wall now in whispers. “That maybe I would have been supportive, grieved with you, helped you through that?”
 

The wall was a good listener.

“You didn’t trust me enough—
love
me enough—to tell me one of the biggest things I c
a
n imagine anyone experiencing, and then you used that information to create a case for dumping me and—you asshole!”
I cried.
 

I rose to my
feet and stood in front of the sink, staring at the gaping, dark holes that were normally my eyes. How many countless hours had I spent in this exact position, eyes boring into my reflection, looking for some answer, some comfort, some “aha!” moment where it all would make sense and I could move on with my life and find happiness
 

Well, ha, here I was. The answer was a big whopper of one, and it didn’t give me any real clarity in the end. Just unleashed yet another vortex of pain.

A gentle tap on the door. Liam stood there, already dressed. Like a stab to the heart, here I was, naked and completely stripped raw while he just tidied himself up, shut down, and walked away.

Who knew life could have a repeat in it like this?

“Um, I don’t know what to do here, Charlotte. Can we go out and get some coffee or just go for a walk?”

Panic fluttered inside me. “You want to leave?”

“I don’t want to leave you.” He kept his eyes centered entirely on my face. The passion from just moments ago was long gone, the dissonance so strong it was like someone had died, and the body was on the floor between us, blood pooling and bones poking out. But we were ig
no
ring it, because acknowledging it meant we had to do something. Act. Change.

I just…I snapped.

“Please give me privacy,” I said in a shockingly controlled voice. He stepped back and shut the door slowly as I turned on the sink and rinsed my acrid mouth out a few times. Then a tap at the door.

“Yes?”

The door opened a sliver and his hand came thro
u
gh with some
of
my discarded clothes. “I thought you might want these.”

Click.

That was the Liam I remembered. Thin
k
i
n
g about my feelings, worrying about how my internal emotional state was, cleaving with me and joining in creating our own little haven of good feelings. As I slid my leg into my panties I felt so vulnerable, sobs making my chest shake. Putting on jeans, then a bra, then a shirt, and finally I was covered. Walled off. Contained.

But it felt like I was still naked and so new. Like someone had peeled off my skin and left me in th
e
bright sunshine to bake.

I could hear him in the living room, little shuffling sounds a constant
re
minder that he hadn’t left. Would he just take off aga
i
n? Shut me out? Shut me
down
? The cruelty of that, of piercing my five-year-thick wall and then dumping me again was so malevolent that it made me think that evil might damn well exist.

My own mind was my worst enemy right now, though. Not Liam. Sterile? He was sterile, and he assumed our baby hadn’t been our baby. All these years.

“Okay, then. Coffee,” I said as I walked out
to face him
.

Without a word he reached for me and slid his arms around my waist. I stiffened. He persisted. I didn’t melt, but a jumbl
e
of words got caught around my heart.
Keep holding me,
I wanted to say.
I need more time.
 

He pulled back and I smiled a sad, tight smile. “I can handle coffee,” I said. “Let’s start there.” He looked like he’d been up for three straight days and had a shell-shocked sense
about him
.

We walked outside, and along the way, we saw a yellow school bus stop. Tiny little kids, no taller than my hip, climbed on board, wearing backpacks bigger than them.

Kindergarteners. Five years. Actually—I realized in that unfortunately timed moment, that cataclysmically ruinous second—
i
f I hadn’t lost the baby we’d have a child headed toward kindergarten in
less than
a year.

I stared at a little girl with a pink princess backpack, long, shining blond curls cascading down her back, her little face grinning at her mom and waving as the bus swallowed her.

Liam watched me watching her, and
the world went cold.
 

“I can’t,” I said
.
“I just…can’t.” I had my purse, and I could walk to the train station from here, take the train to Worcester and call Maggie to come get me.
 

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t do this.” And with that, I walked away from Liam.

H
e didn’t follow me.

Charlotte

I stared at the stack of disc
i
plinary forms sitting on the table in front of me, then looked up at the other members of the judicial committee for residence life. This was a closed session, and three
r
e
s
ident
d
irectors, including me, two R
A
s, the
a
ssociate
d
irector for
s
tudent
s
ervices, and—of course—a university lawyer were all present.

“She tried to kill herself in a residence hall,” the lawyer, Marci Robbett, recounted. “That alone is enough for termination from on-campus living privileges.” But there was an uncertainty in her voice, and I found myself turning toward her in gratitude. Petty bureaucrats who made de
cis
ions based sol
e
ly on the rules, without giving any breathing room for humanity and judgment, made me red with rage.

“And yet we’ve allowed some students who’ve attempted suicide to stay on campus,” I said evenly. While I wasn’t the student’s official advocate, all of the professionals on the committee knew damn well I’d fight for her. She had tried to kill herself after filing rape charges against her ex-boyfriend, and the DA had decided not to pursue the ch
a
rges. Then Campus Life had determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to ban the ex-boyfriend (who was not a s
t
udent) from campus.

Which mean
t
he got away with it, scot-free.

Maggie had recused herself from sitting in on this hearing. We all understood.

“
Is she a danger to anyone other than herself? She doesn’t have a roommate, right?” Marci asked. She was a kindly, older, plump woman with grey, curly hair and sharp brown eyes behind rectangle glasses. Her daughter had been one of my residents last year. Pre-law major. Like mother like daughter…
 

That made me think about the phone call I owed my own mom.

“She is in a double, but the roommate moved out.
The roommate’s
boyfriend is best friends with the perp,” I elaborated.

“Alleged perp,” Marci insisted. But she did it with an expression of dista
s
te that was not aimed at me.

The two R
A
s paid avid attention to the proceedings. My fellow
r
e
s
ident
d
irectors stared at their phones, typing occasionally. Nice.

“We need a final ruling on this one. The student wants to stay through the end of fall semester, and has already applied for a transfer. She says she just needs to get through the semester.”

“Double room, huh?” The
a
ssociate
d
irector looked at me. “Can we get her to pay for a single room and have her stay there? Or do we need that spot for a waiting-list student?”

Ah. A ray of hope. “No,” I lied. “We can keep her there if she pays the single rate.” We did have some freshmen living five to a quad right now, but…

“If she agrees to that, and to being monitored by psych services, and we have a smaller meeting with Charlotte, her psychologist, and me,” the
a
ssociate
d
ean explained, “then I think we can make this work.”

Thank you thank you thank you.
A wave of nausea rolled over me,
making my skin heat up. Thank God the system could bend to serve the people it managed and not always the other way around.
 

“I’ll agree, with caution: the alleged perpetrator should also be monitored, quietly, and the alleged victim should be very carefully trained in how to legally handle any breach that should be docume
n
ted,”
Marci declared.
 

“You mean,” said one of the R
A
s, a very righteously angry young man named Josh from across my quad, “we need to officiate his ass off campus. If he sneezes wrong, it’s written up.”

M
arci gave him a stern look, though I could see she was suppressing an appreciative sly grin. “I mean what I said, Mr. Collins. She needs to have someone
mentor
her through the exact channels for reporting misbehavior so that at every possible turn any actions he takes that can be construed as violating her privacy o
r
personal boundaries will be taken seriously.”

“
Could you translate that to English, please?” the RA asked.
 

M
arci sighed. “The more we document what he does, the better the chance of getting him banned from campus.”

“Paper trail,” Josh said.

“You got it.”

As the meeting broke up, I couldn’t break the pervasive na
u
sea. Sexual violence had such a domino effect, creating wave after wave of fallen pieces of so many lives. While this was one tiny victor
y
, there were so many battles. Thank God I’d never had to deal with being raped, or stalked, or intimidated like so many women I’d known in college and, now, in my line of work.

It wore on me, though. There was a reason people in this job got “Res Life Burnout.” When you live
d
with hundreds of people experiencing identity formation and the shift from dependence to independence as new adults, you saw the gritty underbelly of humanity f
a
r more than you could ever imagine.

“You okay?” Marci asked me, appearing suddenly at my side as I put my papers in my brief bag.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You seem a bit green.”

“Having a student almost booted out of the dorms because she had an emotional reaction to a shits
t
orm of a legal and administrative result can do that to me.”

“Off the record?” she asked.

I nodded and leaned in.

“The guy may have done something similar to a young woman at one of the other local colleges. I did some digging. No paper trail, no proof, the woman transferred out. The college won’t give details. Just rumors, but…”

“Fucker.”

“That about sums it up.”

“Any thoughts on how we can keep him away?”

“Document, document, document.”

I nodded. “Will do.”

“And Charlotte?”

“Yeah?”

“Get something to eat. You don’t look so good.”

Liam

“So it’s over before it really began?” Darla asked. Here we went again. If Oprah and Dr. Phil ever joined forces with Jeff Foxworthy, they’d create a character like Darla.

“Pretty much.”
It had been a month since I’d seen Charlotte.
 

“No hope?”

“She’s not really that interested in talking about it.”
Ignoring my texts was a clue.
 

“I can see w
h
y not. You accuse a woman of cheating on you and trying to pass off a baby as yours and that can kind of make a woman a bit unaroused.”

“That isn’t even
a
word.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You call yourself a writer and you can’t even find the right word to describe a frigid woman?”

“‘Frigid’ is a se
x
ually unresponsive term. Charlotte ain’t frigid on you, honey. She just hates your fucking guts for never talking to her five years ago and being an asshole who dumps a pregnant chick when she needed you most.”

“What the
fuck
?”

“Truth hurts.”

“That isn’t the truth!”

“
I
t’s not? Let’s cover the basics here. You slept with her. Without a condom. She was o
n
the pill. She got pregnant. She called to tell you and you—knowing you’re sterile—shut her down and dum
p
ed her without explaining a thing. You assumed she cheated on you and were passing off some other dick’s kid as yours.”

Those
were
the facts. I just grunted. She took that as agreement.

“Meanwhile, she thinks you’re just some fucking shitface who, after knowing you for years and being your friend and loving you to pieces, turns into a demon asshole in one short conversation. She’s left pregnant, terrified, and in mourning for you. The guy she thought you were.”

“I don’t like those facts.”

“Tough shit. And then she, what—aborts the baby?”

“Miscarriage.”

“
Loses
the baby, alone and scared. Five years later you show up out of the blue, and now she finds out the truth? You’re lucky to have any testicles at all, Liam. Functional or not.
She should have ripped them off you with a rusty fork and shoved them down your throat the second she saw you at that bachelorette party.
”

“
When did all our conversations start to revolve around Liam’s testicles?” Sam asked, walking in with a box of Amy’s books. He dropped it, hard. “And why do you have so many books when you also have an e-reader?” he called over his shoulder as Amy walked in with her own armful of boxes.