Page 57 of Over You
“I listened for a second. She said she was only fourteen when she had me.” He grabbed another handful of sand. Tiny particles caught on the breeze when he tossed it to the side. “She was just a kid. I can’t blame her, but I still hung up on her.”
“Of course you would.”
“She probably just wanted money.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It doesn’t matter, though. She gave birth to me, doesn’t make her my mother.”
It seemed harsh. But some things in life are harsh. “What if she wasn’t calling for money?”
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Try to have some relationship with a woman just because she birthed me and then left me at a truck stop? I could have died had that prostitute not found me and turned me over.” He exhaled. “Maybe that makes me an asshole, but that’s just the way I see it.”
“It doesn’t make you an asshole.”
“You wouldn’t tell me even if it did.” He wrapped his arms around me again. “Which Tom Petty song was I singing the first time you saw me in my backyard?”
The fact that he changed topics so fast meant it bothered him, but I wasn’t going to force the issue. While I knew Spencer had not forgotten what song it was, I pretended he had. “You forgot?”
“I forget a lot of things, Georgia Anne.”
“‘Free Fallin’.’”
He snapped his fingers. “Ah, that’s right.” He hummed the opening notes before the lyrics rustled past my ear, and I closed my eyes.
From the time I was a kid until I was seventeen, I would climb onto the rotting roof to escape my mother rip-roaring through the house. One night, when I had ducked onto the eave, the abandoned house behind ours was no longer abandoned. Spencer sat with a cigarette pinched between his lips and a guitar in his lap. He took a drag, then swiped a hand over the strings. A few chords in, the lull of his voice joined the somber notes, and I found the same peace I thought I could only find watching the waves at Santa Monica Beach.
From that night on, I had snuck out to watch him play. Three weeks in, I felt some part of me knew some part of him, which made it worth the guilt that I was a thief stealing moments that should have only belonged to him. But, at the time, his voice was my only saving grace.
Spencer’s song fell silent. “Ricky wants us to start on a new album by August.” There was a pause. A few waves rolled onto the shore. “You’ll go with me, right?”
“If you want me to.”
“I figured we could just keep the house in Beverly Hills to use whenever we had to go out to LA.” Then he picked up where he left off in the song, his finger sweeping along my arm.
The reds and oranges bled over the tides as the sun slowly sank behind the horizon. We were talking about houses. Planning months and years from now. And I wondered how long he would stay sober. Most importantly, I wondered about what I would do if he faltered. I left because he wouldn’ttry. This was Spencer trying—so what happened if he had a misstep? We did, after all, have the rest of our lives to go. The song eventually ended, and we sat in silence, watching the sun set.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“How old would he be now, two?”
I held my breath.Please don’t make me talk about this. It’s too hard.I tried to keep those memories shoved as far down as possible because they hurt. I busied myself with everything I possibly could, but at night, when the world grew quiet and I laid down to sleep, every time I undressed and looked at the silvery-white marks on my stomach, I thought about Bennington.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it, Georgia. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when . . .” He swallowed Bennington’s name. That’s what we do with pain, swallow it down like a bitter pill, hoping the hurt will eventually pass.
“You were halfway around the world,” I whispered, staring at the darkening sea.
Spencer plucked a broken seashell from the sand and chucked it into a cresting wave. When we lost him, that was when everything had fallen apart. I shut down, and brick by brick, I built a wall. I knew that now, but it took me well over a year to see it. Spencer didn’t know how to handle me. I had stayed in bed. I wouldn’t eat. The world had cheated me, and God, I was angry.
A few months after we had lost him, I walked out of the bedroom and found Spencer and Nash carting the crib away from the nursery. That had made it too real. I fought with them to put it back, and when Spencer told me we had to move on, I slapped him, and he took it.
Our marriage, it seemed, had accumulated a lifetime of strain in the matter of a few years. And yet, we were still here. That’s what true love was meant to do—withstand breaks. At the core, our love was a fire that refused to be extinguished. And while I hated we had missed the past year of our lives together, I took comfort knowing that diamonds are made under pressure.
“You being there wouldn’t have changed anything,” I said.
“No. But I should have been there foryou.” He tossed another shell into the water. “Fuck knows I wasn’t afterward.”
And for the first time, I was honest about the after: “Neither of us were, Spence. Neither of us were.”
