“I can’t be here for this.”
The door slammed shut and I rubbed my hands over my face, trying to control my emotions. My bandmates were torn between looking at me and looking at the door Marki had just hastily exited in the middle of my storytelling. I was grinding my teeth but the quiver of my chin gave away how hard I was fighting the urge to cry.
“Go on,” Brian encouraged me.
I rubbed my hand across the stubble on my jaw, thinking that was the same way I’d felt that night when we’d gotten to the hospital and found out the baby was in trouble - rough and raw. Marki was inconsolable, but I couldn’t be. I somehow had to stay positive and encourage her to pull it together so that she could deliver a baby. The doctors wanted to induce her immediately and I just had to sit back and hold her hand while it all went down.
Hours went by where we just waited for something to happen and every time the doctor came back in the room the situation looked a little more grim. At one point, he’d pulled Marki’s parents off to the side and I reluctantly left her, not wanting to be left out of the loop on what was happening. The doctor stopped speaking as soon as I approached and I looked between the faces of the adults, trying to gauge how bad things were.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “I’m the father, you have to tell me.”
“Nick,” her mother said while wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m not a little kid, I can take it.”
Somehow, whether it was from the position Marki had slept in when she took a nap that afternoon or something else, just a freak accident, the umbilical cord that connected the fragile life inside her with everything it needed to live, had gotten twisted up. The doctor gave me the analogy of a garden hose getting a kink. The water going through the hose hadn’t stopped entirely but had gone down to a trickle. The baby was still alive but the chances of it living without serious brain damage, or living at all, was almost impossible.
It was all my fault. I had spent the every moment since May wishing that this curse had never been brought down upon me then, like a gruesome punishment for being selfish and ignorant, my next shitty Christmas present was for that wish to come to fruition. It wasn’t the personal loss that hurt the most, it was the hurt I felt for Marki, who still looked like a dream to me when to everyone else she certainly looked like a sweaty, emotional, terrified little girl - helpless on a hospital bed.
I first tried to think of what Kevin would tell me to do in this particular situation but given the way his advice had been steering me over recent months I went in a different direction and instead tried to imagine what Brian would tell me to do. I imagined myself as him, strong and resilient, caring and protective, but most of all compassionate for others before himself. With that in mind I simply moved back to the bed, returned to my seat, picked up Marki’s hand and held it tight, letting her know through one of our time-tested silent conversations that I wasn’t going anywhere.
I hadn’t thought about that night, let alone cried about it, in a long time. Hunched over, hands over my face, I was gasping for air by the time I felt someone’s hand on my back between my shoulder blades. I glanced up and caught Howie’s eye and he gave me a sad smile.
“I’m sorry,” I said but he brushed me off and took a seat on the coffee table just beyond my knees.
“So the baby was stillborn?” he asked.
I shook my head, wiping both hands over my cheeks roughly, “No...he was still alive but it didn’t look good, he was barely breathing and they tried to bring him around but the doctor said he would be brain dead and we didn’t want him living on machines. They let me hold him for a minute or so then I was walking…” I had to stop as another sob caught in my throat. “I was bringing him over to her when he just died, right there in my arms.”
The room was totally silent. AJ could not have looked more uncomfortable, his hands wringing the bottom of his shirt anxiously. Brian was crying right along with me while Howie continued to rub my back consolingly. The only person I hadn’t dared to look at was Kevin.
“How could you have carried this with you all this time and not mentioned it to anyone?” Howie asked. “You shouldn’t have had to go through it alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” I said assuringly. “I had Kevin, my voice of reason. The person who told me it was for the best, that as hard as it was to figure out in my head it was probably a blessing in disguise. Then my family issues ended up being the perfect cover for the real reason I was depressed and ended up trying to destroy myself.”
I couldn’t stay in that room a moment longer, it was suffocating me, the weight of everything bearing down on me and hashing up old feelings of guilt and anger. Without a word, I stood, stepping over Howie’s knees to get away from the situation. I needed to find Marki and make sure she was okay.
“Nick, I’m so sorry.” Kevin called out to me. “I know it’s not an excuse but you have to remember that I was really young then, too. I’d never been in a position where I had someone looking up to me the way you did and I didn’t realize the magnitude of what was happening. The things I told you then, as an idiot in my early 20’s who thought he was a god, is nothing like what I would tell you today in that same situation.”
“I know,” I said with a sigh. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Before I could walk out to find Marki, she reappeared in the doorway. Her face didn’t look too different from my own, red and puffy. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest and I knew that she was trying to control her emotions.
“It was really busy out there,” she said, explaining why she’d come back. “I wanted to stay out of the way. Did you tell them?”
“I’m so sorry,” Brian said. “That must have been so heartbreaking only having those few moments before he passed, I can’t imagine what you went through.”
“Except I didn’t really get any moments,” she said.
I looked at her with a mixture of surprise and sadness, “What are you talking about? I sat with you in that depressing-as-fuck hospital room for four fucking hours while you held him and said goodbye. You had moments.”
“No, I had goodbyes. I never even got to look at him while he was alive. The whole 13 minutes that he was alive I stared at your back. Then by the time I got to see him he was gone. You got moments.”
“This is the first I’ve ever heard this bullshit,” I muttered. “It was seventeen years ago, you’re not over it yet?”
“No! I’m not over it yet!” she yelled and I jumped back in surprise by her sudden outburst. Truthfully, Marki and I had avoided discussing the entire situation after it happened. We’d tried over and over again to repair our relationship and move forward without having an adult conversation about it but moments like this would always end up happening, bringing us right back to the start.
“My entire world ended that day. You got to leave and go back on tour and be a big fucking star and have all of your dreams come true and I got to pick out a casket for our baby at 16-years-old then try to put my life back on track. That day changed me forever and I haven’t gone a single day since without thinking about how unfair it was that I did all that work, that I sacrificed so much and got nothing in return but decades of guilt and resentment.
“I never got to see if he had your eyes, or blonde hair, or your big stupid nose. I never got to see him smile, I never got to feel him breathe or feel his heartbeat - but you did! I remember days after you left, my mother had to remind me to breathe because it hurt so much and I felt so awful that I couldn’t even remember to fucking inhale. I couldn’t watch normal people do normal things anymore and I fucking hated you for getting to be special. That’s why this needs to end. I need to get rid of you so I can get over it.”
I didn’t want to have this discussion in front of my bandmates but they had seen the two of us have big blowout fights over the years over much more petty topics. We had been on-again then off-again so many times it wasn’t a big deal to them to see us fighting, usually over me cheating. They had just assumed it was typical of my revolving door of girlfriends.
“Guys, can you give us the room?” I asked graciously.
“No, they deserve to know who you are.”
“Marki, come on,” AJ tried to plead with her. “This is your business, not ours.”
“You guys don’t even know this man. This person standing here pretending to be your best friend, your brother, is a complete fraud.”
“Hey!” I snapped, grabbing her by the wrist in an effort to stop her diatribe. “I get we have a lot of shit, I get we have a lot of baggage and we need to hammer it out but don’t try and badmouth me to my friends. Especially after you just tried to publicly humiliate me in front of my fans.”
A small amount of anger left her tense shoulders and she relaxed enough that her wrist slipped away from my hand. “They didn’t even know you were married, Nick. They didn’t know about…”
“You can say his name.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
The quiet was enough of a signal for the others to leave the room and soon we were alone. The awkward silence not unlike the one I’d felt on the day we’d gotten married and I had a strange feeling that by the end of it, that same silence would finally bring us to divorce.
