But in the middle of the night, I felt so cold that I woke up. It wasn’t that the air was any colder than usual that night; it wasn’t even winter yet. But Michael was no longer wrapped around me, and even in my sleep, it had been enough to wake me. I shivered and looked around in a quick panic, realizing how he must have felt when the same thing happened to him the night that I had left. But Michael wasn’t gone, I could see his back as he sat looking at the fire, facing away from me. He must not have been able to sleep and was watching the flames dance instead. I had no idea what time it was, but by the level of darkness in the sky, I guessed that it was still sometime in the middle-of-night hours.
“Michael?” I said quietly as I sat up on the blankets.
He didn’t turn around at all. Maybe he didn’t hear me.
“Michael?” I said again, this time louder.
He still didn’t turn around or even move. I could see his shoulders rise and fall with his breathing, but that was it. I started to worry that something was wrong, that he was upset at me for something. An uneasy feeling grew in the pit of my stomach as I got up and walked closer to the fire toward him. When I reached him, I put my hand on the back of his shoulder and then knelt down to sit beside him. But when I did, I noticed right away that something was wrong.
He was sweating, and shaking, and had an immense look of fear in his eyes as if he was staring at something horrible, instead of just the bonfire.
“Michael, what’s wrong?” I asked, fearing that he had a horrible nightmare.
I waited for him to answer me, but he just sat there staring at the fire as if he was mesmerized by the hypnotic, stretching flames.
“Michael, you’re scaring me,” I said. “What is it?”
He started to talk to me without looking away from the fire, and his words sounded like they were coming from a man who was on the verge of falling over a mental precipice.
“I never told you about my childhood,” he said in an eerily monotone voice that made it sound like he was intentionally trying not to show emotion.
“We talked about it a little bit, I think,” I said. “Your mother was awful and corrupt, just like my dad was. Both of our families had dark secrets. I think we both always knew that. I could see the way your mother treated you. She was an awful woman.”
“Yes, but I never actually told you about my childhood,” he said again.
“I’m not sure what you mean. Was there something in particular about it that you want to tell me now?” I asked.
“There are broken parts of me, Lisette,” he said. “Parts that will never heal no matter how much you try to love me.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Help me understand what it is. Does this have to do with the whole pregnancy thing? Did it make you start to think about your own childhood again? I told you that I would be careful, and I will. I promise.”
“No,” he said. “This is about me. There’s nothing you can do.”
The dancing flames reflected in his unblinking eyes and I noticed him start to grin at the bonfire as if he was challenging it to reach out at burn him. Tears started to stream silently down his face, and as soon as I saw his fingernails digging into the side of his arms so deeply that they were drawing blood, I started to call for Adam and Rob. Instead of being startled by my shouts for the other two guys, Michael just kept staring and grinning at the fire. When Adam and Rob ran out of the cabin in their underwear and slid to a stop behind us, they both looked at me in breathless confusion.
“Something is wrong with him,” I said as I started to cry.
The guys walked around to the front of Michael and looked at his face.
“Hey man,” Rob said to him as he tried to pull Michael up from the ground. “Let’s go inside for a while and talk.”
Michael didn’t move. He didn’t even look up at Rob. Adam tried too. He saw the nails that Michael was digging into his skin and tried to pull his hands away.
“What happened?” Adam asked as he turned to look at me without success.
“I don’t know. I woke up and saw that he wasn’t beside me, and when I went to go sit next to him at the fire, he was like this.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Yeah, he said his childhood was really bad,” I answered.
Adam raised one eyebrow at me, and Rob looked up at me as if I had lost my mind.
“His childhood?” Rob said.
I nodded. That was pretty much all that Michael had said. I was afraid that something had opened up his worst fears and memories and that he was on the edge of descending into madness.
22
Michael and I sat quietly inside the bedroom of the cabin alone. Rob and Adam were out in the living room talking in hushed voices by the fireplace even though the morning hadn’t even arrived yet. Once we had all gotten inside, Michael seemed to snap out of it a little bit, but he was still not himself as we sat on the bed together with him staring off at the blank wall.
“Michael,” I said as calmly as I could. “Please talk to me and tell me what’s going on. Whatever it is, tell me.”
“I thought I was over it,” he said. “I thought that since you weren’t pregnant, that I could just stop being afraid of it. But then I realized that someday you probably would want to have a child, and when that day comes Lisette; I won’t be ready even then.”
“How do you even know that?” I asked. “We don’t even need to talk about this right now. It’s so far off in the future and I’ve told you repeatedly that I’ll be super careful and that you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“But I do have something to worry about. I worry that one day I will lose you because I still won’t be ready for that and you will be. Lisette, I may never be ready to have a child.”
I realized that I needed to take this one piece at a time. One of the two of us had to be rational right now, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what happened during your childhood.”
“I can’t,” he said, dropping his head down to look at his lap.
“Why not?” I asked. I was starting to get mad. He was the one who had said that we needed to be able to tell each other everything. He was the one who made me promise to be upfront and honest and assured me that we were in this together.
