Pieces of Your Heart

Breakdown

Ian sat in his squad car and lit a cigarette. He watched the smoke drift out the open window and wondered if a phone call would make any difference at this point. Stock images of children's birthday parties flashed across his mind's eye, streamers, birthday cake, brightly colored paper, those latex balloons that he hated so much. On his daughter's second birthday, he'd spent an hour blowing up balloons so Linda, his wife, could hang them all over the house. Several had burst while still on his lips and had made his ears ring for what seemed like days afterward. He'd argued with Linda about the need to even have a birthday party for a two year old.

"It's not as if Makayla's going to remember if we don't throw her a party. She's still a baby! She's not going to subsequently have to spend years of her life in therapy because we were terrible parents," he'd snarled sarcastically. He knew this was just an excuse for Linda to have her horribly pretentious friends over. Looking back now, he realized he was actually glad they'd celebrated that year of their daughter's life; there weren't that many that followed.

He sighed and took an extra long drag off the cigarette that dangled from his downturned lips. He knew he should call Linda, but still he hesitated. Maybe she'd forgotten, and if she had, why should he be the one to remind her of all the sorrow the loss of that one tiny life had brought them?

Ian expelled the smoke from his lungs slowly and picked up his cell phone.

"Hello?"

"Hi. It's me."

There was a long, painful pause. "What do you want?"

"Linda. It's Ian."

"I know who this is, that's not what I asked you. Why are you calling?"

He felt the back of his eyes burning. What did he want?

"...I just wanted to talk to you."

"I don't think we have anything left to talk about. Look, I know it's her birthday. I know she'd be a teenager, be in high school, have friends, maybe a boyfriend that you and I would probably hate... But I also know that I can't look at you. I can't look at you without seeing her. I can't hear your voice without feeling the astronomical hole in my heart that she left me with, that you left me with. It's too much for me."

Ian squeezed his eyes closed and listened to his wife's steady breathing on the other end of the static. "Linda, come on. I know you can't forgive me; but you pushed me away so hard."

"I pushed you away? Is that what you think happened?"

"Please, I don't want to fight with you. I didn't leave you. You moved out, Linda. I'm still here, I never left."

There was a long, heavy pause. "Ian, you left long before I moved out of that house. Maybe you couldn't help it, but it doesn't change the fact that your heart turned to stone when she died. You have no love left for anyone or anything."

His blood boiled over with resentment, and guilt, his wife's words leaving him stunned and breathless like a kick in the gut. He let out a long, violent, gut-wrenching growl as he threw his phone out the window of the squad car. He squeezed his eyelids shut to keep them from overflowing with the hot tears he felt building up behind them. She was right: he had let the distance between them grow into a cold and empty space long before she decided to move out. But if he truly had no heart left in him, then why did it still feel like his was broken?