Reborn before the Freeze (My Ex Husband begs at my door)

Chapter 1

By the first day of the Freeze, he had taken everything. My bank cards, because “we needed to keep the money in one place.” 

The house I paid the mortgage on for five years had only his name on it. The canned food and the generator I bought with my own paycheck, when the weather warnings started, were already packed in his trunk.

But the house was useless once the power died and the pipes froze. The only warm place left was the shelter, and the shelter only took registered family. Derek. His mother, and I, his wife.

Tessa wasn’t on the list.

So that morning, Derek pulled Grandma June’s ring off my finger while I cried. He gave it to the man at the shelter door, and the man crossed out my name and wrote hers.

I didn’t understand what was happening until the guard put his arm out in front of me. Derek walked Tessa and Linda inside without looking back, and the glass doors slid shut behind them.

I pounded on those doors until my knuckles split, begging him to let me in while the snow climbed past my knees. On the other side of the glass, Tessa stood in my long gray winter coat, the one I saved three months for, with one hand on her pregnant belly. Derek pulled her into his arms and told her to step away from the door before she caught a cold.

Then I heard my mother-in-law laugh.

She came to the glass and looked down at me on my knees, and she smiled the same way she smiled every morning when she handed me my tea. The tea I had been drinking for six years. The tea she made me extra strong every time I showed her a positive pregnancy test.

I lost the first baby at seven weeks. The second at twelve. The third was a girl, and I lost her at twenty weeks, and I named her Junie after my grandma and held her in a hospital blanket for an hour while Derek stood in the hallway on his phone.

“Three babies, Nora,” Linda said through the glass. “You really thought those babies just fell out of you on their own? Grandma’s money was never going to a baby. There was never going to be a baby that lived.”

That was the last thing I heard before I collapsed in the snow.

Then nothing.

Then somebody was slapping the back of my head.

“Nora. Nora! Are you deaf now too?”

I opened my eyes. I was sitting at the kitchen table in our house on Birch Street, the air conditioner was rattling the way it always did in August, and Linda was standing over me in her pink robe with her hair in rollers, holding a mug in front of my face.

“Your tea,” she said. “Drink it before it gets cold. I’m not making it twice.”

I stared at the mug. White, with a little yellow duck on it. My mug. The one she handed me every morning with a smile, telling me the herbs came from a special doctor in her hometown and that this was how her own sister finally got pregnant.

My hands started shaking. I pressed them flat on the table so she wouldn’t see.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “You look terrible.”

“I’ve had a long night,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and put the mug down hard enough that tea splashed on my hand. It was warm. Nothing was cold. I grabbed my phone off the table and looked at the screen.

August 3rd.

The first snow came on September 22nd. I remembered because it was Derek’s birthday and everyone at his party was laughing about the weird weather and taking pictures of snowflakes in their drinks, and three weeks later half of them were dead.

Fifty days.

I had fifty days.

“Are you going to drink it or stare at it?” Linda asked. “Honestly, Nora. Three tries and you couldn’t keep a single one. The doctor said it’s the weight, you know that. You think I enjoy standing in this kitchen every morning? I do this for you.”

“For me,” I said.

“Yes, for you! Who else?”

Tessa came down the stairs then, in one of Derek’s T-shirts, yawning, with her phone in her hand. Tessa was Linda’s goddaughter. That was the story, anyway. She had been staying in our guest room for four months because her apartment had a “mold problem,” and she never paid for groceries, and she ate more than all of us while everyone told me to watch my portions.

“Morning,” she said. Then she looked at me and made a face. “Oh. You’re up. Can you make those egg things again? The ones with the cheese? I’ve been so nauseous lately.”

Nauseous. Right. I knew exactly why she was nauseous. I found out the hard way, lying in the snow.

“Make them yourself,” I said.

Tessa blinked at me. Linda blinked at me. Nobody in that kitchen had ever heard me say no before, and I watched it hit both their faces at the same time.

“Excuse me?” Linda said.

“You heard me. She has two hands. I’ve seen her use them to take my credit card out of my purse.”

“That was one time,” Tessa snapped. “And I paid you back.”

“You did not pay me back.”

“Well, I was going to!”

“Enough,” Linda said, and she pushed the mug closer to me. “Drink your tea and go make the eggs. The girl isn’t feeling well. Have some compassion. God knows you have enough room in there for it.”

She said it and laughed a little, the way she always did, so it sounded like a joke I was supposed to laugh at too. I used to laugh. I used to laugh and then go cry in the laundry room where nobody could hear me.

I picked up the mug.

Linda smiled.

I got up, walked to the counter, took an empty water bottle out of the recycling bin, and poured half the tea into it. I screwed the cap on tight and put it in the pocket of my robe.

“What are you doing?” Linda said. Her smile was gone. “Nora, what are you doing with that?”

“Saving some for later.”

“Why would you save it? Just drink it!”

“I’m getting it tested,” I said. “At a lab. I want to know what’s in your special herbs, Linda. I want to know what kind of tea a woman drinks every time she gets pregnant, and then she loses the baby, every single time, three times in a row.”

The kitchen went quiet except for the air conditioner. Linda’s face went white, then red, then white again. Tessa looked at her, then at me, then back down at her phone really fast.

“You ungrateful, fat, useless…” Linda started, and she grabbed for the bottle in my pocket.

I poured the rest of the tea over her head.

It wasn’t hot anymore. It was just warm and brown, and it ran through her rollers and into the collar of her pink robe, and she screamed so loud the neighbor’s dog started barking.

“Derek!” she yelled. “Derek, get down here! Your wife has lost her mind!”

Tessa had her phone up. Of course she did. “Oh my God, I’m recording this, I’m recording all of this, you are so done.”

“Good,” I said. “Send me a copy.”

Feet pounded on the stairs, heavy and fast. Derek came into the kitchen with shaving cream on half his face and his tie hanging open. He looked at his mother dripping on the tiles, at Tessa with her phone, and at me holding an empty mug with a duck on it.

“What the hell is going on?” he said.

“She attacked me!” Linda cried. “She threw boiling tea on me!”

“It was warm,” I said.

“Nora.” Derek pointed his razor at me. “Apologize to my mother. Right now. I’m serious. I have a meeting at nine and I don’t have time for whatever this is.”

I looked at him. At the face I used to wake up early for, the man I packed lunches for, the man who took my money and my house and my grandmother’s ring, then stood behind a locked door and told his pregnant girlfriend to come away so she wouldn’t catch a cold while I froze to death on the other side.

“You have a meeting at nine?” I said.

“Yes!”

“Cancel it.”

“Why would I cancel…”

“Because you’re going to need

a lawyer.” I put the mug down on the counter. “I want a divorce.”