Love You Hard Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Abigail Maslin

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Maslin, Abby, author.

  Title: Love you hard : a memoir of marriage, brain injury, and reinventing love / Abby Maslin.

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018029917 (print) | LCCN 2018051948 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743338 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743314 (hc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Maslin, Abby. | Maslin, T.C. (Thomas C.) | Brain damage—Patients—Biography. | Brain damage—Patients—Rehabilitation. | Brain damage—Patients—Family relationships. | Husband and wife—Biography.

  Classification: LCC RC387.5 (ebook) | LCC RC387.5 M373 2019 (print) | DDC 617.4/810440092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029917

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  To Jack, whose light illuminates us all

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part IChapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part IIChapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part IIIChapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part IVChapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part VChapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  July 2005

  It begins with a T-shirt. In the clamor of the night, warm bodies gather close to the bar, and hips collide with carelessness as beads of sweat collect behind my knees. From a dozen yards away, a gentle wind stirs the Patuxent River.

  This is summer in Southern Maryland: warm and sticky, but touched by the merciful breeze of the Chesapeake Bay and the many rivers that feed into it. It’s air that feels like magic, a warm breath on the cheek or a kiss on the hand.

  As I take in the scene before me, a flash of blue catches my eye. I’m drawn in by the tepid hue. Not royal. Not navy. But calm, cool—like the ocean. Someone’s seven-dollar Hanes T-shirt, most likely, but still I feel compelled to get a better look.

  I can’t see much of the man who’s wearing it. He is inching his way forward in a throng of intoxicated bar goers, and his face reveals itself for only a moment before being swallowed by the commotion of the crowd. He’s taller than I am, anyway. At my height of five-foot-two, my eyes are just level with the simple pocket across his chest.

  “Claire, do you see that guy there?” I nudge my best friend beside me, lifting my chin in his direction.

  The words enter and exit my mouth before my brain has a chance to stop myself. Claire gives me a look of temporary puzzlement and then pulls my arm in his direction.

  I didn’t come to this bar tonight with the intention of meeting anyone. In fact, Claire had to drag me here nearly against my will. After a year of heart-shredding disappointment—first with the ending of my first real relationship, and then with the dramatic and ugly conclusion to a make-myself-feel-better fling—I had recently declared a hiatus from the opposite sex.

  But having abandoned that plan momentarily, Claire and I grab our drinks, two flimsy plastic cups containing the Tiki Bar’s signature drink, a syrupy pink concoction known as the mai tai, and edge ourselves closer to the boy I’m straining to get a better look at. He stands, leaning against a wooden bench, talking to a friend.

  With unimagined clarity, I hear my own voice. Abby, your life will not be the same if you don’t talk to this man.

  I don’t believe in love at first sight. The idea of something so tidy and wildly convenient in this messy, inconvenient real world seems implausible. However, I’m overcome by something outside my control. Whatever it is—a tug from the gut, a hormone-induced trance—I have no reason to trust it. At twenty-two years of age, I know very little about love.

  All I’m really familiar with is the hookup culture around me, a world where disconnection and disinterest are key. Men puff up their chests, pretend to be brave and cool and incapable of softness. Women mirror in response, pretend to be distant and uninterested and incapable of giving a shit. It’s all a farce—one I’ve never been very good at.

  But this young man strikes me as an outlier. His cocoa-colored eyes smile as he laughs in conversation. He runs his hand through his thick golden-brown hair, unaware of his handsomeness. His eyes remain fixed to his friend, not darting around the bar in search of those who might be checking him out or attempting to check out anyone else. He exudes sincerity. Comfort. An unwillingness to play the very game I’ve grown to hate.

  And so I do something I’ve rarely done in the past: I trust myself. I keep walking in his direction.

  * * *

  Later, I’ll choose to describe this night as magical. Fated, even. It’s far more romantic than acknowledging the truth: that TC and I met by chance and that everything that happened after was of our own making.

  Two twenty-two-year-olds from the same hometown who, by some unusual circumstance, had never crossed paths before. I recognized TC’s name the moment he said it. He was the good friend of one of my good friends, Lizzy, who had also been a college roommate.

  I don’t want to get married, I remembered Lizzy saying two years earlier, but if I did, I’d want to marry my friend TC. He’s literally the best guy I know.

  She’d meant it platonically, a means of emphasizing both her disinterest in marriage and her high opinion of TC, but I mulled over her words again that night as if I were listening for the first time.

  It was obvious right away there was merit to her assessment. TC was kind. He lis
tened in a way I’d never before seen a boy (or man) listen. As I told him my story, that I’d been transplanted to St. Mary’s County five years earlier, a radical and unwanted shift after a childhood in sunny Arizona, and that in a matter of weeks I’d be moving again, up north to Philadelphia, where I was starting graduate school, he nodded with deep attention, never pausing to break eye contact.

  He too had a story to share. A Maryland transplant himself (by way of West Virginia), he’d graduated from Bucknell University just a month earlier. In a few days he’d start a new job, as a research scientist at a local marine lab.

  Our different paths lie outlined in the looming future, the finer edges still waiting to make themselves known. We never imagined we’d fall into each other so quickly, agreeing wordlessly to throw our efforts into a two-year long-distance relationship. Philadelphia to Maryland, then Philadelphia to North Carolina, when TC started graduate school at Duke.

  Or that another two years after that, we’d find ourselves standing on the bank of the St. Mary’s River, under the shade of a blooming pear tree, agreeing to belong to each other in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, in failure and in triumph.

  As it always is, most everything was still unknown. There was only this: we’d found each other and began walking in the same direction.

  We never anticipated where that path would lead us.

  Part I

  Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

  —Rabindranath Tagore

  CHAPTER 1

  August 2012

  If a love story can be bigger than two people, if it can also consume the air those people breathe, the trees that produce the oxygen, and the city sidewalks traveled by the footsteps that merged two lives into one, it’s fair to say that my love for TC is bigger than us both. It is, at the very least, as big as Washington, D.C., the city in which we’ve built our life together.

  And this is where it begins: in the northeast section of the city, on the concrete stoop of our hundred-year-old redbrick apartment building, knees pulled to my chest, my fingers trembling around the pink silicone of my iPhone case. The phone I have just used to dial 911.

  Or maybe this is where it ends. It doesn’t matter anymore, really. Beginnings and endings are one and the same—harsh, unplanned delineations marking the passage of one life chapter to another. The Before. The After. And the giant, screaming gape between.

  The midmorning sun warms my face as I look out at the Capitol Hill sidewalk just beyond our building’s wrought iron fence. And even though it’s Saturday, my attention turns to the corner, half expecting to see TC walking the last footsteps of his evening commute, his tanned face and warm brown eyes smiling outward from a sea of happy families and young professionals.

  But he doesn’t come.

  Instead, I scratch at my ankles, willing the pesky mosquitoes to vacate the premises so that I can continue my rapid descent into shock without further bloodshed. However, in the grand tradition of sweltering mid-Atlantic summers, the mosquitoes show little consideration. They buzz about my bare calves, landing and biting every few seconds, ignoring my hand waves and persistent scratching. I suppose a woman in shock is no different from any other warm-blooded body they might choose to feed on.

  The policeman who’s responded to my call keeps his distance from me, maintaining his post on the sidewalk while he scribbles unknown notes on a tiny pad. I scratch at a fresh bite on my ankle as I watch him work. Is this a joke? I wonder. My husband is MISSING. What the hell is a single cop on a bicycle going to do about it?

  The reality is that TC’s been gone for only hours. Well, actually, I don’t know how to calculate how long he’s been missing. Does the countdown begin at midnight, when I discovered I was sleeping alone? Does it begin two hours earlier, when my worry dissolved into panic and the well of comforting rationalizations ran dry? Or does it begin last evening, at 6:30 P.M., when he kissed me on the cheek, smiling and excited to head out to the baseball game, as I fed the baby dinner and the door to our apartment swung shut behind him?

  All I know of police is what I’ve learned from television and the small collection of speeding tickets I’ve acquired over the years. But this much seems to be true: cops take you seriously only if you report a person missing after twenty-four hours. Maybe I should just be grateful to have this officer’s attention at all. Maybe I’d be wise to listen to the part of my brain instructing me to quiet the screaming in my mind. After all, the last thing I need right now is to be labeled a “difficult” woman. Still, I feel compelled to convey my terror, the seriousness of the situation. I need this gentleman, this officer, to understand that my husband is not the type to go missing. I need him to feel the weight of my life in his hands.

  He avoids my gaze and begins to ask me about TC.

  “His name is Thomas Maslin,” I explain, offering my husband’s legal name, which I haven’t used more than a handful of times in the three years since we stood in line at the St. Mary’s County courthouse applying for our marriage license.

  What was he wearing? I try to conjure an image of TC last night, in the moments before he headed for the ball game with his younger brother. “He was wearing shorts, I think. Khaki, maybe. And a T-shirt. It’s sort of a purplish color with a graphic that says Memphis.”

  The vision of my husband’s shirt appears in my mind with perfect clarity, just as it did the first night of our meeting. His style has not changed much over these seven years; his closet remains full of twenty-five-cent shirts and frayed cotton shorts. TC is as stubbornly frugal now as he was at twenty-two, when he was fresh out of college and content to live on a single loaf of wheat bread and a jar of crunchy peanut butter every week.

  “And what about his footwear?”

  I pause, taking a breath to visualize the four pairs of shoes that sit in a dark pile at the bottom of my husband’s small, messy closet. “I believe he was wearing flip-flops.”

  As I speak, my mouth twists in an involuntary half smile. TC’s brown sandals are the quintessential example of his low-key personality. He is oblivious to the fraying leather and the deep blackened grooves made by his feet. The flip-flops are well loved, much in the same way I might describe one of our son Jack’s ratty stuffed animals: utilized to the point of deterioration.

  It is all part of TC’s larger life philosophy. He clings to the simplicity that marked his early life as if upgrading his lifestyle might threaten his very livelihood. The suggestion of glass ceilings and climbing the ranks, designer suits and name-brand anything, repels him. In a city like Washington, where too many people are mostly interested in who you know and what you can do for them, TC is determined not to stray from his humble roots. It doesn’t matter that in many ways, he’s just like them: an overachiever with an impressive career trajectory and a windowed office overlooking Dupont Circle. In his mind, he is, and will always be, just TC Maslin. Helping his mother scrub church floors on Saturday mornings. Catching toads in a backwoods creek in the mountains of West Virginia.

  The policeman continues to prompt me for more answers. “And what was he doing last night? When was the last time you spoke to him?”

  “When he left for the Nationals game. With his brother, Sean.” I think back to TC’s good-night call at around 10:30 P.M. and the empty side of the bed that was even more alarming at 7:00 A.M. than it had been at midnight. The white duvet lay flat in the morning light, still tucked under the corners of the mattress; his pillow was free of any indentation.

  This is normal, I told myself, even as a feeling of unease began to take hold in my belly, and my thoughts flitted briefly toward darker explanations. TC’s absence was unusual but not an immediate cause for alarm. I assuaged myself once more. Things like that can’t happen to you.

  But as I sit, scratching my ankles, tying and retying my sneakers in an attempt to distract my hysterical fingers, my li
es lose oxygen under the crushing weight of an inevitable truth that will not be ignored.

  My husband never came home. TC never came home.

  As I hold myself steady on the concrete stoop, I fight back tears. If I stand, I will fall. If I rise, I have nowhere to go. So I sit, praying for some logical answer, some explanation to assure me I have not stepped into a nightmare—that the reality and safety I’ve always depended on will return momentarily.

  * * *

  Our life is ordinary. It is of the utmost importance that I convince the officer of this underlying fact, as if our ordinariness is somehow the Get Out of Jail Free card that will allow everyone to dismiss the situation as one giant misunderstanding. There is an infinite number of small details I could share to help prove this point, but I don’t know where to begin.

  I could explain that I’m Abby Sullivan Maslin, a fourth-grade teacher at a D.C. public school, ten blocks west of here. Daughter of Marty and Kate, sister to Bethany. Still defiantly attached to my maiden name, having since adopted it as my middle one. Or that I grew up all over—New York to Arizona to Maryland—the flexible existence of a museum director’s child. I could give a history of how I came to live on the Hill, all the jobs I tried out before finally finding a home in my elementary school classroom. Or I could explain that my thirtieth birthday was ten days ago, an occasion for which my husband took me out for sangria and tacos—a milestone I actually looked forward to, having never forgotten my mother’s promise to me many years ago. Of all the decades, your thirties are the best, she insisted. These were the words I clung to during the tumultuous ride of being a twentysomething, and as I’d blown out the candles, I felt ready for my magical decade to arrive.

  I could say just as many things about TC. I could explain that we’ve been a couple since the first day we met. And that in those seven years, we’ve had three major fights: two about where to live, and one about money. I could explain that the worst thing about my husband is how annoyingly easy everything in life comes to him. That he seems to have been born under two competing stars: the one that destined him to a childhood of rural poverty and the one that ensured he’d be victorious in every attempt to escape it.