The End of Us

*TW: occurrence of miscarriage

“This isn’t going to work,” I say, staring at the lanes of traffic in front of us. The harsh drone of the spinning cement mixer on our truck drowns out the bustling city noise and the panic in my head. I’ve been meaning to say it for days, weeks maybe. Mitch lets out a sigh.

“It’s part of the neighborhood, I guess,” he says. “But there’s traffic everywhere these days.” The beat-up junker in front of us, which has been flashing its left-hand turn blinker for the past seven blocks, begins to move and Mitch slowly eases the large truck into drive again. My thoughts spin, trapped in the wet cement behind me. I can’t. Too much. No more.

“No, not that,” I say and then turn to face him. The seatbelt locks and digs into my shoulder, the rough edge choking back my words. “This. Us. We are not going to work.” Each word tumbles from my mouth, piling up in the empty space between us. Mitch’s foot hits the brake and the truck jerks to an immediate halt. The load of cement lurches forward in the spinning barrel behind us and I imagine it pouring through the back of the truck and smothering us both. The suffocation would be a welcome relief.

We had purchased a Victorian era fixer-upper on the edge of the city just two months ago and had begun work to make it our dream home, although I was never quite sure whose dream it was. Today is driveway day. Mitch had enjoyed kitchen cabinet day and new bathroom sink day with the enthusiasm of a toddler experiencing his first winter snowstorm. But he had looked forward to today the most. Driveway day, the last day. He said it symbolized the end of all our hard work and the beginning of our new life.

“A whole new start,” he had whispered in my ear as we spent our last night in our old place.

We had had problems. There had been late nights at work on my part. Other women on his. But things were getting better, or so I told myself. I had lay awake that night remembering each fantastic moment I had spent in that apartment. Most of them pre-Mitch.

And now it’s driveway day. Earlier this week, Mitch had arranged this whole thing with the cement truck.

“I’ve done this stuff a million times,” he assured me. “And it will be much cheaper if we do it ourselves.” His boss had offered him use of the truck for the day, and in return, Mitch would work overtime the following week. He had planned for two of his friends to help out and they are waiting for us back at the house. But this, I, can’t wait anymore.

“Not going to work?” he says, staring straight ahead. The cabin of the large truck is suddenly silent. No more honking, no more yelling from frustrated drivers. Even the churning cement that, moments before, had seemed deafening, has now been silenced. There is nothing but Mitch’s ashen face and the throbbing drum in my head.

Six months ago, after suffering through a week of what I thought was the flu, I found out that I was pregnant. “We are pregnant!” Mitch liked to say. And soon after, the move had begun. We couldn’t raise a child in the studio apartment we had shared since Mitch moved in after our relationship “became official”. His words. We spent several weekends touring homes that were for sale before finding the old Victorian.

“I don’t know,” I had said, scrunching up my nose at the chipped molding and the peeling wallpaper. My glasses pressed up firmly into my eyebrows as I took in the scent of the downstairs bathroom. The whole place looked, and smelled, far more damaged than the “well-loved” description on the flyer. But it was more house than we thought would be possible with our budget.

“It will be great,” Mitch had tried to assure me. He was always one for seeing hope where there was none. “It will be our project.”

“It’s definitely a project, but does it need to be ours?” I asked, pointing at the rather large hole in the baseboard of the wall. “It looks like something else has taken up residence here already.”

“So, we’ll put down some rat poison. Easy,” he had said. “See, we’re already fixing things.” He had smiled at me with his typical assured sense that everything would go exactly as he had planned. I had rubbed my growing middle, trying to quell the unease that was threatening to take over.

But, as the work on the house began, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dying rat and its rat family, and how happy Mitch seemed about it all, and Deborah, the real estate agent who seemed to drop by way too often to “just check in on everything” and who insisted that Mitch call her Debbie.

Two weeks into the project, while browsing countertops at the hardware store, the smell of sawdust and wood stain surrounding me, I felt a pain rush through my body that forced me to the ground and sent us speeding to the hospital. There was more pain and way too much waiting. And then there was the screen that no longer showed what it used to show and the silence where there used to be a small, fluttering beat.

After losing the baby, I pulled away from our project, and from us, while Mitch dove even further in. He wanted to fix the house, fix what we’d lost, fix what we’d become.

And so we sit, each staring at the flashing left-hand turn signal of the car in front of us. Mitch slams his fist into the center of the steering wheel, once, twice, three times. And then he holds it there, sending a long wail of horn out into the world, the noise blending anonymously into the cries of the city.