31. Chapter 31 Staley
Chapter 31 Staley
N oah and my dad lie with one another, and I search the memories in my mind—the stolen glances I must have missed, the hidden kisses in the laundry room when I shouted for glue sticks and more screen time.
How long have they loved one another, and when did it stop? Or did it?
There came a point when my dad stopped going to Noah’s garage for games and a beer. But it was after the diagnosis that their interactions dwindled off. Bile hits the back of my throat as I brace for illness.
Naive. How did I miss this connection involving Noah?
I’m pissed when I push the door open—the hinges squeal announcing my anger. Oiling them was a task Dad meant to get to before he got sick. Their noisiness has shifted into a fantastic house alarm to let me know when he’s left his room. The door bangs into the wall from my force, startling Noah from his slumber. With eyes wide, he scans the room in a panic. It’s not lost on me how he gently releases Dad’s body so as not to wake him.
Avoiding eye contact, Noah swings his legs to the side of the bed and slides his feet into his knotted-up sneakers. This night is complete bullshit because the tears crash down my face for a second time. The hits keep coming.
“Staley, you’re home.” His voice at a low whisper is meant to keep my dad asleep, but I suspect it’s to keep me from losing my ever-loving mind. “You look lovely.”
I’d kill for a pair of my overalls right now. This fancy-schmancy dress-up outfit does not match what will come out of my mouth next.
“Why aren’t you at home?”
Noah stands, prepared to receive his punishment no matter how brutal the blows may be. He braves a step in my direction, approaching me carefully. I double-handedly push him, moving him back. Fire rises in me, turning my sobs into a brutal war cry. I crash into him again until my fists punch into his chest. The noises leaving my body aren’t my own.
Noah meets my blows and wraps his arms around me, guiding me to the hallway. I’ve lost all rationale; I’m no better than a toddler losing it from lack of sleep. He’s focused on calming me down while making sure not to wake my dad. The door clicks behind him, and my entire body collapses against Noah.
Between my whimpers, I mutter, “How could you stop loving us? Fuck you, Noah.”
A heaving breath fills Noah’s body as he tries to gather himself.
“Staley, I never left.”
Anxiety and my brain insist I run hard and fast, far away from here. My feet hit the landing by the front door, and I sprint across the grass until I’m in the middle of the cul-de-sac, screaming at the sky. Pent-up fear and exhaustion release from my body until there’s nothing left for me to expel.
Grief is a real kick in the metaphorical dick, and after the events of the past few years, it hits me all at once. I’m much worse than an anxious overachiever grappling to hold on to all she has left. I’m actively grieving someone who is still alive. Anger burns from the core of my body. Soft fingers cautiously meet the top of my shoulder as if I might bite the hand trying to console me. My grief is not finite. It’s a present and an aching thing. Noah tries to receive my pain, and I let him.
We sit on the grass by the flowers in his front yard, staring at a time in our lives when everything held promise. Noah breaks the silence.
“You know your dad and I had big plans.”
“To travel the world together? Or to turn my bedroom into a home gym kind of plan?”
I’m still angry with Noah, but I let him talk anyway. He lies back on the grass, his hands cradling the back of his head as he searches the sky, looking a little lost like the sky is a map pointing him to a new destination—one where things don’t end with my dad, his love, dying and forgetting both of us.
“Staley, you’re nuts if you think your dad would remove a single memento from the walls of your room without your go-ahead. All those concert posters of bands you’ve never seen live? It would be a crime to take them down.”
Noah laughs at my insinuation as I treasure the knowledge that my dad would never purposefully erase me the way his illness has.
“Dad told me stories about seeing some of those concerts enough I might as well have been there. Maybe I was in a way, or he wanted me to be.”
Noah rolls to his side, leaning his head into his hand. In all the years I’ve known him, this is the first time I’ve seen him willingly get dirty. His body pressed into the overly damp grass leaves an indent from the weight of his permanence. He possesses a sort of durability.
“Did your dad ever tell you how we met?”
From what I can recall, Noah has always been here, orbiting our cul-de-sac as a relevant planet to the galaxy does.
“No, but I’ve heard the story of the first time I met you a million times. I graffitied your entire driveway with chalk without your permission. I insisted on drawing you a whole garden of flowers because I thought it would make your house look better.”
I laughed out loud when I remembered how Dad would tell the story of Noah’s troubled face at the chaos I’d created all over his driveway.
“You were the bravest little girl I’d ever met. So unafraid to do exactly what you wanted, including coloring a driveway of flowers for me, a stranger whose life was far more boring before you entered it.”
Bold as can be by age three, Dad instilled this level of confidence in me from the moment we became a family. There’s a framed picture of me standing proudly next to Noah, who must’ve squatted down to thank me—a tiny artist. His genuine and full smile was balanced by my proud dimples, a display of a little girl at her happiest.
“I wish I could remember. When I look at the picture of the two of us, if I try hard enough, I can go back in time and do the brave thing when, in reality, it was always helping to bring other people joy. Didn’t you meet my dad before that day, though?”
Loving Theo is scary, and in many ways, I know everything can fall apart in the blink of an eye. Hearing Noah’s story makes me nervous. I hope that I don’t end up together and then not with Theo.
“Your dad was moving into the house, struggling to get in all the boxes and move the furniture independently. Stubborn. Russell Monroe was headstrong and a show-off. We fought about it so often that he’d insisted he wasn’t trying to get my attention. Whether he hoped I was watching or not, I couldn’t not see your dad. I mean, I’d be a damn liar if I said it wasn’t entertaining to watch this good-looking man, sweating and exerting himself, lug things in and out of a moving truck. You get that from him, you know? The grit and willingness to do what’s hard.”
Although Noah is my dad’s age, I admire how his face mellows into a youthful glow while he speaks about meeting the love of our lives, my dad. Telling me the story is a gift I didn’t know I needed. There’s nothing more I love to hear than the notion that something I got from my parents, like DNA, doesn’t matter enough for me to inherit the goodness of another.
“And then what happened? Did you drink through a six-pack while he worked himself to the bone because you were ogling his sweaty muscles? Stalker much?”
“Staley Monroe, as I live and breathe, a person who respects the arts is a connoisseur, not a stalker. Witnessing a man master the art of flirting around and finding out was what watching your father felt like. I figured it would be neighborly of me to help, and do you know what he did to me when I crossed the property line to offer a hand? He gave me a million-dollar grin. Do you know the one I’m talking about? The one he’d make when he licked the yogurt off the foil lid or when you’d come out of your room wearing one of his band shirts.”
Tears escape my eyelids, sliding down my cheeks until pools of sadness drown my hearing, muffling how loud all of this mourning of a living, breathing human being is. Grief is an active thing whether I want to acknowledge it or not, festering and poking at the lining of my heart and my mind—it insists on staying as if to say what you had is gone, but it mattered, and it’s going to be different from here on out.
“He always ate that awful goat’s milk yogurt—plain! Criminal.”
Noah laughs, throwing his head back until he collapses onto the lawn.
“When I crossed the line and eventually kissed him a few weeks later, your dad’s smile told me I’d never want to return to my side. But what he said was the most direct thing any man had ever dared utter to me. He said, ‘Took you long enough.’”
“I had no idea my dad had game. I mean, he’s always been charming to me and kind. I wished he had a companion but never understood why he didn’t get out there to find one.”
Naive is the best way to describe my feelings about these revelations. Now that Noah has laid it all out in front of me, it’s clear why my dad never dated; his love was right next door.
Noah elbows me as I hysterically laugh, much like I used to as a little kid when I didn’t have to feel bad for living for the moment.
“That’s the thing, Staley. Loving your dad was never a question. It was the answer I’d been looking for. From that day forward, it was the easiest and the only thing. Love is the act of rubbing the sleep from your eyes and feeling awake but exhausted simultaneously. Your dad went to all those concerts and saved every single one of the band shirts for you.”
He’s not wrong about love being the easiest thing; it’s like this with Theo too.
“Russell loved you before you became his. You were his answer. Loving someone might mean waiting for them to come into your life, but it doesn’t mean you don’t do things to prepare to receive that love. To be loved by you, Staley, was all your dad ever wanted. Being my partner was a bonus for him. And for me—”
Noah chokes on a sob long trapped within him. His chest heaves as he releases all the sadness inside of him. I reach for his hand to find it clenched in a desperate fist, ripping at the grass beneath him. Raw and uninhibited, Noah screams into the cul-de-sac abyss. The stars disregard the heartache and despair the two of us emit by moving through the night as if nothing else matters.
“Shh, shh. It’s okay, Noah.”
“No, Staley, it isn’t. I fucked it all up when your dad got his diagnosis. I backed off. I chose to distance myself from the one person who made me feel complete. Your dad was, is, my reason for living, and when I understood he wouldn’t be here much longer, it was easier to stop living. I’m sorry, Staley. I abandoned you both because I was scared. I’m still scared.”
I pull Noah into a seated position and wipe away his tears, just as he has wiped mine away all these years.
“Noah. I’m scared too. But it’s not too late, and Dad needs you—he needs us.”
His chin drops to his chest at the grace I’m extending him. A grown, middle-aged man crying on a lawn after nine o’clock at night is new territory for me.
“He doesn’t remember me, Staley. How can he need me if he doesn’t even know who I am anymore?”
As I argue with Noah, my heart squeezes, and I cannot help but ask the question that’s been on my mind for a long time.
“You think he doesn’t remember you, Noah? Why do you think he keeps ending up at your damn house? I swear, Dad is a teenager sneaking out at night to make out with his boyfriend. He knows you because he loves you, and that’s not something that ever goes away.”
The weight of my words settles Noah’s shoulders.
“Do you think my dad has any regrets?”
I pull at the grass, afraid of the answer.
“When your dad was diagnosed, he came to me a crying mess one day. He wasn’t making any sense and kept muttering about his guilt.”
“Guilt? Over what?”
“Well, that he’d brought you into his world, made you his family to turn right around and leave you all alone again. He’d thought maybe one day he and I would adopt, give you a sibling, we could be an official family. Your dad wanted to make sure you had someone all your own. A loved one to turn to, to say, ‘Do you remember that Daddy sang “Black Hole Sun” into a paper-towel tube in the driveway while only wearing underwear?’
“And now it’s you and him, but he’s not him anymore, is he? I guess the one blessing is that he can’t remember the regret. But tonight, when he came to me asking where you were, it broke me open again. I’ve been selfish, thinking I was the only one who lost—is losing—a loved one. I thought I was the only one alone when you’ve been here going through it daily.”
A somber paleness sweeps across Noah’s face because he’s missed a vital aspect of my dad slowly dying.
“Dad needs his family, and you and I are it, as is Leslie. He might have given me these band shirts, but he gave me you too. He’d want us to keep living the life he helped to give both of us. But what blows my mind is why the two of you didn’t think I’d be nothing but over the moon about the love you shared with the other. You’ve been a second dad to me all these years, but Noah, I need you, and I’ve needed you for a long time now. Don’t leave us again.”
A choked sob mixed with a laugh leaves Noah’s body. He smiles at me with pride and all the affection a parent would give their child. We hug as the crickets sing the cul-de-sac to sleep, and I wonder where we go from here.