Chapter 2 #2
Carter sat in the pale cream chair across from the bed, leaning slightly forward with his elbows on his knees, his full attention on me in the way he had that felt less like being watched and more like being steadied. "How are you sleeping?" he asked.
"Better than the first week," I said. "Not great."
He nodded, like that was the honest answer he had expected and was glad I had given it. "Is there anything you need that Vera hasn't been able to sort out?"
I thought about it. "She's been good," I said. "She's handled most of it."
"She has," Carter agreed, and something in the way he said it made me think they had spoken more than I realized. "We didn't want to push before you were ready."
Kyle leaned forward, mirroring Carter without seeming to realize he was doing it. "We wanted to come sooner. Carter kept saying to give you space." He glanced sideways. "I said that respectfully."
"You did not," Carter said, without any particular heat.
"I said it mostly respectfully." Kyle looked back at me and his expression was serious underneath the lightness. "Whatever you need. We're here."
I nodded. My throat was tighter than I wanted. "Thank you for coming," I said. "It helps."
Devon was watching me with the quiet attention he used when he was deciding whether to say something. "You don't have to be okay," he said, after a moment. "Not for us. Not right now."
I looked at the cinnamon roll in my hand. Outside the window the January sky was flat and grey. "I know," I said, and I meant it differently that time.
We talked for almost another hour after that, moving through easier things, the ward and what I had been watching on my phone and Devon's running complaint about a coworker who kept microwaving fish.
Devon made a dry remark at one point about the hospital's idea of what counted as a meal that made me laugh for the first time in two weeks, the sound of it strange in my own ears, and Kyle looked so immediately delighted that I laughed again at him, which made Devon look smug.
Carter watched all of it with that quiet attention he had, and when our eyes met across the room he smiled, just slightly, the kind that lived more in his eyes than his mouth.
I had liked that about him from the beginning.
The way he was present without being loud about it.
Before they stood to go Carter mentioned that he had spoken with Vera about what I might need when I went home. I had not known that. Something in my chest loosened a little at the fact that he had thought to do it, had called and handled it quietly without making me aware.
When they stood Carter held my hand for a moment in both of his, warm and firm, and looked at me with that steady focused attention. "I'll call tomorrow," he said.
"Okay," I said. He meant it. I was certain of it when he said it.
He did call, the next afternoon, his voice even and warm asking how I was doing and whether I needed anything.
Devon called two days after that, telling me the bakery had started doing something new with cardamom that I would probably like and he was going to bring some when I was settled.
Kyle left a voicemail that wandered pleasantly through three or four topics before arriving at the point: he hoped I was okay and they were all thinking about me. I listened to it twice.
But something was different in the calls.
I noticed it without being able to name it, the way you notice a sound you cannot place.
A pause that lasted a beat longer than it should.
A care in Carter's word choices that was more considered than usual, and he was always considered.
Questions that felt like they were being guided around something rather than toward it.
I told myself it was the circumstances, that grief made people quiet and deliberate around you, that they were being thoughtful about what I was carrying.
I was right that they were being careful. I had the wrong reason. I did not know that yet. I had enough to carry already, and so I folded the feeling up small and set it somewhere I was not looking, and I let it sit.
I did not understand the full shape of it until later that night, when I mentioned the calls to Vera and she went very still for a moment and then told me that Carter had called her before the visit, to ask about arrangements, and that she had mentioned what Dr. Ansley had said.
She thought it was the right thing to do.
She looked at me like she was no longer sure about that.
I told her it was fine. I sat for a long time in the dark after she left, thinking about Devon laying out the cinnamon rolls on the napkin, and Kyle's yellow flowers on the windowsill, and the way Carter had held my hand in both of his when they left.
All three of them had already known when they came.
They had sat with me for an hour knowing and had been warm and present and kind and had not said a word about it, and I could not quite work out what to do with that.
They discharged me three weeks after the accident on a grey Wednesday morning that smelled of snow that had not arrived yet.
Vera drove me to her house, which was the only arrangement that made sense.
I was seventeen years old. My home was the house on Carver Road where I had lived since I was five, where Nana's recipe journals lived on the kitchen shelf and Pop's tools were hung in the garage in the specific order he had developed over thirty years, where the third stair creaked and the kitchen smelled of whatever she had been cooking and the afternoon light came through the back windows in a particular way in December.
That house was not something I was ready to go back to yet.
Maybe not for a long time. So Vera's it was.
Her guest room was beige and tidy. A lamp on the nightstand, a glass of water, fresh sheets with a faint smell of lavender.
She had done everything right. I looked at the room from the doorway for a moment and then carried my bag in and set it on the floor at the foot of the bed.
I had my journal. I had Nana's recipe journals in their stack.
I had the small plastic bag from the hospital, the one with the red poinsettia clip in it, sealed and unchanged, and I put that in the drawer of the nightstand and closed it without opening it.
Vera brought me tea and set it on the nightstand beside the lamp and said she would be just down the hall if I needed anything, and I said thank you, and she nodded and pulled the door most of the way closed.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the quiet of someone else's guest room and drank the tea and looked at the wall.
It had been three weeks since the twenty-second.
Three weeks since the intersection at Mill and Prospect, since the radio playing on without any of us, since the pale cream chair and the word in its box.
Three weeks since I had been someone whose grandparents were alive and whose future was still the shape I had always understood it to be.
I got into bed with my clothes still on.
The sheets were smooth and cool and smelled of nothing I recognized.
Outside the window a car passed, someone else's ordinary evening.
The drawer of the nightstand had the clip in it.
The journal was on the nightstand. Nana's recipe journals were stacked on the floor beside the bed where I could reach them.
I was going to be fine, I told myself. I had survived the thing I thought I could not survive and I was still here and I was going to carry what there was to carry and I was going to be fine.
It was what I told myself every night when the lights were off.
It was the thing I said like a prayer, over and over, until sleep finally came.