Chapter 6
six
Beckett
Sunday I take Nora to the river. We skip stones and eat sandwiches on the flat rock and she talks about school starting in September and I listen and answer and do the work of being present.
She's quiet on the walk back. She holds my hand without swinging it, which is how she walks when she's thinking about something hard.
"Is Miss Tessa still coming to the program on Tuesday?" she asks.
"She's supposed to leave."
Nora processes this. "Tomorrow?"
"Today."
Two steps. Three.
"She's going back to Vancouver?"
"That's where she lives, bug."
She doesn't say anything else. We get back to the truck and I get her in and buckle her and go around to the driver's side and when I get in she's looking out the window with both hands flat on her thighs, very still.
"Okay," she says.
Like she's putting it in the same place she puts Daddy isn't coming back, and the thought of that — the thought of her having a practiced place for loss, at five years old — does something to my chest I don't have words for.
"Nora."
"I'm okay," she says.
She's not. I'm not. We drive home.
I'm making dinner when I hear her.
She's in Jace's room — I can hear her through the wall, the specific quality of sound a child makes when they're crying and trying not to. Small, controlled, the kind that means she's been doing it for a while. I leave the stove and go down the hall and open the door.
She's on her bed, face in the pillow, Jace's old hockey jersey pulled over her shirt — she does this sometimes, wears it to sleep, doesn't say why — and when I come in she goes still, waiting to see if I'm going to make it worse or better.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
"Come here," I say.
She comes. She climbs into my lap, all forty pounds of her, and puts her face in my neck and cries properly — the full-body kind, shoulders heaving, nothing controlled about it. I put both arms around her and hold on.
This is grief. I know what grief looks like in this kid.
I've been watching it for two years — the questions, the drawings, the bedtime resistance, the days when she laughs so hard it tips over into something else and she doesn't know why.
This is that. A five-year-old who has already lost the most permanent person in her world and has learned, against all natural law, that people leave.
"She has to go home," I say into her hair. "That's where her job is. Where her family is."
She cries harder for a moment, then slows. I feel her breathing even out by degrees.
"Will she come back?" she asks.
"I don't know."
The honest answer. The only one I can give her and mean.
She pulls back to look at my face. Her eyes are red and her braids are loose, one half-undone, and she looks so much like Jace in this moment that it hits me squarely in my grumpy old heart.
"Are you sad?" she asks.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm sad too."
Then she leans back in and I hold her until she's ready to be done, and when she's done she says she's hungry and I go back and finish dinner and we eat together in the last of the evening light and she talks about something that happens at the book sale, something about a girl with a dog, and I listen and it's ordinary and enormous at the same time.
After she's down I stand on the porch in the dark.
My phone is in my pocket. Tessa's number is in my phone.
I take it out. I look at the screen. I want to call her so badly I can feel it like a physical thing, a pull in the centre of my chest. I put it back.
The wanting and the hollow together, and Nora's okay said in that practiced voice, and the deal I make the day Jace dies: Nora first. Always Nora first.