Chapter 40
Fathers and Sons
JAMIE
“Come in.”
I pushed open the door to Roger’s room, letting out a breath when I saw my old friend sitting in a chair by the window.
The sun was going down, the light slanting in the windows milky.
He looked good. Alert. The nurse downstairs had said he was having a good day.
She was the testy one, and sighed heavily like it was a big trial letting me in outside normal visiting hours.
But she must respond well to desperation because here I was.
“Jamie,” Roger said, smiling. He moved to stand, but I held up a hand, telling him I wouldn’t take up too much of his time.
“Wish you would. When are we going to go look at some more stars?”
Guilt swished in my stomach as I set my coat down and pulled a chair over to sit across from him. “As soon as the weather warms up, Roger. I promise.”
We chatted a bit, catching up. It had been a couple weeks since I’d been by. But after a few minutes, Roger leveled a dad look at me, lacing his fingers over his belly. “Now I know you didn’t come here to shoot the crap, Jamie.”
I couldn’t help the little laugh that escaped me, despite my tense mood. Roger’s wife didn’t like him swearing, so he’d stopped. He still didn’t curse, and she’d been gone over a decade.
“Nothing slips by you, does it?” I asked.
Roger lifted a wiry brow at me. He knew I was stalling.
I pulled off my hat, rubbing my head a few times as if that would give me the nerves to start talking. Then I slumped back in the chair. “I don’t… I’m not sure how to articulate what’s going on. But I need advice, Roger. The fatherly kind.”
At his surprised but not unhappy expression, I grimaced. “I know I’m too old for this shit.”
“Pshh,” Roger said. “Never too old for fatherly wisdom. Wish I had mine sometimes, and I’ll be ninety tomorrow.”
In seven years, actually. But he was right.
Did I wish my dad was still around? I’d loved him, but in a distant, theoretical kind of way.
He was the definition of closed off; I think I could count the number of times I remembered my dad smiling on one hand.
When Kevin died, he couldn’t look at me for a full year.
“He doesn’t know how to manage such terrible feelings,” Mom had said, as if I did.
As if I didn’t need him to deal with that horrific loss.
“There it is,” Roger said.
I realized I’d gone quiet. “There what is?”
“What you want to talk about.”
A hard knot formed in my throat. I reached up as if I could work it loose, but found only the whiskers and my still too-fast pulse.
I cleared my throat, wringing my hat in my hands. “Okay, well. My dad never talked about feelings. He acted like they didn’t exist. But you… you were always there for me, Roger. I don’t think I would have survived fatherhood without you.”
Roger smiled, then looked out into the snowy grounds outside.
He was on the third floor, and just over the building across the street, I could see the tops of the non-mountains; the sides of the valley that dipped down into the Quince.
“Nah. You would have survived, Jamie. You survived the worst of it. Just like me.”
That knot grew sharp edges, and that panic I’d felt earlier started to pulse.
The panic, I could recognize now, was the same that had gripped me when Seamus showed up at my door that day, sopping wet, flanked by cops and their flashing lights.
But it wasn’t my kids I saw in my mind’s eye now.
It was Sarah. Sarah, laughing, her nose doing that little crinkle thing she did when she tasted something she didn’t like. Me holding my breath to wait for the freckles to reappear when her nose straightened out again.
Her face when she realized I’d done something nice for her.
The sensation of her hair in my hands, the silky feel of it glorious and transient, yet seared into my skin for life.
“There’s a woman,” I said. “I… I’m in love with her.
Stupidly in love. I want…” I broke off, the prickling in my throat making it difficult to speak.
I took a breath. “I would be honored to spend the rest of my life with her. But every time I think of it, I get this feeling in my chest.” I pressed my fist against my breastbone, trying to ease the sharp pain that rose up even as I spoke.
“At first it was because I couldn’t have her.
She worked for me. But this weekend… I got a glimpse of what it could be like, and Roger, it was the most magical fucking weekend of my life. ”
I breathed through the pain in my chest, forcing myself to keep that panic at bay long enough to get this out.
“But after we crashed through that wall like it was made of paper, I convinced myself it was that feeling I had when we first met. That I shouldn’t be with her because she’s younger than me, and I don’t want to tie her down to an old man.
But she—she doesn’t want the things I thought she did.
She doesn’t want kids. I don’t even think she wants to leave this town. ”
She hadn’t actually told me that, but it was a strong suspicion.
I saw the hesitation on her face when she talked about Natasha.
And while mortification was the predominant expression after that shit in the breakfast line, when she was sure the opportunity might have passed her by, I swear to God I saw the slightest bit of relief there, too.
I thought it might be her old fear about striving for what she deserved, but when Sam talked about Quince Valley on the way home with a kind of wistfulness, I saw her visibly relax too.
It was her home. And maybe… maybe some of it was wanting to still give me the chance I didn’t deserve.
Because when she’d talked about Quince Valley, her eyes had slanted to mine.
“So what’s the problem, son?” Roger asked me gently when I went silent again.
“Well, I still have that fear that she’ll decide she doesn’t want to be with a man of my age.
But it’s not—” I rubbed my fist into my sternum.
That pain was still there. Worse even than a moment ago.
“The problem is… It’s—” I shut my mouth, embarrassed about how I couldn’t even get the fucking words out.
I looked to Roger for help. His expression was so kind, so fucking knowing, that I felt my eyes already brimming with tears.
“The problem,” Roger said, “is you can’t think about being with someone you love so much it hurts, because of how much you know it could hurt if you lost them. Did I get that right?”
The pain in my chest reached a fucking crescendo.
He nailed it, of course. That was the infinite source of fear that had followed me around like a shadow every time I thought of Sarah. That if I gave in to loving her the way I wanted, if I somehow convinced her to have me, that I’d live in abject fear of losing her.
“Losing my son—it broke me, Roger. You know exactly how it was—for both of us. It broke my marriage, and I couldn’t save it. I couldn’t save Deirdre, either.”
The knot in my throat was impossibly hard now, choking me as I thought of how Deirdre couldn’t get out of bed for months.
When she finally did, she lashed out at me.
I took it, over and over again. I took it all and it still didn’t help.
I know she blamed me for not being able to protect him, and I didn’t blame her for that at all.
Not when I felt the same way back then. Even though both of us knew it was irrational, that anger kept her alive at least for a few years.
Enough to divorce me. Then, a few years later, with nowhere else to put her grief, she got sick.
I believe to this day that her sickness was a relief to her.
I watched helplessly from afar. Just like I watched my life turn to ash after that day on my front stoop.
“Seamus and I—we helped each other. I think for a long time we were the only things holding each other up, even if he didn’t know he was helping me too.”
I met Roger’s eye. “I don’t think I could survive something like that again.”
The look in his expression was so empathetic—so knowing exactly what it was like, because it had happened to him too—that the dam broke then.
I leaned over, feeling like I might be sick. Instead I pressed my hands to my face, my body wracking with silent sobs so violent I thought I would seize up with them.
Roger’s hand settled onto my shoulder, and I heard him say something, but I didn’t know what the words were.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, my stand-in dad letting me have feelings my real father never could, as I grieved the worst thing a father could experience.
It was a terrible, incredible, heart-wrenching full-circle moment.
I knew I was here because I couldn’t burden my son with this level of pain.
And because I didn’t want to saddle Sarah with this.
It’s why I’d driven away from her today, even though every cell in my fucking body told me this was the biggest mistake of my life, one I don’t think there was a way back from.
“I can’t be with her the way I want to,” I said, when I’d regained the ability to speak. “If something happened to her—I’d fucking die. And I couldn’t leave Seamus alone.”
“But Seamus wouldn’t be alone, would he?” Roger asked gently.
I blinked, my eyes bleary. He was right of course, he had Chelsea now. He’d also, I knew, had to deal with his own feelings about his brother in order to give her his best self. Maybe I had something to learn from my son.
“No,” I said, my voice still cracking. “He wouldn’t. And he’s strong, too. He’s learned resilience.”
“As have you, Jamie.”
I still felt that pain in my chest when I thought of Sarah, but when I looked over to Roger, his expression was so kind I felt like at least it being there wasn’t something to be ashamed of anymore.
When he chuckled though, my heart sank. He was going to have an episode again. I shouldn’t have laid this all out on Roger. He was an old man, with his own ancient pain.