Twenty-Three
Griffin
The room is dark except for the strip of light under the bathroom door that neither of us bothered to turn off.
I don’t know what time it is, but it’s late enough that the town outside has gone quiet, the occasional car replaced with nothing but the pulse of the ocean. We’re close enough to hear it when everything else stops.
I’ve been lying here for an hour.
I’m not naturally an insomniac. Usually, I sleep when I feel tired, but for days I’ve been running on fumes and gas station caffeine.
I’ve reached that point of alertness where a man keeps finding reasons to stay awake.
But tonight, the ceiling is doing nothing for me.
My thoughts won’t slow down, and I’ve accepted that this is just where I am.
There’s a rustle of sheets from the other bed.
“You awake?” Piper whispers.
“Yeah, Pipes.”
I see her shadow move, a faint shape in the dark.
She slides out of her bed and crosses the small gap between us before sitting on the edge of my mattress and pulling her feet up under her.
It’s a habit I’ve noticed on every chair and surface she’s occupied over the last five days.
She’s in that oversized shirt, her hair a mess, and she’s got Gerald tucked under one arm.
I sit up against the headboard. We don’t turn on a light.
“I can’t sleep,” she says.
“Me neither.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Work.”
She huffs a laugh.
“You asked,” I remind her.
“I did. Does that actually work? Thinking about bridge geometry?”
“Usually.”
“Not tonight?”
“Not tonight.”
The ocean does its thing in the distance. In, out. The room settles around us.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
She takes a breath. “Everything. Nothing specific.” She shifts on the mattress. “My brain won’t pick one thing to worry about, so it’s choosing all of them. It’s not as bad as the first night. It’s different. More like background noise.”
“That’s progress.”
“I think so.” She’s looking at the window, staring at the dark. “I keep thinking about what comes next. I’m not ready to face it yet,” she whispers. “But I will be.”
“I know you will.”
“I just needed—”
“Time,” I say. “I know.”
I see her posture relax as she exhales and picks at the edge of her sleeve. After a while, she stops and goes still. The quiet between us is the kind that’s been getting easier every day. It doesn’t require anything from either of us.
“Can I tell you something?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“When you left,” she begins. “When you moved away, I knew that was the right thing for you. I know it made sense, and Noah understood it.” She stops, choosing her words like she’s navigating a minefield. “But I missed you being around more than I thought I would.”
I look at the ceiling.
“I just mean that you were always there,” she continues. “And then you weren’t. The house felt different. Everything felt a bit different.”
There’s something happening in my chest that I’m taking my time with.
I don’t have the right words, so I reach onto the nightstand, grab my keys, and hand them to her.
“Need me to drive you somewhere?” she asks, confused.
“Just look.”
She holds up the keys so she can see them in the moonlight. Hanging there is the keychain she gave me the night before I left.
“You kept it?” she whispers, her voice cracking on the words.
“It was good to know where home was.”
“Griff, you’re going to make me cry.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t do that,” I tease.
She hits me with Gerald.
“Every place I went,” I say, “I’d look at it and think: there’s the keychain. There’s the beach. There’s the place you’re going back to.” I look toward the window. “It helped.”
She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
“What you’ve built… the fact that you went out there with nothing after… after losing her, and you just worked. You built something real. I’m proud of you. I don’t know if anyone’s told you that.”
Proud.
My grandmother said it a few times when I gave her the chance. Noah has said something similar. Donna, once, at dinner. I showed up late, and she’d saved me a plate, put her hand on my arm, and said, “You’ve done well, love.” I had to look at the ceiling then, too.
But there’s something about hearing it from Piper in a dark motel room at three in the morning.
A car passes somewhere outside. The headlights sweep across the window and are gone as quickly as they came.
“I was proud of you, too,” I tell her. “The article, and every time Noah mentioned something you were doing.”
She makes a quiet sound that’s not quite a laugh, but something close. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I know.”
“I would have liked to have known.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that, too.”
I don’t explain why I didn’t. She doesn’t push.
Truth is, I missed her too.
We’re both quiet until she laughs at something in her own head.
I give her a sidelong glance. “What?”
“When I was sixteen, I was at your place and your grandmother once asked about the violin and where I was planning to take it. I told her I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t want to say something too big in case it didn’t happen.
She looked at me and said, ‘Say the big thing. Small thinking is a waste of a good brain.’”
I close my eyes briefly. “That’s her.”
“I wrote it down,” Piper says. “I still have it somewhere. I should find it.”
She sets Gerald aside and lies back on the far end of the mattress, looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach.
“Say the big thing,” she says quietly. “Small thinking is a waste of a good brain.” She turns her head and looks at me in the dark. “What’s your big thing? The thing you haven’t said yet.”
The question sits between us. I look at her. The dim light from the window edge finds the line of her face, her eyes, the steadiness with which she’s looking back at me.
There are a few answers. I pick the one I can say right now.
“Coming home. Building something in the right place this time. That took longer to say out loud than it should have.”
She holds my gaze. “It’s a good big thing.”
“What’s yours?”
She looks back at the ceiling. A long moment passes. “I think I’m still finding it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I think it might be.”
We don’t say anything after that. At some point, the breathing on her end slows. I know without looking that she’s fallen asleep, her feet still tucked up at the end of my bed, Gerald somewhere between us with his impartial expression.
I look at the ceiling, close my eyes, and think of my grandmother’s words.
Say the big thing.