Chapter 30
Okay, that was a rocky start.
I sputtered something to Joey’s sister about wanting to offer my condolences, as one does. But those words didn’t belong to me and didn’t sound at all convincing coming out of my mouth. I was a talking horse, pawing the ground and hoping to be understood.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said, finally. “To let you flay me, I guess.”
Heather’s anger fell away, as quickly as it had roared to life, but she was a husk without it: wan, pale, her dark eyes sunken. They had the same chin, she and Joey. The same sharp cheekbones, the same curls.
“They said you found him,” she said, her voice gone tremulous.
Sachin put a cup of something hot in front of me. Water, with a stinking bag of something flowery floating in it, when I would have given anything for something a little more numbing. But then Heather was pregnant. She probably needed a drink, too, and couldn’t have it.
We sat in the living room. I sipped my sticks-and-flowers tea and took her through discovering Joey—I left out the terrible color of his skin—and everything I knew so far from the police.
Heather listened, wincing the entire time against a blow that had already come.
When I was through with everything I could think to say, I stopped, the fear of what she would ask me or say to me or accuse me of swelling along with the silence.
“Is it a boy or…?” I said.
“What was he doing sleeping here, Dahlia?” Heather said. “When he should have been with you?”
“Honey,” Sachin said.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “That’s a reasonable question.”
“He loved you,” Heather said.
I put down the tea. “I—I would have to start at the beginning of time and pull out some scientific data on primate affection to explain it to you, but … I know?”
“But you didn’t love him back,” she said dully.
“I wish I had. I wish I could. It was no fault of his. I’m the one…”
Sachin reached to pat Heather’s foot, but she shook him off. “Why waste his time?”
“I didn’t think I was wasting his time,” I said.
Had I been? Was I what the women in the McPhee’s ladies’ room thought I was? Or worse?
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “I—I’m not great with, uh…”
“Basic human emotions?” Heather said.
“Yes,” I said. “I know you meant to cut me just then, well done, but that’s what I mean. That’s what I am, and Joey was … Joey was like…”
What did I really feel? Heather deserved to hear it. Joey deserved to have it said, even if it showed me for what I was.
I stared at my boots, thinking, looking past them, and then really saw them, my right boot, my savings account. My bank, where I stuffed all my hopeless hopes.
“Joey was a song I wanted to sing,” I said.
“It was like I was in the mood to sing, maybe it’s a great weather day, early spring when it’s been so cold, one of those days?
Everyone’s windows open for the first time and a radio is playing, oh, I know this song, right?
What a great song. But I don’t know the lyrics.
I never knew them. They might as well be in a different language.
The music plays on, the song keeps moving, and I can’t sing along. ”
Heather was staring at me in disgust. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I thought we were having fun,” I said. “We argued a lot. About music stuff, you know? What was authentic country and what wasn’t, and whether a kid from, like, Oak Park could play bluegrass—but that’s just a conversation, right?
I thought we fit together, that we were kind of, I don’t know …
To say on the same wavelength—air quotes—really sounds far too, uh, directional?
We were who we were. In one place. I mean not necessarily, you know, going anywhere?
But together. And that was enough. It seemed like enough. ”
That was the truth but also a lie. It had never seemed like a final destination, not to me. My heart hadn’t been fully in it with Joey, and I’d felt stretched between where I stood with him and where I wanted to be. Some future he wasn’t necessarily a part of.
Heather pulled a tissue from the box at her elbow and pointed it at me. “That’s not enough! Not, even, close!” The tissue, punctuating each word. “You could have been— Did you call it directional? God. How old are you, Dahlia?”
“Honey?” Sachin said.
“You could have had goals, and built something together, not just hang out,” Heather continued. “Not just have fun—”
“Hon,” Sachin said, “come on. Dahlia lost Joey, too.”
“It doesn’t seem like she did!” Heather said.
“Hon. Seems like she misplaced him, and he spent the week with us, moping around and talking about how he was finally getting it together, how his life was about to change, and he’d quit that ridiculous trampoline place.
All the time pretending he was here to help set up the nursery. ”
Sachin looked at me apologetically. “It’s a boy.”
“Congratulations,” I said, because humans said things like that. I would have said it, either way.
“Pretending he wasn’t waiting for you to call,” Heather said.
I’d called. Okay, maybe not until I’d realized the rent hadn’t been paid, but I was still insulted. He could have called me. “Actually, my phone is—”
“Pretending that when he finally gave you our mother’s ring, you’d wear it.”
We all sat with that for a moment. Somewhere outside, I could hear someone talking, and then there was a sudden bang at the front door, and we all jumped.
“The postal carrier,” Sachin explained. “She talks on her phone through a, you know.”
“Earpiece?” I said.
“Right,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He looked exhausted, but he reached with his other hand for Heather’s, and she let him. His thumb rubbed across hers, a small, tender moment that made me think about all the ways, yes, it hadn’t been enough. For anyone. “Yes,” Sachin agreed. “That.”