Chapter 10
The dining room had been waiting eighty years for somebody to take it seriously, and Sunny had taken it more seriously than anything Hank had watched a person take anything in a long while.
It was a wonderful house, built honest, buried under decades of people who hadn’t listened to it or believed it. Hank had stopped being surprised by how much that bothered him.
He worked on a ladder, easing the last of the dropped-ceiling track loose from the wall.
Sunny worked on her knees at the baseboard, loosening the last of the gray paint with a heat gun.
The twins had been given the job of carrying scrap out to the truck, which kept them busy and theoretically out from underfoot, and Presley had set up at the bay window with her pencils to draw.
Chloe was asleep in a laundry basket filled with clean sheets, because Chloe slept wherever the notion took her, like a cat.
It was, Hank thought, exactly the kind of morning he’d spent years telling himself he didn’t want or need.
Loud. Cluttered. Full of children and a new woman in his life.
He’d built himself a quiet house on purpose, closed up and covered with sheets the rooms he didn’t use, and learned to call it peace.
But now there was sawdust flying and a toddler asleep in a basket, and the rooms he’d shut were coming open one at a time whether he’d decided to open them or not.
He climbed down from the ladder with the last of the dropped ceiling tracks, distracted by his thoughts. Which was why he didn’t pay attention to the ladder behind him.
He should’ve been watching it. He knew exactly how a child’s brain calculated risk, which was to say not at all. At least not at seven. And he knew Harris had spent the whole morning intently watching him climbing up and down it.
He had his back turned when he heard sneakers squeak on the rungs behind him. He turned, and said, “Harris. Off of there, Bud. That one’s mine,” in his easy voice, not the alarmed one, because there was no call for the alarmed one.
And then the ladder’s feet skated on the drop cloth, and there was call for it.
He’d watched men come off bulls. He’d watched men get kicked, gored, and stepped on, and he’d been the first one over the rail. He knew exactly what a person getting injured looked like.
Harris went down between the ladder and the wall and caught the corner of the cast-iron radiator with his forehead on the way down.
The blow made a dull thunking sound. Then Harris was on the floor and blood flowed from the boy’s scalp fast and bright and far too much of it, sheeting down into his eyebrow and onto the oak planks
Hank was already lunging forward as the boy hauled in one enormous breath to scream. The scream was good. A child screaming had a pulse, a working airway, and the wind to complain. It was the quiet ones that stopped his heart.
He dropped to the floor beside the boy. “I’ve got you,” he said, low and certain, his thumb finding the bleeder above the eyebrow and pressing it shut, clean and exact, the way he’d done a thousand times on a thousand foreheads. “I’ve got you, Harris. Look at me. Right here. You’re all right.”
Behind him, Jenson was keening thin and high, both hands pressed over his mouth as if it were his own head that was open. Presley was on her feet, white. And Sunny!
She crossed the room and was on knees in the blood without seeming to cross the distance at all, her hands reaching out, shaking. “Harris. Oh God. His head. The blood!”
“Scalp wound,” Hank said to her. “They bleed like the end of the world, and they almost never are. Look at me, Sunny. Does my face look worried?”
It didn’t. He made sure it didn’t. He’d learned a long time ago that his steadiness ran downhill into a frightened room and pooled wherever it was needed. He poured it now into the boy under his hand, into the woman beside him, into Harris’s twin, keening by the wall.
“Jenson,” Hank said without turning in the voice that stopped arguments with his brothers in their tracks. “I need you. You’re his brother and I need a brave helper. Go to my truck. Get the black bag on the front seat and bring it here. Can you do that?”
It gave the boy a job which was the only thing that always worked. Jenson tore out of the room as if Harris’s life depended on it.
The bag came. Hank worked with the radiator at his back and the boy’s head in his lap, and he narrated the whole of it in an easy front-porch drawl. Now I’m going to clean it, gonna sting a little. You’re doing fine. Hold still as a fence post for me.
He flushed the gash and finally got a good look at it. He saw, with the private flood of relief he never let reach his face, that it was long and shallow and theatrical. Not even deep enough for stitches. He closed it with a row of butterfly strips and covered them a clean white dressing.
By the time he was down taping it, Harris had stopped screaming and started being deeply, gloriously interested in the amount of blood he had personally produced.
“Is it gonna make a scar?” Harris asked, with naked hope.
“Might be a little one.”
“Cool.”
Hank felt the laugh go around the room like the pressure changing before weather. He sat back on his heels and let his own breath out, the breath he hadn’t told anyone he was holding, and only then did he let himself look at Sunny.
She was still on her knees beside him. There was blood on her hands and a smear of it up one forearm. She was looking at Hank as if he’d walked into the worst thirty seconds of her year and brought her child out whole, which was, he supposed, more or less what had happened.
“He’s fine,” Hank told her again. “He’s going to have a headache and a good story to tell. I’ll want to check his eyes again in an hour and tonight, but I’d bet my license he’s fine.”
“You . . .” Sunny stopped. Tried again. “You didn’t even . . . your hands didn’t . . .” She turned her own hands over, looked at how they were still shaking, looked at his, which were not.
Bewilderment passed over her face. As if she’d spent years being the only steady person in the room, but this time somebody else’s steadiness had gotten to the crisis first.
“Practice,” he said gently. “That’s all it is. I’ve had a lot of practice being the calm one. It isn’t the same as not being scared.”
“You were scared?”
“Out of my mind,” Hank said. “I just don’t let it show on my face.”
And there was only one reason for him to have been that scared.
It surfaced right there on the bloody floor of his dining room with Harris’s head on his knees.
He wanted this. The loud house and laundry-basket toddler, a woman who was cautious of the whole world and had just, for one cracked-open second, let him be the one who held her world together.
The wanting came up in him sudden and total, like water flooding a parched plain that had been dry for years.
And right behind it, fast as a reflex, came the old answer.
You ruined my life. You ruined me. Lorraine’s words, branded on his heart and under them the thing he believed, flat and reasonable as a diagnosis.
This is exactly how it happens. You let yourself want something, you take your eye off the ladder for one minute to want it, and a child you love ends up bleeding on the floor.
He’d built a life around the certainty that he was safest to the people he loved when he needed nothing from them. That wanting was the variable that got them hurt. He looked at Harris, who was already negotiating to keep the dressing as a trophy. He looked at Sunny’s wrecked, open face.
And he wanted them anyway.
He’d wanted things before but always talked himself out of it. This time he wasn’t succeeding. He wanted the woman and the children and the loud house in spite of knowing he was bad for them.
“Coffee,” he said, getting up because he had to say something safe. “Then I’ll carry this brave young man to the couch and we’ll all calm down.”
The house emptied slowly, the way it did nowadays. Natalie took her kids home at dusk with Harris sucking a Popsicle and telling how he got his injury again to anyone who’d listen. Hank went into the dining room to wipe the last of the blood off the oak floor.
“He’s really okay?” Madison asked from the dining room entrance. She’d seen plenty of her father’s calm voice aimed at other people. She knew, better than most, what it did and didn’t mean.
“He really is. I’ll check swing by their place and check him again before bed.” Hank wrung the rag out. “You did good today. Getting Presley out of the room so fast. That was the right move.”
“You saw that?” she blurted. “You seemed totally focused on Harris.”
“Responding to a wound like that is as much about the people around the patient as it is about getting the bleeding stopped.”
Madison picked at a bit of gray paint still clinging to the doorframe. Then she said, in the careful way the Steeles said true things, “Sunny fell apart. I‘ve never seen her do that before.” A beat. “But she let you fix Harris.”
“She did.”
“She doesn’t usually let people do stuff for her.
” Madison considered a spot on the far wall.
“She’s like you that way.” She pushed off the doorframe.
“Anyways. I like them. Sunny. Presley. The munchkins.” She got as far as the stairs and added, to the banister rather than to him, “You’re different, lately.
Lighter, or whatever.” And then she was gone up the stairs.
Hank stood in the stripped room with the rag in his hand and his daughter’s approval sitting on his chest like a warm stone.
She’d come to him tied in knots, carrying a backpack she wouldn’t set down.
Lighter or whatever. He would’ve worked on this place with his bare hands for a year to earn that sentence.
Sunny came back after supper to finish the last of the paint stripping because she would no sooner leave a job half-done than stop breathing.
He offered to help but she turned him down.
He got the impression she needed to do something with her hands to work off the rest of the stress from today’s scare.
He took his guitar out to the porch while she worked.
He’d been playing guitar most nights of his adult life, the half-hour after the work was done and before sleep would have him. He never played for anyone else. It was the one thing he did that wasn’t for a patient or family or anyone but him.
He sat in the aluminum chair everyone hated and tuned the strings by feel in the blue darkness. Then he played the quiet, old songs his granddad had taught him to play on a porch a thousand miles away from here.
He didn’t hear the screen door, but he felt the porch take her weight.
Sunny stood there in the dark with an expression he couldn’t read. He stopped playing, his palm flat on the strings.
“Don’t stop,” she said softly. “I didn’t know you played.” She came and sat on the matching crappy aluminum chair Reno had rescued from someone’s trash at the curb and brought over as a joke, teasing that maybe Hank’s chair would look better if it wasn’t alone.
She murmured, “I’ve been in your home every day for almost a month, and I had you pegged as the most knowable man I ever met. And here’s a whole new room in you.”
“Everybody’s got a room or two they keep locked up and sheeted over inside.” He started playing again, low. “You of all people ought to know that.”
“That’s fair.” A breath of a laugh. Then, quieter, “I keep waiting for you to be less than you are. Finding the catch. It’s the only thing I’m really good at, getting under what a thing’s pretending to be.” She watched his hands move on the strings. “I can’t find yours. It’s making me crazy.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“There’s always one.”
“Not always.” He let the last chord echo in the wood frame.
His eyes adjusted enough to the dark for her face to become readable, and what was written on it had him setting the guitar down beside him.
“Sometimes the surface is true all the way down. Maybe you’ve spent so long searching for the rot that you forgot to allow for a thing to be just well built. ”
She sat very still. The night breathed around them, cooling gently.
“You stepped in front of Marlene Bray for me,” she said.
“You saved a goat from my sons. You fixed Harris’s wound today as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and you weren’t even .
. .” She paused on the edge of saying too much.
But this time she swept on over the edge on purpose.
“Nobody’s taken a burden from me in a long time.
I forgot that I’m allowed to let others help me. ”
“You are allowed,” he said.
He didn’t reach for her. He’d decided sometime in the last week that it would be her closing the distance between them because she’d too many things decided for her, and he’d be darned if he’d be one more.
So it was Sunny who leaned across the small dark space between their chairs, put her warm hand along his jaw, and kissed him.
It wasn’t a careful kiss. He would’ve bet on careful, from her. Provisional, in pencil, ready to be erased. And he would’ve been dead wrong. She’d obviously run the numbers twice and decided to enter it in ink.
He met her the way bedrock meets a load it was meant to carry, and the guitar would have fallen over if he hadn’t caught it without looking, one-handed.
When she drew back her forehead rested a moment against his, and neither of them said the careful thing.
“I should drive home,” she said, not moving.
“It is late.”
Neither of them mentioned the cold kettle on the stove because for once nobody had thought to heat the water.
She gathered herself eventually and went down off the porch into the dark.
In a minute, her lights swung out onto the road and disappeared.
Hank sat a long while in the ridiculous chair with the guitar beside him and his pulse pounding.
He took his own pulse, an old reflexive joke he used to play on himself in medical school after a scary case. It was running fast, and he realized to his vast surprise that he was no longer afraid to feel it run like this.
The house behind him sat with its windows lit, learning to carry sound again, and he understood, sitting there, that he’d stopped wanting the silence anymore, and he was just now figuring that out.
He left the porch light on and went in.