Chapter 1 #2
Older. Thinner in a way that scared me before I even had time to be scared of anything else — his cheekbones sharper, his jaw more shadow than I remembered, gray threaded through hair that hadn't had gray in it, not at thirty-six, not the last time I saw him.
His eyes were the same. That was the thing that undid me first, before the rest of it caught up — his eyes were exactly the same, dark and steady and looking at me like I was the only fixed point in a spinning world, and I knew those eyes, I had memorized those eyes across a decade of mornings, and no grief-stricken hallucination, no cruel trick of a tired mind, had ever gotten them quite right, because I'd tried.
God, I'd tried, in dreams, to conjure his face exactly, and I always failed some small detail, and here was the detail, unfailed, standing on my doorstep in the dying light.
"Josie," he said.
His voice.
I did not faint. I want that on the record, because I know how this sounds, I know the shape of the story people will tell later — dead man comes home, woman collapses — and it didn't happen like that.
My body simply stopped taking instructions.
I stood in my own doorway with flour on my hands and stared at a dead man saying my name like it was the only word he remembered how to say, and I did not move, because moving would mean this was real, and I was not ready, would never in my life be ready, for this to be real.
"No," I said. It came out small. Then, because small wasn't enough, because nothing about this could be small: "No."
"Josie—"
"You're dead." My voice cracked up out of somewhere I didn't know I had, loud now, furious, shaking.
"I buried you. I picked the casket. Cherry wood, because you always said pine looked cheap, do you know how insane it is to agonize over wood grain for a coffin, I stood in a showroom and cried over which handles looked more like you, and you're — you're standing on my — no. No. This isn't — you don't get to—"
"I know." His own voice broke on it, just slightly, just enough that I heard two years of something terrible underneath it. "I know what I did. I know exactly what I did, every day, I know."
"You're not real."
"I'm real."
"You don't get to just—" And there it went, whatever was holding me up, some structural piece of me that had been keeping the whole building standing simply gave out, and my knees went, actually went, the ground tilting sideways in a way that had nothing metaphorical about it, and I was falling, and then I wasn't, because his arms were around me.
The same arms.
I'd know them anywhere. I'd have known them blind, deaf, in the dark, at the bottom of the ocean.
The same weight, the same warmth, the exact way his hand splayed against my spine like it had a hundred thousand times before, and it was that — not his face, not his voice, but the specific, unmistakable, impossible warmth of him, alive, solid, real under my hands — that broke whatever was left standing in me.
I sobbed into a chest I had watched them lower into the ground.
I don't know how long I stood there. I don't know if I was holding on to him or hitting him — both, I think, both at once, my fists closed on his shirt and then opening and then closing again, some animal part of me trying to simultaneously pull him closer and push him away, to confirm he was real and to punish him for the two years he'd cost me by being not-real, and he took all of it, stood there and let me hit him and hold him in the same breath, didn't flinch, didn't defend himself, just said my name, over and over, low, like a man saying the only prayer he had left.
"I'm sorry," he kept saying. "I'm sorry. I'm here. I'm sorry."
"You don't get to be sorry," I sobbed, into his shirt, my voice muffled and ugly and not caring.
"Sorry doesn't — sorry is for being late to dinner, Cormac, sorry is not for — I mourned you.
I wore black to your funeral. Your funeral.
I have a headstone with your name on it in the cemetery on Willow Street, I go there every Sunday, I talk to you, I've been talking to a piece of granite for two years like an insane person—"
"I know."
"How are you here."
"I'll tell you everything. I swear to you, I'll tell you every piece of it.
Just—" His voice caught, and I felt it, felt the shudder go through his whole body where mine was pressed against it.
"Just let me hold you first. Please. I've had two years of not being allowed to.
Just — one minute. Give me one minute before the world comes back in. "
And God help me, I did.
I stood in the doorway of my shop, in the dying spring light, and let a dead man hold me, and for one minute — one single, suspended, impossible minute — I didn't ask a single question.
I just breathed him in, the smell of him underneath two years of road and diesel and unfamiliar soap, some deep animal part of me still, unbelievably, unforgivably, recognizing it as home.
Somewhere in that minute, my brain started working again in the strange, disjointed way it does during a car accident, cataloging details it had no business cataloging while the important things were still crashing down around me.
I noticed his boots were wrong — not the ones he used to wear, some other pair, worn thin at the toe.
I noticed he smelled like a bus station, vinyl seats and gas station coffee, underneath the him-smell I still, God help me, would have known blind.
I noticed my own hands were shaking so hard the porch light rattled where I'd gripped the frame for balance.
I noticed, distantly, that Mrs. Whitcombe from two doors down had come out onto her porch to water plants that did not need watering at seven in the evening, and was staring at us with her mouth open, and that by morning this would not be a private moment anymore.
It would be the whole town's moment. It already was.