Chapter 6 Logan
LOGAN
“Hey, bud, your uncle is calling me if you want to say hi,” I said to Noah as the FaceTime call came in from Harrison.
My oldest brother had built a playful relationship with Noah that warmed my heart, and it had gotten even stronger lately. He’d never been an especially demonstrative guy, but marriage and a baby had changed him in all the best ways.
Noah and I were hanging out in the sitting room before he had to get ready for bed, which was a ritual Noah was slowly warming to. I was cautiously optimistic that he was turning a corner.
“Uncle Harry!” Noah said. He gently moved Ariel off his lap, dropped his tablet, and ran over to where I’d set up shop on the couch.
I wasn’t sure why my brother was calling, but the fact that he was opting to do it over FaceTime meant it wasn’t any sort of business emergency. Maybe he wanted to show off his genius daughter—that seemed to be the theme of our recent video chats.
The call connected. “Hey, guys, how are the seven seas?”
“Hi, Uncle Harry,” Noah flapped his hand at the screen, beaming. “I surfed today!”
“You did? Well, it’s about time you got on a board! You come from a family of surfers. I can’t believe it took your dad so long.”
I refrained from mentioning the ill-fated attempt from our past, when Noah temporarily lost his swim trunks and then opted out of the ocean entirely.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “As nice as it is to see you, we need to get ready for bedtime shortly.”
“Got it. I’m going through some stuff at Dad’s, and I found a box of your stuff. I think I can toss it, but I wanted to check with you first.”
Our father was at the beginning of the long, slow process of downsizing the family home, and we were all at different stages of grief at the thought of leaving it behind.
Logically, it was too much house for my dad on his own, and none of the rest of us had lived there in years, but still.
It was more than just a house—it was the last place where we’d been a complete family, with my beautiful mother at the helm creating magical memories for all of us.
Even after six years without her, going back was still bittersweet. While it was comforting to feel her spirit everywhere, being there was also a reminder that she was gone. The void my mother left when she passed from cancer felt just as deep now as the day we’d lost her.
As the oldest, Harrison was leading the charge organizing the decades’ worth of accumulated stuff that filled the house. My middle brother, Drew, was managing my dad since they seemed to share one brain.
That left me to scramble between them as my dad got ready to make it official and finally put the house on the market.
“If it’s still at the house after all of these years, then you can probably toss it. But show me anyway.”
He rustled around in the box in front of him and pulled out one of my old remote control race cars.
“Pretty nice little Porsche you got here,” Harrison joked as he held up the sleek black car in front of the screen.
“Yeah, right,” I chuckled. “I was addicted to those things back in the day. But they’re probably all rusted out now. And the tech is ancient.”
“There’s a couple more in here,” Harrison said. “A vintage beach buggy, and something called a Hellraiser?”
“We can donate them,” I said.
“Nah,” Harrison shook his head. “They don’t work, I tried. The battery section is all corroded.”
“Okay, toss ’em.”
“No, wait,” Noah said as he pushed closer to the screen. “I want those, Daddy. Don’t put them in the trash. I play with those all the time when we visit Grandpa.” His little hands were twisted into fists.
It was a little tell that meant he was trying not to spiral.
Harrison paused with the Porsche hovering at the bottom of the screen. “Bud, they’re broken. They don’t work.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the remote. They’re still mine,” Noah insisted.
My brother frowned. “Bud, if you’re interested in remote control cars, we can shop for a new one that you’ll really love. Does that sound fun? We can spend a few hours looking at all of the choices, then pick your favorite.”
It actually sounded like a great time to me, and I hoped he agreed.
His bottom lip trembled. “But I want those cars. At Grandpa’s house. I want them to be there the next time we visit him.”
I cleared my throat. I’d been trying to warm him up to the idea that we were selling the house.
Given everything he’d dealt with over the past few months, I didn’t want the house sale to be yet another source of upheaval in his life.
But I couldn’t really do anything about the fact that it was another big change at a time when Noah was very resistant to change.
Not to mention, Noah loved the house. He’d spent plenty of time there since my dad was a doting grandfather with his first grandchild.
Noah was trembling, and I knew we were headed for another meltdown that I needed to stop in its tracks.
“Noey, it’s okay! We’ll spend some time looking for even better cars. Those are old and broken. The new ones they make now go faster!”
“Daddy, no!” Noah wailed. He stomped his foot and fixed me with a defiant glare.
“Uh-oh,” Harrison said softly. “I’m going to leave you guys to work this out, okay?”
I nodded tersely and heard the disconnect chime.
“Uncle Harry, I want those cars,” he screamed at the dead tablet. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Don’t throw them away!”
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” I murmured. I gently grasped Noah’s arm and tried to pull him into a hug, but he wrenched away with a feral cry. “Noah, come on.”
“No!”
And with that, my son dropped to the ground and launched into a screaming fit that seemed to come out of nowhere.
His therapist had mentioned possible bouts of dysregulation when his regular schedule was interrupted, and the trip was obviously a giant leap away from what he was used to. And here I thought the trip would be a fun distraction. I slid off the couch and onto the ground beside him while he wailed.
What now?
I tried to rub his back, to show that it was okay for him to cry it out, but he scooted away, still sobbing.
“Hey, Noah, come on,” I said after a solid three minutes of wailing. That couldn’t be good for him. Did I need to worry about him getting dehydrated? Or getting so worked up that he started vomiting? “We have a solution, right? We’re going to find a better car.”
“I…I…I want that car!” Noah hiccuped, his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead resting on the carpet. “At Grandpa’s house!”
He turned to glare at me, and his face was bright red from crying. He couldn’t get a full inhale, which made me worried for his safety.
And then he started pounding the ground with his hands and feet. It was a meltdown unlike anything I’d experienced, and I felt completely out of my depth, not even sure what to try to get him to calm down.
“Hey, where’s Ariel? Maybe we need to look for her!”
I’d seen the kitten peeking around the corner, keeping her distance from the tantrum.
Noah ignored me.
There was only one person I could think of who might have a shot at getting through to him. She was off the clock until tomorrow morning, but I had to try.
I got up and grabbed my phone. Nina answered on the first ring. “Is everything okay?” A pause. “I can hear him.”
I closed my eyes as Noah leveled up his soundtrack. “No, we’re not even close to okay. I know this is outside your hours, but I can’t get him to calm down, and—”
“I’m on my way,” she said and hung up. I felt a little like crying myself. Nothing about the situation had actually changed yet, but it was such a relief to know that I wasn’t in it alone. I went over to unlatch the door so she could come right in, and then I went back to Noah’s side.
He was still crying on the floor, and his breathing didn’t seem any better than it had been a minute ago, but at least it didn’t seem worse.
I didn’t realize Nina had come in until she was padding into the sitting area in sweats and a tank top with her hair in a high ponytail.
I was used to seeing her in uniform—or that one time in a bikini—and seeing her in her hang-out clothing felt like I was meeting a new side of her.
Ariel brushed up against her rescuer’s legs but skittered off when Noah let out a shout.
I stood up and nodded at her, then stepped aside, praying she’d step up and save the day, as usual.
Nina went over and sat down next to Noah silently. He downshifted the noise level as he recognized that she’d arrived, but he didn’t stop.
“Hey, my friend,” Nina said in a voice so soft that Noah was forced to tone it down even more. “I know you’re pretty upset right now, and that’s okay. It’s hard when things don’t turn out the way we want.”
It got a harumph out of him.
“When I get extra mad, and trust me, I do get extra mad sometimes, I figured out that breathing helps me feel better. You’re breathing right now, because if you weren’t, uh-oh!” She laughed softly. “But the way I like to breathe is special, like this…”
She placed one hand on her chest and one on her belly and inhaled slowly, then exhaled.
“It’s sort of a test, to see if I can make my belly go out like a balloon when I breathe in. Watch me, to make sure that it does.”
Noah turned his head to look at Nina as she inhaled, his sobs quieting down even more as he got engaged in watching her.
“Did you see it? How my belly got bigger? That means I did it right!” She grinned at him. “I wonder if you can do it too?”
Noah shook his head. The screams had died away, but he still seemed short of breath, huffing a little as the tears kept flowing.
“Hmm, I wonder if your dad can do it? I bet he can’t!”
Nina hitched her head for me to walk over and sit beside her. Once I was in position, she took my hands in hers and placed them on the right spots on my body.
“Your hands are freezing,” I murmured to her.
“Always,” she laughed. “I’m an amphibian. Anyway, let’s get to it.”
Nina walked me through the technique, which was counterintuitive to me since I’d always thought an inhale required pulling the stomach in. But even if it felt weird, Noah found it fascinating, and the tears finally came to an end.
“Hey, not bad,” Nina cheered. “Noah, it’s up to you now.”
Within a few minutes, the three of us were sitting cross-legged, breathing deeply.
I watched calm settle onto Noah bit by bit—and the process accelerated when Ariel climbed into his lap and started to purr.
With the tension and frustration behind us for now, sleepiness set in fast. A little while after that, Noah was snuggled in bed with Ariel tucked under his chin. They were both fast asleep.
Once the nightlight was on and the door was shut, I could finally exhale.
I turned to Nina. “Thank you. So much.”
“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” she asked.
“Some old, remote-controlled cars, if you can believe it,” I said, explaining about Harrison’s phone call.
“Yeah, no,” she said, “this was not about toy cars. That may have been what set him off, but there’s something more going on here.
” I went rigid, and Nina let out a sigh, like she was about to say something she didn’t really want to.
“I’ve been trying not to pry, but it’s pretty clear that something major has him on edge, and I’m really not sure how I can help him if I don’t know what’s going on. ”
She was right. She deserved to get the full picture.
“Let’s sit,” I sighed. We settled at opposite ends of the couch in the sitting area.
“A couple of months ago, Noah’s mom, Eleanor, was killed in a hit and run,” I explained. “She and Noah lived in Denver. I had visitation—Noah would come out to California once a month—but we haven’t lived together full-time since he was a newborn. It’s been…a lot of change for him, all at once.”
Nina’s expression shifted from shock to sadness at the weight of what my son was dealing with.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I get it now. Poor Noah,” she said.
“The therapist said that I should expect him to feel overwhelmed. The routine was supposed to help with that—to give him a sense of consistency and predictability that would make him feel safe, but clearly…” I gestured toward his room helplessly.
She nodded, sympathy on her face. “Okay, I’m starting to see how it all fits together now. And honestly, I think you’re doing a lot of things right.”
I let out a hard sigh. “That’s what it looks like when I’m doing things right?”
“That’s what it looks like when someone’s grieving,” she said softly. “It takes time to move through that, and progress isn’t always in a straight line.”
I snorted. “The therapist did mention something like that.”
She nodded. “Plus, kids his age aren’t always the best at knowing how to regulate their emotions. It’s easy for things to get overwhelming, and he might not have the tools to handle his feelings constructively. What we can do is focus on supporting him as he works through all of his big emotions.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
Nina fixed me with an appraising look, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
“You’re already doing it. Keep showing up for your son. Keep getting him the support he needs. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. All stuff you’re attempting. This isn’t an easy process, Logan. I get it. But I can tell you’re trying.”
I’d been trying, ever since I’d gotten the call about Elle. Most of the time, though, it felt like I was failing. But here, with Nina, it finally started to feel like we might be able to get through this.