Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
SAM
He is sitting straight up in the dark with his eyes open and not awake, not all the way, caught in the bad place between, and when I get my arms around him he is rigid as a fence post and slick with sweat and he says, into my chest, in that same flat little voice, “Everybody goes. Everybody just goes.” And I say no, bud, no, I’ve got you, I’m right here, and he says it again, everybody goes, and I understand we are not in a nightmare anymore, we have come up out of the nightmare into the thing the nightmare was about, which is the true thing, which is that in Cooper Mercer’s experience of the world, everybody does, in fact, go.
I do everything. I want that on the record, for myself, for the count.
I do the water. I do the night-light. I do the breathing thing the grief book said, in for four, hold for four, and he tries, he is such a good boy he tries even mid-terror to do my breathing thing, and it does not take.
I carry him down to the lean-to in a blanket at half past two to see the goat, because the goat is the thing that has never once failed, and Pickles wakes up and hollers and headbutts Cooper’s knee and for one second it almost works, I watch it almost work, and then Cooper looks at the goat and his face crumples all the way and he says, “What happens to Pickles if you go,” and there is no answer to that, there is no breathing exercise for that, there is no version of that I can fix, because the boy has done the math, he has done my math, the everybody-goes math, and run it forward onto everything he loves, and I am standing in a freezing lean-to at two-thirty in the morning holding a child who has correctly identified the central horror of being alive, and I have nothing, I have run out of toolkit, I am failing the one job, the only job, the job I promised her at the end I would not fail.
So I do the thing I am not supposed to do. I call Willa.
I think about waking Jonah first. Jonah is the one who is good at the nights, Jonah has a low steady way of sitting in the dark with the boy that I have never once been able to copy, but Jonah got Cooper down at nine and then went down himself, the first whole night of sleep I have seen him take since the funeral, I heard the house go quiet around him like a held breath letting go, and I would sooner wrestle this alone until dawn than take that from him.
And I think about waking Asa, and I do not, because Asa will do the correct and steady thing, Asa always does the correct and steady thing, and the correct and steady thing right now is a wall, and what is sitting on my kitchen floor coming apart does not need a wall.
It needs a door. I stand in the dark doing the arithmetic of who to wake, and I keep coming up with a name that is not in this house, a name my brother told me four nights ago not to come up with, and I come up with it anyway.
I do it in the dark of the kitchen with my back to the stairs so I will not wake Asa, because Asa said.
Asa said at this same table, four days ago, flat as a board, that we were not to lean on her for family things, that it was not fair to her and not wise for the boy, and three of us said the boy comes first and Asa went out to the hives, and I agreed with the boy-comes-first in the daylight and I am betting the whole thing on it now in the dark, and I dial her number, which I should not have memorized and have memorized, and it is 2:41 in the morning and she answers on the second ring, not groggy, sharp, awake, “Sam? What’s wrong, is it Cooper,” and I open my mouth to apologize for the hour and instead what comes out, in a voice I do not recognize as mine, is, “I can’t fix it.
I can’t fix him. I don’t know how she did it and I can’t do it and he keeps saying everybody goes and I can’t,” and Willa says, “I’m already in the car. ”
She is already in the car. She got in the car somewhere around is it Cooper, before I finished a single sentence, before she knew what was wrong, a woman alone driving toward a problem on a county road at three in the morning because a man she has known for one month said I can’t, and I stand in the dark kitchen with the phone hot against my face and I have a thing happen in my chest that I do not have time to look at and do not look at.
She comes in without knocking, in a coat over what are plainly pajamas, her hair not done, no brightness on her at all, none of the sunshine, and somehow she is more herself without it than with it, and she does not ask me a single question.
She goes straight to where Cooper is huddled in the blanket on the kitchen floor with the goat we have let into the house because it is two in the morning and the rules are suspended, and she does not pick him up and she does not shush him and she does not tell him it is okay, which is what I have been doing all night, telling a boy a provable lie.
She sits down on the cold floor next to him, in her pajama coat, and she says, “Yeah. Everybody you ever had did go. That’s true.
That happened to you and it’s the worst thing and I’m not going to tell you it didn’t. ”
And Cooper, who has been inconsolable for an hour, who I could not reach, goes still and looks at her.
“Here’s the part I do know, though,” she says, easy, like they have all the time in the world, like it is not the middle of the night, “because your uncle Asa taught me, out at the hives. You know how the bees make it through the winter?” Cooper, barely, nods.
“They cluster. They get in real tight and they hold on and the ones on the outside shiver to keep the inside warm and then they trade, the cold ones come in and the warm ones go out, all night, all winter. And not one of them could do it alone. One bee in the cold dies by morning. But a whole cluster, holding on? They make it to spring.” She tips her head at him.
“You’re not one bee in the cold, baby. Look around this kitchen at three in the morning.
Count who came running.” She does not list us. She lets him count.
He counts. I watch him do it, his eyes going around the room, me, and the goat, and her, and then up to the stairs where Asa has come down silent in the dark and is standing in the doorway with his arms at his sides, not a wall right now, just a big tired man who heard his nephew break and could not stay in his bed either, and Cooper counts him too.
And something in the boy lets down, by degrees, the way a fever breaks, and he leans the whole weight of himself into Willa’s side, and she puts her arm around him and looks at the goat and says, “Pickles, you are not helping, but I respect you,” and Cooper laughs, wet and exhausted and real, and it is over, the worst of it is over, she ended it in ninety seconds with the truth and a cluster of bees and a joke about a goat, and I have to turn around and look hard at the dark window for a minute.
Because here is what is happening to me, at three in the morning, and I do look at it now, I cannot help it, it is too big to not look at.
I am falling. I am a grown man standing in my kitchen watching a woman in pajamas hold my nephew together with the exact gentleness I have been failing to manage all night, and I am falling for her so fast and so hard that it has the texture of fear, because it is fear, it is the same animal exactly.
I have spent five months learning that love is just the gauge that measures how much a loss is going to cost, and I am standing here watching the cost of this one assemble itself in real time, and it is already enormous, it is already more than I can pay, and she has been in our actual lives for a month.
She leaves in June. School ends. Teachers move on to the next sad child, that is the job, she said it herself once, kindly, and I wrote it down in the part of me that keeps the count.
And if I let this, if I let myself, if I let Cooper, who is right now asleep against her shoulder with his fist in her sleeve, get one inch more attached to a person who is on a clock, then I am loading the gun that goes off in June, I am personally arranging the next everybody-goes, and I cannot, I will not, I am the one who watches the road for exactly this.
I get Cooper up to bed. He goes easy now, boneless, done.
When I come back down Willa is at the sink rinsing the water glass, because of course she is, and Asa is standing at the bottom of the stairs, and the two of them are not looking at each other in a way that is louder than looking, and the kitchen is full of something I do not have a word for, three in the morning and a stranger in pajamas who is not a stranger and my brother who has gone gray in the face, and Willa dries her hands and says, soft, “He’ll sleep now.
Call me if he doesn’t,” and she does not wait to be thanked, she never waits to be thanked, she gathers her coat and she is gone back out into the dark before any of us can make it mean too much.
The door clicks. The truck starts. The headlights swing across the kitchen wall and away.
And Asa says, into the quiet, not unkind, the unkindest thing, “Sam. We can’t keep doing this.”
And I am tired, and I am cracked open, and I am falling, and I am terrified, and for the first time in my whole life as the youngest, the one who agrees, the one who keeps the peace, I look my big brother dead in the eye at three in the morning and I say, “She got in the car before I finished the sentence, Asa. She didn’t even ask what was wrong.
You tell me what we’re supposed to do with that.
You tell me. Because I don’t have a number for it. ”
And Asa does not answer me. Asa, who has an answer for everything, who holds us all up, who promised her he’d keep us whole, stands at the bottom of the stairs and does not have one single thing to say, and we stand there, the two of us, in the kitchen that still smells faintly of honeysuckle and warm sugar where a woman just was, and I watch my brother not have an answer, and I think, with the small cold clarity that comes at three in the morning, oh.
Oh. It is not just me. He is falling too. And he is more afraid of it than I am.