Chapter 6
Beckett
We prepped for the interview at night, after Eli went down, sitting on the floor of the cabin with photo albums spread out between us and the lamp throwing everything gold, and it was supposed to be practice and it turned into the realest thing I'd ever done.
The idea was simple. The officer would ask us everything, so we had to know everything.
Favorite foods. Childhood stories. The small domestic truths that real couples carry around without thinking.
So we traded them. Night after night, on the floor, knee to knee, building a shared history out loud, except we weren't building it — we were discovering it had been there all along, two lives that had grown together without either of us admitting it.
"Coffee," she said, first night, quizzing me. "How do I take it?"
"Black with one sugar, and you steal the last cup every morning and pretend you didn't, and I let you because I'd rather have you caffeinated than fight you over it."
She blinked. "You let me—"
"I make extra now. There's always a last cup because I plan for you to steal it. Has been for a month." I shrugged. "Your turn. What's my coffee."
"Black. Just black. You drink it like punishment." She tilted her head. "You make extra coffee for me on purpose?"
"It's not a big thing."
"It's a — Beckett. That's a marriage thing. That's a thing married people do. You did a married-people thing without telling me."
"We are married," I pointed out.
"You know what I mean."
I did know what she meant. I knew exactly what she meant, and I went back to the photo album instead of saying so.
It went like that. Every question was a trapdoor.
What does he do when he can't sleep? — splits wood, she'd say, dry, not looking at me, and I'd feel my ears go hot, because she'd noticed, of course she'd noticed, the woodpile was the size of a small house.
What's her tell? — her whole face, the eyebrows, she can't lie to save her life, I'd say, and she'd throw a pillow at me, and Eli's monitor would crackle and we'd both freeze and laugh.
We learned each other. We were supposed to be learning a script and instead we were just — learning each other, all the way down, the way you do when you stop performing and start telling the truth because the truth is the only thing that'll hold up under questioning.
And then, the fourth night, we got to the hard ones.
She asked about Cora.
I'd known it would come. You can't fake a man's whole history and skip his sister.
The officer would ask about my family and I'd have to have an answer, a real one, and Mari knew it, and she asked gently, the photo album open to one of the only pictures I had — Cora at maybe twenty, laughing at something off-camera, the way she was always laughing.
"Tell me about her," Mari said. "Not for the interview. Just — tell me. I've never heard you say her name out loud except once."
So I told her.
I hadn't told anyone. Three years and I'd never sat down and told a single soul the whole of it, because there was never room, because there was always a kid to feed and a bottle to make and a fever to panic over, and grief is a thing you do alone at four a.m. and put away by six.
But Mari sat there on the floor in the lamplight with her knees pulled up and she didn't rush me and she didn't flinch, and it came out.
All of it. The thunderstorms when we were kids, Cora narrating the thunder, scoring it like a sport.
The way she talked enough for both of us.
The phone call about Eli being born, three a.m., her crying and laughing.
The other phone call. The drive. The rocking chair. The vow.
"I keep thinking I should've visited more," I said, and my voice did the thing it does, the crack, the one it only does for her now.
"Before. I had six months with that baby being just my nephew, a kid I'd see at Christmas, and I visited twice, because I'm a coward about feelings, and now I'd give anything for those months back.
I didn't know they were all I'd get. You never know.
That's the thing nobody tells you. You never know which ones are the last ones. "
Mari reached over and put her hand on my knee. Just rested it there. Didn't say I'm sorry, didn't say any of the things people say. Just held on.
"And the guilt," I said, because once it was open I couldn't close it.
"There's a guilt I don't — I'm raising her son.
I'm doing my best. But some nights I lie there and I think, he should have her.
She should be here doing this, she'd be so much better at it, she had all the words, and instead he got me, the quiet one, the one who can't even open a juice box, and it feels like — like he got the consolation prize.
Like I'm a stand-in. Like I'm just keeping the seat warm for a mother who's never coming back. "
"Beckett." Her hand tightened on my knee. "Look at me."
I looked at her.
"You are not a stand-in," she said, fierce, the steel showing all the way through the warmth now.
"I work with kids who have stand-ins. I know what a kid looks like when they're being kept, versus when they're being loved.
That boy is loved. Down to the ground. He doesn't have a hole in him where a parent should be, because you filled it.
You filled it so completely he doesn't even know it was ever empty.
That's not keeping a seat warm. That's being his father. Full stop. The realest one there is."
I couldn't talk. I sat there on the floor of my cabin with this woman's hand on my knee and three years of grief loosening in my chest, and I couldn't say a single word.
"Now you tell me one," I managed, finally. Rough. "Fair's fair. I gave you mine."
So she gave me hers.
She told me about leaving Spain at twenty-three.
A suitcase and a nursing credential and a grandmother who'd raised her after her parents passed, who'd told her to go, go, mija, build something, don't stay here and shrink, and who'd died two years later while Mari was an ocean away saving up for a plane ticket home she never got to use in time.
"So I know about the last visit you don't know is the last visit," she said quietly. "I have one too. I video-called her and the connection was bad and we only talked nine minutes and I was tired and I cut it short because I had an early shift. Nine minutes. That was the last one. I didn't know."
"Mari."
"And then I built this whole life here, and it's a good life, it's a full life, but there's a loneliness in it that I don't think people see, because I'm — I'm the warm one, I'm the one who fills the room, nobody looks at the warm one and thinks she's lonely.
But I built a life among people who could send me away with a piece of paper, and some nights that's exactly what it feels like.
Like I'm always nine minutes from losing everything and I won't know until it's gone. "
We were sitting close. We'd gotten close without noticing, knee to knee, the photo albums spread around us, her hand still on my knee and mine, at some point, having come to rest over hers.
The lamp was the only light. The cabin held its breath.
Outside the tree line rustled and a spring wind moved through it, soft.
"For the interview," I said, and my voice came out low and not entirely steady, "they'll ask when we knew. They always ask that. When did you know you loved them. We should — we should have an answer."
"When did you?" she said.
And there it was. The trapdoor. The biggest one.
She'd asked it like it was about the interview and we both knew it wasn't, we both knew the script had run out a while ago and we were just two people on a floor telling the truth now, and I had a choice, I could give her a safe answer or I could give her the real one, and I'd promised this woman honesty, I'd made it the one term I couldn't bend.
"The morning you fell asleep in my bed," I said.
"With Eli between us. After the nightmare.
I woke up before dawn and you were both there, breathing, and the cabin wasn't too quiet anymore, and I lay there feeling something I had no right to feel and I knew it then.
That I wanted it to be real. Not paperwork-real.
Real-real. I knew it then, and I've been splitting wood ever since trying not to know it. "
Her breath caught. I heard it. In the quiet I heard her breath catch.
"When did you," I said.
"The creek." Barely above a whisper. "Watching you teach him to skip stones.
Every rock went straight down, plunk, and you told him he was the best skipper in the world and you meant it, and I sat there and watched you love him like that and I thought, this is the family I didn't know I was allowed to want.
And I wasn't allowed to want it. We signed a paper.
Separate rooms. No expectations. So I folded it up and I didn't look at it and I've been pretending ever since. "
We stared at each other in the lamplight.
The careful thing between us — the terms, the contract, the whole architecture we'd built to keep ourselves safe — I felt it dissolving. Not breaking. Dissolving, quiet, like sugar in water, like it had never been solid to begin with, like we'd both just been pretending it could hold.
"We agreed to separate rooms," I said. The last sandbag. The last thing standing between me and the cliff edge.
"We did," she said.
Neither of us moved away. Her hand under mine. My pulse going somewhere up around my ears. Eli's monitor crackling soft from down the hall, the small ordinary sound of a sleeping child, of the family we'd built backwards and were about to stop lying about.
The cabin held its breath. The lamp glowed. The spring night pressed warm against the windows.
"I don't want separate rooms anymore," I said.
It came out rough and quiet and it was the truest thing I'd ever said, truer than the vows at the courthouse, truer than the vow over the crib, the realest words I'd ever managed in a life of rationing them.
Mari's eyes filled, gold in the lamplight. She didn't say anything.
She closed the distance.