CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Alex
Now
Two days after Della’s kitchen table, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I’d started to believe he really had absorbed it the way he’d said he had.
He’d gone to school. Done his homework. Eaten dinner and asked Riley about carburetors and told Martina her rice needed more salt, which she disputed on principle and then quietly agreed with in the kitchen where no one could hear her admit it.
He was, by every visible measure, exactly the boy he’d been the week before.
I should have known better. I did know better. I’d told Riley as much myself.
I found him at eleven at night sitting on the floor of his closet with the door mostly closed, a flashlight in one hand and a shoebox in his lap.
I almost didn’t say anything. I almost let him have it, whatever it was, in private, the way he preferred to have most things.
But the light under the door had been on too long, and something in me, some old, learned vigilance about children left alone with things too big for them, made me knock instead of walking away.
“Arthur.”
Nothing for a moment. Then, “Yeah.”
I opened the door.
He was sitting cross-legged with the shoebox open in front of him. Photographs. Joshua’s, from before. A stack Martina had rescued from a drawer in California and never known what to do with, so she’d given the box to Arthur for no reason either of us had examined at the time.
“What are you doing?” I asked, and sat down on the floor across from him because standing over him felt wrong for this.
“Looking,” he said.
I waited.
“Everybody keeps saying it’s the same,” he said, not looking up from the photograph in his hand.
It was Joshua. Younger, unsmiling, standing beside a car he’d probably loved more than he’d loved most people.
“That I’m the same. That nothing’s different.
” He picked at the edge of the photo with his thumbnail, not looking up.
His jaw did something that reminded me, painfully, of both of the men whose blood was apparently now a fact rather than a question.
“But he’s not the same. He’s not my dad anymore.
” He stopped. “Or he still is. I don’t know.
Nobody’s actually told me which one I’m supposed to say. ”
“You can say whichever one is true for you,” I said carefully. “Both things can be true at once. He raised you. That doesn’t stop being real just because it turns out he isn’t the reason you exist.”
“He’s dead,” Arthur said. “I can’t ask him anything.
I can’t ask him if he knew.” He stopped, jaw working.
“Or why he never said anything. Or if he—” His voice cracked and he stopped and pressed the heel of his hand against one eye, hard, the way he did when he was trying to force something back down that had already gotten too far up his throat to manage.
“Hey,” I said softly, and reached for him.
He let me pull him against my side, which he hadn’t done since he was much younger, and he cried the way he almost never let himself cry, not delicately, not with any of the composure I’d watched him perform for four straight days, but hard, and a little angry, his shoulders shaking against my arm.
“I’m not mad at Riley,” he said into my shoulder.
“I don’t think I’m mad at you either. Maybe.
I don’t know.” He pulled back enough to look at me, his face blotchy and furious and much younger than eleven.
“I’m mad that nobody asked me anything,” he said.
“Everybody just. They decided stuff. About my whole life. And now everybody’s deciding how I’m supposed to feel about it too, and nobody asked me what I—” He pressed his lips together, hard, an eleven-year-old’s version of a gesture I’d watched Riley make a thousand times.
“That’s fair,” I said. “That’s completely fair, and I’m sorry. You should have been asked things. I didn’t know how, and that’s on me, not you.”
“I loved him,” Arthur said, quieter now, looking back down at the photograph. “Josh. Dad. Whatever I’m supposed to call him now. I loved him even though he wasn’t very good at it half the time. Is that stupid?”
“No,” I said, and meant it. “That’s not stupid. That’s just true. You’re allowed to love someone and be angry at them and grieve something you didn’t get to have, all at the same time. I’ve been doing exactly that for longer than you’ve been alive.”
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, an old habit, unselfconscious. “Does it get easier? Holding all of it at once?”
“Some days,” I said honestly. “Other days it just gets more familiar, which isn’t quite the same thing, but it helps.”
He was quiet for a while, turning the photograph over in his hands.
“Riley’s not going anywhere,” he said finally. Not a question.
“No,” I said. “He’s not.”
“Good,” Arthur said. “I already picked him anyway. Before any of this. On Saturdays.” He looked up at me, and something in his face had settled, not fully, not completely, but enough. He shrugged one shoulder. “Just wanted somebody to know I’m still allowed to be mad about the rest of it too.”
“You’re allowed,” I said. “For as long as you need to be.”
He leaned into me again, and this time it was quieter, the worst of it spent, and we sat on the floor of his closet with a dead man’s photographs between us until he fell asleep against my shoulder the way he hadn’t done since he was small enough for me to carry him to bed afterward.
I carried him anyway. He was heavier than he used to be. I did it anyway.
In the morning he came down for breakfast and asked Riley, with no visible trace of the night before, whether the engine cases had come in yet, and Riley said Saturday, and Arthur said good, and that was that.
But he’d shown me the rest of it once, in the dark, on his own schedule, exactly the way I should have known he would.
That was, I was beginning to understand, all any of us ever really got to have.
Not the absence of the hard thing, but somebody willing to sit on the floor with you while you had it.