15. Lori
Lori
The transition from sleep to wakefulness is usually gentle, but today it arrives with the heavy, measured tone of a man who knows how to handle a crisis.
I wake up to his hand on my shoulder and his voice.
“Lori.” Measured and careful. The voice he uses on a call when the situation is unclear. “Hey, I need you to wake up.”
I reach for him before I open my eyes. My hand finds his forearm, the flannel rolled to his elbow, and I hold on because the bed still smells like us and I am not ready for whatever is on the other side of his tone.
“What time is it?”
“A little after nine.” He is sitting on the edge of the mattress in jeans and the flannel from last night, buttoned now. His boots are on. That is what wakes me up all the way — not the voice, the boots.
Carson does not wear boots inside his own house.
“Someone’s here,” he says. “At the kitchen table. He’s looking for you.”
I sit up. The quilt falls and I pull it back, not from modesty but from the December cold that has settled into the room. My body remembers last night the ache in my thighs and the soreness in my hips.
I try not to focus too much on last night because something in his voice tells me this is a delicate matter.
“Who?”
Carson looks at the door. Then back at me. “His name is Tyler. He says he’s your brother-in-law.”
Tyler, Ella’s husband. I remember him from Ella’s wedding, the August courthouse event in San Marcos with store-bought cake, and a groom so quiet I would think he is somebody’s plus-one if he isn’t attached to my sister the whole day.
My sister’s husband is here, at Carson’s kitchen table, and I am in Carson’s bed with a hickey on my inner thigh and a bruise on my hip from the edge of his bed.
I pull on leggings from the floor and one of Carson’s old T-shirts from the chair, the gray one with the washed-out fire department logo. I walk down the hall barefoot on cold hardwood and stop at the kitchen doorway.
Tyler.
He is bigger than I remember. Wider through the shoulders, canvas jacket over a thermal, both stiff with road dirt.
His ball cap is in his hands. His knuckles are cut and the cuts have not closed.
There is a scar above his left eyebrow, stitched rough and still pink. That was not there at the wedding.
He is staring into a mug of coffee Carson made him. He looks up when I take a step closer toward him.
“Lori.” My name comes out of him ragged.
“Tyler.”
We look at each other across the kitchen. The coffee maker ticks as it cools. The clock on the wall reads 9:14 am.
I want to ask where my sister is. I want to ask why he’s here and not her. I don’t ask either one, because his face already answers both and neither answer is good.
“Do you know — where’s —” he stutters.
“Your baby’s at Tina’s. Carson’s mom. Ten minutes from here. I’ll go get her.”
Carson steps into the doorway behind me. I feel him before I see him, the warmth along my back and the size of him filling the frame, and my whole body leans toward that warmth on instinct before the rest of me catches up. His hand touches my hip for a moment, and falls back to his side.
The house has a stranger in it and whatever happens last night has no room to breathe. I can feel the want in his small touches, and I ignore it because there is a man at the table who drives a very long way to find his daughter.
“I can drive over,” Carson says to me.
“It’s okay. I go.”
He doesn’t argue. He knows what I sound like when I need to be the one to move.
I take his truck because mine is blocked by Tyler’s.
The road to Tina’s is ten minutes of bare live oaks, cedar fence posts, and frost on the wire.
I drive with both hands on the wheel and my mind turned off, because if I let myself think about what Tyler being here without Ella means, I will not walk into Tina’s house with a steady face.
Tina opens the door in her robe and reading glasses. She takes one look at my face and knows something is wrong. “What happened?”
“I need Junie.” I shift my weight on my legs. “I’ll get back to pick up Cadie later. Or maybe Carson will.”
She doesn’t ask further questions. Junie is asleep in the portable crib in the guest room, still in the yellow sleeper with the ducks, one fist curled by her ear.
I lift her out. She makes a small wet sound against my neck and settles, and her weight in my arms is the one sure thing in the last twenty minutes.
As soon as I’m sure Junie’s safe in her car seat, I get behind the wheels again and drive back to Carson’s. Past the same fenceposts and same frost. I walk back into Carson’s kitchen with a baby in my arms.
Tyler stands. The chair scrapes the kitchen tiles.
His hands are at his sides, open, empty, and his face comes apart in a way I am not prepared for and cannot brace for if I try.
The mouth pulls down, the jaw works, the eyes go wet and stay open because he will not blink and miss a single second of the daughter he has never held.
“This is Junie.” My voice comes out steady. I have no idea how.
I close the distance and set her in his arms while supporting her head. I let her go slowly, and his scarred hands are enormous around her and they are shaking. He holds her like she will disappear if he breathes wrong.
Then, he sits down, slowly, not on the chair but on the kitchen floor, back against the cabinet, and he bends his head over his daughter and he cries into her hair without making a sound. Junie shifts against his chest. Her fist finds his shirt and holds on.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen with my arms empty. I carry this baby for two months, learn her sleep sounds and her hungry cry and the specific curl she does against my collarbone at 3 a.m.
Now, there is a man on the floor holding her, whose hands are bigger than mine, and she fits against him.
The six weeks of fury I carry for Ella is already coming apart at the edges. This man meets his daughter now. There is a reason for that I do not yet understand, and standing here watching Tyler cry into Junie’s hair, I am suddenly afraid I am angry at the wrong person for a very long time.
Carson is by the counter. He lets the room be what it is, and gives us the space.
Once he calms down, Tyler tells the story at the table.
Junie is asleep in the crook of his arm, the left one he seems to favor without noticing.
Carson refills our coffee, checking on us time and again.
I sit across from Tyler with my hands around my mug and wait out the gaps, which are long.
Tyler speaks in pieces with silences between them.
It started on an offshore rig, near Louisiana. He goes on the hitch for three months, saving for the baby. Ella was six months along when he left. He is supposed to be home a week before the due date.
“There is an explosion on the lower deck,” he says, to his steaming mug. “A fire shortly after. Two men do not make it.”
There is a long pause before he speaks again.
“I am on the stairs when the rail gives away. I go down about twenty feet, hit the platform on my left side.” He touches his collarbone through the thermal without pressing on it, and I notice the flinch he tries to hide.
“Break this and have a concussion. They medevac us to a facility in Louisiana.”
“I am out cold for eleven days. I am hospitalized for a couple more weeks due to my injury. I do not have my phone with me. They say they notify families. I do not know if they do. I am in and out of it. I am jacked with painkillers for the collarbone and something for the swelling. I do not remember most of the days.”
“When they clear me, they shuttle us to New Orleans. They also find my phone.” He looks at me.
His eyes are red-rimmed and dry. “I call Ella many times. From the airport, the cab, in front of the apartment door. It always goes to voicemail. I leave her messages. The apartment is empty when I arrive. No note. The crib is still set up and most of her things are there.”
Crib still set up.
She packs the baby and leaves the crib standing, because some part of her is planning to come back.
“I sit on the floor for an hour,” he says. “Then I start calling everyone. Her phone. Your phone. Your old number is disconnected so I call her mother. She says she does not hear from either of us in years and hangs up.”
A flicker crosses his jaw.
That sounds exactly right. Our mother’s love comes with a shelf life and a return policy and neither of us qualifies for either by the time I was nineteen.
“I am supposed to be home before the baby comes,” Tyler says, and he looks down at Junie in his arms, her mouth open, milk-drunk and dreaming, her fingers still hooked in his shirt.
He looks at his daughter like she is a question he is afraid to answer.
“I think she is dead,” he says. Voice flat, emptied out. “When she does not answer from the airport. I think she is dead.”
His silence runs in the same direction as Carson's, the jaw is locked, the conviction that holding on quietly keeps everyone safe. Except Tyler’s version nearly splits his whole family open.
The rope scars across both palms, the knuckles still unhealed, the left arm trembling.
A man who holds on as hard as he can and still loses his grip.
We leave Tyler on the couch with Junie on his chest, both asleep. I pull up a throw blanket over them.
The kitchen is too full of ghosts and grief, so I step out into the sharp December air to let the cold clear my head.
Carson follows me to the back porch and brings two coffees. He hands me mine without looking at me.
The back porch is cold. Wind through the cedars along the fence line, and I sit on the top step with my knees up and the mug against my sternum.
The warmth of it is the only thing between me and the cold that has been settling into my chest since I walked out of that kitchen.
Carson sits beside me, a foot of space between us.