Chapter 3 #2
I didn't move the nebulizer. I nudged it two inches so I could plug in my phone charger, and when Cole came in to set up the evening treatment he spent thirty seconds hunting for it before he spotted it and gave me a look that could've frozen the Pennsylvania summer in its tracks.
We snap and retreat. Snap and retreat. The house is too small for two men who don't know how to talk to each other, and the July heat makes everything worse.
The ceiling fan pushes a thin current of warm air down on our heads, accomplishing nothing except reminding us the air exists and it's full of medicine and old wood and the closed-up smell of a house where the windows stay shut because opening them lets in pollen Eileen can't handle.
Cole spends hours in the garage when he isn't at Mick's shop.
I hear him out there, the soft clatter of tools, the occasional scrape of something heavy.
He comes in for meals and medication checks and to help Eileen to the bathroom, and each time he passes through the kitchen or the hall the air changes — gets denser, charged with something entirely different from anger and everything to do with the fact that we're grown men who still can't share a room without the temperature climbing five degrees.
Three days in, I'm eating dinner standing at the counter because sitting down feels like surrender.
Something I cobbled from the wreckage of yesterday's groceries — eggs, toast, a slice of cheese walking toward its expiration date with the dignity of a man heading to the gallows.
I'm halfway through, fork in hand, staring at the wall because the wall has nothing to say and that's exactly what I need, when Cole comes in.
He's here to refill Eileen's water glass. A thirty-second task. He moves to the sink, turns on the tap, and we end up facing each other across eighteen inches of counter because the kitchen is the size of a closet and geometry is not our friend.
He's been in the garage. His hair is pushed back, damp at the temples.
A smear of grease on his right forearm, dark against the tan, shaped like a thumbprint where he wiped his hand without thinking.
His eyes are hard and tired — the tired that comes from months of sleeping in fifteen-minute increments between medication alarms — and they find mine and hold.
The silence stretches.
One beat. The tap runs, filling the glass, water on plastic like very small rain.
Two beats. His hand on the faucet, mine on the counter edge. Eighteen inches between us. I can smell the garage on him — motor oil, metal, concrete that never dries — and under it something warmer, something that belongs to him alone and that I've spent ten years trying to forget.
Three beats would be too many. At two and a half he shuts off the tap.
The glass is full. He doesn't pick it up right away.
For half a second I think he might say something — break the pattern, drop the act, name the thing in the room, which is that we're close enough to touch and neither of us is breathing right.
He doesn't. He takes the glass and walks back down the hall toward Eileen's room, footsteps measured. The back of his shirt is dark with sweat between the shoulder blades.
I set my fork on the edge of the plate. The eggs are cold. The toast's gone soft. I don't pick the fork up again.
I dump the eggs and rinse the plate. The drain gurgles in protest. I stand at the window and watch the side yard, where nothing grows but weeds and a strain of regret that thrives in neglected soil.
When Cole comes back through five minutes later, headed for the garage, we don't look at each other. We've mastered that much — the art of being present and absent at once, two men in a house sharing oxygen, each pretending the other is made of glass.
Evenings have a rhythm too. Cole handles the night meds — the ones that help Eileen sleep, that ease the coughing fits that wake her at two — and I've taken the early shift, sitting with her through dinner and the first round of breathing treatments.
Nobody divided the day into shifts. It just happened, the way things happen in a house where two people orbit the same dying star and neither will admit they're caught in the same pull.
I'm coming out of her room as Cole is going in. The doorframe is narrow, and neither of us moves fast enough. I'm stepping into the hall, he's stepping into the room, and we meet in the threshold like actors hitting a mark they didn't rehearse.
Cole's hand comes up to brace against the frame — automatic, the gesture your body makes moving through a tight space. Except his hand doesn't find the frame. It finds my forearm.
His fingers close around the muscle there. Not hard. Not a grip. Just contact — his palm against the inside of my wrist, fingers curling over tendon and bone. His thumb rests on the pulse point. I can feel my own blood moving under his skin.
We both stop.
The contact lasts maybe two seconds. The span of a held breath.
But in those two seconds the air goes dense, charged with something that has nothing to do with the heat and everything to do with the fact that we haven't touched in ten years and now we're touching and neither of us knows what to do with it.
Cole pulls back like he's hit a hot pan. His hand drops, fingers flexing once, twice, like he's checking they still work. His jaw is set, a muscle ticking in his cheek, and his eyes find mine and hold.
One second. That's all he gives me. One second across the narrow gap of the doorway, and in it I catch something raw move behind his eyes — recognition, or regret, or just the shock of touching something you've spent years pretending isn't there.
Then it's gone. His gaze drops to the worn carpet with its faded flowers. "Excuse me."
The words come out lower than they should, dropped half an octave into a rough register I haven't heard since we were teenagers in that bed, pretending not to notice how close we were. The voice of a man ambushed by his own body, and the sound of it does something to my chest I refuse to name.
I step aside. Just enough to clear a path, give him the room to pass without touching me again. He goes in. The door stops an inch short of the jamb, a thin line of yellow light spilling into the hall, and I hear the murmur of his voice saying something to Eileen.
I stand there with my forearm warm where his hand was.
The imprint lingers, a brand already cooling.
I press my thumb to the spot, chasing the ghost of his grip, and the stupidity of it isn't lost on me.
I'm thirty-two. I've been shot at. I've held dying men in my arms with my own shoulder bleeding out.
And here I am in a hallway in rural Pennsylvania, cataloging the feel of my stepbrother's hand on my wrist like it's intelligence.
Through the gap in the door I hear Eileen's voice, low. Cole answers. Then a pause, and I know — I just know — she saw the whole thing. The near-touch. The freeze. The way we both went still like deer in headlights, caught wanting what we can't have.
I move off down the hall to the kitchen, where the linoleum is cool under my socks and the refrigerator hums its one note.
I fill a glass with water I don't want and drink it at the sink, and my forearm still feels warm, and I want to bring it to my mouth and press it to my lips and taste the skin his fingers touched.
Eileen's small kindnesses thread through the days like gold in dark cloth.
They don't fix anything — not that she's dying, not that Cole and I circle each other like wounded animals unsure which is predator and which is prey, not that this house holds more history than any structure should be asked to carry.
But they exist, and that's its own kind of mercy.
"Are you eating enough?" she asks one afternoon, watching me cross from kitchen to living room with a plate of toast I have no intention of finishing.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're thin." She reaches for my wrist — the same one Cole grabbed, which is becoming prime real estate — her fingers cool and light. "The military took good care of you. Somebody needs to now."
"I can take care of myself." I don't say it's been years since anyone took care of me at all.
"I know you can. That's not the point."
The point, which she doesn't say but which sits in the air between us, is that being able to take care of yourself and being taken care of aren't the same thing, and one of them is lonelier than the other.
I don't have an answer, so I let her hold my wrist a moment longer, then go back to the kitchen and make another piece of toast I won't eat.
Another day, I'm leaning down to check her tubing — the cannula's slipped again, it's becoming a theme — and she reaches up with two fingers and adjusts the collar of my t-shirt.
The gesture is so casual, so maternal, it catches me off guard.
Her fingertips brush the skin at the base of my neck, light enough that I almost don't feel it, except I feel everything right now, every point of contact a live wire.
"There," she says. "Now you look presentable."
"For who?"
She doesn't answer. She just smiles, and the smile contains multitudes.
She calls us both "boys." Not "men," not "guys.
" Boys. Would you boys mind helping me to the bathroom?
You boys are going to wear a hole in that hallway if you keep pacing.
The word should be infantilizing. Should make me feel small, or patronized, or whatever grown men are supposed to feel when someone calls them children.