27. Sloane #3
“Mom would —”
“Danny.”
“— I’m just saying. She’d have liked him.”
And he can say it, that’s the thing. He’s the only person alive who can set Mom down in a sentence near me and I don’t have to leave the room, because he’s the one I kept, and the one you keep is the only one you can stand to remember in front of.
“I’ll be in Haven a couple more days,” he says. “Tomorrow, Monday. I fly out of Boston Tuesday morning, go sort out the shit with Dad. So I’ve got two days, and I’d like to spend them looking at your actual face instead of the bad pixelated one. If that’s allowed.”
“Come for dinner tomorrow.”
“Sloane —”
“Not for any of this. Dinner. Here — the Sailmaker’s still gutted, so here.
” I hear myself, fast, arranging it, because arranging is a thing I can do with my hands while the rest of me is underwater.
“There are people I want you to meet. My roommates. Margo, June, Wren. They’re —” My throat does a thing I don’t permit.
I shut it down. “They’re good ones too. Turns out I went and collected a few. ”
Danny’s eyes go bright and he blinks it off “Yeah,” he says, rough. “Okay. Dinner. I’ll bring the bad wine I can afford.”
“You’ll bring nothing. You’ll let yourself be fed for once in your life.”
“There she is.” Soft. “Bossy. Just like —” and he catches it this time, because the back half of that is Mom, and even Danny knows which wires are live, and he lets it lie, and somehow the not-saying is warmer than the saying would’ve been.
“They’ll like you,” I say. “The girls. Margo will cross-examine your intentions toward the family by the time the salad’s out. June won’t let you leave the house hungry. Wren won’t say six words and she’ll still have you read by dessert.”
“So. Three more of you.”
“Warmer than me. Everyone’s warmer than me.”
“Nobody’s warmer than you, Sloanie. You just keep it in a lockbox.” Gentle, no edge on it. “Always did. You used to ration your Halloween candy clean into the next October. One piece a day, like a tiny banker.”
“It was a system.”
“It was a hostage situation. I watched you make a fun-size Snickers last until spring out of pure spite.”
“The spite was load-bearing.”
He laughs, the good one again, and for one second the worst Sunday of the year has somebody I love laughing in the middle of it. That’s the thing about Danny. That’s what he’s always been — not the absence of the bad, just the standing proof it never got all of me.
He won’t stay over. I try — the couch, we’ll make a bed, anything — and he won’t, because Danny doesn’t take up room in other people’s houses any more than I do. He’s got a motel by the highway and a flight to go make grief with.
At the door he hugs me and I let him. And into the top of my head he says it low, where Beau in the kitchen can’t hear.
“You did good, Sloanie. Getting out. Whatever you think you are,” he pulls back and holds me by the shoulders, our father’s jaw sitting on both of us, the family curse worn two different ways, “it’s his mess.
It was always only his. It didn’t come with you.
Don’t let the news from back there tell you different. ”
“I hear you,” I say.
I’m lying, and he can’t tell, because for once I’m not performing okay — I’m performing agreement, which is a different play, and he never had to learn my tells the way Beau’s started to.
Beau walks him out. I watch through the window: the two of them in the wet grey by the truck, talking low, in the register men use when they’re quietly agreeing to share custody of someone.
Danny says something. Beau nods, once, the way he nods on the ice when a thing is settled.
They shake. Then Danny’s in the cab and the taillights smear off down the street, and the house is just the house again, lit and lived-in, mine for a little longer.
Beau comes back in rubbing the cold off his hands and crosses to me at the window and wraps both arms around me from behind, sets his chin on the top of my head, careful, the way you hold a thing you’ve decided is yours.
And I let him. I stand inside it. And for the first time since the night I let myself say it back, the warmth of him doesn’t land like a gift.
It lands like a thing I’m stealing.
It lands like the heating pad and the coconut shampoo, the whole soft rented life, and under all of it now there’s a clock I can suddenly hear that I’d somehow stopped hearing — counting down to the part where I do to him what we do, or he finds out the whole of what I’m from, or the line just comes due, because it always comes due.
It came due on Renata’s face in a kitchen in Pennsylvania on a Thursday.
And I stand wrapped in the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I start, very quietly, behind a face he can’t see, to draw up the exit I swore to him and to myself I’d never need.
“You okay?” he says into my hair.
“I’m okay,” I say.
It’s the most grammatically perfect sentence I’ve said all day. He can’t see my face. For once, he doesn’t catch it.