32. Sloane
Sloane
The call comes at eight on Christmas morning, and the screen says Liv, but it’s both of them, because the Sorensen twins have never once in their lives operated a cellphone separately.
“Sloane. Don’t hang up.” Liv, breathless, and behind her a second voice going give it here, give it— “It’s Liv. And Britta’s here. Don’t hang up, okay?”
“I’m not hanging up.” I’m already upright, already reaching for the lamp, because a Christmas-morning call from a number I saved at a dinner table in Greenwich five weeks ago is not one you let ring out.
“The shoulder got infected.” Britta’s wrestled the phone away; I can hear the handoff happen.
“After the surgery. They readmitted him three days ago, he’s on a drip for it, and they’re saying if it doesn’t turn around they have to go back in and clean it out, which is a whole other thing, it pushes everything later, and he just—” Her voice goes down the middle the way a sixteen-year-old’s does when it’s been brave too many days running. “He won’t talk to us, Sloane.”
“He talks to the nurses.” Liv again, having won the phone back. “He says all the right things to Mom. But he’s gone somewhere behind his face and we can’t get to him, and Dad keeps saying give him time, and Mom’s gone quiet, and it’s Christmas, and we didn’t know who else to—”
“We thought of you.” Britta, from somewhere near the speaker. Plain, the way her brother says plain things. “Everybody wants something off him. You never did. We thought maybe you could get in.”
“How bad is he?” I’m asking a sixteen-year-old to put a number on her brother’s despair, which isn’t fair, but they called me at eight on Christmas, so fairness already left the building.
A silence with two people breathing in it. “He told us Merry Christmas this morning,” Liv says finally, “and he said it like a guy reading it off a card. Beau doesn’t read things off cards. He’s reading everything off cards now. That’s why we called.”
I should say no. I have a clean speech for it, a good one, I could read it cold off the page: I’m the one who left, I forfeited the chair, you don’t get to walk out of a person and then walk back into his worst morning like you kept a key.
It’s airtight. It’s true. I’m pulling my coat on over my pajamas while I rehearse it.
“Text me the room number,” I say.
Haven on Christmas morning is the emptiest a town gets — every shop dark, Margaret’s Books dark below me as I lock the street door, one strand of somebody’s lights still burning over the shuttered hardware store.
I take Margaret’s Volvo, because the alternative is twenty minutes on foot to talk myself out of it, and I have learned the hard way this month that given twenty minutes I will always, always talk myself out of it.
The radio is wall-to-wall carols. I turn it off and drive to the sound of the heater and my own bad nerve.
Annika finds me before I find the room. She comes out of it with two paper cups of coffee, and she stops dead at the sight of me at the end of the hall, and her whole face does a thing I’m not braced for, which is relief — plain, undressed relief, the kind people don’t bother to make presentable.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, you came.”
And then she’s crossing the hall and she has both arms around me before I can assemble anything to do with mine, and I do the thing I do, the freezing, standing very straight inside a person’s kindness like it’s a coat cut for somebody else.
Annika Sorensen holds on anyway. The whole family holds on like nobody ever taught them you’re supposed to be the one to let go first.
“He carries your coffee order around in his head, you know,” she says into my hair, not letting go yet.
“The bergamot. The too-hot thing. He told me about it at Thanksgiving like it was a state secret — my son, who cannot reliably remember the name of his own dentist.” She breathes out.
“I have not heard him say a true sentence in nine days. I am hoping he has one left in him for you.”
“Thank you.” She pulls back and keeps her hands on my arms and looks at me, and whatever she finds makes her mouth go soft and sad.
“You’re not eating either, are you. The two of you.
A matched set.” She doesn’t wait for the lie.
“Liv. Britta. Come. We are going to go find your father something that resembles breakfast, and we are going to take a long time about it.”
The twins surface from the room and there’s a tangle of arms I don’t start and can’t get out of and don’t entirely want to.
Britta’s eyes are wet; Liv’s jaw is set in the exact line her brother’s takes.
Annika reads the hallway in one second flat and herds them toward the elevators, and at the turn she looks back.
“He’s angry, Sloane. Not at you — at all of it. Don’t let the angry fool you into thinking it’s the top layer.” Then they’re gone, and it’s just me and a door with his name in dry-erase on a little whiteboard, SORENSEN, B, and a lopsided heart drawn next to it that could only be Britta.
I go in.
He’s smaller. That’s the first thing, and it’s a lie — he’s exactly the size he’s always been, six foot three of him folded into a bed that wasn’t built with him in mind — but everything that makes him fill a room is switched off, and without it he’s just a big, tired boy with a line taped into the back of one hand and his arm strapped down across his chest. The gray light does him no favors.
There’s a meal tray he hasn’t touched. The TV’s on with no sound, a parade somewhere warm and far away.
I stand in the door and the last wall I had goes over without a sound, the way a set strikes — one second it’s a whole room you believed in, the next it’s flat and dust and open air.
“Beau.”
His eyes open. It takes him a second to find me, and when he does, he doesn’t reach for a single one of his faces.
That’s how I know how bad it is. Beau Sorensen has an expression ready for everyone who’s ever walked toward him, and he doesn’t put one on for me.
He just looks at me like I’m a thing he made himself stop wanting.
“Hey.” Rough, unused. “What are you—” He stops, wets his lip. “What are you doing here, Sloane?”
Gentle. Not an accusation. That’s worse than an accusation.
“Your sisters called me.” I make myself come in and take the chair, because standing in the doorway is only a slower way of running. “They’re scared. They said you’re not talking to anybody.”
“They shouldn’t have dragged you into—”
“They were right to.”
He looks away, at the silent parade, and I keep going before I lose the nerve.
“I knew you were hurt worse than you let on. Back in November. I watched you favor it and I let you tell me it was nothing, because letting you was easier than the fight.” The words come up tasting like rust. “I should’ve made you go in. ”
“No.” He shifts, and the shift costs him, and I watch it cost him.
“That one’s not yours to carry. I hid it from everybody — it’s the thing I’m best at, hiding the—” He doesn’t finish that, either.
“I should’ve gone in September. I sat on it because I didn’t want it to be real, and now it’s about as real as it gets.
That’s mine, Sloane. All mine. Don’t go taking it. You take everything.”
“Somebody has to.”
“You’d think.” The corner of his mouth moves, almost. Then his eyes do something I know too well, because I taught it to him over a counter in a bookshop — they go slow and careful over my face, taking the inventory. His jaw sets. “You’re not eating.”
“Beau.”
“You’ve lost—” He won’t put a number on me; he just stops, and the not-saying is louder. “When did you last actually eat something?”
“Things taste like nothing lately.” I hand it to him before I can dress it up, which is how I know I’ve already started to lose. “It’s not a thing. It’s just — appetite’s the first thing to leave and the last to come back. I know the order of it.”
“Don’t do the fine.” Still gentle, but there’s a floor under it now. “Not with me. You never had to do the fine with me. That was the whole — that was my favorite part.”
I don’t have anything to put on top of that, so I put nothing, which with Beau has always been allowed.
“Tell me about the surgery,” I say. “The real version. Not the one you give your mom.”
So he does, because I asked, and asking him is the only thing I’ve got to give that isn’t a lie.
The repair. The infection that crept in after.
The drip. The clean-out they might still have to do.
The season’s been over since the boards, he says, like that part’s old news.
The draft is the part he says flattest, and the flatness is how I know it’s the part that’s bleeding.
“First round’s gone.” He says it to the parade.
“Maybe gone for the year, depending how the next month goes. Guys come back from this. Some guys. With a shoulder that does what it used to, if you get lucky twice — once on the table, once after.” A slow breath.
“I had one thing in my whole life that was only ever mine. The wanting of it, I mean. Not my dad’s, not the scouts’.
Mine. Turns out it’s the one thing nobody gets to hand back to me when it breaks. ”
“Does it scare you? Not making it?”
“Yeah.” No hedge on it, which from Beau is its own kind of nakedness.
“Not the way you’d think, though. I’m not scared of being bad at it.
I’m scared I was only ever this one thing, and now I’m not sure I’m even that — and then who’s left in here.
” He looks at the strapped arm like it belongs to somebody else.
“Fifteen years of being the guy who’s good at the thing.
I don’t know who’s in the room if he’s not. ”