33. Beau
Beau
They cut me loose the thirtieth of December, once the infection finally lost interest, with a bag of pills, a sling I’m supposed to treat like a personality, and a list of things I can’t do that runs longer than the list of things I can.
Sloane’s in the chair.
She’s been in the chair every day. I keep trying to make that sound like less than it is, and I can’t.
Every day, somewhere between her shift at the shop and whatever finals the department let her push into January, the door does its thing and she’s there.
Two coffees. A paperback she pretends she’s reading.
The first days after Christmas she didn’t say much. Neither did I. She held the rail of the bed instead of my hand, like the rail was as far as she’d let herself come.
Day two she read to me, because I asked, because the page does the thing it does and a hospital’s a bad place to fight it alone. She read off her spring syllabus and stopped in the middle to tell me it was garbage.
“You picked it,” I said.
“The department picked it. I’m contractually obligated to have read it. Different thing, and the difference is my entire personality.” She turned a page like it had insulted her. “This man has never once heard two humans actually talk to each other.”
“You’re doing the thing where you fix the bad book instead of the bad day.”
“Yes.” She didn’t look up. “Don’t narrate me.”
By day three she was holding my hand. She didn’t announce it.
That’s not her. She reached over while she was reading me a line she thought was bad, and her hand was on mine, and she didn’t take it back, and I didn’t look at it, because looking might’ve made her notice she was doing it.
I have never worked so hard in my life to keep my face still.
Day four Mormor came and found Sloane in the chair and did not look one bit surprised, which is the most Mormor thing there is. She’d brought soup in a jar, like a hospital is a thing you fix with soup, and maybe it is. She looked at the pair of us a long minute.
“Good,” she said. To the room. Then she made Sloane eat the soup, because Sloane works for her and there are limits to what you can refuse a woman who signs your checks.
“She knew,” Sloane said after, holding the jar in both hands like it was warm enough to be worth holding. “The whole time. About us. She set it up.”
“She sets everything up. She set up my parents.” I watched her hold the jar. “She’s never once been wrong about a person. Worth knowing, going in.”
Cash showed up the next afternoon with a milkshake he’d clearly already drunk half of and stayed forty minutes telling Sloane a story about my catheter that did not happen, and on his way out he stopped at the door, looked at the two of us, and said, “Yeah, okay,” like he’d confirmed something, and didn’t explain it, and didn’t have to.
Near the end I noticed she wasn’t eating. Same as she’d noticed me on Christmas. So I made her split the sad pudding cup they kept bringing me, one spoon, back and forth.
“This is the worst pudding made by human hands,” she said.
“Eat the worst pudding, Sloane.”
“I’m eating the worst pudding.” She ate the worst pudding.
The bad day came the afternoon before they let me go.
They came in the morning and gave me the draft timeline in plain numbers, the kind even I can’t let slide past me, and I went somewhere behind my own face for a few hours and couldn’t find the way back.
Sloane didn’t try to talk me out of it. Didn’t hand me a speech about how it would all be fine.
She just moved her chair to the side of the bed where I could see her without turning my neck, and she read, low, out loud, for two hours, and every so often she landed on a line she liked and said it twice.
Somewhere in the second hour the place behind my face let me come back, and she clocked it the second I did.
“There you are,” she said. Didn’t make it a thing.
“Here I am.”
“You want me to keep going? There’s a monologue coming up I have strong opinions about.”
“Keep going,” I said, and she did, and that was the whole rescue, and neither of us called it that either.
So now it’s the thirtieth and they’re letting me go, and she’s in the chair with Mormor’s keys, because somewhere in the last week it got decided, without one word about it, that she’s the one taking me home.
The guys cleared the house. Cash texted me a photo this morning of the four of them at a diner two towns over, caption take your time captain, then thirty seconds later a second photo of Wyatt’s pancakes, because Cash physically cannot let a sincere thing stand for half a minute without putting a pancake on it.
Sloane drives the Volvo like it owes her money. For a few miles we don’t talk, the heater loud between us.
“Cash detailed your car,” she says finally, eyes on the road. “While you were in. He won’t admit it, but there’s a little tree air freshener now and a receipt in the cupholder he tried to hide.”
“That’s Cash saying he loves me.”
“I’ve learned the dialect.” A pause. “They all came by. The girls. Margo brought a card that’s mostly threats. Wren signed it. June drew a — I think it’s a moose.”
“It’s a moose. June draws one moose, it’s on everything.” I watch the side of her face. “You’ve been keeping my people warm.”
She doesn’t answer that. Around the green her hands go tight on the wheel, and I notice it the way I notice everything about her now — a step behind, after it’s already landed.
She’s nervous. Sloane Beckett, who argues like she’s billing by the hour and never once let me see her sweat, is nervous to be alone in a house with me.
I don’t ask, because asking is how you spook the thing.
The house is warm and empty and smells like the guys tried to clean and quit halfway, which is its own kind of love.
She sets the keys down and stands in the front hall like she’s not sure which way the play’s going to break.
I stand there in the sling like furniture nobody ordered.
For a second neither of us knows what the room is for.
She breaks first. She can’t stand a silence she didn’t design.
“You should sit. You’re not supposed to be on your feet this long, it’s on the list.” She’s already moving, hands coming up, careful, professional, to steer me to the couch. I catch her wrist with my good hand. Not hard. Just enough.
“Sloane.”
She goes still.
Here’s the thing about me and the sentences that matter.
They don’t line up. Everybody else’s words show up in order and go where they’re sent.
Mine scatter — every letter there, not one of them where I need it, same as a page does when I’ve been up too long.
I’ve lost every sentence that ever counted.
Stay, in a doorway. A text at two in the morning that never went.
I’ve spent a whole life letting the important ones get away, because chasing them out loud means everyone finds out I can’t catch them clean.
So I quit trying to catch it clean.
“I’m gonna say this bad,” I tell her. “I don’t get the important ones to come out right. You’ve watched me not get them out. So I’m gonna say it bad, and you’re gonna have to take it bad, because if I wait until I can say it good, you’ll be forty and I’ll still be standing in this hall.”
“Beau. You just got out of a hospital.” The calm voice.
The exact one. “You lost your season. Your draft year’s in pieces.
You’ve been in a bed the better part of two weeks with a tube in your arm, and now you’re reaching for the nearest warm thing because the rest of your life caught fire.
That’s not me being cruel. That’s me being the only person willing to say it out loud. ”
“You’re not saying what’s true. You’re saying what’s safe for you.”
“And if I’m wrong about you?” She steps in — that’s my move, not hers, and I clock that she’s rattled enough to borrow it.
“You move me in. You fight your mother off me at Sunday dinner. And in a year the shoulder’s healed and the draft’s back and you’re gone half the season, and you look up one day and there’s a girl in your house whose father’s in a state prison, whose mother mails one card a year, who goes stiff every time you’re kind to her.
What then. You’ll be too decent to say it.
You’ll just go quiet. And I know quiet, Beau. I grew up downstream of a man’s quiet.”
“That’s your father’s quiet. Not mine.” It comes out rough. “You don’t get to staple his onto me before I’ve done one single thing to earn it.”
“They all start out different.”
“Then we find out.” I don’t break her eyes.
“That’s the whole deal. That’s what staying is.
You don’t get the part where you know first — nobody gets that part, Sloane, there’s no version where anybody gets it.
You’ve spent your whole life trying to read the last page before you’ll buy the book.
There’s no last page. There’s just whether you’re still in the chair when it gets hard. ”
She’s quiet a second, and I think maybe that’s it, and then she comes back lower, the last card in her hand.
“People don’t stay for me, Beau. That isn’t drama.
It’s a pattern with a sample size. My mother.
My father. The first one. The plan I built my whole self around just walked off with Vivienne Wood.
I’m not fishing. I’m handing you the data, because you deserve it before you sign anything. ”
“I’ve had the data since Thanksgiving.” I keep my eyes on her.
“In my dad’s car, when you told me all of it and figured it’d send me running.
It didn’t. You keep handing me the worst of you like a receipt — like if I read it close enough I’ll come to my senses.
I read it close. I’m still here. I’m gonna keep being still here, and you can check the work as many times as you need to. ”
Her mouth opens and nothing comes out, which from her is a kind of miracle, so I keep going, because if I stop now the page wins.