Chapter 9
Itold Auggie we were going to meet a friend.
It was the wrong word and I knew it while I was saying it — friend wasn't what Deacon was, wasn't what he'd been, wasn't what he could become in a room with duck-print curtains and a social worker taking notes — but I didn't have a better one.
Father was accurate and impossible. Stranger was accurate and cruel.
The man who was supposed to be here was too many words for a three-year-old currently focused on whether his left boot went on his left foot or his right, and who had decided, with the conviction of someone who had never been wrong about anything important, that it went on the right.
"Other foot, bug."
"This foot."
"That's the wrong foot."
He looked at the boot. He looked at his foot.
He looked at me with the expression of a person being asked to accept an unreasonable premise.
Then he pulled the boot off and shoved it onto the correct foot with the air of making a concession he didn't believe in, and I loved him so much my chest hurt, the physical ache that comes from knowing that the person you love most is about to walk into a room you can't control.
The drive to Duluth took forty minutes. Auggie sang to himself in the backseat — a song he'd invented about a truck that went to the lake and came back with fish, which he'd been performing for two weeks with minor variations and which I had learned to find soothing through sheer repetition.
He had Barge with him, the stuffed moose Dessa had found at a thrift shop in Grand Marais, named Barge because he'd heard the word once while we watched a shipping documentary and had decided it was the best word he'd ever encountered.
Barge went everywhere. Barge had been to the hospital, the grocery store, the lake, and Dessa's backyard.
Barge had one antler bent sideways from an incident involving the dryer that neither Auggie nor I discussed.
The family services office was on the second floor of a building that also held a tax preparer and a dentist whose sign featured a cartoon tooth with arms, which Auggie studied with deep interest while I signed us in.
The visit room was designed to seem casual — a play area with toys that were slightly too new, a couch with cushions too clean, and those duck curtains covering a window onto the parking lot.
A woman named Lena Novak introduced herself as the visit supervisor.
She was somewhere in her forties, calm in the practiced way of someone who had facilitated a thousand awkward meetings between children and adults who were supposed to love each other but hadn't done the work yet.
She shook my hand, crouched to say hello to Auggie, and told me I was welcome to stay or wait in the observation area next door.
"I'm staying," I said.
"Of course. He'll be here in about five minutes. I'll bring him in. Sit wherever's comfortable."
Nothing about this was comfortable. I sat on the couch with Auggie on my lap — he was adjusting Barge's bent antler and explaining something about moose architecture that I couldn't follow — and I waited for my son to meet the man who had missed his birth, skipped his first three years, and filed a legal petition to be allowed into the life he'd abandoned.
* * *
Deacon came in at ten past two. He was in a gray sweater and jeans, no brace visible, walking with the careful gait of someone whose knee was stabilized but not fixed.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at Auggie the way you look at a thing you can't believe exists — with the wide, unguarded expression of a person who has imagined something for so long that the reality of it stops him mid-step.
Auggie looked up. He studied Deacon with the frank appraisal of a three-year-old, which is the most honest form of assessment available to the human species.
"Hi," Deacon said. His voice was careful. Not the press-conference voice, not the camera voice. A voice I hadn't heard from him before — tentative, stripped, a man standing at the edge of something he could break by leaning on it too hard.
Auggie looked at me. "Mom. Is that the friend?"
"That's the friend."
Auggie considered this. Then he held up Barge. "This is my moose."
"Hi, moose." Deacon came the rest of the way into the room, slowly, the way you approach an animal you don't want to startle.
He sat in the chair across from us — not next to us, not crowding the couch, not assuming proximity he hadn't earned.
Lena took a seat in the corner with a clipboard and the practiced invisibility of a professional observer.
"What's his name?" Deacon asked.
"Barge."
"Barge." Deacon said it the way he'd said my title in the consult room — slowly, learning it. "That's a good name for a moose."
"He goes everywhere."
"Where's his favorite place?"
Auggie thought about it. "The lake."
"Yeah? What does he do at the lake?"
"He watches. Moose watch."
"What does he watch?"
"The water." Auggie slid off my lap and carried Barge to the play area, where there was a plastic kitchen set and a box of blocks and a rug with a map of a cartoon town printed on it.
He set Barge on the rug, positioning him with the seriousness of a stage director, and began building something around him with blocks.
Deacon looked at me. I didn't give him anything.
I sat on the couch with my hands in my lap and I watched my son play and I gave Deacon Roe absolutely nothing, because this room was not for me and him.
This room was for Auggie, and whatever happened in it would be determined by a three-year-old with a thrift-store moose and an opinion about architecture, and neither of us had the right to make it about ourselves.
Deacon got up from the chair. He walked — slowly, the knee — to the play area and sat on the floor. Not close to Auggie. Near enough to be present. Far enough to not intrude. He sat on a rug with a cartoon town on it in a room with duck curtains and he waited.
Auggie ignored him for four minutes. Four minutes is a long time to sit on a floor and be ignored by your own child.
I watched Deacon endure it. I watched him resist every instinct I knew he had — the instinct to fill silence, to perform, to make the room respond to him.
He just sat there. The man who had commanded an arena, who had taken a press conference and turned it into a trending clip, sat on a rug in a family services office in Duluth and waited for a three-year-old to decide he was worth acknowledging.
"Do you know about moose?" Auggie said, without looking up.
"A little."
"They're the biggest deer."
"That's true."
"They eat underwater plants."
"I didn't know that."
"Barge eats underwater plants." Auggie held up a block. "This is his house."
"It's a good house."
"It needs more." Auggie pushed the box of blocks toward Deacon. Not an invitation — a directive. He wasn't asking this man to play with him. He was assigning him a task.
Deacon took a block. He placed it carefully where Auggie indicated.
Then another. They built in silence for a while — Auggie directing, Deacon following, Barge presiding over the construction from his position on the rug.
Lena wrote something on her clipboard. I sat on the couch and watched my son give orders to his father and his father follow them, and I felt something I didn't want to feel.
It wasn't tenderness. I want to be clear about that.
It wasn't the swell of a woman watching the reunion she'd secretly wanted.
It was the recognition — clinical, unwanted, precise — that Deacon was doing this right.
Not because someone had coached him. Not because he was performing for Lena or for me.
He was doing it right because something in him, some instinct that had been buried under the ice and the franchise and the machine, had surfaced when his son pushed a box of blocks toward him and told him to build.
I hated it. I hated that he was good at this.
I hated that the man who had missed the birth, the first word, the first step, the first hundred nights I'd walked the floor at 2 a.m. with a screaming infant and a body that was still bleeding from delivery, could sit down on a rug and do the one thing that mattered, which was to follow a three-year-old's instructions without trying to lead.
They built for forty-five minutes. Auggie told Deacon about the lake.
About the trucks. About the hole he was digging in Dessa's yard, which was getting "real deep," and about the hospital where Mom fixed people's bones.
Deacon listened. He asked questions that were careful and simple and didn't push.
He didn't ask about me. He didn't ask about us.
He asked about the hole and the trucks and the moose, because those were the things Auggie cared about, and for the first time in twelve years I watched Deacon Roe care about something that wasn't on a scoreboard.
At the end of the visit, Lena said it was time. Auggie looked up at Deacon and said, "You can come back."
"Yeah?" Deacon said. And his voice cracked — not the press-conference crack, not the performed emotion. The raw, ugly sound of a man hearing something he hadn't earned from the person he'd failed most.
"Yeah." Auggie picked up Barge. "Barge says too."
I collected my son and his moose and his boots — still on the wrong feet, because he'd switched them again while I wasn't watching — and we walked to the car.
I didn't look at Deacon. I buckled Auggie in and closed the door and stood in the parking lot with November air on my face and I breathed, and I thought: he was good.
He was good in that room. And I don't know what to do with that.
* * *
Three days later, Dessa called at seven in the morning.
"You need to see something," she said. No preamble. The voice she used when something had gone wrong and she was choosing not to soften it.
"What."
"I'm sending it."