Chapter 53
Katie
Present Day
The Hamptons
I woke up to the sound of the landline in my sitting room ringing. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I’d been drifting in and
out of sleep for hours, waiting for the calls to begin. I checked the time on my charging phone: 5:07 a.m. A record for my
mother, to be fair. She’d never made it this long after daybreak, although it was possible she’d simply forgotten, for the
first hour, that I didn’t have service here and dialed my cell a thousand times instead.
The call went how it usually went—a highly detailed timeline of my brother’s demise. How eight years ago, she and my father
were visiting him in Pennsylvania. How he’d been working really hard, had made new friends, and everything was finally going
to change. How he was going to come home soon. That there was a surgeon in the city who thought, maybe, just maybe, Mikey
could grip his hand again. That if he could just stay focused, maybe everything could go back to the way it was before, and
so on and so forth, until the stories blended into one another and into unintelligible sobs and weeps and moans and groans.
I listened intently for an hour, nodding as if she could see me, absorbing all her pain and saying almost nothing, being a good and quiet daughter, pushing myself to the point where I could barely breathe just so my mother, for a minute, might.
When it was finally over—she was doing a live-streamed motherhood podcast at eight, had to get her fundraising face on—I hung up the phone, crawled back into bed, and cried.
There was a knock on my door.
“Katie?”
“Don’t come in. I’m—”
“Katie, please.”
“Don’t. I don’t want you to—”
Tyler cracked open the door.
“Not today, okay?” I said. “I can’t today. I can’t pretend. I can’t . . .”
He slid into bed next to me and handed me a giant cup of coffee. His palms were shaking, and he wouldn’t quite look at me,
which was fine because I wouldn’t quite look at him. I put the mug on my nightstand and turned away, studying the soft lines
and warm angles of morning while my body shuddered and my eyes welled. I swallowed a gasp—a big, fat, ugly one—and then burrowed
my face into a pillow.
Tyler slipped a hand onto my back. Light, tentative, but it was there. He patted it twice.
I snickered through a silenced wail. “Thanks, Grandpa.”
He kicked me in the calf and then wrapped his arms around me, pressing his nose into the nape of my neck. “I’m trying,” he
said.
I sniffled, rolled over to face him, and said, “I know.” My face, I was sure, red and swollen and covered in snot. My breath,
sour. My hair, a mess. He wiped the tears from my eyes and kissed me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask you how you were doing this past week. I’ve been distracted, and that’s on me. If you were struggling
and I missed it, I’m sorry. And I’m here now.”
I exhaled and then kissed him again.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and then, for a little while longer, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, Tyler was sitting up in bed, reading one of Meredith’s books. Tell Me You’ll Wait for Me. An early title, one she’d likely written herself.
“Am I hallucinating?” I said.
He grinned, then put the book down, its pages smooshed against the comforter. “She is so outrageously good. Do people even
realize that? That her character work is so, so good?”
I propped myself up on a pillow. “Yes, Tyler. I think the people realize it.”
He laughed and then pulled me into his arms. His face, now, neutral. Serious. “So, today.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Today.”
“You’re welcome to do your own thing. Whatever you need. I know it’s a Thursday. That we should probably write, if you’re
up for it. But I kind of have a tradition of my own, if you want to do something together. If you don’t want to be alone.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
He held out his hand. “Then come on. We’d better get moving.”
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” he said. And I knew, from the way he’d said it, that he didn’t mean New York City.