Chapter 68
Katie
On Thursday, after letting Tyler get an extra couple of hours of sleep, he and I made our way to Meredith’s dock for another
pondside picnic to get back to work on our novel. This lunch, of course, was a little different from the one we’d been forced
into back in June. Namely because our dangling legs were completely intertwined, we’d spent the entirety of last night having
filthy, if not slightly sunburnt, sex, and our manuscript was now 300 pages long—and due in nearly a week. We still had to
add another eighty-or-so pages to the story, which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, was running long.
Still, neither of us was worried about the third act. We’d both written our fair share of novels, and emphatically agreed
that endings should be written as quickly as possible. That the faster and more inspired the sprint toward the finish, the
better the climax, that final page. And so, instead of forcing ourselves to knock out twenty-five-hundred words a day of flat
and predictable prose, we were polishing everything we’d drafted to date so our last chapters could be written in one caffeine-fueled
fever dream.
We were in the middle of tweaking Willa’s backstory when my phone rang.
I hadn’t even realized I had service out here.
In fact, over the past couple of months, outside of taking pictures of food and flowers and Tyler’s scruffier-by-the-day face, I’d sort of forgotten I even owned a phone.
I was starting to like that about Meredith’s little universe—the quiet.
How small and weightless it made the real world seem.
It rang again.
“You going to get that?” Tyler asked.
I shrugged, flipping through my notebook, still refining that backstory. I was searching for a list of Willa’s high school
boyfriends I’d scribbled down months ago. I’d forgotten the name of her junior prom date, and it was about to come up in an
angsty flashback scene.
The phone rang a third time, and suddenly, my stomach churned. I didn’t have to look at the screen to know who it was. And
neither, apparently, did Tyler. He’d been leaning back on his elbows, careless and languid, but now? He’d stiffened.
I walked ten feet down the dock and turned my back.
“Mom?” I said. “I can’t really—”
“Katie, baby. Thank god. Do you have a TV where you are?”
“A TV? What? No. I’m working. I—”
“You need to find a TV,” she said. “You need to turn on ESPN.”
That ache in my stomach traveled north and tightened around my rib cage. When it began to rise through my throat, I swallowed
it back down.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m writing. I really can’t—”
“It’s Alex Peridos. He’s pitching for the Rangers right now. Don’t you remember? He played with Mikey at that camp in Virginia
Beach. He’s making his debut, and his parents are there, and his wife, and . . .”
I pushed the dry, itchy cattail out of my face. Suddenly, hot gray clouds hung so low and thick I could not breathe. I closed
my eyes and inhaled anyway. “Mom, it’s okay. It’s—”
“It isn’t fair!” she said. “It isn’t fair!”
“Just take a deep breath, all right? Turn off the TV. It’s all right. It’s—”
She blew her nose: a honk. The echo of the announcer and his color commentator, muffled but loud enough to set the scene.
My mother, holed up in that extra bedroom. All those trophies and medals and news clippings. My brother, frozen at ten, at
twelve, at fourteen. There was Stephen Strasburg, and there was Gerrit Cole, and there was Mark Appel, and then there was
going to be my big brother, Mikey Caruso. At sixteen, he could throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball in his sleep. He was
built like a lumberjack—like, according to a Sports Illustrated article published a month before the accident, a Greek god. His shoulders, so broad he could barely fit through a doorframe.
He’d been born to do this—to throw a slider, a cutter, a curveball.
“Every time another one of his teammates makes it,” she said, “it’s a whole new death to me. They’re all twenty-six, twenty-seven
now. I thought we were done. It’s just too much. It’s too much.”
“I know, Mom. But you can’t do this to yourself anymore. You can’t—”
“What else am I supposed to do? He was my baby! He was going to be the best to ever do it! He—”
“Mom! Do you even know where I am right now? Do you even remember what I do for a living? That I have an actual job?”
“Of course I do! I’m grieving! I—”
“Grieving!?” I said. Tyler had walked toward me.
His arms were crossed around his body, and his head was bowed.
I recognized the hunch of his shoulders and the strain in his eyes from the night he came back to my window.
From the night he realized what was really happening inside my home.
“It’s been eight years! Stop fucking grieving! ”
“That’s not fair, Katie! You know that’s not fair!”
“Not fair!?” I was spinning in circles. The sky was smothering. Sweltering. There was no air left for me to breathe. “None
of this has ever been fair! What about me? I’m right here! When’s it going to be my turn for you to give a shit about me?”
“He was my son! A piece of me is gone, and you expect me to carry on? You expect me not to spend the rest of my life fighting
for what I lost? You expect me to put up Christmas lights and go on a cruise and pretend it never happened? How could I do
that? How could I ever let him go? You could never understand—you’re not a mother. But he was my little boy. My Michael, my . . .”
Tyler was grimacing. His eyes were shut, and he was rocking back and forth, fists closed and jaw clamped. I took a deep breath,
and then I did something I had never, ever done.
I hung up the phone.
I heard my mother in pain, and I did not care.
I sat on the marble floor of Tyler’s shower, my heaving and hitching body wedged between his bare knees. His hands were wrapped
around my stomach, wrapped around me. His mouth, pressed against the base of my neck as falling water ricocheted off our shoulders.
“Will you come with me?” I said. “Saturday?”
“Wh-where?” Tyler replied. I could not see him. I could only hear his voice, soft and low on my skin. I fell deeper into him, into his arms. My spine, glued to his chest. His heartbeat, fast, but his hold on me, tight.
I exhaled. “My mom, she started this charity . . . I know I’ve hardly mentioned it, but it’s this substance abuse thing for
athletes. I guess they’re predisposed after an injury or when their careers end. It’s actually a really amazing program. She’s
gotten a lot of legislation passed, a lot of funding and grants to help with education and treatment. That Narcan-in-every-dorm-room
bill that’s about to go through—that was all her. And I know I should’ve told you sooner. That you, of all people, would’ve
understood. But I guess there’s this big part of me that’s ashamed because it’s so obvious that helping her with this stuff
is the only way I can get her to pay attention to me. And I didn’t want you to see that side of me.”
He pushed his nose into my shoulder. “You don’t ever have to feel ashamed with me, Katie. But I know all about it, okay? I
always have.”
I craned my neck to face him. “You do?”
He twisted me around completely and pulled me into his lap. “Those first few years after Mikey died . . . I looked you up
all the time. Your mom, your dad, your cousins, anyone I could find. When I was in college, I knew you were in school in New
York. I wanted to come find you. I thought about it constantly. I even bought train tickets a couple of times. But I couldn’t
do it. I was too afraid. And then, when I got to the city, I stopped looking. I knew you must’ve been close, and that made
it so big and so real. I told myself you were okay. That by then, you must’ve been okay. I was terrified to run into you.
I knew that when I did, it’d be too late to say I was sorry or try and make things right.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I was waiting for you. That night, after the funeral. That whole year we moved, even the summer after. I thought you’d come back for me. I thought you’d at least come and say goodbye.”
“I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know.”
“Why didn’t you? I needed you. Where were you?”
Tyler closed his eyes. Something coursed through him, traveling from his face to his torso to the tips of his fingers, which
were still wrapped around me but suddenly distant. Suddenly not the same.
“Tyler,” I said. “Why didn’t you show up that night? Why didn’t you even say goodbye?”
He looked at me. His irises, piercing. Water, clinging to his skin. He pressed his palms to his mouth and blew out a breath.
“I didn’t—I can’t . . .”
“I need to know. Please.”
He closed his eyes again.
“I was a kid,” he said. “I was nineteen, and Mikey was gone, and it was all my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault. No more than Mikey’s. It could’ve been either of you that day.”
“But it wasn’t either of us,” he said. “It was me, and everybody knew it, and I couldn’t live with the shame. I wanted to
come back for you, I swear. But I was a kid, and I ran. It was the wrong thing to do, and I’m sorry. I really, truly am.”
I nodded and kissed him. There was salt on his lips, and I did not know whether the tears I tasted were his or mine. I kissed
them away all the same. It was a simple answer. A stupid one, really. But it was enough for me. He was sorry, and he was everything
I’d ever wanted—and he was here now.
“So you’ll come?” I said. “I can’t face my mom alone. Not after that. I’ve never done something like that before.”
“Katie, listen, all right? I don’t think this is how I should show back up in your family’s life. And your mom . . . she’s
not going to want me there.”
“That’s not true. You’re different now. You’re better. The whole event is about recovery and second chances. Half the people
there are in A.A. or whatever. Politicians. Celebrities. And I know it seems big because you haven’t seen her in so long,
but I promise you, she doesn’t give a shit about you or me or anyone else. It’s still all about Mikey.”
He shook his head. “I think we should wait. I don’t want to fuck this up. I know we haven’t talked about what’s going to happen
when we get back to New York, but I don’t want to lose you. We need a plan. We need to think.”
“Please,” I said, pressing my hands on his chest. “I’ve never asked you for anything. This is one of the worst nights of the
year for me, and I want you there. You make everything better. You make the hard stuff fun. We can get dressed up and eat
weird appetizers, and maybe we can even get a hotel, and . . .”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just . . .”
“On Mikey’s birthday,” I said, dropping my hands to his, “when you took me home . . . That was the first time since he died
that I thought about him and didn’t feel completely, horribly alone.”
He closed his eyes. And then he unclenched his shoulders and kissed me again.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”