Authors: Rachael Herron
Then Pree thought of what she could leave behind with Robin. It was so verboten she surprised even herself. But she leaned forward and reached into her backpack anyway.
A normal predrawn slap wouldn’t do. She needed to make a new one. She got out her black book to use as a lap desk. From an interior pocket, she pulled a “Hello My Name Is” sticker—she’d had to buy the pack, so it wasn’t quite street but it was the most traditional slap, and she was, after all, introducing herself.
Her Pilot squeaked as she dragged it across the paper. She did the
R
s perfectly, sharp and bony. The
A
was a thing of thick, jagged beauty. She just had to nail the
E
—and she did. She almost wanted to save this one for herself.
This
was her tag. She added the swirls below, the two dots above, and the most perfect heart she could possibly draw at the end. She held it out, and in the dimness it was as if she were looking in a mirror.
Pree pulled off the backing and, without looking, reached around and stuck it on the back side of the marble slab.
From below her, she heard a distant engine sound, a tinny clatter, like a stuttering golf cart. Then there was a piercing whistle and Flynn came running. “They saw me! Hit it!”
Pree leaned forward and kissed the top of the stone. Her lips, afterward, tasted like chalk. “Good-bye,” she whispered.
Then Flynn took her hand and they ran.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
11:15 p.m.
T
hey waited until the coast was clear, until the last news van had pulled reluctantly away after the last newscast. They wouldn’t be back, Nolan guessed. They hadn’t gotten anything from them, and new atrocities, new tragedies would be waiting for them to report on by noon tomorrow.
When Nolan was leaving Kate’s house, at the last minute, at the front door—
his
old front door—Kate reached out a hand and brushed the top of his forearm for a split second before she drew it back. “Wait.”
Nolan stopped immediately. He’d do anything she said.
“Can you . . . ?”
He waited. It didn’t do to rush Kate, ever.
“Will I see you again?”
For a second Nolan’s heart soared so high he could have touched a satellite if it was going by.
I didn’t want to leave you.
He should say it. God, he should say it. “Of course.”
“I’d like that.” She bit her bottom lip. “Not for . . . Just to talk and—”
It broke his heart that she thought she had to spell it out. “Katie. Of course. Anything you want.”
She shut the door.
“Anything. Anytime,” he said quietly to no one.
I didn’t want to leave you.
Nolan drove home and pulled up in front of his apartment complex. He caught his breath as the pain hit him, as it always did, fresh as ever as he realized again that the man his son had known was gone. That man lived in an apartment now. Alone.
When Robin turned two, it had been as if he’d gotten the memo straight from the Department of Children. He was a Terrible Two from his second birthday until the instant he turned three. There were nights when he’d scream for three hours in a row—nights when nothing would soothe him, and his voice went raw from shouting his utter outrage. Those nights, Kate had looked at Nolan, exhaustion in her eyes (but nothing like he’d see, five years later, when they were up all night for different—worse—reasons), and ask, “Is he always going to be like this?”
“No,” Nolan had said, putting a hand on top of her head. “He’ll be seventeen someday and he’ll be out all night, and you’ll call all the hospitals and the morgue and the police, and when he comes home at six in the morning smelling like beer and weed, you’ll be the one screaming louder than he is now.”
She’d grinned at that, and they’d known that, no matter what, they’d be together. With Robin.
And then they weren’t.
He unfolded from the car and stretched. Late as it was, he’d take Fred Weasley for a lap around the block.
“Hey.”
The voice behind him in the courtyard made him jump.
Rafe stepped into the light, with Johnson on his heels.
Happiness warred with confusion and was quickly snuffed out by realization. “Shit.” They knew.
“Yeah.” Rafe nodded, his baseball cap pulled low, casting a dark shadow over his eyes in the dimness.
“Brother, it wasn’t that I was hiding it from you—”
“Brother?” Rafe asked.
Something fragile inside Nolan broke into tiny, sharp shards. “You want to come in?”
Johnson and Rafe looked at each other. Rafe pulled a work bandanna out of his pocket and moved it back and forth, threading it through his fingers. Nolan had seen him do that a million times when he was thinking about where exactly to start a job or what kind of gravel to use next.
Finally, Rafe said, “A minute.”
Inside, Nolan poured them the best scotch he had. Okay, it was the only kind he had, a Glenlivet that had been on sale at Trader Joe’s. He splashed a little water in each and handed them the glass tumblers he’d found at a garage sale.
“Fancy shit,” said Johnson from his perch on the wooden side chair. He didn’t look comfortable, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to stay.
“Just whiskey.” Nolan looked at the carpet.
“You killed your kid?” Rafe took a deep swallow of the alcohol, and it didn’t seem to faze him—he breathed as easily after it as if he’d shot an ounce of plain water. “Your son?”
Rafe had daughters. All three of them girls. He’d admitted to Nolan once that he thought it made him less of a man that he couldn’t make a boy.
“Yes.”
Rafe pounded the rest of the pour and then leaned forward, running his hands through his hair, tugging hard when his fingers got stuck. “Jesus, Monroe, how could you let us think you were in for something stupid?” His words were on the edge of slurred. The scotch wasn’t the first drink he’d had that night. “White-collar shit, that’s what we all thought it was. It’s my ex, Tanya, that calls me. I’ve got the kids, and she’s screaming something about the TV, and I turn it on and it’s you, and then she says she’s gonna come get them from me because she’s worried that you’ll come around. And now Rita’s pissed that Tanya’s calling me freaking out and I don’t know
what
to think.” Rafe thought in black and white, good and bad. That left no middle ground for Nolan to stand on.
“I’m so sorry.” This was why he’d never wanted them to know. That, and he knew they wouldn’t care about him the way they had.
“You were our family,
pendejo
.” Rafe’s voice broke. “And I’m gonna take you to my mom’s for her birthday, huh? Murder? Premeditated? What about our kids? Rita’s not so freaked out ’cause she says it sounds like euthanasia. I didn’t even know that word till today. That’s some kind of mercy? I’m trying to wrap my head around it, how you would do something like that. What about the man I know? Huh? Where’s that guy?”
During the surprisingly short trial, the entire world had broken into three camps. There were those who supported Nolan, who thought it was just a horrible accident, who said it could have happened to anyone. They tried to shake his hands in the courthouse’s hallways and used his name as if they knew him.
Then there was the group of people who believed in and fought for the idea that people could take care of their own loved ones, including escorting them to the grave. They were the ones who felt sorry for him, because he hadn’t managed to off himself, too. Nolan had become—unwillingly—their poster boy for a year or two, the man who was prosecuted and imprisoned for loving his son too much. They’d never gotten the quote they’d wanted from him, though. He wouldn’t talk to them. They could think what they wanted.
Then there was the third group: the ones who felt that only God should decide, that continued medical intervention was necessary for all struggles for survival, and God would decide the final outcome. Because Nolan didn’t verbally embrace the voluntary euthanasia side—never said a thing either way, in fact—the God-people chose him for their example, too. He was their example of how badly assisted suicide can go. He was left without his child and for a time without his memory, never able to know exactly how long medicine could have extended his boy’s life. Indubitably, the Catholic Rafe would fall into this camp.
Nolan had fit into none of the groups. For a long time, he’d had no memory of what had happened that day. None at all. It was common, he’d been told, after carbon monoxide asphyxiation.
Rafe continued, “I don’t even know who you are, man.”
“Who knows?” said Johnson, who’d been worrisomely silent until now. “Who knows if you won’t do something like that again?”
Rafe glared. “You know that’s bullshit. It’s
Nolan
.” But he didn’t look convinced.
Nolan held up empty hands. “Won’t happen. I’m fresh out of kids.”
Rafe winced.
Johnson poured himself another shot.
Nolan waited.
After a long pause, Rafe finally said, “I know it was an accident and all, but
man.
You take
care
of your kids, you get me?”
“I guess that’s for you to—”
“You still look like the Nolan I know. Far as I can tell. Shit, man. You don’t
lie
to your family like that. Not telling us about why you were in prison? That’s a lie, nothing less. Biggest lie I ever heard.” Rafe took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. “Okay.” He scooted forward so he was sitting on the edge of the old couch. “Tell us. Go.”
Nolan lost a scrap of his patience. “You saw the news. You know what happened.”
“I been on the news twice in my life, and neither time they got it right,” said Johnson.
“TV ain’t truth,” said Rafe. “
You
say the truth. Then we decide what we have to do.”
These were the only friends Nolan had, and while he’d been on the road with them, he’d tried to give them the real deal, the real Nolan. With them, he’d been the kind of man he’d never been at the law firm. He was strong. Necessary. They relied on him and he relied on them. They were good men. Johnson once spent his entire lunch break on his hands and knees in the Big Longs parking lot, helping an old lady find her glasses that she’d dropped. He kept looking, even when she’d given up, and when he found them, he’d called the number she’d given him. When she said never mind, that she’d found a better pair at home, he’d tucked the glasses into his shirt pocket after wrapping them in paper towels. Just in case.
And Rafe, knowing nothing at all, had taken Nolan for a friend. They’d talked late into tequila-flavored nights about everything, the stars, the women they’d known, fights they’d had; they’d talked about larger thoughts, depression and hope and honor. They’d trusted each other. Rafe had let Nolan fly his three-year-old daughter around the backyard, her arms and legs spinning and diving while Rafe was inside cutting onions and tomatoes for the burgers. Nolan knew that was the hardest part—for Rafe the father to forgive himself for trusting his children with a man who’d killed the son God had seen fit to give him.
Leaning forward in an echo of Rafe’s motion, Nolan lied, “I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit,” said Rafe.
“I fell asleep in the garage, and when I woke up, I’d been sent to hell. Been trying to scratch my way out since then.” Another lie—he hadn’t tried to help himself for a long time, more than a year. He hadn’t cared what happened to him. He slowly straightened to standing and said, “I got out, and got the roads job. And I met you guys, and you were . . . my new family.”
Rafe had listened with big eyes and clenched fists. Now he stood. He pulled back and smashed Nolan so hard in the eye that Nolan couldn’t breathe for a moment. Fred Weasley barked sharply, then scrabbled away to hide in the bedroom. Rafe immediately cradled his hand. “Fuck. That hurt like a motherfuckin’
fucker
.”
Nolan stood in place, wobbling, unsure if he should sit back down or just go for the floor, which was what his body wanted. Instead, there was another roar, and this time Rafe threw his arms around Nolan and clung to him as if they were wrestling, stuck in a grapple hold. Was it a hug or was Rafe just holding him up so Johnson could finish the job?
Nolan waited to find out which it was. His eye throbbed and the relief of the pain was astonishing. Somebody else making him hurt was the best idea ever.
Rafe released his death grip and stepped backward. “I gotta think all this through. I gotta think hard. You get me?”
Nolan nodded.
Rafe turned and left without another word, Johnson on his heels. They slammed the door so hard the thin walls shook.
Nolan found Fred huddled inside the laundry basket, head shoved into a pile of towels. “Hey.”
The dog pushed farther in.
“Hey, Fred. Hey. It’s gonna be okay.”
But Fred Weasley wouldn’t come out, and Nolan figured he knew the truth, too. The tears finally broke through then, hot and fast, his back aching with how he leaned forward digging his fingers into Fred’s fur—the pain sucking at his gut as if it could bust right out. Any second all the tears and blood would pool in front of him until they filled the room, filled this shitty apartment, until everything was under the salt water and the bile.
Robin
January 2002
F
ear was the first symptom of Kate’s second pregnancy. She woke up one morning and heard it, a rumbling inside her, a generalized, low-grade, thrumming worry. When she realized she’d missed two periods, the tremors grew louder, shaking and rolling through her: she didn’t deserve this, it wouldn’t work out, this time the baby wouldn’t make it to full term. Because she’d given the last one away, this one wouldn’t be healthy, or it would be born with an important part of its brain or heart missing.
Kate had to tell Nolan, but thinking about it terrified her. Would he read in her eyes that she’d gone through this before? Jesus, would the doctor know this was her second pregnancy even though she planned on lying about it?
While standing with Nolan as he picked out deodorant in Safeway, she picked up a box of tampons and said, “I guess I won’t be needing these for a while.”
Nolan glanced at her and then back at the deodorant. He tried to place it carefully back on the shelf but it fell out of his hand, clattering to the floor. The plastic base spun off.
“Are you . . . ?” The happiness in his voice was unbearable, and Kate walked away, taking refuge in the cracker aisle. From over the top of the saltines, she heard him yell, “Are you
pregnant
?”
A woman who was studying a package of rye crisps looked up, alarmed.
“Nolan!”
He yelled over again. “You tell me in the
grocery store
?” But then he was in her aisle, and he was crying, holding her tightly, kissing her over and over.
“I think so.” She laughed. “I’m pretty sure.”
They moved to the paper products aisle and he opened a box of Kleenex. Noses blown, Nolan led her by the hand back to the first aisle they’d been in. Then, pink box in hand, he led her through the store, back to produce.
“Bathroom?” he asked the man spraying the radishes.
Wordlessly, the man pointed through the big plastic flaps that led to the back.
“She’s pregnant. Probably,” said Nolan conversationally. Kate’s heart flip-flopped. The radish man gave them a grimace and a thumbs-up.
In the bathroom he opened the box and put it in his pocket—“So we can pay for it on the way out”—and turned his back as she peed on the stick.
Then she watched, with a growing sense of something that felt like happiness as the plus she knew would form formed.
“Oh, Katie,” said Nolan reverently.
“Is it . . . okay?”
This time, is it going to be okay?
“Okay? There’s nothing better in the whole world. You’re a miracle.” He kissed the side of her face and then the crown of her head. “My miracle.”
“No,” said Kate. “It’s just nature.”
“It’s a miracle. I’m going to be a
father
. To your baby.” Somehow he managed to turn around in the small space, raising and lowering his arms as if he were praying in a Baptist church. He spun twice more, laughing. Kate laughed with him, unable to stop herself. They laughed their way out of the restroom, through the checkout line, where the girl looked startled when Nolan pulled the used box out of his pocket and handed it to her to scan, and then through the parking lot and out to the car.
The bubbles of laughter rising in her chest felt good. They felt wonderful. And they were wrong, too. She didn’t deserve this kind of happiness. She tried to push the effervescent feeling of joy back down so she didn’t get used to it. She would do something wrong. She’d lose both of them.
But the baby stuck, growing inside her. The ultrasound said it was a boy, and they laced their fingers together over Kate’s stomach, talking about toy trains and baseballs and firefighter hats. Together, they built a nursery, cursing over the mobile that neither of them could figure out, laughing at how small the socks they bought were. How could anything
be
that tiny? Sonia swam up out of her depression for the first time in years and came over at least once a week, her arms full of the knitted items she made at night. After the unborn baby had more than twenty tiny sweaters, Kate asked her to stop, or at least to slow down.
“I didn’t get the chance to dress your daughter, did I?” was the sharp response. “Who made
her
sweaters?”
“Shhh.” Kate looked over her shoulder. “Don’t
talk
about her. I wish—” She couldn’t complete the sentence. Their silent collusion made what small connection they’d created over the years feel even more breakable.
“Just tell him, then.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“He has to be able to trust you,” said Sonia.
“He already does.” Kate folded her lips. She was right about this.
Sonia harrumphed and shoved her circular knitting needles, newly free of a robin’s egg blue hat, into her project bag. “So anyway. I can knit your son a motorcycle if I want to. He gets whatever he wants.”
Once, during her sophomore year, Kate had been doing homework in her mother’s office at the pool. She’d needed help with a thesis statement, but Sonia had just looked down at her desk calendar before shaking her head. Then the office door had crashed open and a girl with dripping hair barged in.
“Mrs. Brashear! Julie needs you—Caitlyn slipped and she cut her head wide open. There’s blood everywhere!”
Her mother left the office at a dead run.
On the wet slab of concrete next to the diving board, one of the coaches held a towel to a girl’s forehead. The blood spread dark in the puddled water, but Sonia took over easily, directing another coach to call 911 while she stanched the wound with a bandage and said things that Kate couldn’t quite catch from where she sat on the bleacher. Her mother was smooth. In control. Soothing.
As the ambulance prepared to load their patient, Sonia signed forms and patted the coach on the back. Another little girl, white with fear, leaned against Sonia’s side, and in what appeared to be an unconscious gesture, Sonia petted her, smoothing her hair off her forehead while she talked to a medic.
Now, her knitting needles pausing in their flight, Sonia looked sharply at Kate. “And he’ll
swim.
Not like you. He’ll swim.” She held up the tiny hat and spun it on her chlorine-reddened finger. “I’m making you a matching one, by the way.”
Each day that Kate got bigger with Robin was a day she grew happier. As her body got heavier, her heart got lighter. On the day Kate gave birth to Robin (the pain was so much easier without the heartbreak attached), the joy she’d been feeling became unimaginable. And as she looked at Nolan’s face glowing so brightly she hardly recognized him, the joy finally,
finally
eclipsed the fear.
August 2007
Robin was born a water baby. His favorite thing in the world was anything wet—a pond, a pool, a tub. He swam every Monday and Wednesday with Sonia, who dubbed him her little merman. They clung to each other, laughing, in the shallow end, and Sonia shouted encouragement as Robin splashed past her best swimmers into the deep end.
The outdoor tub on the hill was Robin’s brainchild—he’d seen it while wandering the salvage yard with Nolan and said, “We could run a hose with hot water outside! Like inside! Then we could be like birds and I’d flap around and squawk and sing in the outdoors.” That weekend, the tub came home with them. They painted it sky blue and Robin took the inaugural dip.
But the regular inside bath worked well, too. Robin, at five, no longer wanted supervision. He wanted to be able to play with his toys and make up his stories all by himself, without Kate or Nolan hovering overhead.
“Fine,” said Kate. “But you have to sing.”
“Huh?”
“Sing the whole time so I can hear you. If you’re singing, I know you’re not drowning.”
Robin giggled. “So if you hear
glub-glub
?”
“Then I come running. And it’s not funny, Robin. I’m serious. I’ll leave you in here alone only if you sing.”
He nodded gravely. “I’ll sing.”
So he sang, with great ceremony. If she was downstairs, on the phone with one doctor or another, Kate could always hear the sound—the tone—but couldn’t always hear the words. If she was putting things away in the hall closet, she could hear the song itself: “I’m not drowning, Mom. Mom, I’m still alive! Me, me, me,
me
—I’m still alive and can breathe!”
Kate kept Robin out of the pool only when he was sick, and even then he liked a warm bath—it couldn’t hurt, she thought. Not long after they got the outdoor tub, he got a bad cold. It wasn’t a big deal. In fact, Kate and Nolan both had it, and there were two weeks when one or the other of them was walking around with pockets full of used Kleenex. Kate laughed as she always did and said that she’d never gotten sick before she’d birthed a germ magnet. “You get them all over you, don’t you?” she’d say into Robin’s sticky neck. “You roll around in germs and then come home and pour them in my soup, is that right?”
“You can’t spread them like that, Mama.” Robin was practical. “You can’t pour germs like you pour salt.”
“You’re right. How did you know that?”
He shrugged. “I just know.”
Of the three of them, Robin had it the worst—a wheezing in the chest and a sick thumping sound to his cough. When she and Nolan were better and Robin still had it, she took him to the doctor, who said, yep, his glands were swollen and it was going around. Nope, there was nothing they could do, but he could give him antibiotics if it would make her feel better.
Another week went by. By then Nolan was losing sleep.
“He’s still sick,” said Nolan at three in the morning.
It took Kate a minute to wake, to come to herself, and then she said, “It’s a cold. The doctor said so.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Who the hell likes to have their child sick? Go to sleep.”
Behind her, Nolan curled into a ball, and she had to roll over in order to spoon him. As she drifted back to sleep, she felt Nolan kick. He worried too much, that was all. He always had. If she were a good wife, she’d stay awake and comfort him. Maybe have sex—that always made both of them feel better. But sleep called and she answered.
When Robin’s cold was going into its fourth week, Nolan and Kate went together with him to the doctor. The doctor was out, but the nurse-practitioner told them that she wanted to run some tests.
“What kind?”
“Just some routine blood work. Make sure he’s really getting over this cold that’s got him down. How long has his neck been swollen like that?”
Robin, nose dribbling, didn’t look up from playing his Sony PSP. He barely seemed to notice when they took the blood. The next week, when they did the needle aspiration of the lump in his neck, he just blinked as they numbed him. Kate was a wreck and Nolan still wasn’t sleeping. Robin, though, sat patiently through the appointments and barely complained at the prodding.
When the results came in, they were inconclusive at first. Standing on the staircase’s top landing, the portable phone in her hand, Kate gripped the rail with her other hand, amazed that her voice stayed normal. They were trying to rule out non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but hadn’t been able to yet. “Non-Hodgkin’s. Is that the good kind? Or the bad?”
In the chamber of her body—somewhere between her heart and her throat—where she’d stored the fear away, something started to twinge again. A dull, low ache, and she recognized it as what she’d felt back then, when she was first pregnant with him.
Nothing is this good. Nothing can stay safe.
Kate and Nolan said nothing to Robin while they and the doctors decided on his treatment. They knew it was a reprieve, no matter how short it might be. They wiped his nose, and gave him treats and read to him in bed, whatever book he wanted, at any time. She nodded reassuringly when he said he was bored. “Soon. Soon you’ll be able to go outside and play, but look, it might rain. Let’s stay in and build that paper castle we were talking about, okay? Daddy’s home from work at five, and I’m going to ask him to pick us up a pizza. Would you like that?”
But he was almost six, for god’s sake, not a baby. He had the language and the understanding to know that whatever was happening to him wasn’t a good thing.
One morning, when she was carrying clean laundry into his room next to the bathroom, she heard a song she hadn’t heard before. “I don’t have cancer, Mom. Mom, you worry toooooo much! Mom, you should let me have my bath all day, all the time, all the day, and I don’t have cancer, Mom!”
She pushed open the door so fast it knocked over the small stool Robin had set next to the tub to hold overflow bath toys.
“Robin!”
He looked up, wide-eyed.
“Where did you hear that?”
“What?” He pushed at his hair to remove the bubbles that had collected over his left ear.
“What you said. What you don’t have.”
“I don’t know.”
“Robin.”
He shrugged and wriggled his knees so that the water splashed up the tub sides. “I just heard it.”
Kate knelt and gathered his skinny wet body to her and kissed him fiercely. “Don’t you worry about a single thing. Daddy and I are taking care of it. Do you hear me?” She kissed him, her cheeks damp. “You don’t worry.”
He pulled away. “That’s what I was
saying.
Don’t
worry.
Jeesh.” He held his breath and then slid under the water before popping right back out with a question. “Do I have to take medicine?”
Oh, baby. So much medicine.
“Yes, sugarplum. You will.”
“Will it taste bad?”
She nodded, her heart dropping. “Probably.”
Robin’s mouth, always the barometer of his emotions, tightened. Tears formed. “I don’t wanna.”
Everyone said he would be fine. All the books, all the sites on the Internet. Even though signs were pointing to bone marrow involvement, the prognosis was still good: eighty percent chance of long-term survival. But the number took poisonous root in her brain: eighty. Eighty percent meant that twenty percent of kids in stage four didn’t make it. Wasn’t that what it meant? Was it truly that awful? Could it possibly be?
“I don’t want you to, either.”
Everything will go wrong. Nothing can stay safe.