Just a Heartbeat Away

by Cara Bastone

  The lamp lighting his face from one side. The stubborn tears that he’d wiped at first and then just let glint in the green-and-blue light from the television. Christ. The look in his eye as he’d just said whatever had come to mind next.

  It had been honest. More honest than she was used to from almost anyone. She thought that probably Fin was the only other person who would have told so much truth.

  “Miss DeRosa, are you cold?” Matty asked as she ran the bath for him, readying his shampoo and a washcloth.

  “No, why?”

  “Your hands are shaking,” the little boy observed.

  And so they were. Actually, all of her was shaking as that thing inside her just kept folding down tighter and tighter. Soon it would be microscopic, and dense as the entire world smashed into the head of a pin. Tiny as it was, there was no room for this inside her. There was no room for this in her life.

  “I’m all right.” It was a bald-faced lie. “Sometimes that just happens.”

  She held out a hand to Matty, and naked and shameless, he climbed into the tub. “I can be by myself in here as long as you check me.”

  She nodded, handing him his soap, and went into his bedroom to turn down the covers on his bed and choose a few books to read together. She took a deep breath. She needed to hold it together for another hour, and then she could go home. She could go home and call Fin and figure out what the hell had lodged itself somewhere between her lungs. Every time she breathed, her heart rubbed against this dense, sharp little intruder.

  Via picked some pajamas from the drawer and headed back to the bathroom. She couldn’t help but smile at Matty’s beard of bubbles and the matchbox car he was racing down the highway of his own shin bone. She slicked electric blue toothpaste onto his red Cars toothbrush and grabbed his Kermit towel off the hook.

  “I assume this is yours and not your dad’s?” she asked, knowing it would make him laugh.

  “Daddy’s is the blue one. You can tell because it’s Daddy-size.” He smacked his hand to his chin and made the bubble beard explode in every which way.

  Via ignored the way that knot between her lungs did a little pulse at the mention of Sebastian’s size and held the towel out like a cape for a prince. “Your Majesty.”

  Matty pinched his nose between two fingers and collapsed backward underwater, rinsing himself clean. He rose from the tub and Via wrapped him up like a little boy burrito. She handed him the toothbrush, and he brushed while a tiny lake formed at his feet.

  “Are you feeling all the way better from being sick or just most of the way better?”

  “All the way. Except right now I feel a little sick.”

  “Really?” She automatically reached out and felt his forehead with the back of her hand. He was hot, but he was also medium roasted from a hot bath.

  “Yeah. In my eyes. They’re scratchy.”

  “Ah.” He was just tired then. That quelled her worry. “Get your jammies on, and then we can read a few books.”

  His eyes lit up and he spit toothpaste into the sink, tapping the toothbrush on the side to get the residue off in a way that made Via smile. She could imagine Sebastian and Matty brushing their teeth side by side, the son imitating the father.

  Via handed over the pajamas and it was just a few minutes later that Matty came scampering back from saying good night to his dad.

  “Miss DeRosa?”

  “Hmm?” Via sat across Matty’s bed and leaned against the wall.

  “Do you think my dad will be better tomorrow?”

  “I hope so. But it might be the next day.”

  “Okay.” Matty inserted himself between her and the book with enough force to make her say “oof.”

  “Oh!” Matty was back up like a shot and rifling through one drawer of his craft table. “I almost forgot, but I made this for you. Because you visited me when I was sick.” He held out a lanyard with all sorts of colored beads on it. He’d even carefully braided part of it. “It’s a key chain.”

  “I love it,” she told him, completely honestly. “I’ll put it on my keys right away. Thank you!”

  “Welcome,” he told her and snuggled back in to her side.

  She’d chosen three books, but she folded and read him a fourth and by the last page, his eyes were glassy and blinking with all the speed of a tortoise crossing a highway.

  She wished him good night and didn’t get much of a response as she pulled the covers up to his chin. He immediately kicked his legs out one side of the covers and pillowed his hands under one cheek. Via closed the door halfway and headed back out to the living room.

  Sebastian’s eyes were closed, his breaths even and deep. She quietly picked up the dishes and started carrying them out of the room. It was his voice, low and so heartbreakingly serious, that stopped her. She turned back around to him. Set down the dishes.

  “We wouldn’t have made it,” he said hoarsely. His eyes were fevered slits. She wondered if he even knew what he was saying right now. “Me and Cora. I know I’m dumping this on you and that it’s probably not fair, but you’re the only one who has asked about her in almost two years. Everyone I talk to about her knew her already. They saw us married. They think of her as my wife. Even saying that now, I feel like such a—”

  He cut off, almost violently.

  Sebastian leaned forward and she saw that he’d sweat through his T-shirt. His hair was sticking up and he’d tossed the afghan over the back of the couch. He was feverish. She could basically feel his heat from three feet away. He was leaning forward on his knees. His eyes bright and dark at the same time. A look on his face told her he’d been trying, so hard, for years, but right now, he just needed to be broken.

  “What do you mean?” she asked softly, knowing that he just needed to know that she was listening still. That it was okay to talk right now. To say everything he needed to get out.

  “I mean that we weren’t gonna make it as a husband and wife, I don’t think. As a couple. If she were alive, I don’t think she’d still be my wife.” His face somehow tightened and crumbled at the same time. Via knew when someone was saying something out loud for the very first time. When the words were so raw they were almost a prayer. When a feeling that had been curling and spiking and growing inside you finally, finally found its way to the outside. To the world.

  “There wasn’t enough love there,” he admitted, tracing a hand through his sweaty hair. He grimaced when he swallowed. “There was respect, but no affection. We got married when she got pregnant. We’d only known each other a few months. Because there’s just no other way. For me. I had to marry the mother of my kid. I was so scared of being a dad. I guess I thought getting married, having a wife, living with my kid day in and day out would somehow make fatherhood a little easier. A little more paint by numbers and less white-knuckling the steering wheel.” Sebastian laughed at a joke only he got. “But it wasn’t. Being a dad was just as scary as I’d thought it would be and marrying Cora only made it worse because she carried my weight. We both knew I was shitty at it. Only there for the good shit, gone in a flash for the hard shit. She carried me. I let her.”

  Sebastian’s head lolled to one side, his cheeks flushed and the dark sweat on the back of his shirt blooming. Via fished for his ice water that he’d set on the floor beside the couch and handed it over to him. He gratefully swigged it back and sucked an ice cube.

  “Seb, you might not want to hear this, but you’re an incredible father. Devoted, hardworking, loving, firm. It’s your business whether or not you congratulate yourself, but you have to admit, empirically, you’re a good father.”

  He nodded, but she wasn’t convinced he really believed her. Or if he was even able to hear her words through the haze of his fever. He rested sideways on the arm of the couch. He slowly lifted his feet up, and when they caught on the big cushion, Via reached down and hefted them right up ont
o the couch beside her. “Sometimes I think that makes it worse. That I learned how to do it only after she was gone. I wish she could have seen the kind of father I am now. It would have made her proud of me. I loved it when she was proud of me. And it didn’t happen very often in those last few years.”

  His eyes pinched closed and he pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, obviously fighting a headache.

  “Where’s your medicine?”

  “Kitchen cabinet next to the sink.”

  Via rose and brought the dishes into the kitchen. She selected some Motrin and one of his antibiotics, just in case it was time. She quickly chucked the dishes into the dishwasher so that he wouldn’t wake up to a dirty kitchen. While she performed the task, she thought of the very first version of Sebastian that she had met. Disheveled, lost, terse, destroyed. He’d loved Matty, that had always been palpable, but he hadn’t known right from left.

  She’d thought at the time that it was just the shock of the loss he was enduring. But she realized now that perhaps he’d been just that clueless as well, when it came to taking care of his kid. She’d been witness to all manner of parenting styles. Often there was a primary parent and a secondary parent. That worked for some families. It wasn’t necessarily something that he needed to be feeling epic shame over.

  She filled a fresh glass of ice water, rooted around in the freezer for an ice pack and grabbed the medicine. “Is it time for your antibiotic as well?”

  He cracked an eye and nodded, gratefully accepting the pills and the ice water. He hissed when she slid the ice pack between the couch pillow and the back of his neck, but he didn’t move it.

  “Via,” he started, and she knew he was about to apologize for everything he’d just said. She didn’t want him to.

  “When my parents died,” she cut him off, knowing exactly what she was risking—that drafty space opening up inside her, but for Seb, for this moment, she would risk it, “I was lost, Seb. Gone. I’ve never found that part of me again. She’s gone. I came out the other side a different kid. It changes you. The event changes you, of course. I’ll never forget that day. But the grief changes you, too. The long, awful, up-mountain trek of grief, it changes who you are. I don’t know that you should feel shame for being a different person after you endured the loss of Matty’s mom.”

  He nodded and kept his eyes closed as he knuckled one eye and then the other. His face was lined and exhausted. He should be sleeping. She almost rose, to leave him in peace, when he rolled to one side and stretched out his legs. His feet slid over her lap and all the way to the other end of the couch. The heavy weight of his calves penned her in. He groaned just a little bit and cast a forearm over his eyes. If she could have reached the lamp, she would have dimmed it.

  “Yeah, but what do you do, as a person, when grief changes you for the better? God, I feel so much shame for it. She died and I became a better man. It makes me sick with myself. I’m such a bastard. Why did it take that for me to be who I am now? Why couldn’t I have done that when she was here?”

  His arm was heavy over his eyes and his mouth was tightly clamped shut, his jaw square and dusted with more errant stubble than she’d ever seen him with before. His T-shirt was fully soaked through. If so many things were different, she’d go get him a fresh one, throw the sweaty one in the wash.

  But as it was, all she could do was ignore the microscopic needle between her lungs and say the thing she’d wished someone had said to her. She had to keep going. For the first time, she wanted to keep going. The drafty feeling was absent, maybe because there was something else occupying her chest right now. Or maybe because that drafty wind couldn’t blow her away when she was being pinned in place by that hot needle inside of her.

  “What do you do when grief changes you for the better? Seb, you say thank-you to the world for being the world.”

  His forearm lifted off his eyes at her tone. He’d probably never heard her speak with such authority before, but she was an expert on this subject. The metamorphosis of grief. And he was her friend. And she was going to drag him out of the swamp if it was the last thing she did.

  “You be grateful,” she continued. “Grateful that you’re here. That your little boy has a good, loving, competent father. A father who leaps a fence to sprint him to the ER and makes Raspberry Beret pancakes and tells him the truth about the dates he goes on.” Somehow one of her hands landed on his calf and she gripped the warm jeans there, as if she could pin him down and make him listen. Make him hear her.

  His eyes flashed to her hand but then back to her face like he was being nailed in place by a cosmic hammer.

  “And you stop doing this math equation that’s killing you. In one hand you have your wife’s death, and in the other hand you have all the progress you’ve made over the years. But, Seb, A plus B doesn’t equal shit in this case. You can’t add or subtract those two things. They’re a completely different language. And holding yourself hostage with your wife’s death is false math that’s designed to punish yourself. That’s a way of turning your grief back in on you, to keep it trapped and circling.”

  He made a sound. Just a quick grunt, like she was pulling stitches out of a mostly healed wound.

  “So, just stop doing that.” She laughed at herself, at how bossy she sounded. “I know it’s not easy, but you have to let it out. You’re a good man who is grieving because his wife died. And no one, no one, no one ever feels simple after someone they love dies. Everyone feels complicated as hell, all loose strings and sloppy endings and regrets. That’s life. That’s the world. The same world where you get to make furniture and tuck your son in at night and walk him to school. You can’t get one part without the other. It’s just not the way it works.”

  This time, Sebastian didn’t squeeze his eyes closed. He looked her square in the face while two feverish, determined rivers carved their way down his face.

  A tight, tense feeling rose up in Via’s throat, and her lips pursed at the same second a track of tears spilled out of her own eyes. They just stared at one another, dim gold in the lamplight, two people who’d been broken and were learning to live all patched up.

  She knew that he might look at her and realize, terribly, that it never ended, the patching yourself up after you get so viscerally destroyed. But she also hoped that he’d look at her and realize that it was worth it. Every dirty, ugly, scraping step forward was worth it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WELL, ARE YOU going to tell me what’s wrong, or are you going to continue making everyone in this house ten minutes late for everything?”

  Seb had to close his eyes and laugh at his mother-in-law’s question. Muriel Sullivan, the least nurturing woman on Earth. And yet? She was still asking. She could have been ignoring his long stares out the kitchen window, his deep, unfortunate sighs, his losing track of his car keys four times in a row.

  Seb had been that way since last week. Since Via had come over when he’d been sick. He’d been feverish and dozy and emotional, and she’d drawn his pain out of him like a long, thin splinter that he wasn’t sure he’d even known was there. He’d felt like shit that night. Delirious and hot. He wasn’t even positive what time she’d left, he’d passed out on the couch so hard. He’d woken up the next morning with his fever broken and a Post-it note on the coffee table with instructions to call her if he needed help getting Matty to school.

  He’d lain there on the couch, stinking of sickness and broken fever, the afghan kicked off onto the floor, his face pressed into his arm. He’d waited for the wave of shame and humiliation to drag him down to the bottom of the ocean. Because, oh God, all that truth he’d told the night before. Just bomb after bomb. He’d said things out loud that he hadn’t even let himself think in the privacy of his own mind. And of course, the person he’d chosen to tell it all to was someone he’d told himself he was going to STOP growing closer to.

  He could blame
it on the fever. Sure, he’d been loopy and hot and his vision had been all wobbly. He was lucky he hadn’t confessed feelings for her.

  He’d felt chagrin that he’d unloaded so unexpectedly and so fully. But the humiliation and shame never quite showed their faces. As he’d gotten up to shower and rouse Matty for school, Sebastian had slowly realized that as intense as the experience had been, he really felt like she understood what he’d been saying. Sometimes she seemed so delicate, with her sweet face and quiet voice, that tiny little stature, but she’d been strong and unfazed the night before. He’d slowly realized that not only did he not regret that conversation, getting it off his chest made him feel weightless, free, relieved.

  He’d been well enough to walk Matty to school that morning, but not well enough to work in his shop. So he’d cleaned the house instead, taking a few rest breaks and a nap after lunch. It had been a day for the record books. He’d been weirdly energized, stripping his house of any remnants of sickness. He’d scrubbed every surface, and as he got used to this ethereal, cosmic lightness in his soul, he felt as if he were scrubbing away the last poisonous dregs of his unresolved grief over Cora’s death.

  He knew he wouldn’t stop mourning her—that would probably never end—but he was prepared for it, it felt healthy. The twisted, shameful grief he’d kept hidden deep in his gut had been extracted from him the night before, removed with the precision of a surgeon.

  It was only toward the end of that day, when he knew he’d have to head over to the school to get Matty, that Seb allowed himself to think, really think, about the woman who’d performed this emotional exorcism on him. He felt his floating lightness toss down a rope. And another. And another. Soon, he was tethered to the ground again and slowly lowering.

  He knew he should be simply grateful that she’d taken care of his son. Made dinner. Provided one hell of a therapy session. But instead he’d felt the leaden weight of disappointment slowly descend over him from head to toe. She was such a wildly incredible person. So competent and kind and fierce and sweet.