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.
Chapter Thirty-four
Robin
January 2002
Fear 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 stom
ach, 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?
Pack Up the Moon Page 23