by Serena Bell
His times had gotten better and better. They were at the low end, now, of what nonamputee triathletes could hope to achieve. And still rising, albeit slower and slower. Inching up.
He’d run with Pierce a few times, too. Pierce had been the only one who’d seen through the nonchalance of Jake’s answer about Mira at the beach. We’ve been spending a lot of time together.
Pierce had shot him a look of clean, wry disbelief. And later that afternoon, making a before-dinner beer run with his brother, basking for the first time in almost a year in the old ease, Pierce had said, “You guys have been spending a lot of time together, huh? Can’t blame you. She’s hot.”
“Step off.”
“With both my fucking legs, man,” Pierce said, and Jake knew the worst was past, the pity and the awkwardness over.
Because of that, Pierce had been the only one he’d told about breaking up with Mira, about Aaron’s proposal.
He’d told the whole story on a long run, his chest and throat aching, as they had most of the last two weeks—whether from exertion or emotion, he wasn’t sure.
And Pierce had said only, “You won’t convince me he’s the better man.” And sped ahead, forcing Jake to push himself harder to catch up.
That was a brother for you.
When Jake wasn’t running, he swam or biked. He biked the Burke-Gilman Trail from Fremont to Kenmore and back again. He took his bike on the ferry to Bainbridge and mapped out a trail for himself. Not a kindly trail that would lead him around the edges of the island, not a tour of the island’s vistas—the Seattle skyline and Rich Passage—but a harsh circuit of its ridges. A glacier had clawed six grooves in the island’s terrain, and you could ride up and down them in succession, catching your breath before you forced yourself over another one.
The harder it was, the more it drowned out the memories—the scent and feel of her hair, the sound of her laughter, the feeling that had no name, that in her presence he’d been safe and, miraculously, whole. Those moments, with her, he’d been happy, and he’d been able to believe, even if briefly, that he deserved that happiness.
And then one day he ran home and found Sam sitting on the front steps of his apartment building.
“What the hell are you doing here, Sam?” he said, before he could think better of it or watch his language.
“That offends some people,” Sam said tolerantly. “It doesn’t offend me because I think God probably has other things to worry about besides whether we say ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and stuff.”
“Did your mother tell you that?” Jake asked, and he was surprised by how much it hurt to invoke her, even at a slight remove, even as “your mother” and not by name.
Sam nodded.
“Does your mother know where you are?”
Sam shook his head.
Jake pulled out his phone and texted Mira, “I’ve got Sam here.” No point in making her worry more than was necessary.
“Did you text her?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s going to be really, really mad. The new babysitter was watching me, but she fell asleep on the couch.”
“Where’s Aaron?” Jake asked. He couldn’t help it. It was petty and low and not a fair thing to demand of a seven-year-old boy, but it was the only question he wanted to know the answer to right then.
“He’s in Florida,” Sam said. “Mom told him she didn’t want to marry him and he went back to Florida.”
This gave Jake immense amounts of pointless pleasure, a rush of release that was almost sexual in its satisfaction. He’d meant what he said to her. He’d believed Aaron would take care of her. Take care of Sam. But when it came down to this—fuck all that. He was still glad the guy wasn’t screwing Mira. He was so damn glad his throat was choked with it.
He sat down on the step next to Sam, and Sam pointed at his running prosthesis, at the curved metal “foot,” and said, “That thing is kind of like Wolverine’s claws. You look like a superhero.”
“I know,” Jake said. “And it’s fast.”
“Were you running?”
“I was.”
“Are you still going to do a triathlon?”
“I think so.”
Sam leaned over and gave the running prosthesis a thorough examination.
“Sam, maybe you should tell me why you’re here so I can try to explain it to your mom and she won’t be so mad. First of all, how did you get here?”
“On the bus,” Sam said. “Mom always says that the bus drivers are nice and don’t want you to be lost, so you can always ask them questions. So I waited for the bus near our house and asked how to get to your house. I remembered it was near Samami Restaurant, so I said that.”
“You’re very smart,” Jake said, thinking, I wonder how much credit I get for that genetically?
“I came because I kept telling Mom I wanted to hang out with you and she kept saying, ‘Tomorrow. I’ll text him tomorrow.’ And then I’d say, ‘Mom, you said you’d text Jake today,’ and she’d say, ‘It’s late’ or ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I can’t think about that right now’ or ‘He’s probably busy.’ And finally I decided I needed to come find you.”
“And so you did.” It made him feel rotten to think of all those times Mira had decided not to reach out to him, even though of course he probably would have found ways to ignore her texts. Even though he had pushed her away. Handed her to Aaron on a silver platter.
She told him she didn’t want to marry him.
Fuck it, that felt good, which made him an asshole.
“I wanted to tell you that I think you should ask Mom to marry you.”
He turned, startled.
“You’re my dad already, so it makes sense.”
Sometimes Sam blew him away. “Not every two people who have a kid together are meant to be married.”
“Do you love her?”
Jake nodded, as if he were a puppet driven by some other set of strings. As if it were impossible for him to lie. And maybe it was impossible for him to lie to Sam.
“So you should marry her.”
Even when he was Sam’s age, he was pretty sure he hadn’t held such a romantic view of love and marriage. Even then, he was pretty sure he’d already believed that marriage, at best, was a complicated alchemy of necessity and forbearance that love had little to do with. That it was terribly easy to make the kind of mistake that would corrupt not only your own happiness, and your partner’s, but the next generation’s, too. How had Sam held on to this pretty, rose-colored version of the world, despite the fact that he’d believed his own origins story featured a plastic cup and a turkey baster?
“She loves you. I can tell.”
Jake felt a surge of unruly, unwanted, unadmirable victory, followed by the sharp recollection of why such a victory wasn’t a win for anyone.
“I wouldn’t make her happy.”
“Huh,” Sam said thoughtfully, tilting his head to one side. “But you make really good pancakes.”
Jake laughed, against his will. Sam had such a broad streak of wisdom in him, so often seemed so old for his age, that Jake had seriously expected him to say something revelatory. “Pancakes are good,” he agreed. “But I don’t think I could make her happy by just making really good pancakes.”
“You like to go places we like to go, like Discovery Park and the Ferris wheel and the Oregon coast.”
“True,” Jake said.
“She smiles a lot more when you’re around than when you’re not,” Sam said. “I don’t think she’s smiled since Aaron showed up, and she was really smiley before that.”
Jake’s stomach clenched at that. A memory resurfaced, sharp and dismal, of Sam saying that he hadn’t told Mira about his lack of friends in Florida because he’d been worried about her happiness. This boy worried a lot about his mother’s happiness. This boy knew the subtle degrees of Mira’s emotions.
She smiles a lot more when you’re around than when you’re not.
And if that were tr
ue? What would it mean, anyway?
“I bet Aaron used to make her smile a lot, too,” Jake said.
“Not as much,” Sam said.
He should not have felt a wave of relief at that. He should not have.
He struggled to find the words to explain to Sam what he’d known with so much conviction the night he walked away from him and Mira. Because it was important to explain. It was important for Sam to understand. That he hadn’t walked away to be cruel. He’d done it …
He’d done it to be fair.
“When you’re a dad, or a husband, you take care of the people in your family. It’s a big job, and to do a good job at it, you have to have your own life in order. Aaron has his life in order. He has a job and he knows what he wants, enough to fly out here and ask you guys to be in his family. I’m not like that.”
“You have a job. You’re a soldier.”
“I used to be a soldier.”
“Did you stop being a soldier when you lost your leg?”
“No,” Jake said. And suddenly he understood the truth. “I stopped being a soldier when I lost my friend.”
“You lost your friend?”
“He died in the war. And I didn’t—I don’t want to keep fighting. I’m done.”
He expected to feel a sense of loss at the finality of his own words, but instead, he felt a rush of relief. Done.
“So now you could get a different job.”
“I could.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
Sam seemed to think about this for a long time. He actually rested his head on his palm like The Thinker.
“Are you afraid?”
Chapter 28
Sam was still waiting for his answer. Are you afraid?
He’d asked the question as if the thought was absurd. And all at once, Jake saw that it was. He thought of Sam’s resilience, in the face of everything he’d experienced in the last several months. A move across the country, a fall, the acquisition and loss of several babysitters. The realization that he had a father he hadn’t known he had. A grandmother, two aunts, an uncle, and two cousins. A whole fucking family.
The reappearance of a father figure.
The disappearance of a father figure.
And here Sam was, sitting beside him, having plotted an escape, a downtown bus trip, and—unless Jake was reading this whole thing wrong—essentially, an intervention.
Why had Jake ever thought, even for a moment, that he had anything to teach this kid about being brave?
As if Sam could read his mind, he said, “You told me that being brave was doing what you wanted or needed to do even if you were afraid.”
Jake’s throat was tight, his heart wide open with love for Sam. “Yes. I did.”
But the thing was, aside from that single pithy reduction, which only put into words what Sam already embodied in the world, everything Sam knew about resilience, about being brave, he’d learned at his mother’s knee.
She’d carried him and given birth to him, she’d raised him into the man he was becoming, the man he already was, and she’d done it without Jake. She’d made a decision relatively early on—she’d told him so herself—that she didn’t need or want his help. And then, when it turned out that Aaron’s partnership came at too high a price, she’d walked away from that, too. She’d driven three thousand miles, unloaded her possessions into a new house, started a new job, and then, when she stumbled straight into what had to be the most terrifying thing of all, confessing to him what he’d missed, she hadn’t hesitated for one single second. Right there and then in the physical therapist’s office, knowing almost nothing about who he was or how thoroughly he could upend her life, she’d done the right thing.
And then she’d slid down this slope with him, even though she’d been down it once before. Even though she knew where it had ended last time. Even though she knew the exact and particular ways he was driven and broken, the exact ways he could leave and break her.
That was brave.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s okay to be scared,” Sam said. “What are you scared of?”
A list was forming in Jake’s mind. Of the things he needed to do. The people he needed to see—the ones he owed something to that he might finally deliver on, the ones he owed nothing to but might still disappoint. The ones he still hadn’t met that he might have something real, something big, to give something of himself to.
“I have some things I have to do,” Jake said.
“What things?” Sam asked.
“Grown-up things,” Jake said.
“Scary things?”
“I thought they were. But now I think I can handle them.”
In his pocket, his phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket. Mira, calling.
“Hey.”
“What the hell?”
“He’s totally fine. He ran away from his sitter and took the bus here.” He decided not to tell her the sitter had been sleeping. Mira could figure it out. Handle it. God, she could handle anything. She could take life by the balls ten times over, and she pretty much had. Pregnant at eighteen, raising a kid on her own, fleeing her father to make something of herself. And meanwhile he was … Jesus, what?
Running away.
Mira was shrieking her outrage at the other end of the phone, and he handed the phone to Sam, because, after all, it was Sam’s outrage to absorb. He watched Sam’s face go through the same stages his would have gone through—guilt, contrition, apology, and then, when the diatribe went on several beats longer than was strictly necessary to make its point, irritation. He took the phone back. “Mira?”
“I’m going to send the sitter to pick him up,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” Jake said. “He can hang out here for a while. We can go get cupcakes.”
“Make sure—”
“I’ll make sure they’re allergen-free.”
“I’ll tell the sitter to get him around three. Does that work?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. There was so much more he wanted to say to her, so much more he wanted to ask. Sam says you’re not going to marry Aaron—is that true? I know you’ve already given me a second chance, but how about one more?
I love you.
But he’d told Sam he had things to do, and he’d meant it. Before he could ask for another chance, he had to deserve it.
He remembered how Mira had put it, on the beach, after he’d told her the truth about how his leg had been lost, how Mike had died. You came home and managed to stay alive.
He had, but he understood now that that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough that he hadn’t put a gun to his head, that he hadn’t drunk himself to death. It wasn’t enough to sketch the outlines of living, to rise in the morning, eat three meals, and go to sleep at night. It wasn’t enough to find purpose in the things that merely happened to fall in your lap, to take on responsibilities because they were handed to you on a silver platter and made you forget, for a few days, that you had been booted, unceremoniously, from your own life but had never quite figured out what came next.
Mira and Sam deserved a hell of a lot more than that.
When Sam had asked him what he was scared of, he hadn’t had to think more than a second before he’d known the answer. The real answer.
Deciding to live.
Chapter 29
“Mira, please talk to me.”
It would have been better if it were Jake at the other end of the phone begging, if only so she could hang up on him, but it was her father.
Three weeks had passed. Three weeks since the beach, since Aaron had shown up with the ring, since Jake had walked away. Two and a half weeks since she’d sent Aaron packing. Ten days since the first new babysitter had fallen asleep on the couch and Sam had taken a bus downtown. The second new babysitter—Opal’s second cousin’s teenage daughter from Everett—was so far competent, if uninspired.
Mira went through the motions, headi
ng to work, eating lunch with Opal on the bench, coming home, taking care of Sam. Missing Jake every minute of every day. When it came time to pick up takeout. When she cleared the table. When she sat on the couch, when she tucked Sam in, when she got into bed. When she trailed her fingers over her belly and thighs and remembered not just the sensation of him on her and in her, but all that had surrounded it—his roughness, his bossiness, the awkward realness of it. That sense of connection, of dissolved boundaries, of emotion running through her like her own blood.
She hadn’t spoken to her parents since Jake had walked away, because she couldn’t face them. Because she couldn’t bear their sympathy, couldn’t bear to have her father know, even if he didn’t say so, that he’d been right.
But now he was on the other end of the line, and as much as she wanted to hang up on him, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
Her father cleared his throat. “Lani says I haven’t been fair to you.”
As an apology, that didn’t go far, but she waited.
“I didn’t even give you a chance to explain yourself. I just waded in, guns blazing.”
“Yeah, you did,” she said. Not that if she’d had a chance to explain it, things would have gone much differently.
What the hell is Jake doing there?
Exactly what you think. Getting some, as long as things don’t get too complicated.
He sighed. “And she’s right. I know she’s right. If you trust Jake with Sam, we need to trust him too. I owe both of you an apology.”
A few weeks ago, she would have been ecstatic to hear those words come out of her father’s mouth. Now …
Well, now it hardly mattered.
Still, it was nice, and it was rare for her father to admit he’d been wrong, even under pressure from Lani, so she said, “Thanks, Dad.”
“So—do you want to tell me about it?”
“There’s not much to tell.”
There was a long silence. Then he said, “I know Aaron proposed.”
Damn it, three thousand miles couldn’t keep her father out of her business, and she thanked the gods and the stars and the rest of the powers out there that she’d broken up with Aaron in Florida and refused to let him back in. “What—did he ask your permission first?”