“Taking care of my girl?” Erik said as he went in.
Jack closed the book and put it down on the nightstand. Swung his feet to the floor and got up.
“I made your side warm,” he said. “I’m good at that, too.”
His arms went around Erik’s waist, squeezed once. Then he slipped like smoke out the door.
He moved as noiselessly as Will.
UNDER CANADIAN LAW, a child born after twenty weeks gestation—alive or dead—guaranteed full parental leave. Both the Fredericton Playhouse and New Brunswick Ballet threw compassionate leave on top, giving the Fiskares fifteen weeks to grieve.
“Get out of here,” Will said to them. “Just go somewhere. Go around the world. Fuck it.”
They didn’t want to go anywhere. They stayed put, wandering around their life, getting through the structureless days. Picking things up and putting them down again. Eventually, cabin fever settled in, and they headed outside in an orgy of yardwork. Dawn to dusk they labored, cleaning up the world with a feverish energy. The lawn and garden beds were immaculate, the garage sparkled and the shed boasted a new paint job. Out of chores, they began walking long miles together: loops around the lake and treks through the woods. On stronger days, they drove to parts of the Trans Canada Trail. They tramped and trudged along the pathway, not to enjoy the scenery, but to wear themselves out.
Erik kept hypervigilant eyes on his wife’s skin. “Promise me,” he said. “If you start thinking about glass, start even entertaining the idea of hurting yourself, you tell me.”
“I promised to stay alive for you,” she said. “A long time ago.”
“Promise this for me now.”
“I promise,” she said. “It hasn’t entered my mind. It’s not who I am anymore.”
“All right,” he said. “But if you feel like you’re spiraling down into the dark, you’re going on the meds. It’s not even a question.”
She touched his face. “I know.”
“I mean it,” he said, his voice shaking. “Your mental state is more important to me than anything else. Don’t tough it out, Dais.”
“I don’t have the strength to tough it out,” she said, a tiny, sad smile trembling beneath her damp eyes. The green was gone from their depths. She was a woman at war.
Erik felt battle-weary and defeated. He hadn’t cried since Kees’s ashes came back to them. He walked around with a constant lump in his throat, but the tears wouldn’t come. Woven in with his stopped-up grief was an enraged fury and the occasional, twisted urge to either trash his workbench or kick a small animal to death.
He found himself frequently visiting his bedside table drawer, taking out the leather case with his Purple Heart, peeking beneath the inset where a flattened copper penny lived. Fighting a strange urge to put it in his pocket.
He passed long stretches of time gazing at the coin, remembering the power it held over him for so many years. He looked the compulsion in the eye. Acknowledged and felt his way through the need as he peeled his fingers off it.
It wasn’t your fault.
It wasn’t wood un-knocked, it wasn’t superstition ignored, it wasn’t you flaunting your happiness and inviting James to come back and shoot it down.
It was nothing you did or didn’t do.
It’s something that happened to you.
He kept waiting to either cry or erupt. Anything to break the stalemate. Grief was an iron collar. Anger was barbed wire in his guts.
It hurt like hell.
He wondered if he was dying.
“Can you die from not crying?” he asked.
“I’m tired of crying,” Daisy said through her clenched teeth, her forehead against the window pane. Outside was torrential wind and rain. “I’m so fucking angry. I want to smash something. I want to kill something. It’s not fair.”
He put his arms around her from behind. “Nothing’s fair.”
“We got sucker punched. All that joking about us finally getting a break and fate was just off in a corner fucking laughing. Waiting to backhand us into misery. I am sick of life doing this to you and me…”
Will and Lucky were renovating their kitchen. They invited the Fiskares over, gave them each goggles and a sledgehammer and pointed toward a wall marked for demo.
“Remove that,” Will said.
They destroyed it. Reduced the entire thing to a rubble of sheetrock and studs in under five minutes. Then pounded the pieces into dust because fuck everything.
Breathing hard, Erik looked over his shoulder at Will. “Got anything else you want taken out?”
Eyes wide at the kill, Will slowly shook his head. “No, but I got some wood you can split?”
“I’m taking your wife,” Lucky said. “We’re going for a spa weekend. Make sure Will doesn’t burn the house down.”
“I heard that,” Will yelled from the living room. “We’re having our own spa weekend.”
“We are?” Erik said.
“No,” Will said. “I have to work.”
But he left the kids with the nanny and spent the better part of Sunday afternoon with Erik. Just hanging out playing video games. It was like college, Erik thought, sitting on the floor next to Will, their backs up against the couch. Sweatpants and ball caps. Unshaven and scruffy. A pizza box and empty beers on the coffee table.
He felt old all of a sudden.
“I just hit the wall,” he said, an immense surge of emotion pressing against the back of his eyeballs. He wanted Daisy to come home. His heart hurt, as if she had left forever.
Will tossed his remote onto the table. “You all right?”
“I feel like ten kinds of crap.”
Will put an arm around him. “Dude…”
Erik sniffed hard. Tried to laugh it off. But it hurt today.
“I still got Dais,” he said. “I threw all those years away but I found her again. I still got her. I’ll never let her go. I need her more than I need any of the rest of it.”
“Fish, what are you trying to do, find a bright side? You got no silver lining. You lost your baby, all right? You lost your son.”
Erik pressed his forehead against the heels of his hands. “I lost my Dad,” he said. “And I lost my son. I’m abandoned from both fucking sides now. What the hell is the world trying to tell me? What, Will? What’s it going to take? How much do I have to take?”
His entire life burst through his eyes and he was crying. The collar slipped from his throat and all the furious hurt in his heart boiled up. With a grunt of rage he shoved the coffee table, tipped it over in an avalanche of magazines, electronics, pizza crusts and tin cans. Then he fell back, his face in his hands, weeping.
“Come here,” Will said.
Blind with hot tears, Erik stepped off the edge of himself, stepped over the line and turned toward Will. He rolled on his knees and down on the other hip so he could slump in the circle of those tattooed arms, bury his face in the wall of Will’s chest and let it go. The river of grief burst its dam and ran free, pouring out like thunder.
“I got you,” Will said over the roar. “Give it here.”
Erik cried hard. Cried for all the joy in his life that had been yanked away, shot down and burned up. He cried as both angry man and frightened child and the combined hurt was suffocating. He could grieve as an abandoned son or grieve as a bereaved father, but the bi-fold pain of both at the same time was drowning him. It sank sharp, icy nails into his skin. A lament so old, so familiar, it seemed slightly ancient.
You left me. Why did you leave me?
Red tail lights of his father’s truck making a left onto Webb Street.
The squeak of the bassinet wheels when they took Kees away for the last time.
Ashes on top of the piano.
Gold around his neck.
Come back.
Daisy crying in the night. Crying for him out loud in the dark with no arms to hold her.
Don’t leave me. Come back.
He was swept along until he though
t he would die, coming to a slow stop and finally left floating in the shallows, spent and exhausted.
“I can’t take any more,” he said.
“I know,” Will said. “I can’t watch you take any more.”
Erik freed a hand and wiped his face. “This is karmic debt coming due, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s what I did to Dais. This was her, crying on the floor every night for me. I made her feel like this. I made both you and her feel like this.”
“Don’t. It’s old pain and it’s forgiven. It has nothing to do with now.”
“I fucking hate now.”
Will held him tight. His heart beat slow and steady in Erik’s ear and his jaw rested on the top of Erik’s head.
“I hate it too,” Will said. “You don’t deserve this shit.”
Erik exhaled and they sat still a few minutes, breathing. Then Will’s hands patted Erik’s back and squeezed his shoulders. “You all right?”
“I’m tired.”
“Go lie down. I’ll clean up. Go on.”
Wobbling like a newborn foal, Erik slowly got to his feet, needing the crutch of the toppled coffee table to help. He stumbled upstairs and lay down. His head ached and his eyes burned. Yet within minutes he plummeted into a coma-like sleep, emerging when Daisy slipped in beside him and curled up in his arms.
“I’m home,” she whispered, her voice blowing away the fog.
He held her, breathing deep, assessing himself. The headache was gone. His throat was open, his chest peaceful. He felt husked out. Sort of…clean. The grief was there but it wasn’t so slimy.
“Feel okay?” he asked, sliding his hand along her neck and into her hair.
“I do now,” she said. Bastet jumped up onto the bed and curled herself into the tiny space between their bodies. They laid their hands on her silvery fur and rested.
Later, Will texted a black and white picture. A soldier sitting on the ground, crumpled weeping in the arms of a mate. His face pressed, hidden, against his friend’s chest. Every line of his body utterly defeated. The soldier who comforted stared straight ahead, his face a stone. Taking in the horrors of combat as if nothing surprised him anymore. But the hand on his shattered friend’s head was soft. Gentle. Erik could almost see it moving there. Could almost hear the repeated, murmured litany: It’s all right. Let it go now. I got you.
Story of every man’s life, I guess, Will texted. At one point or another.
Erik replied. The thing you said about loving in a guy what you love in yourself? I get it now.
A bit of silver had peeked through the clouds over Erik’s heart. Kees’s death would never be justified. It would bewilder and anger Erik all the rest of his days. Yet it had shone a light on bit of truth. At just the right angle to kindle a sudden insight.
“I only did what any man would’ve done,” John Quillis said.
Not any man, Erik thought. Exceptional men.
His life was filled with them.
The moment with Will in the parking lot, so foreign and strange at the time, shimmered in Erik’s mind like a miracle. It wasn’t a thing to be dismissed. Without it, Erik would still be trapped in the agony of unexpressed grief. Dying from unshed tears.
It wasn’t the first time he and Will had been in a foxhole with a battle raging over their heads: in the hospital after the shooting, Will had been the weeping soldier, his face crushed into Erik’s chest, shell shocked and stricken, hiding from the world. Now Erik was the broken one. And Will was on the lookout.
I trust him with my life. I trust him with my pain. He can’t make it go away, but I can give it to him to hold for a while.
He knows me.
I see in him what I like best in me.
Life was war. Life would go on doling out what it saw fit, and he and Will would just keep switching roles. The rock and the wrecked. Each being what the other needed, knowing they could never be misunderstood.
And if that wasn’t love, Erik had no idea what was.
Dave,
Thanks for your note. I won’t lie. It’s hard. It hurts like hell. We’re just getting through the days. Most of them suck, some are merely numb. The rest aren’t worth getting into. You’d think what we went through at Lancaster would prepare us better. Maybe it’s best not to think the worst has happened to you.
I know you and I still have a lot to say to each other. Or maybe not. I’m too tired to hold onto stupid shit anymore. Too sad to cling to what happened back when neither of us knew any better. It was nobody’s finest moment. What happened that day is on you, but what happened the next twelve years is on me. It’s too much weight. And it doesn’t fucking matter anymore. It did at the time, but now I can’t stay in that bitter place. I’ll never get up if I do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the night of the shooting. At the hotel. I remember I talked to my mom before I fell into bed and she told me, “Put your head down. Stay with David.” Then you handed me a valium and stood watching until I swallowed it.
You didn’t go to sleep. You were in the chair in the corner, reading the bible, reading Psalm 41 out loud. Keeping watch until I was out. You stayed with me. You set me in your presence.
I can’t say I’m ready to see you. But I can say the night of the shooting was, without question, your finest moment. And I’m keeping it. I’m keeping the moment and letting go of the rest. It’s a better place.
I’m letting go of it. All right? If it’s weighed heavy on you these years then put it down. Leave it in the corner. Go to sleep in a better place.
We own this place.
Take care of yourself. Take care of your family. Hold them tight.
E Fish
“HEY BUDDY,” MIKE SAID. “How you doing?”
“Hanging in there,” Erik said. “Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“You said my dad wrote you letters. When you were in the Coast Guard or at college.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you keep any?”
A thoughtful silence in which Erik could see Mike pulling at his beard. “Well, that’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t remember having a ceremonial disposing of them, but that’s not to say they didn’t get scooped up and tossed during one clean-up or another.”
“I just wondered,” Erik said. “You told me in one of them he talked about the struggle after Pete went deaf. How hard it was when things were beyond your control. I don’t know. I got to thinking I’d like to read that if I could.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll look. I have some boxes in the attic with old papers and such. I’ll certainly look and if I find any, I’ll send them to you.”
“Thanks,” Erik said. “No rush. I’m not expecting you to have kept them, but I thought I’d ask.”
They chatted a little and then hung up. Erik laced his hands behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling. Footsteps came into the living room behind him and he extended his fingers out. Daisy took them in hers.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked, leaning over the back of his chair.
He didn’t. Then her perfume curled around his nose and he looked up. She was wearing her favorite black cashmere sweater, her necklace with the gold fish and the pearl and the matching pearl earrings. Her hair was fixed and she had a little lipstick on. She looked pretty and Erik could see the effort it took. He ran wet hands through his hair and put on a clean shirt before they left.
They parked in town and walked. No destination, just crisscrossing the grid of Saint John. Watching boats come in and out of the harbor, watching people going about their business, watching the world continuing to spin.
Hunger made a surprise appearance so they went into the Wharf Tavern. Nick behind the bar came around to hug them. “It’s good to see you out. I’ve been thinking about you guys. Come sit down.”
They sat kitty-corner at a little table with a bottle of wine and shared an order of fish stew
, hot and creamy and loaded with good things. They dunked bread and fed each other shrimp and scallops and haddock. Not saying much but never breaking physical contact, their ankles woven under the table.
And over the rims of their wineglasses, they stared.
“I love nobody and nothing,” Erik said, “the way I love you.”
They ambled down Chester Street. Stopped in A Drink With Bread and Jam and bought a half-pound of their favorite loose leaf tea. Wandered through a bookstore. Looked in windows. Looked at each other.
“I’m having a good time,” Daisy said, picking a bit of something off his jacket then smoothing her hand down his chest.
He hooked his arm around her neck and inhaled deep on the crown of her head. Breathed in fresh air and the warm, clean scent of her hair.
“So am I,” he said.
They walked around a flea market at Lalille Pier. One booth had the perfect little silver box for Kees’s ashes. Sleek and handsome and simple. When the vendor learned what it was for, she pressed it into Daisy’s hands and wouldn’t take their money.
“Que Dieu vous bénisse,” she said, kissing their cheeks.
Her blessing on their faces, they turned down Palace Avenue. The sleek black awning of Ink & Think, the tattoo parlor, beckoned from across the street. Not a glance or a word was exchanged as they crossed over.
Just a K, they decided. The artist copied the letter’s style straight out of Daisy’s fish tattoo and inked it into them in black. Erik’s on the inside of his right wrist. Daisy’s in the hollow of her left hip bone.
She came to him that night. The tiniest green flicker in her eyes as she wound her arms around his neck and found his mouth with hers. He slid his hands up the back of her sweater and unclipped her bra. His touch was careful, knowing her breasts were still sore. Their sorrowful weight filled his palms but they stayed dry.
Her hands trembled as she pulled his shirt off and pushed his jeans down. She eased him to the bed and lay on top of him, the full length of her body all along his. Her head on his chest, her toes against his ankles. Naked save for her jewelry. Every bit of adornment she wore was something Erik had given her. On her finger. At her ears. Nestled in her throat.
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