Harold tilted his head. “You don’t look too good.”
He smiled. “I’ve had the flu.” He gazed up at the ceiling, as if his lines might be written there. “The forsythia’s falling down, you know.”
“I know. It’s been a windy winter.”
“I’ll help you stake it, if you want.”
Harold looked at him for a long moment then, his mouth slightly moving, as if he was both trying and not trying to speak. Finally he said, “Yeah. Let’s go do that.”
Outside it was abruptly, insultingly cold, and both of them began sniffling. He positioned the stake and Harold hammered it into the ground, although the earth was frozen and chipped up into pottery-like shards as he did. After they’d gotten it deep enough, Harold handed him lengths of twine, and he tied the center stalks of the bush to the stake, snugly enough so they’d be secure, but not so snug that they’d be constricted. He worked slowly, making sure the knots were tight, snapping off a few branches that were too bent to recover.
“Harold,” he said, when he was halfway down the bush, “I wanted to talk to you about something, but—I don’t know where to begin.” Stupid, he told himself. This is such a stupid idea. You were so stupid to think any of this could ever happen. He opened his mouth to continue and then shut it, and then opened it again: he was a fish, dumbly blowing bubbles, and he wished he had never come, had never begun speaking.
“Jude,” said Harold, “tell me. Whatever it is.” He stopped. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No,” he said. “No, nothing like that.” They were silent. “Are you?”
“No, of course not.”
He finished the last tie and brought himself to his feet, Harold deliberately not helping him. “I don’t want to tell you this,” he said, and looked down at the forsythia, its bare twiggy ugliness. “But I have to because—because I don’t want to be deceitful with you. But Harold—I think you think I’m one kind of person, and I’m not.”
Harold was quiet. “What kind of person do I think you are?”
“A good person,” he said. “Someone decent.”
“Well,” said Harold, “you’re right. I do.”
“But—I’m not,” he said, and could feel his eyes grow hot, despite the cold. “I’ve done things that—that good people don’t do,” he continued, lamely. “And I just think you should know that about me. That I’ve done terrible things, things I’m ashamed of, and if you knew, you’d be ashamed to know me, much less be related to me.”
“Jude,” Harold said at last. “I can’t imagine anything you might have done that would change the way I feel about you. I don’t care what you did before. Or rather—I do care; I would love to hear about your life before we met. But I’ve always had the feeling, the very strong feeling, that you never wanted to discuss it.” He stopped and waited. “Do you want to discuss it now? Do you want to tell me?”
He shook his head. He wanted to and didn’t want to, both. “I can’t,” he said. Beneath the small of his back, he felt the first unfurlings of discomfort, a blackened seed spreading its thorned branches. Not now, he begged himself, not now, a plea as impossible as the plea he really meant: Not now, not ever.
“Well,” Harold sighed, “in the absence of specifics, I won’t be able to reassure you specifically, so I’m just going to give you a blanket, all-encompassing reassurance, which I hope you’ll believe. Jude: whatever it is, whatever you did, I promise you, whether you someday tell me or not, that it will never make me regret wanting or having you as a member of my family.” He took a deep breath, held his right hand before him. “Jude St. Francis, as your future parent, I hereby absolve you of—of everything for which you seek absolution.”
And was this what he in fact wanted? Absolution? He looked at Harold’s face, so familiar he could remember its every furrow when he closed his eyes, and which, despite the flourishes and formality of his declaration, was serious and unsmiling. Could he believe Harold? The hardest thing is not finding the knowledge, Brother Luke once said to him after he’d confessed he was having difficulty believing in God. The hardest thing is believing it. He felt he had failed once again: failed to confess properly, failed to determine in advance what he wanted to hear in response. Wouldn’t it have been easier in a way if Harold had told him that he was right, that they should perhaps rethink the adoption? He would have been devastated, of course, but it would have been an old sensation, something he understood. In Harold’s refusal to let him go lay a future he couldn’t imagine, one in which someone might really want him for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded in a foreign land, with no one there to guide him home.
Harold was waiting for his reply, but the pain was now unignorable, and he knew he had to rest. “Harold,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I think—I think I’d better go lie down for a while.”
“Go,” said Harold, unoffended, “go.”
In his room, he lies down atop the comforter and closes his eyes, but even after the episode ends, he’s exhausted, and tells himself he’ll nap for just a few minutes and then get up again and see what Harold has in the house: if he has brown sugar, he’ll bake something—there was a bowl of persimmons in the kitchen, and maybe he’ll make a persimmon cake.
But he doesn’t wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and then drapes a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six thirty, and Harold’s conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels Harold’s hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling him his flight’s leaving in a few hours.
Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.
He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.
The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.