She smiled, a little watery, maybe, reached across the table to take his hand, and said, “If I haven’t said it enough—I love you. You are such a good man. You make me proud to … to know you.”
He said, “I want to marry you.”
He didn’t mean to. It just came out. Because what he’d wanted her to say was, “You make me proud to be your wife.”
She said, “Oh,” then almost visibly set it aside and said, “We can talk about it later, don’t you think? It’s kind of an … emotional time right now.” Then smiled, just a twist of her mouth. “A really emotional time. This is as bad as it gets.”
“We can talk about it later,” he said, “but I’m not changing my mind.” It was right there in front of him, so clear that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it sooner.
“OK,” she said, “but I’m going to tell you the other things now, because we don’t have that long before we land.”
“Right. Go.”
“I arranged for Alison and the family to fly over, because I can’t imagine six hours in the car with two little kids, facing this. They’ll be there by the time we arrive. I hope that’s all right.”
“Sure. How about Vanessa?”
“She was working a flight, but she’ll get here as fast as she can. Probably tonight. And I called your grandparents and arranged their tickets and their room, too. They’re coming tomorrow evening. I thought …” She took a breath. “That they’d want to be here with you right now, and that you’d want to bury your mom as soon as you can. She’s been alone long enough.”
That was it. He tried, but … he lost it.
Jennifer was beside him in the aisle. On her knees, her arms around him. He managed to say, “You need to … get back in your seat. Seat belt. And … Bug. I shouldn’t …”
“Yes,” she said, her voice fierce, and so tender, too. “You should. Annabelle needs to know that this hurts everybody, that it’s safe to hurt this badly, to let herself feel it. And you all need to say goodbye to your mom. You need to tell her you love her. You need to grieve, and you need to do it together.”
He shook his head, his hand over his face, still crying like he couldn’t stop. That place that was numb—the anesthetic had worn off, and it hurt.
It hurt.
She was still holding him. “Harlan,” she said. “Go on and cry. The grief doesn’t go away, otherwise. It just sits like a hard ball in your chest until you can’t breathe around it. You need to feel it.”
No chance of doing anything else. Finally, though, he was mopping up, and she was back in her seat. He took a few more deep, shuddering breaths, got himself back under control, and said, “Right. Next.”
She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t make final arrangements for the funeral. I wasn’t sure if you’d want her to be buried there, or maybe with your grandparents. Or even out in Portland, near you and Annabelle. I figured you all could talk about it tonight. I made some preliminary choices in case you wanted to do it in Bismarck, but I can cancel them. Or change them.”
“OK.” It was too much to think about, and she was right. They needed to do it all together.
“Last thing,” she said. “Your dad.”
“Where is he?”
“At the house. He’s still out on bail until sentencing. I didn’t make any decisions at all about that. That’s up to you.”
60
Love Wins
It was Friday afternoon, high summer in Bismarck. A day for kids to ride their bikes to the pool and run through the sprinklers and get purple tongues from their popsicles. And Harlan was driving to the house, the route as familiar as a recurring nightmare. The sky around him summer-blue, the clouds puffy-white. Field after field of yellow sunflowers lifting their cheerful faces.
Behind him, Vanessa said, “Mom loved the sunflowers. She always had a big vase of them in the house. Do you remember that? We’d tease her that you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing sunflowers, but she said they made her happy, and we could just hush.”
“I remember that,” Alison said from beside Harlan, and Annabelle said, “I don’t.” Sounding so sad. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Vanessa had her arm around her.
The four of them, doing this together. That had been Jennifer’s suggestion yesterday afternoon, when she’d come back from her swim and found him sitting on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, unable to work up the energy to get up and shower after his workout.
He was never stuck. He didn’t let himself be stuck. He was stuck now.
“You know …” she said when she’d gotten the hard words out of him, “you could skip this. Of course you could. You don’t need to let him justify himself to you. If you need to confront him, to make a statement, you can do it at the sentencing hearing. That’s part of what that’s for, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I want to do it now. And I don’t want to do it at all. Go back into that house … I don’t want to. But I feel like I need to.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw and tried to think, but it just wasn’t coming. Like when you had a concussion, and the thoughts wouldn’t form, but kept skittering away the more you tried to pull them in.
She said, “What if you all did it together?”
He raised his head, and she said, “Just because he asked for you, that doesn’t mean only you can go. I think, if you asked them, everybody might want to go. To be able to ask their questions. To be able to yell if they needed to. To be able to call him names. They might feel constrained, in a courtroom. And you know … there would be two reasons I think they’d all say yes. Because, first, you’re the glue. You’re the leader. You’ve got the strength to hold them together, and you’re also their protection.”
“What’s the second reason?” he asked.
“Annabelle. If you’re the protector, she’s the one you all want to protect. At least for Vanessa and you, because I’m not sure about Alison. It helps to have a protector. It helps more to be a protector.”
“Being loved deeply by someone gives you strength,” he said. “Loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “the Tao is right.”
Now, he pulled up outside the house. Not into the driveway. He didn’t want to put a car there. Irrational, maybe, or maybe not. Maybe completely rational, because sometimes, your body knew more than your brain. He turned the engine off and said, “Everyone still want to do this? No shame in staying in the car, if you can’t face it.”
“Yes,” Vanessa said.
“I think so,” Alison said.
He looked in the rearview mirror. “Bug?”
“Yes.” Her chin was set. For once, she looked older than seventeen, and he got a glimpse of the steel underneath.
He said, “Let’s go.”
When they got out of the car, Vanessa had Annabelle’s hand, and she still had it when they were standing on the porch. Framed by the railing he’d jumped off in the cape his mom had made him, when he’d been sure that if he only flapped his arms hard enough, he could fly. Next to the driveway where he’d learned to ride a bike with her running behind him. As she’d liked to tell him, “Only about five times, because after that, you balanced. Everybody said a three-year-old couldn’t ride a bike, but you learned faster than anybody else’s child. Partly because you were just that coordinated, and partly because you were so determined.” The same driveway where he’d run himself behind Alison’s bike, and then behind Annabelle’s, his hand on the seat, shouting encouragement.