“Ah.” He felt frozen. “That’s why. It’s because I wish it had been me. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Shh,” his mother said, stroking his face. That was how Grayson realized that he was crying. That he was actually making an embarrassing noise while doing it.
“Shhh. Don’t talk such nonsense. It was senseless. There was no reason to who came back and who didn’t.”
“Mama.”
She folded her arms around him. “I’m glad it was you,” she told him. “I’m so glad you’re still in this world. I’m so glad.”
His face was wet with tears—utterly shameful—and his nose was running when the door opened again. Gray tried to choke back his emotions. But it was Adrian who entered—Adrian and his father.
“Ah,” said his father jovially. “You’ve found the man of the hour… Oh.” He cut himself off.
“Grayson,” Adrian said slowly. “Is everything all right?”
I’m fine, he almost said. But he could hear those not-yet-uttered words overlapping with Amelia’s. Don’t tell me you’re fine if you’re not fine. And: Who cares for you? He’d been holding the truth back because he was afraid to ask for the care he wanted, the care he needed. He’d wanted to fix everything else before he could believe that he deserved to be fixed himself.
He finally saw his error. He could not fix this. He had known it all these years. He’d known it and refused to admit it. He couldn’t fix this because one man could not fill a gaping hole, no matter how far he stretched. Grayson had to know; he’d stretched himself six thousand miles now, and it hadn’t been enough.
Everything seemed lost in despair. His family’s wounds? Irreparable. Amelia? She wanted him to be happy, and here he was, brought to his knees by what should have been his greatest victory.
Grayson shut his eyes and touched his fingers to his temples. He thought of Amelia’s drawing of a mouse hiding in a corner, munching cheese. He thought of hiding away.
And yet in the cold, dark night, with the telegraph chattering noisily away, his mother squeezed his hands. Adrian came to sit on his other side, arm coming to his shoulder. His father pressed in front of him. The three of them squeezed him in a hug so warm, so tight, that even Grayson could not help but feel embraced by it.
“What’s wrong?” Adrian whispered.
Don’t tell me you’re fine if you’re not fine, he could hear himself say, and yes, that was right for other people, but surely, for himself? For himself, it was a weakness.
Grayson lifted his head long enough to lean his forehead against his brother’s chest.
“Oh Gray.”
“I wasn’t supposed to do this alone,” Grayson said. “Harry and John and Noah and I were all supposed to do it together. I thought if I finished the transpacific line that we’d worked on together, it would…”
He didn’t even know how to complete the sentence. Serve as a monument? Preserve their memory? Bring him peace? He’d thought all those things.
“I thought if I finished the last thing we planned together,” he said, “that it would mean there’s something of them still in this world. But they’re still not here. It’s just me.”
“There still is.” His father cupped the back of his head. “There is in our hearts. And in your telegraph.”
“But it’s not enough. This isn’t enough.” He’d spent so long flinching from this truth. There was nothing he could do. Nothing. Nothing would ever be enough. “I’m not enough.”
Tears came again like the opening of floodgates, a violent unstoppable torrent of water sweeping through the barren landscape of his heart. He could scarcely think beyond the grief that swept through him.
“I miss them too,” Adrian said. “I’m still sad too.”
Grayson could feel his brother’s arms around him, surrounding him with love and affection and a grief that was so close to his own.
“I miss them every day,” his father whispered. “Sometimes I forget for a day, and then one thing reminds me…”
“We were talking about Noah on the way up,” his mother said. “Remember his steam engine phase?”
Grayson let out a laugh. “Who could forget?”
But that was what he had tried to do, pushing his grief away, denying it a place in his heart. He listened to his mother tell a story about how his younger brother had disappeared on a train for three hours while his parents had searched for him, more and more frantically, only to discover he’d found his way to the engine where the Black crew of engineers was answering his questions and feeding him lunch.
Then there was the time Harry had gotten into a scrape overseas. The time John had gone to Brazil. Painful memories. Precious memories. He couldn’t fix them, not without jettisoning them in their entirety. He couldn’t fix anything, broken as it was.
“My ship’s logs.” He put those words out there. “My journals. I have so much of them saved in there. Maybe when I come home next, we could…?”
“I would like that,” his mother said quietly, her lips pressing against his forehead. “I would like to go through them together. I hate thinking of you out in the world all alone.”
Grayson exhaled and thought of Amelia telling him she wanted him to be happy.
“On the subject of being alone.” He looked away. “I have a confession to make.”
“Hmm?”
“I need to tell you about my vice president of telegraphic encoding. She is…”
He searched for a word, but the truth must have come through in his struggling silence.
“Tell us about her?” his mother said. “From the sounds of it, I believe you need to bring her home. Or am I wrong?”
He exhaled. “You’re not. You’re not wrong.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Grayson’s family had come up aboard the Reliant with his cousin Ben as captain.
“Well, of course you should sail back to San Francisco with everyone,” Ben said, when Grayson asked the next morning. “I thought I was going to have to hit you over the head and toss you in a sack to make you come along, and here you are asking, pretty as you please.”
It felt odd to be idle aboard ship, odd not to have to worry about the paying out of cable or the coming storms, odd to be so disconnected on the waters when he’d spent weeks with a copper connection that could fill in all the details of what was happening ashore. It felt odd to bid the Celerity and the Victory farewell until they reconvened in San Francisco a little later. It felt odd to sit at a table with his cousins and tell tales of their exploits. It felt odd to fit in.
He brought up his brothers one afternoon during the Daily Disoccupation. Ben and Zed had been teasing him because the Disoccupation aboard the Reliant was kites—flying, crafting, making, and of course, since he and his cousins were involved, being competitive about the entire thing.
Grayson was not good at kites. He always managed to tangle his kite with someone else’s, or snap the string, or misread an eddy and end up watching his kite plunge into the ocean while everyone else’s soared high.