Page 64 of Keep Me

“Do you now?”

She looked around the kitchen. At Austin. At me. At the letter, folded now, resting on the counter like something that had finally been allowed to rest. “I think I do,” she said. “I think he gave all of us something. Even after. Especially after. Maybe that’s how you need to see it, Seren. He didn’t force anything. He gave us the chance to find people that love us.”

“Thank you,” I said, to both of them, to the letter, to the kitchen, to whatever had conspired or simply happened to put all four of us, five if you counted the ghost still folded into the pages on the counter, in the same orbit.

“Always,” Austin said, the same word he always used, the one that had never once been a lie.

Blair reached over and squeezed my hand, and for a while none of us said anything else. We just sat there together in the quiet and let it be enough.

Sunsets

People talk about after like it’s a real place.

I know. I said that already. I said it in May, standing in a blue apartment, filing everything I loved into a future I was sure would hold it. What I did not say then, what I did not know yet, was that after is not one place. It is a series of places. You arrive in one and it turns out to be the entrance to another. You keep walking. You keep putting things down and picking up different things. There is no counter. There is no clerk. There is just the next room, and the one after that, and the accumulating understanding that the journey is the whole of it and you were wrong to think it had a destination. It was another one of time’s tricks. There is no after, there is only now.

And before. The before does not leave. You might leave one room and walk into another, but you do not forget each room you pass by. I think each room changes you, sometimes barely, sometimes completely. You never know which room changed which part of you until you look back at all the doors you opened.

I was in a new after now. I could feel the walls of it, unfamiliar, not bad, just new. The texture of a life rearranging itself around what it had learned. But the rooms I walked through had changed the shape of me and I did not quite know what shape that was.

Zane had been in the kitchen for an hour before I opened my eyes. I knew by the smell, coffee first, then something with eggs, then the cereal that appeared whenever he was trying to take care of something without announcing it. I lay in my childhood bed, which no longer felt like my childhood bed, and listened to him moving around in the rooms below and thought about how that sound was the same in any house. The rhythm of him. The weight of his steps. I had that wherever we went. I was starting to understand that was the point.

The laptop was already open when I came downstairs. Lucy’s face on the screen, the same armchair, the same reading glasses, the tea she always had at this hour.

“Good morning,” she said, the way she always started. “A lot has happened.”

“Yes. A lot happened,” I said.

“Tell me.”

Zane moved around the kitchen behind me, the sound of the coffee being poured and the creak of the cabinets, easy and unobtrusive, present without being a presence. I told Lucy as much as I could. Not everything, not the letter or the sixteen-hours I spent sitting on the kitchen floor, but enough. Henry. The graveyard. The things I had been walking around without knowing.

Lucy listened without writing anything down, which was rare. She just watched me through the screen.

“I want to bring something up,” I said, before Lucy could ask a question.

She paused. Looked at me over the glasses. “Go ahead.”

“You said something to me in May. About my dad.” I kept my voice steady, the same way I had kept it steady at the kitchen counter, the same way I had kept it steady at Tom’s grave. “When he sent me the picture of the hummingbirds. When I came back from West Bridge and I told you he seemed lighter. Happy, almost. And you said sometimes things are just what they present as. That there doesn’t have to be something behind it.”

Lucy’s expression did not change, which was its own answer. She had been waiting for this.

“I took that with me,” I said. “I used it. And you were wrong. It was not what it presented as. Every time I noticed something off, I put it down. He wasn’t working. He was stepping back. He seemed slow. He seemed soft. I cataloged all of it and filed it under your sentence, and then he died. And now I know what that actually was.”

“What do you think it was?” she asked.

“Acceptance,” I said. “And eight months of knowing he was dying and deciding not to tell me.” I looked at her directly. “He had been hiding it since September, Lucy. He had been to the boxes and chosen the photograph and signed the estate papers before I even walked through the door. I sat across from him, and I thought it was peace. Because you told me it was probably just what it looked like.”

“I did say that,” Lucy said. She did not apologize and she did not deflect. Both of those things I was grateful for.

“I’ve been trying to figure out,” I said slowly, “whether that was the wrong thing to say. Whether I should have kept looking.”

“What do you think?”

I sat with it the way she had taught me to sit with things. The full weight of it.

“I think,” I said finally, “that there is a difference between healthy trust and deciding not to look. And I don’t know which one I was doing. Maybe both. I trusted you and I trusted him, and I filed it all away.” My voice dropped. “And he still died.”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “He did. You trusted him and he died anyway. Here’s what I want you to hold,” she said. “That sentence was true, in the context I said it. Your dad was trying to know you. He was reaching toward you. None of that was false. And.” A pause. “And it was also true that he was ill and hiding it, and neither you nor I were given the information that would have changed what we were seeing. You did not miss something that was visible. You missed something he made invisible.”