Page 57 of Roadrunner

“Apparently.”

She squeezed my hand once and then released it. She stood and picked up my coffee cup and poured it down the drain and refilled it from the pot without being asked.

She set it in front of me.

I wrapped my hands around the warm cup and stared at the kitchen table.

In the conditional tense. That was where the other life had lived. Tentative. Unspoken. Just a shape at the edge of things.

I wondered if I was supposed to let it go now.

I wondered if I could.

I drank my coffee and tasted nothing.

And I did not, no matter how reasonable it would have been, stop thinking about it.

That afternoon I picked Arthur up from school, and he climbed into the car with his backpack and the particular gravity he carried, and he looked at me for a second too long before he buckled his seatbelt.

“You look weird,” he said.

“I probably do,” I said.

“Good weird or bad weird?” he asked.

I considered the question more seriously than the way he asked it probably deserved. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Your dad’s doing better. The doctor called this morning.”

Arthur processed this the way he processed most things, in silence, looking out the window at the strip malls going by. “Is that good?” he finally asked.

“It’s good,” I said, and made myself believe it while I said it, because whatever else was true, it needed to be true for him.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m sure it’s good for you,” I said. “I’m still figuring out what it means for me.”

He nodded slowly, like that was a reasonable answer, which from a child who had spent his whole life reading the weather in a house that rarely told him the truth outright, it probably was.

“Okay,” he said, and let it go, and I loved him so much in that moment for letting it go that I had to blink hard at the road for a second before I could see it clearly again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Alex

Now

Joshua woke up on a Wednesday.

Not fully. Not the way it happens in movies. It was slower than that. More ambiguous. A response to stimulation. A squeeze of the hand when prompted. Dr. Patel called it emerging.

I stood in the hallway outside his room and absorbed the word.

Emerging.

Like something working its way out of the ground.

Arthur was at school when it happened. I didn’t tell him immediately. I drove to the hospital and stood in the hallway and looked through the glass at Joshua and tried to sort out what I felt.

I tried for a long time.