AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I…don’t know.”
Jem was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe this isn’t the time, but I wanted to say I’m sorry.” Theo glanced at him, and Jem shrugged. “For being…well, a major asshole, I guess. When we met.” He couldn’t seem to look Theo in the face as he continued, “I’ve got all this stuff about reading and school, and you were so smart and confident, and I acted like a huge piece of shit. So, I’m sorry.”
It seemed impossible to Theo that they could be having this conversation right then. He could only process it in bits and pieces, his mind lurching toward Auggie every few seconds before Theo tried to pull himself back to this moment. Somehow he managed to say, “It’s ok.”
Jem did look at him now. “Plus I had no idea you were such a badass.”
Theo’s smile felt dry and cracked.
“He’s going to be ok,” Jem said quietly. “We’re going to get through this together, all of us.”
“I know.”
A man in scrubs hurried past them, texting on his phone, and he left silence in his wake.
Jem broke it by saying, “Tean would say we should go back. I guess we should go back.”
Theo nodded, and he let Jem lead him back to the waiting room.
They didn’t have to wait much longer. Auggie appeared, escorted by a nurse. The nurse was telling Theo things, explaining how to care for the wound, change the bandages, something about the stitches. But the words breezed through Theo; all he could see was Auggie. A huge bandage covered one side of his face, and he looked ashy, his eyes smudged with exhaustion. But he looked back at Theo, and one side of his mouth smiled.
“Mr. Stratford,” the nurse was saying, “do you have any questions?”
“No,” Emery said. “He doesn’t. We’ll pick up the prescription, and I’ll go over the instructions with him after he’s had some rest.”
That seemed to satisfy some obligation that Theo could only register at the periphery of his consciousness. He was aware, as they left the hospital, that John-Henry was going back to work—now, of course, to deal with the aftermath of everything with Ambyr. Jem and Tean piled into a car with North and Shaw. And Emery got behind the wheel of the Audi, which meant Theo could sit in the back seat with Auggie.
They drove. Columbia’s light pollution faded behind them, and then they were in the true dark, the deepness of limestone cuts, under walls of hickory and oak and pine. Everything that Theo needed to say ran through his head like words on a ticker tape that wouldn’t stop printing, wouldn’t give him a chance to catch up.
“Stop,” Auggie murmured, tucking his head into Theo’s shoulder. He rubbed Theo’s belly. “Please. Stop.”
He was asleep in a few minutes.
When they crossed the Missouri, the tires rumbled over the bridge, and the waters were black and wide except where reflected light floated like pancake ice. No stars. The sodium and halide coruscation of Jeff City. The dark again, movement: a branch bending, outstretched wings, the curve of a white-tail’s neck.
Emery parked in front of the house and killed the engine. They sat there in silence, and then the headlights clicked off.
“Let me get Auggie in bed,” Theo said, surprised by the rasp of his words, “and I’ll drive you home.”
“I’m going to stay here tonight. Tean and Jem took Lana for a sleepover with Evie.”
Theo nodded and let that flow past him. He woke Auggie and helped him into the house, into the residual reek of fire and scorched plaster and singed wood. In their bedroom, he undressed Auggie and helped him under the covers, and then he stripped down to a t-shirt and boxers and stretched out beside him. Auggie’s hand came to rest on his belly. That was good; his hand was an anchor, while everything else in Theo was electrified, spinning on a thousand rotors and propellers, every inch of him trying to take flight.
The knife.
The baby carrier skidding toward the wheels of the truck.
Auggie’s face. The curtain of blood.
He could hear his labored breathing in the darkness. He thought he saw lights, colors, in the darkness of the room. Spots that floated on the edge of his vision and faded when he turned his head. The pancake ice lights of the river, he thought. Floating out in the blackness.
And then the old, treacherous part of his brain stirred. Because there was a way to feel better. He’d given Auggie the pills he’d taken from Dalton, and what had Auggie done with them? It didn’t matter. Theo was done with that. Done with all of that. He’d promised Auggie. He’d promised Lana, although not in so many words.
Auggie had put them in his pocket. That was clear in Theo’s memory. He’d put them in his pocket after Theo had given them to him.
It didn’t matter.
And then they’d come into this room, and Auggie had stripped down the way he always did.
