Page 19 of Hold on Tight

“He likes you.” Her arms were crossed, but her expression was the softest he’d seen it. So soft it moved something behind the cage of his ribs. So soft he could feel it sinking into the base of his spine.

“How can you tell?”

“I just can. He’s slow to warm up, but he likes you. He doesn’t usually engage this fast.”

He likes me. It was an unexpected boon, a sudden, strange, sharp almost-pleasure. He caught himself feeling something that, if it were indulged, might be calledhappy.

Then he remembered. That there were kids in the world whose father would never come home again, because of him. That there was a father—one who had been a real father, who had wanted to be one—who would never see his kids again.

Sam came back with the inhaler in the palm of his hand.

“Do you know how to use it?” Jake asked Sam.

“Yeah,” he said. But Mira took it from Sam anyway and demonstrated it to Jake. “Inhaler in the spacer, like this.” She showed him how they fit together. “Squeeze once, breathe in and out five times. Squeeze again, five more breaths. He hasn’t had an asthma attack in more than a year and a half, though. Kids do sometimes outgrow it. I remind him not to overtax his system, though. If he’s running really fast, or whatever, I remind him to take it down a notch.”

“Really?” Jake asked, before he could think better of it.

Her face darkened.

Okay, that had been a dumb thing to say. Butreally? A seven-year-old kid who hadn’t had an asthma attack in over a year, and she was discouraging him from realizing his full potential? It went against everything Jake believed about people, everything he’d been taught in training and in war. You pushed yourself to the limit and you saw what your limits were. You saw that everything you feared at the furthest edges of your capabilities wasn’t to be feared. That there was nothing to fear in yourself.

Until you weren’t yourself, because the thing you’d believed made you you was gone. Then it was appropriate to be scared shitless.

There was a dark rut in his mind where he used to be sure he knew what he was doing. Sometimes, when his thoughts went there, he had trouble pulling them back.Maybe if I went back to war, I’d find it again. The rhythm, the reason. The thing that made me feel like fighting was worthwhile. It was as if he were watching a jerky filmstrip of his life as a soldier, the rah-rah, the gung-ho, then the early edge of doubt, how the first thing he’d thought the first time he’d seen Mike hesitate under fire was,That could be me. That’s what happens when you aren’t sure anymore.

He could feel the groove worn in his brain by this line of thinking, and he could get stuck there for hours.Could be me, should have been me.

She was watching him carefully. “Sam has to be cautious about physical activity right now, anyway. He’s a lot better than he was, but he’s supposed to take it easy for a few more weeks. The reason we were at PT is he fell out of a tree. That’s the whole reason we’re in the fix we’re in. He was supposed to go to this tennis and golf camp all day the last two weeks and the next two until I could work out sitting arrangements. But he’s too banged up.”

“He seems pretty good now.” He hadn’t seen evidence of a limp or any other injury.

“He’s a lot better. That was probably our last PT session. But like I said, with the asthma, anyway, I want him to take it easy.”

There was nothing, per se, wrong with tennis and golf. It just rubbed him the wrong way, somehow. There was more to life, more to being a boy and a man, than hitting little balls at a country club. Not that Sam had to love football or hockey or riflery or archery. But he deserved a chance to figure out for himself what he did love, what his body could do.

“Take it easy” wasn’t a credo Jake knew anything about.

“You’ll bring your phone, right, if you sit?”

He nodded.

“So we have each other’s numbers.”

“Yeah.”

“I also have a landline in case the power goes out.” She showed him. Above that phone, she’d listed emergency numbers. Her home number, cell, and work. Her parents’ number, with the note “long distance, but knowledgeable.” The pediatrician, 911, poison control.

“Can I show Jake my room?”

Mira looked at Jake, and he shrugged. “Sure.”

Sam led him down a short hallway to a small bedroom littered with Legos and other building toys. Jake’s first impulse was to kneel and begin playing with the toys, but kneeling wasn’t easy for him. It still involved an embarrassing amount of effort and the potential loss of balance. He didn’t want that to happen to him in front of Sam and Mira. So he stayed standing. “I like Legos,” he said.

“Can we do Legos? If you babysit?”

He looked at Mira, not sure how to answer. Was he going to babysit?

“Sure,” she said. Answering both Sam’s question and his, with a tight nod, as if to say,You’re on probation, buddy.

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