Page 56 of Just a Heartbeat Away

Sebastian’s eyes were closed, his breaths even and deep. She quietly picked up the dishes and started carrying them out of the room. It was his voice, low and so heartbreakingly serious, that stopped her. She turned back around to him. Set down the dishes.

“We wouldn’t have made it,” he said hoarsely. His eyes were fevered slits. She wondered if he even knew what he was saying right now. “Me and Cora. I know I’m dumping this on you and that it’s probably not fair, but you’re the only one who has asked about her in almost two years. Everyone I talk to about her knew her already. They saw us married. They think of her as my wife. Even saying that now, I feel like such a—”

He cut off, almost violently.

Sebastian leaned forward and she saw that he’d sweat through his T-shirt. His hair was sticking up and he’d tossed the afghan over the back of the couch. He was feverish. She could basically feel his heat from three feet away. He was leaning forward on his knees. His eyes bright and dark at the same time. A look on his face told her he’d been trying, so hard, for years, but right now, he just needed to be broken.

“What do you mean?” she asked softly, knowing that he just needed to know that she was listening still. That it was okay to talk right now. To say everything he needed to get out.

“I mean that we weren’t gonna make it as a husband and wife, I don’t think. As a couple. If she were alive, I don’t think she’d still be my wife.” His face somehow tightened and crumbled at the same time. Via knew when someone was saying something out loud for the very first time. When the words were so raw they were almost a prayer. When a feeling that had been curling and spiking and growing inside you finally, finally found its way to the outside. To the world.

“There wasn’t enough love there,” he admitted, tracing a hand through his sweaty hair. He grimaced when he swallowed. “There was respect, but no affection. We got married when she got pregnant. We’d only known each other a few months. Because there’s just no other way. For me. I had to marry the mother of my kid. I was so scared of being a dad. I guess I thought getting married, having a wife, living with my kid day in and day out would somehow make fatherhood a little easier. A little more paint by numbers and less white-knuckling the steering wheel.” Sebastian laughed at a joke only he got. “But it wasn’t. Being a dad was just as scary as I’d thought it would be and marrying Cora only made it worse because she carried my weight. We both knew I was shitty at it. Only there for the good shit, gone in a flash for the hard shit. She carried me. I let her.”

Sebastian’s head lolled to one side, his cheeks flushed and the dark sweat on the back of his shirt blooming. Via fished for his ice water that he’d set on the floor beside the couch and handed it over to him. He gratefully swigged it back and sucked an ice cube.

“Seb, you might not want to hear this, but you’re an incredible father. Devoted, hardworking, loving, firm. It’s your business whether or not you congratulate yourself, but you have to admit, empirically, you’re a good father.”

He nodded, but she wasn’t convinced he really believed her. Or if he was even able to hear her words through the haze of his fever. He rested sideways on the arm of the couch. He slowly lifted his feet up, and when they caught on the big cushion, Via reached down and hefted them right up onto the couch beside her. “Sometimes I think that makes it worse. That I learned how to do it only after she was gone. I wish she could have seen the kind of father I am now. It would have made her proud of me. I loved it when she was proud of me. And it didn’t happen very often in those last few years.”

His eyes pinched closed and he pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, obviously fighting a headache.

“Where’s your medicine?”

“Kitchen cabinet next to the sink.”

Via rose and brought the dishes into the kitchen. She selected some Motrin and one of his antibiotics, just in case it was time. She quickly chucked the dishes into the dishwasher so that he wouldn’t wake up to a dirty kitchen. While she performed the task, she thought of the very first version of Sebastian that she had met. Disheveled, lost, terse, destroyed. He’d loved Matty, that had always been palpable, but he hadn’t known right from left.

She’d thought at the time that it was just the shock of the loss he was enduring. But she realized now that perhaps he’d been just that clueless as well, when it came to taking care of his kid. She’d been witness to all manner of parenting styles. Often there was a primary parent and a secondary parent. That worked for some families. It wasn’t necessarily something that he needed to be feeling epic shame over.

She filled a fresh glass of ice water, rooted around in the freezer for an ice pack and grabbed the medicine. “Is it time for your antibiotic as well?”

He cracked an eye and nodded, gratefully accepting the pills and the ice water. He hissed when she slid the ice pack between the couch pillow and the back of his neck, but he didn’t move it.

“Via,” he started, and she knew he was about to apologize for everything he’d just said. She didn’t want him to.

“When my parents died,” she cut him off, knowing exactly what she was risking—that drafty space opening up inside her, but for Seb, for this moment, she would risk it, “I was lost, Seb. Gone. I’ve never found that part of me again. She’s gone. I came out the other side a different kid. It changes you. The event changes you, of course. I’ll never forget that day. But the grief changes you, too. The long, awful, up-mountain trek of grief, it changes who you are. I don’t know that you should feel shame for being a different person after you endured the loss of Matty’s mom.”

He nodded and kept his eyes closed as he knuckled one eye and then the other. His face was lined and exhausted. He should be sleeping. She almost rose, to leave him in peace, when he rolled to one side and stretched out his legs. His feet slid over her lap and all the way to the other end of the couch. The heavy weight of his calves penned her in. He groaned just a little bit and cast a forearm over his eyes. If she could have reached the lamp, she would have dimmed it.

“Yeah, but what do you do, as a person, when grief changes you for thebetter? God, I feel so much shame for it. She died and I became abetterman. It makes me sick with myself. I’m such a bastard. Why did it take that for me to be who I am now? Why couldn’t I have done that when she was here?”

His arm was heavy over his eyes and his mouth was tightly clamped shut, his jaw square and dusted with more errant stubble than she’d ever seen him with before. His T-shirt was fully soaked through. If so many things were different, she’d go get him a fresh one, throw the sweaty one in the wash.

But as it was, all she could do was ignore the microscopic needle between her lungs and say the thing she’d wished someone had said to her. She had to keep going. For the first time, she wanted to keep going. The drafty feeling was absent, maybe because there was something else occupying her chest right now. Or maybe because that drafty wind couldn’t blow her away when she was being pinned in place by that hot needle inside of her.

“What do you do when grief changes you for the better? Seb, you say thank-you to the world for being the world.”

His forearm lifted off his eyes at her tone. He’d probably never heard her speak with such authority before, but she was an expert on this subject. The metamorphosis of grief. And he was her friend. And she was going to drag him out of the swamp if it was the last thing she did.

“You be grateful,” she continued. “Grateful that you’rehere. That your little boy has a good, loving, competent father. A father who leaps a fence to sprint him to the ER and makes Raspberry Beret pancakes and tells him the truth about the dates he goes on.” Somehow one of her hands landed on his calf and she gripped the warm jeans there, as if she could pin him down and make him listen. Make him hear her.

His eyes flashed to her hand but then back to her face like he was being nailed in place by a cosmic hammer.

“And you stop doing this math equation that’s killing you. In one hand you have your wife’s death, and in the other hand you have all the progress you’ve made over the years. But, Seb, A plus B doesn’t equalshitin this case. You can’t add or subtract those two things. They’re a completely different language. And holding yourself hostage with your wife’s death is false math that’sdesignedto punish yourself. That’s a way of turning your grief back in on you, to keep it trapped and circling.”

He made a sound. Just a quick grunt, like she was pulling stitches out of a mostly healed wound.

“So, just stop doing that.” She laughed at herself, at how bossy she sounded. “I know it’s not easy, but you have to let it out. You’re a good man who is grieving because his wife died. And no one, no one, no one ever feelssimpleafter someone they love dies. Everyone feels complicated as hell, all loose strings and sloppy endings and regrets. That’s life. That’s the world. The same world where you get to make furniture and tuck your son in at night and walk him to school. You can’t get one part without the other. It’s just not the way it works.”

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