Page 8 of Broken Country

“He died two years ago. He was nine.”

“Almost the same age as me.”

Leo takes my words at face value, the way only a child can. But then, in a gesture so kind and unexpected it takes my breath away, he reaches for my hand. “You miss him, don’t you?” he says.

“I do,” I say, and Leo must hear the fervency in my voice for he gives my hand a quick squeeze.

When Gabriel comes back with three spades, one for each of us, Leo and I are still standing in the same spot. We don’t talk, but there’s a peculiar sense of peace between us. Perhaps it is the proximity to this boy, not my boy, butthere’s an energy and sweetness that brings Bobby back to me.

It’s laborious and physical, the digging. The ground is too hard for us to make much progress and Leo soon gives up and sits a yard or so away, watching.

Gabriel and I dig in silence for a while. Then, I say: “I hear your mother is living in Australia now.”

He glances up at me. “A mere ten thousand miles between us. Turns out there is a god, after all.”

“Of course there’s a god, Dad,” Leo says. “Why would you think there wasn’t?”

“Just a figure of speech. I’m joking.”

“Dad doesn’t like my granny much,” Leo says, in a confiding tone.

“I can’t think why.”

I had forgotten Gabriel’s laugh, how he gives himself over to it until it becomes infectious, and I can’t help laughing too, in spite of myself; or rather, in spite of the way I feel about his mother.

“Beth had a son, Dad,” Leo says. “But he died. She’s still so sad.”

The laughter dies on both of us, instantly.

“Oh, I know,” Gabriel says, looking everywhere but at me. “I wanted to write and then I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know if you—”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Really.”

I find myself in this situation often: managing other people’s awkwardness around my grief, my loss. But talking to Gabriel about Bobby, a child he never knew, will hurt me in a very specific way.

“It isn’t fine. I should have written, I thought about you so much but—”

“Gabriel?”

“Yes?”

“Stop. Please.”

“All right. But can I say something?”

“So long as it’s not an apology. I hate that.”

My voice is harsher than I’d intended. But the endless sorrys get you down. The soft, sad eyes, the reverent tones: It makes me want to scream.

“Is there any way you and I could be friends?” He sticks his hand out in a gesture that reminds me of our beginning.

I think, looking at Gabriel’s anxious face, how much I like him. I always did. In spite of everything.

I reach across the grave for his hand. “Friends,” I say.

Before

Gabriel is waiting at the end of his drive but looking the wrong way, as if he has forgotten the direction I am coming from. It gives me a second to regard him. He is dressed in dark clothes tonight—a navy sweater, gray trousers—and from twenty yards away his silhouette is long and lean. I cannot see his face but I absorb everything else, his tallness, his slightness; the way he keeps running one hand through his hair, the other stuffed into his trouser pocket.

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