Here to Stay (8 page)

Then Christine did throw the tissues. “I’ll spank you. I mean it.”

Pete deftly caught the box and drummed his fingers on it. Cocked his head and drummed them again, listening. He smiled at his wife.
Can’t wait to hear you in b-e-d,
he signed.

Laura smiled back. “You know the kids can s-p-e-l-l?”

Erik had stayed quiet all this time, cross-armed in a corner of the room. Out of the way and observing. Finally, Pete set the tissue box aside and looked over at him.

“What’s with you,” he said. “You never shut up.”

Erik smiled but couldn’t think of anything.

“Say something,” Pete said.

At a loss, Erik swallowed and managed, “Hello?”

Eyebrows wrinkled, Pete gestured
louder.

Erik cleared his throat. “Can you hear me?”

Pete seemed to draw back a little. He nodded, his eyes welling up, staring at Erik like a little boy would at Spiderman.

“You can hear me?” Erik said, taking a step closer.

Pete nodded, hands twisting. “I can hear you,” he said. Every wall was down. He looked small in the chair, staring up at his brother.

“How do I sound?” Erik said.

The tears started to track down Pete’s face. Laura turned away. Christine, tissue-less, buried her face in her hands. Aaron and Valerie looked wide-eyed from their father to their uncle.

“It’s me,” Erik said. “This is me.”

“I can hear you,” Pete said.

Erik crouched between his feet, his hands on Pete’s upper arms. “This is my voice.”

Pete was crying then, bent over double in the chair. Erik shifted onto his knees, babbling nonsense just to keep his voice present.

“I can hear you,” Pete said, his shoulders shaking, his hands fisted around Erik’s shirt. “I can hear you.”

Now Erik rolled toward Daisy, conscious of the creak of springs and the whisper of cotton and quilting against skin. The watery click in his throat when he swallowed. His heartbeat muffled in the ear that was pressed into the pillow. The tiny sigh in Daisy’s chest when he touched the back of her neck.

“Can you hear me?” he said.

She sighed again.

“I love you,” he said. And even after he knew she was asleep once more, he kept whispering little nonsense things. Just to keep his voice present.

WILL TEXTED ERIK THE day before Christmas Eve.

Want to grab a beer and a steak? And my ass?

Erik replied.
Is this the second date? I thought I blew it.

Yeah, well, I’ve always been kind of stupid when it comes to you.

As they drove into Saint John, their conversation flowed a little easier. Will played Jimi Hendrix on the stereo, which filled any awkward gaps with air guitar.

“This is
Are You Experienced?”
Erik asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this album in its entirety.”

“I rediscovered it when I was in Germany,” Will said. “I choreographed a solo to ‘Fire.’ Lately I’m thinking I could add to it. You know, like a rock ballet set entirely to Hendrix.”

“Huh,” Erik said, air drumming now.

They parked in a municipal lot and walked down King Street toward Market Square. The streets were lined with lighted trees and the air smelled of snow.

Will’s phone pinged as they passed Lawton’s Pharmacy.

“How does she do that?” Will said. “I swear, Lucky has a sixth sense for when I’m passing a drug store. And she always needs something.”

“Maybe she’s put a tracker app on your phone.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Sends her an alert anytime I’m in range.”

While Will collected his goods, Erik hung out in the magazine aisle, flipping through
Sports Illustrated
.

“Dude. Check it out.” Will materialized by Erik’s shoulder and was pointing discreetly to the next aisle over.

Erik glanced over the top of the display shelves. A third of the adjacent aisle was the family planning section and a young teenage boy was facing down the condoms. Clearly overwhelmed by the selection and nervous from the presence of a middle-aged woman two feet away, comparison shopping fiber supplements. The boy kept looking up nervously, shuffling his feet, then trying to study the display again.

“Watch this.” Will walked briskly down their aisle, rounded the end and headed toward the boy. He stopped and regarded the shelves a few seconds.

“Excuse me.” Without making eye contact, Will made a confident choice and walked off toward the registers. Erik flipped pages and watched the boy stare after Will. Then the boy reached and took the identical brand. Erik put the magazine back and headed to the front.

“He get them?” Will said.

“Yep.”

“Same kind?”

“Yep.”

“My good deed for the day.” He held the bag up as they headed outside. “You got need of rubbers, my friend?”

Erik shook his head. “No. But if you’re ready for some gory details, I got a story for you.”

“So,” Erik said, when they were seated in a booth at the steak house and had ordered. “My marriage started disintegrating when we started trying to have kids.”

Will held up a palm. “Time out. Let me just say I’m glad it didn’t happen. I suck and I think I’m about to suck even worse but go on.”

“Well, nothing was happening so I got tested first and turns out I’m shooting blanks.”

A long stare. “Do they know why?”

“It might have been from the mumps when I was a kid. Might’ve been just a flukey thing. At the end of the day, they couldn’t point to any one reason. And I don’t exactly shoot blanks. My counts are low and whatever can be counted doesn’t swim. We tried to do IVF, but I had about four different procedures to extract sperm and they just never got anything viable.”

He knew the general luxury of spilling your guts to a buddy. But he’d forgotten the particular comfort in slicing off a bit of a problem and handing it to Will to hold. Something in his chest seemed to both jump up in remembered joy and pass out in relief at the same time.

I missed him.

“Dude…” Will sat back, rubbing his forehead. “That sucks. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

Erik started to shrug it off. But this was the new him. He worked through the impulse to dismiss and held still. Took a taste of sympathy. Let the idea of sterility sit down next to him and properly introduce itself. He looked at Will as a father of two. Two and a half. An extension of his blood and his name. A manifestation of his and Lucky’s love. A legacy. The most elemental part of being a human being.

As he thought, Erik felt the links of the gold chain around his neck. The necklace had been handed down through generations of Fiskare men. Eldest son to eldest son. But Erik was the end of the line. A branch of the tree that might not bear fruit. If he died with no son, he’d leave the necklace to his nephew Aaron.

Which ought to have consoled him but didn’t.

It kind of sucked.

And it hurt.

“Believe it or not, I think I’m taking it in for the first time,” he said.

Will nodded. “Holy fuck, you really did shut down.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe… This is probably the shaman in me talking, but maybe you were so good at shutting down, you shut down on a cellular level.”

Erik looked across at Will, met his eyes and held on tight. “I could get behind that.”

“What was Dais’ reaction when you told her?”

Erik swallowed. “I haven’t yet. I’m kind of paralyzed between it’s too soon and it’s too important.”

Will checked his watch. “Yeah, give it a few more hours. You just met.”

They laughed into their beers. “When,” Erik said, “I mean, if Dais and I ever get to that point—”

“You will.”

He blew out a sigh. “I can’t look that far. I’m still learning how to feel what I feel as I’m feeling it. All I know is it’s going to matter.”

Will nodded. “I’m really sorry. I have no reference point.”

“When I called Daisy on Thanksgiving? She made a crack about how you’d sneeze and Lucky would be knocked up.”

Will smiled, rolling his eyes as if embarrassed at the virile feat. They pushed aside their drinks and silverware as the waitress set a strip steak in front of each of them, arranged dishes of creamed spinach and sautéed mushrooms. “Bon appétit,” she said.

Will speared a mushroom and ate it. “When I said ‘you will’ before? I meant you will get to that point. Or at least to that conversation. She wants a family. It’s why her last relationship fell apart.”

“Ray?”

“Oh, you know about Ray?”

“I know she was with him a few years and it was pretty serious.” He took a bite of steak. The charred, peppered sear gave way into melting pink goodness, forcing a small grunt of pleasure from his chest.

“It was definitely the happiest I’d seen Dais since college. And Ray was a great guy. I got nothing bad to say about him. But…” Will took a bite of his own and closed his eyes. “Jesus, that’s good. Sorry, what was I saying?”

“Nothing bad to say about Ray, but.”

“Right. It actually feels good to talk about this because Lucky and I were all smiles to Daisy’s face and then we’d lie in bed at night and moan about it.
Think she’ll marry him? Why wouldn’t she? She should. He’s great to her. Yeah, but if they get married, it’ll be the end.”

“The end?”

“That’s how we felt—if she married him it wouldn’t be the beginning of a beautiful life but the end of some crazy little dream we had that you’d come back.”

Their meals were demanding attention and talk died away while they ate. The food was outstanding. Erik kept closing his eyes in appreciation, his stomach yearning like a dog who wanted the belly rub to go on forever.

“Ray was older than her,” Erik said.

“By like fifteen years. He was in a totally different place. He’d gotten married young, had his kids while still practically a teenager. He was about to become a grandfather. His empty nest was beautifully arranged and Daisy wanted to fill it with babies.”

Erik had been wolfing the last bit of steak, but “babies”
made it go cold and tough in his mouth.

Will went on. “And we sucked so bad. We felt like shit, lying around sighing about it.
I hope she doesn’t marry him. God we suck, why shouldn’t she be happy, she should marry him. Oh God, don’t marry him, it’s the end of hope…”

Erik managed to laugh in the wobbly security of how things turned out.

Will glanced up. “Just out of curiosity?”

“I know where this is going.”

“What would you have done if you called and she was married?”

“Dude.” Erik carefully scraped together the last forkful of creamed spinach. “It’s a good thing I’m still an expert at not thinking about shit. Because I can’t even think about that shit.”

“You thought about it. Come on.”

Busted, Erik gave it a try. “It would have been…not a good thing.”

Will wiped his mouth, revealing a grin. “I would’ve helped you steal her.”

“Shut up.”

“Telling you.”

“Jesus fuck, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

Will pushed his plate away. “Would you still have called me?”

Erik tried to rearrange events, fold time into a different origami ornament. A different scenario. “I like to think so. I had it in my mind that my shit to work out with you was entirely separate from Daisy. I had things to put right with you no matter what happened with her. I could only do one thing at a time though. And no offense, but she smells nicer than you.”

“Fair enough.” Will folded his napkin and tossed it on the table. A bit of silence as Erik finished eating.

“You haven’t told Dais about the fertility thing yet?” Will said. “For real?”

“For real. Why?”

Will laughed a little. “Nothing.”

“What?”

“It used to tickle the shit out of me when you’d come to me with a problem. Feels like old times.”

Erik set his silverware across his plate and pushed it aside. “I missed you,” he said, wiping his mouth.

Will caught the waitress’s eye and signed the air with an invisible pen. He rubbed his hands together, then back through his hair. “I have some Christmas shopping left to do,” he said. “You got time to come with?”