“Well,” Harold sighed, “in the absence of specifics, I won’t be able to reassure you specifically, so I’m just going to give you a blanket, all-encompassing reassurance, which I hope you’ll believe. Jude: whatever it is, whatever you did, I promise you, whether you someday tell me or not, that it will never make me regret wanting or having you as a member of my family.” He took a deep breath, held his right hand before him. “Jude St. Francis, as your future parent, I hereby absolve you of—of everything for which you seek absolution.”
And was this what he in fact wanted? Absolution? He looked at Harold’s face, so familiar he could remember its every furrow when he closed his eyes, and which, despite the flourishes and formality of his declaration, was serious and unsmiling. Could he believe Harold? The hardest thing is not finding the knowledge, Brother Luke once said to him after he’d confessed he was having difficulty believing in God. The hardest thing is believing it. He felt he had failed once again: failed to confess properly, failed to determine in advance what he wanted to hear in response. Wouldn’t it have been easier in a way if Harold had told him that he was right, that they should perhaps rethink the adoption? He would have been devastated, of course, but it would have been an old sensation, something he understood. In Harold’s refusal to let him go lay a future he couldn’t imagine, one in which someone might really want him for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded in a foreign land, with no one there to guide him home.
Harold was waiting for his reply, but the pain was now unignorable, and he knew he had to rest. “Harold,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I think—I think I’d better go lie down for a while.”
“Go,” said Harold, unoffended, “go.”
In his room, he lies down atop the comforter and closes his eyes, but even after the episode ends, he’s exhausted, and tells himself he’ll nap for just a few minutes and then get up again and see what Harold has in the house: if he has brown sugar, he’ll bake something—there was a bowl of persimmons in the kitchen, and maybe he’ll make a persimmon cake.
But he doesn’t wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and then drapes a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six thirty, and Harold’s conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels Harold’s hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling him his flight’s leaving in a few hours.
Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.
He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.
The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.
Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he’d cook, and he spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking that night—the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia likes; the sourdough bread they both like—and picks through ten pounds of crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day all he’ll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he’ll roast and serve over ice cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold and Julia’s favorite dishes, and he is glad to make them, glad to have something to give them, however small. Throughout the evening, Harold and Julia wander in and out, and although he tells them not to, they wash dishes and pans as he dirties them, pour him glasses of water and wine, and ask if they can help him, even though he tells them they should relax. Finally they leave for bed, and although he promises them that he will as well, he instead stays up, the kitchen bright and silent around him, singing quietly, his hands moving to keep the mania at bay.